The brazenness of the theft is astounding. Democrat election officials in Arizona and Florida, not finding the will of the people to their liking, are manufacturing a will of the people of their own. In Florida, they’re miraculously finding ballots — overwhelmingly votes for Democrats, of course — that were somehow inexplicably overlooked on election day. In Arizona, the Republican Party has accused Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes of “premeditated destruction of evidence” leading to “voting irregularities.”

The Democrats are determined to overturn the Republicans’ gain last Tuesday of two Senate seats, and are in the process of stealing those seats in plain sight.

The theft of elections, even defying court orders to stop while the whole world is watching, is a new low in American politics, and testifies to the Left’s overriding lust for power. The Democrats have never recovered their equilibrium after losing to Donald Trump in 2016, and now appear to be willing to stop at nothing — absolutely nothing — to neutralize Trump and regain their hegemony.

But there is more to this open theft than just that. The shamelessness and unapologetic audacity of this election fraud is no accident. The Democrats in Arizona and Florida and their allies in the establishment media piously intone that “all votes must be counted” as this fraud unfolds before our eyes, but they’re neither stupid nor naïve. It is much more likely that their very brazenness is not a bug, but a feature.

The Left is doing this out in the open to send a message:

There is nothing you can do. We will win. If we lose, we will cheat. We will lie. We will steal. And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that you can do about it.

If the Democrats pull this off, they will have shown conservatives — and the world — that nothing could stop them. The governor of Florida couldn’t stop them. The courts couldn’t stop them. President Trump himself, who has been commenting repeatedly on Twitter about the theft, couldn’t stop them.

The election fraud in Arizona and Florida is a continuation of the Kavanaugh hearings. Just as the outrageously false allegations of sexual assault and rape against Brett Kavanaugh did, the election fraud demonstrates that there is no low to which the Democrats will not stoop to gain and hold power. They will even affect a self-righteous mien of moral superiority while stooping.

The lesson that conservatives are meant to learn is not just that the Left will stop at nothing, but that the Left is unstoppable. Republicans and conservatives can vote for “drain the swamp” candidates all they want — but the swamp will not be drained, as those candidates will not take office even if they win.

The intention is to intimidate and demoralize conservatives, induce them to give up and get out of this dirty game. This is, in a word, terrorism. The Left has taken a page from the fourteen-year-old playbook of Islamic jihadists. In my book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, I detail numerous analogous incidents, in which Muslim rulers displayed gratuitous brutality against their captive non-Muslim populations solely to intimidate and demoralize them. To reinforce the lesson that resistance was futile.

In one such incident, Abd al-Rahman III, the Tenth Century Umayyad caliph of Córdoba, determined to make sure that his Christian subjects knew their place. The Eleventh Century Muslim historian Ibn Hayyan of Córdoba recounts that one of the officers of Abd al-Rahman III “chose the 100 most important barbarians” (that’s how the Muslim rulers referred to the Christians) and sent them to Córdoba, where Abd al-Rahman was headquartered. As Abd al-Rahman watched joyfully, “all the prisoners, one by one, were decapitated in his presence and under his eyes, in plain sight of the people, whose feelings against the infidels Allah alleviated, and they showered their blessings on the Caliph.”

While noting that the Muslim onlookers were happy at this spectacle, Ibn Hayyan doesn’t record the reaction of any Christians who may have witnessed this scene. It isn’t, however, difficult to imagine: amid their shock and horror came the realization that there was nothing they could do. It was useless to resist Abd al-Rahman. And for the most part, they didn’t.

The Democrats are not rounding up conservative leaders and executing them in the city square — however, the approval of mob violence from the likes of Hillary Clinton and Eric Holder is a sign that such a day might not be as far off as we would like to think. In the meantime, however, the effect is the same: we are meant to learn that they have carte blanche, that the democratic process is over, and that we might as well just submit to their will.

This is all the more reason why we must work harder to stop their thefts in Arizona and Florida, and to take all legal means to end their dishonest and underhanded practices once and for all.