Free and Fair Elections

I really enjoy reading articles by Peter Heck. He is a very reasonably minded individual who is very good at keeping things in perspective. That's why I'm unsurprised by his take on the subject of this article, as it is a very level-headed analysis, but I cannot help but disagree with it in part.

I don't disagree with his argument that there has been no professionally produced evidence that Trump actually won the 2020 election. He's obviously right. The grandiose promises of the people who were sure they could produce extraordinary evidence that the election was rigged did not come to fruition. That's obviously true. Is confidence in fair and free elections paramount for our particular governmental system to endure? Yes, I'd say it is. To save from going through every little detail, I agree with most of the arguments as standalone statements. The facts are facts, unless they aren't - to make my stance a little more clear. We couldn't know any differently because no hard evidence has come of it. The election process is innocent until proven guilty, persay. But just as many people have been acquitted under shaky and suspect terms, I'm wholly unconvinced that the "judicial process" has confidently acquitted the 2020 election. We're looking at the Casey Anthony of presidential elections.

So do I disagree that it's dangerous and irresponsible to "continue to peddle" the claim that Trump actually won the 2020? It could be interpreted that way, but it's not so clear cut. It's actually a little strange that Heck makes this argument considering that there is no sanctity of the election process from the leftosphere - especially when this is discussed at length in the article. Confidence in the election process is nonnegotiable for the survival of our country as is. Yet we have been seeing Democrats et. al. contesting the results of elections since George Bush in 2000 and 2004. Suddenly, after Obama won, elections are free and fair again. Trump wins in 2016 and the democratic process is hopelessly corrupt and endangered. It's all okay, though, because Biden won in 2020, so all those glaring issues with the election process that allowed Trump to incorrectly win in 2016 have been fixed and now it's dangerous and irresponsible to believe the elections are anything except the freest and fairest in all the land.

Peter Heck insists, essentially, that it's wrong for Our Side to say that the election process is corrupt to its very core because Their Side is saying it, so we must instill confidence in the populace about the integrity of the process by discontinuing to vocally doubt it. If we stop that, then there can be confidence in our election process once again and everything will somehow be fine.

This premise makes little sense if the democratic process is, in fact corrupted. If our elections are not, in fact, free and fair, then we do nothing but doom ourselves to an accelerated takeover by a one party rule. There appears to be little hard evidence of fraud, whether it's 2000, 2004, 2016, or 2020. Very few people are found guilty for voter fraud every year. The amount of fraud or otherwise tampering of the election process would have had to occur in multiple states and affect many thousands of votes for Trump to have actually had the election stolen from him as he so claims.

Yes, of course, there has been no hard evidence. Every lawsuit was denied processing, so evidence they had was never admitted to court. Events that have long passed, like Georgia's conspicuous burst water pipe that was resolved many hours before they sent people home and "stopped counting" but didn't actually stop counting, and every other state that was an all-but-guaranteed Trump win suddenly stopping votes in the middle of the night, shutting out Republican watchers, barring up windows and blocking all oversight, dumping ballots in through the back doors under cover, some states taking many multiples of days to finish counting and the subsequent gaslighting that "this happens all the time" (it doesn't), and then suddenly multiple states inexplicably turning around for Biden at the very last second, are not things we can really go back and examine, as they were real time events that do not have quantifiable numbers. Multiple YouTubers have been suspended and videos taken down for going to registered voter addresses and finding condemned houses or empty lots. People attest to having received many multiples of mail in ballots to their address. But there is no hard evidence, I'll admit. Nothing was admitted in court because all of the lawsuits were not allowed to proceed, so how could we have the evidence? People who investigate are blocked, silenced, and stifled. The mainstream media would never write dozens of highly amplified articles about canvassers going to registered voter addresses who voted in the 2020 election and finding empty lots, so speaking about it is a "conspiracy theory". There's nothing anyone can do except shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, there's no hard evidence."

What all of these events and this, I suppose, softer evidence points to, however, is absolutely a justifiable suspicion that perhaps our elections are not the freest and fairest elections of all time, and that they may, in fact, be compromised. The confidence in our elections is paramount to a continued functioning democratic republic. Which is why it's such a crying shame that it's entirely justifiable to believe that these elections are in fact not free, nor fair, and have been rigged in various covert and unquantifiable ways. We have articles all but admitting the "shadow government" rigged the election ahead of time by changing election laws and altering as many aspects of our democratic process as possible entirely under the radar, without the people's consent and even admittedly illegally in some cases, and yet we are somehow supposed to believe it's all good. Freest and Fairest Election of All Time. Never mind that many of the events that occurred while votes were being counted that night are the same schemes that are pulled in corrupt third world elections. Claiming it is very important for us to stop questioning the validity of the 2020 election to help instill confidence in the election process ignores that questioning the validity of the 2020 election isn't the problem. The problem is the incredibly suspect validity of the 2020 election.

