by Capt. Seth Keshel
Mike Pence’s failure to seek remediation of the 2020 quasi-election, as well as his national bellyflop of a presidential campaign which existed only as a vehicle to attack President Trump, has overshadowed one of the worst political moments preceding his time as the 48th Vice President. You may recall in March 2015 that Pence, while serving as Governor of Indiana, threw his legislature under the bus and backed away from their religious freedom bill after angry mobs, certainly prompted by dark money messaging campaigns, came calling for him and shredded some of his most loyal supporters in the process.
Pence had won the office in 2012 by defeating his Democrat opponent, John Gregg, by 2.9%, or 74,408 votes. While that’s certainly no landslide, there was no question that Pence had legitimately won the governorship of the Hoosier State. Unfortunately, Republicans have a storied and well-documented history of betraying their voter base even after winning outright landslides, from John Kasich to Larry Hogan, Lindsey Graham, Kristi Noem, Mitt Romney, Doug Ducey, and Greg Abbott.
While Abbott is better than most on that list, if not all, he refused to stand up for Ken Paxton until his impeachment fate was decided by the Texas Senate, less than two years after defeating careerist candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke by 10.9%, or 883,443 votes in margin. Lisa Murkowski, a Democrat hiding behind a Republican family legacy represented fiercely independent and freedom-loving Alaska, was reelected by 15.2% in 2016 only to become an additional Senate face of the GOP anti-Trump resistance, right behind John McCain himself.
This is why I’ve become fond of referring to the Republican choke artists we’ve come to detest as the Vichy GOP, named after the Vichy French regime of the World War II period that sought to collaborate with Nazi Germany rather than dig in with the rest of the French people. Statesmanship is one thing, when elected officials seek the best possible outcome from a bad set of inputs and variables, and outright political treachery is another. While Democrats certainly use people and throw them scraps, like the black voter base that is now being traded in for the emerging illegal alien aspiring citizen voter base, they tend to do what they say they are going to do, especially when it pertains to the unending assaults on the rights of the American people, and using all guns on deck to attack their political opposition.
Political treachery is a uniquely Republican problem. We have much to learn from our enemies, who possess the killer instinct required to follow through on their evil, anti-American, anti-freedom agenda. Take Kris Mayes, Arizona’s illegitimately elected Attorney General, for instance.
Mayes “won” her race against Abraham Hamadeh by 511 votes in November 2022, and that margin subsequently dwindled down to 280 after uncounted votes were miraculously found in Pinal County. That race between Mayes and Hamadeh was the closest one out of the four stolen from Hamadeh, Kari Lake (Governor), Mark Finchem (Secretary of State), and Blake Masters (U.S. Senate – and did everyone a major disservice by conceding a corrupt election).
Despite having what amounts to roughly a quarter-million likely fraudulent ballots in her quiver, Mayes held on to the victory because 8,000 Election Day provisional ballots went uncounted. Election Day turnout in Arizona exceeded 3:1 in favor of registered Republicans. Even if those 8,000 ballots only went to Hamadeh at a 2:1 clip, he would have still won the race by more than 2,000 votes. I respect Hamadeh but think it is a poor use of his platform to run for the U.S. House this year when, at just 32 years old, he was (and is) the closest of all candidates nationally to overturning a high-profile stolen election, and I’ve told him that in person – that he should stay put and fight for his rightful position.
What is it that we should be learning from the uber-corrupt Mayes, Arizona’s new top cop? Number one, I struggle to paint a starker contrast between “elected” Democrats and Republicans elected in landslides than that between Mayes and any GOP officials who have been elected in blowouts yet continuously waffle on the tough decisions. Mayes is widely perceived as illegitimate, and rightly so, and therefore possesses zero mandate. A political mandate is something that comes from the public that says, “we see you, we heard you loud and clear, and here is your huge margin of victory to do exactly what you said you would do.”
Since swearing in early last year, Mayes has used the full weight of her office to stomp on any dissidents who would seek to upend her election, and does so in the name of our democracy. Cochise County Supervisors Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby have both been charged with felonies for election interference in seeking to delay the certification of the 2022 election results, and the Mohave County Supervisors have been coerced and threatened by her office into backing away from the unthinkable – a hand count of 2024 election ballots. Mayes, one of America’s most unrepentant villains, now reportedly has plans to prosecute the alternate slate of electors presented in the aftermath of the corrupt 2020 presidential quasi-election, and will have a say in the emerging entrapment scandal surrounding the ouster of State Representative Austin Smith.
Her office cares little to nothing about the litany of legitimate issues impacting Arizona and her citizens, and those issues are vast. She’s not concerned with that, because she is doing the bidding of her masters to upend, not enforce, the rule of law, exempt herself from rightful scrutiny, and put down any potential citizen uprising against the overreach of her corrupt and compromised office.
Mayes is doing all of this with a margin of 280 votes in “victory” out of 2,512,390 counted, with her margin of defeat contained in uncounted provisional ballots that will never see the light of day. In other terms, if 1 in 8,973 ballots were fraudulent, Hamadeh wins. I’d venture that, given Arizona’s status as America’s election fraud ground zero, that mathematical possibility is not only likely, but certain.
Perhaps I am writing this as a plea to the next United States Attorney General, maybe Ken Paxton, if we can get President Trump through the modern gauntlet of corruption-ridden elections one last time. Can we please stop trying to be nice and presentable for the next cocktail party? At the risk of pissing off southerners (and I am one), Lincoln disposed of his establishment generals one by one until finally realizing he couldn’t spare Grant, despite his alcoholism and roughness around the edges, because “he fights” and was willing to do whatever it took to end the Civil War. If Kris Mayes can behave like a tinpot, third-world strongman while holding the office of Arizona Attorney General, then we can go after the legions of corrupt actors who have deliberately crippled election integrity one state at a time. We can start with Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s governor, who, while serving as Pennsylvania’s Attorney General, inexplicably said once all ballots were counted, it would be impossible for Trump to win. What did he know?
What did Keith Ellison know when he said Minnesota Democrats didn’t have enough votes to beat Trump and other Republicans, like Jason Lewis, late on the afternoon of November 3, only for Trump to lose Minnesota almost as badly as Romney did in 2012?
What did Brad Raffensperger know when he told the Today Show on November 4 that Georgia had 4.7 million voters participate in the 2020 election, only to have the state certify 5.0 million weeks later?
I could continue listing names, but it’s a moot exercise, because our system of elections is just one area that needs a fleet enema regarding the unrighteous and morally absent justice system. There aren’t enough jail cells to hold the officials and their accomplices who have looted every government system stood up in the past century or conspired to lock down the economy and proliferate a high contagious virus for political purposes. What I am writing here today underscores why I don’t give a hoot in hell about conservatism, and why I don’t find it worthwhile to argue with the hard left (or the weakling right) online. Simply put, if someone’s head is so far lodged up their fourth point of contact that they can’t see the light of day despite lockdowns, economic closures, vaccine mandates, and increasingly deliberate social brainwashing, they aren’t waking up, and it no longer represents the best use of my time to try and convince them they are wrong and likely irreparably broken between the ears.
Conservatism is too good to repay the favor and act like Kris Mayes. Mark these thoughts down as yet another reason I’m no longer interested in being tagged as conservative. We must learn from our enemies, indeed, or there will be no position left to retreat to.
