Kengor Writes . . .

Paul Kengor

Paul Kengor is a professor of political science and the executive director of The Institute for Faith and Freedom at Grove City College, in Grove City, Pennsylvania. These essays are republished from The Institute for Faith and Freedom, an online publication of Grove City College, and The American Spectator. Paul Kengor is the author of God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (2004), The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (2007), The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan’s Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007), and The Communist — Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor (Threshold Editions / Mercury Ink 2012).

Pennsylvania Bombshell: Biden 99.4 Percent V. Trump 0.6 Percent

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in The American Spectator.

There are landslides and then there are landslides. There are lopsided votes and then there are lopsided votes. There are egregious examples of vote manipulation and then there are really egregious examples of vote manipulation. What surfaced during hearings in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 25, 2020, may set the standard for electoral outrageousness. An expert testifying to the Pennsylvania Senate flagged a batch of ballots that recorded some 570,000 votes for Joe Biden and only 3,200 for Donald Trump.

Yes, you read that correctly. That would equate to Joe Biden bagging 99.4 percent of that enormous chunk of votes. That one batch alone would have flipped the state to Biden.

This bombshell was dropped last Wednesday at the Wyndham Hotel in Gettysburg. The November 25 hearings, which began at 12:30 p.m. and ran for nearly four hours, were convened at the request of Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Adams, Cumberland, Franklin, and York counties). It was sponsored by the Senate Majority Policy Committee, chaired by Sen. David Argall (R-Berks/Schuylkill). Mastriano has called what happened “unacceptable,” and has called for the resignation of Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar.

This particular gem was provided by Ret. Col. Phil Waldren, a former combat officer with a background in Army information and electronic warfare. Waldren, who testified along with Rudy Giuliani’s team, brought to the hearing his considerable expertise in analysis of election-data fraud. After Waldren presented his material, the chair opened the floor for questions. Rudy Giuliani went first, asking Waldren to clarify what his analytics team means when they talk about “spike anomalies” in voting patterns. These, as Waldren defines them, are “events where a numerical amount of votes are processed in a time period that is not feasible or mechanically possible under normal circumstances.” Waldren showed a chart with a shocking example of an apparent massive dump of votes for Joe Biden. Giuliani pressed Waldren for clarification regarding this unbelievable “Biden injection of votes.” Here’s the exchange:

Waldren: “At the very beginning of the chart, where there’s a circle that says “On Election Day,” what that indicates is there’s a spike in loaded votes. 337,000-plus-or-minus-some votes that were added in there in one big batch. So that was an anomaly in the reporting. Normally you would expect to see a smooth curve going up, not any big spikes, that’s kind of what Greg was talking about, the anomalies of loading and uploading those votes. So that big spike that occurs there is a prime indicator of fraudulent voting.”

Giuliani: “And that’s [a total of] 604,000 votes in 90 minutes, is that right?”

Waldren: “Correct, this is [shows chart] 337,000 votes in that period of time.”

Giuliani: “And when you look at this entire curve, with all these spikes, can you calculate how much of a vote that accounted for Biden, and how much for Trump?”

Waldren: “Close to 600,000. I think our figures were about 570-some-odd-thousand that all those spikes represent over time.”

Giuliani: “For Biden?”

Waldren: “Correct.”

Giuliani: “And how much for Trump?”

Waldren: “I think it was a little over 3,200.”

That’s roughly 570,000 votes for Biden and 3,200 for Trump. Biden scooped up this enormous batch by 99.4 percent. Incredible. Impossible. Scandalous.

When Waldren said this, the audience in the room gasped in shock.

If what Waldren alleges here is true, then this would constitute one of the most insidious examples of documented voter fraud in the history of American presidential politics. This one spike alone would have erased Donald Trump’s 600,000-vote lead over Joe Biden late Tuesday night, November 3. Biden has reportedly won Pennsylvania by about 70,000 votes. This one swing would have done it. If this is true, then this episode alone might well constitute a smoking gun affirming a fraudulent election in Pennsylvania.

And yet, this electoral bombshell has been completely ignored by the mainstream press. The only national sources that I could find reporting it were RealClearPolitics, Breitbart, and Greg Kelly of Newsmax TV. A video link is provided courtesy of Right Side Broadcasting Network, a conservative source, filling a gap vacated by shameless mainstream “news” sources, which avoided the hearing like the plague.

