You're conflating the woke with the DNC. There's nothing to the idea that e.g. the Biden administration is responsible for "the decline of discussion culture and free speech".
Woke capital is also backpeddling out of their own accord.
I am confused why so many people conflate pointless and toothless culture wars issues with the presidency. First of all, Kamala has never been woke. Second, letting Republicans into power will make "woke" stronger, since there is always a backlash to the incumbent party. Woke peaked under Trump, with MeToo and BLM riots. It has been losing relevancy under Biden because it is no longer countercultural.
Also, are Americans so spoiled now that this is what we are focused on? Do they think their democracy is 100% foolproof from a guy that tried to steal the last election? Who tried to destroy the department of education and the NIH? Do they think they are immune to the religious extremism talking over the government like what happened in Iran and Afghanistan, after Trump appointed Barrett to the Supreme Court? After a third of American women just lost the right to not be forced to give birth against their will? It is genuinely baffling to me that anyone would vote based on BS issues like DEI rather than things that affect real people. I really hate to say this because it is so over-used, but you are really sitting at the height of privilege and self-absorption if you think woke is the highest issue in the country. Woke people can maybe get you banned off a private social media platform. In some cases, maybe get you fired from a private company. There has never been a threat to the first amendment or any censorship from the govt under a Dem president. While on the right, Trump is literally talking about the media being the enemy of the people. He just sued CBS this week trying to punish the news for not taking his side! You know Trump has no morals and no respect for the Constitution. People that think like this make me want to rip my hair out.
<i>Second, letting Republicans into power will make "woke" stronger, since there is always a backlash to the incumbent party. Woke peaked under Trump, with MeToo and BLM riots. It has been losing relevancy under Biden because it is no longer countercultural.</i>
Wokeness, as we all know it, began under Obama, in part because of his actions and policies. And the idea that wokeness has been losing relevancy over the past few years is contrary to my personal experience.
<i>I really hate to say this because it is so over-used, but you are really sitting at the height of privilege and self-absorption if you think woke is the highest issue in the country.</i>
I think it's the other way around, actually. If you're poor, you rely more on having a good ambient culture, because you don't have the resources to insulate yourself from the effects of living in a bad one.
<i>Do they think they are immune to the religious extremism talking over the government like what happened in Iran and Afghanistan, after Trump appointed Barrett to the Supreme Court?</i>
1) Which policies of Obama's caused woke? As I understand, it happened over decades as a backlash to the severe oppression of certain groups throughout American history. The word "woke" started in the 1940s. The term "African-American" instead of black started in the 80s. The extreme feminist activism of the 2010s (Slutwalk, FreeTheNipple, etc.) is just another wave of the same brand of bra-burning activist stuff from the 1970s. The stuff coming out of Buzzfeed and Vox today is so unbelievably tame compared to the "woke" books back then. I believe that the social justice movement has been bubbling under for decades, but exploded in the Obama era because the internet first became accessible for teens. And I cannot argue with your personal experience, but I feel like woke reached its peak during Trump and has been dying down. The only "woke" stuff I see now is right wing grifters complaining online about the odd latina actress in a Disney movie. I don't believe there has been any new "woke" protests or movements? I would not count Gaza because it is a war, not a trivial issue.
2. Huh? How is a poor person harmed by woke? Why would they need resources to insulate themselves from it?
3. Everyone thinks a dictator is absurd until it happens in their country. It is weird how people are so mad about woke but not mad that SIX of the nine supreme court justices are Catholic, and use the court to impose their religion on the entire country. Isn't all the extreme religious stuff worse than some occasional, misguided attempts at equity that sometimes goes too far?
<i>I would not count Gaza because it is a war, not a trivial issue.</i>
No true Scotsman thinks Gaza is a woke issue.
<i>And I cannot argue with your personal experience, but I feel like woke reached its peak during Trump and has been dying down.</i>
Anti-white rhetoric is as normalised as ever, for one example.
<i>Huh? How is a poor person harmed by woke? Why would they need resources to insulate themselves from it??</i>
Letting criminals off because systemic racism is absolutely a policy that harms poor people.
<i>It is weird how people are so mad about woke but not mad that SIX of the nine supreme court justices are Catholic, and use the court to impose their religion on the entire country.</i>
Not as weird as people who can't see the difference between "States can decide what they want their abortion laws to be" and "The Taliban".
From ABC news: "Woke is defined by the DeSantis administration as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." Gaza is not just a systemic injustice. It is not about harmful language or representation or any of that. It is a literal war that has killed tens of thousands. It is fundamentally different from "woke" issues. Is that hard to see how protesting a war should be in a different category than using the right pronouns?
Where is this anti-white rhetoric? On Twitter? Be honest, does this actually affect your life if you don't go searching for it?
About the criminals, are you talking about Prop 47? What a fluke:
I don't know enough about California politics to know if Prop 47 was good or bad. But I live in a woke state with one of the lowest crime rates in the country. Why don't you blame conservatism for states like Alabama and Louisiana, which have way, way worse crime than California? Do you think Alabama has turned woke too?
It's also funny how you hate the woke agenda but are a-ok with the Catholic agenda imposing their religion onto everybody. Makes it hard to believe you actually care about the things you say you care about.
<i>Where is this anti-white rhetoric? On Twitter?</i>
Just read any mainstream media publication or academic journal, and count the number of times "white" is used in a negative sense vs. the number of times it's used in a neutral or positive sense.
<i>Be honest, does this actually affect your life if you don't go searching for it?</i>
Being constantly told that my race is responsible for all the bad things in the world does affect my life, yes.
<i>About the criminals, are you talking about Prop 47?</i>
No, I'm talking about the general woke reluctance to do anything about crime, because that would disproportionately involve locking up underprivileged people, and therefore be racist.
<i>It's also funny how you hate the woke agenda but are a-ok with the Catholic agenda imposing their religion onto everybody.</i>
Be specific. What tenet of Catholic belief has the Supreme Court imposed, and how?
The treatment of Gaza in the years leading up to 10/7/23, is very much considered a "systemic injustice" by the woke left (among others). 10/7, and the ongoing violence by Hamas and Hezbollah, are considered by these people to be side an act of heroic resistance to systemic injustice (see e.g. BLM or Antifa). Israel's assaults, are considered to be brutal genocidal violence meant to perpetuate systemic injustice.
To the woke, Gaza is absolutely a woke issue. I don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that it has distracted so many of them from their other issues.
It's not certain Trump is going to be the next Chavez. I frankly don't expect a Democrat-counterreaction feedback loop--I just expect the acceptable level of corruption to rise to the point where we look more like Argentina or Brazil and less like Canada than we do now. But the risk is high enough I'm concerned, because it could cause significant negative effects to the country downstream over the next few decades. Further than that, I have no predictive ability whatsoever.
With Kamala in charge, if woke makes a comeback, I'll just come out as bi.
I can and have politically maneuvered against a too-woke office and can tune out a DEI session if it makes no sense. I make my worth very apparent in a workplace. Things move downstream from there. I'm fine. I make $155k a year. So is Elon, he's worth over 100 billion.
I can't maneuver against or tune out a true autocrat like Orban, Putin or Chavez. Most people who live in the democratic West can't even comprehend what that is like. Venezuela is ruined, and Russia is a social trainwreck that sent hundreds of thousands of young men to die as cannon fodder.
Things might be fine if Trump becomes president. Don't come back to me if he gets elected and it is in 2029. But the small but real risk things might not be fine is a small risk of catastrophe. A freedom X-risk if you will. The US, with all it's power and might, has always had a check on the president and an easy way to remove the governing party on a national level.
Left vs right in the US is like that coughing baby vs nuclear bomb meme to me.
In principle I’d be willing to bet a hundred bucks. In practice, I don’t know how one would operationalize a bet on a 4 year timeframe between two pseudonymous internet strangers.
$100? At 90% confidence? It's basically free money! At an even bet, your expected value is 80% of what you are betting! You should bet half your savings or something!
...you should, if you seriously believed what your were saying, that is.
Martha Stewart went to prison,. Jeff Skilling went to prison. Martin Shkreli went to prison. Samuel Bankman-Fried went to prison. Just off the top of my head. I'm not sure all four of those were literal billionaires, but they were certainly in the 1% of the 1%, and they went to prison.
Yes, it's newsworthy when a billionaire goes to prison. It's newsworthy when a billionaire does pretty much anything. But being very very rich, does not endow people with get-out-of-jail-free cards, or anything remotely close to that. It does mean that prosecutors have to bring their A game, and they may not bother if that means giving up five easy convictions of ordinary criminals. But rich + controversial + widely hated, yeah, if there's provable fraud and if it won't get them in trouble with their bosses, it can happen.
Or not, because often billionaires don't commit serious crimes. One thing money is good for, is hiring lawyers who can advise you on how to accomplish your goals legally, and where the line is. That, plus a legal team that can fight against bogus prosecutions based on false accusation, is a pretty good way to be confident you're not going to go to prison. But it only works if you listen to your lawyers, and this is Elon Musk we're talking about.
I wouldn't go to 9:1 odds on Musk without a specifically alleged crime for him to go to prison for. And I wouldn't expect him to actually be incarcerated in four years, because see e.g. the criminal cases against Donald Trump. But if Harris is elected, he is I think at significant risk.
It's true that famous people are more at risk than non-famous rich people so that prosecutors can make a name for themselves, so I cheated a little bit by pointing out that the prison population is 0.01% from the top 10 percentile, but I figured it was worth pointing out. And with Elon's gazillions I think he's as insulated as your average fellow with just 30 mil to rely on.
The fact that America's economic-legal system matches that of Sodom and Gomorra ought to be brought up every once in a while.
I had hoped that the Democrats would lay off that a bit to distinguish themselves from Trump who would absolutely arrest rich and powerful people on trumped-up charges (sorry that pun is so bad it wasn't meant to be a pun). What's with Vote Harris, get someone who respects the law?
(Though somehow Hilary Clinton stayed out of jail during Trump 1.0, so maybe presidents can't do everything they want.)
This seems like a weak bet because Elon Musk has a very long track record of breaking actual laws and getting into trouble over it. Nothing jail-worthy yet I'd say of course, but the idea that he would step over the line and get a ~6 month sentence seems perfectly possible, particularly in the world where his Trump Gambit failed.
So bet wise I don't think you can really get around that. I ofc would take 95% odds that the Harris administration will not invent charges to jail a political opponent because that is something the Dems don't do, but then you have to decide "is he actually guilty" for the bet - not a good resolution criteria!
(I guess you could just roll "odds Elon Musk will commit an actual crime" into the bet, seems rough though)
The beauty of `3 felonies a day' is that almost everyone is `actually guilty' of an `actual crime.' So you don't need to invent charges, all you need to do (once you've decided that you want to put X in jail) is to figure out which actual (but seldom prosecuted) crime X is guilty of.
So yeah, I'm not predicting that the Harris administration will invent charges either. I'm just predicting that if Harris ends up in the white house, then Musk will be convicted of an actual crime, for which he is actually guilty, but for which there is a ~0% chance he would have been actually prosecuted if he didn't have a political target on his back.
But the "3 felonies a day" thing just isn't true? Like it is a combination of "completely made up" and conflating wildly different things. You could probably find a fine for a improperly filed permit application on most people's backlog, sure, but you absolutely could not find a jailable offense on 95% of people. The bar for criminal offenses is actually very high!
Which you can know because if the majority of politicians had such a record, *their enemies would be jailing them over it!* That hasn't happened to Harris or Romney because they haven't committed crimes. It is happening to Trump because he *has* committed crimes. And Musk has previously committed way-more-than-average levels of "big fines" that have had explicit warnings that repeat offenses could result in criminal prosecution. Bayesian odds made this pretty easy.
This goes back to your question from last open thread about what Trump can actually do — a Presidency is an incredibly contingent thing. You run on one agenda and then in office spend most of your time and energy dealing with the crises of the moment and they either defeat you or empower you. It’s like trying to create a weather report for October 31, 2025.
>"why should we vaccinate against measles when measles is so rare?"
Trump saying he'd put the anti-vaxxer RFK in charge of "health" was just the most recent outrageous thing he's said. By this point I've lost track. There are many things I'd like to change about the Democrats, but a second Trump presidency would be a mistake for America.
"Vaccines are good" is like "plastic is recycleable". Not all plastic is recycleable, and historically some vaccines have hurt people, or not been very effective. Blindly trusting everything labeled a vaccine because you "believe in science" is... not good actually.
Why must one be antivax or non-antivax? I'm against COVID vaccines, but for "real" vaccines, defined (by me) as vaccines that work for longer than a year.
Antivaxxers that are against vaccines on general principles that don't have a better alternative for fighting diseases have a poor position.
I object to your "nonsense" classification, as my point stands that COVID mutates too fast for vaccine strategy to work well, as mRNA viruses do. Get vaccinated against the common cold; it's certainly possible to develop one, and also certainly not worth the effort, useful though a workable one would be. The point stands that one can be in favor of some vaccines and against others.
What does it mean for a vaccine to “work for longer than a year”? Covid vaccines seem to (in that they reduce infection rates even in people who haven’t been vaccinated in a year) though like many other vaccines, they do lose some effectiveness, and like some other viruses, covid mutates quickly.
Do they not know how long a vaccine "works" by detecting antibodies, or some such combination, against the disease for which the vaccine was developed? I have every confidence a COVID vaccine would work...until COVID mutates again. In that case, you would still have antibodies that are effective against the original strain, but less so against current (and future) ones.
It's hard to tell whether, as you suggest, the vaccine reduces infection rates past, say, three months. You would need a control group, and need to be careful of lots of biases in both the test and control groups.
I got COVID in April of 2021, and again in April of 2022. I did not get any vaccines, as I considered myself to be "naturally vaccinated". What would the artificial vaccine do that the actual disease didn't do? Both involve exposure to proteins to train your immune system.
Yeah it’s very hard to test effectiveness in real-world contexts, given how many confounders there are once vaccines are available and different types of people are choosing whether and when to get them.
There are ways to test blood for the presence of antibodies. My understanding is that most vaccines and infections produce an initial burst of antibodies that gradually fades - but there are some differences (e.g., syphilis antibodies never fade to zero, but many other infections do). And perhaps more importantly, a lot of the protection is provided not by antibodies that are constantly detectable, but by memory cells (B cells?) that can re-emerge when they detect the thing they are remembering.
I think when you get an infection, your body tries to train on everything present at the time of the infection, which includes various proteins on various parts of the virus, and possibly some things not associated with the virus. When you get the COVID vaccines, you only get the spike proteins, so your body especially focuses on learning that. Since the spike protein is the part that is on the outside, it might be more relevant for protection against initial infection, but I don’t know what they’ve actually found about that.
All viruses are constantly mutating, but if the mutation hasn’t changed it too much, then a lot of the antibodies against the old one will still work equally effectively, or perhaps slightly less effectively. Some viruses have more mutation in some parts than others.
Kurzgesagt has had a really interesting series of videos about the immune system (starting several years pre-pandemic), which is much weirder and more complex than we often think. I sometimes wonder if there might even be a second consciousness in our bodies, run by the immune system, which is as complex as the nervous system, but quite separate from it.
There is no point of no return for almost anything. Still, what happens during any cycle matters. Even if we will eventually get to a good place, it’s better if there is less suffering along the way.
> If antivaxers win, disease noticeably goes up... then support for vaccines comes back and antivaxers lose support?
Not necessarily. The first thing the antivaxers would say is that the diseases are actually a result of vaccination, therefore we should have even less of it.
Michelle Obama pushed for healthier school lunches. RFK Jr. pushes for not vaccinating people and bringing back the eras where generations were decimated by (now-preventable) diseases, in addition to at least a dozen other inane and insane ideas. Trying to improve Americans' health is good, but RFK Jr. would do the polar opposite.
This is a blog dedicated to ideas of rationality and RFK Jr. is an excellent example of anti-rationality and anti-intellectualism.
If the country stopped judging politicians on their stated goals, and started judging them based on results produced by their policies, we'd never see another Democrat elected for the next 20 years.
Could not agree more. It would be awesome to put together a dashboard of different metrics to view correlations as different policies are adopted.
A bit like a success rate graph at SaaS companies (products like data dog or grafana). You see when the code changed and look for errors or bad performance as a potential result.
Desired result: stabilize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
Achieved result: When war broke out between Israel and various Iranian groups, not only did Israel's Arab neighbors, for the first time ever, decline to pile on, they actively came to Israel's defense.
Remain In Mexico policy.
Desired result: Decrease illegal immigraiton.
Achieved result: Net negative illegal immigration. (More illegals leaving the country — often voluntarily! — than entering.)
If you want to understand why people support Trump look at cases like the above. Despite his many, obvious flaws, he got good results. He got *astoundingly* good results.
And Republican emphasis on lower deficits? Trump's promises to restore coal & manufacturing?
Saying a politician got some results they like risks cherry-picking. Do I give Obama credit for the post-recession recovery and expanding healthcare coverage?
I'm afraid Trump's idea was worse than injecting disinfectant - he wanted to get the covid in their lungs not their blood stream. The idea he proposed in that press conference was to fill their lungs with disinfectant. Since doing this with just water is fatal I'm glad he accepted his advisors' recommendations against this one.
Many Thanks! Ye gods, I hadn't known he suggested _that_. ( Were there two press conferences involved? One that I watched included Trump saying "injected" and "disinfectant" in a suggestion of his. In the same press conference, he was also suggesting using UV... I have no idea how he was thinking of administering _that_ to the inside of someone's lungs... )
Many Thanks! If he somehow turned recommendations for external use of disinfectants into suggesting looking into injecting them, that is pretty severe garbling. Most people learn, prior to adulthood, that disinfectants are for _external_ use. Now, Harris is bad enough ( speech censorship proposal, illegal immigration spike, Woke in general ) that Trump may be the lesser evil, but I'd prefer a GOP candidate with better common sense.
Yes, of course it does Kenny, because the people responsible for America’s bad health and nutrition are meanie assholes, and so are the people responsible
Not sure. Vaccine policy is a footnote for rfk jr at this point.
Ending the revolving door between pharmaceutical companies and the FDA seems much more promising to me. Ending advertisements for pharma seems like a good idea too.
Ending pharmaceutical advertisements sounds like a good idea. Has someone proposed that law? (Would an executive like RFK be able to unilaterally impose it without a congressional law?)
Perhaps more importantly, would the current Supreme Court (which has the most expansive view of the first amendment of any court to date) actually allow such a restriction? I know that traditionally commercial speech is held to an intermediate scrutiny standard (instead of strict), but A) the legal reasoning for that distinction is kinda weak and B) even if they maintain intermediate scrutiny as the test, it's a notoriously flexible test to judge prejudices. The common saying on standards of scrutiny is:
That sounds plausible. As far as I know, the restriction on tobacco advertising is entirely the result of a voluntary legal settlement that avoided even larger financial penalties, rather than an actual law.
Can you not take a look at the man and ask yourself, "could he, just maybe, have a good grasp on what being healthy looks like"? And just maybe, with his legal and environmental background he might be a good fit?
Or do you, like many Americans, take health advice from obese people who aren't required to take nutrition classes (44% of doctors are overweight according to Google)?
Why are 44% of physicians overweight?! At this point I don't care about the vaccine element of Bobby's policy, I care that he cares about figuring out the root causes of our chronic disease epidemic.
Which theories specifically are you referring to? Top 1 or 2 worst offenders would be adequate in my opinion.
I'll do the same but highlight one I happen to agree with him on: the FDA is overwhelmingly run by the pharmaceutical industry which has outsized influence due to the revolving door.
I'll lean on Scott Gottlieb and Stephen Hahn as example cases. The best rebuttle being that the idiot who put them in charge is the same idiot I'm advocating for.
I actually don't think being in good shape is all that good a proxy for being able to make sensible policies wrt drug safety, recommended vaccine schedules, and the like.
It shouldn't be the sole qualification, but it is a factor in my opinion.
Unhealthy, overweight people have the position RFK is vying for. Excellent personal health should be the *minimum standard* to be considered for the position.
I too heard Trump say RFK would be out in charge of health!! Completely insane.
Joe Rogan, who interviewed Trump, is entertaining and intelligent but he's not educated deeply on things like vaccines about which he has strong opinions! He and Trump seemed to share opinions about many things.
He’s not antivax. This is another liberal media hoax
If you listen to what RFK actually says, instead of what they report about him, you’d quickly realise this. Look, he has expressed some skepticism about the intensity of the current childhood vaccine schedule and whether that could be related to the dramatic rise in chronic disease among children. Maybe studies will prove that he’s wrong to be skeptical, but the point is that you’re allowed to ask these questions when trying to understand the root causes of the decline in health and the rise in chronic disease, mental illness and obesity over the past decades.
Most of his actual policies are about taking on the powerful lobbying companies who (for example) allow pesticides to be present in the American food supply at levels that are banned in Europe. Or the influence of Big Pharma over medical education.
Make America Healthy Again shouldn’t be controversial.
Besides the fact that Tulsi Gabbard is in a cult and is a grifter, RFK Jr. is insane and Vance support Curtis Yarvin, if there was a billionaire supporting Kamala Harris who would get a spot in her cabinet if she won I'm sure you would be very happy too lmao. Elon Musk might be a successful CEO but he obviously has no place trimming down the government, especially because he would obviously benefit himself
That's... not a very charitable article. First off, I note it tries to imply/claim the Thiel (a libertarian) and Yarvin (an authoritarian monarchist) are aligned (citing a proposition that you could also get the Constitutional Convention to agree with!), and then only details Yarvin's views otherwise. That's a blatant smear vs Thiel.
Next, he does the exact same thing with Vance; Vance claimed that Trump needed to fire the entire federal government (and indeed, cited Yarvin as to why that extreme measure was justified.) But then he drops Vance/Trump entirely, and describes Yarvin's preferred replacement for the bureaucracy (authoritarian monarchy), implying that this was also Vance's goal... while ignoring that it's entirely in opposition to everything Trump and Vance have said about their goals for a WEAKER administrative state.
I do, sincerely, appreciate you replying with a source, but I find that source really unpersuasive of the claim it's trying to make, and generally pretty scuzzy.
>Make America Healthy Again shouldn’t be controversial.
"The *slogan* for my policy sounds uncontroversial, therefore the actual policy shouldn't be controversial either, right?"
If someone advertised defunding the police as "Make America Safe Again," I expect you'd find that controversial even though the slogan sounds reasonable. That's how I feel about RFK saying "Make America Healthy Again."
RFK also said Trump was a grave threat to democracy before changing his tune and endorsing him for President. Posting a politician's own propaganda tweet when they have a history of going against what they've publicly said and they've issued far more irresponsible sayings on the specific subject is hilariously epistemically irresponsible.
>In July, Kennedy said in a podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told FOX News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.
He said the Democrats were a worse threat to democracy, on CNN. This was all prior to endorsing Trump and it was based on them systemically shutting him out of the primaries and giving him zero media coverage and attacking his campaign via lawfare. Why do you think he changed his tune?
Nah, what’s “hilariously epistemically irresponsible” is posting left wing propaganda on a politician and insisting it better represents their views than actual things that they say.
I’m sure all of your scare quotes are correct, he did say these things at some point, but so what? You’re allowed to express skepticism about the intensity of the vaccine schedule for children, you’re allowed to wonder if it might be linked to the rise in chronic disease such as autism, as long as you acknowledge that you might be wrong and more study is needed.
That’s RFK Jr’s position. It’s pretty reasonable, and maybe you need to think why these mainstream media outlets keep selectively quoting him and misrepresenting him. What else are they doing that with?
I've seen RFkj speaking to both friendly and adversarial audiences. Generally, when I see him speaking to adversarial audiences, he's saying the kind of thing Turtle is talking about and I think, "Yeah, that's a great description of some of the problems with the system I also see. This guy is smart and understands what he's talking about!" When he's speaking to friendly audiences he starts going off on how vaccines cause autism and nobody in their right mind should give one to their children, and I think, "Why did I ever think this guy was anything but an ideologue, again?"
What do I expect from an RFKj-influenced NIH/CDC/etc.? He'd be walking into an adversarial environment, so I would expect him to do things like preside over updating the vaccine schedule* to something more rational, or allow legal action against vaccine manufacturers who hide adverse effects or otherwise try to cheat the system, or implement more stringent testing of adverse effects of pesticides and fertilizers. I don't see him able to do something like banning vaccines, or getting the CDC to declare that they cause autism or anything like that.
