By guest columnist Patrice Johnson, Chair, Michigan Fair Elections
During a recent conversation with Cathy, a Michigan Fair Elections supporter, I was embarrassed to admit I hadn’t heard of attorney Jeff Childers. She sent me his “great big end-of-the-year roundup essay,” and I am pleased to republish select portions that relate to election integrity here.
The power of the individual rings through, as do the successes and challenges of the past year. I took the liberty of bolding some portions, and where I felt compelled to add my two cents, I’ve bracketed them.
May you enjoy the read, and may 2023 be healthy, happy and productive for you and your loved ones.
☕️ A GREAT BIG NEW YEAR ☙ We crushed it in 2022, and just wait for what we’ll do in 2023.
JEFF CHILDERS
CHAPTER ONE. THE ROAD BEHIND US
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Whitaker Chambers (1902-1964) the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Chambers had died twenty years earlier after testifying in Congress against State Department official and treasonous Soviet spy Alger Hiss, who’d drafted the United Nations Charter allegedly on the United States’ behalf at Yalta.
Until 1938, Chambers ran a U.S.-based spy ring for the Soviet communists. He was born in the U.S. right after the turn of the century, grew up poor in an atheist household, and was attracted by communism. But he defected in 1938, having grown increasingly uncomfortable with Stalin’s internal purges and having found God.
For ten years after Chambers fled into hiding, he tried unsuccessfully to interest the FBI in his ring of traitorous, highly placed government and state department officials that he’d been supervising and who were working to secretly undermine the United States. About the time he’d given up, the House Un-American Activities Committee reached out, and the rest, as they say, was history.
In 1952, Chambers published his autobiography, ‘Witness,’ which became one of the most influential American anti-communist and conservative books in history. I’m going to quote a few parts from the introduction, in which Chambers — fully expecting to be assassinated — addressed his children to explain why he went public and testified about what the Russians were up to.
According to Chambers, communism poses an existential crisis to Mankind and begins with the belief that science can save humans from the very problems that were created by the rise of science:
In part, the crisis results from the impact of science and technology upon mankind which, neither socially nor morally, has caught up with the problems posed by that impact. In part, it is caused by men’s efforts to solve those problems.
Chambers asked how communism could infect the minds of very smart folks who should know better, but instead, they become willfully blinded to the reprehensible ideology’s evils. Again, speaking to his children:
I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time. You will ask: Why, then, do men become Communists? How did it happen that you, our gentle and loved father, were once a Communist? Were you simply stupid?
No, I was not stupid.
Were you morally depraved?
No, I was not morally depraved. Indeed, educated men become Communists chiefly for moral reasons.
Did you not know that the crimes and horrors of Communism are inherent in Communism?
Yes, I knew that fact.
Then why did you become a Communist?
It would help more to ask: How did it happen that this movement, once a mere muttering of political outcasts, became this immense force that now contests the mastery of mankind? Even when all the chances and mistakes of history are allowed for, the answer must be: Communism makes some profound appeal to the human mind. You will not find out what it is by calling Communism names. That will not help much to explain why Communism whose horrors, on a scale unparalleled in history, are now public knowledge, still recruits its thousands and holds its millions—among them, some of the best minds alive.
Chambers’ explained with a simple statement from Karl Marx:
“Philosophers have explained the world; it is necessary to change the world.”
Communists, Chambers wrote, are bound together by no secret oath. The tie that binds them across the frontiers of nations, across barriers of language and differences of class and education, in defiance of religion, morality, truth, law, honor, the weaknesses of the body and the irresolutions of the mind, even unto death, is a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world.
Chambers begins the first chapter describing WHY he made his fateful decision to leave the Communist Party and turn on his former allies. This paragraph always profoundly affected me:
I wanted my wife to realize clearly one long-term penalty, for herself and for the children, of the step I was taking. I said: “You know, we are leaving the winning world for the losing world.” I meant that, in the revolutionary conflict of the 20th century, I knowingly chose the side of probable defeat. Almost nothing that I have observed or that has happened to me since has made me think that I was wrong about that forecast.
Chambers had intimate knowledge of how far the Communists had penetrated the U.S. government. He knew full well the odds were stacked against him, against us all; an enormous, terrifying, heaping mountain of bad odds.
“We are leaving the winning world for the losing world.” Chambers wrote when he defected in 1938 and again in 1952—almost 15 years later.
In other words, the free countries were losing the world. In fact, in 1980, if you’d painted all the communist countries on a classroom globe red, that globe would’ve been 75% crimson.
We were in the final inning with minutes to play, down by six, with two strikes. It looked bad.
But still, against all odds, in just eight years, Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union. It bought us 40 years of peace. There we were, stumbling blindly along the brittle precipice of losing it all, up to our eyelashes in communist spies, probably including in several White Houses, when in the blink of an eye, against all odds, we saved the entire world.
Just like that.