I ask: Is this accurate? What happened here? Who or what could have flipped votes like this? Who was responsible? How does this occur? Is this real? Does this not have the potential to remove Pennsylvania from Joe Biden’s column? At the least, should it make the Pennsylvania vote uncertifiable for either Biden or Trump?

This was just one of many striking claims by Waldren and others throughout the nearly four hours of hearings. Another stunner, according to Waldren, is that a total of 1,823,148 mail-in ballots were sent out by the Commonwealth, and yet 2,589,242 mail-in ballots were counted in the final vote tally for the state. Thus, there are allegedly some 766,000 mail-in ballots unaccounted for. Rudy Giuliani observes that these 766,000 ballots “appeared from nowhere.” Neither the Pennsylvania secretary of state nor governor addressed this alleged massive discrepancy. (As I write, the website of the Pennsylvania secretary of state’s office has information posted that disputes these numbers. Presumably, Waldren would say that this data was changed.)

Trump’s critics will want to dismiss the hearings as a partisan spectacle hosted by Pennsylvania Republican legislators. You can’t do that. A real journalist would see enough here to at least merit making some phone calls or sending a few emails. It’s not rocket science, press boys and girls. Do your jobs!

For the record, likewise egregious voter spikes have reportedly occurred in Michigan, Georgia, and Wisconsin. One analysis has targeted these four incidents of “voter updates”:

1. An update in Michigan listed as of 6:31 a.m. Eastern Time on November 4th, 2020, which shows 141,258 votes for Joe Biden and 5,968 votes for Donald Trump

2. An update in Wisconsin listed as 3:42 a.m. Central Time on November 4th, 2020, which shows 143,379 votes for Joe Biden and 25,163 votes for Donald Trump

3. A vote update in Georgia listed at 1:34 a.m. Eastern Time on November 4th, 2020, which shows 136,155 votes for Joe Biden and 29,115 votes for Donald Trump

4. An update in Michigan listed as of 3:50 a.m. Eastern Time on November 4th, 2020, which shows 54,497 votes for Joe Biden and 4,718 votes for Donald Trump

Likewise, these incidents could have flipped the respective state into Joe Biden’s win column. I could go on and on. See the affidavit of Russell Ramsland of Allied Security Systems detailing the numerous instances of “physical improbabilities” in the voting tabulations (and election results) in Michigan. If your mind and heart is open, you can’t but be shocked by this.

But back to Pennsylvania, which is my focus here.

Could some reporter at some mainstream media outlet — one with a modicum of journalistic integrity and decency — pause to take some time to try to determine if these claims are accurate? Could just one “journalist” with access to Joe Biden ask for his reaction? How long would it take for Donald Trump to be grilled by a pack of ravenous reporters if Joe Biden had been potentially victimized like this?

And given that the media will not give these claims a hearing, could the U.S. Senate give them a hearing? There’s enough here that demands investigation.

Whether you like Donald Trump or not, whether you voted for him or not, this should concern every American. If this were Joe Biden being victimized, I would likewise protest. The media sure as heck would. This is not right.

Fifty Years Ago Solzhenitsyn Received the Nobel Prize for Reminding Us of a “Forgotten God”

Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at National Catholic Register.

“In 1949, some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences.” So opens Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s majestic The Gulag Archipelago, a seemingly odd start for a classic on the Soviet gulag, the nation’s forced labor camps. Readers initially wonder where the author is headed with a sort of ho-hum report from not a political journal but a science journal. He continues:

“It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream — and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot.”

At this point, readers might still be confused. Isn’t this a book on the Soviet gulag? Why are we reading about prehistoric fauna?

Actually, they’re learning about the gulag — its escapees, its survivors. Solzhenitsyn next explains what those present did with those ancient creatures. They didn’t rush them off to a museum; no, they devoured them. They were not doing a scientific excavation — they were escaping a Communist prison camp, where millions starved and died.

“Flouting the higher claims of ichthyology,” narrated Solzhenitsyn, and “elbowing each other to be first,” they chipped away the ice, hurried the fish to a fire, cooked it and bolted it down. No doubt, said Solzhenitsyn, Nature impressed its readers with this account of how 10,000-year-old fish could be kept fresh over such a long period. But only a narrower group of readers could decipher the true meaning of this “incautious” report. That smaller club was his fellow gulag survivors — the “pitiable zeks,” as Solzhenitsyn called them. When your goal is survival, you survive, even if it means hurriedly devouring something that in a normal world would be carefully rushed to a museum.

