The Return of the Tower of Babel, Chapter Six, Saturnalia, Parts 2 & 3
Stop the Steal and Show Me the Kraken
Note: I enlarged, re-wrote, and re-edited Part 1, “Rogue Software.” The new version is now posted on substack.
2. STOP THE STEAL
A lack of forensic backup continued to outrage Trump and his Election truthers. To believers, it was obvious what had happened. Even the Democrats, they proclaimed, were of aware their unconscionable crime. Trump-fanatic broadcaster Lou Dobbs puzzled his way through the “paradox” on his Fox News show, “We’re eight weeks from the election, and we still don’t have verifiable, tangible support for the crimes that everyone knows were committed—that is, defrauding other citizens who voted with fraudulent votes (sic). We know that’s the case in Nevada, we know it’s the case in Pennsylvania and a number of other states, but we have had a devil of a time finding actual proof. Why?”9
How did he “know”? He didn’t; a robofished egregore did, eventually becoming a GOP passport for legitimacy, lack of which condemned one to a RINO. Followers believed so strongly in Trump’s 5-D invincibility that a stolen victory was a certainty, a 99% likelihood.
The master crook had conducted his meme magic again. What had begun as a blend of performance art and tactic turned into a way to invent new electoral rules. What also began years earlier as Trump’s “joke” that Barack Obama must have been born a Muslim in Kenya had turned into a string of punchlines. “How many Poles (or Mexicans” jokes became “how many Democrats does it take to screw in a light bulb (or screw up an Election?” and “How could I lose to a dementia-ridden coward hiding in his basement” became “I didn’t lose to Joe Biden. Watch 2000 Mules.”
Humoring Trump while compartmentalizing elephants worth of discrepancies became the new version of Ronald Reagan’s Southern Strategy. To stay relevant, Republican politicians had to embrace the Steal.
But it was more than that. It was internet relativism: old rules and verities didn’t count; a mere retro election was lame beside TikTok and Instagram “likes.” In the Opinion pages of the Sunday New York Times, Carlos Lozada wrote:
“[T]he lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election has grown so powerful because it is yoked to an older deception, without which it could not survive: the idea that American politics is, in essence, a joke, and that it can be treated as such without consequences. The big lie depends on the big joke. It was enabled by it. It was enhanced by it. It is sustained by it. When politicians publicly defend positions they privately reject, they are telling the joke. When they give up on the challenge of governing the country for the rush of triggering the enemy, they are telling the joke. . . . When their off-the-record smirks signal that they don’t mean what they just said or did, they are telling the joke.”10
The joke precedes Trump’s “politics as performance art,” but the last scintillas of seriousness and consequences were subsumed in their confluence. Now there are only costumes, props, and scripts.
The Big Lie was not just based on the Big Joke, there also seemed to be circumstantial evidence. If the Deep State, or a Democrat-led collusion aided by RINOs and Never Trumpers, or a corporate cabal, or the Illuminati themselves, wanted to rig an election and turn a Trump landslide into a Biden steal, they would have used the same game plan and left the same fingerprints: a whopping Trump improvement from 2016 among African Americans, Hispanics, and women; a surge of 40 to 50% in midland regions; a 4.4% gain in his native New York despite his abandonment of the City for Florida; significant hikes over his 2016 numbers in Ohio, Florida, and Iowa, a Republican down-ballot near-sweep in Congressional and state legislatures; nine million more votes than his own pollsters’ 63-million victory threshold—in other words, a combination grand slam and royal flush.
But where’s Donald? It took a deluge of late Biden mail-in ballots to pitch four key swing states plus Arizona and Georgia. Where did those cartons of cards come from? How did the royal carriage turn into a pumpkin at midnight?
I see three separate steals: one bogus, one legitimate, one metaphysical. First the bogus.