In general, I don't expect a big change, since moving the US government system is generally a slow-run thing. I expect a few 'big splash' ideas to punch through, but probably nothing of dramatic consequence. As with any politician, some good, some bad, but nothing dramatic.
So it's a wash? Maybe not. Focusing on improving the public health agencies could significantly improve trust in US heath-related government agencies, which is NEEDED after the last few years. Trust is earned. After COVID, trust was lost for a reason. That needs to be built back up, or it doesn't matter what your vaccine policy is, people won't listen to it. As someone who thinks vaccines are a huge good and who recommends them way more than RFKj would be comfortable with, I suspect RFKj could actually increase uptake in the long run (or at least preside over a decrease in the fall in vaccinations).
*"Like what changes, exactly?" Nearly everyone I know who's anti-vax cites early neonatal vaccination as the thing first piqued their skepticism. In other words: Hep B. But why give any neonatal vaccines, since kids don't develop T-cells for 6-12 months, and maternal antibodies are protective? First, childhood vaccinations don't usually provide much in circulating protective antibodies and most adults don't get boosters. (We should really focus on getting updated vaccinations for WOCBP, but whatever.) Meanwhile, there's some evidence that early neonatal doses of hep B can prevent maternal transmission of hep B (but it's not a 100% thing, and really you should be giving them hep B IG if the baby is in danger of contracting hepatitis from their mother - something we only do if we test mom and discover an active infection).
What's the potential benefit to universal hep B vaccination? Okay, there are approximately 5.8 cases of hep B per 100,000 people in the US. Assuming that rate for pregnant women, of the 3.6 million babies born every year around 209 should have mothers with hep B, of which maybe a hundred might go on to contract it (transmission rate varies based on mother's hep B titers).
Now, I don't know how many mothers are refusing all vaccinations because of the hep B vaccine, but I have personally met at least a dozen and I don't go around asking, so I'm going to say that number is probably pretty big. Large enough to bring equipoise into the discussion: is it overall beneficial to have a policy that might help a hundred kids in exchange for putting millions more at risk?
And more importantly, could there be a BETTER policy that still protects that 100 kids, while improving trust in recommendations by health authorities? For example, by testing women for hepatitis B ahead of time, then only recommending the vaccine if they test positive (at which point we'd also give the hep B IG and monitor infection).
"But the vaccine isn't harmful! We don't have any evidence demonstrating adverse effects of the hepatitis vaccine, so why not just give it to everyone?" Um ... the vaccine *recommendation* appears to be harmful in that it leads to vaccine skepticism, even if the vaccine itself isn't directly harmful. It's not even a choice between fewer kids dying of hep B over more kids dying of not getting MMR/DTaP/etc. We can improve this system, and while RFKj isn't a perfect vessel for doing that, it's certainly better than screaming "trust the science!" while more and more people stop trusting good medical evidence.
I just want to re-iterate a key point about RFK Jr, because the vaccine stuff is controversial and tends to suck all the oxygen out of the room.
The reason why I support him has nothing to do with his opinions on vaccines, and everything to do with him promising to take on Big Pharma, Big Ag and the profit motive in corporate medicine.
He says stuff that many doctors have known for a long time about how the system cares more about profits for the few than health for the many.
He talks about the prevention of chronic disease for pennies, rather than treating it for millions.
He talks about really looking into the causes of why our health has worsened so much in past decades. What’s going on? These are questions that the establishment has not thought to ask - or rather, prefers not to think about because it might threaten their campaign contributions from the big players in “healthcare.”
I’m really excited about RFK Jr in the administration.
I'm uncertain about his short term efficacy, but encouraged that health policy (and not just health insurance or costs) is becoming a national issue. If this is what it takes to get us there, hopefully we see both parties take an interest in the next election. If so, the long run effect will dramatically outstrip whatever he can do in an administration.
Personally I have no qualms with them all being approved, I'd just like to remove the liability shield. The government should not be in the business of protecting drug lords from the people. Bad drugs should not be protected. That isn't how free markets are supposed to work.
So I got curious and checked out the guy's campaign website which spends an entirety of 180 words on his healthcare plans (always the sign of a deep thinker). It vaguely suggests banning some food additives, banning (or taxing or whatever, unspecified) ultra-processed food, and ban toxic chemicals "from our air, water, and soil". I.e., regulation, regulation, and more regulation. Great fit for the Trump/GOP agenda of deregulation and kneecapping agencies like the EPA.
One can debate whether the current US regulations strike the right balance between caution and growth, but a pretty clear and consistent pattern is Democratic governments erring more on the side of caution and Republican governments erring more on the side of growth, and everything Trump did before as a president and says now as a presidential candidate fits into that pattern. Health advocates putting their faith in Trump are tied in level of idiocy with the muslims who think Trump is going to stop the war in Palestine.
I think that's an absolutely horrible idea. The dose makes the poison, and there are very few things that aren't toxic at some level. Oxygen, for example, is literally toxic, and I would be amused to see someone banning oxygen from the air in our schools, because Think Of The Children!
*Placing reasonable limits* on toxic chemicals, is a good idea. But you need to establish the limits you're talking about, so the rest of us can decide whether they are reasonable. If your proposal is being described as "banning toxic chemicals", the smart money is on the proposed limits being very unreasonable.
I understand your point now. But it seems to rest on the idea that banning toxic chemicals can’t reasonably be interpreted as banning toxic levels of chemicals.
He is not an anti-vaxxer afaik and I have researched his statements for myself. He thinks too many untested vaccines are in use, and that vaccines are used on the very young in excessive amounts. The dose of vaccines given to US children is actually considered quite excessive in much of the rest of the world.
I think the analysis of who is more evil (Trump) is spot on. That said i think I’m still going Trump because his brand of authoritarianism is hated by the media and a majority of the public. Also his brain is jelly and Ivanka and Jared will be running the show and they are standard chamber of commerce neoliberals which is why Trump didn’t do anything authoritarian last time.
See how little power he has when he moves against popular will - ie republicans have been on the back foot on abortion since Dobbs because abortion is deeply popular and when a ban will be enforced, suddenly a lot of republicans decide to be pro choice. Trump will lose congress in the midterm if he tried and it will be gridlock before that.
If Harris wins, the media and most power centers will back her bid for authoritarianism and things start getting bad real fast.
That’s generally true but Roberts hates Trump, and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch don’t like him either. They won’t bend the law to help him, the immunity decision was restrained in scope - they remanded it to the trial courts to develop facts and explained what kind of acts would and wouldn’t be immune based on the nature of the constitutional power he was exercising. If they wanted to protect him they would have just granted him absolute immunity and spared him from years of litigation.
Roberts also thinks Alito and ACB are hacks - if you read his concurrence in Dobbs it’s him calling them idiots for repealing Casey v PP when they could just boil the frog slowly and roll back abortion window as fetuses become medically viable sooner.
So this court will go right in culture war issues, checking Harris more than Trump, but they also won’t carry any water for Trump personally - even if you’re cynical, Roberts, Gorsucch, Kavanaugh all want to keep getting sweet speaking gigs and teaching boondoggles from moderate never Trump conservatives
"they could just boil the frog slowly and roll back abortion window as fetuses become medically viable sooner"
Yes, and there would still be the clamour for exceptions and heart-rending cases of "rape, incest, threat to life of mother" as to why there should be legal ability to carry out an abortion at twenty weeks even though that's the new viability limit.
'Late-term' (or however you want to define them, the matter is of course controversial) abortions are rare, but do happen:
The inherent limits of medical knowledge and the infeasibility of ensuring early pregnancy recognition in all cases illustrate the impossibility of eliminating the need for third‐trimester abortion. The similarities between respondents' experiences and that of people seeking abortion at other gestations, particularly regarding the impact of barriers to abortion, point to the value of a social conceptualization of need for abortion that eschews a trimester or gestation‐based framework and instead conceptualizes abortion as an option throughout pregnancy."
Another paper thinks "viability" is useless as a legal definition:
"In this paper, I explore how viability, meaning the ability of the fetus to survive post-delivery, features in the law regulating abortion provision in England and Wales and the USA. I demonstrate that viability is formalized differently in the criminal law in England and Wales and the USA, such that it is quantified and defined differently. I consider how the law might be applied to the examples of artificial womb technology and anencephalic fetuses. I conclude that there is incoherence in the meaning of viability and argue that it is thus a conceptually illegitimate basis on which to ground abortion regulation. This is both because of the fluidity of the concept and because how it has been thus far understood in the law is unsupported by medical realities. Furthermore, it has the effect of heavily diluting pregnant people’s rights with overly moralistic limitations on access to healthcare."
You may think your proposal will boil the frog, but there are plenty of people waiting to scoop the frog out of the pot on the plea of necessity.
Including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists:
"Viability is just one factor that patients and health care professionals use when considering whether to proceed with or end a pregnancy, and gestational age is only one factor considered when estimating viability. Legislative bans on abortion care often overlook unique patient needs, medical evidence, individual facts in a given case, and the inherent uncertainty of outcomes in favor of defining viability solely by gestational ages. Therefore, ACOG strongly opposes policy makers defining viability or using viability as a basis to limit access to evidence-based care."
I think you're trusting the exact guardrails that authoritarianism tries to subvert. I agree that the guardrails will probably hold this time, but I think attacking them does a little bit of long-term damage each time.
And I think it's pretty hilarious to accuse the GOP of being more in violation of "brightline norms" when close to half of democrats favour internment camps for anti-vaxxers and the BLM/Antifa riots were orders of magnitude worse than Jan 6 along every measurable dimension, along with the minor detail of trying to storm the White House.
We are long past the point of any realistic expectation that the Blue Egregore is going to spontaneously reform itself without putting a lot of their institutions to the torch. I think it's unlikely Trump will turn out to be a literal dictator, but in the worst case scenario I'll take Pinochet over Maduro any day of the week. I'll even take a Hitler over a Mao.
Perhaps, but depends on how. If it's a singular event, democracy likely holds in this situation, as the succession of power would still be maintained and not subverted.... you are only removing from office, you are not installing into office.
What do you actually think happens when a mob storms the white house? Because I'm guessing it's a big pile of dead rioters while the president and his family are in a secure room with several locked doors and armed guards between them and danger.
Why are you treating this as if it were a hypothetical? Trump was, in fact, escorted to a security bunker although so far as I can tell zero rioters were mowed down with assault rifles, and I'd be surprised if many of them were even prosecuted.
And what is the point of this argument? An attempt at overthrowing the government doesn't count if you could reasonably predict it would be futile? How does this not apply to Jan 6?
What do you think actually happens when rioters storm Congress, attempting to overturn the election results? Congress bugs out for a couple of hours, a guy in a Viking costume sits in the big chair for a couple minutes, and then Congress certifies the election later in the day.
Implicit in all the hysteria about January Sixth is that had the rioters managed to get their hands on some paperwork in the House chamber, they could have ticked a few boxes and Donald Trump would be president again... And everyone would just agree to it. Nothing we can do, the rioters got the Magic Paperwork.
I don't know if you knew, but "killing the president" is a pretty popular pastime in the USA. It's just about the most deadly job you can hold, with 4 out of 45 killed and many more attempted. And yet, the *institution* of democracy hasn't taken any damage, which is the whole point of the excercise - democracy holds even if you kill the guy in charge, because there is an agreed-upon, non-violent system of succession.
The only fundamental danger to democracy can come from the top, if the separation of power breaks down for any reason and is exploited by the executive branch to keep it broken down.
This never made any sense to me. How exactly does a mob rampaging through the capitol building constitute a coup? It’s not like if you capture the flag in the basement you become president automatically. Even if they take some congressmen hostage, so what? BLM riots killed a lot more people and broke a lot more things while insisting they were peaceful.
I should acknowledge that Trump did ask his staff if he could have a little coup, as a treat. Trump totally would if he could. But he can’t. His staff ignored him. The same thing will happen this time - the military and security state would put a bullet in Trump before letting him illegally stay in power. The scary antidemocratic move is for republican statehouses to change how electors are chosen - either by legislative vote or by county or congressional district. That could let them engineer lots of EV victories with a minority of the population.
I think Trump would be a little more careful about choosing his staff this time. I liked Tillerson and Mattis, for example, because they were successful in their respective domains and I respected that and was somewhat impressed by Trump choosing them, and dismayed by how the media reported on them. And Pence was... fine... I guess, and establishment. Those are the sorts of people who would ignore Trump and not try to give him his little coup. But they were all pushed out in various ways and are now openly against him.
This time around, he wouldn't pick people like that. Vance, for example, scares me, and strikes me as someone who's intelligent and calculating enough to do damage, and not rein in or ignore Trump.
> How exactly does a mob rampaging through the capitol building constitute a coup?
I think you're missing the context. The "mob rampaging through the capitol building" happened during the usually pro-forma electoral vote count. At least some of the rioters intended to intimidate enough officials -- Pence and/or Representatives/Senators -- to refuse to certify a majority of electoral votes for the Biden/Harris ticket. They could have then either declared an outright Trump/Pence victory or thrown the race to the one-vote-per-state tiebreaker mechanism, to the same result.
That's how it constitutes a coup: it is a threat of violence directed at officials precisely when they are taking (nominally ceremonial, but still important) actions to transfer power. Had the intimidation worked, it would have caused a constitutional crisis -- it's not clear that the courts have the authority to intervene in the legislature's duty here, even if they've performed that duty corruptly or incorrectly.
>Even if they take some congressmen hostage, so what?
Trumpers are braindead. To be clear. He intended to force Mike Pence to accept an alternative slate of electors and declare him president. All of this is clear as day if you did the intellectual work of reading something.
I think you may be conflating the Democratic Party and the Blue Tribe. When you say "half of democrats favour internment camps for anti-vaxxers" I'm assuming you mean democratic voters, not politicians. Well, this is an interesting fact about american civics, you actually don't vote for the voters, you vote for the politicians. If you and I vote for the same candidate, and that candidate wins, I don't get to hold any sort of government office out of the deal.
This is relevant because of the massive gap between how much the GOP has been taken over by its most extreme elements, and how much the Democratic party has. If you hate left-wing populists and right-wing populists the same amount, then obviously you should prefer the Democratic Party by a huge margin.
I don't hate them by an equal amount, since the extremists on the left getting their way would literally destroy civilisation, and given that Blue Tribe elites kept much of the planet under borderline house arrest for 18 months I don't see much daylight between them and the 'extremists'.
The rest of us understand that India did not shut down due to "Blue Tribe elites". Other governments did lockdowns because they thought it was a good idea.
Plenty of people disagree with that. But saying it was because a US political faction had enough power to force most of the globe to act against their interests, and burned that overwhelming international influence on... forcing Italians stay at home for 18 months? That's pretty ridiculous.
India shut down for about two months. I don't think anyone is actually all that upset about shutdowns of four weeks to eight weeks, even a bit longer. It was not clear what was going on. It was what followed, a virtual dictatorship of unreason, that was so odious.
Seems worse with the Democrats. I know a lot of Democrat voters and they are reasonable people. None of them believe that thieves should go unpunished, or that schools should be dumbed down for "equality," or that transgenders should be allowed to play in women's sports. A solid majority of Democrat voters are like this. And yet when Democrats get into office, we get those insane policies.
The Republicans seem to have the same general structure with a reasonable electorate and crazy ideas on top, but when they get elected, for whatever reason, we don't get those crazy policies actually in effect (with some notable exceptions in FL).
Depends what you define as crazy, really. I'm pretty liberal, but I would consider it crazy to try to ban IVF or to ban abortions with no exception provided for rape, incest, or nonviable fetuses.
I would consider an iVF ban to be crazy. AFAIK that has not happened anywhere.
I am pro-choice myself, but I do not consider abortion bans crazy. I can see how reasonable people could consider that murder. Lack of exception for non-viable, I consider crazy.
I consider any exceptions for rape and incest to be crazy. Whatever our law about abortion is, it should not take these factors into account. Any such exception creates a situation where we have an entity whose right to live is removed based on the crimes of its parents. Now that's crazy!
I was fairly skeptical on that one, but I think it's coming from this Rasmussen poll in 01/2022: https://bit.ly/3YKoGRP . They ask the question, 'Would you strongly favor, somewhat favor, somewhat oppose or strongly oppose a proposal to limit the spread of the coronavirus by having federal or state governments require that citizens temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine?'; 45% of Democrats said yes (29% of all voters, 22% of Republicans).
That said, I question whether this is representative of overall Democrat sentiment, given that:
- Rasmussen is as far as I know widely considered a low-quality and strongly right-leaning pollster; Wikipedia mentions that 538 dropped it for being low-quality (https://bit.ly/40sQJ9K) and cites a study that rated it 24th of 28 pollsters in accuracy (https://bit.ly/4hrUORq).
- This was at the height of the Omicron spike, when cases were going through the roof and people were panicking (Our World In Data: https://bit.ly/40qF3Er ).
I also think that "favour internment camps for anti-vaxxers" isn't the best summary of the question asked (as shown above).
But it's certainly a real finding from a real poll.
Rasmussen's low quality might shift the needle on what we should believe is the accurate percentage of Democrats want to throw unvaccinated people in internment camps, but it doesn't entirely negate that some people want this. What is an acceptable level of democrat desire for camps? 40%? 30%?
People panicking isn't an excuse for desiring internment camps, because an awful lot of wickedness is preceded by panic including most historic cases of people being thrown in internment camps.
*Democratic, please. EDIT: Either I misread your comment, in which case sorry, or else you yourself edited what I objected to, in which case thanks.
Issue-based (as opposed to candidate-based) polling is notoriously unreliable at determining preferences, because the phrasing of the question (or just the fact that the question is being asked) can mislead people about what the policy is and how reasonable it is. During the height of COVID panic did any influential Democrats call for unvaccinated people to be interned anywhere? If not, it’s hard to see how this poll is relevant to anything.
> People panicking isn't an excuse for desiring internment camps
No, absolutely not. I don't mean to imply that it is, only that I think this poll would have gotten pretty different results at almost any other time (and MA_browsing says 'close to half of democrats favour internment camps', suggesting that it's true currently).
> What is an acceptable level of democrat desire for camps? 40%? 30%?
Reasonable point! I don't feel great about *anyone* advocating for this, although again, I don't think any Democrat I know would endorse this.
But if it's (by assumption of the poll question) temporary, and in the middle of a pandemic that appears to be growing exponentially (and which had had a much higher rate of mortality at the time the poll was taken than it does now)? Sure, I guess somewhere between 30 and 40% I'd stop feeling alarmed by the possibility of that actually happening. There are all *kinds* of terrible things endorsed by at least 30% of each party (not, of course, typically the *same* terrible things across parties). And in this case note that 29% of voters overall were in favor of this at the time.
For candidates. That doesn't necessarily reflect on their polls on issues, which as I said in another comment is known to be unreliable in general. Arguably them just asking the question—about a policy which to my knowledge no Democratic politician or health official had proposed—is itself a form of bias.
Thanks! Although I don't have a strong opinion on Rasmussen myself (I haven't paid a ton of attention to their quality or accuracy, I don't see their polls enough to care), I did notice that the same Wikipedia page I cited above says that
'An analysis by Nate Silver on FiveThirtyEight ranked Rasmussen 20th out of 23 pollsters for accuracy in the 2012 elections, with an average error of 4.2 points.'
and
'Nate Silver described Rasmussen as "biased and inaccurate", saying Rasmussen "badly missed the margin in many states, and also exhibited a considerable bias toward Republican candidates."'
That said, those are from 10 - 15 years ago; possibly they've improved or he's changed his views for other reasons. Although I agree with Tom Hitchner that it's not clear that their accuracy on candidate polls can be treated as a good representation of their accuracy on issue polling.
Rasmussen and Atlas have been the most accurate pollsters in recent presidential elections although they did not call recent midterms accurately. This is a matter of historical record. They are right wing.
Thanks! Can you point to some evidence of their accuracy over time in presidential elections? I treat Wikipedia as a reasonable first-pass source -- it's certainly wrong sometimes, but I think the burden of proof falls on the person claiming it's wrong.
We now have data on Rasmussen's latest polling, and their polls on the 2024 presidential race were pretty much exactly accurate, unlike almost all of the "mainstream" polls. They called the national election and the states.
That does not make it accurate in general, but I think that the same thing happened in 2020 and 2016.
I note the shift- how is it relevant what 50% of democrats believe in? Are the survey participants getting elected? Did politicians suddenly swear they'll all obey their voters' every whim when I wasn't looking? If so, why do we suddenly believe them?
Jan 6 was organized by Trump with the intent of intimidating Congress and Pence into refusing to certify. For comparison, even if the BLM riot in front of the White house had a plan to breach the perimeter (instead of... throwing trash at Secret Service and yelling about racism, as all serious assassins do), this would still be a nonsensical comparison because it was organized by randos, not politicians. Torching political institutions would have approximately no effect on such mobs' ability to act like unserious mobs.
These guardrails have held up for so long, it's easy to forget that they were not given by God.
"The guardrails of liberty must be refreshed from time to time (every four years) by the votes of patriots."
That did not turn out as elegantly as I hoped, but I think it's true. If you vote for the guy who is more overtly trying to bash the guardrails, you won't be able to rely on those guardrails for very long.
Partially because it sets a precedent: Trump winning creates more Trumpists in the future. If Trumpism succeeds, it will create more Trumpists.
*While I am not for Trump*, I am amused that the original quote is arguing for the opposite of what you're arguing for. Here, in all its context:
"""
We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted.
"""
[Typos are just the way they wrote at the time, or the site I grabbed it from]
Hey Scott, I have a younger sister who was in her early 30s during Covid. She was a social worker assisting teens just out of Juvenile Detention. During Covid she worked completely remote. Her assessment of the vaccine was that it was risky due to the unprecedented low levels of testing. Between her age, the fact she worked remote, and her risk assessment, she decided not to get the vaccine. Despite having stellar performance reviews, she was fired for this.
I struggle to take your authoritarian claims seriously. The guardrails have effectively prevented the right from becoming authoritarian. They have not done so with the left.
I hate that both parties are walking down this road, but only one seems to be actually effective.
I'm confused. Would it be more authoritarian for a government to enforce certain kinds of employment policy, or the opposite? Does it matter what level of government is doing the enforcement? Does it matter if the employer is themselves a (different level?) government agency? Does authoritarianism have no need for government at all, and can just describes a form of free association between individuals???
IMO one of the predominant political successes of the 20th century was federal recognition of individual rights as a tool to constrain state power, in a result that presently codes as left-wing. I don't think a one-dimensional definition is going to cut it here.
I feel like both candidates attack the guardrails and it's irresponsible to only highlight attacks from one side. It's like standing inside the gates of a besieged city with two rival armies vying for the right to sack your home, and pointing out that you don't like Red armor, so let's let the Blue soldiers be the ones to do pillaging.
How can you affirmatively recommend a vote for Harris without having an honest discussion of how she was instrumental in hiding Biden's decline? As the VP, most of her job is to take over in the event the president is incapacitated. She took over Biden's campaign when he was incapacitated, but not the WH? Indeed, she still insists he's sharp as a tack. How long did she hide Biden's decline, and what role did she play in his ouster after it was too late to hold a real nomination? How did she secure delegates pledged to Biden without ever going to the voters?
Everything about her campaign seems like a corrupt backroom deal to engineer an appointment, as opposed to respect for democratic electoral norms. Indeed, the last 3 Democratic 'nominees' were engineered placements of one type or another (freezing out Sanders in 2016 and 2020, giving Clinton access to party funds during the primaries, etc). A vote for Harris is a vote to perpetuate this corruption of one of the two major parties. There will never be popular input into the Democratic party's nomination process until there are consequences for ignoring the will of Democratic party voters within the party. If party officials perceive that their voters will "vote blue no matter who", they'll eventually jettison party principles to the point where they're willing to campaign with their ideological opponents of yesteryear, like George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, or Dick Cheney.
