Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! I’m home and enjoyed the indescribable pleasure of recovering from flu by sleeping in my own bed last night. Your author is back in the official C&C chair and ready to begin catching up on the news backlog. Your Tuesday roundup includes: federal prosecutors charge 28 California non-citizens in a voting sweep, and Attorney General Rob Bonta unveils the state’s official election-security doctrine, which fits neatly inside a five-gallon pail; the four logical fallacies Democrats use to make voter fraud vanish, including the one where the crime didn’t happen because no cop saw it; and the curious case of the missing congresswoman, plus a House chairman with some awkward questions about wine barrels.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
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Great news! Especially for anyone worried about the integrity of our sacred democratic process. The State of California wishes you to know that, despite a few bumps in the ballot, its elections are completely secure, perfectly pristine, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a dangerous conspiracy theorist who does not possess a master’s degree in Public Administration. Just ask Attorney General Rob Bonta (but don’t ask the FBI). Yesterday the South China Post reported, “US charges 28 in California sweep targeting alleged non-citizen voting.”
Yesterday, federal prosecutors announced charges against 28 more foreign nationals across California in an operation dubbed “Protect the Vote.” The suspects, all legal permanent residents (not citizens), were indicted for things like falsely swearing on naturalization documents and submitting fraudulent voter registrations.
Naturally, this caused immediate, high-grade panic among the credentialed classes who manage our nation’s narrative infrastructure. The corporate media instantly rushed out its boilerplate talking points, enthusiastically explaining that non-citizen voting is statistically non-existent.
Cue the arrival of California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta, who practically sprinted to the nearest microphone to assure humanity that ‘only’ 28 illegal voters in a state of 39 million people is —direct quote— “just a drop in the bucket numerically. It’s 0.0001% of all the registered voters.” This is a neat metaphor that could also describe Bonta’s functioning brainpower, but which has become the cornerstone of modern administrative wisdom. Call it the “Bucket Defense.”
The brilliant thing about the Bucket Defense is its unscientific but majestic versatility. If, by diligently not looking, officials discover zero instances of non-citizen voting, the experts confidently say, “See? It never happens! Stop asking questions, you paranoid peasants.”
You’ll recall the Bucket Defense from the jab days. Say we find a cluster of ten teens who all died on the same football team and it’s confirmed to be myocarditis from the shots. Progressives sneered and asked, Do you know how many people got the shots? Ten is just a DROP IN THE BUCKET.
I guess that was intended to be comforting to the twenty parents. It’s the same thing when another small local election in California flips by six votes in favor of the candidate who promised sanctuary laws and free stuff for illegal aliens, and then they arrest some illegals for fraudulent voting. Liberals quickly say: sure, it sucks for YOU, but it’s just a DROP IN THE BUCKET.
But when they actually assign investigators, conduct interviews, check paperwork, track down suspects, and scoop up nearly thirty people doing the exact thing the experts insisted was physically impossible, the experts just adjust their tortoiseshell glasses and declare, “See? It’s just a drop in the bucket! Why are you obsessing over buckets? Put the bucket down.”
Of course, the primary reason the fraud bucket appears so empty is that California election officials have spent the last decade wearing the bucket as a hat.
🔥 It is a proven scientific fact that you cannot see fraudulent ballots if a five-gallon galvanized pail covers your eye sockets. If someone wanders down to the Department of Motor Vehicles, hands over a foreign passport, and the state’s automated voter registration system quietly slips them onto the rolls like an overeager waiter pushing the bread pudding, then nobody checks. (The Golden State forbids local clerks from even asking for proof of citizenship.)
Then, when federal agents actually look at the rolls and pluck out dozens of illegal voters, Sacramento throws its hands up and cries, “Look at these extremists, throwing drops into our lovely bucket!”
I selected the South China Post to headline today’s post because, unlike most U.S. platforms, it included this commonsense explanation from Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter:
You cannot argue with McCotter’s logic, which is why nearly every U.S. corporate media platform led with Bonta’s dumb “bucket” comment and ignored the undeniable fact that small numbers of fraudulent votes do matter. Which is why Democrats lean away from facts and into logical fallacies.
Democrats and their media allies rely on four main fallacies. Let’s quickly review them.
🔥 First up is the mythical Rational Criminal. Here, the credentialed classes argue that non-citizens would never risk their immigration status, deportation, or a prison sentence just to cast a single ballot.
