Hello again, my readers. 久しぶりだ！

So, Iowa was a thing, and with the caucuses this year came a massive amount of foul play that people like me have an absolute joy for digging around in. The massive amount of media attention and record turnouts made many people question the results, and I felt like I owed it to myself to check around and see what was going on. So, while we wait for @LibertarianBlue to drop his investigative bombshell on Cruz, I thought you’d enjoy some of my insights as to how Iowa may have been the most underhanded, dirty caucus I have ever seen. (Not that I have much to complain about!)

Washington said that designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views, but he clearly didn’t factor in how entertaining that difference would be on Primetime CNN.

Marcosoft

“It’s not the votes that count, it’s who counts the votes.” -Josef Stalin

So, first and foremost is the scandal everyone’s been Tweeting about under the hashtag #MicrosoftRubioFraud, and before we actually look at the viability of such a scheme, I would like to remind the Washington Post and its ilk that condescendingly talking to angry voters as if they were petulant children is really not the best way to dispel suspicion. Perhaps the only reason I’m interested in the whole idea at all is because it’s extremely possible; Microsoft basically held the ballot box, they had quite a clear reason to siphon Trump votes off to Rubio due to their respective stances on H1B visas, and the GOP website did go down for about half the night, as opposed to its Democratic counterpart, which would provide ample cover for any sort of rigging before the totals were read off to the media.

But the big reason I’m inclined to believe that Microsoft didn’t rig anything is because there was any suspicion at all. Microsoft has enormous technical capital at its disposal, and there’s no need to take down the website to rig anything; just change a few Trump votes to Rubio ones before they go live. It would only take a few seconds at most. As Occam told us, never attribute to malice what incompetence may explain. Plus, if I was Microsoft and I was rigging an election, I would have every data center at full capacity so that the live site never suspiciously goes down. I take evidence of a failure as a sign that no one was trying too hard to cover anything up.

Crossing the Rubio-con

Goddamit, a little history knowledge is the root of some truly horrible puns.

But before we lay this Rubio thing to rest, I do have 2 concerns that indicate something fishy may have been going on.

Why did the site go down? — These were no momentary outages, we’re talking about the GOP system plain cutting out for 20 minute stretches for everyone. All alongside a Democratic map, arguably fielding more traffic as the Sanders-Clinton race remained close, not once going down.

— These were no momentary outages, we’re talking about the GOP system plain cutting out for 20 minute stretches for everyone. All alongside a Democratic map, arguably fielding more traffic as the Sanders-Clinton race remained close, not once going down. Where did Rubio’s magic 20% come from? — This is someone who was polling at around 10% before the caucuses. Even assuming the man lived in Iowa prior to the caucuses, it’s very suspicious that he would suddenly jump right to a perfect tie.

Did anything happen with Rubio and Microsoft? Probably not. The likelihood of a biased ballot reader intentionally misreporting votes is higher and probably happens all the time. And in any event, it’s pretty much impossible to do any further research into a locked down platform. But there are far more transparent things happening across the aisle.

Heads I Win, Tails No Recount

To those of you who feel like I’ve been unnecessarily harsh on Secretary Clinton, rejoice. Any potential scandal has been artfully removed by Senator Sanders handling a nail-biting race with the kind of sportsmanship I clearly don’t possess. (No, seriously, I am a sore loser.) But I digress. I promise that the Clinton section will be somewhat short, and you’ll have your Republican for the final course. There are basically 2 things I want to touch on, and neither one is particularly serious.

Oh, Snowden, you’re such a rip.

It’s amazing just how frequently some of us lose track of how to count, especially when a good outcome hinges on us getting the numbers, how do we say, creatively.

By God, I’ve figured it out! They’re indoctrinating us with Common Core so we can never properly caucus again! EVERYONE GRAB YOUR AR-15 AND RUN!

Basically, there’s not much to report here, other than perhaps the most angrily named CSPAN clip ever (maybe they’re doing clickbait now?) showing a caucus in Polk County apparently being rigged towards Clinton. I’ll save you the tedium and summarize it for you. A Clinton caucus captain simply adds to her total instead of doing a recount. You can watch it yourself, but it does seem to look like there was some foul play on someone’s part.

The other thing that perked my ears was the bizarre coincidence that, not only did 6 caucuses have exact ties, but that Clinton somehow won all 6 coin tosses. Futhermore, this extraordinary luck (we’re talking 1.5%) went uncontested. I’d investigate this more, but, like the Rubio issue, it’s basically impossible to see anything else without donning a tinfoil hat. And believe me, the stuff the last candidate in this article did makes this weird coincidence barely worth mentioning.

So, did Hillary cheat? Again, unlikely, unless Microsoft was somehow involved in rigging exact ties. Did certain caucus captains cheat? Absolutely, but I don’t really want to tar Clinton with that, especially after all the ugly ruckus I raised following the Deport Racism incident. I leave that in the hands of the Sanders campaign.

Cruz’in’ for a Brusin’

So you guys thought that stuff was bad? Oh, boy, my dear readers, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Get ready for something that’s just seriously fucked up.

I’m non-aligned in this race, of course, and I’m still struggling to pick a candidate, but I’ll go off the record here and say that on a personal level, Cruz creeps me out. Something about him makes me suspect he’s always planning something sinister. I don’t hate him like his ex-roommate does, but he definitely makes me feel uneasy. Which is why it gives me very little pause to tell you that he won Iowa by cheating and lying harder than his countrymen when they insist poutine isn’t just fancy cheese fries.