And that's where Mr. Heck and I will simply have to disagree. I watched these bizarre and highly suspicious situations play out in real time the day and night of Nov 3rd 2020. This isn't a random dossier that showed up from an unknown source with unproven claims that got published by every mainstream media outlet who all declared it simply must be true. This is what I saw with my own eyes. I won't allow the MSM to gaslight me into believing it is very normal for it to take many many days to declare the presidential election winner. I have watched the news coverage for the presidential election in 2004 and 2008, as well as of course 2016. 

Trump was declared the winner in 2016 by 2am on Nov 4th 2016. No states suddenly stopped counting, threw out bipartisan vote watchers, had trucks of ballots dumped into the back doors while the vote counters taped poster boards all over the windows, nor had various "counting errors" giving statistically unlikely solid chunks of votes to a single candidate at 4 in the morning. Bipartisan vote watchers were not barred entry despite having been court ordered by a judge to be allowed in. Yet I am to believe no one would have committed any fraud in an election where a significant number of people genuinely believed they were going to "vote out" a literal dictator? Impossible. I contest it is in fact irresponsible to tell people to believe that there was not malicious behavior in the 2020 election. Our democratic republic does not require only confidence in the election process, but actually fair and free elections. The illusion of a properly functioning democratic republic is not an actual properly functioning democratic republic.

I wonder if the real reason Heck insists we should no longer question the integrity of our election process is simply because it's clearly no longer valuable or useful. I don't suspect this is the case, as a man who has written before about the importance of truth. I wonder then if it was not the fruitless endeavor and hopeless doomerism of the burden of knowing the election process is most likely compromised, but there's little any of us can actually do about it which prompted him to simply explain away the problem like this. Simply believing we have fair and free elections will not actually help us have fair and free elections, but it would surely help promote a comforting illusion. 

There is absolutely no reason not to bring up these highly suspicious behaviors by vote counters, the rushed patchwork legislation changes people did not vote for, the non-zero number of registered voter addresses located at empty houses. It is imperative not to simply put our fingers in our ears and sing loudly that we have confidence in the democratic process. We must be able to have dialogue about what kind of behavior is not allowed in order to have that confidence in our elections. Barring watchers, stopping counts at midnight and sending the Other Team's counters home, taping paper over the windows, trucking ballots into backdoors at 4am - these are not behaviors conducive to a fair and free election. Do not bar discussion about these things - and if you believe that casting doubt on the 2020 election while having this discussion does not help the case, then just say that. We can speak objectively about what does not happen when a country's elections are actually fair and free without invoking the alleged "Big Lie". But it's offensive to say that we must simply drop the whole thing and start having confidence in our election process after nothing has changed. 

Just a Regular Rape

For a few weeks there has been a lot of discourse about the Loundoun County school where a girl was raped by a boy in a skirt in the school bathroom. Recently it has come to light that the girl had previous consensual encounters with the boy and the story for the most part turned out to be different than it has first been reported upon, as usually happens. Once the news broke that the girl had had consensual encounters with the boy previously, I nervously waited to see if the champions of consent from the past would compromise their own morals and beliefs to condemn this girl for "her part" in her rape or not, or to what degree.

I was predictably disappointed that they did, in fact, compromise their morals on consent - but it was as little as possible. Only in implications, in the framing. When making headlines or opening paragraphs, the fact that the girl and boy had met up for consensual sex in the school bathroom previously was brought up as the "main point" - disguised as an objective journalistic reporting detail, but worded and framed as a headliner detail. Their reason for this isn't to excuse the rape necessarily, but to excuse the boy in the skirt in the girl's bathroom. Because, you see, to the mainstream population this issue has been, from the beginning, not about a girl being raped, but about trying to defend transgender bathroom policy. It started that way from the very beginning when the girl's father was dragged out of a school board meeting and has never stopped being about that for them.

That's why such an obtuse a ridiculous article was written entitled, astonishingly, "The Right's Big Lie About A Sexual Assault in Virginia". I cannot stress enough how absurd this was to read as a real, genuine article.

The title is one thing, but what's somewhat surprising is that every terrible detail is confirmed in the article, which still has the audacity to claim that the whole thing was a "big lie". The dad being arrested for acting out at a school board meeting because he was furious that his daughter was raped. The school not properly reporting the crime and covering it up. The boy being transferred to another school and committing a second sexual crime. Everything, every single detail is correct. So what on earth is the "big lie" here that the article showcases?