Unfortunately, Reagan only beat the Soviet Union. He didn’t defeat communism. He didn’t — couldn’t — crush the insane delusion that Man can replace God with Science. Neither did Reagan root out the networks of treacherous communist termites secretly embedded in nearly every government on Earth.
That’s what happened. Now allow me to spin the dial toward speculation about our present circumstances and what comes next, even allowing that history is never settled or free from controversy. Figuring out what’s happening in the present can be perilously tricky, if not impossible. The future? Well, that’s just guesswork.
But it seems fair to imagine that, after the Berlin Wall came down, world communists, having just been rubbing their bloodstained hands in glee at the thought of imminent global domination, stood stunned, dumbfounded, and astonished, having watched the whole thing ripped from their grasp at the very last second by some toxically-masculine cowboy.
Baffled, they wondered, “What just happened?”
They’d already learned one lesson with Stalin; don’t put any more narcissistic dictators in charge of the movement. But after Reagan, I imagine the communist élites recognized the risk of being too obvious, too public. The Soviet Union was a target that could be, and was, destroyed. It was a basket with too many eggs in it.
It started too soon. They learned you don’t want to go communist in one place until you’re ready to go all-in everywhere, all at once.
They also learned the grave danger of allowing a populist, anti-communist president like Reagan (or Trump) to have a full eight years. But that’s a different story.
At the time the Soviet Union collapsed, our and every other government in the world was packed with treacherous communist termites waiting for their orders.
In other words, outside the Soviet Union, the communist spy network remained solidly in place in the newspapers, TV stations, courthouses, and government offices. Nobody went after them.
Nobody fumigated the communists. Nobody cleaned house.
I wonder how many seconds it took for the top soviet spymasters to skedaddle from Moscow, headed toward friendlier climates, to be productively re-employed, helping their next master take control of the former Soviet spy networks. Was it China? China seems like a likely candidate, being well-positioned, eager, and having the resources.
But it easily could have been another opportunist who saw the possibilities. One closer to home, perhaps? American communists? Masons? The Vatican? A Rockefeller? Who knows.
…The question becomes, “all right, Jeff, now what?”
THE ROAD AHEAD
I started the post with Whitaker Chambers because it shows the unraveling of Twentieth Century global communism began with one man, a man who made a highly personal, moral decision to do something different. You can trace a line from Chambers to a second man, Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who published “The Gulag Archipelago” in 1973, straight through to a third man, Ronald Reagan, and from there to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
All the while, the Communists thought they were winning; the seeds of their inevitable destruction had been planted, were putting down roots and growing branches.
Here we are in 2022, a most remarkable year.
First, like Washington’s barefooted winter troops, the ragtag “Team Reality” volunteer army somehow defeated the pandemic’s worst excesses. Remember, it was only last January that the Biden Administration recognized Omicron and started backing down from all the mandates, just in time for the midterms.
Yesterday the Department of Defense officially ended the military mandate.
Also this year, Elon Musk made the totally irrational, anti-economic, wholly inexplicable decision to spend Solomon’s fortune buying Twitter — and against his own interests, promptly disconnected that platform from its government controllers. Now information is flowing freely again, a tsunami of truth washing out the pestilent enclaves of official disinformation.
The roots of censorship pre-dated the pandemic. In my research, I found the government’s war against the Neo-Flat Earth movement, which began in 2015.
Suspend your judgment about the merits of that movement for a moment to consider the broader implications.
I found the first Congressional demands for YouTube and Google to censor “conspiracy theorists” started in 2017, and the very first issue government officials were concerned about was all the new flat earth ‘evidence,’ which was exploding into an online movement.
Why does the government care so much about what some kooky YouTubers think?
The flat earthers are skeptical about what government says. They do not believe one word from NASA. They’ve published countless videos showing that NASA has, apparently, faked a lot of space videos. They’ve been using new high-resolution cameras with 1,000x zoom to photograph distant objects like oil platforms that should fall below the curve of the Earth but instead remain in the line of sight. They’ve been putting up lasers on one side of large lakes and showing the lights from far away on the other shore, which they say should be impossible under a globe model.
I have no opinion about any of that. I’m sticking with ‘globe.’ I like NASA. I’m a lawyer, not a geologist or astrophysicist or whatever. But the flat earthers are raising some interesting questions….
It seems perfectly reasonable that everyday people would want to make YouTube videos about all that. How is that a problem?
And if people do find repeating patterns in clouds in official NASA pictures of the Earth from space, suggesting some photoshopping was going on, what’s the problem with making a YouTube about it? NASA shouldn’t badly fake its space pictures. If they have to, for some reason, at least they should explain why.
My First Amendment professor, quoting the Supreme Court, would always say the correct answer to bad speech is MORE speech.
I mean, we do have a bloated, over-funded space agency. Why can’t NASA just make some YouTube videos of its own, explaining how people can see those oil platforms miles away, out in the ocean? It can’t possibly be the expense of making YouTube videos; these volunteers are doing it for free.