Please don’t ban me from flying into Canada, I’m literally addicted to this stuff.

Lying

Ted Cruz has already done some less than savory stuff in Iowa before the caucuses even began, the most notable being sending fake “voter violations” to Iowa voters, containing made up data to shame them into voting.

Holy crap, it’s like some weird stress dream involving failing a test, being stuck at the DMV and getting yelled at by Canadians.

Reaction was swift, including Facebook banter from Senator Rand Paul making fun of Cruz’s attendance and condemnation from Iowa’s Secretary of State.

If this election was based purely on bantz, Rand would have this thing in the bag, by the way.

“Today I was shown a piece of literature from the Cruz for President campaign that misrepresents the role of my office, and worse, misrepresents Iowa election law. Accusing citizens of Iowa of a ‘voting violation’ based on Iowa Caucus participation, or lack thereof, is false representation of an official act. There is no such thing as an election violation related to frequency of voting. Any insinuation or statement to the contrary is wrong and I believe it is not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa Caucuses.” -Secratary Pate

Furthermore, this is what the law of the state of Iowa has to say about doing that:

718.2 IMPERSONATING A PUBLIC OFFICIAL.

Any person who falsely claims to be or assumes to act as an

elected or appointed officer, magistrate, peace officer, or

person authorized to act on behalf of the state or any

subdivision thereof, having no authority to do so, commits an

aggravated misdemeanor.

So, depending on the permissiveness of Iowa law, Cruz could be in big trouble. But we’re not done yet, my friends.

For the sake of argument, let’s start at the hypothetical worst thing a candidate can do, say, telling everyone another guy dropped out to steal his votes, then, uh, let’s say, blaming the lie on another campaign. Obviously Cruz didn’t do that, but — oh, wait that’s exactly what he fucking did.

I’m gonna let the screenshots speak for themselves. The guy in the first one is Dan Gabriel, remember his name, I’m coming back to it.

“MOM! BEN JUST LEFT AND SAID I COULD HAVE HIS VOTES!” “Are you sure, dear?” “YES!”

If you’d rather have your lies in SMTP form (name withheld to protect source’s identity.)

Iowans are a friendly people, they may rather be lied to in person.

And of course, Iowa representative Steve King, being roundly called out by an angry Jeb supporter. (Or at least someone who’s watched a certain satirical pro-Trump series fixating on Jeb’s love of guacamole)

I seriously hope that Carson brings this up at Saturday’s debate. But beyond that, when caught, Gabriel did the honorable thing and blamed Trump.

Say what you will, the man can delete Tweets quickly.

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Gabriel’s Tweets are now protected after what I can only imagine were some truly hate-filled Tweets. I wonder if he’ll claim he was harassed off the platform? Liars need a safe space, too!

Battle of the Memes

But we’re not done yet! Remember Dan Gabriel from a few lines up? Turns out he has quite the storied history. By his own admission, he’s ex-CIA, and founded a company called, I shit you not, Applied Memetics.

My guess is that the original name of “the SOS Shitposting Brigade” was taken by angry imageboard users.

Despite its innocuous name, the company does far more than trade rare Pepes; it’s involved with large scale data harvesting and sentiment analysis, over radio, SMS, WhatsApp, and we can assume other channels like Twitter, as its LinkedIn page lists that it works with “dynamic engineering of social networks”.

Why do I bring this up? After all, candidates all use this kind of information now to further grassroots engagement. Well, I bring it up because I believe that Cruz is putting time and effort into covert operations on Twitter and Reddit and other forums for discussion to Astroturf public opinion. I bring it up because someone who uses the word “psyop” in Tweets, whose company has job openings far outclassing what a normal social media company would need, and who’s clearly willing to sabotage the campaigns of others scares the crap out of me, especially now that we see the lengths that politicians will go to to keep antiestablishment figures out of the way. And if you’re a supporter of these politicians, it should scare you too.

It’s my Globalism and I want it NAU!

OK, this one isn’t a scandal, just some fun digging, so you can go ahead and skip this section, if you just want the Iowa stuff.

Before I did research into this primary process, I decided to do a little research into Cruz prior to this election, and I was more than a little surprised by what I saw. Senator Cruz champions himself as a standard bearer of grassroots conservatism, a reputation already under ferocious attack from a certain billionaire, who savaged him on Twitter for failing to disclose massive loans from CitiBank and Goldman Sachs. As we can see, that’s not the end of it.

It’s fairly common knowledge that Cruz’s wife, Heidi Cruz, has held a job at JP Morgan in New York, and currently works at Goldman Sachs, provider of at least one undisclosed loan. However, she has also served on the Council of Foreign Relations, which the senator has called a “pernicious nest of snakes”.

I’m not here to provide an opinion on whether our borders should be open or closed. My opinion on the matter is unimportant, and likely not based on sound enough research. But there are fears among angry conservative voters that plans put forward by the CFR, calling for more immigration and economic interconnectivity, as well as the incorporation of non-citizens into US police forces. could lead to a hypothetical “North American Union”. And, while my opinion on globalism or protectionism doesn’t really matter here, the idea of a candidate this close to a hypothetical globalist future calling for a protectionist one on the campaign trail gives me deep seated doubts about his willingness to keep campaign promises.