Since for them it was about transgenders in bathrooms from the first day, it's still about it now. The "big lie" is that this wasn't a case of a regular teenager using the cover of false transgender identity to enter the girl's bathroom and commit a crime. We can all rest easy, folks! Since the girl and boy had met up previously in the girl's bathroom, this is not a case that can be used against transgenders in girl's bathrooms! Conservatives lied yet again! The entire premise of saying the right had a "big lie" is that this was not a normal teenage boy using the cover of the transgender bathroom policy to commit a sexual crime against a totally random and unsuspecting female victim. 

What's interesting is that that fact is the only thing that is a "lie", yet the article intends to convince us that we "had it all wrong". All wrong. All of it, totally wrong. Except for the vast majority of it. What's most glaring of course is that it was never a lie - details about the story were missing. For all intents and purposes, it was actually definitely a boy using transgender identity as a cover to go into the girl's room and rape someone - until we learned that they organized ahead of time to meet up in there on purpose. We do not lie when we are lacking information. Is it wise to make declarations about a situation when you don't have all the information? Surely, we could have a discussion about that, but that is different from intentionally lying about a situation. 

None of this, of course, matters to the author of this and other articles like it. The framework of this piece allows unbelievable responses in the people who were desperate to be relieved of their guilt for wanting to belittle this crime against an innocent girl, such as the following:

"So, it was all bullshıt. The boy wearing a skirt who raped a girl isn't trans. They had hooked up in the bathroom a couple times before. This time she said no & he raped her. Then the girl's dad fed the media the "trans predator" story."

"It was all bullshit." All of it, according to the rape apologists, was bullshit. Except, of course, for the school hiding the rape, sending the boy to another school where he would commit another sexual crime, arresting the father for trying to speak for his daughter, so on and so on. It turns out a very large amount of the story was absolutely not bullshit, but it becomes all bullshit when the magic information they needed to quell their nervous hearts is heard, that the girl and boy had previous encounters. Suddenly all is forgiven.

Except that the biggest cover points I have seen in every article that discussed this horrible situation did not even focus on the transgender aspect. It was mentioned, of course, but nothing has been more important to the people covering this story than the fact that the school covered up the rape. This was the absolute biggest part of the story, it was not focused on transgender kids from the beginning. It was, however, the main focus for the mainstream, liberals, leftists, and Democrats. They projected their focus on transgender bathroom policy onto their opposition - or perhaps maliciously, intentionally pretended that a school covering up a rape was not a big deal.

Yes, from the beginning, before it was even a story, before the girl's father was even arrested, this was about transgenders in bathrooms for the mainstream - that's why the school hid the rape. That's why they had the father forcibly removed, because they knew they hid the rape and didn't want to be found out. They hid the rape because the boy had worn a skirt as a cover to go into the girl's bathroom uncontested and they didn't want this story used as ammunition against their transgender bathroom policy. It was a relief to them that the girl had had previous sexual encounters with the boy, which is why they think "the right" has made this case into what they see as a whole hullabaloo over just a run of the mill rape. They are ecstatic that this isn't a random assault by a boy who wore a skirt to enter the girl's bathroom. Despite that this girl was raped, the fact that they had intentionally met up in the bathroom before, and had done so that day, resolves the moral quandary they had over the case from the beginning. They project that to their preferred boogeyman of "the right" and spin the story until it vomits. "The right lied about this story from the beginning!"

Except the big problems I've seen from the beginning weren't that a skirt wearing boy used transgender bathroom policy to rape a girl, but rather that the school hid the rape because they were worried people would use it against their transgender bathroom policy. They had the father - understandably furious - arrested to keep trying to hide the rape. The big story was the blatant disregard of this girl, the crime against her hidden for their agendas, and as if it couldn't get any worse, another girl was assaulted due to their negligence. Because they didn't want to hurt the transgender cause.

It wasn't the right that made this about transgender bathroom policies, it was the Loundoun County school when they hid the rape for fear of making it about transgender bathroom policies. It is about transgender bathroom policy not because a boy wore a skirt into a bathroom to rape a girl, but because adults are so worried about passing transgender bathroom policies that they would hide a rape by a boy in a skirt. The transgender agenda itself is not worried about sacrificing young girls for their cause.

What's more is, unfortunately, they still aren't even in the clear. They are so focused on the boy in a skirt portion that they are ignoring the fact that these two students were having sex in the school bathroom. How is that even acceptable? Of course, kids were having sex in school bathrooms when I was in school, too, but it was at least marginally more difficult when boys were not allowed free reign of the girl's room. The transgender bathroom policy may have not, in this specific case, enabled a boy to randomly assault an unsuspecting girl in the girl's bathroom under the cover of the transgender bathroom policy, but the greater transgender discourse absolutely enabled the situation. Would they have met up anyway, without pretending to be gender fluid? Maybe. Probably even likely. But the fact of the matter is, there would have been a small chance he would have been stopped at the gate if the adults in the situation were not so hellbent on propping up transgender ideology.

