Wisconsin

Caught with your pants down

I’ll take a brief interlude to link to my affidavit to the State of Wisconsin, related to Election Day 2021 there. Here it is: https://www.scribd.com/document/498215405/Affidavit-Kloster

At the highest level, I have a few short points about the election, and about future elections.

Right off the bat, let me say this: the 2020 presidential election was stolen, fair and square. No use complaining.

If you read anything about American politics, and not just the sanitized versions, you’ll learn that democracy is messy. John Calhoun’s father obtained state legislative representation for his large and growing district by marching to his state Capitol at the turn of the 19th century with an armed posse, and they got it! Add to that Tammany Hall, the Daley machine in Chicago, or the caudillo border politics leading to the infamous (and confessed!) fraud relating to “Box 13” in LBJ’s statewide race there (The Duke of Duval is pictured above). When I lived in Miami I recall the grizzled Cubans all chuckling about their red phone where they could call a bus full of abuelas in the middle of the day and get fifty or a hundred votes delivered where needed.

This is America! Democracy is when the one guy steals 1000 votes, you steal 800, and you win by 50. Love it or leave it, I always say. Over time, this machine politics stabilizes the system, because it takes years to build a machine. If you have the ability to steal, it means you’ve put in the work to build that capability, with bribes, favors, and control of municipal offices over time. It’s the democracy of the dead. In a sense, there is nothing more conservative. And there’s nothing less conservative than ceding the entire field, bitching, and then filing lawsuits and complaining about the courts. Counting on the courts is what you do when you are lazy, or a rube.

In 2020, Republicans demonstrated that we didn’t have the local machine. In a state like Georgia, you had countervailing winds exacerbating it— local party bosses actually wanted to lose the presidential and win the senate races. This led to infighting. In Wisconsin, this lack of a machine meant that electoral training was woefully inadequate, even though everyone was largely rowing in the same direction.

When you see a violation of law, what do you do? You object. When your objection is unheeded, what do you do? Without a machine, you don’t do much. You can’t get in the face of the opposition, and you can’t threaten them with collateral issues. What can you do?

In my case, I did nothing. I had no group of UAW workers with bats, tant pis. But I gripe a lot, and so I sent in an affidavit. Thankfully, much much later, some good folks saw the affidavit and now we have investigations on the subject in Wisconsin, largely centered around two carbetbagging libs who I ran into.

I testified before the state legislature a few weeks ago on my own dime, and we will likely see additional hay being made out of a rather ridiculous situation, wherein Zuckerberg gets to donate $400 million nationwide and completely swamp the way things are normally done.

But you know what? The money isn’t the issue. The issue is that we need our own army of local bureaucrats. And we need to fight for our locales. We need our own irate hooligans (incidentally, this is why the left and our national security apparatus hates the Proud Boys) and our own captured DA offices to let our boys off the hook. So I’m excited about Georgia, and the willingness of the state to fight back, actually fight back, and not just grift off complaining about unfair treatment (looking at you, David). Governor Kemp’s political fortunes inspire whiplash, and God bless the man; he has seized upon a wonderful opportunity here, and deserves a long career if he continues to be so savvy.

We are a nation of farmers, by blood, and farmers like process, and the numbers game. We are inherently intellectually lazy, and we want to spread the seed, follow the rules, and reap plenty. We don’t want to have to think about it. We want to set up the rules, and then sit back and let the system work. We’re peaceful. But our opponents are built for exploiting these systems: how can I find a location where rubes will just drop their valuables into my lap. Electoral politics is one of our roads to market, and these highway robbers are encamped on the hills, just laughing as we keep shipping them cart after cart of produce. It’s doing no good patting ourselves on the back when they are caught sleeping and we happen to get one through. It’s the system that’s the problem.