This has a been a year of gaslighting. They gaslighted us about churches and Easter meals being a spreader but riots safe. About masks being worthless (at the beginning and for decades before) or being critical (a few weeks in). They gaslighted us about Thanksgiving killing grandma but that nursing homes accepting COVID patients was perfectly safe.

They gaslighted us before the election about how far down Trump was in the polls, then that no fraud happened, and then that not enough happened to make a difference. They are gaslighting us now about whether it’s provable, while blocking any attempt to share provable facts.

The legacy media have gone full gaslight trying to convince us that this unprecedented behavior is normal, that it happens every election, that this is the way elections work.

Like the protagonist in Gaslight, we’re crazy if we remember anything different—if we believe our own eyes and ears and memories.

Michael Anton turns out to have been more right than he could have known when he called 2016 the Flight 93 election. If this much blatant fraud is allowed to succeed, the extremists have chosen to crash the plane rather than let the passengers take over—and not just in Pennsylvania.

Exposing the rot and corruption of the ruling class doesn’t matter if the corruption is allowed to succeed.

My home state of Michigan has long known about the corruption in Detroit. The same appears to be true of Milwaukee in Wisconsin, and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. The dark joke was that any statewide candidate who opposed that corruption had to beat the margin of fraud. The darker joke is that we just accepted it, and tried harder to beat the margin of fraud rather than stop the fraud.

On election night, Trump beat the margin of fraud. By a lot. So they stopped updating, drove observers away, and added more fraud in the dark of the night.

The question is no longer whether fraud happened but how much are we willing to accept? If this much fraud is allowed to stand, it will set another gaslit new normal. With unverifiable post-election mail-in ballots, there is no margin of fraud to beat. Fraudulent votes can be created in any number needed. Once you know how many votes you need, bring in the envelopes, push the observers so far away they can’t verify names, let alone signatures. All the votes they need for the result they want.

The same is true of accepting ballots after the deadline. After the deadline is when you know how many ballots you need.

I cannot imagine what the media circus would be like right now if the opposite had happened, if the vote had been pro-Biden in Texas, Florida, and Ohio, the updates had been stopped in the night, and in the morning the hidden count had overwhelmingly gone to Trump. Our media wouldn’t be calling it suspiciously like fraud. They wouldn’t be framing the fight against fraud in terms of overturning the election. They would call it obvious fraud and would now be calling for impeachment, recounts, invalidation of the election, everything possible to restore the election.

The red flags are blatantly obvious and they know it. Media outlets have shown remarkable restraint in the aftermath of this election. Biden’s electoral results overturned decades of electoral bellwethers. He lost Ohio and Florida, and not by small amounts, shattering the decades-long record of these states as representative of the country as a whole. It’s been sixty years since those states have failed to predict the outcome. That’s newsworthy.

He did this with far less help from the metro areas that normally propel Democrats to a win: he trailed Clinton in every metro area except Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. This kind of an electoral shift is immensely newsworthy, especially among a news media that’s been pushing unity in the wake of November 3.

No incumbent in a century and a half has lost their re-election bid while increasing their popular vote total. But Biden didn’t just beat Trump’s massive popular vote increase, he beat President Obama’s best total—all while Trump increased his share of minority voters. That’s extraordinarily newsworthy on multiple levels.

A media as bent on unity as our legacy media has been in the last few weeks would be reporting these unprecedented results nonstop—less reliance on identity politics—if they believed the results were real.

That they’re not is a very loud silence. Like the famous dog in Silver Blaze, they know the results are not real, they know who the perpetrators are, and they have no desire to call attention to either. Gaslighting isn’t just about what’s said, but also what is ignored.

Even now, when the president’s legal team has submitted serious court filings with real evidence, the press is simply not reporting it—while at the same time threatening everyone who does bring it to light. The tech giants are pasting an Animal House-like “don’t pay attention to this” over every item that the President posts, even Happy Diwali and the pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey.

Praetorian guards come in many forms. We may be looking at the point where the Republic turns into an Empire. This is a coup, and it’s meant to look like one. It’s meant to discourage everyone who expects fair and secure elections. Especially those often disenfranchised who came out to vote for Trump.

If we accept this kind of massive fraud it will not be limited to gaslighting conservatives. Even between Democrats in local elections, candidates had better make the right genuflections to the Praetorians who control the vote counting.¹

In a sane world there would be a lot of traditional Democrat voters, minorities on the left especially, recognizing how paternalistic the leaders of the Democrats are and what allowing this level of fraud to stand means for non-establishment candidates, whether in the general election or in primaries. And whether Democrat or Republican, left or right.

All the people who normally don’t vote, they’re going to go back to not voting. They’re being told loud and clear that their vote doesn’t matter. A lot of people who do vote will also give up. If they’re Trump supporters, their vote doesn’t count, and if they’re Biden supporters, their vote isn’t needed.

Republicans are unlikely to run someone who inspires nonvoters to vote, which means that less fraud, if any, will be necessary in 2024. But if the crime is allowed to stand, the tool will remain available when needed. And it will be needed more and more often, for lesser and lesser candidates.

All Republics eventually fail. There’s the old prayer, better in my lifetime than my descendants’ lifetime, but the fall of Democracy is not a one-time event. If it falls now, it will be fallen then. If they want freedom, if they want the American dream, they’ll have to build it themselves. It is our duty to ensure that they have as many tools remaining as possible.

The only consolation of failure is that all empires crumble, too. But that’s hardly a consolation. When the Republic falls, you can keep your head down, don’t draw attention to yourself; social mobility and progress die but otherwise things continue as before. You won’t want to be a politician, of course, or your family will be threatened when you tell the truth.

But when the fall finally comes, there is no hiding from the chaos. The best response is to become the chaos.

I saw something really smart on Facebook a few weeks ago. “Donald Trump didn’t bring division, division brought Donald Trump.”

Now, the same people who brought division have brought fraud—and a call to unite over the fraud. But fraud never results in unity—it only results in silence, at best, until the silent boil over.