I accept that Trump thought, or convinced himself, that the 2020 election outcome was rigged and that he had won in a landslide. There was, in fact, a landslide, but only in MAGA counties—a Red Mirage enhanced by the fact that it encompassed more than eighty percent of the total counties in the U.S. He was blind to anti-Trump blowback in denser blue population centers where the majority saw him as, to varying degrees, a buffoon, an emotional three-year-old, a repurposed crime boss, a con artist, a lazy imbecile, an unqualified lunatic flying in Air Force One, or a maniac holding nuclear launch codes. There was only one candidate, Trump; his opponent could have been Sylvester Cat and he would have lost. As long as it wasn’t someone too “Bernie” or “AOC.”
Trump not only didn’t win the actual Election, he lost in a relative rout given a pretty much evenly divided electorate. Outside of Trump City, 81 million people voted, if not for Joe Biden, then to end a national nightmare. Folks absentee-voted in unprecedented numbers to get Trump’s tweets, idiocies, grift, emoluments, and “so sad” cadences out of their lives. It might not have been “more bogus votes than you can shake a stick at” but more new voters—did you see them lined up in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, overriding the Red Wave? And that’s not even counting the pandemic-amped mail-in, harvested, and drive-by ballots—the ones Trumpists deemed invalid.
Trump got 11 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, but Biden got 15 million more votes than Clinton and 18 million more than Trump the first time. The critical mass was that 66.9% of the electorate voted in 2020, compared to 55.7% in 2016. That made the difference. The so-called Steal, a turnabout that Sean Hannity claimed was mathematically impossible, was conducted by 11.2% new voters, enough to make it quite possible.
Even assuming fraudulent votes peppered among them, bootleg ballots alone would not have been anywhere near enough to override other checks and balances and overturn the results. In fact in the 2020 election, far more Republicans than Democrats were outed as double-voting or voting for dead people.
Trump was wrong too that more than half the people who voted put their mark by his name—“your favorite President,” as he was wont to say when assuming that his self-love was requited even by folks who despised him, a narcissist’s endemic delusion. He came closer to the truth unintentionally when he said, in effect, “81 million people didn’t vote for Sleepy Joe, he couldn’t fill an outhouse. Those were fake ballots and dead people.” Yeah, Donald, the election was about you, and you drew 150 million votes to Biden’s paltry 2 or 3 mill. But those weren’t fake ballots or dead people voting: 79 million voted nay.
The majority of Joe Biden’s votes were legit—every recount in every county or state confirmed that, even the one that Republican shill Cyber Ninjas meant to “trump up” in Arizona. Ballots may have been cast under pandemic rules with unprecedented eligibility and leeway, but that didn’t mean that fake or dead people voted, just that the majority of newbies voted against Trump, which was crime enough for believers and the fanatic MAGA base. It also wasn’t more votes than voters either; a third of the country still didn’t cast a ballot.
The measure that most favors Republicans, in fact, every first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, is the huge numbers of nonvoting cynics, slackers, and snobs, a majority of whom are left of center. They put Repubs in office, cycle after cycle, all the way back to Richard Nixon. But it was never the case that more Americans wanted a second term for Trump and that their collective will was thwarted. Even if there were major irregularities—and there weren’t beyond looser eligibility rules—the majority still voted “Trump, vamoose."
No MAGA Republican could win a referendum of all eligible voters; that’s why, afterwards, y’all wanted to change the laws and trim the bandwidth. 69% was way too many voters. 55% had proven just right.
This fuss was always about “who votes”—the unruly masses, descendants of slaves and mulattos, immigrants, nationless Gaians, First Nations, West and East Indians, Eurasians, Asians, Aborigines, and everyone else—or just everyone else.
What the Stop the Steal crowd wanted—and still wants—is a new poll tax under plausible deniability of racism.
The notion of a stolen election was a maturation of a global revanchist delegitimization of opposition parties. Because the opposition is considered automatically unpatriotic and socialist—the first step in authoritarian takeovers—their votes are never legitimate, and any procedure that makes it easier for them to register is de facto a “steal,” an election stolen by people who shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Semantics aside, Stop the Steal was, and still is, an attempt to replace a democracy with a putsch.
