Election Update
I apologize for things being quiet here at 1P5 today. I spent most of the morning writing up additional thoughts on the US election at my Substack, since I want to keep most of my political commentary somewhere that isn’t 1P5. Tomorrow will mark one week since election day, and is far from a settled matter. Specifically, I tackle the gaslighting that’s going on in an attempt to make people who suspect election fraud appear delusional:
Let’s just get this out of the way: those who are claiming that there’s “no basis” for the claims of voter fraud are simply not looking at the evidence being produced. There is clear evidence of at least some fraud, and of even more irregularity that might point to fraud.
Anyone who doesn’t want a contested election to hang over this country for the next four years, with all the rancor that will produce, should be eager to investigate and litigate any such claims.
Instead, they pretend that it’s all just silly, and that nobody should even bother taking it seriously. They have allegedly kept election observers out of reach of “meaningful access” to the process in Pennsylvania, in defiance of a federal court order.
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They are dismissive, they are engaging in gaslighting, and they are seeking to obstruct.
What do they have to hide?
Some people — we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say not all of them are disingenuous — keep asking where the evidence is of voter fraud. I’ll now go through a few of the indicators — and I say indicators because they’ll only amount to proof when they are investigated and verified.
I spend a good bit of time looking at actual situations where suspicion of fraud is warranted, with links to relevant stories or substantiating information. If you’re looking for one place to get a lot of relevant information you can use with naysayers, I hope it’ll be helpful.
Viganò Weighs In Again on the Elections
Archbishop Viganò has a new essay out on the elections, and he’s swinging for the fences. There are parts of it I found, to my own chagrin, that I take issue with; there are other parts I want to cheer on. I delayed publishing it so I could give it some thought, and I ultimately went with it, including a small disclaimer so I could express my thoughts on it separately.
I was impressed (and in a way, reassured) to see His Excellency make a very similar argument to the one I made last Friday in my piece about the war against meaning. He says that the division in the world “consists of a split between reality and fiction: objective reality on one side, and the fiction of the media on the other.”
To +Viganò’s mind, this can be seen in two spheres: the pandemic, and the “surreal American political situation, in which the evidence of a colossal electoral fraud is being censored by the media, which now proclaims Joe Biden’s victory as an accomplished fact.”
On the question of COVID — a topic I have come to hate addressing because of the rancorous disagreement that always seems to follow — I was on record earlier this year as supportive of initial lockdown measures to flatten the curve, much to the annoyance of a not-insignificant portion of my audience. I performed my due diligence at the time, however — both by reading a great deal and by speaking with healthcare professionals — and I see no reason to second-guess the position I took. I think it was the right one.
But my position has evolved as the situation has, and I am also on the record opposing the proposed “second wave” lockdowns, the perpetuation of mask mandates, etc.
My view of the pandemic is essentially this: it was a virus of unknown origin, that was released under very suspicious circumstances in China. It appears to have come from a lab, though the question of whether it was ever engineered or was only being studied remains unclear. As I discussed on the podcast with Steven W. Mosher back in April, it was also clear that China spread the virus intentionally through the promotion of continued international travel even after their own draconian domestic lockdowns – including travel restrictions – were implemented.
China would not have done this if they did not believe it would be an effective socio-economic weapon.
And it was that: it killed a lot of people rather quickly: with only 10 million known cases in the US, COVID-19 killed 237,979 people by the official count as of this writing, which is significantly more than the 34,200 who died of the flu in this country in the 2018-2019 flu season – those drawn from 35.5 million cases. COVID was more lethal than the flu. That appears to no longer be the case.
