Democracy is dying in darkness, but since there’s no way to blame Donald Trump for it, the media is uninterested.
As you probably know, Monday night’s Iowa Caucus (which kicked off the presidential primary season) was anything but ordinary. Usually on election night, early returns start coming in as early as 7-8pm CST. But not Monday night. On Iowa Caucus night, the nation waited and waited for the results to begin trickling out, but there was nothing. By 9pm and 0% of the vote reported, it was clear something was amiss in Iowa.
Then came the announcement at around 9:05pm:
“Out of an abundance of caution,” the Iowa State Democratic Party was undertaking “quality control” measures and would not be releasing the caucus results anytime soon. No time frame was given for when the results would be released to the public.
Immediately people began pointing out the obvious: they’re rigging it against Bernie, again.
The comments began pouring in in response to the MSNBC tweet:
By Tuesday morning, the #2 trending hashtag on Twitter was “#PeteTheCheat,” in reference to Pete Buttigieg, who bizarrely delivered a victory speech late Monday night despite 0% of the results having been reported:
Things had taken a turn: it wasn’t Biden for whom the Iowa Caucus was being rigged–it was Pete Buttigieg. How would he know to deliver a victory speech on Monday night despite 0% of the vote having been reported?
Well, that’s because there’s a strong possibility “Mayor Pete” was part of the reason the voting results weren’t available on Monday night. What made the 2020 Iowa Caucus different from all previous Iowa Caucuses was that this year, the Iowa State Democratic Party decided to use an app called “Shadow” to coordinate and calculate all the vote totals. It was this app “Shadow” that “failed” (many would say it succeeded, depending on your perspective) and threw everything into chaos.
It turns out that Buttigieg’s campaign gave thousands of dollars to Shadow:
I just want to add: why did they give the app such an obviously sinister name like “Shadow”? A movie villain wouldn’t even be this blatant about it.
At around 4pm on Tuesday afternoon, the Democratic Party announced that it had 62% of the votes counted and finally released the partial results. They showed Bernie and Buttigieg neck and neck for the lead, with Joe Biden a distant fourth behind those two and Elizabeth Warren.
Finally, on Thursday night, the full results of the 2020 Iowa Democratic Caucus were released:
The final results showed Buttigieg with a 0.1% margin of victory over Bernie Sanders. Keep in mind this result shows the percentage of delegates won. As far as the final popular vote went, Bernie was ahead of Buttigieg by several thousand. But it’s the delegates that actually matter.
This was quite a remarkable turn of events for Mayor Pete given that the final polls from Iowa in the run up to Caucus Day showed him far behind Bernie. The RCP average had him at around 16, with Bernie in the lead at 23%:
Only one polling outlet had Buttigieg in the lead prior to the vote, while the rest showed either big Bernie leads or decent Biden leads:
The fact that Buttigieg managed to make up so much ground over the course of a couple days is a testament to the scrappiness of his campaign and its exceptional get-out-the-vote efforts. And absolutely nothing else, okay?
Not only did Mayor Pete overcome what was by most accounts a sizable polling deficit just days before the Caucus vote took place, but last night he just so happened to be on-air at CNN when the news broke that he won on Thursday evening:
That Pete Buttigieg is one lucky fella, huh? It’s almost as if. . .
Buttigieg’s surprising victory in Iowa has unsurprisingly boosted his polling numbers in New Hampshire, where he’s now in a virtual tie with Bernie for the lead according to freshly-released polling data:
The damage has been done. Bernie supporters are furious, and now Buttigieg is surging in the polls due to the momentum from winning Iowa. People like a winner, and so it should be no surprise that more and more people are climbing aboard the bandwagon.
Monday’s Iowa Caucus is now ancient history, despite some serious red flags being raised about its results–beyond just the Buttigieg-Shadow connection:
Even the New York Times admits that there are enough “errors” in the numbers that, given the slim margin of victory for Buttigieg, the results of the Iowa Caucus probably aren’t even accurate. There were dirty tricks aplenty:
But these cries will fall on deaf ears, because though the voting tallies may have been wrong (meaning fraudulent), the Right Candidate won. So it’s on to New Hampshire.
Keep in mind, however, that winning the Iowa Caucus does not automatically make you the favorite to win the party nomination:
- In 2016, Ted Cruz won Iowa on the Republican side. Hillary won Iowa on the Democratic side, but we all know the 2016 Dem primary was rigged (more on this in a bit).
- In 2012, Rick Santorum beat out Mitt Romney by a mere 34 votes to win Iowa.
- In 2008, Barack Obama famously won Iowa and gained a ton of momentum in the primary fight against Hillary. But on the Republican side, Mike Huckabee won Iowa with 34% of the vote while John McCain finished a distant fourth with just 13% of the vote.
- In 2004, John Kerry won Iowa.
- In 2000, George W. Bush won Iowa, as did Al Gore.
So in the five elections since and including 2000, between both parties, five times has the candidate that won Iowa gone on to win their party’s nomination: Hillary 2016, Obama 2008, Kerry 2004, and both Bush and Gore in 2000. Three times we’ve seen a party nominee fail to win Iowa: Trump 2016, Romney 2012 and McCain in 2008.
Actually, now that I look at it, it’s clear that winning Iowa is far more important on the Democratic side than it is on the Republican side. Every Democratic nominee since 2000 first won in Iowa, while only one Republican nominee since 2000 won Iowa (George W. Bush in 2000).
Why is this? I have no idea. Maybe it’s because the Democrats rig their primaries. Maybe it’s simply because the best candidate tends to win the most states, Iowa included. It could be any number of reasons.
But clearly the Democratic Party feels Iowa is important, as evidenced by the fact that they blatantly rigged the election against Bernie and in favor of Buttigieg.