Trump’s 2016 Electoral College margin—he lost the popular vote to an even more unpopular opponent—was thinner than a rat’s ass. A quirk here or there (plus the WWF entertainment factor) got an unprepared, cartoon-reality mountebank into office.
The different sample of eligible voters in 2020 was, as noted, because of COVID and the belief that Trump was winging it in office. But a real census wasn’t taken and never will be. There hasn’t been a truly elected president since Dwight Eisenhower, and there probably won’t be one as long as selective ineligibility under Jim Crow rules, fungible technology, voter intimidation, Citizens United, political entertainment wars, and social media are in play. Plebiscites are chaos systems, more so when you add in a virus and software. We still don’t know who really won in November before George W. Bush, John F. Kennedy, and Rutherford B. Hayes strode into the White House in January with only minor fuss—no riots or attempted coups.
Proud Boys and Oath Keepers only seemed like centurions for a moral majority. Trump’s delusion was like the myth of Prince Gautama growing up in a palace where he never saw suffering or death. His carny career fell well short of finding enlightenment under a bodhi tree, but he shared with the mythical Buddha the initial perception that his palace was the real real world. Instead of inventing Buddhism, he invented its opposite: Trumpism, turning attachment into more attachment, suffering into making other people suffer.
How about the Steal that was? Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, detailed it in her book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Biden had a huge unearned advantage in the back rooms of corporations, election wards, and high tech where Aristos funded and spruced his campaign. They hid the true contents and meaning of Hunter Biden’s laptop until it was too late (though Trump benefitted similarly from the meaningless email kerfuffle James Comey chose not to hide the first time—and the laptop was stolen).
Hemingway was right: 2020 COVID voting rules favored Democrats disproportionately, expanding windows for absentee and harvested ballots and extending deadlines for posting and counting. The electorate was selectively enlarged. Legislatures in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan made it easier for poor people to vote, to MAGA’s detriment. They stretched electoral semantics as if no more significant or less fungible than dog parks and loading zones. Aristos were, in fact, relieved that the pandemic gave them cover to change the rules because, as noted, Donald was considered a menace to themselves, their children and grandchildren, and the planet itself.
Drop boxes, absentee ballots, unsupervised ballots at nursing homes, and the like might have flipped the winner in key swing states, but those were still legal voters. Hemingway’s real “Steal” came from Aristos and corporations priming an extra 14% turnout, not from a scam or switcheroo.
This was even out in the open. Liberals bragged on it much in the way Trump boasted about his own boondoggles. Time magazine heralded it as “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election”:
In a way, Trump was right. There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEO’s. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. . . . Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. . . . After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.”11
Having been punked once, they were not going to let it happen a second time. My friend and author, Dallas attorney Luke Lafitte (Machine Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm), was flown to Western Pennsylvania at the last minute to keep an eye out for foos. He reported laughing with the Republican attorneys over a couple of Penn State beers, and I sent him audios of “There’s a Pawn Shop on the Corner in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania” (Guy Mitchell) and “Shuffle on Down to Pittsburgh” (Lou Christie). Anything to get back to the fifties when Eisenhower was President and Trump was just a brat in Fred Trump’s nursery in Queens.
The fact is, just about everyone in mainstream media and big tech who could tilt the 2020 election Joe Biden’s way did, either from leaning on the financial and social-media scales or hiding Joe from his own gaffes and cognitive impairments and then burying the laptop story.
Maybe people are fickle enough to be swayed by each red herring. I find it strange that mere money makes people change their votes, that polls vary from week to week. Are we that sellable and fitful a populace?
