 Good day, May 40 here. So I was just talking to a right-wing Jewish friend and he said things that I already knew, but he just summed it up really well. I was just really impressed by what he said and I wanted to share it with you. So our conversation started off with me sharing Richard Spencer's critique on how the alt light became radicalized. That alt light, people like Nick Fuentes and Mike Sonowich, Lauren Southern, Laura Luma, Big Delasca, etc. that compared to the alt right, they wanted to work within the system, they want to work within the Republican Party, they're concerned about optics, they want to present a much more socially acceptable presentation of their dissident view. So someone like Nick Fuentes, he's basically a paleoconservative, he's just a little more open with what's called racist perspectives, he's just more open with the skepticism of Jews and Jewish influence. Nick Fuentes is basically a paleoconservative, but because they tried to sign on with Donald Trump, sign on with the system, tried to work within the Republican Party, they became much more vulnerable to Trump talking about voter fraud and they took Trump's talk about voter fraud literally. So apparently according to some surveys, 72% of Republicans believe that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent. Now my friend made the great point, voter fraud discussion is not really about voter fraud, it's about voter suppression. He says, you know, I want to suppress the vote as much as possible, quoting him. The easier you make it to vote, then the more Democrats are going to turn out to vote. So from my friend's perspective, expanding mail in voting was voter fraud, not literally voter fraud, but it expanded the ease with which people could vote. So he says the issue with, at the ballot box, which goes under the rhetoric of voter fraud is really voter suppression versus voter expansion. So with mail in ballots, you had voter expansion, you made voting easier. So a lot more people voted in the 2020 presidential election than would have voted if they'd had to show up to the polls. So my friend's very much for voter suppression, he wants to make voting as difficult as possible. And that's generally speaking, the Republican perspective. So when Republicans talk about voter fraud, they're not talking really about voter fraud, they're talking about voter suppression. And left-wing academic analyses of this topic point out, yeah, that voter fraud is usually a rhetorical device to promote voter suppression. So the conventional wisdom is Republicans do better in elections where there's lower turnout, Democrats do better where there's a higher percentage turnout. So it's to Republican advantage to suppress the vote, to make voting as difficult and challenging as possible. It is to the Democratic Party advantage to expand the vote. So the Democrats are always trying to expand the vote, expand the ease of voting. And the United States is an outlier among industrial nations. It's the only industrial nation where the government is not essentially running voter registration. So in the United States, you have private parties trying to sign people up to vote in other industrialized nations. All the citizens are automatically signed up to vote. That's why the United States has one of the lowest percentage of its citizens voting. The United States is a complete outlier in that it has private groups, private individuals trying to sign people up to vote. In a normal country, you're just, in a normal industrial country, you're just automatically signed up to vote. So it is to the Republican Party's advantage to suppress the vote. Now, this is given the rhetoric of voter fraud. Republican activists, intellectuals, apparatchiks will say, you know, we're just trying to reduce voter fraud. And then stupid people take the voter fraud argument literally. It's like, oh my God, it's stealing, it's fraud. No, it's not actually stealing, it's not actually fraud. But from a Republican perspective, expanding the vote is voter fraud, because Republicans are much more skeptical of human nature and they don't believe that human nature is inherently wonderful. They're much more skeptical of expanding the voting franchise. So many Republicans privately will oppose the 19th Amendment, which expanded the vote to women. So from a Republican Party perspective, from a conservative perspective, you want to reduce the percentage of the population that votes. You want to suppress the vote. And the way to do that is to use the rhetoric of voter fraud. But idiots take the rhetoric of voter fraud and take it literally to mean fraud. But no, it's just a rhetorical device. It's not really about fraud. It is about suppressing the vote while from the Democratic Party's perspective, their goal is to expand the vote. If you expand the ease of voting, more people will vote. And the more likely it is that Democrats will win. That's the conventional wisdom. Now, Republicans overall did really well in the 2020 election, much better than expected. So perhaps there is some reason to question whether, you know, suppressing the vote is