Look for more in '24
The Friday Letter / No. 538 / April 28, 2023
Fourth Sunday of Easter
Updated at 8:46 a.m. EDT with additional reporting on the Hunter laptop scandal
In March 2020, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's hapless, anti-Trump Republican secretary of state, signed a consent decree with Democrats that opened new opportunities for voting fraud by allowing voters to “cure,” or correct problems discovered on their absentee ballots, ditching the long-held practice of rejecting ballots with fraudulent signatures or missing information.
“Most important,” Mollie Hemingway wrote last year in Rigged, her book on the stolen 2020 election, “the settlement got rid of any meaningful signature match for mail-in ballots.”
The consent decree sank Georgia's 2020 twice-delayed primary into an unmitigated disaster. The New York Times said the new voting system suffered a “spectacular collapse,” and it wasn't sure if the cause was Raffensperger's “mere bungling or intentional.”
Here is Hemingway's description of the mess:
The “trouble that plunged Georgia's voting system into chaos” was related to Dominion Voting Systems, the Times claimed, “which some elections experts had been sounding alarm bells for months.”
The Times wasn't alone. In a 2019 piece, Politico cited security experts who “warn that an intruder can corrupt the machines and alter the barcode-based ballots without voters or election officials realizing it.”
And the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cited security experts at Capital One and Equifax who said “the system will still be vulnerable to hacking.”
Hemingway quotes a warning from U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon: “Forty-three percent of American voters use voting machines that researchers have found have serious security flaws.” His reference was generic and did not mention Dominion.
Why the difference? How do Mollie Hemingway, Ron Wyden, Politico, the New York Times, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution get away with reporting on alleged flaws in electronic voting machines, including Dominion's, and Fox News has to cough up $787.5 million to settle a libel suit?
One difference may be that Dominion got Fox to acknowledge that it falsely claimed Dominion rigged voting results knowing the claims were false, and further allowed people like Rudy Guilani and Sidney Powell to repeat them on air.
Thus, Dominion relied on the 1964 ruling in Times v. Sullivan that the press has broad 1st Amendment protection from untrue and even unfair claims it makes about public figures (including corporations), unless plaintiffs can show the claims were made with malice or with the knowledge that they were untrue.
The Times, Journal-Constitution, Politico, Sen. Wyden, and Mollie Hemingway, on the other hand, merely reported sources who claimed Dominion's machines don't work well, not that it conspired to commit fraud.
Apparently, Rupert Murdock concluded that at trial Fox would likely be found to knowingly lying and acting with malice.
That's the best, non-lawyer explanation I can offer. Victor Davis Hanson brings up another question, however:
“Did not Twitter, the FBI, CNN, and MSNBC knowingly try to influence an election by spreading what they must have known was an absurd lie?”
His reference is the 2020 election.
“Almost no one after the election swallowed the notion that Dominion had rigged its voting machines. But millions before the election may have been swayed by the Biden campaign and the media-generated lie that the authentic Biden laptop was part of a Russian intelligence operation.
“And that lie, unlike the Dominion charge of post-election defamation, might have changed history.”
Social and legacy media censored the New York Post story that exposed the Hunter Biden laptop computer scandal. With the urging of federal agencies and the White House, they called the story misinformation. (“Misinformation” is also known as a lie.)
At the only Trump-Biden TV debate, Biden cited 51 intelligence agency operatives who signed a letter claiming the contents of Hunter’s computer were planted by Russians.
Biden’s accusation was a lie, and either Biden or his puppet masters knew it was a lie when he made it.
The contents of Hunter’s laptop were true as reported. The Communist Chinese government had paid the Biden family — Hunter, Joe, and others — millions of dollars in the most costly influence peddling scheme in the nation’s history.
The Post wouldn’t have published the story knowing otherwise. Polls later showed that 17% of Biden’s voters would not have voted for him had they known about the supressed, censored story.
Biden’s handlers, our spy agencies, social media, and the corporate press kept the public from knowing the truth. In so doing, they overthrew the government of the United States.
Not one conspirator spent a day in prison. Not one paid a fine. Not one was fired. Not one politician was impeached. Not one establishment media figure job his job.