Meanwhile, there was Crossfire Hurricane, which seems like completely bulldozing the guardrails of American democracy. I guess you could argue that Trump will ALSO weaponize the government. Maybe he will continue/escalate prosecution of his political opponents, control/censorship of media, etc. After all, didn't he team up with Musk and Twitter? Maybe next he'll go after Facebook, Apple, Google, etc. That could be catastrophic, since the censorship apparatus for those companies is already in place. But wait ... who put that dangerous censorship apparatus in place to begin with? And is it responsible to vote in favor of that candidate if the potential to exploit it is an argument against Trump?
When one other party continues something that was started under the other party it becomes Standard Operating Procedure in American politics. But how is that an argument in FAVOR of the initial offending party?
Indeed, if the Harris regime is rewarded with a win, they might conclude that part of the winning strategy was branding her opponent as a felon and proceed to prosecute her next opponent, too. Maybe the next step really is to put them in jail, and then do we really have a different system than a banana republic? There's a possibility that the Trump team will see the prosecutions as having helped him, in which case maybe they'll demur after the election, similar to how they moved on from the "lock her up" chants in 2016.
Or maybe they'll go for revenge. If you believe Trump will prosecute his political opponents, don't vote for him. (He said he would, then suggested later he wouldn't. But he talks a lot about "prosecuting cheaters", whatever that means. With Trump it comes down to who you choose to believe: Trump or Trump.) But if the potential for prosecuting your political opponents is a reason NOT to vote for Trump, how could you also justify a vote for Harris?
Let's talk about what a real authoritarian regime looks like. First-generation regimes are centered around the revolutionary leader who overthrew the last government. They tend to be strongman types who have a close tie to the military that put them in power. Late-generation authoritarianism often goes the opposite direction, setting up some emperor/monarch/dictator in the Sacred City and not allowing him/her contact with the outside world. Then a bunch of bureaucrats fight over the Dear Leader for influence, controlling the country by proxy. Not sure how much that describes a Biden, Trump, or Harris presidency. Probably all of them to some extent.
Let's not be blind to half the argument because we made up our minds already. Arguments that "sure this side is bad, but the other side is worse because of X" don't hold water. You have to earn my vote, you don't get it as a way to prevent the other side from getting in - swing state or no.
While Trump has some alarming rhetoric around authoritarianism, I'm curious as to your take on some of the actions by the Biden administration. For example, do you see the weaponization of the justice department against Trump and Elon as justified? Do you agree with the policy that it should be illegal to spread misinformation? That creating AI-generated parodies of a political figure should be illegal?
Justice system: The question isn't whether a law can, somehow, be used to gain a conviction, but whether it is fairly applied. If large numbers of black people get pulled over and given tickets for infractions like going 5mph over, having a taillight out or whatever that's fine so long as the police are aggressively going after everyone else who's going 5 over. If there's a racial disparity, it could be because of a difference in offending rates or a difference in enforcement. Democrats have been arguing for decades that enforcement in the justice system is unfairly slammed against unfavored groups. Republicans refuse to see it, though, insisting that the problem is a difference in offending rates.
Trump's case looks like an enforcement difference, especially given campaign promises (now fulfilled) to aggressively pursue some kind of legal action against him.
Also, sometimes the process is the punishment. If you're a minority business owner who doesn't trust banks and works only in cash, civil asset forfeiture can seem extremely unfair, especially when you have no recourse to a justice system that effectively assume your a drug dealer because you were carrying cash around. For years, Republicans dismissed concerns like these when it was about minorities. Now they see the Carroll case looking like it may get reduced or overturned, and they're beginning to understand that the point wasn't to take Trump's money permanently, but to ensure he was unable to self-finance. It's legal to self-finance, but if the people in power don't like what you're doing or how you're doing it, they'll find a way to use the justice system against you. This is nothing new, but it's new for Republicans to realize it. (They just think it's limited to Trump , or maybe J6 protesters). Meanwhile, it's disappointing to see Democrats suddenly insist that the justice system is fair. Since when?
(I will say I think Elon has almost certainly done something illegal with his million dollar giveaways. He'll likely get away with it, since the punishment will be some kind of fine and the giveaway will have the desired effect on the election before it's reversed. It's a price he's willing to pay. Meanwhile, if government contacts and launch approvals hadn't been leveraged against him, I think Elon would have stuck to tweets against 'the libs'. He's on a tight deadline to get Starship ready for the next window to Mars. That's the thing he cares about most in the world, and going after it is what clearly activated him - something I think is bad, since Elon is clearly effective in tech development and him getting sucked into politics. The Musk golden goose almost certainly has a few more eggs to lay, and it'd be a shame to lose out on that. However, blowback from powerful people like Elon is why government usually only weaponizes against powerless people.)
Misinformation: I think the worst culprits of misinformation never get censured by the government because they're doing the government's work. Misinformation has been a problem for decades, but when it's combined with government power it allows significantly worse excesses than when it runs rampant on its own. Compare the effects of the demonic preschool scare in the 90's to the WMDs in Iraq lie, or the supposed link between Saddam and Al Qaeda - who hated each other in reality. The government claiming that Russia blew up their own pipeline, that the US was winning in Vietnam, that the Biden laptop was a forgery after they'd internally confirmed its authenticity, that they weren't spying on American citizens, and on and on. Intelligence agencies have executed many misinformation operations against the American people to get things to go their way, but there is never any suggestion of taking corrective actions against them, despite the fact that it's clearly worse when they do it than when it arises organically.
I think a good case study of the problem of misinformation is COVID-19. There was plenty of misinformation circulating during the pandemic, and it took both the organic form and the government-sponsored/supported form. We've now learned the government did a huge amount to crack down on natural misinformation, but that they also clearly eliminated a lot of true information specifically because it cut against their own misinformation they were trying to spread. The government's threshold isn't about whether information is "true" or "false", but whether it advances their interests or not. They are not a disinterested third party, and as such cannot be relied upon as an arbiter of truth.
As an expert in this field, it wasn't difficult for me to spot which was which during the pandemic, but many people I knew weren't able to do the same. They were usually credulous in favor or opposed to the government line. So for my anti-government friends, they would agree when I pointed out obvious government misinformation about COVID-19, but then they'd start talking about some other misinformation and I'd have to correct them. They were generally less responsive to correction when it was something the government had called out, since their experience was that the government wasn't credible (which it wasn't). My friends who were credulous of the government line refused to believe corrections to government misinformation, even after it was proved, until the government came out and explicitly acknowledged wrongdoing, or it became generally acceptable to admit the government line was no longer tenable.
Is misinformation a problem? Yes. Is it a good idea to give the government control over what should be labelled 'misinformation'? No. Sad experience demonstrates that this will only serve to amplify the spread of misinformation - and in particular dangerous misinformation.
AI generated parodies: I feel like we've been hearing the deepfake scare for a long time, without seeing much come from it. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it doesn't seem to have materialized in a meaningful way. I remember the claim Republicans made a few months ago that Harris's campaign had faked a photo at an airport to add to her crowd size, but then it turned out there were a bunch of other photos of the event from hundreds of cell phone cameras, so nothing ever came of it because it wasn't faked.
Except, I don't care about crowd sizes to begin with, so the whole discussion seemed dumb. I'm not sure where the line crosses from parody to fraud, but this is not a question that began with AI-generated images. The best satire is the kind that's as close as possible to believability. I remember Republicans getting really angry in the early 2000's when Onion articles would get circulated as truth by Republican lawmakers and pundits, because the parody was close enough to things they actually believed that they bought it. Back then, they wanted to shut down parody for the same reason Democrats went after the fake Harris campaign video - except the Onion never explicitly labelled its content as parody and the AI-Harris video did.
I know outlets like the Onion and the Babylon Bee have legal departments that review all their content to make sure it doesn't cross the line from parody to fraud. If you're setting up a fundraising website based on fake content and calling it parody, you're potentially fooling people into contributing money to something they believe is real when it isn't. That seems like outright fraud to me. But we have a long tradition in the US of allowing parody to mock people's beliefs without explicitly coming out and telling them they're being mocked. When you start going after the satirists, you know you've lost the argument.
I'm a libertarianish-conservativish person who basically feels the same way about this election that Scott Alexander does. Can you tell me more about what you mean by Kamala's "bid for authoritarianism"?
Fairly liberal and voting for Kamala here; I think a lot of the concern about this is based on Joe Biden's administration pressuring private companies to self-censor and the various legal actions against Trump, especially the hush money trial which is pretty clearly politically motivated IMO.
I don't think "critical" is quite the right word. Yes, the media questioned many of the Trump administration's claims when he was in power, but it also credulously hyped a lot of stories that turned out to be false. It didn't seem to me that it was doing its job so much as just trying to help the opposition.
Isn't Trump's (and his most avid followers) bid for authoritarianism, if you will, depend on a circulation of elites, such that the very elite class that you seem to assume will rise up against him will be cut off at the knees and effectively replaced?
Replacing the existing "resistance" elite would be impossible, but it is also unnecessary. It is only important to replace a subset of the elite who effectively leverage power over a larger swathe of the elite class and/or control how funding is distributed to universities, states, cities, etc.
This one reason why he wants to use the impoundment powers of the President (whether it is lawful or not is another question) so that he can distribute favors to those who fall in line and cut off contracts to corporations, grant moneys to universities, funding to local entities. Most of these entities will effectively cave if it means their funding streams dry up.
Or, for example, it is also why he wants to eliminate protections for civil servants. He is not going to fire all of them, he just has to fire a few and ensure that everyone else knows that he has the ability to do the same with them. Most people will fall into line at that point.
Just look at the way big tech (Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc.) are already bending the knee. If he can effectively "control" them, middle management won't matter and the "resistance" will be little more than an aesthetic.
" it'll provoke the media into being critical again"
Until their guy wins the election after the bad Republican, and now everything is gas and gaiters. Remember how Covid was so deadly, even the chance of spreading it by attending your local church was too great a risk, so please don't hold religious services - but protest marches are a-okay because racism is a bigger threat than the Most Deadly Disease Ever.
If we're going to have things imposed on us by fiat, at least placate the plebs by being evenhanded about it?
This doesn't make sense to me. If one brand is less popular but it manages to win next week, doesn't that make it significantly more likely to succeed?
Let's say there's a two-step process to bulldozing the guardrails against authoritarianism: gaining sufficient popular support, and gaining support from elites. Whichever party wins the election next time would de facto have crossed the "popular support" pillar. Then we would want to be concerned with preventing whichever party has also completed institutional capture from instituting authoritarian policies, since the guard against less popular authoritarian movements is elections.
I mean, being motivated by spite implies that you're doing something less because you think it's "good" and more because it will "make your enemies mad". You see a lot of "liberal tears" stuff, not so much "conservative tears". I think this is because conservatives in general kind of care less about "good things" as much as they care about "no good things for people I don't like".
No, sorry to convey that. I’m saying Trump’s authoritarianism is loathed by me, the media, 60-70% of the public, 80% of congress, the military, and the security state. There’s no base of power for him to launch a coup from or more slowly erode our freedoms. We had 4 years of Trump and zero authoritarianism bc of this. Meanwhile the FBI has succeeded in eroding our privacy rights under Clinton/Reno as Bush/Ashcroft. Bush normalized torture when Obama refused to prosecute it. Obama pioneered drone-murdering US citizens overseas without due process. Trump refused to get us entangled with Syria and his strike against Soleimani was the perfect deterrent to Iran, bc it deftly avoided collateral damage or escalation.
That said, I still think this is a wrong way to think, and doesn't result in any good. I think that "Trump is so offensive he won't get anything done" was 65% "true" in 2016 but is closer to 30 or 40% "true" now. Do I think he'll bang his executive gavel and put everyone trans in camps? No. But like... the GOP is obviously a party of Trump now. They tried to replace him with a technically more competent DeSantis and thankfully failed, but even DeSantis couldn't bring himself to seriously criticize Trump *while* actively running against him.
I think the GOP is filled with way more yes-men than it was before, and I think that Trump's influence on their culture will extend past his death. I think him having been elected at all is kind of disastrous long-term in this sense. After he dies, he's going to be replaced by a guy who expresses basically the same opinions, but also isn't so impulsive and narcissistic that he hamstrings himself every time he tries to get something done that takes longer than a week.
This is why I said it's "thankful" DeSantis lost, lol. I think "the guy whose campaign staffers were putting Black Suns in his Twitter videos" combined with "presentationally being a professionalish politician" is far more dangerous than "Trump", and this kind of politician is something enabled by Trump having been elected.
I'm trying to read this in a way that doesn't sound like "my political opponents getting elected is a bad thing."
Could you frame any of this in a way that Trump voters, even hesitant Trump voters, would agree with?
Almost all of the Trump hesitancy (as opposed to fully supportive or opposing) I see is about his temperament, so getting his policies without the temperament would be seen as a good thing.
I get that, for instance, many people oppose his immigration stances. But, like, the majority of the US population actually supports it. What does it mean to live in a democracy? It can't mean that a minority who hold the reigns of power get to block the will of the majority just on their own preferences. The Constitution can stop the majority, but not a self-selected minority. Claims that Trump is undermining democracy rang very hollow in such conversations.
> I'm trying to read this in a way that doesn't sound like "my political opponents getting elected is a bad thing."
I mean... this seems kind of tautological, doesn't it, lol? I'm not sure why you're trying to read it in a way that doesn't imply this - that is what I'm implying. I don't want Republicans to win offices.
> What does it mean to live in a democracy?
I believe that there are certain things that supersede democratic concerns, democracy itself ironically being one of them. If everyone voted to have an absolute monarch, I'd still say we shouldn't allow that! Putin was arguably legitimately democratically elected at some point. He definitely isn't *now*. There should be systems to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
Anyways, I don't think it's possible to convince the average Trump voter. I think it's possible to convince some people on the margins whose opinions seem kind of flippant and random (this is true for most people in general, they just consistently have random opinions within the window of partisanship). But like... anecdotally, a lot of Trump supporters are just kind of stupid and emotional, and the ones I know who are *really* into it just seem mentally ill. The most success I have in converting Trump members (largely through family) comes not from argument but rather "acting like they're being embarrassing" or "refusing to talk to them" or "saying something really pithy and vaguely religious because a lot of people have huge biases towards someone saying a belief is spiritual".
You are, of course, welcome to have an opinion. I thought you were making a case that might try to appeal to general principals or would be convincing to others so that more people would want to choose your stance.
Naked partisanship isn't exactly new. I would prefer a world where there is less of that, such that we may be able to convince one another of important differences in positions. I think that would also make transitions between administrations less jarring and concerning.
>What does it mean to live in a democracy? It can't mean that a minority who hold the reigns of power get to block the will of the majority just on their own preferences.
This is one of the reasons why a lot of ancient authors (notably Thucydides) were so critical of pure democracy. Democracy without any additional protections leads to the domination of demagogues and the tyranny of the majority. That's why we're a constitutional republic and not a pure democracy. The Bill of Rights most definitely says that minorities can block the will of the majority, if the will of the majority is to take your guns, to censor your speech, to keep slaves, etc etc etc. I don't think most conservative policies are bad enough that they violate our rights in this way, but some of the more extreme ones (bans on abortion that don't make clear exceptions for rape, incest, or the safety of the mother, various free speech infringements meant to curtail wokeness and crossdressing, throwing someone in prison for using the wrong bathroom) seem to qualify.
It sounds like you have already determined which issues matter to you more than the ability of others to have an opinion. How do you think your opponents should reconcile *their* list of non-negotiable items when they differ from yours?
My arguments against the zero authoritarianism view is that the Roe v Wade court stacking, his draconian treatreatment of migrants, the overall election effort, both the legal maneuvering and the big lie, were authoritarian. Not categorically denying QAnon was authoritarian. They're as modern authoritarian vs traditional as the quasi-theological social elite oligarchs that Scott is still looking to work against in the long term. But they all had greater negative short term impact. And his support and admiration of authoritarians worldwide builds strength for the growing influence of strong man style politics worldwide.
Would Democratic politicians not "categorically denying" BLM riots be authoritarianism? If so, what makes Republicans/Trump worse on this metric? I'm trying to figure out your definition, and it seems to just run along partisan lines. That's fine for your opinion and your vote, but doesn't seem very convincing.
My comment was directed at there being zero actual authoritarianism during Trump’s presidency, with examples to show where I think there was. I’m saying, for instance, that helping fuel an entire mythology around satanic pedophiles having taken over the government, which people I know actually believe, were as least as modern authoritarian as those done on the left (see sentence 3 - really seems like you skimmed over that, though if you can explain how my describing the left as “quasi-theological social elite oligarchs” is a neutral description, let me know and I’ll try to work harder to make it more negative in the future). So no denials or counterarguments against the existence of left authoritarianism. The fact that left authoritarianism exists doesn’t have any relation to whether or not Trump’s authoritarianism (and I do mean specifcally his, rather than the right as a whole) exists beyond mere rhetoric. Beyond that, the debate’s about relative impact, and yes, there I’m partisan, I believe for the right reasons, but sure I have biases. Those biases do not include believing my side - such that it is, I’m pretty moderate - has absolutely zero authoritarian impulses or impacts. As to my metric, it’s immediacy. Not denying that the right should exist as an opposition party to the left. The “which is worse?” question is a long-term minimization & optimization project. I think individuals should be voting their interests through parties, not letting parties enact party interests through individuals’ votes. By all means, vote straight ticket GOP. I just think if you’re not in the upper echeolons of the Trump’s circle, Trump being back in the Whitehouse will not be in your best interests.
That's fair. I wouldn't classify most of the things you did as authoritarian in the first place, so I was double-checking to see if we were even using the same language. It appears that we are, but you generally include more things as authoritarian than I do, which is fine.
I think this analysis is wrong in a subtle way. It's true that all those institutions dislike Trump and will scrutinize everything he does - but how often does the media's criticism of Trump make you think "yeah, they nailed it! Spot on!"? The media and commentariat haven't prosecuted the case against Trump very well even after 10 years, so Trump being in power again will just enable more caterwauling and less cogent analysis. There's a sense in which he breaks people's brains (not just his supporters'), so the combination of "evil president + bad arguments for why he's evil" just means you're going to get an evil president without effectively persuading people that he's evil, not to mention a very exhausting four years.
Also, respectfully, your Iran comments are a bit off-base. I write about Iran constantly and wouldn't be able to do justice to everything wrong above, but it's unclear if Iran even *can* escalate and what real escalation by them would look like at this point (notably, they did and continue to respond to Soleimani's killing, which led a bunch of symbolic retaliations and 176 passengers of Flight PS752 being pointlessly murdered). It's further unclear whether Trump did anything particularly unique by taking out Soleimani (I think the Obama foreign policy establishment might have done the same). Characterizing this as "the perfect deterrent to Iran" is really misleading - a year later they elected a crazy hardliner!
See, I agree with what you're saying, but to me, that's another reason not to vote for Trump. If he wins, it will absolutely accelerate the bad tendencies in "the media and most power centers" due to backlash. Left wing people got way crazier 2016 -> 2020, and moderated 2020 -> 2024.
Kind of, yeah? We have a democracy with millions of people. That a candidate (and I include Trump, Hillary Clinton and anyone else with ridiculously high disapproval ratings) is absolutely straight up hated by ~30 million of them, and we absolutely have evidence that "hatred of specific other side candidate" leads to extremism and violence in "our" side, then I am fine with biasing my vote on avoiding that backlash.
I might rephrase it as "when you nominate a hated candidate, it gives the other side license to adopt more extreme policies because the relative cost for doing so goes down, so I want to disincentivize parties from doing that."
I don't know a perfect way to measure it, because normally I would use previous elections and long-running disapproval ratings, and there's less of that info available for Harris (though for similar reasons I would have suggested the Dems running a candidate who actually had been thru those things, so as to avoid backlash-y behavior from their own party members), but I feel pretty confident that the former is less than the latter.
The Democrats cut the rod for their own backs, and they're stuck with Harris because of the denial around Biden until the bitter end. After that, they couldn't pick anyone else, but the impression the 'party of democracy' gives by putting up a candidate without even a pretence of having a convention to choose from a selection, that the party in general could vote for, instead of the elites saying "this is who you have to approve and it doesn't really matter either if you don't approve because we've already decided" isn't too great.
This is exceptional circumstance, but the idea that Kamala is the people's choice is really bending reality.
Yeah, but the hatred for Clinton was explained as "sexism! hate for strong women! anti-reproductive rights!" (and race got pulled in when the black women feminist voters were angry with the white women feminist voters for not coming out and voting enough for Hillary). It wasn't "gosh, maybe we shouldn't have picked the most unpopular choice possible" reflection, it was "the people are wrong and we have to double down on educating them to be better".
I'm astounded that Trump has been as successful as he has been, but he's resonating with *someone* on *some* issues, and just beating that away with "Fascism! Racism! Sexism! Homophobia! Transphobia! Christofascists!" is not going to fix the problem of "what is he getting right that we aren't? what candidate can we put forward that appeals to the deplorables/garbage?" (and that's part of the problem right there: the deplorables and garbage attitude to something like a quarter of the country, if I'm being generous to Hillary in her division of Trump voters into 'half of them are sincere but too stupid to know what's good for them, the other half are evil').
Harris is pretty historically underwater, at least compared to pre Trump/Clinton candidates. Long term I hope both parties start nominating candidates that are at least 50% popular. In the meantime, how does this help us determine who to vote for now? Someone (whether it were Trump or Harris) being slightly less unpopular is not a convincing argument.
The heckler’s veto plus threats of violence is what got so many Republicans to capitulate.
Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney were harassed at the airport.
Adam Kinziger and Liz Cheney have both said they talked to several Republicans who wanted to vote for impeachment but feared violence against their families.
A Republican legislator in Michigan was hounded out of the party after his exhaustive investigation found no evidence of election fraud. Same for the former Arizona speaker of the house.
Not just "threats" of violence. I notice that two attempted assassination attempts - including one that almost worked - against Trump didn't merit even a mention in ACX's spiel about "threats to democracy".
Not to mention that, like...it wasn't the Democrats behind those assassinations? The constant equivocation between Democrats, anyone who hates Trump, and left-wingers more generally is getting old, as someone who would be considered a left-wing extremist by 80% of the commenters here, it seems.
Genuinely, Democrats are almost all neoliberal corporate shills. It's just that they're not actively trying to roll back civil rights and make life actively harder for myself and my loved ones. Deepest hope of this election would be that the Republican party shatters and the Democratic party splits in half with the most centrist/center-right elements linking up with the remnants of what was once the GOP to have a new paradigm with a genuine progressive party as an option for once.
Neither of the failed assassins was a Democrat/on the left. One was a depressed teen who wanted to go out with a bang via suicide by cop. The other one a guy with some meth problems who became crazy in Ukraine, and said he voted Trump in 2016.
Perhaps it is time to consider whether democracy is in a ratchet death spiral, everywhere in the world. Perhaps now that we have the society, prosperity, and technology we have, there is no way to prevent each side's strong incentive to be worse tomorrow than they were today.
What do *you* do if democracy is irretrievably broken? I hope the answer isn't "lay down and die", because historically a ton of people have been very happy living in not-democracies.
I'm utterly sick of this claim that wokeness and left-wing extremism was in any way caused by a backlash to Trump. It's completely and demonstrably false.
The first recognisable instance of cancel culture I know of was in February 2013, a campaign to get Orson Scott Card removed from co-writing a Marvel comic storyline because he opposed gay marriage. (It succeeded IIRC by convincing his co-writer to drop out, killing the storyline). The two canonical and famous defining examples were Justine Sacco (December 2013) and Brendan Eich (April 2014). By mid 2015 there had been dozens of such cases, the realignment of society towards these unprecedented new norms of "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom to dissent from the progressive orthodoxy" was well underway, and the only reason it didn't have a clear name yet was because there was so little pushback to this among the elite institutions that it wasn't thought to need a name other than "basic decency" or "correct opinions". And all this was before Trump had even announced an intention to run for president.
So I think three things are undeniable. (1) This was not at all caused by Trump's election but by Obama's re-election. Far from being a fearful reaction to losing power it was a triumphant "now we can freely hurt the people we hate" reaction to winning. (2) Two of those three defining cases were based around the issue that the left was most clearly and overwhelming winning on (homosexuality/gay marriage), further proof that cancel culture had nothing to do with desperately resisting the powerful and everything to do with sadistically crushing the losers. (3) Trump was a backlash to (among other things) wokeness and cancel culture, and the narrative that it was the other way around is unbelievable memory-holing and past-rewriting. Kind of like the Nazis/Bolsheviks justifying their seizure of power as justified by the Allied wars against them!
