What makes a myth enduring? According to J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, the genuine power of fictional stories, especially fantastical ones, comes from the deep truths they tell — the more powerfully because they’re defamiliarized, disguised, and stripped of the cliches that might have encumbered them in the culture.

We see true human friendship all the more clearly when it’s two hairy-footed hobbits, Sam and Frodo, scrabbling up Mount Doom. If cliched depictions of Jesus have left us somewhat jaded, the image of Aslan offering himself for the hapless sinner Edmund makes the Redemption fresh for us again.

One myth that has stayed with me is the world built in the first two Terminator movies, which raise the urgent question of whether man can survive his machines. The idea grows more unsettling with each new hoop that AI can jump through, and with each headline about killer drones triumphing over mere mortals in battle.

The reason those two movies (though not their cash-grabbing sequels) worked so powerfully is that they were genuinely humane. They powerfully depicted romantic love, maternal self-sacrifice, and virtues such as courage — the really human, God-given goods that make our species worth saving in the first place. And all those things are threatened by implacable, relentless rogue tech “terminators,” controlled by a network of self-aware, unfeeling computers. They’re machines that serve The Machine (in these movies, it’s named “Skynet,” as in others it’s called “The Matrix”).

I had the honor this weekend of meeting David Clements, a former prosecutor and college professor, a patriot and Christian convert. I consider David the real world’s answer to The Terminator’s John Connor — that fearless soldier who led the human rebellions against The Machine.

Waking Up to the Threat of the Machines

Once a NeverTrump skeptic on the sidelines, Clements was awakened by the COVID panic to the inhuman threats we face when administrators at the university where he worked imposed draconian masking and vaccine mandates. They couldn’t justify these arbitrary measures, except by citing distant “authorities” who were silencing their critics. (Remember when YouTube deplatformed anyone who questioned the World Health Organization? When tens of thousands of people’s social media posts questioning the COVID party line were deleted and the users banned from the platforms?)

David K. Clements

So Clements refused, and was promptly fired, despite a long string of teaching awards. He went on to question the bizarre events of Election Night 2020, when we saw Donald Trump losing votes instead of gaining them in key swing states before the mysterious shutdown of counting, and the sudden surges of just enough votes to turn the results in Joe Biden’s favor. Clements didn’t buy it, and started speaking out.

Suddenly “ethics” complaints against Clements began flooding his local bar association — as they have against Rudolph Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, and countless other attorneys who dared to write scholarly opinions or file lawful challenges to the election.

When the stage-managed police riot of January 6, 2021, happened, Clements questioned the savage prosecution of nonviolent election integrity protestors. Soon he was silenced by almost every social media platform.

The Cold, Hard Truth Will Set You Free

Now effectively unemployed, Clements consulted with his family and with their agreement, devoted himself full-time to investigating and exposing corrupt election practices — especially software-based systems that make it easy to bias vote counts — and defending the victims of lawfare, especially the brutally targeted January 6 protestors.

The Stream’s editor-in-chief Karla Dial and I had the pleasure of speaking with David Clements over dinner earlier this week, where he shared his journey of faith from a lapsed Mormon upbringing to a fervent trust in Jesus. The next day I joined him for a talk he gave at a gathering of patriotic citizens through their local Republican club. He rose to explain to them the grim situation we face. I’ll try to unpack it as clearly as he did:

• Our elections are almost universally compromised by the use of software that is by its very nature vulnerable to manipulation, either from without or within. Just as AT&T can’t stop itself from getting hacked and exposing millions of users’ data, election systems can’t make themselves fraud-proof — even if they want to. And the stakes are vastly higher here than some greedy ransomware geeks in a basement in Crimea: control of the most powerful country in the world.
• Most Republicans, including the Republican National Committee, are blind to these threats to our elections. They embrace catastrophic ideas like early voting — which only gives the bad actors trying to steal our elections more information, sooner, about how many fake votes they need to produce to get the results they want. To illustrate this point, Clements shared this hilarious, factually accurate video by antiwoke filmmaker JP Sears:

• While the rank-and-file Republican establishment is blind to this, the party’s power brokers are complicit in it. In red states like Texas, they rely on The Machine to keep control over primaries, and prevent populist candidates from unseating stale, compromised RINOs.
• When voter fraud can’t prevail, they resort to lawfare, as we saw in the corrupt, baseless impeachment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
• Even most genuinely conservative, patriotic media are unwilling to address the core mechanism of The Machine — hack-friendly voting software, instead of old-fashioned hand-counting of paper ballots. Why? Because they don’t want to face punitive lawsuits like the ones Dominion Voting Systems filed against Tucker Carlson and Fox News simply for reporting on well-documented allegations by Sidney Powell and others. They don’t want to get boycotted and debanked, like the courageous Mike Lindell — one of the few stalwarts who has proven fearless in the face of unrelenting persecution.

Unplug the Machine

The only way to shut down The Machine is to cut off its control over how our votes are counted —and miscounted. If you want to save America, get hold of your local election officials as soon as possible. Lobby to have corruptible, black-box voting machines cut out of the loop.

For more information on this, watch Clements’s news and commentary show on FrankSpeech, follow him on Twitter, and sit down with your family to share his beautiful, heart-rending film about the election steal and the January 6 victims, Let My People Go.

The Machine is hunting Clements, though not with cyborgs (yet). Its machinery of destruction is our own laws, our own election officials, and most of all our apathy — our desperate wish to pretend that we still live in Ronald Reagan’s America, not a James Cameron movie.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.