The NYT flagrantly accuses the Bad Team of using this story to hurt "transgender children" when they used "transgender children" from the beginning to try and erase a crime against a girl and a second crime against another girl that was enabled due to their complicity. That's why they are so stuck on the idea that anyone has been "lying" about this story to hurt the transgender cause - because they thought someone would and proactively tried to hide the rape to keep that from happening.

Of course they will argue that the father made the situation about the transgender bathroom policy. I understand that this was his intention, as it is very likely his daughter framed the situation for him thusly. She was brave enough to speak up about being raped, but was she brave enough to tell her father that it was by a boy with whom she had been regularly fornicating in the school bathroom previously? We don't know that yet, but it seems rather likely. Despite any of this, of course, while it may have been his intention to frame it thusly, his sudden summary expulsion from the school board meeting is what set the narrative. While surely people had been talking about the "predatory exploitation of the transgender bathroom policy" aspect before we knew that the girl planned to meet with the boy who raped her, I cannot stress enough that the biggest part of the story from the beginning was the school hiding the rape. Articles like these, meant to assuage leftist moral quandaries over being more concerned for transgender bathroom policy than a girl being raped, do even more to delegitimize the victim - by claiming that the people who were defending her and trying to ensure her rapist saw justice were actually lying about the case. The more nuanced details, of course, insist that surely she was raped and trust us we do think that's bad, but the discourse is framed overwhelmingly about transgender bathroom policies instead of that adults responsible for the safety of a young girl covered up a heinous crime against her. 

Of course, more details don't make this story better. Many parts of it are disgusting and revealing about how our culture hurts children and teenagers. One of the first articles I read about this story that contained the information that the girl and boy had had previous consensual encounters was a very objective article. In this article, a much larger problem about this crime is uncovered. It stated that the boy had previously propositioned the girl for "a particular sexual act" in the past, but she continually refused. Considering the crime was forcible sodomy, we do not need to do much of a connect the dots puzzle to figure out that the boy had been trying to persuade this girl to engage in consensual sodomy rather than forcible. The boy further claims that he stopped when he realized he was hurting her. Whether or not that's true, it showcases a deeper tragic scenario. 

When we know what we know about porn and its horrible effect on young minds, we get a much more depressing picture of this encounter. A boy's mind poisoned by gratuitous pornography showcasing women enthusiastically enjoying sudden anal penetration, or perhaps even more disturbingly not enjoying, convinced this teenager that if his female hookup just tried it, it would be just like the sex he sees in the porn! So convinced he was of this in fact, he decided it would be okay to force it upon her, and it would just work out, like it does in the porn, and he'd get the sexual gratification he sees the men in porn display. All the education about consent in the world has to fight against the brain rewiring, evil power of highly accessible, gratuitous porn.

Many many things could have been different to have stopped this situation from ever happening. Many things could have been done differently to allow responsible adults to actually handle it properly after it unfortunately did happen. The big story isn't about whether boys can use the girl's room, though it is a small part of it. 

Truly no situation is ever so cut and dry. I'm sure there are people who were excited that there was what appeared to be such a plain and uncontestable example of transgender bathroom policies harming young girls, just as excited as the people who were thrilled to hear the victim of this crime had intentionally met up with her soon-to-be rapist that day. People love to exploit others for their causes and beliefs, an unfortunate reality. But the real story is actually just as bad, despite it not matching up perfectly to any one of these sociopaths' desired narratives. There are multiple aspects to it, all of which are terrible. The facts of the situation do not reflect well on the Loudoun county school and contribute even more fuel to the fire of the greater "parents and school board meetings" discourse happening concurrent to this. This is probably the most important aspect of the story and people are more than happy to bury it, as the facts undeniably point to a justifiably outraged father being arrested for attempting to advocate for his daughter.

I am not very surprised lately by the grotesque behavior of many, but the framing of this crime as what essentially boils down to "guys this isn't a special rape, it's just a regular run of the mill rape" is particularly disgusting. We were just a few years ago heavy into how important it was for schools to take sexual assault seriously. Apparently it was a huge deal then. But now it is not, because holding the school who tried to hide a rape accountable could hurt the transgender cause, even though we could easily agree to set that aside and focus on the reality of the victim. The blatant display of tribalism and friend vs. foe thinking is perhaps the last time I will be so naively surprised. They would surely sacrifice thousands of young girls at the altars of their culture war than risk harming any of their ideological causes and it is naïve to believe otherwise.