The more proximate thing was the end of Occupy Wall Street after it had gotten infested by the woke and subsequently petered out. These terms see a sharp uptick starting in 2011-2014, depending on term and publication:
I am sick and tired of people claiming the Dixie Chicks are an example of right-wing cancel culture. They were "cancelled" for things they said in public, as part of their public performance and deliberately made in front of an audience.
What actually got them into trouble was trying to say one thing in front of one audience that another audience would be angered by. Honest people shouldn't be doing this, and dishonest people shouldn't be surprised if they're caught at it.
Also, notice that this is pretty much the only right-wing example anyone can ever find?
I did not see Justine Sacco as a triumph of liberal or left-wing cancel culture; the position that she was stupidly claimed to hold by people who didn't or didn't want to understand irony was one that no conservative with a brain would actually consciously hold (white people don't get AIDS). Rather, I saw it as an example of an online mob, and how easily it could form in social media. That did predate Trump's election, but it does not seem to be inherently political, let alone in the narrow sense of having one particular political coloring. Rather, it is a phenomenon that fed into online wokedom later, and not only there; it would be silly to claim that right-wing online mobs can't form - it's just that we associate "mobs of righteousness" with the woke.
It is clear to me that wokeness has helped Trump and is helping him now, though it's unclear by how much. But Trump I was not somehow a reaction to the Justine Sacco case. How much Trump was a reaction to then-incipient woke - that's an open question to me, though I have much stronger doubts than I would now. The wave of woke had only barely lapped the shores of most people's consciousness during Trump's ascent, even if it was already a thing in some circles.
I don't think that's an accurate description of the Justine Sacco mob. I think it consisted of tweets like "this bitch just insulted Africa" and "welcome to black twitter" and endless accusations of her being privileged and flaunting her privilege. In other words, these were woke people (not apolitical or centrist), and their anger was not thinking she wasn't joking, but thinking it wasn't an acceptable thing to joke about. (And not because of a concern for the feelings of AIDS victims specifically, but for much more general woke reasons of racism and marginalisation and privilege).
As for wokeness barely lapping the shores, I think that's clearly wrong as well. Look at the comments on Scott's 2016 version of this post. There's heaps and heaps of references to voting for Trump to fight against wokeness (or "social justice", "political correctness" or "SJWs" as it was known then). It was a widely recognised phenomenon that had been taking over society for several years, among anyone who was paying attention, by that point. The main change during the Trump administration was giving it a clear name--the terms "woke" and "cancel culture" were popularised 2018-2019 or so. But this is an example of rising *resistance* to wokeness: naming it means acknowledging it as something that can be criticised and opposed and as something that certainly isn't remotely equivalent to "kindness" or even to "progressivism" in any way.
Ok fine, but I maintain that it was far more widely known. Brendan Eich was a household name in conservative media regarding the excesses of the left. So were people like the British scientist (I forget his name) who joked about falling in love with female co-workers. BLM started in 2013 I believe, and by late 2015 was a household name, doing things like aggressively shutting down a Bernie Sanders speech and shutting down the dedication of a Christmas tree (!), and other things that had nothing to do with Trump but were left-extremist attacks on centrists, fellow leftists, and apolitical people. And Hillary Clinton ran her campaign on extremely heavy and blatant identity politics, as well as using woke language in her speeches.
I think if you look at archived online discussions from 2016 from many sources you'll see many references to wokeness in numerous forms.
Very astute analysis, thank you for giving me some context to consider. I lean more heavily to the idea that Obama's reelection started it all. The smugness with which he approached Romney and his other opponents publicly (and, yes, the winking at the IRS to punish enemies privately) created more threat to democracy than Trump did in his actual presidency.
Kind of infuriating to watch Obama drift back into the picture now with the same progressiver-than-thou rhetoric that marked his presidency (e.g., telling black men that they're not voting for Harris solely because they're afraid of women). There's probably a good book to be written about all the cultural things that soured in and after his presidency.
I don’t it caused it, I think it’s a repeated game of escalation/arms race. The extremists on both sides empower each other, and becoming more extreme increases the likelihood of the other side doing so as well. Their true enemies are the moderates.
Who fired the first shot in this latest, ongoing culture war? I could be convinced that the left started it, but partisan extremists on both sides have been gleefully making the vicious cycle turn faster.
I think that a lot of the guardrails against Trump have eroded since last time. For instance, previously Mike Pence refused to put Trump above the constitution (and Pence has now stated that Trump should never be president again). Now J.D. Vance has explicitly said that he *would* overturn the election in Trump’s favor if it happened again. Similarly, Trump now has a Supreme Court that will support him to the degree of offering presidential immunity. Trump has explicitly been trying to attract followers who will be personally loyal to him and support his bids for power, and it seems like he has been succeeding even with his endless parade of scandals.
Contrast that with the supporters Harris has, who initially supported Biden and then (reasonably) decided that they wanted him replaced when he seemed too old and addled. Compared with Trump, Harris’s support is more fragile, and we should expect that it would pivot to favoring some other generic Democrat for reelection if Harris did anything too egregious.
I have a different take on the facts but your position is well thought out and if i agreed with you on the facts I’d be voting for Harris for the same reasons.
Thank you! Out of curiosity, what facts do you disagree with? It can definitely be tricky to say *for sure* how dangerous Trump would be with the people around him trying to keep him in check, but it seems to me that some of the people in the best position to know those facts would be the people who have been in those positions before.
And it’s not just Pence, but also Kelly (Trump’s former chief of staff), Grisham (his former press secretary), Scaramucci (his former communications director), and at least 10 other notable officials that worked under Trump who are standing against him. These include people with largely conservative values, who are presumably aware of the problems with the Democratic Party, who still think Trump is more dangerous. Same thing with Dick Cheney and Mitt Romney (to my knowledge, McCain was also not a fan of Trump).
That’s a pretty big update for me. Whenever I see people acting in opposition to the way they would normally be biased, I take those views a lot more seriously.
>Now J.D. Vance has explicitly said that he *would* overturn the election in Trump’s favor if it happened again.
I'm not entirely sure how this is supposed to operationalise. I mean, if there's an election in 2028 and Vance is VP that means Trump got elected now, which means Trump would be indisputably ineligible due to term limit and Vance couldn't "overturn the election in Trump's favour" (since the SCOTUS and/or military would step in at that point).
>Similarly, Trump now has a Supreme Court that will support him to the degree of offering presidential immunity.
I will note that while the scope of presidential immunity is debatable, the *existence* of a "things that are illegal for private citizens aren't always illegal for government agents performing official business" rule is kind of inherent in society. Protection money vs. taxes. Kidnapping vs. arrests/imprisonment. Murder vs. death sentence. Piracy/freebooting vs. warfare.
Ivanka has been missing from action and reportedly wants nothing to do with politics any more.
His other sons like Don Jr are ascendant, recommended Vance, and are in charge of purging the party and administration from people willing to stand up to Trump.
I agree, I also find it absurd that Trump will easily turn the entire country into a fascist state when literally most of the elite is against him, whereas it is much more feasible for Kamala Harris to enact terrible left-wing economic policies that will harm capitalism and make everyone miserable.
What is 'the elite'? Academics have near-zero hard power, and their soft power has been much damaged by overzealous sophomores (in the literal or general sense: people whose intellectual development stopped in their sophomore year) who cherry-picked some terms here and there and ran away with them.
Yes, I also found this part of the comment strange. Usually when people refer to the 'elite' they either mean academics, policymakers, or rich people. It's definitely not academics, who as you say have little sway, policymakers, who the Trump admin would be putting into or taking out of power, or rich people, who... I mean, just look at the WaPo nonendorsement scandal. At the very least there are plenty of extremely powerful 'elites' who do not want a Harris presidency.
> Ivanka and Jared will be running the show and they are standard chamber of commerce neoliberals which is why Trump didn’t do anything authoritarian last time
>That said i think I’m still going Trump because his brand of authoritarianism is hated by the media and a majority of the public.
"No one goes to that bar, it's too crowded."
If Trump wins, can you really claim that his brand is less popular?
>If Harris wins, the media and most power centers will back her bid for authoritarianism and things start getting bad real fast.
I'm not totally sure what authoritarianism you're referring to, aside from Harris saying platforms like X should have more restrictions. Given that the Supreme Court is dominated by conservatives, I don't expect Kamala to be successful in challenging freedom of speech.
They don't need to actually get a ruling in their favor. They can just suppress whatever speech they want, the 9th Circuit rules for them, and then, much later, the Supreme Court overturns it. Then they do it over again.
The same slow authoritarianism (both a combo of gov policies and elite non-gov policies) that has been turning people towards trump for 8 years.
Examples being: affirmative action, speech restrictions at schools/workplaces, COVID mandates, nation’s capital “black lives matter” painted on the street, etc.
I am definitely looking forward to the "mostly peaceful" Dem protests and attempts to overturn the election/s when Trump is elected and inaugured, just like last time. Maybe people won't forget the second time?
The guardrails that held last time were name Bill Barr and Mike Pence. The fact that he replaced Pence with Vance shows that the guardrails will not be nearly as strong next time
I would argue the right's SCOTUS control is one of the more concerning authoritarianism issues at the moment, particularly if they get more control than they currently have and so no relatively reasonable justice/s can swing a verdict. I am also concerned that popular will does not support policies that will keep this country stable and properly running, and may support really awful things, and that a right-wing administration will ignore this issue even when the Constitution would normally protect people. Probably one of the more obvious points here is related to free speech; most people on the left and on the right want to censor their political opponents, and a party that doesn't respect the rule of law is more likely to fully and directly subvert that (and specifically, more likely to use the government to severely persecute private individuals who disagree with them) than a party that at least allegedly does.
But I'm also a single-issue voter on whether I'll be able to keep my passport, so take my words with a grain of salt.
There are thousands of quotes, articles, and interviews with members of Trump's staff from the first term talking about how they had to constantly distract and delay him in order to avoid doing the insane things he asked for, and instead just do their job normally in spite of him. That's why he couldn't cause too much damage the first time (this is what he and supporters call the 'deep state', career bureaucrats just doing their job normally and resisting bad orders from on high).
The last 4 years has been Trump and his closest allies vowing to correct this injustice, and building a huge network of cronies plus loyalty tests and plans for who to fire and replace on day one. Vance was chosen on the back of a long campaign of arguing that democracy was violated during Trump's first term by bureaucrats ignoring Trump's demands, and vowing to implement anything Trump wants including not certifying electors.
'Trump didn't accomplish many crazy things in the first term so he won't in the second term' is a good outside-view prior on how the world probably works. But the inside view contains mountains of specific evidence on why that's not likely to be actually true in this one case.
"It went fine last time" isn't a totally reassuring argument when Trump and all the yes-men around him have been talking for the last four years about how much better they're going to vet executive branch appointments for yes-men and prevent the internal resistance that kept his previous administration in check.
Countless members of his former administration have openly admitted to ignoring Trump's requests, distracting and delaying him, and functionally treating his whims like that of a grumpy toddler. Most of them have said he's not fit to be president, and have endorsed Harris. Those people aren't going to be in the White House this time around. The guard rails will be weaker.
Thank you for the psychodrama angle and the analogue to New Atheism. It’s a pretty powerful metaphor for me personally as well and I felt that pang of recognition as you elaborated on why you tend to react more viscerally to left-leaning malpractice than the reverse. You’re not alone.
But what "opposite side" means depends on where you're standing. I think most ACX readers wouldn't necessarily consider a Trump fan their direct opposite, politically.
> I would feel like a total hypocrite with no ground to stand on if I claimed to be pro-freedom, pro-liberalism, and pro-democracy, but didn’t really take a stand against somebody trying to attack enemy politicians and rig an election.
Oddly, this is one of the main reasons I will be voting for Trump despite being in a Blue Safe State. I guess everybody has their own take on events.
Yeah. My brain started composing a top level response to this one, but it was just going to be a list of "Hey, this bad thing that you said that Republicans did, here's a place where Democrats did something comparable or worse!"
But what happens then? There'e be a massive tree of replies going "But actually that thing is not as bad, the Republican thing is worse!" with replies going "No way, actually the Democrat thing is way worse". It seems like a boring discussion.
What depresses me is that someone as smart as Scott and someone as smart as I can see the world so differently, and see it as something so obvious it hardly even needs to be argued. I mourn for my nation.
Most contemporary thinkers do believe in truth too. And plenty of thinkers in the 1700s didn’t. It’s just that the direction of movement was different. We are still in a much more truth oriented academic world than we were for most of history (and certainly for the general public).
Things were beyond repair long, long ago. As for this essay, it's not his fault, and obviously raw intelligence is no more a protection against drowning in misinformation than it is against drowning in water. It's just not the right tool. I hope none of us are here on ACX because we think Scott is right about everything, or even most things.
When propaganda was more centralized, things certainly had the appearance of working better, and I suspect that plenty of people are nostalgic for those simpler times.
I'm using the wrong word because you're hallucinating my opinion? That's not how language works - I used an old phrase correctly and to express what I wanted to express, mind your business.
>someone as smart as Scott and someone as smart as I can see the world so differently
Convergence from updates from evidence is _hard_ . Did you follow the lab leak/zoonosis debate, and see how far apart even the judges were at the end, a factor of 50? And that was with everyone doing their best to present all of the evidence they had. Depressing, but I think unavoidable. ( And politics is worse - much that we want to know is not "What _did_ happen?", but "What will this person do in the future?" )
So, if you see the situation as an escalating tit-for-tat, with each side becoming terrible in response to the other, then surely it's incredibly important that we break that cycle. It's not a conflict that one side can win in way that doesn't leave us an economically broken one-party state, so we're going to have to deescalate- which means political norm-breaking, fewer power grabs, less fighting of cultural battles with governmental force, and so on, even when these things feel like justified responses to provocation.
A liberal democracy is like a nuclear reactor containing and running on the dangerous fuel of political competition. When that competition leaks outside of democratic norms, it becomes something deadly rather than useful.
It may be the case that neither party is willing to fully commit to keeping their competition contained, in which case the question becomes: which side is more likely to escalate? Which is willing to go further to "win"?
Okay, but the question is how to vote in this election. Is there any choice that breaks the cycle in this election?
If Harris wins, Trump's federal prosecutions go forward. Now I'll say that I think the Florida documents case is legitimate. But the other three contain various levels of bullshit, and I'm not even a Trump partisan. And 1/3 of the country views the whole thing as illegitimate lawfare. So electing Harris doesn't break the cycle; that 1/3 will be in power eventually and looking for revenge.
What's it's going to take to start breaking the cycle now is for the Democrats to decide that the prosecutions of Trump must stop. They would have to decide, to borrow Scott's example, that these were crimes but maybe they didn't actually harm anyone the way that shoplifting really doesn't do much harm.
Trump got Presidential immunity for most of his actions he took as President and the Jack Smith indictment had to be refiled. Why would he need Democrats to stop prosecuting him?
I agree that Trump may not *need* for a Biden and/or Harris administration (along with Georgia and New York) to drop his prosecutions. He may yet avoid legal punishments by a combination of appellate decisions and acquittals. But my response was to concerns about escalating tit-for-tat lawfare and weaponization of political power, and what those could do to the country. I want to live in high-trust society and those things work against it. To the extent that these persecutions are political, the only way out that doesn't leave somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the country feeling angry and defeated is a political compromise.
No, my comment was rhetorical. Trump obviously needs a federal pardon because he not only committed crimes as official acts of the President but as a private citizen seeking reelection. I also think the best resolution to uniting the country would be trying Trump for treason and everybody who intended to vote to decertify the results of the 2020 election. Also, borrowing on Trump's plan to delicense news media, we should probably delicense Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax for their peddling of election fraud lies that they either have admitted to lying about or are in the process of losing their multiple defamation suits in court. Ideally this would bring back normalcy to the conspiracy laden right wing in our country and show that there are consequences for trying to sow this much division in the country, especially through illegal means.
What specifically is the claim that Kamala Harris tried to attack enemy politicians and rig an election? I genuinely haven't heard this allegation but I don't follow American politics closely.
Regarding rigging an election: the concerted suppression of information harmful to Biden in the last election, the "fortification" of that election by Zuckerberg et al. in ways that (surprise) only helped Democrats, the unConstitutional changes to state election rules by people other than the state legislatures, the mysterious and unprecedented suspension of vote-counting in precincts of swing states, the videos of mishandled ballots and testimony of whistle-blowers, and the endless fraud that Trump was a Russian agent, which the FBI knew from Day One was bogus. In this election, attempts to disqualify Trump from the ballot on grounds of insurrection when neither he nor *anybody else* has been even charged with insurrection.
Regarding attacking an enemy politician: Denying RFK Secret Service protection; constant equation of Trump with Hitler, doubtless contributing to three different assassination attempts; and the invention of historically unprecedented accusations of bogus felonies in the hopes of jailing him before the election.
Trump has been threatening his opponents generally with jail time.
No Democrat has done that, even though Trump personally has been prosecuted for various credibly-alleged crimes.
If Democrats were threatening their opponents generally, we would have seen a lot of investigations of Ron DeSantis and Milo Yiannopoulos and Joe Rogan and Kristi Noem. Instead, when we look past our Trump-focused-syndrome, we see that the investigations of politicians are basically a mix of various corrupt types of all parties (Eric Adams, Bob Menendez, Hunter Biden, locally in Southern California Andrew Do, etc.)
Trump threatens to throw people in jail, but he's just bloviating. He never actually tried, even when he had the power. Democrats have an actual track record of wielding the legal system to try to imprison their defeated opposition.
There were at least a dozen lawsuits trying to prove voter frtaud and overturning the election. Mostly by that Krakedn lady who I've forgotten the name of, and Giuliani. All failed.
When you run for attorney general or prosecutor on a platform of "I will find something I can charge Donald Trump with and then prosecute the heck out of him," that is pretty close to threatening your opponent with jail time.
You can hardly compare private owners of social media companies slowing the spread of new, potentially bad information right before an election to Donald Trump (the guy I assume you're voting for!) literally manufacturing false slates of electors to try and get Mike Pence to overthrow the results of the election.
Have you read the Twitter Files? The “private owners” of social media companies were leaned on *very* heavily by government entities.
I acknowledge that “overthrow the election” is the Leftist way of describing what went down when it came time to count the votes. You must know that your opponents describe it differently, as the last legal and Constitutional opportunity to correct what they saw as fraudulent votes.
I saw the messages rather melodramatically so named. I saw nothing except suggestions which could be freely ignored. Social media companies have $ for lots of lawyers.
Seriously. It's just beyond belief that we're now both-sides-ing as disingenously as _that_.
One thing I've learned during this past decade is how few Americans actually take seriously the central importance of protecting our Constitutional system. I already knew that about some, mostly on far left. I had no idea, and would not have believed if it told, just how wide a swath of people to the right of me have zero actual respect for our Constitutional structure and norms.
Turns out to be _far_ more people than to my left. It's an example of something that Donald Trump had intuited by the time he came down that golden elevator, and he was right about it and I was way wrong.
The left wing in the United States of America has benefitted from Constitutional protections far, far more often than it has been stymied by them. Free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press? These are all things that favor iconoclasts and boundary-pushers, and regardless of which side one might think today's iconoclasts are one, historically, it's mostly been the left, and we remember our history. We actually fully give up on respecting some constitutional protection, collectively and legally? Next time the pendulum swings it'll be the latest strain of McCarthyism, complete with life-ruining prison sentences. That's the whole reason so-called "cancel culture" became a thing: it's vigilante social consequences to try to force behavior change through non-governmental avenues.
The leftists who don't give a shit about constitutional norms and protections are often just straight up tankies. Fuck tankies.
There's too much wrong in your understanding of the history to even begin on, but I agree with your closing statement and always have.
Doesn't change the shock of learning how many _more_ Americans to my right bluntly consider our Constitution worthwhile only to the degree that it supports their particular priors and wishes. If a leftie 20 or 30 years ago had predicted the extent of that I'd have dismissed it as the usual tankie bullshit...in fact I'm pretty sure that happened given where I was residing during that period. On that point, sadly, they were right and I was wrong.
It's amazing and a credit to the Democrat propaganda machine (corporate news) that people believe this. Appointing a set of alternate electors is what state law prescribes, generally, when challenging election results. This allows you to have people ready if your challenge is successful. They actually discuss this in the recorded phone call, if you bother to listen.
It's true that states decide themselves if they want to issue alternate electors, like Hawaii in 1960. Now which state legislature, governor, attorney general, or any other higherup authorized Trump's alternate electors? None of them, that's why they're fradulent. Not a single state representative authorized Trump's electors, despite him lying about all the supposed states rescinding their certified electors during the Raffensperger call.
Do you count all campaign advertisement as "rigging an election"?
I think the attempts to disqualify Trump from the ballot on grounds of insurrection involved attempting to charge him with insurrection - which the courts struck down.
Your only allegation of election rigging was about someone spreading or not spreading information. That’s what advertising is. Even if you think these informational maneuvers are violations of law, they really don’t seem like “rigging”. They’re comparable to what Russia did on behalf of Trump during the 2016 election, not to what Trump tried to do after the 2020 election.
Because one is free speech and the other is treason? Free speech isn't required to be good, but at least you can counter it with other speech (or in this case, other platforms). You can't really reverse in the same way someone overturning an election like Trump tried to do.
>Free speech isn't required to be good, but at least you can counter it with other speech (or in this case, other platforms).
Well...
1) I don't think it's accurate to refer to "government actors leaned on platform operators to censor other people saying X" as "free speech".
2) In practice, no, you can't actually counter such censorship with "other platforms" if all of the big platforms are in lockstep, because 90% of people are not actually *on* other platforms to hear you. See Scott's article (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/). Elon Musk buying Twitter ended this regime for real because Twitter already is a big platform... except that Biden's been harassing him ever since and Harris/Walz seem if anything less moderate.
This was more believable before a group of tech companies colluded in broad daylight to kill the fastest growing app/social media company (Parler). The claim that people used it to coordinator January 6 was a barest fig leaf for that effort, considering how Twitter had been effectively used by the likes of active terrorists including ISIS/Daesh for years.
With respect, Scott's saying Trump is a uniquely bad individual to vote for president and he'd make a stand to vote against him because he personally tried to "attack enemy politicians and rig an election."
Coming back and saying Democrats 'in general' have done the same and therefore not vote for Harris seems quite different and is a much more sweeping claim. I mean, you could use this as an argument to always vote Republican in every election in the USA. At that point are you really 'taking a stand'?
Also just to nitpick one item on your list, uhh, what's especially bad about 'attempts to disqualify Trump from the ballot on grounds of insurrection'. Seems perfectly legal to me, certainly doesn't seem to have anything to do with rigging.
Like, back in the day, didn't Trump, among others, attempt to disqualify Obama on the grounds that he wasn't born in the USA, despite Obama never having been charged with immigration fraud? Was that somehow rigging too?
Oh yeah, I had forgotten about the fortification thing.
"Our shadow campaign fortified the election so the right candidate would win" doesn't sound like something you should be boasting about, but of course since it was against Literal Hitler all methods are legitimate, right?
"In February 2021, Molly Ball of Time magazine published an article titled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” that took both sides of the aisle by storm. Depending on the reader’s perspective, the story was a tell-all confession or a story of epic heroism about a massive, multi-faceted, and secret campaign to “save” the 2020 election by helping President Joseph Biden win and defend his win from legal challenges by President Donald Trump and his allies. Now, as the 2024 election seems destined to be something like a rematch, it’s time to revisit the old article and see what the conspirators—or heroes, depending on one’s view—are doing now.
... Ms. Ball, undoubtedly aware of the opposite ways readers might interpret her article, concluded the introduction with the following lines:
That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream—a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures."
Wow, you Americans are so lucky the secret cabal is only out there to do good! They only work behind the scenes to change the bad laws that would prevent a clean sweep by the right candidate!
I don't understand how your epistemology is so fucked that you think somebody writing a flowery article about a "secret cabal" is in any way shape or form strong evidence that Democrats tried to steal an election, but Trump falsifying electoral votes and directing his AG to confiscate voting machines isn't. What is a single alleged crime that took place from that Time magazine piece?