Hunter Biden was a manipulator and crook who had, if possible, as little respect for democracy as the Trump boys. His laptop as the Da Vinci code of the MAGA Right was real enough—Burisma was shelling out funny money faster than Boeing, and Hunter was Joe’s true shadow and bad boy. But those Trump lads and their Kushner in-law made him look like a hapless, cocaine-addled street urchin and starving artist. They killed more elephants and tithed at more decimals without monthly down payments. All four libertines should have been, at worst, a combined wash.
Yes, POTUS 45 got rolled. He was as canceled as a Confederate statue in Charlottesville. But it was a collateral event in a larger storm of fake news and false flags, with egregores flying on both sides. Marc Short, Mike Pence’s chief of staff, noted rightly that politics is politics and that Trump was not the only one capable of hardball, “We often observed the irregularities that occurred during the 2020 election, the reality that Democrats effectively weaponized election changes that were the result of Covid, but ultimately it was important to catalog the various allegations and where there was hard evidence, or lack thereof, of actual theft.”12
That was where Lou Dobbs fell off the wagon, confusing the two. Partisans do what they can to elect their candidate, and that includes soliciting funds from people who have money to throw away and expect something in return, the sort of behavior enabled by the Citizens United decision, that cash is free speech. They use the levers of government (national, state, local) and the sway of corporate hierarchies (national, transnational, and foreign, despite the rules).
Trump lost the count on the field, but he also lost the game inside the game, and that’s what rankles him and the Stop the Steal crowd most. They are sore losers, using a double standard of righteous innocence. Mollie Hemingway’s rigged election is every election. Her neo-Federalist, MAGA-loyal argument comes down to an originalist view of poll-tax-like laws that were meant to keep the majority of people from voting. They didn’t work this time, and certain people, most of whom considered Trump divinely coronated and/or a Republican savior and patriots’ dream, were so addicted to their Moral Majority hype, Ms. Hemingway among them, that they believed in the sacred imperative of their own “majoritism.”
Her Stop the Steal was accurate—the Democrats had figured out how to stop the Republican steal with their own.
Radical journalist Christopher Hedges, hardly a Trump supporter, shined a different light on the “Steal” after he got wiped from YouTube overnight—something like ‘Trump is bad, but you guys were worse because you caused him’:
The most vocal cheerleaders for this censorship are the liberal class. Terrified of the enraged crowds of QAnon conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists, gun-toting militias, and cult-like Trump supporters that grew out of the distortions of neoliberalism, austerity, deindustrialization, and the collapse of social programs, they plead with the digital monopolies to make it all go away. They blame anyone but themselves. Democrats in Congress have held hearings with the CEOs of social media companies pressuring them to do more to censor content. Banish the troglodytes. Then we will have social cohesion. Then life will go back to normal. Fake news. Harm reduction model. Information pollution. Information disorder. They have all sorts of Orwellian phrases to justify censorship. Meanwhile, they peddle their own fantasy that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It is a stunning inability to be remotely self-reflective or self-critical, and it is ominous as we move deeper and deeper into a state of political and social dysfunction.
What were my sins? I did not, like my former employer, The New York Times, sell you the lie of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, peddle conspiracy theories about Donald Trump being a Russian asset, put out a 10-part podcast called the Caliphate that was a hoax, or tell you that the information on Hunter Biden’s laptop was “disinformation.” I did not prophesize that Joe Biden was the next FDR or that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election.13
I agree with Hedges, and I confess that I too thought it was crucial to prevent a second Trump term at any cost, even rigging the results if necessary. Guilty as charged! I fell back on my neo-Liberal past and neo-Con bias. I forgot that Trump won the first time by calling the Democrats on their hype to their base, lies of convenience, and electioneering merde. The 2016 vote was lost for Hilary the moment Barack took a drink of Flint tapwater and said, “Yum, yum, tastes fine.” That was the epitome of the neo-Lib scam, from cannabis criminalization to drone fleets over Afghanistan captained in Florida to decriminalizing the mortgage-crisis criminals.