This is the classic “argument from incredulity” fallacy. It assumes that every human being on the planet operates according to a woke, mid-level bureaucrat’s cost-benefit analysis. They presume that if they wouldn’t trade a Green Card for a ballot, then no one would. For example, in one 2024 “Fact Check,” ABC News quoted Brennan Center attorney Sean Morales-Doyle saying it was “mind-boggling to think” someone would risk their freedom and presence in the country “to cast one ballot in one election.”
That presumes the illegal fully understands the potential consequences. But even within a rational, fully informed cost-benefit calculus, the severity of punishment is not the same thing as the person’s perceived likelihood of being caught.
Progressive experts conveniently ignore the fact that many non-citizens are not acting as calculated criminal masterminds; they are being constantly pressed by politicians, NGOs, activists, and automated government systems that they should register, that it is their “civic duty,” or that they are already ‘entitled’ to do so. But it isn’t always a heist. It’s often a bureaucratic ‘error’ cultivated by a system that prioritizes registration volume over eligibility verification.
The ‘errors’ keep happening, illegals keep getting registered when they get or renew driver’s licenses, and they —the illegals— are somehow expected to know that when the government hands them a receipt saying “Congratulations! You are now registered to vote!”, it actually means “do not vote.”
There are more than a few drops in the “erroneously registered” bucket. Here’s just one example from last month, headline from Reuters:
I’m not saying some illegal immigrants who can’t even speak English are nearly as dumb as Rob Bonta and don’t understand that being registered to vote by the government was the government’s mistake— for which they still remain responsible. Implying they aren’t smart or well-informed enough to understand would be mean.
I’m just saying that, in the glorious panoply of human existence, we each have more or fewer drops in our intellectual buckets, if you follow me. Some of us lack enough water to fully comprehend the ins and outs of federal law providing that voter registration is not the same as voter permission.
🔥 I call the second fallacy the Integrity Threshold. Rob Bonta’s “it’s rare” argument assumes that we should be okay with a certain “acceptable level” of corruption, like telling CVS it should just lock up the deodorant sticks because prosecuting shoplifting under $950 isn’t worth the cops’ effort.
But election law isn’t a retail pharmacy operating in the ‘hood. It is the absolute foundation of self-government. Once you concede that it is acceptable for non-citizens to vote —provided there aren’t too many of them— then you have destroyed the franchise’s foundations. You have turned the American citizen from a stakeholder with a unique, protected, Constitutional right into one additional statistical data point in an administrative database.
If the government’s response to a security breach is “don’t worry, only a few hackers got in,” that isn’t reassuring. It’s an admission that they aren’t trying very hard to keep the doors locked.
🔥 Third, the most condescending part of the “it’s rare” argument is the implication that voters are being paranoid for wanting an accurate count. This is the Systematic Denial of Agency fallacy.
Whenever the Trump Administration or independent watchdogs push for things like voter ID or citizenship verification, they aren’t just looking for “widespread“ fraud; they are trying to restore the sovereignty of the citizen. The elite classes hate this, because a sovereign citizen is much harder to manage than a passive, registered data point. If a citizen can’t be sure that their neighbor —who might have jumped the border yesterday— has the exact same say in the future of the republic as they do, the social contract begins dissolving.
The experts believe the numbers are small. But they also know that the precedent is huge. If they admit that the registration process is flawed, they have to fix it. And if they fix it, they lose the ability to keep the “bucket” of the electorate as large and porous as possible.
They don’t want a secure, accurate election. They want a “legitimate” one— which, in their lexicon, is just a synonym for an election that results in the people they like staying in power. If that requires a few thousand “drops” in the bucket to get the job done, well, they’ve already decided that the drops are nobody’s business but their own. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few buckets.
🔥 Fourth and finally is the ultimate Credentialed Class parlor trick. It is the Fallacy of the Proactive Audit, or, put simply, the “If the Police Aren’t There, Did the Crime Even Happen?” delusion.
The experts love to hold up the number of prosecutions as the gold standard for total fraud in the same way a burglar might argue he’s innocent because the police only managed to catch him that one time he tripped over the cat while carrying the plasma TV down the stairs.
This particular fallacy is wonderfully useful for people who prefer their elections a little murky. The logic goes like this: “We only have X number of prosecutions for voter fraud per year, therefore the level of fraud is X.” This is like saying that because there were only three arrests for speeding in a town of 50,000, nobody in that town ever drives over 25 miles per hour.
