What the NYT Cancel Culture Editorial Got Wrong, And What It Got Right //

The New York Times’ Editorial Board did not offer such a thoughtful conversation in its piece “America Has a Free Speech Problem,” which discusses oft-invoked “cancel culture.” It’s vexingly unserious.

Will this gambit work? Can you cut a deal to rid yourself of sanctions imposed because you started a war of aggression if you promise not to starve a few million people to death? Even when there is no guarantee those people still won’t starve if sanctions are removed? Never lose sight of the fact that Putin is a strategic genius in the same way that “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” He’s dealing with self-serving idiots incapable of resolve, so don’t count out the EU shouting “Leeeeeroy Jenkins,” and coming to Putin’s rescue.

We never told our supporters what had happened with Abbas. We never told our teammates. It took years before the two of us could even talk about it between ourselves.

We’d absorbed the unwritten rule in missions: Failure is unacceptable. I’d grown up immersed in missions culture, yet I couldn’t remember a single time that a missionary story, presentation, or newsletter ever included failure.

I know better now. But even today, missionaries are reluctant to share defeat, depression, or despair. Maybe there is too much at stake. Hundreds of people are donating thousands of dollars for you to do this work. Everyone craves numbers: numbers of converts, numbers of churches planted, and so on.

The “successful” missionaries always have lots of numbers. They fill their newsletters with compelling stories and photographs of large groups of believers. But nobody gives presentations about evangelistic events where no one showed up, or posts a picture of the local pastor who abused his daughter, or writes a newsletter about the exciting convert who just slowly disappears. //

Could we have done anything different with Abbas to prevent his falling away from faith? At the time, we were so consumed by our own hurt that we never helped him explore the root cause of the theft. Maybe we could have taught him to lean more heavily on grace—and reminded ourselves to do the same. Maybe we could have remembered that missionary stories in a broken world rarely end with a “happily ever after.” Until that day when all things are made new, life is always going to be messy.

True the Vote bought three trillion geo-location signals from cellphones that were near drop boxes and also near election nonprofits, from Oct. 1, 2020, through to the election on November 3. In Georgia the end date covered the Jan. 6, 2021, run-off.

…

For example, in the Atlanta-metro area they drew a line around 309 drop boxes and bought all the cellphone data of people that had been near those drop boxes and NGOs.

That narrowed the search to 2,000 mules.

Then they went looking for public surveillance camera footage of those drop boxes. In all they found 4 million minutes across the country.

The results are stunning. When a mule is matched with video, you can see the scheme come to life.

A car pulls up at a drop box after midnight. A man gets out, looks around surreptitiously, approaches the box, stuffs in a handful of ballots and hightails it out of there. Then he goes to the next box, again and again.

After Dec. 23, 2020, Phipps noticed mules in Georgia started wearing gloves. He pinpoints the change to an indictment for ballot stuffing handed up in Arizona on December 22. “The way the FBI nailed them was fingerprints.” After that, mules started wearing gloves.

The data pattern is unmistakable, as D’Souza shows a spider web of routes taken by various mules between NGOs and drop boxes.

For each of the 2,000 mules the average number of drop box visits was 38, with an average five ballots deposited per visit. That’s 380,000 suspect votes.