Today we find out whether enough of our representatives have the sense and the courage to object to the obvious fraud following President Trump’s historic win. The smart money is on no. Swamp dwellers are a bipartisan majority in Washington. But we shouldn’t even be here. None of this is a surprise. We always knew about the fraud in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and other states with fraud centers. We laughed it off.

We made dark jokes about having to overcome the margin of fraud, never thinking that the margin would someday exceed any hope of overcoming.

There are so many things we used to just accept and occasionally make dark jokes about, pretending that if they just keep it from being too obvious, we could pretend it wasn’t there.

How many times have you heard someone say, a big reason Trump won in 2016 was that the left didn’t think they’d need to cheat? And yet still we did nothing. Now we have what seems to be obvious fraud—made all the more obvious by state and local officials refusing to make public the data that would show their elections were not fraudulent.

We can’t accept that any longer. Even here in Texas, if Attorney General Paxton hadn’t fought in court to maintain our election laws, we might be in the same fix as Michigan and the other dark-of-the-morning bump states. State by state, we need to harden our election laws against fraud. To whatever degree possible our election laws must be self-enforcing so that they don’t depend on who is in the Attorney General’s office or the Secretary of State’s office. They must be automatically open so that they can be validated without the need for convincing a judge or a county official.

Validation of elections isn’t something one candidate should have to fight for. It should be automatic, every election. We should always be looking for better ways to validate elections and to discard fraudulent votes.

We need, further, to identify where else we’re accepting corruption and do what we can to fix it now, before it gets out of hand, not afterward. What other half-hearted dark jokes do we tell?

We send children off to school, and joke about the indoctrination they’re getting. That’s crazy. We need pluralistic education. It’s one of those reforms that the majority of voters across every spectrum support. And yet we’ve let the professional politician slide when they fail to produce. We need to hold them accountable.

Then there’s court packing. We’ve been letting the threat of it go on for far too long. We have enough experience now to know that twelve justices works well, but there’s never even been an attempt made to codify that into the constitution. That needs to change—it needed to change three years ago.

Printing money is another of our dark jokes. And like election fraud, by the time hyperinflation hits us it’s going to be too late to do anything about it.¹ The obvious answer is that we need to stop pretending that money doesn’t exist. But we also need to be prepared for the national government not having the willpower to do that. We need alternatives, to stop it and to prepare for it both. Could individual states, or Allan West’s Union of Constitutional States, be ready in the case of hyperinflation to introduce some sort of currency backed by something? I think so.

We need to force our politicians to do something now, before hyperinflation hits. We need to prepare ahead of time instead of frantically running around after the fact—or, as so many of the professional political class are doing, pretending that nothing happened.

One of the interesting things about President Trump’s fight against possible election fraud is how many election workers and tangential election workers (delivery personnel and so on) are willing to talk about potential fraud now that someone is taking it seriously. They were probably always ready to talk, while the rest of us were making dark jokes about beating the margin—and then accepting the fraud with a dark joke and letting it stand.

In 2015, I wrote:

Despite two years of Democrats controlling congress, he’s been limited mainly to tying up the economy in executive orders. Because that’s where much of his red tape lies, a conservative successor, should we be that fortunate, can easily usher in an economic revival though their own executive order removing all of that red tape.²

I could accept the possibility of another leftist President in 2016 only because I believed our elections were sound. If people choose a candidate, it’s because they chose that candidate. If the nation wants to change their mind, I had faith that they could choose a different candidate in the next election.

I no longer have that faith. I can’t even be sure that President Obama won his elections. And the people who could show that my fears are unfounded are instead hiding the data that would allay those fears.

Instead of accepting these things with dark jokes, we need to fight. If we want to preserve the Union, we need to start now. We need to lay the groundwork now to counter corruption nationally—perhaps Allen West’s Union of Law-Abiding States is a good idea. A Convention of States is also worth pushing harder for; I haven’t seen anything from Governor Abbott about it since his book—2020 isn’t the only disappointing thing about him—but what he outlines in his book seem like good ideas.

Even secession is worth talking about: a serious threat of it could well push the beltway class into taking reform seriously.

But don’t give up. Even where we fail, we need to make the fraud obvious. If Trump had followed past Republicans and accepted this year’s fraud, it would have been a quickly-ignored footnote. He’s made it obvious that the left has something to hide, or think they have something to hide. Every call for open validation is dismissed and resisted by those who ought to want to prove that we had a valid election. Whenever I see a headline or a talking head telling us we need to stop looking under a rock, I can guess that they think there’s corruption hidden under that rock.

Keep voting. The beltway class would like to pretend that they have the moral high ground. They don’t get that when their fraud is obvious, when they have to keep saying silly things to keep us from looking under the rocks. Make sure they have to keep cheating to win. The more they cheat, the harder it is to hide. They’ll get better at stealing in the future, better at hiding it. There’s no need to stay home and make hiding it easier for them.

Stay angry, but don’t despair. Prepare. Fight. If you live in a state that hasn’t yet been corrupted, harden your elections against corruption. If you live in a state that has been corrupted, make them fight for it! Believe your lying eyes, and talk with others about what you see.

Don’t let your neighbors, locally and online, become isolated in the flickering gaslight.