In what world is the better solution to pressure private companies to secretly censor Americans, kooky or not, who are just talking to each other?
Having myself been labeled an official “covid disinformer” and having been canceled and shadow banned, I oddly find I have a lot of sympathy for these flat earthers. I’ve also learned over the last two years that the government lies easily and often, and instead of exposing those lies, our so-called “independent media” loyally trots along behind, excreting even more lies.
So, it seems perfectly legitimate these days to question what the CDC, NASA, or any other government agency says.
All of this to say, the censorship didn’t start with COVID; it started before, with the flat earth people.
Government and social media were already illegally censoring us when covid swept into the long-range viewfinder. It’s just that nobody cared about people who think the Earth is flat.
If nothing else, the flat earther movement highlights a growing distrust of government propaganda — pre-dating the pandemic — and an unwillingness to accept government ‘facts’ at face value, even facts about very basic things like the shape of the Earth. On the one hand, that loss of trust is a tragedy, but on the other hand, if change is going to happen, people SHOULD distrust a faithless government.
I just got a bulk New Years’ email from defenestrated New York Times editor Bari Weiss. She says she already has over 300,000 subscribers to her new “Free Press” newspaper. And the Epoch Times is growing faster than it can handle.
All our pieces are on the chessboard for major moves in 2023.
A GREAT BIG NEW YEAR
Because corporate media wants you to think we’re losing, you need to be reminded about how much ACTUAL progress we’ve made this year — even under extremely difficult conditions.
Let us count some of the ways, all of which were covered in C&C this year.
[Here, Childers prints a list. Editor additions point out gains in Election Integrity and are noted in brackets. For Childers’ complete list, go to the original link above. ]
1. Twitter’s little birdie flew out of its cage, and the conversation about social media censorship shifted from “Did it happen?” to “Yeah, it happened.”
2. Republicans took the House, Pelosi lost the gavel, and now fur will fly. [We can expect public hearings on issues the FBI and DOJ have been tamping down like whack-a-moles. A new Church (Jim Jordan?) Commission could be brewing.]
3. [Grassroots activists are waking up and stepping forward in the battle for election integrity.]
4. [The issue of election integrity is rising in public polls, not declining.]
5. [The U.S. Supreme court is considering the U.S. Constitution to determine who directs our elections, the courts, the executive branch or the Constitutionally guaranteed ‘independent state legislature doctrine.’]
6. [Florida’s Gov. DeSantis created an Election Crimes Unit. It’s turning over rocks and exposing grubs, encouraging ever more whistleblowers to come out.]
7. [Wealthy and really smart people are stepping in to show somnolent politicians and parties the way.]
8. Americans — especially seniors — are “forgetting” to take their boosters, and parents aren’t jabbing their kids in any large numbers.
9. Alternative media is bursting at the seams.
10. Trust in government fell below trust in carnies.
11. Beat cops exposed a sordid mess in the Pelosi home.
12. The January 6th Committee published its odious report, and nobody noticed. [Then, no charges were filed against Trump.]
13. Fauci fled.
14. Florida (and other states) banned pediatric castration, and cosmetic mastectomies outlawed K-3 gay education, and started investigating perverts at “family friendly” erotic drag shows.
15. The Supreme Court defenestrated Roe v. Wade.
16. Free Florida went full red.
17. The Brunsons somehow got a hearing in the Supreme Court. It won’t remove Joe Biden, but still. If the Brunsons can do it…
18. [Populism rose.]
19. We made major progress against election cheating, even where we lost.
20. Solid information developed about the mechanism of safe and effective jab injuries, like IgG4 tolerance.
21. Elon Musk debunked the FBI by exposing its Hunter Biden laptop scandal and coverup.
22. The CDC was attacked from all sides, from the right and the left.
23. China’s covid-zero plan failed miserably under public pressure.
I could continue, but I had to stop somewhere! All of those [23] points are called “momentum.” Momentum is a forward motion that is difficult to stop. 2023 is going to make 2022 look boring.
What we can expect
Well, Elon Musk, who hasn’t lost a fight yet, is going to war against legacy media:
Check out those numbers. The Squawk Box and Elon’s tweets both got around the same number of views. But the numbers of likes and retweets are even comparable. Think about that for a second. Should the Squawk Box conclude it has the more persuasive argument?
Does it look like Musk’s “reputation” is “tarnished” to you?
Let’s sum this up.
1. The central planning planners can’t plan diddly squat because central planning doesn’t work.
2. Lots of people trust the planners less than they trust Nigerian princes.
3. It only takes ONE PERSON — for example, a Whitaker Chambers — to start unraveling [oppressive] government.
4. We have LOTS of good people.
5. The momentum is on our side. Especially locally.
The good news is: most of us have zero control over what happens outside our local area.
That’s good news because we don’t have to worry about the insane asylums called Washington, D.C., London, [Beijing], Brussels, or Moscow. That’s not our job.
Our job is local, local, local. Keep the pressure on! It’s working.
