The Big Rig: Midterms Edition
The systematic effort to steal elections has been in operation for decades—but it’s nearing a wall.
Big Rig
When the Civil Rights Act was signed into law in 1964 by Lyndon Johnson, followed by the Voting Rights Act a year later, American racists began a long project to claw that progress back. The reactionary fervor to those laws was a major factor in Lyndon Johnson pulling out of the 1968 presidential race, and his Vice President Hubert Humphrey losing the election. And it’s why segregationist George Wallace had a credible candidacy as an independent.
Another big factor, however, was the Johnson administration’s failure to end the Vietnam war. As we now know, Richard Nixon deliberately interfered to extend the war, so he would have an issue to run against—and Johnson knew about it.
I argue this was the beginning of the Big Rig, a systematic campaign by the Republican Party to steal elections—and a systemic failure of the opposition to stop them. Every Republican president elected from Nixon forward has cheated to win. All of them.
Nixon deliberately prolonged the Vietnam war until after the 1968 election, costing countless lives over the next five years.
Reagan conspired with the Iranians and Israel to keep the hostages in Iran in captivity until after his 1981 inauguration. Craig Unger has detailed this history extensively.
Bush was elected in 1988 after covering up for the crimes of Iran-Contra as CIA Director for Reagan, and continued the cover up during his presidential term—using Bill Barr as frontman.
Bush Jr. was elected in 2000, after Roger Stone and three of the current Supreme Court Justices (Roberts, Kavanaugh, Coney-Barrett) coordinated the legal case and “Brooks Brothers Riot” which prevented a recount in Florida which would have swung the election to Al Gore.
Trump was elected in 2016 through psychological and hybrid warfare operations conducted by a conspiracy of the Russian government, Peter Thiel, Jeffrey Epstein, Mike Flynn, Erik Prince, and numerous others. At the end of his term, Trump tried to overthrow the 2020 election to stay in power.
Trump was elected again in 2024 by Elon Musk purchasing Twitter to run right-wing influence operations—and by giving Trump $300 million to prop up his failing campaign.
At every step of the way, Democrats have failed to prevent these catastrophes in real time despite ample foreknowledge—and failed to get accountability afterwards, despite clear evidence of crimes.
Revved Up
We are now six months before the 2026 midterms—an existential election for restoring a semblance of democracy to America, and the Big Rig has revved up its engines.
The same three lawyers who helped give us George W. Bush 26 years ago, voted to gut the Voting Rights Act last week—setting off a string of state legislatures unilaterally gerrymandering their districts to disenfranchise as many Black people as possible. This includes Tennessee’s legislature voting on Thursday to eliminate its single Black-majority Democratic district in Memphis.
But for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, this war on equal voting rights goes all the way back to the start of his career as a lawyer in the White House. John Roberts wrote a talking points memo to the Justice Department advocating for gutting the Voting Rights Act—in 1982, for Reagan.
Roberts and the christofascist supermajority on the Court are not there to interpret the Constitution. They are there to destroy the ability of the American people to move beyond our racist past. They are there to protect the white billionaire class that propelled them to power—and to advance their personal Catholic integralist beliefs.
Donald Trump would not be anywhere near power were it not for the Roberts Court. It is the Citizens United decision which gave billionaires the ability to launder money into the American political system to disinform the population—a loophole Trump drove a truck through in 2016.
Numerous other absurdly tortured SCOTUS decisions enabled Donald Trump to get elected a second time, including overturning a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that Trump was ineligible to run in 2024—and granted him the novel power of “presidential immunity.”
Not Just SCOTUS
On Friday morning, the Virginia Supreme Court handed down a 4-3 decision that may end up being historically crucial. After a successful referendum in Virginia, in which voters chose to redistrict the state to counter Republican efforts at gerrymandering, the Virginia Court struck down the results, disenfranchising 3 million voters, and handing Democrats a potential death sentence in the midterms.
The ruling is worthy of Aileen Cannon, the Trump judge that obstructed the Jack Smith investigation for over a year. It is a strange, twisted argument involving journeys into semantics and references to 19th century writers. The dissent however, is straightforward, clear, and based on the law.
The ruling was obviously designed for a political result and comes in stark contrast to other states being torn apart by Republican gerrymandering—each of which is being altered unilaterally by legislatures. Not a single Republican voter has approved any of their party’s actions to rig elections.
Nevertheless, this is the attitude of the GOP—because it is a nihilistic, paranoid personality cult, not a political party.