My question is this: why has the Democratic Party Establishment kicked Joe Biden to the curb in favor of the 38-year-old homosexual mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana? Is he really their best hope of defeating Trump?
The obvious answer would be that Biden is unfit to run for President given his obviously deteriorated mental facilities. The guy is falling apart; half the time he doesn’t even know what day of the week it is. It’s not a stretch to say this is the reason the Democratic Party Establishment–which he himself is a part of, or perhaps was a part of–is bailing on him.
Speaking of Biden, his media hype has officially collided reality. For a while I’ve suspected his candidacy was not nearly as popular with the voters as the polling suggested. I think his polling success was based mainly on a combination of his name recognition relative to the other candidates, as well as outright rigging of the polls by the media outlets conducting them because Biden is the Establishment’s Choice.
I’ve never felt like Biden was the true front-runner in the Democratic race, either he was a placeholder or the pre-determined nominee. But he’s no longer the front-runner. Polling in New Hampshire–the next primary on the calendar–shows Biden projected for another fourth-place finish. He’ll probably win in South Carolina, but even that could be in doubt now. It would appear Biden is cooked.
The only reason I want to talk about Biden is in relation to Buttigieg, specifically how Buttigieg replaced Biden as the apparent Chosen One in the eyes of the Party Establishment.
There are rumors that Buttigieg is CIA: somehow, this small-town mayor from Indiana received the endorsement of over 200 “foreign policy and national security professionals,” including former CIA Deputy Director David Cohen among many other CIA, State Department, Pentagon and NSC officials from the Obama-era That’s odd.
And how did Buttigieg become so popular in the first place? Why is no one talking about how unprecedented it is that the mayor of a town in Indiana has suddenly built a national profile for himself and has become one of the front-runners to win the Democratic nomination for President? You don’t just do that all on your own; it can only be done by having friends in high places.
There’s something up with Buttigieg. I don’t know exactly what it is, but for some reason his candidacy has the blessing of people high up the chain. He would not be where he is today without the permission of high-ranking officials and their mouthpieces in the media. Buttigieg is backed by powerful forces. He’s like an iceberg in that 90% of him is shrouded in mystery.
Something’s up.
***
Keep in mind that it is an indisputable fact that the DNC rigged the 2016 primary for Hillary Clinton and cheated Bernie Sanders out of the nomination. Yes, it is a fact. A federal judge reviewing the case even admitted so in 2017:
“In June 2016, a class action lawsuit was filed against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz for violating the DNC Charter by rigging the Democratic presidential primaries for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders. Even former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid admitted in July 2016, “I knew—everybody knew—that this was not a fair deal.” He added that Debbie Wasserman Schultz should have resigned much sooner than she did. The lawsuit was filed to push the DNC to admit their wrongdoing and provide Bernie Sanders supporters, who supported him financially with millions of dollars in campaign contributions, with restitution for being cheated.
On August 25, 2017, Federal Judge William Zloch, dismissed the lawsuit after several months of litigation during which DNC attorneys argued that the DNC would be well within their rights to select their own candidate. “In evaluating Plaintiffs’ claims at this stage, the Court assumes their allegations are true—that the DNC and Wasserman Schultz held a palpable bias in favor Clinton and sought to propel her ahead of her Democratic opponent,” the court order dismissing the lawsuit stated. This assumption of a plaintiff’s allegation is the general legal standard in the motion to dismiss stage of any lawsuit. The allegations contained in the complaint must be taken as true unless they are merely conclusory allegations or are invalid on their face.
The order then explained why the lawsuit would be dismissed. “The Court must now decide whether Plaintiffs have suffered a concrete injury particularized to them, or one certainly impending, that is traceable to the DNC and its former chair’s conduct—the keys to entering federal court. The Court holds that they have not.” The Court added that it did not consider this within its jurisdiction. “Federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction, possessing ‘only that power authorized by Constitution and statute.’”
The Court continued, “For their part, the DNC and Wasserman Schultz have characterized the DNC charter’s promise of ‘impartiality and evenhandedness’ as a mere political promise—political rhetoric that is not enforceable in federal courts. The Court does not accept this trivialization of the DNC’s governing principles. While it may be true in the abstract that the DNC has the right to have its delegates ‘go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way,’ the DNC, through its charter, has committed itself to a higher principle.”
But ultimately, it is only the DNC itself that can choose (or choose not) to hold itself to those “higher principles.” The Court cannot make the DNC be “impartial and evenhanded.” Thus you have the Court conceding that the DNC is entirely within its rights to rig its party primary for its favored candidate.
Basically you had the DNC’s lawyers arguing that the voting and the primary process itself is just for show. They’ll only let the voters’ votes count if they vote for the candidate the DNC wants to get the nomination. If the voters go off-script, well, tough: the DNC is under no obligation to honor their wishes. The DNC can simply pick its own nominee.
It’s an extraordinary admission for the DNC to make, but their backs were against the wall: the primary was rigged against Sanders and everybody knew it, and so the DNC was facing the prospect of having to repay millions and millions of dollars of objectively wasted campaign donations that went to Bernie. Their only option was to admit that yes, they had rigged the campaign, but hey: it’s our Party, we can rig our primary if we want.
Of course, this incredible admission by the DNC was hardly reported in the mainstream media–the media was far too obsessed with propagating the Trump Russia Collusion Hoax. But the Federal Court ruling gave the DNC the green-light to rig every future election henceforth.
On Monday night, when the “quality control” news broke, it became clear that the Democratic Party was never again going to allow its elections to be decided by the voters. Every Democratic Party election from 2016 on will be rigged, and this is why Monday night unfolded as it did.
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