Yet I was terrified that the country wouldn’t survive another four years of a guy who thought that Finland was still part of Russia, that Slovenia and Slovakia were the same country, and who believed that diplomacy consisted of blackmail and being unpredictable. The nuclear football shouldn’t be in the hands of a three-year-old playing “She loves me, she loves me not.” I was relieved that Trump got rolled and that there were no fingerprints or actionable crimes.
I didn’t consider it partisan pandering; I didn’t see Trump as a Republican, I saw him as a sadistic sociopath and a mafia-like don and crook.
The “Stop the Steal crowd” shares my view; only they think that the country can’t survive four more years of Princess Kamala and Demented Joe, so they will similarly rig the 2024 plebiscite and Electoral College any way they can.
The guy who didn’t expect to win the first time probably should have taken his chips and gone home because it wasn’t just a parlor game for the Aristos and liberal class. Plus, the guy didn’t really want to serve anyway, he just wanted to throw his weight around, monetize the Presidency, and fly Air Force One to golf matches, and get to brag about his holes-in-one on taxpayer dimes. He mailed in his term. Mafioso love leisure, tributes, and graft even more than pleasure itself.
To Trump, it was always who put on the best show, and the winner of that contest was clear. He was still putting on the show more than a year later. Whatever else you might say about Big Don, he was a marathon man.
Endnotes
9. Lou Dobbs, Fox Business News, January 5, 2021.
10. Carlos Lozada, “The Big Joke That Became the Big Lie,” The New York Times Opinion Section, September 25, 2022, p. 6.
11. Jim Troupis, “The Cancer of Election Fraud,” Americanmind.org, May 23, 2022.
12. Betsy Woodruff Swan, “Pence team couldn't verify Trump campaign's election fraud claims, new memo shows,” Politico, June 10, 2022.
13. Christopher Hedges, “On Being Disappeared,” ScheerPost, March 28, 2022.
3. SHOW ME THE KRAKEN
My third “steal” is an esoteric one: rogue permutations “haunting” tabulating networks, but from where?
Well, those UFOs, made of unknown isotopes of common metals, flitting in and out of ordinary reality that hovered around nuclear sites in the U.S. and Soviet Union demonstrated how they could turn on and off launch commands.*
Compared to deep silo encryptions and firewalls, Dominion software would have been a cakewalk. I go with my college classmate Sid Schwab, a retired surgeon whose book Cutting Remarks I published. He said, “A surgeon can kill you . . . and you’ll sleep right through it.”14 If UFOs can hack nuclear launch codes, they can flip elections, and we’ll sleep right through it. To a congress of Earth-protecting E.T.s, a second Trump term might have been the equivalent of nuclear winter.
No one at Dominion or in the Democratic Party stole the election—the Dominion machines couldn’t turn Trump punches into Biden ones. That was a fantasy based on a Mission: Impossible plot.
And as for that matching paper trail in Georgia, Dutch psychic Gerard Croisset proved the precognitive power of telekinesis. Replacing cards after the fact is psychic duck soup for interdimensional time-travelers. Read Douglas Adams’ hitchhiker’s guides to the galaxy for how to get a boat inside a bottle ex post facto.
On the higher spheres, every election may go through a double-slit reality with alternate results. The real wheel remains in quantum spin. Perhaps Trump was a magician but in the service of a Blackwater-type intelligence—the quintessential Manchurian candidate, not only groomed by the Russians to sink the West but body-snatched by Nazi ghosts, Klingons, humanoid lizards, and Greys.
Maybe a combination of deep-state CIA, FBI, and Pentagon actors, in concert with corporate CEOs, the world’s most skilled hackers and cyber- pros—a deeper “deep state” with undetectable means—decided to end Trumpmania. Their tools were inviolable. Ping-proof Dominion and SmartMatic hardware and software aside, anything in principle can be hacked; we have no idea what cyberwarfare is capable of these days.
