(If they want to lock up people for saying that Democrats stole the election, they can start with me. In my new column at Real Clear Politics, I lay out the evidence against me — but I’m not afraid. It’s a free country, isn’t it? Well, maybe not anymore.)

---

By Frank Miele

Remember when we all thought we knew what a coup was? “A sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government,” as defined by Google’s Oxford dictionary. From the French coup d’etat, literally “blow of state.”

That’s what it was then, but now a coup is when legal means are used to counter a perceived attempt to seize power through subterfuge and electoral manipulation. Huh? That doesn’t make any sense.

No it doesn’t, but it’s the narrative being pushed by the far-left media and the inbred governing elites, who have essentially turned language into a weapon against those who would challenge their power. Thus, anyone who sought an investigation into the 2020 presidential election is now a danger to society, a threat to democracy, a domestic terrorist who ought to be thrown in prison.

It starts with Donald Trump, of course, who apparently engaged in what Rep. Jamie Raskin has identified peculiarly as a “self-coup.” And it continues with the protesters who foolishly fought with police on Jan. 6 because they thought that a real coup was taking place inside the Capitol and that they could do something about it. But in the past few weeks, we have been coached to accept the idea that anyone was part of the so-called “Trump coup” if they doubted the official election results. Never mind the First Amendment. Never mind the rule of law. If you took any steps, even though entirely legal, to contest the election, you are an enemy of the state.

Which brings me to my confession. I have to admit that both before and after the Nov. 3, 2020 election, I suspected that the Democrats would rig the election and said so publicly. I encouraged President Trump to fight the election results in the Electoral College, in the courts, in peaceful rallies, and in Congress. It seemed to me that no step short of violence should be omitted in the effort to prove that the election was stolen.

I was not alone. That’s probably what pisses off Democrats so much. There were millions of us, the good old Deplorables, who refused to give up and go away just because we were told by the media that we were crazy. After all, the media had told us we were crazy for thinking The Donald could win in 2016. They told us we were crazy for thinking Hillary Clinton was behind the Russia collusion hoax. They told us we were crazy for believing that a laptop filled with incriminating evidence against Hunter Biden and his father could be anything other than “Russian disinformation.”

They told us we were unhinged conspiracy theorists, but we persevered. We knew by now that the media lies – relentlessly. We knew they were in the tank for the Democratic Party. We knew that it was an uphill battle to get the truth out when the other side controlled Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and most of Fox News. But we knew we had a right to fight for what we believe in – not with arms, but armed with truth. This was still America after all.

So Sen. Josh Hawley worked to put together a coalition of Republican senators and representatives who would present evidence of fraud to the joint body of Congress which had to give its imprimatur to the Electoral College results. Earlier, attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis had gone into court after court looking for a venue where the evidence would be heard instead of turned away. And behind the scenes, people like Clarence Thomas’ wife Ginni were working to convince anyone who could help to keep fighting.

Under the new rules, Thomas is a coup plotter because she sent a text messageurging Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows to help Trump “stand firm” against what she called “the greatest Heist of our History.” That communication was one of many collected by the House’s Jan. 6 select committee through subpoenas and intimidation and then leaked to the media, which dutifully reported them as if they were incriminating.

They are not. Despite the breathless reporting by the likes of Chuck Todd and Jonathan Karl, the messages are predictable and repetitive. They prove nothing other than what we knew already – that many of those who believed the 2020 election was stolen weren’t content to sit quietly on the sidelines. Like Ginni Thomas, we were trying to think of any strategy that would convince the courts, Congress, and the American people to look at the evidence. It was no secret that we were doing so, because we were shouting from the highest mountain tops. Yet the Jan. 6 committee keeps trotting out these text messages and emails as if they were shedding light on some dark, hidden conspiracy.

Democrats seem to be convinced that anyone who questioned the election results publicly is guilty of “seditious conspiracy.” People like me are called “insurrectionists” even if we weren’t anywhere near the Capitol on the day when protesters stormed the halls of Congress.

The logic of the case is flawless. After all, the government told us in no uncertain terms that this election was “the most secure in American history,” and since the government has never lied to us before, we were expected to either heartily embrace the official story or at the very least shut the hell up. Dissent, we discovered, is not allowed in a democracy, dammit.

Unfortunately for me, I’ve always been a contrarian, so now there is a ton of evidence that I was part of the Trump “self-coup,” and I figure there’s nothing left for me to do except confess. It should be easy for some smart young government lawyer to convince a court to lock me up for years based on what I have written.

Heck, even before the election was over, I warned that no one should expect the results to be announced early “because of the rigged system of early voting and late counting cobbled together by Democrats and useful idiot RINOs that allows massive manipulation of the results to achieve a favored result.” I also warned that “Any state that allows late counting could see weird things like precincts voting 100% for Biden.”

Despite my fears, by midnight Eastern Time, I was ready to project that Donald Trump was the winner even though I conceded that he had likely lost Wisconsin and Arizona. I awarded him Pennsylvania, where he was ahead by 14 percentage points, and Michigan, where he had an 11-point lead. And I gave him Georgia, of course, not yet knowing about the votes that were stashed under tables or the corrupt bargain that Stacy Abrams had negotiated with the secretary of state.

