90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, November 4, 2020

Democrats Spent $104.1 Million Losing to Lindsey Graham, Most Expensive Loss in Senate History

Democrat Jaime Harrison spent $104.1 million in his unsuccessful bid to unseat Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the most expensive loss in the history of the U.S. Senate.

Harrison shattered fundraising records, as Democrats from across the nation poured money into the race in an effort to punish Graham for his role in confirming conservative Supreme Court justices.

Earlier on Election Day, Fox News summarized the numbers:

Harrison announced a record-breaking fundraising haul of $57 million on October 11 for the third quarter of the election cycle. The previous quarterly record — $38 million — was held by former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke in his losing 2018 Senate bid against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.

Harrison has also now both raised and spent more than $100 million overall, by far the most of any Senate candidate in American history. He raked in $107.6 million in donations, but his campaign spent almost as much, doling out $104.1 million. The previous spending record was set in 2018 by Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., with $85 million, though much of that total was self-funded.

As Harrison appeared to inch closer to Graham, the three-term veteran became a ubiquitous presence on social media and conservative talk shows, warning (correctly) that liberals were raising massive sums of money to...

California's voters beat back looney-left's affirmative action Proposition 16

California was a lost cause in voting for the president, but there was still a little bit of good news.

Proposition 16 failed, by a huge 56% to 44% at last count margin, smacking down yet another effort by the state's far-left elites to foist affirmative action labeling onto California's diverse population.

Here's what Google had on its results (it doesn't link to anywhere) on a keyword search for 'Proposition 16 results,' citing the Associated Press:

Which is a huge repudiation.

A big reason, of course, is that California has a large Asian-American population, and very large numbers were aware that any newly instituted affirmative action spoils system was going to come out of their hides. I wrote about that here. Work your hardest to win some prize, watch it handed over to someone else who has the 'right' color of skin as their main merit.

Presumably, underrepresented blacks and Latinos would benefit and Asians would lose, but here's the impressive thing: Every last county in California rejected it save for the Bay Area counties (which includes lily-white Marin), and huge Los Angeles County. Every one, see the New York Times map here, and note that that includes Latino-majority and Latino-significant counties such as Imperial, San Diego, San Bernardino as well as the counties in the lower San Joaquin Valley. The Latinos, like anyone else, rejected this bean-counting measure that measures the worth of people by the color of their skin over...

Michigan Dem Gary Peters in trouble vs. GOP challenger John James

James, an Iraq War veteran, would be the first African American elected to represent Michigan in the Senate

Following Tuesday's vote, U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, a Democrat, was trailing GOP businessman John James in the critical swing state of Michigan.

James held a double-digit lead for much of the night until Peters started closing the gap early Wednesday, reports said. The race, still considered too close to call, could decide whether Republicans keep control of the Senate -- or Democrats win the majority.

“It’s pretty clear we’re not going to know the results until sometime tomorrow,” Peters said at an event in Pontiac, Mich., on Tuesday night, according to Grand Rapids' WOOD-TV. “A number of jurisdictions are still processing this massive amount of absentee ballots. … Stay tuned.”

Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., speaks at a campaign event before Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Tuesday, Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020, in Southfield, Mich. (Associated Press)

With roughly 80% of the votes counted as of 5 a.m., Peters trailed James by roughly 6 percentage points, Fox News election data showed.

“There’s still a lot of votes to be counted to be sure. But we’re extremely excited and optimistic about where we stand right now," James told supporters in Detroit, according to WOOD.

With control of the Senate on the line, money poured into the race. The Peters-James face-off was expected to top $100 million in spending, making it the most expensive election in Michigan's history, according to the Michigan Campaign Finance Network.

James, an Iraq War veteran, would be the first African American elected to represent Michigan in the Senate. If successful, he'd join Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina as one of two current...

Watch: Protesters Get Violent with Baseball Bats in DC

A fight broke out in Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House in Washington, D.C. late Tuesday night.

Video captured a fight breaking out when a man wearing all black began fighting with another white man. The video shows multiple people joining in and assaulting the man before he manages to escape.

One person struck the make with some type of bat, the video shows.

“Where you going?” someone asked the man just as the fight breaks out. Another man tried to separate the two men until the first blow was struck.

The fight quickly broke up before any serious injury occurred. “Let him go,” someone yelled as he ran away.