No, it's to say that you have no object level facts that any fraud took place on behalf of the Democrats, and are instead so ideologically poisoned that you're reading tea leaves on the meta level by accusing Democrats of fraud because somebody wrote a Time piece using spooky language to characterize legal coordination between Democrat operatives during and mostly after election time.
You seem to be equating "literally called up the governor of a state and asked him to find more votes" with "said mean things about your opponent." As Scott put it, there are different levels to this sort of thing, and punishing open, blatantly illegal attempts to subvert democracy is much more important than punishing attempts to get an advantage legally-but-scummily.
(Also, all 2-3 assassination attempts (the third one it's debatable if he was actually an assassin or just a sovereign citizen who didn't understand gun laws) came from right-wingers, inasmuch as crazy assassins have coherent politics. It's hard to explain that as a product of comparing Trump to Hitler.)
I am equating no such things; I disagree with both characterizations of the events in question.
And I am astonished to hear somebody claim that the first two assassins were right-wingers. Crazy I’ll grant, but if everything they had read or heard for eight years told them that Biden was the Antichrist, do you really think Biden would not have been their target?
I could grudgingly forgive the Democrats if after the first attempt they had moderated their rhetoric, but no, they doubled down. That tells me it had the desired effect.
I don’t know. But it would have been a service to the country to actually resolve these questions one way or the other, rather than sidestep them. We might not be having this argument if they had.
Well it was resolved. Trump supporters brought cases before Conservative judges and almost every single one was shot down due to lack of evidence.
If there really is evidence of significant voter fraud out there, you should be mad at the Trump faction for not being able to bring the required evidence in front of fairly friendly judges.
Or consider that maybe this evidence did not exist after all.
I believe there were still cases pending that were deemed moot after Congress met, and appeals for those dismissed for lack of standing. But that’s not germane to my main point, which is that the merits should have been resolved rather than sidestepped.
Propaganda is there everywhere, all the time. Yes, it's there with the Hunter Biden laptop story just like it was there with the Russians leaking DNC emails.
What makes Trump special is that he took steps to decertify actual election results.
Unfairly fighting in the information war isn't good but it simply doesn't measure up to what Trump tried.
I know that’s the description of events that the left prefers. Your opponents do not believe he was attempting to decertify actual election results, but rather attempting to use the last legal, Constitutional means to correct improprieties.
Your flat phraseology settles the matter for you, but will not convert somebody not already on your side.
The Constitution states that Congress counts the Electoral Votes. It puts that responsibility on the members of Congress rather than on some clerk with an adding machine because it is a vitally important operation. They are expected not only to do arithmetic but to certify to the nation that the numbers they are adding up were validly obtained and correctly reported.
Most of the time this certification process is trivial. Sometimes it is obviously contentious. During the years of and following the Civil War there were bona fide arguments about what the actual results of some state elections were, and the Congress stepped up to resolve them.
There were a number of discrepancies, as I have described, in the 2020 elections -- changes in the election rules that were made by minor officials rather than (as mandated by the Constitution) the state legislatures; weird and unprecedented suspensions in vote-counting in some swing districts, and resumption after Republican poll-watchers had left; bales of ballots that showed up with shaky provenances. Some of these led to litigation that was pending right up until January 6, and Republicans very properly put together slates of Electors who would cast their votes if the litigation went their way. Many of these problems are unsurprising considering the challenges of holding an election in the depths of a global pandemic, so it's also unsurprising that Congress in 2021 faced an unusually contentious task.
If the Congress had decided that it was necessary to wait a short time for these cases to be resolved, or that the issues in question merited recognizing the alternate slates outright, that is their job. They chose not to, and that too is their job. Because the Congress made the choice they did, Joe Biden won the election and was peacefully inaugurated on January 20. Had they made a different choice, Donald Trump would have won and would have been peacefully inaugurated. That's the way it works.
I'm not one of those that say Trump "really" won in 2020. But I don't see any impropriety in his attempts to plead his case, any more than I see impropriety in Gore's gamesmanship about recounts in 2000.
Neither of these posts even tries to link specific actions to Kamala Harris. Like you even say "maybe the Democratic Party was just better at taking advantage of the absentee voting rules"
Honestly of lot of stuff here just comes accross as conspiratorial to me.
"Despite nobody much liking Biden as a candidate, he received a record number of votes nationwide. There were 19 bellwether counties that voted for the winner in every presidential election from 1980 through 2016, but in 2020, 18 of the 19 voted for Trump. In all but one election since 1964, the candidate who won the Presidency saw his party gain seats in the House of Representatives. Not so in 2020: the Democrats lost House seats. Biden came up with just the votes he needed at just the right time. Republicans wondered how."
Come on man, how are statistics like that supposed to be convincing evidence of rigging? I just looked up that New York voted for the winner every election but one between 1880 and 1944... But then they voted for Dewey in a tight election in 48, something fishy I say, fraud.
Right-- I have nothing on Harris personally, or Clinton for that matter. That does't alter the fact that the election looks rigged-- by somebody, and it wasn't Trump.
I find the voting pattern in 2020 odd, and I haven't seen a good explanation except the one you and I both mentioned: that the Dems were just really good at targeting in that year. I am on the lookout for an explanation. I haven't seen one. Some professor ought to write an article on it-- it really is an interesting question as to what happened.
> One’s belief in whether Biden really won is rather like one’s belief in God: the evidence is insufficient for proof or disproof
This is uh, refreshingly frank, I guess. Usually if there's no evidence of a crime and no suspects, you do not assume a crime has taken place, but there's a certain logic to a religious person having *faith* in such a thing. It's also fair to think that if security was poor enough, the election should be repeated, but I wonder whether Mr. Rasmusen (Edit: just noticed that he is you) was outraged about the Supreme Court halting the recount in 2000 and declaring Bush the winner.
While he acts like it's easy to commit voting fraud (both in person and absentee, just with more fraud possible for absentee) I expect this to be untrue and therefore expect evidence of the claim. Surely election officials would notice that the same person voted twice, let alone 1000 times? You need a name on the ballot, and the name is checked against voter rolls, right? How is large-scale fraud supposed to go unnoticed?
And then in the later article he says, well, it *was* detected for 329,614 ballots in the country. I wasn't sure where that number came from at first, but after plugging some numbers in my calculator I think he is saying that “Non-matching signature” (the most common case), “No voter signature” and “Voter already voted in person” all count as attempts at fraud.
By coincidence, we recently asked one of my few friends to sign documents on our passport applications (they required someone outside the household to sign it for some reason). But multiple signatures were required and we didn't notice that our friend used quite different signatures in different places, which almost derailed the process after the application was submitted. My friend then explained to us that she doesn't have a consistent signature. Mr. Rasmusen is saying that 0.26% of all ballots had mismatching signatures which is "fraud at first look", and essentially says "even if 90% of those aren't *really* fraud that would leave 0.047% in the three categories combined which is still a *lot* of fraud". Um, okay, but (1) why assume a minimum of 10% were real fraud attempts, or that a fraudster's technique would *ever* be to leave the signature line blank? (2) 0.047% countrywide surely wouldn't swing the election, (3) all of this was detected which means none of the alleged fraud attempts succeeded.
So then he's like ahh, but sometimes they don't bother to compare signatures at all, or are lenient about matching them". Okay, but still, why should you actually believe large-scale fraud really happened? I mean, take me through the process. You are a ne'er-do-well who wants to vote 1000 times.
(1) How do you actually pull if off without being detected?
(2) How do you know that most of these undetected fraudsters voted for Biden?
And then he's like "I’d guess more like a million [were fraudulent]" and justifies this by linking to the first article, which explains how it's faith-based.
The legal cases against Trump are the crimes he very obviously, blatantly, committed. He was convicted of the Stormy Daniels case and you can just read the indictments for the other cases. It's actually insane how you people mindfucked yourself into believing that the American court system can just be trivially suborned. I guess in that reading the most trustworthy person to take control of it is the guy who constantly talks about how he needs to crush the "enemy within" (his political opponents).
> He was convicted of the Stormy Daniels case and you can just read the indictments for the other cases.
You can. And if you don't know anything about the law, you might even end up coming away thinking that he did something wrong. But to anyone who knows what they're looking at, the entire thing is a joke.
The thing he was alleged to have done in the Stormy Daniels case *was not a crime.* It would have been laughed out of court had it not been a court run by a politicized judge, and it will never survive on appeal.
The Bragg persecution is even more laughable. Read the analyses by Andy McCarthy, a career prosecutor from SDNY (Southern District of New York, where the trial was held.) The trial was a farce from beginning to end, and contains at least half a dozen severe, obvious errors, any one of which is enough to completely overturn the case on appeal.
I actually believe in our court system. The thing he did was a crime, that's why he was convicted. You cannot convict people for things that aren't crimes.
If you don't believe in our court system, again, I don't understand why you want to put the guy who talks about locking up every single political opponent (or even people who didn't dicksuck him about his election denial claims) in charge of it.
They say that the average American commits three felonies a day. (Yes, I understand the median would be a better measure, but this is the famous stat.) Of course he has committed SOME crime. The problem is the selective (and this case, obviously politically motivated) enforcement.
I still don't understand what exactly the crime was, I took away from it that he was convicted of paying a bribe out of the wrong bank account? That he should have claimed it as a campaign expense? I don't know, but I do see that nobody seems to have gone after Stormy Daniels to return the stolen money that was the proceeds of crime, so colour me unconvinced that this was the Crime of the Century.
You look at your court system doing all sorts of outrageous nonsense against Trump and you think: well, I'm not a lawyer, the judges know better, our court system is respectable, I don't understand how or why, but my own lying eyes are deceiving me probably.
Another man looks at this and thinks: well, that's it, the court system has been subverted, we can no longer trust it.
An interesting thing is that there doesn't seem to be an object level disagreement even. You agree which way the evidence points in each individual case. If I asked about more of them, like for example the novel legal theory that you don't have to give a person the right to any legal representation to judge them a traitor if you're not going to impose any penalties, and then another court can cite that judgment to remove them from ballots, again without any representation because this time they are not doing any judgment, you'd probably agree that that too is outrageous nonsense.
The only disagreement is that you think that there's not enough evidence yet to stop trusting the court system. But if you agree that you will probably change your opinion in the future if things continue to go the way they are doing, then why not change your opinion now?
I tend to think of the classified documents case as having merit. Other politicians who retained classified documents returned them when asked, Trump, not so much.
The other three look essentially purely politically motivated to me:
Stormy Daniels - basically mislabelling a payment - when the statute of limitations had run out. The legal theory used is more twisted than a pretzel.
The real estate valuation estimate thing - basically accused of being a realtor.
The Jan 6th - Yeah, he used inflammatory language, as if Biden and Harris don't use similarly inflammatory language against him. If Jan 6th had _really_ been intended as a coup, he would have told the rioters to arm themselves.
I would recommend actually reading the January 6 indictment. He did not just "use inflammatory language," he knowingly spread lies, put together false slates of electors, and attempted to pressure Mike Pence into throwing out the results of the 2020 elections.
I think the Mike Pence thing is the most blatant attempt to overturn an election I've ever seen. He wanted the vice president, a single man, to unilaterally choose to overturn the election, despite having no authority to do so by his own admission. If that's not a coup attempt I don't know what else to call it.
> You can. And if you don't know anything about the law, you might even end up coming away thinking that he did something wrong. But to anyone who knows what they're looking at, the entire thing is a joke.
Not really. The facts there were pretty clear. The conviction is sketchy, because it relies on a questionable legal framework to bypass the statute of limitations on the misdemeanor version of the law, so I suspect it might get overturned on appeal.
But "can't be prosecuted for a crime he clearly committed and that a jury determined he committed because of a procedural bar" is not the same as saying he did nothing wrong. He did something wrong and didn't get caught until the statute of limitations ran out.
>It's actually insane how you people mindfucked yourself into believing that the American court system can just be trivially suborned.
Have you heard of all-white juries in the Jim Crow South? The peremptory-strike process in jury selection actually makes it very easy to wipe out a minority from a jury, because knocking out a juror who's part of the minority will probably result in replacement with a member of the majority, but the other side knocking out a juror who's part of the majority will probably result in replacement with another member of the majority - and both sides get equal numbers of peremptory strikes.
And, well, Manhattan is 85% Democrat, and Trump is so incredibly polarising that most jurors would vote their party.
I'm not saying I like Trump (I don't), and I'm not saying all the cases against him are baseless (there's a case to answer for some of them). I am saying that I treated the Stormy Daniels conviction as a null update regarding Trump's character because the circumstances rendered the verdict nearly a foregone conclusion regardless of the facts of the case.
If you believe that Trump (or any other person) raped somebody in the changing room of a department store and got away with it, I have a bridge to sell you.
I have actually read quite a lot about sexual assault - it was one of my hobbyist interests in college, having read cover-to-cover multiple books on the subject, regularly going through Google Scholar on it, etc. The idea that somebody raped somebody else in a private location that was otherwise "public" is so insanely banal that your comment suggests nothing but your own ignorance.
e: For example, from Anna Salter's Predators:
> An offender may molest a child in a room with the door open and the other parent in the next room. He may molest a child with other children present who are witnesses and can confirm the child’s testimony. He may meet friends who have moved far away in a motel halfway between their two towns, play cards in one room, and take breaks to “check” on the kids sleeping in the next room, but instead molest them with the door open but out of sight. He may take a break from watching a ball game at a friend’s house to go to the bathroom but walk, instead, into a child’s room to molest her.
>All these are real cases of offenders who have been caught because their detection apprehension was too low. Every once in a while a parent walks in on one of the above scenes and cannot be convinced they didn’t see what they saw. But the sad fact is that for detection apprehension to be that low, the offender has to be successful at molesting children for many years.
This sounds a hell of a lot more crazy to me than raping somebody in a bathroom, changing room, or other semi-public location.
Do you have Trump Derangement Syndrome? Because there are very, very many "enemy politicians" under *any* definition of "enemy politicians", and this list of enemy politicians has very little overlap with the list of politicians who are in the middle of prosecution for crimes right now.
How many Republican members of Congress, or Republican governors, or Republican mayors, are currently being prosecuted? How many Democratic members of Congress, or Democratic governors, or Democratic mayors, are currently being prosecuted?
There is literally one person who is an "enemy" of Joe Biden who is being prosecuted right now, and it's not Hunter Biden, or Bob Menendez, or Eric Adams, all of whom *are* being prosecuted.
I forgot there were a few others like them. But do you claim they weren’t guilty? Criminals should be prosecuted even if they have enemies who are in power.
Depends if the laws are sufficiently broad and vague that everyone is technically guilty of something. The offences on which Trump has been actually convicted seem to have this flavor.
The Giuliani damages bill was, frankly, insane, but is just part of the general US issue of juries setting insanely high figures for punitive/exemplary damages. Navarro could have showed up and pleaded the fifth, so that doesn't look like unfair treatment (sure, it was a witch-hunt-y house committee, but that's more of an Americanism than a Democrat thing). Eastman being disbarred looks like partisan targeting,* but I haven't gone through the California Bar Court proceedings.
*It all comes down to the general issue of whether "conspiracy to attempt to incite Mike Pence to do a thing" is a treasonous plot, or a bunch of morons larping at being hardball political operators. I can see the argument that if he'd actually done it successfully then it's in coup territory, but I just can't take it seriously as it's so obviously the least serious parts of the Trump circus clowning around.
I have no objection in principle to early voting and mail-in ballots. It is clear that they open the door to fraud in a way that must be guarded against, and it is far from clear that they were adequately guarded against in 2020: Several states eliminated the requirement of comparing the signature on the envelope to the signature on the registration, to give one trivial example, and there were several stories about boxes of ballots appearing with inadequate provenance. Those stories might all have been false, but the system gives us no way of knowing. My biggest objection is that many states started doing mail-ins without being ready for it, and the decision was made in ways that did not involve the state legislature, which is the one firm requirement stated in the Constitution. In the light of Covid neither is surprising, but given the fact that all the worst anomalies happened in swing states that (in the end) favored Biden, it's hard not to conclude that the Democrats made sure not to let the crisis go to waste.
Continuing with the spirit of my original question, is it fair for me to summarize your answer as, "yes, 'rigged elections' = 'early voting and mail-in ballots'?"
Putting aside the specific claims you are making, I agree with you that there is something deeply troubling about all of this. Democracy clearly does not lead to choosing perfect policies or amazing leaders. At a minimum, though, it should deliver legitimacy. IF US elections are clouded with a fog of illegitimacy, then they are not delivering the most important and only expected benefit from the process.
When a large enough group of people don't believe the election result is legitimate, it creates a pressure that threatens to be relieved through violence.
I don't think either major party sees this risk or has taken the necessary steps to address it.
I don’t agree that that is a fair summary. Equating early ballots and mail-in voting with rigged elections is pessimistic and simplistic. It may be that there is no way to have the former without the latter, but I don’t believe it.
But I think I do agree with everything else you said. I have read lots of people who see the risk you point to and who have described ways to address it. (Most of these do involve drastically cutting back on early voting and mail-ins, which I think is overkill.) But I don’t recall ever hearing anybody you’d call a party bigwig address it.
Sorry, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth. My original intention was to expand on your statement:
>this is one of the main reasons I will be voting for Trump
by working out what "this" meant. I grabbed the two specific items in the Scott comment that you quoted and assumed "this" was pointing at those. I think I've misunderstood, but not necessarily gotten closer to the "this."
My guess is that you've already clarified in response to other comments, but I'm not sure that I will have time to go through and find the answer. Sorry that this attempt to start bridging between alternative realities didn't bear fruit.
I don't think the election was rigged (beyond the usual amount of fraud or stupidity) but the way it was handled, I also don't think there is a way to stand over the process as "absolutely 100% secure, no possibility at all of something going wrong".
Very small changes in voting patterns in places like Maricopa County flipped the state to Biden, and that's the kind of thing that on first glance looks very suspicious - this county voted red all the other times, but *this* time it's blue? - until you dig into it. But most people are not going to dig into every single strange-looking result, so the perception can legitimately be "this was fraud" and not "this was a small number of swing voters who did change their minds from last time, just enough to tip over the line".
Also the flip-flopping about voting machines: 2016 - the Russians hacked them to give Trump the victory! 2020 - impossible to hack so the result is impeccable! 2024 - looks like revving up the hacking story again in case Trump wins/loses:
"Those discoveries come amid ongoing foreign and criminal targeting of U.S. elections. In 2016, Russian hackers both targeted the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and compromised voter registration databases in multiple U.S. states. It’s affecting this election cycle already, as POLITICO first reported Saturday that the presidential campaign of former President Donald Trump was hacked, a breach the campaign attributed to Iran.
While there’ve been no foreign cyberattacks taking wide swaths of voting machines offline on election day or evidence of hacks that affected results, the risk is always there."
> Also the flip-flopping about voting machines: 2016 - the Russians hacked them to give Trump the victory! 2020 - impossible to hack so the result is impeccable!
Do you have in mind any specific people who said both of those things explicitly? It's very easy to falsely perceive flipflopping just by not paying close attention to who said any specific thing and imagining everyone who disagrees with you as some sort of giant hivemind. And yes, I have been guilty of that as well - being careful is hard work. But that doesn't make it any less important.
I agree, we absolutely need elections we can trust. And, unfortunately, as a weird artifact of our two-party system, there's one party that has decided to officially oppose strengthening elections in basically every possible way. They've even decided it's a good idea to - uniquely among Western democracies - oppose _requiring an ID to vote_! I don't believe that Democrats are doing this because they're planning to commit systemic fraud, but I also suspect they think that any low-level fraud that occurs is likely to benefit them. (Otherwise, I don't understand why they would pay the political cost of loudly and proudly being against election integrity, rather than just having no official stance on matters like mail-in voting and voter ID.)
As a left-wing person? Because it's much easier to pass a requirement for voter ID than it is to simultaneously also pass a requirement to make acquiring that voter ID easy enough to ensure every citizen/voter who wants to get one can get one. The left is far more worried about voter disenfranchisement, a real historical thing that has happened to minority groups throughout our history quite often, than it is about voter fraud. And voter ID laws set by state legislatures are often one means of enacting voter disenfranchisement through careful selectivity of which methods of identification count and which don't. Do state university student IDs count? How expensive is the process to get an ID that counts? How much time does the process take? Are there readily available places within walking or bus distance of voters who may not own a car? We already have voter turnout manipulation with polling station placements and removals in many states. There are what we consider to be genuine and real threats to meaningful democracy already demonstrably occurring, and so we oppose the solution put forward to something which is not yet demonstrably a problem and could reinforce the problems we do see.
I would rather have an election where voter turnout in every state is improved by 100,000 voters and there end up being 10,000 fraudulent votes cast in every state than one in which we lose 100,000 voters in turnout and only prevent 10,000 fraudulent votes. The mathematics of which one is preferable seem patently obvious to me, personally, even in what I consider an egregiously extreme scenario that favors the idea of voter fraud being more of a problem to a degree I find farcical based on the evidence I have available to me.
I'm genuinely curious - what exactly would "demonstrate" to your satisfaction that it is a problem that _you do not have to prove who you are to vote_? To me this is at the level of needing a double-blind study to prove that parachutes save lives. As far as I know, no other democracy in the Western world is so weirdly stupid about this (sometimes they allow minor exceptions to ID requirements, but they're principled and limited).
I understand that disenfranchisement is the party line, but as you said yourself, the other solution to the problem is to make it easier to get ID. There was no reason Democrats had to hitch their wagon to the dumber solution.
I do appreciate your honesty about your fraud tolerance. I think I have a fundamental disagreement with you there. I would absolutely prefer a system with zero fraud, where sometimes people don't manage to vote because it's not as convenient as they'd like. When issues are truly important (ie, democracy is on the line because Trump is Hitler^WChavez), people will overcome minor inconveniences to vote, and the system still works. But if people can't trust that the results of an election are legitimate, everything starts to break down. All Trump's sore losing in 2020 would have convinced far fewer people, and caused much less trouble, if Democrats weren't actively taking the position that election security isn't "demonstrably a problem".
"Take an oath and have an elector who knows the voter vouch for them (both of whom must make a sworn statement). This person must have authorized identification and their name must appear on the list of electors in the same polling division as the voter. This person can only vouch for one person and the person who is vouched for cannot vouch for another elector."
As you can see, the exception is strict, and careful to avoid the potential for abuse. If you intended to make some point that Canada's voting security is just as lackadaisical as the non-voter-ID states, well, you're flatly wrong.
(0) It probably won't surprise you that some D's think working for better voting security would be repurposed to support criticism of the 2020 POTUS result
(1) I encourage you to read about the disparate impact of ID availability (as mentioned by another respondent)
(2) my understanding is that R's oppose a national ID solution (for reasons, but this helps illustrate that the issue has nuance that may lurk beneath the surface)
(3) a sincere effort from both parties to make voting accessible and secure seems like an extremely reasonable ask.
I'd note that I don't agree with the respondent below about the threshold of election fraud they would tolerate for the extra participation. That's because (a) I don't think we are nearly so close to the technical efficient frontier that those trade-offs are necessary and (b) many factors influence legitimacy and I think that amount of fraud would blow-up the system. Part of my reasoning for (b) is that the structure of POTUS elections already makes the vast majority of voters feel disenfranchised, so the baseline level of feeling legitimate is already low, and the overall result is sensitive to small numbers of votes in a small number of places.
Finally, on that point (a) about the efficient frontier. I originally left out the word "technical" and then realized that we might be at the efficient frontier on what is politically/practically achievable.
I'm curious: when you read that ID access and voter suppression is a concern, did you update your model of the world? Note: this is a sincere question and I'm not making an implied claim that you did not update.
> I'm curious: when you read that ID access and voter suppression is a concern, did you update your model of the world? Note: this is a sincere question and I'm not making an implied claim that you did not update.
Well, no. It wasn't new information, of course. It's basically impossible to navigate society without hearing each and every left-wing argument 100 times. I probably should have been clear that I knew the official party line about "disenfranchisement" and considered it at the level of most political tropes: silly, but virtuous-sounding enough to be yelled at rallies without thinking about it too hard. For one thing, it stretches the definition of "disenfranchisement" to an almost absurd extent - would it be "disenfranchisement" if I have to cross the street to vote, and I'm too lazy? Putting an absolutely _trivial_ step in front of voting, that has a _very good_ justification for existing, is not racism. There were real examples of disenfranchisement in the past, and they do not resemble modern voter ID laws.