What started as a seemingly odd opening about prehistoric fish was actually a poignant anecdote about the human horrors of Soviet Communism. It was not about fish at all. It was about human beings who had been trapped in their state-constructed frozen ice lens — the frozen camps of Siberia.

I mention this now because it was 50 years ago, shortly before the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, that Alexander Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Few recipients have so earned it.

To summarize Solzhenitsyn’s life or book would be impossible. There was so much of note. Many might point to his Harvard commencement address in June 1978, or perhaps his less known but equally inspiring Templeton Prize speech (“Men Have Forgotten God”) in May 1983, or his reporting on the daily travails of another sufferer in his classic A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For me, however, what endures most are his reports of religious persecution under Communism.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn reported on the Moscow “church trials” of the 1920s — classic Communist show trials, aimed particularly at the Russian Orthodox Church. Solzhenitsyn provided a narrative account of this surreal, painful miscarriage of justice. The presiding judge was Comrade Bek, with the prosecutors Comrade Lunin and Comrade Longinov. Solzhenitsyn didn’t bother to share the first names of this dubious troika of comrades. It didn’t matter. Their names and faces and roles and duties were interchangeable in the Soviet system.

On trial were 17 defendants from the Russian Orthodox Church, including the patriarch, archpriests and laymen, accused of disseminating “propaganda” and of “hoarding” Church valuables (including everything from liturgical items to relics to icons) that the Soviet state demanded. Lenin and his Bolsheviks salivated over these “fabulous treasures” of the Church. Leon Trotsky rubbed his covetous hands together: “The booty is enormous!” he thrilled.

And thus the Church was told that it must give up everything to the state — then and there, without hesitation. That would ultimately include churches themselves, not to mention the loyalty of priests. The Soviet state was to be the new arbiter of truth.

And so, on May 5, shortly after May Day 1922, the holy day of international Communism, Patriarch Tikhon was one among 17 Church officials dragged into a Moscow “courtroom” to testify for having “acted incorrectly” in disobeying the state.

Solzhenitsyn’s narrative strikes me especially today because the words echo in the United States today. In fact, what Tikhon told the judge is eerily similar to what Kim Davis, the Kentucky law clerk, told a judge post-Obergefell when she refused to issue in her name same-sex marriage licenses because doing so would violate the teachings of her faith. Many Christians will face similar interrogations for not doing what the state orders in defiance of the teachings of their faith. Here’s Solzhenitsyn’s narration:

Comrade Bek to Patriarch Tikhon: “Do you consider the state’s laws obligatory or not?”

Patriarch Tikhon: “Yes, I recognize them, to the extent that they do not contradict the rules of piety.”

Judge Bek: “Which in the last analysis is more important to you, the laws of the Church or the point of view of the Soviet government? Are we, the representatives of the Soviet government, thieves of holy things? [Do you] call the representatives of the Soviet government, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, thieves?!”

Tikhon: “I am citing only Church law.”

The Soviet atheist judge then lectured the head of the Russian Orthodox Church on a correct understanding of “blasphemy.” He told the shaken patriarch that he was a liar.

The verdict, incidentally, was already predetermined. Nonetheless, the “jury” proceeded forward with the farce, ordering criminal charges against the patriarch. He was arrested and removed from office, and he eventually died of a heart attack while under house arrest. At least he wasn’t executed on the spot — 11 of his 17 co-defendants were shot.

In my view, accounts like this are among the most memorable moral lessons in Solzhenitsyn’s great work. He documents vile examples of Soviet sacrilege and persecution of religious believers. In The Gulag Archipelago, he recorded how nuns and prostitutes were housed together in special sections of the gulag, both deemed whores by the atheistic state.

Solzhenitsyn understood that the battle against Communism was not simply a political one. The roots of Communism’s rage were unmistakable: “Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin . . . hatred of God is the principal driving force.” As Solzhenitsyn knew, Soviet Communism was not merely a political and ideological threat but a spiritual threat. And few did better work exposing that dark world than he did.

It was 50 years ago that the world recognized Solzhenitsyn “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature” — a literary achievement that went well beyond the realm of literature. Like the best of literary works, what he told us had profound moral-spiritual lessons that endure through the ages. He would not want us to forget. And we shouldn’t forget.     *