Clueless in New York
David Leonhardt writes Democrat propaganda for the New York Times in an email column called the Daily Briefing. He is the only NYT stenographer I read because it's the only stuff that's free there.
David wonders why Joe Biden doesn't do more public appearances. After all, David shared with us, he's doing such a swell job.
“The biggest reason that many Democratic officials are nervous about President Biden’s age is not his ability to do the job in a second term,” he wrote in his Wednesday missive. Really, he said that.
His second paragraph offers the mother of all excuses for incompetence: “Strange as it may sound, the American government can function without a healthy president.”
To illustrate, Leonhardt notes that surrogates actually operated the machines of government while FDR was ill in 1944 and 1945. He then tells an outright, disprovable lie, that “Four decades later, the government managed its relationship with a teetering Soviet Union while Ronald Reagan’s mental capacities slipped.”
(David forgot the big one. But because he is likely the product of government education, he might not recognize the name of Woodrow Wilson, whose wife Edith became the de facto president after he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919.)
Here is Leonhardt's concern:
“The issue that makes many Democrats even more anxious than Biden’s second-term capabilities is whether his age will prevent him from winning a second term. If enough voters are turned off by the idea of a president who would turn 86 in office, Republicans might win full control of the federal government in 2024 – and Donald Trump might return to the White House.”As Mike Miller wrote yesterday at Red State, “Democrats at large don’t give a damn about whether or not Biden has the mental capacity to cognitively carry out the duties of his presidency; they only worry about whether he can win.”
Michael Shear, another New York Times White House stenographer, has an easy explanation for Joe's vacant stare and absence from the public eye:
Quoted by Leonhardt, Shear said Biden's handlers are unapologetic about avoiding interviews and news conferences: “They say that traditional media don't have clout, and they think there are many other ways that he can better present himself.”
We can't wait.
Leonhardt's words are reassuring when he says “There certainly are reasons to think that Biden is up for both the substantive and performative parts of the job. He looked sharp during his State of the Union address this year, trading verbal volleys with congressional Republicans – and winning the exchange. I have spoken with Biden a couple of times since he was elected and found him to be sharp, able to discuss policy and politics in the same discursive style he had in prior years.”
Election fraud update
In Arizona's fraud-plagued Maricopa County, 222 noncitizens have registered to vote, and at least nine have voted in federal elections, the Public Interest Legal Foundation reports in a story at The Washington Times.
In 2019, Pennsylvania found 11,000 registered noncitizens. North Carolina found 41 noncitizens who voted in 2016. Motor vehicle departments had sent them registration forms with the citizenship box already checked.
The revelations come on the 30th anniversary of the National Voter Registration Act, nicknamed the voter motor act, allowing drivers to register to vote when they apply for a driver's license.
The number of discovered illegal voters is not huge, but the mere act of voting or attempting to vote in a U.S. election is a direct assault on our sovereignty and arguably one of the most serious non-violent offenses. The solution is long federal prison sentences followed by deportation.
Upstaging Reagan
At an Aug. 12, 1986, press conference, President Reagan said “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.”
Now he's been upstaged with six words from Joe Biden's re-election announcement that will spark terror in the hearts of men: “Join us. Let's finish the job.”
He's made an excellent start – of finishing us as a free society. It's difficult to imagine what comes next.
Short takes on the news
Nebraska becomes the 27th state to acknowledge the 2nd Amendment right of law-abiding citizens 21 and older to carry a concealed firearm without a permit.
Quote for today
“Fox hired Caitlyn Jenner because he's trans and fired Tucker Carlson because he's religious. That's your 'conservative' news network.” – Commentator Matt Walsh, in a tweet quoted at The Blaze
Headlines of the week
From the Babylon Bee
“Man Jiggles Toilet Handle, Thus Exhausting His Knowledge of Plumbing”
“Millions of Boomers Call Grandkids to Ask How to Change Channel from Fox News”
To contact Steve: stephencombs@substack.com. The Friday Letter is published in the op-ed section of USSA News. Ask your friends to read the Friday Letter and sign up for a free or voluntary paid subscription. It's easy: Just go to fridayletter.us.