2020 Redux
In Summer 2020, four years into Donald Trump’s first regime, America was COVID-fatigued, deeply radicalized, and extremely divided. I became concerned about the security of the elections and the more I tuned into what was happening on American streets—and American social media—the more concerned I became about violence.
Two of the people who most concerned me were retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, who was cheerleading QAnon and the Big Lie, and Kash Patel, who was installed as the Chief of Staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller after Trump lost the 2020 election.
I was following their activities—and QAnon’s—closely which allowed me to predict the events of January 6th with high accuracy, weeks ahead of time.
Both Flynn and Patel were involved in planning the insurrection, and ensuring the rioters had a chance to try to find Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. Patel was working from the Pentagon and Flynn as the frontman for QAnon.
Georgia was one of the biggest targets for Big Rig interference in 2020, and after the case against Trump and over a dozen defendants was dropped, Lawfare was able to get the grand jury transcripts on Thursday. Here is what Mike Flynn testified: “The Fifth”—over and over, just as he did for the January 6th Committee.
Despite his non-cooperation, however, Flynn was never indicted or even named as a co-conspirator; he got off scot-free. Same with Kash Patel, who is now using the FBI to investigate a journalist who reported on his drinking, and is also suing her for defamation, while he continues to push the 2020 Big Lie for Donald Trump.
Desperate People
Full disclosure: Mike Flynn sued me in April 2023 and finally dismissed the case in March of this year. I am currently suing him back to get attorneys fees and sanctions under SLAPP.
Kash Patel frivolously sued me for defamation in Nevada six weeks after Flynn did. He received a default judgement for $250,000 in 2025 despite never having served me with the lawsuit. My lawyers are currently attempting to set aside the judgement in federal court.
The FBI Director’s lawyers, knowing I don’t have any money, have asked the judge to impose a bond to force me to pay them to sue me—which would essentially put me into bankruptcy and make me unable to fight them in court. This is an exercise in spite, designed to shut up the one guy who saw right through Patel and Flynn from the start.
Kash Patel is reportedly “in panic mode” trying to save his job by silencing his political opponents, harassing journalists, and giving Donald Trump whatever he wants by abusing the full power of the federal government. Like Trump, Kash is a prime example of the psychological marriage of narcissism, paranoia, and sadism in malignant narcissists.
And finally, it is now being reported that Patel has ordered polygraphs of over two dozen of his subordinates to “find the leakers” who told a reporter about his bourbon stash. He has no shame, no morals, and nothing to lose by continuing to commit more crimes for Trump. That is his only purpose.
Hitting the Wall
If you step back and look at the Big Rig over the six decades it has been in motion, you will notice a trend. While the conspiracy to steal elections started as covert operations to influence geopolitics behind the scenes—operations which could be easily dismissed as “conspiracy theories”—the conspiracies are no longer hidden. It is the stated policy of the Trump regime to deny that he lost in 2020. And it is a requirement of his sycophants that they go along with his delusions, including judicial nominees.
This trend cannot last forever. The oscillation between Republicans and Democrats gaining power—a tacit arrangement in which the GOP steals an election and then the Democrats clean up the mess they made—has gotten far too extreme. Either the population will roll over for totally performative elections, Russia-style, or we won’t. There is no gray zone left.
It is no longer possible to even pretend elections are about the candidates or issues anymore. Elections have been reduced to the practical question of whether Republicans will be able to successfully steal them. That is not a sustainable trajectory for a democracy. It is an out-of-control 18-wheeler heading towards a wall.
Either the Democrats stop staring, hypnotized, into the Big Rig’s headlights and move out of the way, or we will all get run over—again.
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We aren’t mad enough. Because leaders that we voted for, rode hard for, the ones we trusted they understood how important this is aren’t mad enough -if at all. It’s a big club that protects each other. Apparently they’ve fooled Dem leadership that they’re in this elite club too. Or maybe they like the club -who knows. Confederates were blended back into society after the civil war too. And didn’t we do it with the Manhattan project? Shame on all of them. They could be banning together in outrage but as we see…… they are not. Black people have been right all along about the grotesque racism at the top. Some of us just didn’t believe them.
Mark me down as in favor of giving every single eligible Black American voter in the United States two votes in every election for the next 200 years instead of just one as they were virtually denied their right to vote since 1789. Also, double the amount of polling places in areas with substantial minority voters while halving the number of polling places in areas with majority whites.