by Rush Limbaugh in the Limbaugh Letter, February 2020
"The only way liberals win national elections is by pretmding they're not liberals." -- me, "35 Undeniable Truths" #23, March 1994
"It's the left, my friends, that's trying to stamp out any dissenting opinion, in the public square, in political campaigns ... They seek to curtail robust debate during elections. It's the ACLU and the NAALCP that are both subsidiaries of the Democrat Party that are using federal courts to stop [recall] elections in this country." -- me, EIB, 9/23/03
I shocked many of you recently by predicting that the left is going to try to abolish elections. It is increasingly obvious that the only thing standing between them and perpetual power -- to which they think they are entitled -- is your ability to vote against them. As such, elections will be in their crosshairs.
It won't happen this year, and it won't happen overnight. But it will happen. In fact, leftists have already started laying the groundwork. Last September, Politico reported on a presentation by UC Irvine Professor Shawn Rosenberg that rocked the annual International Society of Political Psychologists convention. Rosenberg announced that "democracy is devouring itself" and that "we the people" are to blame. Politico details:
As society's 'elites' ... have increasingly been sidelined, citizens have been ill-equipped cognitively and emotionally to run a well-functioning democracy. As a consequence ... angst-filled voters have turned ... to right-wing populists. [Rosenberg's] prediction? "In well-established democracies like the United States, democratic governance will continue its inexorable decline and will eventually fail."
Translation: You're too stupid to vote the right way; elections that reject elites and choose right-wingers are an existential threat to America.
On 1/17/20, NBC News ran a piece titled "Trump Voters Motivated by Racism May Be Violating the Constitution. Can They Be Stopped?" Yes, they can, according to Whitelash: Unmasking White Grievance at the Ballot Box, a new book by University of Baltimore School of Law Professor Terry Smith:
Rather than excuse racist voters or try to figure out how to live with their choices, [Smith] argues that racist voting is not just immoral, but illegal. The government, Smith says, has the ability, and the responsibility to address it.
Anyone who voted for Trump had to be "motivated by racist sentiment," according to this genius -- who proposes that such voting be "invalidated". The ballot box is "racist", so bye-bye, ballot box. Poof.
As the academic world begins to contemplate American disenfranchisement, the political world is much farther along. In fact, Democrats' constant bellyaching about "Russian election tampering" and "foreign interference" has laid the foundation for them to eventually declare our elections "broken".
For over three years Democrats have relentlessly blamed the Ruskies for gaming the 2016 election. They have kept petal to the metal, day in and day out, in every media outlet. The 2016 vote went wrong; that is the message. The election was corrupted. It was hacked. The Russians -- working "in cahoots" with Donald Trump -- stole the election.
The truth is, Democrats have done more damage to the public perception of our electoral system as honest and dependable than Vladimir Putin could ever have dreamed of doing. I'm convinced it's deliberate. They play the long game. The objective of the American left, the Democrat Party, and their media accomplices is to sow increasing doubts about the sanctity, honesty, and legitimacy of American Presidential elections.
And now they've pressed replay. They've seamlessly slipped into "Russia-Russia-Russia" mode for 2020:
They have tried to condition people to not only doubt the legitimacy of Donald Trump's 2016 victory but also his likely win in 2020. All they have to do is taint perceptions, so more and more average citizens mistrust and disbelieve election results.
What is the end game? Take it to its logical conclusion: abolish elections. Oh, it will be spun initially as "reform" -- by ditching the Electoral College, or instituting "ranked choice" voting, or operating by opinion polls, or another liberal mechanism that nullifies conservative votes. If elections are not trustworthy, if they're corrupt -- if the Russians are cheating and the Republicans are working with foreigners to skew elections -- then the system must be replaced with something more "fair". It will be said that "our broken elections are not actually expressing the will of the people."
