crossing the Rubicon

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/17/if-americans-can-no-longer-trust-our-elections-were-in-big-trouble/

The court-won destructions of state election law smacked Republicans  as nakedly political. Nobody seriously believes that allowing mailed  ballots to come in after the election has anything to do with actually  protecting people from the pandemic, especially when the same officials  applauding mail-in balloting have selectively applied coronavirus restrictions to reward their friends and punish their political enemies.

Democrats have compared Trump to Adolf Hitler and have widely called  his supporters white supremacists and fascists. If they believe half the  things they are saying about Trump or his supporters, why wouldn’t  massive vote fraud be justified and even moral?

The same people who ranted about Russia hacking the 2016 election—to the point where almost 70 percent of Democrats falsely believed that Russia had hacked and changed vote totals—tell  Trump’s base that it is dangerous and unpatriotic to doubt the results  of this election. 

Russia, via a so-called troll farm, spent less than $100,000 on social media advertising before the 2016 election, but that didn’t stop House Democrats and many  Senate Republicans from treating this spending like it was the biggest  problem this country faced.

The censorship of any post questioning any part of the election on  social media and the denial and dismissal of obvious signs of fraud only  add fuel to the fire. These fly in the face of common sense. Consider  an article from the BBC in September 2016, about vote rigging in Africa. The article says that  classic signs of fraud include “high turnout in specific areas,” and  “delay in announcing results.” Note that states like Florida had high  turnout, but it wasn’t hugely concentrated to certain areas and ballots  were counted instantly.

But if Trump loses his court challenges and recounts, his supporters  aren’t going to forget about this. People are angry unlike anything this  author has seen before. The Jeffrey Epstein affair, the FBI corruption,  and the riots have completely eroded trust in basic institutions,  especially on the right.

If the fraud alleged did occur, it was pre-planned, industrialized,  and brazen. This isn’t 1960, where John F. Kennedy received more votes  in Cook County than the number of people living there. It isn’t 2000,  where a legal battle is ensuing over one state’s balloting issues.

This is an allegation that there was massive fraud, on a scale never  seen before—and the allegation comes from about 50 million Americans.  The allegation is plausible because the establishment denying it has  hated Trump and his supporters from the get-go. Trump supporters deserve  to be paranoid—they have been neither accepted nor understood.

Overall, people feel like America has been sliding for decades, and indeed the American working class has been  sliding for decades. If people begin to feel like elections no longer  matter, the only avenue to settle differences is through force and  violence. The far-left in this country has already skipped belief in the  electoral system and reached this conclusion. How else does a divided  people settle disputes without the ballot box?

The phrase “crossing the Rubicon” refers to the moment Julius Caesar  crossed the Rubicon River, which precipitated the Roman Civil War and  the end of the Roman Republic. It’s like saying “the point of no  return.” People can laugh at what this is implying, but America is  reaching a dangerous point if the people—on both sides—no longer trust  elections.