I had thought that serious people were not serious about that justification. However, I'll say that I did update (slightly) because @Rolepgeek seems both smart and sincere about it.
> I have no objection in principle to early voting and mail-in ballots. It is clear that they open the door to fraud in a way that must be guarded against
Why is that, in and of itself, not sufficient grounds for objection-in-principle?
And if it's not, here's another clear objection: In addition to integrity/fraud problems, they open the door to vote-security problems as well. Just look at the multiple cases we've seen in the last few days of ballot drop boxes being firebombed by Antifa terrorists, destroying hundreds of ballots.
In my Substack I suggest a way to improve absentee ballot procedures to reduce the ease of cheating somewhat, but it's an intractable problem, because it makes vote-buying too easy. That's why most countries in the world don't allow it, or allow it only for citizens who are abroad. https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/cheating-with-absentee-ballots
In 2020, I rather liked the convenience of mail-in voting. But, AFAIK, it has one unsolvable problem. Since the vote is cast in a home, away from a voting booth with a poll worker observing who is in the voting booth, one can never know that the vote wasn't coerced.
>Those stories might all have been false, but the system gives us no way of knowing.
The system gives you plenty of ways of knowing. Georgia had two state recounts and an internal audit. There was video footage released the day of Rudy Giuliani lying about Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss running multiple ballots, bringing out hidden suitcases, being professional fraudsters, and dozens of news sources reporting on it. Pennsylvania had recounts in multiple contested counties. Any and every audit of Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines showed they were more accurate than hand counted ballots. There is an infinite amount of evidence that our elections are safe and secure and the leading proponents of the negation of that proposition are literally all liars, some of which like Giuliani admitted to lying in court or Powell saying she wasn't making statements of fact.
Chase Oliver supports none of that; libertarianism is liberalism taken to logical extreme. A vote for Trump in a solidly Dem state has no effect, so why not make a truly pro-freedom statement?
I am pretty confused by this, assuming "attacking enemy politicians and rigging an election" is mostly around January 6th.
I am not American but would have voted for Trump in 2016 - like explained in this post I strongly subscribed to the "furniture must be smashed in the Capital" view so I just wanted to vote for whoever was anti-establishment (naive "fuck the system" and all that).
But any and all support I could possibly have had for Trump completely died on January 6th. What is the take on these events that someone smart can take that is pro-Trump? I have tried as a mental exercise and I just cant find it. Maybe my Overton window needs expanding but the more reasonable answer just seems to be you cant be pro-democracy, pro-freedom, and pro-liberalism if you also believe January 6th happened the way that virtually all evidence seems to suggest it happened.
Look around this thread. There are multiple explanations.
If you want a more concentrated take, there's a thread on DataSecretsLox titled "Change Your Mind: Trump's Behaviors on Jan 6 are Sufficient Reason to Vote for Kamala", where someone makes a college effort to present the other side, and gets a lot of counter-responses. There's not much one can do to summarize it, unfortunately, given the number of charges made against Trump, but my attempt at a gist is that many of the accusations against Trump are for things he didn't actually do, or are theoretically possible but incompatible with what we know of his public face; there are a few irregularities that were conspicuously not investigated by the other side; and while there are some things one could lay at Trump's feet, they're relatively minor and also the sort of thing one could lay at the feet of anyone else.
I doubt I agree with all of the counter responses (or the OP), but it's a pretty long thread, so anything you have a question about is likely to have been mentioned there by now, including a general counternarrative.
I appreciate the response and the pointer on where to learn more, but if I go to https://www.datasecretslox.com/ I cannot find "Change Your Mind: Trump's Behaviors on Jan 6 are Sufficient Reason to Vote for Kamala"
"Many of the accusations against Trump are for things he didn't actually do... and while there are some things one could lay at Trump's feet, they're relatively minor and also the sort of thing one could lay at the feet of anyone else. "
Ok, well which are false/minor from this list below - that as far as I can tell actually happened? Surely there has to be some go-to pro-republican article/website or something somewhere that open-minded intellectually rigorous people tend to be recommended to read if these are all demonstrably false/minor?
1. Trump had knowledge that he lost the 2020 election but spread misinformation to the American public and made false statements claiming significant voter fraud led to his defeat;
2. Trump planned to remove and replace the Attorney General and Justice Department officials in an effort to force the DOJ to support false allegations of election fraud;
3. Trump pressured Vice President Pence to refuse certified electoral votes in the official count on January 6, in violation of the U.S. Constitution;
4. Trump pressured state lawmakers and election officials to alter election results in his favor;
5. Trump's legal team and associates directed Republicans in seven states to produce and send fake "alternate" electoral slates to Congress and the National Archives;
6. Trump summoned and assembled a destructive mob in Washington and sent them to march on the U.S. Capitol; and
7. Trump ignored multiple requests to speak out in real time against the mob violence, refused to instruct his supporters to disband, and failed to take any immediate actions to halt attacks on the Capitol.
Despite the fact that this thread in general seems to generate more heat than light and I'm sorry I started it, I was about to take you seriously and put together a summary. This list makes me think you are trolling; each item is phrased in such a way as to put it in the worst possible light. The link Paul Brinkley cites is https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,12502.0.html.
But for the record:
1. Trump believed that he had won the election and publicized that belief in an effort to correct for what he saw as fraud. Which statement is correct? Neither you nor I can read his mind.
2. "Planned to remove and replace"; "false allegations". Did he in fact remove and replace? What if the allegations were true? Do you know? Complaining about "planned to" is pretty weak sauce.
3. Trump argued strongly for Pence to take actions that Trump and Trump's lawyers believed were unusual, but nevertheless both legal and arguably Constitutional. That was his right. Pence chose not to take those actions. That was *his* right. I discussed this at greater length earlier in this thread (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein/comment/74940194)
4. Trump believed there had been counting errors or perhaps even malfeasance in Georgia, and he requested officials there to investigate. What "pressure" was he even in a position to apply? Do you imagine he was about to send troops, or a cruise missile?
5. Alternate slates of electors is the normal way to deal with contested votes.
6. Trump held a rally. At its end, he requested the attendees to "peacefully and patriotically" march to the Capitol to make their feelings known. He did not advocate violence. There were a few troublemakers like Ray Epps who were waiting there even before Trump started his speech, and directed the arriving protesters to enter the Capitol, after removing the signs and obstacles that would have made it clear this was impermissible; there are reasons to suspect that Epps and his compatriots were Feds trying to incite violence. They were remarkably unsuccessful; the protesters lined up and were admitted to the building by Capitol guards who held the door for them. Video of the event mostly shows people wandering around, sightseeing, while guards stood by to make sure nothing untoward happened.
Protests at the Capitol are not rare occurrences. This one got very slightly out of hand (or was pushed) but neither you nor I have any reason to believe Trump planned for it to do so.
7. Trump did speak out, urging people to remain peaceful. And why wouldn't he? His plan was to convince the Congress to act, in their Constitutional capacity as certifier of the vote counts. It would have been stupid to muddy the waters with violence. You may say he waited too long, but Monday morning quarterbacks are seldom convincing.
The list was simply copied verbatim from Wikipedia. Sorry, I wanted to change them to something that are more in line with what I actually believe. But I honestly got overwhelmed by the prospect and thought it was good enough to start a good faith discussion.
1. (point 1 is again verbatim from Wikipedia):
Many in Trump's inner circle informed the president he had lost and there was no evidence of widespread fraud. According to several video clips of prior testimony shown by the committee:
1.1 A senior adviser to the Trump campaign, Jason Miller, testified that Trump was internally advised he had lost the election. According to Miller, the campaign's top data aide, Matt Oczkowski, told Trump very shortly after the election "in pretty blunt terms, that he was going to lose".
1.2 Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon testified he had spoken to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in November 2020 soon after the election and told Meadows there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. According to Cannon, Meadows replied: "So there's no there there."
1.3 According to his testimony, attorney general Bill Barr "said that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were 'bullshit'".
1.4 Ivanka Trump said she "accepted" Barr's assessment.
To me with all this you start with "he knows he lost" and if there is strong evidence to the contrary we update. It seems silly to be neutral "we cant read his mind." That's infantilizing. Trump isn't a child. He had all the evidence presented to him and so many in his circle telling him he had lost and he still decided to go against it all and spread "alternative facts" to his constituents.
There was no "I commit to a peaceful transfer of power but I must get to the bottom of what I believe are irregularities as is my right." No it was just "The election has been stolen! Rile up your emotions!" or to quote him directly "This is going to escalate dramatically. This is a very dangerous moment in our history. ... The fact that our country is being stolen. A coup is taking place in front of our eyes, and the public can't take this anymore."
Last I checked planning to overthrow the results of a democratic election is pretty fucking bad even if you didn't succeed. And worst when the president does it. I'm kinda like weirded out you don't think that's a big deal. Wouldn't you think it a big deal if you found out Kamala planned to overthrow the election results even if she didn't succeed? Would you tell anyone she only "planning to" is weak sauce?
- On December 14, two weeks after Barr stated there was no evidence of significant election fraud, Trump announced that Barr would be leaving as attorney general by Christmas.
I'm a "take people at their word" kinda guy.
Particulars on this point I am not interested in. I should not have copy-pasted this point. The main crux is just that he clearly pressured the hell out of so many lawmakers. If Harris had done the same - even if she *actually* believed her election was stolen - it would be just as appalling. Same goes for Trump. i.e. See points 3-4.
3.
- In late December, Pence called former vice president Dan Quayle for advice, and Quayle told him (according to reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa): "Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. ... I do know the position you're in. I also know what the law is. ... You have no power."
- Although the fourth Wednesday had passed, Trump still believed that Pence had the authority to reject electoral votes, and kept asking him to do so; however, over lunch on January 5, Pence informed Trump that he did not believe he had any such authority.
- Attorney John Eastman incorrectly told Pence in a January 5 Oval Office meeting that Pence had the constitutional authority to block the certification, which Trump reportedly urged Pence to consider.
- By January 5, Trump was continuing to assert that Pence had unilateral power to throw out states' official electoral certificates on grounds of fraud.
- In March, when ABC News' Jonathan Karl asked Trump if he was worried about Pence while the crowd was chanting, Trump defended the crowd, saying they were "very angry" and that it was "common sense" that they would want to stop Congress from certifying the election result. (you know after the whole "hang Mike Pence" stuff)
- Trump released a statement asserting, falsely, that Pence did have such power: "Unfortunately, he didn't exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!" and "they now want to take that right away".
- Pence: "President Trump is wrong. ... Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election."
Your quote:
"""
I'm not one of those that say Trump "really" won in 2020. But I don't see any impropriety in his attempts to plead his case, any more than I see impropriety in Gore's gamesmanship about recounts in 2000.
"""
Maybe I just don't know what the 2000s were like. Did Gore really pressure anyone as hard as Trump clearly deliberately pressured Pence? Is there anyone like Pence in the Gore story that did a complete 180 and was appalled by Gore and no longer endorses him?
4. Same as with the disinformation he spreads. He knows how much power he has wielding his base. Here are a few republican remarks:
- She [Kim Ward] stated that Republican leaders were expected to support Trump's claims and if she had announced opposition to the letter, "I'd get my house bombed tonight"
- The day the suit was filed, Trump warned Georgia attorney general Chris Carr to not rally other Republican officials in opposition to the suit
- After Georgia had twice recounted and twice certified its results, Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger received death threats. He was pressured to resign by others in his party, including the state's two senators.
- Trump called the investigations chief in the Georgia Secretary of State's office, who was then investigating allegations of mail ballot fraud, and urged the official to "find the fraud"
- Trump blocked government officials from cooperating in the presidential transition to Joe Biden.
- He repeatedly urged Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to convene a special session of the legislature to overturn Biden's certified victory in the state, and he made a similar plea to the Pennsylvania Speaker of the House.
- In an early January 2021 phone call, he pressed the Georgia secretary of state to "find" the 11,780 votes needed to secure his victory in the state
That last one was a particular holy shit for me. Would help a lot if that one was debunked thoroughly...
Anyway, these are not the actions of a truthseeker whose goal is the truth regardless of whether the truth is there is or is not fraud. These are the actions of someone that has an end-goal goal regardless of the truth.
It's not like he was trying to talk to fellow republicans and have them explain to him how things can "look weird" but still be likely he lost.
5. Is it now? Again, Wikipedia:
"The intent of the scheme was to pass the fraudulent certificates to then-vice president Mike Pence in the hope he would count them, rather than the authentic certificates, and thus overturn Joe Biden's victory. This scheme was defended by a fringe legal theory developed by Trump attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, detailed in the Eastman memos, which claimed a vice president has the constitutional discretion to swap official electors with an alternate slate during the certification process, thus changing the outcome of the electoral college vote and the overall winner of the presidential race. The scheme came to be known as the Pence Card. By June 2024, dozens of Republican state officials and Trump associates had been indicted in four states for their alleged involvement... According to testimony Trump was aware of the fake electors scheme, and knew that Eastman's plan for Pence to obstruct the certification of electoral votes was a violation of the Electoral Count Act."
This doesn't seem like a "normal way to deal with contested votes." Granted there seem to be weird loopholes to make it legal, but seems pretty damn fringe and done in bad faith. i.e. this is not a tactic someone who believes the election was stolen would use. This is the tactic of someone who desperately wants to stay in power at all cost would use.
Also, this takes us back to "there was clearly a concerted plan" from point 2.
6.
"there are reasons to suspect that Epps and his compatriots were Feds trying to incite violence"
I presume you aren't going to drop a bombshell like that without evidence?
"""
the protesters lined up and were admitted to the building by Capitol guards who held the door for them. Video of the event mostly shows people wandering around, sightseeing, while guards stood by to make sure nothing untoward happened.
Police were fucking knocked out blood over their head. And if there is to be any conspiracy theorizing it should probably start with why there was so little police support at the Capital that day - something the current government in power during the riot (Trump) had a say over.
Haven't looked into this myself so don't mean to insinuate anything. But it seems a totally fair question to ask.
""""
Protests at the Capitol are not rare occurrences. This one got very *slightly* out of hand
"""
Can you point to any protest in the Capital that is similarly violent (at least at the level of police being knocked out and suicide-level trauma) that the media considers only considers getting "slightly" out of hand? Like if you can find something similar that was some pro-leftist riot at the Capital where police committed suicide after from the trauma sustained that would help your claim that this was a normal-level thing to happen in the American Capital.
If not, what I am left with is something that fully looks like a concerted effort by Trump to use a mob to pressure the government to get what he wants. I mean hell, he resisted sending in the National Guard and at the rally said he would *never* concede the election. On social media, Trump was suggesting that his supporters had the power to prevent Biden from taking office and One of his tweets, posted on January 6, 2021, at 5:43 a.m., was "Get smart Republicans. FIGHT."
Seriously, what has to be true about the events that unfolded that we must definitively conclude that Trump was using the mob to pressure Pence to overturn the election? What is missing or has to be different?
What about what happened *has* to be different that point 6 is a very reasonable conclusion given all the evidence we have? Tell me what we need to find that you would change your mind. And then commit to changing your mind if we do find it. I am happy to do the same for the reverse. I have already noted some cruxes earlier.
Some other quotes at his rally:
- As to counting Biden's electoral votes, Trump said, "We can't let that happen" and suggested Biden would be an "illegitimate president".
- 'Something's wrong here. Something's really wrong. [It] can't have happened.' And we fight. We fight like Hell and if you don't fight like Hell, you're not going to have a country anymore".
- "going to the Capitol and we're going to try and give [Republicans] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country"
- "you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated"
- He called upon his supporters to "fight much harder" against "bad people"; told the crowd that "you are allowed to go by very different rules"; said that his supporters were "not going to take it any longer"
Let's assume Trump has many lawyers on his side that can tell him what he can and cant say if he wanted to rile up a mob. Isn't everything he said and did consistent with what someone smart and careful would do to try and deliberately rile up a mob without getting caught?
7.
Yea but that was after a ton of pressure from his aides. It was only after being pressured by his cabinet, the threat of removal, and many resignations. I forgot which one but on the phone one of his aides even had to say "who do you think you are?" in disbelief when telling Trump he has to end the riot and things are getting out of hand. Because Trump's response was basically something like "well you have to find a way to make this work." I don't like this memory being tenuous so I'll be sure to link evidence to it if I can find the call again (otherwise I'll retract and point out if I find it was a lie)
He used the word "fight" 20 times and the word "peacefully" once in his entire rally.
For me the waiting too long to act isn't nearly as damning as how much damn pressure was needed to get him to talk down the rioters.
There was also the whole trying to seize voting machines thing. Which just by itself is damning.
I mean, I basically agree with this. I think it's a dumb situation to be in, but I blame the Republicans who nominated Trump. Yes, if you nominate a bad enough guy, you can force voters to vote for the other party's crappy candidate just to avoid him. That's not a criticism of the voters' decision algorithm, that's a criticism of the nomination process.
It's not easy for the Republicans, just the Democrats. Back in 2016, the propaganda press gave Trump lots and lots of free publicity, so he could win the primaries.
What's probably not intentional, but still true, is that in 2019 the Democrats, controlling various government units, started criminal cases and lawsuits against Trump, to his considerable benefit as far as getting the nomination went, because of the sympathy vote.
>Back in 2016, the propaganda press gave Trump lots and lots of free publicity, so he could win the primaries.
Was this a concerted effort or just failing businesses chasing ratings? If anything, their "mea culpa" from that situation made them intolerable during Trump's term.
Not a concerted effort, I think. Trump was getting big ratings for them and they followed that incentive gradient, which led in part to his election. They should have ignored him, should have went "huh, interesting, Trump's running again" and moved on, and maybe none of this would ever have happened.
Maybe. There are a lot of other factors for Trump's 2016 win.
I don't think a single democrat I know wouldn't instantly push a button to replace Trump with McCain, or Romney, or Liz Cheney. Trump running is a nightmare opponent for them.
That sounds plausible, but with enough time, you can probably Dutch book them: pick a candidate, let them call him a Nazi fascist racist etc., work themselves into a frenzy, and then offer them the option to replace him with someone else. Then they call HIM a Nazi fascist racist, and so on.
I don't think most of the "free publicity" in 2016 was intended to make Trump the candidate. It was mostly because he was often outrageous and controversial, which pulls in eyeballs. And I don't think liberals expected the unending torrent of negative coverage to help him. David Shor was on the rationally speaking podcast talking about this a while ago, and most Democrat campaigners were wildly wrong about what sort of ads would help persuade swing voters that year.
"The Democrats prosecuted Trump not because they wanted him to be punished but because they wanted to ensure he would be re-nominated in 2020" is an absolutely galaxy-brained take.
In 2016 Hillary preferred Trump, thinking he'd be easy to best. That doesn't make Trump their fault, but it is an irony.
It's like, if you will, Israel supporting Hamas way back because they figured they were so outrageous that they could be leveraged to work against the real, concrete villain, the PLO.
A better analogy might be the USA arming and supporting the Taliban against the Russians in Afghanistan, then in the end the Taliban became *their* problem to deal with.
I accepted this argument in 2016, and think it was largely (if not majority) true, but a lot of the "let's get the GOP to nominate Trump, then we'll win" doofus really learned a lesson.
I'm not sure I'm following the implied argument here.
Suppose your threat model is "Democrats can effectively choose the nominees of both the Democrats and the Republicans". Then the way you should act is...what? Vote for the Republican candidate (that the Democrats selected)?
Yang would have been nice, but we didn't get Yang, and I don't care for any of the jokers we did get. Between the two choices who have a chance, I vaguely prefer Trump, but that's mostly because I want the Democratic party to be a real political party again and so I want them to fail miserably, rather than having a legitimate preference for the man himself.
Also if Trump has his second term we never have to hear about him again.
The model isn't quite that, or you're right. Rather, it's: The Democrats can influence who the Republican nominee is, to be either someone they like more (Jeb Bush) or someone they like less (Trump), but not somebody ideal (Bernie Sanders). If they help Jeb, though, they lose in the general election, and Jeb is almost as bad as Trump (or maybe even worse, since Jeb would be mor effective in office).
I think the Democrats really dodged a bullet, twice, when Cruz and DeSantis lost the nomination. Their rhetoric is milder, but those two know how to fight a bureaucracy and win.
I remember very well Trump saying back then that yes, he didn't win the popular vote, but he didn't campaign for that; he could have won the popular vote if he'd had to, in fact, it would have been easier.
Since when was the Democratic Party line ever "Kamala Harris is absolutely useless"? Not to mention that there was a lot of dissent against Biden between the debate and him stepping down...
It's not a question of whether the Republicans would vote for one of them, but whether someone currently voting for Harris or another Democrat if the Democrats became "too authoritarian." If Democrats will not support any Republicans even if the Democrats are acting as authoritarians, then the argument that we should vote for Harris because "Trump is authoritarian" doesn't mean much.
Larry Hogan, Charlie Baker, Phil Scott, maybe Spencer Cox. I probably wouldn’t vote for Brian Kemp but if he won I wouldn’t be especially upset about it.
None of those would have won a Republican primary in 1980-today. None would have gotten even if you magicked away the winner. High probability of them failing even if you did it to the top 3. Significant even if you removed the top 5.
Kemp could win in some of the 3/5 scenarios. But you still said you wouldnt vote for him. So your opinion is kinda moot. Its like a Republican saying they wouldn't vote for Joe Manchin but wouldn't be terribly upset if he ended as president.
A *federal* primary, you mean? But that just brings us full circle - I'm willing to vote for a Republican and have in fact voted for one of the names listed - and he won! The Republican primary process is such that they'd never pass it to the presidential general, sure, but that doesn't make *me* more of a partisan.
As someone who would not have voted for a Republican presidential candidate in the last 30 years, McCain seemed kind of okay to me, just really hard to vote for because I hated Bush and Obama's speeches were so good. But ~last year I heard McCain talking off-the-cuff about the Ukraine war in 2014, and everything he said precisely matched my own understanding of Ukraine-in-2014 (which I mostly learned about in 2022) so I went away very impressed, especially after these many years of Orange Man, and I really wish he hadn't died.
Romney was more suspicious to me rather than clearly bad, and his vote to impeach Trump really does him credit. So I'd vote Romney if the Democrat was particularly bad. In a Romney-Hillary matchup, I think I could at least stay home on election day without remorse.
Since Schwarzenegger ran as Republican I would've been biased against at the time, but I recently saw he's actually the leader of a climate and environmental action group which makes me go "oh I guess I like you now", and I listened to one of his speeches for it and it was quite good―and pragmatic, a common virtue of Republicans. No native American invited to give a prayer, no irrational worries about all the places microplastics have been located, +1 Arnold.
You can also blame the 8 republicans who agreed he was to blame for Jan 6, but failed to vote to convict because they said “he was no longer president so it doesn’t matter.”
Those are the cowards who could have protected their own party from him but didn’t, who gave in to fears of death threats to their family and mob threats.
With those 8 votes you’d have hit the supermajority needed to convict at 66/100
I think this heuristic is basically a good analog to what most people are choosing this election. People either are voting:
1) on the bold platform of not being Donald Trump OR
2) on the bold platform of not being a democrat
People choose which heuristic to use based on whether they think democrats OR Trump has the highest chance of ending American civilization as we know it.
IMO one might as well flip a coin, but with a slight edge towards democrats edging the chance higher.
The options I see are trump turning USA into some authoritarian South American-like country, or democrats turning us into a slowly dying and useless EU.
Authoritarian countries are worse now, but I suspect EU-like ideals will lead to an eventual total decay of the west without USA to prop it up, eventually being worse.
At the end of the day this decision on the coin flip probably comes down to who one associates with. On the internet I associate with a combo of people, but IRL I associate with rural blue-collar people who I love and respect. Group-think leads to One Obvious Answer, so fuck it I’ll go with it.
I can’t wait to listen in to the results via satellite radio from my hunting camp in national forest where there’s no cell service/internet.
Yeah. Basically "the one pro-Trump argument that genuinely bothers me" from the post, right? I definitely agree with you, including that the worst case with the democrats is probably worse. I'm going with a simple cautious heuristic, though: avoid any short-term disasters. The democrats are just going to keep making things gradually worse. Trump could plausibly make things suddenly greatly worse.
