The Lesson Raffensperger Learned

Out of all the pieces of wisdom my father gave me, easily the one that stuck with me the most was “you cannot reason with unreasonable people.” Georgia Secretary Of State Brad Raffensperger tried to do the impossible, only to find it biting him in the ass.

Trump started by demanding a recount in Georgia, Raffensperger happily gave him it. That didn’t go Trump’s way, so he demanded a statewide audit, which Raffensperger also gave him (in a historic first, might I add) without question. Some minor foot dragging was in place, but at the end of the day, he stilled tried to reason with the unreasonable, which has since been his biggest mistake. It was only when Trump asked him to make up the results that Brad Raffensperger finally put his foot down — but it shouldn’t have taken him this long for Raffensperger to finally say “no”.

I should note, I firmly believed from the start that the “recount” was nothing more than a smokescreen for a steal. I’m reminded of this tweet from Justin Gray on 11/17/2020 as just one example:

New: a memory card was found during the audit in Fayette county with 2,755 votes. Decreased Biden statewide lead by 449. New margin total statewide in GA is a 12,929 lead for Biden

One cannot help but notice that Biden votes are found in ballot boxes while Trump votes are found on SD cards. Randomly “finding” Trump votes happened all the time during both the recount and the audit (although it was never in large enough numbers to get Trump ahead), and it made the entire thing look like the trojan horse it was.

Despite the praise Raffensperger got from liberals, I have no doubt he intended both the recount and the audit to push Trump over the edge. Neither of them did, in fact both of them grew Biden’s lead over Trump, but I highly doubt that was part of the plan. When first running for Secretary of State, Raffensperger ran on a platform of paper ballots and voter ID — both of which were put on hold as Brian Kemp filled the state with Ivanka Trump’s voting machines after Kemp was elected under shaky circumstances in 2018.

All Trump had to do was two things:

1. Not make it obvious his opinion on Raffensperger relied on his winning Georgia
2. Not say the quiet part out loud

The first one became a failure rather quick, with Trump supporters giving Raffensperger death threats less than a week after the election. Business Insider documented a handful of these towards his wife in a 11/19/2020 article:

“Your husband deserves to face a firing squad,” one message read.

“You better not botch this recount,” another read. “Your life depends on it.”

“The Raffenspergers should be put on trial for treason and face execution,” a third read.

While this was going on, Trump supporters started openly advocating for Trump to hold a coup — which Trump wouldn’t need to do if he actually won. The Donald (a website based on the subreddit r/The_Donald, which reddit banned on 6/29/2020) openly started advocating for a monarchy after the election, as did 4chan’s /pol/ board and twitter accounts like Liberty Hangout. In fact, I would say Liberty Hangout summed up the attitude of Trump and his supporters on 12/11/2020:

Shame on Brett Kavanaugh for rejecting the Texas case. After all that Trump and his supporters did to defend your family from baseless lies, you go and turn your back on us like Judas Iscariot. Shame shame shame.

The second one was on Trump, he had to make this about “democracy” and not about his victory. And the phone call from 1/2/2021 summed up how Trump failed at that:

All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.

Of course, even if Trump somehow flips Georgia, that would still give Biden 290 Electoral Votes — enough to win. The overwhelming momentum for Biden and Harris can not be underestimated, and the Republican Party has used all of its resources in one place, basically promising it nothing but doom in the foreseeable future.

The main question of 2020 was this: Will we be governed by Biden or by a group of ivory tower philosophical supremacist Republican writers at First Things and American Compass who the majority of people cannot stand. We The People have responded with Biden, and the second group cannot stand that fact. They wrapped themselves up with “America First” rhetoric, hoping this would distract from the evil they do. The fact that the American people didn’t fall for their trick has driven them crazy, and they are doing everything possible in hopes that maybe they can win — hopefully, soon reality will sink in.