A lot of you are objecting, "But Rush, but Rush, that could never happen!" Really? Look at the trajectory of the radical left, with their intolerant bullying and intimidation of anyone who disagrees with them, and their determination to squelch any expression of alternative views. That trajectory has a natural destination. If you're going to shut people up, if you're going to bully them, if you're going to make sure they cannot be heard, say, on a college campus or on social media, then how far down the road is it to make sure they're not heard at the ballot box?
Indeed, invalidating the ballot box is precisely what this entire impeachment fiasco is about. As President Trump's legal team made clear in their January 18 response to the Democrat articles of impeachment:
This is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election -- now just months away ... In the end, this entire [impeachment] process is nothing more than a dangerous attack on the American people themselves and their fundamental right to vote.
Bingo. They don't want this country to remain a representative republic. They don't want you to have a choice. They don't want you to have the chance to reject them. They are offended they have to run for election. They are offended the American people have a say in whether or not they run things. Do not doubt me. They are that arrogant.
Proving my point in his opening "argument" on 1/22/20, lead House impeachment manager Adam "Pencil Neck" Schiff said this: "[T]he President's misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won." Donald Trump represents everything they hate about this country, and he's got to be stopped. Not because of a phone call to Ukraine. And not because he supposedly meddled in the election. He's got to be stopped because he's denying them what they think is theirs. They can only achieve what is theirs if they permanently transform this country away from its Founding principles. That's what offends me. They are not coequal participants in the democratic process. They are trying to undermine it.
Democrats simply refuse to accept losing elections now. That's why we're where we are. Their entire political purpose since election night 2016 has been to deny the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump their vote. They are not interested in trying to figure out how to win you back. They want to punish you for rejecting them.
On January 6, when President Trump called in to my radio program, I asked him why Nancy Pelosi had not yet, at that point, delivered the articles of impeachment to the Senate. He answered, "I think what they are trying to do is affect the election illegally. That's what they are trying to do."
He was exactly right. Since free and fair elections are keeping them from the total power they crave, they are always on the hunt for ways to cheat. Vote fraud is on page one of the Democrat Handbook. On January 2, Judicial Watch reported that 378 counties nationwide "have more voter registrations than citizens living there and old enough to vote, i.e., counties where registration rates exceed 100 percent." There are an extra 2.5 million people on the rolls who shouldn't be there. The worst offenders were California, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Colorado. You won't be surprised to learn that Virginia, Colorado, and North Carolina have all had significant gains in local Democrat races in recent years. And California -- where over 1.5 million fraudulent registrations had to be purged in Los Angeles County alone, thanks to a Judicial Watch lawsuit -- still has major chicanery, including in Orange County. No coincidence that OC flipped from a longstanding red county to all blue in 2018.
Then there's the left's continual attack on the Electoral College, most recently via the National Popular Vote plan. Not yet tested before the Supreme Court, this plan has been adopted by several blue states agreeing to award all their electoral votes to whichever Presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote nationally, regardless of who wins the state.
They do not care that the Framers did not believe in raw, direct democracy. To preserve and protect individual liberty, they deliberately set up a Constitutional representative republic -- eschewing majority rule, which always devolves into mob rule. But the left loves the mob when it's their mobsters doing the ruling.
They smear the Founders as eeevil slaveholders who invented the Electoral College to keep power out of the hands of the people. (The truth is just the opposite.) In "Here's Every Defense of the Electoral College -- and Why They're All Wrong", New York magazine calls the Electoral College a "vile institution" that gives "disproportionate influence" to "whiter states". The Founders, they say, deserve no deference on the issue because they:
were (mostly) a collection of land speculators who build their fortunes by ethnically cleansing Native Americans, and slavers who built theirs by participating in one of the greatest atrocities in world history ... [W]e're talking about incredibly flawed, extremely dead human beings, not philosopher kings appointed by God. Thus, there is no reason to reflexively defer to their judgment...
The reason the left wants to end the Electoral College is to establish federal control -- that is, Swamp control -- over elections. If they succeed, there will never be another Republican President.
Which is , of course, the entire point of all of this. Do not doubt me on this, folks.