In reality, voter fraud is a “low-probability, high-consequence” crime. It is notoriously difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to investigate because it’s usually buried in piles of classified paper, and, more importantly, nobody is looking. If you put on the bucket and don’t audit the rolls, and you don’t cross-reference against immigration databases, and you don’t investigate the “clerical errors” at the DMV, your prosecution rate will always be near zero. The experts then point to that zero and say, “Look! A perfect, fraud-free system!”
This is not a system of electoral integrity; it’s a system of uninvestigated inconvenience.
The worst part of this fallacy is the claim that “limited resources” prevent us from investigating every ballot. The experts assure us, “We simply don’t have the manpower to cross-reference every registration against every immigration file.”
This is fascinating, given that the same government has the technical capability to track your location through your phone, monitor your bank transactions for suspicious activity, and send you a tax bill the nanosecond you forget to report a $50 Etsy hustle. They have the resources to find us when they want to. The fact that they can’t seem to find the resources to verify that the people voting are actually citizens is a choice.
It is a policy preference, not any real logistical limitation. The “Prosecution Fallacy” is just the “Bucket” argument with a bowtie.
They insist that we should measure the size of the storm by counting the number of people standing in the rain with umbrellas. The experts aren’t interested in measuring the storm; they’re interested in convincing us that the rain is actually just a pleasant, refreshing mist, and that if we get wet, it’s only because we weren’t standing under their very special, very secure, and very empty bucket.
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Where in the world is Ilhan “Carmen Sandiego” Omar? Over the weekend, the Congresswoman —currently running for re-election— apparently failed to show up at a Minnesota CAIR rally in her support.
CLIP: Bizarre Omar rally lacks a candidate (2:11).
As alert readers know, Ilhan Omar is under an active investigation, probably for immigration fraud. On Monday, supporters held a “Stand with Ilhan” rally at Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis, her home district.
Multiple outlets (AP, Star Tribune, FOX 9, CBS Minnesota, and others) reported that Omar did not attend. Instead, rally organizer Wintana Melekin read a message from her to the crowd. The message thanked supporters for showing up, calling her office, and posting on social media; said she and her family were okay and would not be silenced; and stated she would “be home soon to get out the vote.”
“Soon” is a relative term. She has not been seen in public in the eight days since her DC residence was raided.
Her husband was seen outside the couple’s D.C. home (e.g., walking the dog) and pushed back on reporters asking about rumors that she had left the country, did not confirm or deny any travel. He said only, “You guys are annoying the hell out of all the neighbors around here, man.”
Seizure of her passport should have restricted international travel, assuming she does not have a second Somalian passport. Omar has posted on X only three times since the raid, with the most recent being four days ago.
She’s not completely invisible. On Saturday, the UK Guardian reported that Omar’s attorneys sent the DOJ a letter demanding her property be returned. Headline: “Ilhan Omar’s attorneys say federal search of her home was ‘neither justified nor lawful.’”
According to various media reports, the DOJ has issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including of Omar’s relatives, and seized records, her passport, and her phone in its ongoing investigation. “There is no legitimate basis for any suggestion that she has violated any law concerning her citizenship status,” said her lawyer’s letter, which was leaked to the Associated Press.
Fueling speculation over the grounds for the investigation, this weekend on Fox, House Oversight Chair James Comer discussed Omar’s so-called ‘winery’ and said, “They were apparently selling investors barrels of wine to be aged, but there was nothing in the barrels.”
Whoops. If true, this raises a few pointed questions. Why would ‘investors’ buy empty wine barrels? Who were these investors, and why were they ‘investing’ in empty wine barrels? If the barrels were empty, why didn’t the investors complain? Were they paying for empty barrels on purpose?
Of course, on the other hand, we shouldn’t pre-judge anything. Empty might mean it was just a drop in the barrel.
Have a terrific Tuesday! Get back here tomorrow, when we’ll return to full C&C strength back at HQ, with a normal roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.
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I hope for the day when this happens in Michigan, and our potential governor / current secretary of State gets hauled before a grand jury to be asked: why do your voter roles have more 'voters' than people residing in Michigan who are of voting age?
Her usual response: I can't tell you because of privacy.
A single cell is private too.....
California’s corrupt elections are probably the reason Xavier Becerra hasn’t been seen on the campaign trail for governor and why he skipped debating Steve Hilton a second time. I’m sure the fraudulent votes to secure his victory are already in the can - or the bucket. 😡😡