So I find that I must object when the archbishop characterizes COVID as “a seasonal flu that caused the same number of deaths as last year,” or his description of it as a mere “hologram.” The facts just don’t bear that out. COVID wasn’t a hoax. It was a virus with a high r0 and lethality rate that peaked early and never became the doombringer people thought it would be. That said, it was never just some flu. If it were, it would never have effectively prompted the responses it got from governments and medical institutions around the world. It was scary enough to cause real global concern. Reports about China’s internal responses — from welding people inside of apartment buildings to incinerating live patients — only added to the fear. When Italy became the first Western nation to see significant case numbers, they were hit harder, on a per-capita basis, than anyone else ever would be subsequently – making them into an exaggerated cautionary tale. I talked to a nurse who described to me how crazy fast patients went from needing supplemental oxygen to full intubation. The videos and stories coming out of hospitals were of terrifying deaths suffered by people who simply couldn’t get enough oxygen to stay alive.
Nobody knew what we were dealing with or how to fix it, and anticipatory overreaction was a not entirely surprising result.
But the global medical community, throwing their not inconsiderable efforts at the problem in unison, have become much more effective at treating this thing. It appears that despite a high number of new cases (many of which are the result of increased testing/false positives) there has not been a commensurately drastic increase in the number of severe hospitalizations or deaths.
In other words: I believe this monster has been effectively de-fanged. It will never, therefore, hit the worst-case scenario projections that we heard at the beginning. All of this is very good news, because it’s past time to move on.
And this is where my view converges with the archbishop’s: when weaponized as it has been, the confusion and fear around COVID have forged a singularly effective political weapon. The willingness of a populace to go along with impositions on their daily lives in the interest of “public health” — indefinitely — has been taken advantage of. And with the inherent exploitability of mail-in-voting as a means of accomplishing electoral fraud, the end goal for the first phase of this weaponization has come into much clearer focus. “Social-distancing” provided one hell of an opportunity to make a mess of the republic. Who knows what the next phase will bring? Will it indeed be a health dictatorship posing as a “health emergency that is revealing itself more and more fully as instrumental to the establishment of an inhuman faceless tyranny”? Will it bring about the necessary conditions for a Great Reset?
Only time will tell, but I am less skeptical of the possibility than I’ve ever been.
Where I think His Excellency really hits the ball out of the park with his latest analysis is when he goes after the hypocrisy this has all generated:
The accusations of irresponsibility thrown at Trump supporters for holding rallies vanish as soon as Biden’s supporters gather in the streets, as has already happened for BLM demonstrations. What is criminal for some people is permitted for others: without explanations, without logic, without rationality.
So too when he evaluates the way this hypocrisy extends to the issues — truly, the evils — that the so-called champions of the people represent:
They are the good ones, even if they support the killing of the innocent – and we are supposed to get over it. They are the ones supporting democracy, even if in order to win elections they must always resort to deception and fraud – even fraud that is blatantly evident. They are the defenders of freedom, even if they deprive us of it day after day. They are objective and honest, even if their corruption and their crimes are now obvious even to the blind. The dogma that they despise and deride in others is indisputable and incontrovertible when it is they who promote it.
And he has especially harsh words for the sycophants of the world, particularly the American bishops:
But if we understand that the sycophancy of world heads of state and party secretaries is simply a part of the trite script of the global Left, we are frankly left quite disturbed by the declarations of the United States’ Conference of Catholic Bishops, immediately republished by Vatican News, which with disturbing cross-eyedness credits itself with having supported “the second Catholic President in the history of the United States,” apparently forgetting the not-negligible detail that Biden is avidly pro-abortion, a supporter of LGBT ideology and of anti-Catholic globalism. The Archbishop of Los Angeles, José H. Gomez, profaning the memory of the Cristeros martyrs of his native country, says bluntly: “The American people have spoken.” The frauds that have been denounced and widely proven matter little: the annoying formality of the vote of the people, albeit adulterated in a thousand ways, must now be considered to be concluded in favor of the standard-bearer of aligned, mainstream thought. We have read, not without retching, the posts of James Martin, S.J., and all those courtiers who are pawing to get on Biden’s chariot in order to share in his ephemeral triumph. Those who disagree, those who ask for clarity, those who have recourse to the law to see their rights protected do not have any legitimacy and must be silent, resign themselves, and disappear.