Ah strategic voting, the quickest way to make your vote meaningless. If nothing Trump could do would keep you from voting for him, your vote doesn't matter ... to him. Same with Harris. This is why campaign promises get broken, because your revealed preference is that you don't care whether they actually govern after they get into office.
Contrast this with, say, a vote for Stein or Oliver in a suburb of Philadelphia (assuming Stein/Oliver earned your vote). If Harris wins, her staff will want to win the next election by shoring up support. They will notice that they can get XX,000 voters in certain suburbs of swing state cities if they pursue policies these voters care about. So in the next 4 years, they're going to start governing in a way that they hope will persuade these voters. If Trump wins, his team will make some of the same calculations, ensuring some policy proposals from persuadable voters are incorporated into the next administration to shore up support.
Meanwhile, if you're not a persuadable voter, but are going to vote for "the other candidate" no matter what, there's no reason for a politician to change the way they govern in order to earn your vote next time. They got it without having to earn it.
IMO this was one of Douglas Adams's worst takes. If a randomly chosen ordinary "non-lizard" American magically got a major party nomination, they would likely be crushed in the election, because they wouldn't have anywhere near the star quality of their opponent. Voters largely (and mostly correctly) prefer typical politicians, because they are more charismatic, more competent, and smarter than average people.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23120 "[Swedish] politicians are on average significantly smarter and better leaders than the population they represent."
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4166034 "We document that electoral candidates nominated by political parties fare better than the office-eligible population in multi-dimensional tests of cognitive and non-cognitive ability conducted by the Finnish Defense Forces. The politicians elected by voters demonstrate even higher levels of ability."
It's also the case that politicians generally have much higher education than the average person, and educational attainment is strongly correlated with intelligence.
Does this apply to Swedish local politicians, or to national politicians only? Because I've seen local guys up close and I'm not convinced they are that much smarter, better, stronger, faster, we can rebuild him, we have the technology - sorry, where was I going?
Yeah, there's not a whole heap to choose between Local Politician and Average Citizen.
MPs do best but local politicians are also substantially better than the average population, especially mayors. See the figure in section 8 in the paper (p. 29 or 31).
Yes, but not all smart/competent/charismatic people are lizards!
Being smart/competent/charismatic is needed to succeed with general voters, sure. But the lizard analogy is also pointing at worse traits needed to succeed behind the scenes and get on the ballot in the first place, relating to being power-hungry, two-faced, open to power-brokering with special interests and party insiders, etc.
I think there are a lot of genuinely good people that voters would vote for, who can't make it through the gauntlet to get their party's support.
Listen, I very badly want Approval voting so that we can break teh two-party system. Any time you want to throw your weight behind that reform, you will be welcomed to the movement.
Until then, it's a two party system, and yes that means choosing the lesser of two evils.
If you don't like the opposing party, nominate someone less evil!
I mean sure if I agreed with you that Jan 6 was so terrible I might be against trump too. If you hurt someone, then yeah you should get prison but what I saw was people entering already open doors, with cops welcoming them in and chatting it up as they wandered the halls. Until Jan6 I actually had no idea that entering the capital was illegal - protesters do it all the time in state capitals and it's celebrated.
I am not a January-6-ologist in the way that some people are, but I predict that people will show up here with evidence that it was pretty hard for people to do January 6 by accident without realizing it was illegal.
I think the argument is that as far as riots go, it wasn't that bad*, and the extent to which the people who participated in it had the book thrown at them was unprecedented.
*people usually point generally to the BLM riots, but the specific example I always think of is CHAZ/CHOP, which was way closer to what I'd call an insurrection, and had a bunch of people end up murdered.
I agree that CHAZ was probably more violent and lawbreakingy than 1/6, but CHAZ was just futzing around with part of Seattle, whereas 1/6 was going against the US Capitol as they were trying to certify an election. Worst case scenario for CHAZ was approximately what happened, worst case scenario for 1/6 is they ... threaten? rough up? Pence into declaring the election for Trump, and then we have some kind of coup or civil war or something. So I think it's fair to classify CHAZ as "random criminality" and 1/6 as something sort of like "attempted coup" (coup is a strong word and I prefer "insurrection", but something along that pathway).
Also, AFAIK Kamala Harris wasn't personally responsible for CHAZ.
> Worst case scenario for CHAZ was approximately what happened, worst case scenario for 1/6 is they ... threaten? rough up? Pence into declaring the election for Trump, and then we have some kind of coup or civil war or something
I don't think the law works that way. You can't just force the Vice President to say some magic words and bam, the election is overturned. I don't know what happens exactly, I assume the Senate reconvenes later once the immediate physical danger was passed and passes a "well actually" resolution. And if that doesn't happen then I'm sure there's all sorts of Supreme Court challenges. There's
If anyone thought the "VP says magic words" theory really worked, then the legislature's top priority in 2021 should have been to change the procedure by which the nomination is confirmed, because it's currently ridiculously non-robust... not against a random group of protestors entering the Capitol but against a VP less scrupulous than Pence.
(I also don't think any of this is physically possible, not for an unarmed group of citizens. Capitol security was shit, apparently, but not close to being that shit.)
1. It wasn’t just “magic words.” The plan involved trying to get Mike Pence to accept fake electors along with the certified ones. They wanted him to announce there were competing electors and ultimately throw the election to the House. Ron Johnson and Mike Lee were both part of this scheme, as were a few House members.
2. The Electoral Count Act was updated last year to clarify that the VP’s role is strictly ministerial, and raised the objection threshold to 20% from the previous one each from the House and Senate.
You can force the Vice President to say some allegedly-magic words and then millions of idiot Trumpists will believe that Trump is so obviously and legitimately President that it's their duty to back his play with their AR-15s. Even the possibility of that, makes 1/6 far more dangerous than CHAZ.
Under the law as it existed four years ago, it basically explicitly said that the Vice President's magic words determined the President. They have now changed the law.
Fair enough, I stand corrected on that particular aspect.
(I still don't believe that the VP's magic words would have determined the President in practice, particularly not if uttered under duress, but it's good to hear that they changed the law to make it more explicit.)
My understanding is that, under the law as it existed four years ago, it was just about possible to argue with a straight face that the Vice President's words determined the President. It has now been explicitly foreclosed.
- There's some Plan B but it takes 66% of Congress and nobody can get 66% of Congress to do anything these days.
- There's some Plan C, but the guy in charge of the relevant Congressional committee is a Republican, plus he just saw Pence get beaten up for defying Trump and he's not that excited about tempting the same fate.
- Trump is inaugurated on January 20, this wasn't "legal" according to the best and smartest interpretation of the law, but who's gonna stop him?
In this specific example, the relevant law dictates that both chambers of Congress have to agree if dual slates of electors are submitted. Say the House backs Trump and the Senate backs Biden. Now the tie is split by which elector slate is certified by the relevant state government executive. None of the Trump alternate slates were certified, so Biden wins. Even if Trump somehow subverted that system, he still has to survive a court challenge. The only way his plan works is if he can convince the state legislatures to throw out the legitimate Biden electors. And all of the relevant statute was amended in 2022 precisely to prevent another incident like this from happening.
The law is not a magic contract enforced by invisible gods. It's a human construct whose enforcement rests on legitimacy and belief. Consider how many times in the past countries had a civil war over whether the dead King's brother or the dead King's bastard son was supposed to be the heir to the throne. Didn't they have a succession law? Sure, but it was muddy enough that both those people could say to have some legitimate claim, and then the fact that various prominent aristocrats had conflicting interests did the rest.
Similarly, there is no magic word that makes the President. But if comes to the point where one political body says that the president is A, and another says that's invalid for <reason>, the president is B, then you have a succession crisis. If roughly 50% of your army's generals are persuaded that their sworn duty is to A, and the rest that it's to B, then odds are you also have a civil war.
I think that's fair but also, maybe Jan 6 also went about as bad as it could've? Like, what if the protestors were not let in? What if there was an actual security detail in place? Even if they got there and threatened pence, would that actually do anything?
> whereas 1/6 was going against the US Capitol as they were trying to certify an election.
Hmm. I wouldn’t vote for Trump were I American, because he’s as mad as a box of frogs. Stability is what is needed now.
However, even insurrection is too big a word here. Coup is ridiculous.
Let’s say the protestors had entered the Capitol and had stopped the ratification. What then?
Is it essential that the vote take place in that building? At that hour? Could the politicians not reconvene in the Tennis Court? You will get the reference.
Does it have to be on Jan 6th? Would Trump have been dictator for ever if the protestors occupied the building until Jan 7th? Jan 8th?
If the vote isn’t timely, does the Supreme Court throw its hands up in the air and issue a judgement saying because the constitution is ambivalent here, and even though the election looks like it went to Biden, with there being no vote because of an illegal entry into Congress the presidency is now Trump’s for life. He can proclaim himself King if he cares, nothing can be done. Meanwhile we might as well disband the court and let’s have no more discussion of constitutions. It was a vote on 3pm Jan 6th or Tyranny.
The word insurrection sounds more formidable to me, I’d expect a tank or two.
> Is it essential that the vote take place in that building? At that hour? Could the politicians not reconvene in the Tennis Court? You will get the reference.
> Does it have to be on Jan 6th?
Legally speaking, yes it had to be in that place at that time, according to the law. Meeting in the tennis courts would technically be a constitutional revolution of sorts.
I believe they've now changed the law so that the event is a formality, rather than the actual determination.
The word "insurrection" is used specifically because it sounds formidable. My personal feeling is that it's like the word "racist". You don't need to microanalyze dog whistles to determine who's secretly racist - an actual racist is all too happy to tell you their racist ideas. (Since they're so rare in modern society, it's too easy to forget what real racists actually look and act like.) And you don't need to pick out whether 3 words in Trump's speech could be interpreted as maybe kinda leaning towards insurrection. An actual "insurrection" would require somebody - ANYBODY - involved to know that they were trying to commit an insurrection. The people merrily tromping through and taking selfies in a building that's mostly open to the public sure weren't thinking that.
Come on, there is no plausible scenario where that happens. Trump made a perfectly legal (though tasteless) challenge of the electors. That is in no way an attempted coup. I agree that he disrupted the perception of the normal transfer of power, but that's all he did. It was a superficial interference with the ceremony and nothing more. I agree that it was tasteless and a black mark on his character, but honestly not any more tasteless than we already knew he was. "Coup" and "Insurrection" are intellectually dishonest political framings. Frankly it's beneath you. It's like accusing Colin Kaepernick of treason because he knelt for the national anthem. Yes it's tasteless, yes it means he's kind of a terrible person, but he's perfectly entitled to do it.
It wasn’t a perfectly legal challenge. He tried to submit fake electors. Dozens of fake electors have been indicted in Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Michigan, as were a few of Trump’s attorneys.
Fine, that's election fraud, or would have been had it gotten to the point where he was able to submit them. But it didn't. It wouldn't have worked anyway (the Senate wouldn't have voted for them) and it definitely wasn't an insurrection. I don't know the details there but at worst he's guilty of conspiracy to commit election fraud, which if you're honest with yourself you know probably happens on some level in every election. You don't think the Clintons ever did anything shady?
Alternate slates of electors are not "fake electors;" it's a standard practice that Republicans and Democrats have both participated in plenty of times throughout the nation's history. The fact that people got indicted over doing it this time is evidence of Democrat depravity and political persecution, not of those people having done anything wrong.
>CHAZ was just futzing around with part of Seattle
It obviously lacked the national significance of the attack on American democracy on Jan 6, but it should be noted that CHAZ involved multiple shootings, an unarmed Black teenager who was murdered by a lynch mob, and a warlord (who was repeatedly accused of sex trafficking) handing out rifles to random people, and assaulting people on camera, with a Seattle council member not only allowing the carnage to continue, but apologizing for their murders, and praising their occupation of the police station that precipitated the violence.
The aforementioned warlord was never charged for his atrocities and the city instead coordinated with him as a de facto leader.
Multiple city officials illegally destroyed evidence regarding the crimes there.
It was entirely possible that several members of Congress, and maybe Mike Pence, could have been taken hostage or killed. If Pence was killed and a state of emergency was declared, Trump might have tried to do other emergency actions justified by that.
The thing is, the foundational mythology for America *is* that kind of "private citizens rise up against a corrupt/unrepresentative government and take control of their own affairs and declare their own rulers". You have an entire day, 4th July, celebrating that! By force of arms, even!
So I think it's easier for Americans to believe that they are acting in the spirit of the Minutemen and the Founding Fathers by engaging in this sort of protest: of course the cronies of the illegitimate regime call us lawbreakers, but we are the true patriots.
" In 1767, tensions flared again following the British Parliament's passage of the Townshend Acts. In an effort to quell the mounting rebellion, King George III deployed troops to Boston. A local confrontation resulted in the troops killing protesters in the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. In 1772, anti-tax demonstrators in Rhode Island destroyed the Royal Navy customs schooner Gaspee. On December 16, 1773, activists disguised as Indians instigated the Boston Tea Party and dumped chests of tea owned by the British East India Company into Boston Harbor. London closed Boston Harbor and enacted a series of punitive laws, which effectively ended self-government in Massachusetts.
In late 1774, 12 of the Thirteen Colonies (Georgia joined in 1775) sent delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. It began coordinating Patriot resistance through underground networks of committees. In April 1775 British forces attempted to disarm local militias around Boston and engaged them."
'Underground networks of committees' can be construed as 'domestic terrorists'. It all depends who ends up writing the history.
By contrast, the Irish foundational myth is "they went forth to battle, but they always fell". Our successful rebellion succeeded by failing and having the response crushing us be so hard, it got other countries to put pressure on Britain (particularly America, due to the Irish-American campaigning).
If so, that's really bad. That was 250 years ago and what was appropriate and valor-worthy then is no longer now. That mythos needs to die because it is a dangerous one in the world and the country we have today, IMO.
It’s actually very hard to find out about the circumstances of CHAZ; the mayor and chief of police who presumably made the decisions to withdraw police from the area have been mum about it.
January 6, and especially the fake electors scheme, was organized by the sitting president. CHAZ and BLM were not. Biden condemned BLM violence from the very beginning and has made no effort to pardon anyone associated with it.
And even if the didn’t organize it, he did nothing to stop it for three hours despite please from his staff, daughter and various Fox News personalities.
Also, the day before, there was a strange announcement that Charles Grassley would preside instead of Mike Pence, but Pence shut that down. When that didn’t work they apparently were hoping to get Pence out during the chaos, something the Secret Service tried to do but which Pence resisted.
Then there’s the weird fact that all the Secret Service text massages were deleted.
I understand why the riot and other stuff gets conflated: it creates striking imagery and bolsters the coup rethoric. But it doesn't seem like a winning message: as an (admittedly somewhat unsympathetic) outside observer to the BLM riots, I could appreciate the left-wing approach on libertarian grounds, but after J6 I don't know jf I can reconcile it as anything but "I want my guys to go free and their guys to rot in jail forever".
Okay, then why have 4 times more people been prosecuted in connection with Jan 6 than in connection with BLM/Antifa violence during the summer of Floyd, despite the latter involving hundreds of times more violent actors over a span of months, not hours, and resulting in orders of magnitude more deaths and property damage?
I’m not here to defend to BLM rioters. I’ll just note that we’ve had thousands of riots in our history, many of them extremely bloody. But we’ve only had one president who wouldn’t commit to the peaceful transfer of power.
Fine, Trump is the first. How does this make him the greater evil, compared to an entire political party that is obviously far more willing and able to inflict politicised violence?
The worst case scenario for the BLM riots was that the rioters succeeded in storming the White House and killed Trump and/or his family. That's, uh... also another way to impact election outcomes, and probably more reliable than roughing up whoever was in the capitol that day.
> The worst case scenario for the BLM riots was that the rioters succeeded in storming the White House and killed Trump and/or his family
Or one or more Supreme Court justices. Remember, at least one actual assassination attempt was made, and only averted because the guy's sister (I think it was his sister, at least) talked him down at the last minute.
Also true. It amazes me that people somehow forget how Trump survived at least two assassination attempts, enabled by what can charitably be described as conspicuous ineptitude on the part of the secret service.
Only one of them was an attempt. The other was an attempt at making an attempt, but didn't actually rise to the level of an attempt. There are many other attempted attempts in history that no one pays attention to.
You also have to be pretty naive to say Trump had nothing to do with 1/6, he was just holding a rally a couple of blocks away from the capitol on the day of the certification after losing an election that he didn't admit on losing.
I was going to go to DC on Jan 6 to enjoy a laugh at the loons, but I can assure you that once the dumb mob and smart provocateurs broke through and the police were ushering people in an orderly fashion I would have entered as well. Judging the 700th guy to enter the capital building as having committed any kind of crime at all is quite sickening.
Jan 6 isn't principally about the riot per se. The trespassing, even the violence, is just what's most visibly striking, but it's not what makes it terrible. I would agree with you that it's not that big a deal if it was just a protest-turned-riot.
The real story of Jan 6 is the story of Trump's attempt to overturn the results of the election by every possible means. The riot was the last-ditch attempt in a long series of attempts that had been going on for months prior. The real story of Jan 6 is that it was part of an attempted coup. That's what makes it completely disqualifying, what makes it so terrible that this election isn't about politics-as-usual.
> The real story of Jan 6 is the story of Trump's attempt to overturn the results of the election by every possible means. ... The real story of Jan 6 is that it was part of an attempted coup.
No. It was not. Please don't go spreading around wild allegations so far removed from the facts that even the New York Times has debunked them.
The simple, undeniable fact of the matter is, while the Trump rally in which he allegedly incited the riot was still going on, the riot was already in full swing. Before he ever spoke the allegedly inciting words, the Capitol had already been breached. Unless you wish to submit evidence that President Trump or one of his surrogates *literally has a time machine,* it is physically impossible for this accusation to be true.
What I understood from Matt's comment is: the January 6 rioters were inspired by exactly the same election denial from Trump that underpinned his refusal to concede, his pressuring of swing state election officials, his endless frivolous litigation, his refusal to initiate the presidential transition, and his holding of the same day's rally in the first place.
The Trump campaign had been sowing the seeds of that riot literally for months before Jan 6. The plan to pressure Mike Pence to reject the Presidential Elector votes had been in swing since the results were known. The rally, the speeches by Trump's cronies (like Eastman and Giuliani), and the speech by Trump himself, were all part of this same plot. They were the last ditch effort to prevent the ordinary procedure from continuing.
None of what you said contradicts any of that. Again, the point isn't "Trump incited people to violence at the Capitol." The point is the whole series of events that led there. In other words, the deliberate, months-long attempt to coup the government in favor of Trump.
Your assertion that “the riot was in full swing” is misleading. Trump’s entire speech concluded at around 1:10 pm. The first barriers well outside the Capitol were breached at 12:50, 20 minutes prior. The actual Capitol Building wasn’t entered by force until around 2:10, a full hour after Trump’s speech. No one would reasonably consider the Capitol riot was in “full swing” until the rioters at least entered the Capitol Building. And by that time they’d certainly know of Trump’s remarks more than an hour prior.
Also, I can find no evidence that the NYT debunked the claim that Trump played a role on January 6th in inciting the Capitol riot. Can you link to it?
Yes it was. Why did the protestors say "Hang Mike Pence"? What did the protestors, and Donald Trump, want Pence to do? What did Pence mean when he later said that Trump asked him to "choose between Trump and the constitution"? January 6 was the final part of the "fake electors plot", which is well documented.
This is a deep misunderstanding of the issue. Even if Trump *hadn't even asked anyone to go to the Capitol during his speech at all*, he would still be responsible for most of what happened at the Capitol that day.
Does he bear full responsibility? No. Would he bear more responsibility if he had said "go there and break in and show those people who we are"? Yes. But these standards are absurd.
Yes it was. You are just uninformed or are trying to burry your head in the sand. Which is more likely. Trump absolutely did try to overturn the election. He was pretty incompetent about it, because he is not the smartest. But he absolutely did try. And it is obvious.
What's amazing is how nobody remembers the faithless electors and related efforts of 2016/17, and the rioting and attempts to disrupt the EC voting and inauguration.
I think you are focusing on a single tree that is wrong about what Trump did and missing the forest of all the stuff Trump seems to have actually done.
It is possible both that the liberal media spread misinformation about Trump's allegedly inciting words AND for him to have spent over a month of concerted effort to attempt a coup.
It is a Motte and Bailey fallacy. Your Motte is that Trump never spoke the alleged inciting words. Your Bailey is that Trump never actually tried to overturn the election through over a month of concerted effort that resembles a coup.
Also... this even seems besides the point because event your Motte isn't that strong. I watched it all live. I only thought "holy shit that is not a protest that is a now a riot" after Trump was done speaking. As someone further down posted:
> The first barriers well outside the Capitol were breached at 12:50, 20 minutes prior. The actual Capitol Building wasn’t entered by force until around 2:10, a full hour after Trump’s speech. No one would reasonably consider the Capitol riot was in “full swing” until the rioters at least entered the Capitol Building. And by that time they’d certainly know of Trump’s remarks more than an hour prior.
Where's this NYT debunking you are referencing btw?
I think that if "the forest of all the stuff Trump seems to have actually done" is on the table, then so must be the forest of things Clinton, Biden, Harris, and the DNC have done, which puts us close enough to square one that you might want to rethink that.
Rethink what? Square one what? Did you even read the article this is a comment section to? The 4 counterarguments Scott brings up I think argue convincingly that the leftist monoculture can be very bad but it is still better to support right now than Trump.
Also if you pointed out something bad Harris did and my response was "well if that's on the table we need to consider the bad things Trump did and you might want to rethink that" I would look avoidant at best and like I am simply conceding that it doesn't matter and Harris is that bad at worst.
It doesn't counter-argue the claim that Harris is bad at all. Same goes for you simply pointing at Clinton, Biden, Harris. I don't care about these politicians nor particularly support them anyway.
This is some of the info about Trump that makes a difference for me. They didn’t necessarily succeed in making obvious any ties to Russian organized crime per se, but he’s been swimming in “organized crime” water for a long time due to the old school NY crime families and his business deals.
His “normal” is this tradition of dominance at any cost. It’s fundamentally contrary to literal democracy. He didn’t do a good enough job last time partly because he incorrectly assessed the people around him. That problem has no doubt been addressed and he has different people visible around him now, plus all the old connections.
The quasi-tourist riot didn’t work because most of the rest of the system did their jobs. People think the ones they like will win the revolution. I am not looking forward to the mangled monstrosity of a gutted government I think Trump would usher in. I don’t see “satisfying, seamless conservatism” coming, I see a big mess with plenty more opportunities for organized crime and other outside infiltration. Jan 6 had volunteers and a Hollywood quality but his Act II would be weirder and worse. I think.
Tell me if you think those people were welcomed in by police, and that they would not have reasonably known they were violating the law.
The point of January 6 was to coerce Mike Pence into throwing out the electoral votes of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Mexico, Georgia, and Arizona. As part of his plot to get these EVs thrown out - representing tens of millions of voters - Donald Trump engaged in a criminal conspiracy to create seven false slates of electors. Loraine Pellegrino, one of these false electors for Arizona, has already plead guilty; many others are in the process of being charged for falsely representing themselves as the legitimate electors. The riot is just the cherry on top of an attempted coup.
I'm not sure if you're interested in changing your mind, but on the off chance that you are, you should read the Eastman memos (https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf). They detail exactly what Trump's plan was on J6. It's a very short document, but a quick summary is:
- Manufacture claims of fraud
- Use those claims as a justification to throw out electoral votes from blue swing states
- Claim that with the remaining electoral votes, Trump won
It's a really dangerous idea, one that is about as close to 'only counting the votes with my name on it and discarding the rest'. I would focus less on the riots, they are a bit of a distraction, and instead focus on the legal play that almost would have worked if Pence was a weaker man.
There were extensive violent clashes between the rioters and capitol police on January 6, including one police officer who was beaten to death by Trump's supporters.
This is a blatant lie. The autopsy of Brian Sicknick is publicly available, anyone can read it. He died of multiple strokes that were ruled natural causes; there was no evidence of blunt trauma or allergic reaction to the chemical (pepper spray) the rioters used on him.
Hey, just wanted to say thanx for posting this comment. I believed for a long time the death was a direct result of the rioters and never rechecked on the news later. I just did a double-take and you are indeed correct. I believed an untruth.