automatically better for the Democrats. But remember, there's a big difference between rhetoric and reality. And rhetoric does not always match reality. So rhetoric about voter fraud is not really about voter fraud. It is about voter suppression. And left-wing academic analyses will say the same thing, that voter fraud is a rhetorical device. Its aim is to suppress the vote. So the lower the percentage of the population that votes, the conventional wisdom is the better that is for the Republican Party. So Republicans do everything they can to make voting more difficult, to make it more onerous, to add requirements. And the Democrats do everything they can to expand the vote, to make voting easier, to make voting more frictionless. And there are major differences between the United States and every industrial nation. Like it's more onerous to vote in the, yeah, Eliot says I vote for more requirements. Yeah, from a conservative right-wing Republican perspective, you want to suppress the vote. From a Democratic perspective, you want to expand the vote. So every other industrial nation in the world makes voting easier than does the United States. And that's why the United States is probably more right-wing than every other industrial nation because it has such a relatively low percentage of the population that turns out to vote. So don't confuse rhetoric with reality. Voter fraud is a rhetorical device. Don't take it literally. So from a Republican perspective that I think the 2020 election was stolen, it was stolen in the sense that the voting franchise was rapidly expanded through the use of mail-in balloting. So when Republicans talk about mail-in balloting being much more fraudulent, they're not speaking on a literal criminal level of fraud. They are talking about expanding the vote, making it easier. So it's a rhetorical device aimed at suppressing the vote. It's not aimed at literally convicting people for a crime. So thinking of voter fraud as a crime is much more literal and much more effective if you want to use voter fraud on a literal basis. But on a rhetorical basis when Republicans talk about the 2020 election was stolen, what they're really saying is the voting franchise was so massively expanded that voting was made so easy that all sorts of people that Republicans think really shouldn't be voting, low-information voters, people who aren't very smart, were able to use this easy new system of voting, mail-in balloting to cast their ballots, and that was decisive to elect Joe Biden. So remember, voter fraud is rhetorical. What it's really all about is do you want to suppress the vote or do you want to expand the vote? Eliot says, conservatives should have known this day was coming. They had both houses and they could have done voter ID. So a lot of people get confused. Republicans have so often tried to crack down on voter fraud and for 25 years Republicans have talked so much about vote fraud and reducing vote fraud and they've assigned US attorneys, they've had commissions, they've done so much to try to reduce vote fraud. So why weren't they able to reduce vote fraud more? Well, they're getting confused that it's really literally about vote fraud. It's about voter suppression but you can't win politically saying that you offer voter suppression. So you have to use rhetoric. There are a lot of unpopular perspectives that people have to take a dishonest rhetorical approach to try to make the argument. So why weren't Republicans able to suppress the vote more effectively? Well, they did not have the House of Representatives the last two years. So they weren't able to suppress mail-in balloting after Trump the deluge. Maybe, maybe. So Democrats won by expanding mail-in balloting and so Republicans weren't able to rhetorically and politically effectively make the case against mail-in balloting. So once it became clear that about half the country was going to vote through the mail, in all likelihood, the odds were about 90% that Trump was going to lose. So what is amazing how close Trump came? Like he was 47,000 votes from winning the 2020 election. Like Trump came closer to winning than Hillary Clinton did. So if 100,000 votes had gone the other way in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have won. But I believe if about 47,000 votes had gone the other way this time, Donald Trump would have won. So it was the massive expansion of the voter franchise that cost Republicans the presidential election. And so how were the Democrats able to make mail-in balloting, mail-in voting so widespread in 2020? That's a key question. How were they able to do that? The United States is also unique in that voting rules vary state by state. We've got 50 different states with 50 different sets of rules. And we also have a voting system that's overwhelmingly operated by volunteers, which makes us different from other industrialized nations, I believe, the extent of volunteers. And we have almost no academic research into voter fraud. I didn't realize this. So we have almost no academic research into voter fraud. So you often hear about the 1960 presidential election was stolen.