Stooges like Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Lindsay Graham, and Roy Blunt were convinced; Newsmax was too, either that Biden won or that it behooved them to say so. When Karl Rove, Tom Cotton, and William Barr turn against Pepe, parties dumping more than tea and cryptocoins are underway.
Only Election Truthers dug in. To them, as to Trump, the nation had folded like dog shit in rain. "You're quitting! You're a quitter! You're not fighting!" Michael Flynn screamed at Trump impeachment lawyer Eric Herschmann. Turning to Trump, he added, "Sir, we need fighters."15
When Herschmann then asked Trump conspiracy-theorist attorney Sidney Powell why, if she had such a strong case, she had lost so many appeals, she replied that “it was because all the judges, both state and federal, were corrupt.”16
"That's your argument?" Herschmann responded incredulously. "Even the judges we appointed? Are you out of your fucking mind?"17
POTUS Trump had fallen into the ultimate New Age booby trap: self-sabotage. In pretending that a Deep State, real or strawhorse, was vulnerable to a takeover, he tried to have it both ways: a malign and impregnable meta-power and a swamp he could drain—the emperor’s new clothes and a suit he could take to the Supreme Court. But the master crook was outcrooked, “out-nemessed” by a deeper deep state, his lies swallowed in a bigger lie. And they slept right through it.
Everywhere the Trumpians searched, they saw or heard a sasquatch indicator—a tuft of fur, a pawprint, an alien turd, a humanoid yowl—so they went full yeti, magnifying each real and imagined perfidy into a menagerie.
A hillbilly dude at a 2021 CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) meeting—he went by the name Grizzly Joe—inadvertently spilled the beans when he turned the tables on a reporter, asking him rhetorically about a missing cryptid. His comments read throughout at two levels:
‘I gotta have the evidence. I gotta see it,” Joe said. “If you tell me you're gonna release the Kraken, show me the freakin’ Kraken for crying out loud. Show me the freakin’ Kraken. Show me a piece of the Kraken. Show me something.
“And don't tell me to go to Mr. Pillow man's website to get the information, and I click on there and you get a million sites, ads pop up and I'm still not gonna see even a fingernail of the freakin’ Kraken.”18
Still not a chromosome, isotope, or mule!
It’s reassuring that someone, physical or metaphysical, deep state or kraken, had enough leverage to pull it off, just as it’s sort of reassuring if E.T.’s—time-travelers, tricksters from a parallel universe, psychoids, inner-earth dwellers—won’t allow our self-destruction. We may be part of a cosmic federation, our destinies entwined. The true Deep State may not even be in this dimension.
Deep State or not, there can be no resolution or peace on this plane alone; the Deep Universe, with all its planes and polarities, is where the real work of creation is being done, and all sentient beings, forms, entities, beasts, and angels are at it together, to raise All That Is to the next vibration in the Great Dance. Only then will the Lion—can the Lion—lie down with the Lamb.*
We don’t know how the cosmic agenda works but, with Pluto headed toward Aquarius, it led next to a serpent march on the capitol.
Endnotes
14. Sid Schwab, Cutting Remarks, back cover.
15. Harry Litman, “Trump’s impeachment defense is threadbare and irrelevant. But he’ll probably win,” Los Angeles Times, February 3, 2021.
16. Harry Litman, “Trump’s impeachment defense. . . .”
17. Harry Litman, “Trump’s impeachment defense. . . .”
18. Stephen Proctor, “Trump supporter at CPAC rails against election fraud lies: 'Show me the freakin' Kraken',” Yahoo Entertainment, July 13, 2021.
*See the 2020 documentary The Phenomenon, directed by James Fox, and Top Secret UFO Projects: Declassified, created by Petr Vachler, for corroboration of E.T. talents and skillsets by high-level U.S. and Russian military personnel.
*This is where Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms and Bottoming Out the Universe re-contextualize The Return of the Tower of Babel.
