"Put the adults back in charge," they whined.  "Donald Trump will break the world," they lied.  Well, they manipulated election rules to certify suspicious vote totals that preposterously portrayed senile Joe Biden as the most popularly elected president in history; censored and locked up anyone who complained; and covered up their crimes with J6 show trials drenched in untruths meant to hide from history the Uniparty's underhanded machinations in outright stealing a presidential election.  The whole mess was so banana-republic-yucky that Biden was inaugurated behind barbed wire and a show of military force befitting the small junta who attended the successful coup's celebration.  And as a result of the Uniparty's installation of Dementia Joe as White House marionette, the American people have been plagued with crime, inflation, political persecution, COVID tyranny, deadly battlefield retreat, open borders, staggering drug deaths, proxy wars, bankruptcies, bank runs, endless new regulations, a plummeting standard of living, economic panic, and social volatility.  Elections have consequences, but stolen elections have catastrophes.

For over two years, the State-controlled press and the permanent political class have accused anyone who challenges the ruling regime's legitimacy of being an "election denier" pushing the "big lie" that the 2020 race was rigged.  That resort to low-minded name-calling always seems like the "big tell" that they know that the people know that they're full of it.  Never mind that Time ran an exposé shortly after the election diagramming in great detail how "a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, work[ed] together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information."  Never mind that the American people later learned that Facebook CEO "Mark Zuckerberg and other left-wing actors commandeered election operations in blue hubs of swing states in 2020" by "strategically bankroll[ing] and staff[ing] local government election offices, which are in charge of voter registration, voting, and vote counting."  Never mind that leftist agitators had spent months in the run-up to the election threatening to unleash mayhem if Biden "won" the so-called "national popular vote" but lost the Electoral College.  Never mind that those same leftist agitators also spent months seeding a public narrative that a "red mirage" would show Trump winning before days of ballot-hunting eventually overturned those ephemeral victories.  Nope — put all those public admissions and "color revolution" propaganda campaigns aside, you dumb deplorables, and blithely accept the authorities' assurances that Biden's election was on the up-and-up.  People with power crossed their hearts and promised they were telling the truth; what more could Americans without power possibly require?  

Here's an idea: when more than half the country believes that "cheating likely affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election" and that future election outcomes cannot be trusted, then that crisis in confidence reflects catastrophic government failure.  In functioning republics with reliable voting systems, allegations of electoral malfeasance are a "big deal."  When nothing less than the people's faith in the democratic process is at stake, then representative government will not survive unless the people perceive that process to be fair, transparent, and above reproach.  When they instead judge elections as corrupt, manipulated, and unverifiable, the blame for such disastrous public perception lies entirely with government officials.  The burden of ensuring secure elections, swift results, and trusted outcomes rests with those in power, and loss of public confidence reflects government abrogation of its own civic and legal duties. 

In 2020, when COVID's ongoing "state of emergency" conveniently provided a pretext for making sweeping changes to the ways in which votes were cast and collected, irrespective of binding statutory law, mail-in ballots with scant security checks or signature verifications flooded battleground states in Democrat-controlled zones that tilted Trump victories to Biden victories days after the actual election.  During that days-long window, ballots were lost and found; election workers inexplicably stopped and started their work; and numerous allegations of improper collection, derelict verification, unlawful voting, mixed sorting (where suspect ballots were separated from mail-in envelopes before verification but nonetheless included with good ballots), and double counting were never resolved.  Still, pundits pretended everything was perfectly normal, despite the reality that, among global peers, America alone is incapable of tabulating its elections promptly or providing results that can be transparently verified and reproduced.

Rather than investigating any of these issues, Secretaries of State looked past clear violations of election law and testimonial evidence alleging various instances of fraud to certify vote counts; state and federal courts, deferring to those bureaucratic certifications despite deficiencies, refused to investigate the matters any further; and the Supreme Court ran like a frightened child when a "case or controversy" of the highest national concern finally reached its doors.  So fearful, apparently, of replaying some version of the contentious judicial events that settled the 2000 election between Bush and Gore (or so terrified of the left's certain campaign of terror arriving outside their own families' homes), the courts threw up their hands and permitted perhaps the least trusted election in American history to be rubber-stamped as valid.  

Voters, having attempted to invite disinterested third parties to review these serious issues but receiving no help from anyone empowered to do so, looked to American history for answers.  In such circumstances, when vote fraud or other election crimes have been suspected of having directly affected the electoral outcomes for federal offices, voters have successfully delayed the certification of those elections until the allegations could be either fully resolved through the courts or settled through negotiated compromise.  In this matter, voters similarly encouraged lawmakers and Vice President Pence to delay certification of the Electoral College's 2020 vote tallies until all election-related cases could be exhaustively resolved and, by doing so, uphold their constitutional duties to certify only lawful, honest elections.

Rather than taking advantage of such a possibility, the vice president insisted that he had no choice but to certify the Electoral College vote, regardless of whether or not its results were tainted by fraud, and Congress used the J6 election protests as a pretext to invoke an "emergency session" and sidestep the substantial election issues entirely.  In essence, the vice president and members of Congress followed the Supreme Court in concluding that their constitutional duties required them to rubber-stamp a disputed election.  The federal government once again proved itself little more than a coalition of cowards and criminals.  The people were then expected to watch this constitutionally questionable process play out — during which none of their allegations of election illegality were ever fully scrutinized or resolved — and somehow respect the outcome as fair, reasonable, and legitimate.  

That expectation was hooey then and is still hooey today.  When a majority of Americans see election fraud and a near unanimity of lawmakers see none, then America's ruling Uniparty is willfully blind.  When Americans' efforts to pursue all available legal remedies are unceremoniously quashed at every turn, then justice is no longer blind.  When Congress decides to ignore all the evidence for 2020 vote fraud and instead pumps out years of propaganda about an "insurrection" that never happened, then more Americans have their eyes wide open and can finally see.  When the consequences of a stolen election are nothing less than impoverishment, persecution, crime, and war, then the people can see ever more clearly that justice delayed is justice denied.  

When those who run the government have no vision and those punished by the government have committed no crimes, then the blind won't see what they've destroyed until it's too late.  Trust is a tricky thing to restore.  Once it's gone, systems just break.

Image via Pixnio.