Townhall reporter Julio Rosas tweeted video of tense moments amid an arrest. Nearby, protesters taunted other police officers.

Another protester accosted what he believed to be a Black police officer, calling him an “Uncle Tom,” among other slurs:

Democrats are laying the groundwork for revolution right in front of our eyes.

As if 2020 were not insane enough already, we now have Democrats and their ruling class masters openly talking about staging a coup. You might have missed it, what with the riots, lockdowns and other daily mayhem we’re forced to endure in this, the most wretched year of my lifetime. But it’s happening.

It started with the military brass quietly indicating that the troops should not follow a presidential order. They were bolstered by many former generals—including President Trump’s own first Secretary of Defense—who stated openly what the brass would only hint at. Then, as nationwide riots really got rolling in early June, the sitting Secretary of Defense himself all but publicly told the president not to invoke the Insurrection Act. His implicit message was: “Mr. President, don’t tell us to do that, because we won’t, and you know what happens after that.”

All this enthused Joe Biden, who threw subtlety to the winds. The former United States Senator (for 26 years) and Vice President (for eight) has not once, not twice, but thrice confidently asserted that the military will “escort [Trump] from the White House with great dispatch” should the president refuse to leave. Another former Vice President, Al Gore, publicly agreed.

One might dismiss such comments as the ravings of a dementia patient and a has-been who never got over his own electoral loss. But before you do, consider also this. Over the summer a story was deliberately leaked to the press of a meeting at which 100 Democratic grandees, anti-Trump former Republicans, and other ruling class apparatchiks got together (on George Soros’s dime) to “game out” various outcomes of the 2020 election. One such outcome was a clear Trump win. In that eventuality, former Bill Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, playing Biden, refused to concede, pressured states that Trump won to send Democrats to the formal Electoral College vote, and trusted that the military would take care of the rest.

The leaked report from the exercise darkly concluded that “technocratic solutions, courts, and reliance on elites observing norms are not the answer here,” promising that what would follow the November election would be “a street fight, not a legal battle.”

Two more data points (among several that could be provided). Over the summer, two former Army officers, both prominent in the Democrat-aligned “national security” think tank world, wrote an open letter to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in which they urged him to deploy the 82nd Airborne Division to drag President Trump from the Oval Office at precisely 12:01 PM, January 20, 2021.

About a month later, Hillary Clinton declared publicly that Joe Biden should not concede the election “under any circumstances.” The old English major in me interprets the word “any” to mean “no,” “none,” “nada,” “niente,” “zero,” “zilch” “bupkis”…you get the idea.

This doesn’t sound like the rhetoric of a political party confident it will win an upcoming election.

The Cover-Up in Plain Sight

These items are, to repeat, merely a short but representative list of what Byron York recently labeled “coup porn.” York seems to think this is just harmless fantasizing on the part of the ruling class and its Democratic servants. For some of them, no doubt that’s true. But for all of them? I’m not so sure.

In his famously exhaustive discussion of conspiracies, Machiavelli goes out of his way to emphasize the indispensability of “operational security”—i.e., silence—to success. The first rule of conspiracy is, you do not talk about the conspiracy. The second rule of conspiracy is, you do not talk about the conspiracy.

So why are the Democrats—publicly—talking about the conspiracy?

Because they know that, for it to succeed, it must not look like a conspiracy. They need to plant the idea in the public mind, now, that their unlawful and illegitimate removal of President Trump from office will somehow be his fault.

Never mind the pesky detail that the president would refuse to leave only if he were convinced he legitimately won. Remember: Biden should not concede under any circumstances.

The second part of the plan is either to produce enough harvested ballots—lawfully or not—to tip close states, or else dispute the results in close states and insist, no matter what the tally says, that Biden won them. The worst-case scenario (for the country, but not for the ruling class) would be results in a handful of states that are so ambiguous and hotly disputed that no one can rightly say who won. Of course, that will not stop the Democrats from insisting that they won.

The public preparation for that has also already begun: streams of stories and social media posts “explaining” how, while on election night it might look as if Trump won, close states will tip to Biden as all the mail-in ballots are “counted.”

The third piece is to get the vast and loud Dem-Left propaganda machine ready for war. That leaked report exhorted Democrats to identify “key influencers in the media and among local activists who can affect political perceptions and mobilize...