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It is indicative that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Planned Parenthood are both expressing their satisfaction for the presumed electoral victory of the same person. This unanimity of consensus recalls the enthusiastic support of the Masonic Lodges on the occasion of the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, which was also not free from the shadow of fraud within the Conclave and was equally desired by the deep state, as we know clearly from the emails of John Podesta and the ties of Theodore McCarrick and his colleagues with the Democrats and with Biden himself.
The archbishop implores that American Catholics “American Catholics must multiply their prayers and beg the Lord for a special protection for the President of the United States,” and that priests, “priests, especially during these days, to recite the Exorcism against Satan and the apostate angels, and to celebrate the Votive Mass Pro Defensione ab hostibus. Let us confidently ask for the intervention of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to whose Immaculate Heart we consecrate the United States of America and the entire world.”
Hard to argue with any of that.
Archbishop Viganò remains one of the most interesting commentators on the American political situation of our time.
The Long-Awaited McCarrick Report Comes Out Tomorrow
Speaking of Archbishop Viganò, it’s time to revisit his original testimony about the coverup of sexual abuse in the highest echelons of the Church. That’s because Tomorrow, November 10th, the Catholic world expects the release by the Vatican’s Secretariat of State of the long-awaited McCarrick report — allegedly the result of a “two-year investigation into the career of ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who has been found canonically guilty of serial sexual abuse and misconduct, and was laicized in 2019.”
I don’t know when the Vatican decided to release the report this week; I’m unaware of it having been scheduled in advance. But as a former public relations guy, I find it remarkable that the report will finally be published under the media cover of the most hotly-contested American election in history.
It will certainly get a lot less attention that way.
Of course, I don’t expect it to tell us a great deal we don’t know. Asking the Vatican to investigate McCarrick’s malfeasance is like asking the DNC to investigate the fraud allegations that have come up during this election, or to disclose the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The pope himself is implicated in the coverup of McCarrick’s abuse, as is Pietro Parolin, the Cardinal Secretary of State, whose dicastery directly oversaw the investigation. (Cardinal Becciu, who recently got canned from the Secretariat of State by the pope, was also directly accused in the Viganò report.)
Recall what the former papal nuncio said about the pope’s own knowledge about McCarrick:
On Sunday June 23, before the concelebration with the Pope, I asked Monsignor Ricca, who as the person in charge of the house helped us put on the vestments, if he could ask the Pope if he could receive me sometime in the following week. How could I have returned to Washington without having clarified what the Pope wanted of me? At the end of Mass, while the Pope was greeting the few lay people present, Monsignor Fabian Pedacchio, his Argentine secretary, came to me and said: “The Pope told me to ask if you are free now!” Naturally, I replied that I was at the Pope’s disposal and that I thanked him for receiving me immediately. The Pope took me to the first floor in his apartment and said: “We have 40 minutes before the Angelus.”
I began the conversation, asking the Pope what he intended to say to me with the words he had addressed to me when I greeted him the previous Friday. And the Pope, in a very different, friendly, almost affectionate tone, said to me: “Yes, the Bishops in the United States must not be ideologized, they must not be right-wing like the Archbishop of Philadelphia, (the Pope did not give me the name of the Archbishop) they must be shepherds; and they must not be left-wing — and he added, raising both arms — and when I say left-wing I mean homosexual.” Of course, the logic of the correlation between being left-wing and being homosexual escaped me, but I added nothing else.
Immediately after, the Pope asked me in a deceitful way: “What is Cardinal McCarrick like?” I answered him with complete frankness and, if you want, with great naiveté: “Holy Father, I don’t know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation for Bishops there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.” The Pope did not make the slightest comment about those very grave words of mine and did not show any expression of surprise on his face, as if he had already known the matter for some time, and he immediately changed the subject. But then, what was the Pope’s purpose in asking me that question: “What is Cardinal McCarrick like?” He clearly wanted to find out if I was an ally of McCarrick or not.
Do not expect anything helpful about that to be in the report.