The next morning I wrote a post where I assessed the dramatic swing that had occurred while most of America was sleeping. Seems that the vote counting had stopped in key states with Trump far ahead, but then miraculously switched direction when counting started again. All of a sudden it looked like Trump would lose. Still, I included this caveat: “The question of course is whether there is any fraud in the ballot counting. The whole thing will be headed to court, but Republicans don’t usually win in court.”

Truer words were never written. Except maybe these written later that same day:

“How can it be 24 hours later, and we still don’t know the final unofficial vote count from every state in the union? I know there are many different time zones, but are some of the states still in the 19th century? In what reality is it OK for Nevada to just stop counting its ballots with 75% done? … Don’t get me started on Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. There are lots of questions in all three states about the magical ability of Joe Biden to garner thousands of votes at the same time Trump gets none. We will see whether those votes hold up.”

Well, needless to say, they did hold up – in the official count – but that didn’t stop many of us from asking questions, raising hell, and demanding answers.

Two days after the election, I wrote a column for RealClearPolitics that called Nov. 3 “the Kafka Election” and began to list some of the irregularities being reported in five battleground states, and particularly in Detroit, Mich.; Philadelphia, Pa.; Atlanta, Ga.; Milwaukee, Wis.; and Las Vegas, Nev.

“The allegations,” I noted, “range from mysterious ballot drops that seem to show tens of thousands of votes for Joe Biden and zero votes for President Trump, inexplicable record turnouts in late-counting counties (all Democrat-dominated) that far surpass turnouts in counties in other states where the votes were counted on a timely basis; and of course the illegal banning of election observers in those very counties where the most outrageous anomalies are reported.”

As I also wrote at the time, “The judicial process allows a candidate to go to court to present evidence of fraud or violations of law in the casting or counting of ballots, but then what? … [I]f Republicans prove wrongdoing, what exactly is the solution? Remember, you can’t distinguish a legal vote from an illegal vote once they have been counted, so what can a judge do? What could the Supreme Court do?”

For the next two months, I posted repeatedly to my blog at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com about the legal fight to prove fraud in the election – and about the media’s stubborn refusal to look at the evidence. By the end of December, there was only one legal remedy left – stopping the certification of the electoral votes by Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. I therefore celebrated on Dec. 30 when Sen. Hawley announced he would object to the results in Pennsylvania and possibly in other states. That meant the case for election fraud would finally be put before the American people in a venue where the evidence could not be ignored or swept under the rug.

The following Monday, I ran a column at RealClearPolitics that lauded Hawley for answering “The Call of Conscience,” but adding a word of caution:

“Mind you, there is no reason to expect that the Jan. 6 session of Congress will result in certification of President Trump as the victor of the 2020 election. Despite the extensive evidence of fraud that has been amassed, this vote will be an exercise in raw political power, not an expression of blind justice. Probably the best that Trump supporters can hope for is a fair hearing before the American people regarding the reason why doubts exist as to the legitimacy of Biden’s apparent victory.”

Unfortunately, that fair hearing never happened. As everyone now knows, the invasion of the Capitol by overzealous protesters shut down the whole process. The case for fraud was never properly made because by the time Congress reconvened in the middle of the night, the nation’s attention had shifted to the dangerous assault that had occurred in broad daylight. National Guard troops were called up to protect the Capitol, razor-wire fences were erected, and the Democrats began their steady drum beat of rhetoric that blamed Trump for a coup and an insurrection.

Let’s get one thing straight. The riot that happened on Jan. 6 did not aid Trump’s cause.. It hurt the president more than anyone, and quickly led to him being impeached for the second time. As I wrotewhile the riot was still taking place:

“We don’t know who these people are yet, but President Trump is going to get the blame for this idiotic insurrection. If they are patriots, who do they think they are helping? Certainly not Trump! [But] when Democrats say Trump was attempting a coup, they will now point to this violence as proof of their claims.”

That was smart of me. Too smart. And when I look back at what I wrote from Nov. 3, 2020 to Jan. 6, 2021, and beyond, I am surprised there hasn’t already been a knock on my door, followed by the shout: “Come out from behind the First Amendment. Put your column down, stop writing, hands in the air, and follow us! You’re under arrest for plotting a coup.”

---

READ MY PRO-AMERICA BOOKS

Heartland Diary is solely operated by Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana. If you enjoy reading these daily essays, I hope you will SUBSCRIBE to www.HeartlandDiaryUSA.com by leaving your email address on the home page. Twitter and Facebook may ban me at any time. Also please consider purchasing one of my books. They are available through the following Amazon links. My new book is “What Matters Most: God, Country, Family and Friends” and is a collection of personal essays that transcend politics. My earlier books include “How We Got Here: The Left’s Assault on the Constitution,” “The Media Matrix: What if everything you know is fake?” and the “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy. Part 1 is subtitled “Bush’s Global Failure: Half Right.” Part 2 is “Obama’s Fundamental Transformation: Far Left.” Part 3 is “Trump’s American Vision: Just Right.” As an Amazon Associate, I may earn referral fees for qualifying purchases through links on my website.