This does interestingly mean the rioters didn't actually directly kill a single person. This is an important update for me.
No problem. I think the culture war nature of this thread drew in a lot of low quality posts. Stuff that was just wrong, and could be verified as wrong with a cursory effort.
Yea kinda embarrassing how quickly it is verifiable. Up until recently also didn't believe how many Isrealis the IDF's helicopters killed after October 7th. The Hannibal Directive I knew existed, but I read some debunking article of it at the time and concluded it was Hamas propaganda. Had a friend point out actually they were used so did a double-take like I did with your comment and... sure enough. Same story as the fire extinguisher. The debunking article I read closer to October 7th was just lies.
If I am any evidence - I think it is just too useful to lie when something crucially damning is happening for implicated parties. Because even truth-seeking people cannot properly fact check so close to the event (or it is very difficult). Then they believe the wrong thing and don't self-correct until only months later when the lie can no longer be propped up and it becomes easily verifiable it was a lie all along.
This is laughably bad faith. We all watched it, the video and photos are readily available. Police were being bashed with fire extinguishers. Police were defending barriers with water cannons. It was abundantly obvious you can't storm the capitol. Congress people were fleeing for their lives and hiding in closets. Quite honestly, you should be ashamed to be either this ignorant or this apologist of terrorism on US soil.
Ok, so I believed the exact same thing as you. Except if you look on say the wikipedia page now it says this about his death:
"Multiple media outlets reported Sicknick's death was due to injuries he sustained, but months later the Washington, D.C. medical examiner reported there were no injuries to Sicknick... The media, however, continued to incorrectly report for weeks that Sicknick had died after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher during the unrest, citing two "anonymous law enforcement officials" as their source"
And NONE of the reddit photos you linked show police being bashed by fire extinguishers.
I've changed my mind. It does look like it was a lie from from the leftist side to get more clicks. The left lies as well unfortunately.
I won't be following your endorsement but I appreciate how balanced this article was, without resorting to 'Trump is a Nazi dictator' histrionics. One of the best election articles I've seen this cycle.
One thing you did not mention at all was Trump's age and VP choice - I like Vance and would be happy for him to step up a leadership role within the party, if not take over the Presidency, and his career would obviously be benefited substantially by a Trump win.
I did find this bit quite remarkable after yesterday's post on Prop 36, which seemed totally fine with shoplifters and drug addicts violating norms: "A single shoplifter or paint-thrower does very little damage, but this is true only because we jealously protect the norms against these kinds of people. If we truly gave up on punishing shoplifters, everyone would steal from everyone else and civilization would collapse. Asking “why should we punish shoplifters when they do so little damage?” is like asking “why should we vaccinate against measles when measles is so rare?”
Clara included a slightly different set of caveats than I would have. If I'd written that article, it would have stressed that current law mandates six months in jail for shoplifting, the new law mandates three years in jail, and [long collection of studies that I would have rounded up] shows us that criminals aren't especially moved by the difference between six months and three years of jail time when "deciding" whether to commit crimes.
I definitely don't think "don't punish shoplifters at all" is a good strategy.
If we want to get all game-theory about it, the punishment should be set at the equilibrium between where the resulting people sitting in prison are more of a loss to society than the negative externalities from the shoplifting feedback loop.
Ideally though you'd be able to think up cheaper alternatives than prison for disincentivizing shoplifting. Maybe some combination of good surveillance + high policing and better economic/welfare policies such as zoning reform, better transit, an LVT, and a minimal UBI?
Fresh off of jury duty, I decided that we should stop worrying so much about deterrence and incapacitation and such.
Punishments should be set no more harshly than the jury pool can bear. They won’t convict if they feel it’s too harsh, or they’ll want an unreasonably high standard of proof.
My impression is that probability of punishment matters more to deterrence than severity of punishment. I'm also under the impression that CCTV security tapes _potentially_ make a lot of shoplifting straightforward to prosecute, but that stores don't find it worthwhile. Maybe, instead of changing the sentence, the change should be to give the stores more of an incentive to prosecute? It is tricky to avoid incentivizing perverse outcomes, but maybe subsidize prosecution in cases leading to a conviction? ( but not so much that stores start faking evidence... )
Yeah, I'm thinking if there's like a way to easily catch and civily fine shoplifters, even for minimal sums, that might be ideal at discouraging people at the start from taking more. No one starts out shoplifting hundreds of dollars of merchandise after all. Maybe big box stores should be empowered to hire employees that follow shoplifters home, report the addresses they find to the police so the police can verify that the person caught on video shoplifting lives at the address. If so, write them a ticket (like a traffic ticket), put their face, address, and name in a database, and leave.
Many Thanks! Yes, something like that might work. I'm not sure if civil fines will work (a shoplifter with zero assets can't be effectively fined), but something that costs them even minimal amounts of time, _if_ it has a high probability of happening, might be enough to discourage them.
"Maybe some combination of good surveillance + high policing and better economic/welfare policies such as zoning reform, better transit, an LVT, and a minimal UBI?"
According to this law firm's website, it's not a blanket six months in jail, it's *up to* six month. And there are ways to avoid that, if you (or your lawyers) can wangle your way onto a 'diversion program':
Shoplifting in California is normally a misdemeanor offense that carries a maximum potential penalty of:
- up to six months in the county jail, and
- a fine of up to $1,000.
If someone is accused of stealing or attempting to steal items valued at more than $950, then that individual can be charged with Penal Code 487 PC grand theft.
Grand theft can be charged as a felony that carries up to three years in state prison.
There are situations where a defendant can face felony charges punishable by up to 3 years in jail and a $10,000 fine.
Felony penalties apply if defendant has a prior conviction for any of the following crimes:
- a sex crime that requires registration as a sex offender,
- any sex crime on a minor under 14 years old,
- any sex crime committed by using force, violence, or threats,
- gross vehicular manslaughter under Penal Code 191.5 PC,
- murder, attempted murder, or solicitation under Penal Code 187 PC,
- any serious or violent felony punishable by life in prison or death
Civil demand letter
Business owners that shoplifters victimize will also often make civil demands under California Penal Code 490.5 PC.
A civil demand requires the shoplifter to pay restitution to repay the business owner for the items stolen or damaged by the alleged shoplifter.
These letters are sent by law firms representing the business owners and can demand up to $500 to recover costs incurred by the alleged shoplifting.
Proposition 47
Before Proposition 47 was passed in 2014, you could face Penal Code 459 burglary charges with felony penalties, but now you must be charged with misdemeanor PC 459.5 shoplifting.
Anyone convicted of burglary prior to the new [law] who actually committed shoplifting, are eligible to apply for resentencing.
What Are Some Defenses to Shoplifting?
The crime of shoplifting requires a specific criminal intent to steal the items from a store prior to entry.
Thus, perhaps we can make an argument you developed the intent to steal after you entered the business.
While this defense still can result in a conviction for petty theft, it may help avoid a conviction of shoplifting in certain cases.
If an individual forgot to pay for an item or was planning to pay for an item they were carrying in a bag or pocket while inside the store, then a mistake defense can be raised.
Prosecutors will look to every fact and circumstance in a shoplifting case to prove an individual's criminal intent as it is often the key element that needs to be proven in a shoplifting case.
While not technically defenses, there are other ways that you may be able to resolve your shoplifting case without ending up with a criminal conviction. These methods include:
Diversion program: if accepted into a diversion program, you will have to agree to abide by a number of conditions set by the court, such as community service or restitution. If you complete these conditions successfully, your case will be dismissed, and you will not end up with a criminal record.
Civil compromise: this is an agreement between a shoplifter and the business where the items were alleged to have been stolen. In a civil compromise, the shoplifter agrees to repay the costs incurred because of the theft or attempted theft, and the business agrees not to prosecute the shoplifter.
Further, through prefiling intervention, we might be able to negotiate with the prosecutor to avoid filing criminal charges before court.
If you have questions about a criminal case, then it is important that you speak to an experienced criminal defense attorney."
Increasing jail sentences for petty crimes is prosocial even if it doesn't a priori disincentivize the crimes, because it reduces both time available for recidivism and the birth rate of petty criminals
The current law doesn't mandate six months in prison though. That's a huge misrepresentation of how our justice system actually works in practice. The maximum allowable sentence is 6 months under Prop 47. Nobody actually serves 6 months. I'm not an expert but probably judges give out an average sentence of 2-3 months after a trial. But 95+% of cases end in a plea bargain, and a plea bargain is less, maybe 2-3 weeks of jail time. And that's before we even start talking about progressive DAs giving offenders 1 week or less. So the comparison should be more like 2 weeks in jail vs 12 weeks in prison, which is much more significant.
I'd be interested to learn more if any commentors can post more info about the average sentence, maximum observed sentence, plea bargain process, etc. for shoplifting . I'd be impressed if someone could find a case of anyone serving more than 3 months for shoplifting in the whole state, or 1 month for shoplifting in SF specifically. Also the plea bargain negotiation seems interesting. The criminal has no leverage because they're poor and they only have a public defender. But the DA has no leverage because they don't want to spend an exorbitant amount paying a judge, prosecutor, court secretary, etc. for a trial about shoplifting less than $950, and then some progressive jury member who doesn't want to prosecute non-violent crime causes a hung jury.
+1 on this take. I support Trump but I appreciate Scott’s good faith attempt to articulate positions for both sides. His fair-mindedness, which spills over into his commenters, is the reason I hang out in this corner of the Internet.
Many of them can, especially around here. But reasonableness is anticorrelated with popularity these days, so I don't blame you if you haven't noticed.
When did Trump say "let's decapitate that reporter"? I'm pretty sure if that were a thing, Google could've found it when I searched for it. I remember he "urged the military to handle 'radical left lunatics' on Election Day", but for Trump that kind of rhetoric just seems like an average Tuesday, and his actual conduct as president suggests the kinds of things he'll do in a second term, which is to say: he'll do a wide variety of bad things, divide the country even more, weaken democracy even more, maybe cause some economic problems that benefit at least some of the wealthiest, suck up to dictators and seem overly approving of them...
but probably not decapitate any reporters, commit any genocides, or become a genuine dictator even if he wants to. I think 'Trump is a Nazi dictator' histrionics are counterproductive.
Good piece! I particularly like the point about how nearly all the bad things that Harris advocates like price controls are also things Trump advocates and the comparison to Chavez. I think it's worth emphasizing the J6 stuff: like, he attempted to pull off a coup. The day of January 6 where the mob stormed the capitol is a much less big deal than the months long conspiracy to get fake electors to unilaterally declare him president in violation of the law.
I have no idea if he was, but I am not particularly sure why pointing out that someone was wrong on a single issue 15 years ago indicates something wrong with their judgement now. It would be different if you could point to a consistent record of errors or point out a continuing systematic error that has lasted well over a decade but in their absence it provides little illumination.
My once liking Chavez, who ended up becoming a dictator, contributes to me now shunning politicians with strong authoritarian tendencies, which is why I supported neither Trump nor Sanders eight years ago.
They weren't "fake" electors, alternate elector slates are part of the process of legal challenges to elections. The electoral college results have a submission deadline in mid December, and if they aren't submitted they can't be used in any circumstance. So if Trump won an election lawsuit after Dec 14 2020, but didn't have alternate electors submitted, there would be no remedy and Trump would still lose even though he proved in court there was election fraud. Alternate electors were used in the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy election, in Hawaii, because there was a recount underway at the time of the deadline. You can find op-eds arguing that Al Gore should have used an alternate elector slate in Florida if he wanted to drag out his election challenge, or the Democrats should have used them in Pennsylvania in 2020 if things dragged on too long there. Alternate electors are not illegal or even necessarily shady.
The Electoral Count Act of 1887 lays out how alternate elector slates are handled. The process is to have the Senate and House independently determine which slate is legitimate; if they can't agree, the slate verified by the governor of the state in question wins. If you want to know where Trump went wrong, search for the Eastman memo. The VP does not have the authority to unilaterally choose elector slates.
No, they were fake electors, that's why they are being charged. Loraine Pellegrino has already plead guilty, and others are in the process of being prosecuted.
Alternate slates of electors have to be empowered by the legitimate legislature.
I don't think this is true, or otherwise the 1960 electors would also have been illegal. The ECA is rather vague and only requires that the electors be ratified by the state executive. Further, I don't think the alternate slates have to be certified to be legitimate or that wouldn't be the proposed tie breaking method. But I'm not sure and if you have any links to the relevant US code or such I would appreciate it.
The 1960 electors were all done in the open, with the state government ultimately agreeing they should be the slate. On Dec 19, the Dem slate cast their ballots one minute after the Rep slate, at the same place. That's different from getting eleven of your buddies to sign a document saying that they're "duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America from the State of Arizona" with no involvement from the state legislature whatsoever. Otherwise I could just make a slate of electors myself for every state and try to send it to Congress, and it would be all gucci, when that's obviously filing false documents (and illegal, and basically what Trump did*).
*: In most cases. PA and NM both included hedging in their language, so their electors aren't being charged.
Their votes didn't have any legal value because they were contingent on the various state elections being declared fraudulent, which obviously never happened. But the text of the ECA only stipulates that the electors must be officially selected by the states, which they were. The text of it here: https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/24/STATUTE-24-Pg373.pdf
The ECA was amended in 2022, because it was rather vague and didn't prevent these kinds of things from happening.
They were indicted, which doesn't mean much. A couple people took plea deals before trial, but again this doesn't get into the legal theory of why what they did was unlawful. AFAICT, the alternate electors were within the legal process established by Article II and the ECA.
Now, it's entirely possible they violated state law in their individual jurisdictions. I don't know the penal code for every single state where this happened, but all of the indictments seem to be some form of a filing false documents charge.
> Has anyone done a deep dive on the fake electors scheme? And have there been other instances of similar behavior in American history?
It's called "submitting an alternate slate of electors," and it's been a common practice throughout American history. Practically any time there's been a state where the race was close enough to be contested, both parties, as a standard practice, will submit their electors and then wait for the recounts to resolve which slate becomes "official."
Democrats calling this completely standard practice, which they have engaged in plenty of times over the years, a "scheme" to submit "fake electors" in this particular instance, is nothing more than a game of Calvinball.
Purely as a matter of empirics, in how many previous elections has a state sent more than one slate of electoral votes to the senate? My understanding is that it happened once, in the 1880s, and it almost caused a constitutional crisis that led to the ECA. And then it happened again, once, in the 1960s in the Nixon/Kennedy case. And that's it. If it happened more than that, I'd love to hear about it, because I have done a lot of research on this and may have missed something.
The first time was 1876. Also apparently someone in Oregon sent in an alternate slate in 1888, but it was regarded as a joke (possibly about the ECA that was passed the year before?) and ignored. 1960 in Hawaii was the second (real) time, and that's it afaik.
Problem is that the way in which they went about alternative electors would have ended up with them losing 0-9 in the supreme court in the opinion of the people who orchestrated the whole alternative electors plot. This should give you a clear indication that what they were doing was not legal.
- Use those claims as a justification to throw out electoral votes from blue swing states
- Claim that with the remaining electoral votes, Trump won
It's a really dangerous idea, one that is about as close to 'only counting the votes with my name on it and discarding the rest'. I would focus less on the riots, they are a bit of a distraction, and instead focus on the legal play that almost would have worked if Pence was a weaker man.
Thank you. This is what I was looking for. Definitely a shady play. I agree with you, the riot was mostly just noise the media could cry about for 4 years.
To play devil's advocate: Does the lack of voter id laws in many blue and swing states concern you?
A question that cuts to the point: is it possible to legally demonstrate fraud under circumstances where ID is not checked?
I haven't felt the need to consider whether voter ID laws are good or bad because I don't think they are material to how I feel about J6. The Trump team filed 60 (!) cases alleging fraud in a variety of ways. By the time of J6, all but 4 had been dismissed, including from R appointed judges. So a lot of people with a lot of motivation looked into this and couldn't find anything.
(And even if you ignore the cases, Trump's DOJ, Republican state officials, and Republican election officials ALSO couldn't find anything, even when directly asked by Trump. Here's an example transcript of a call where Trump is trying to get a Georgia official to admit there was fraud, and the official goes, paraphrasing, "I'm sorry man, I really wish there was, but there isn't": https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/03/politics/trump-brad-raffensperger-phone-call-transcript/index.html)
- More faithless electors defected against Clinton than against Trump
- The 2020 schemes were completely driven by Trump; Clinton did not create or promote the 2016 faithless elector campaign
- The 2016 pro-Clinton faithless elector campaign was conducted in public, whereas Trump/Eastman's secret plan was designed to blindside everyone who wasn't in on it.
- Electors' freedom is clearly implied by the constitution, otherwise there's no reason for electors to exist in the first place. Even if state law creates a penalty for faithless voting, once a faithless vote is cast, people might raise their eyebrows, but the vote is valid and will be counted. Thus, no conspiracy was necessary. But Trump/Eastman's plan involved misleading their so-called "fake electors", i.e. if the electors knew what Trump/Eastman were planning to do, they likely never would have agreed to act as a second slate of electors in the first place. The plan also required Pence to disregard federal law without seeking a court ruling on their ad-hoc self-serving theory that the law was unconstitutional.
- In 2016 Clinton won the popular vote, which motivated the campaign
- In 2020 Trump knew that he lost both the popular vote and electoral college, after convincing his fans beforehand that the election would be rigged and encouraging them to prepare to intervene ("Proud Boys? Stand up and stand by!")
- The 2016 campaign was simple; Trump's scheme was elaborate, with many moving parts
- After losing, Trump attempted to mislead the public and convince many officials to act immorally and/or illegally in order to produce an outcome that was arguably, itself, constitutional in a narrow technical sense.
I just learned that Nick Fuentes prefers Game of Thrones to Lord of the Rings, so he's dead to me. Or he would be, if I ever knew anything about him or cared 😁
I say, It's Her Turn Now! For Jill Stein - this is her third bite at the cherry, after 2012 and 2016. She was even accused of the dreaded Russian collusion, God bless her. So I think she should have her chance to sit in the White House and introduce her own Green Party bills if she wants to do so.
Trump was President 4 years, and couldn't keep the bureaucracy from defeating him or even to stop the Justice Dept. from suppressing the Hunter Biden tax investigation or using lawfare against him. He's no dictator; he couldn't even dictate to a secretary if she had civil service protection.
The Democrats, on the other hand, has the media, the FBI, the CIA, the State Dept., the military, and the rest of the bureaucracy. And they don't even bother to pretend that it's Joe Biden or Kamala Harris who is running things. Don't you find that disturbing?
I agree that one small shoplifter can't damage the company. But if you get lots of them, because shoplifting is easy/fun/not a crime/not prosecuted, it adds up. Idiot teenager who steals a lipstick because she's on a sub-reddit that boasts about boosting stuff from stores isn't a problem. Gangs of teenagers doing it? That starts to become "we have to lock up our goods, or at least keep them behind the counter where the sales assistant hands them out, and this inconveniences our ordinary customers, who may become so aggravated, they stop coming to our store".
Then add in organised criminal shoplifting, and it does become a real problem.
"A man who carried out 12 shoplifting offences in Cork City was jailed for seven months as the sentencing judge said shopkeepers were challenged by such thefts as they strive to pay their staff, rates and other business expenses.
...Previous to the 12 new theft offences, the defendant had 205 convictions, including 37 for theft, 31 for being threatening and abusive and 50 for being drunk and a danger."
People are naturally sympathetic to stories of "person arrested for small theft, wanted to feed their children" and I'm sympathetic to that myself, *when* it's genuine. But again, professional criminals use children as decoys when going in to steal, and use pleas of "I was only trying to feed my kids" when the fact is that they routinely engage in theft:
"A mother of three is starting a 10-month jail term as a result of the theft of €24 worth of groceries from an Aldi supermarket.
What made the shoplifting offence by Mary Cash more serious was the fact that she had 36 previous convictions for theft, the court was told.
A sentence of three months was imposed on her for this latest offence committed on September 25, 2023, in Aldi at The Elysian building in Cork.
Compounding matters, the 38-year-old woman had a 10-month suspended jail sentence hanging over her. That sentence had been imposed for previous thefts but suspended on the condition that she would not commit any more offences for the following year.
The September 25 offence triggered an application by the prosecution to revoke that suspension."
I do see why courts and police don't bother with 'small' crimes as a waste of time and effort, but on the other hand, a lot of small crimes add up, and someone who gets away with small crimes may be likely to keep committing them, or to move on to more serious offences.
"A woman allegedly shoplifted a number of items from Penneys on her way to court to appear on other shoplifting charges, a court has heard.
Lisa Mongan appeared at Letterkenny District Court in Co Donegal charged with stealing property valued at between €400 and €600 of cosmetics and clothing from Penneys at Letterkenny Shopping Centre.
The court was told that gardaí have CCTV footage which shows Ms Mongan (33) lifting items and placing them into her bag before walking out without paying. None of the items were recovered.
The incident happened at around 10am on Wednesday morning, moments before she was due in court on similar charges."
Declaration of bias: worked in retail many, many moons ago; was targeted by organised shoplifters, they distracted me and made off with lottery ticket cash, I got hauled over the coals by my manager for it, so I am on the side of "yes arrest the so-and-sos" 😀
Yes, I did read Part III. I've just written up some disagreements. It's embarassingly long, but that's because I respect you and wanted to give as good a reply as I could in half an hour.
Argument 1. The Democrats are slowly and quietly eroding democracy, but Trump is attacking it outright.
Counterargument 1. First, think about what Trump’s done to democracy. Nothing, except cast doubt on the integrity of the 2020 election. There, the real question is whether there was really zero cheating as almost all the media says, or at least a trivial amount of cheating, whcih is what some intellectuals say. It is begging the question to say that complaining about a stolen election is anti-democratic.
What about January 6? That was a riot, never truly investigated, probably instigated by the Left, possibly even with FBI help. Who benefited from it? Who *could* have benefited from it? The riot cut off the planned debate on whether the election was stolen, and gave the Democrats a cudgel to use for 4 years. See https://www.unz.com/article/remembering-the-reichstag-fire/ .
What Trump *has* done is talk very wildly about things like throwing Hillary Clinton in jail. But we all know that he is constantly hyperbolic. His talk is poetry, not prose, in the sense that it conveys meaning well, but not the literal meaning. He never did put Hillary in jail, and she undoubtedly committed an illegality (was it criminal or civil? I think it was criminal for Genl. Schwarzkopf) with her use of confidential info.
What about the Democrats? The reason their illegalities seem mild is because the media won’t cover them as anti-democratic. The unilateral forgiveness of student loans was illegal and an offense against democracy, even though it doesn’t sound dangerous. What about the hundreds of Jan 6 felonies misusing a false-records statute, which the Supreme Court threw out recently? What about the prosecutions of numerous Trump officials, and of Trump himself? Don’t say: “Republicans deserve it; Democrats don’t.”
The Democrats have seriously proposed packing the Supreme Court, and getting rid of the electoral college. They have overthrown a President— the Biden disappearance— and chosen a presidential candidate who had no popular support even in the Democratic Party.
So, the Democrats walk softly but carry a big stick. Trump does the opposite.
Argument 2. The Democrats have two serious obstacles to destroying democracy: the Supreme Court, and their lack of internal unity. Both of those favor the Republicans.
Counterargument 2. The Supreme Court would also stop Trump from becoming a dictator. We have no evidence to the contrary. The 6 more Republican justices, unlike the 3 Democratic justices, do not vote in lockstep. Also, it is not true that the Democrats have less unity. How many Democratic officeholders have condemned Joe Biden or Kamala Harris? Trump has lots of his former officials and lots of Republican leaders who hate him, and are willing to say so in public. Half the party, at least, has distaste for him— I, myself, am an example— and he is actually to the left of the Republican Party, a feature concealed by how willing he is to talk big about how bad the establishment is.
Argument 3. It’s bad if you want to “be pro-freedom, pro-liberalism, and pro-democracy, but didn’t really take a stand against somebody trying to attack enemy politicians and rig an election.”
Counterargument 3. I think maybe you were getting tired of writing at that point, as I am now myself! Otherwise, you’d think about how viciously the Democrats attack Trump. Has Trump even called Harris a Communist? He has obvious contempt for her, but that’s his opinion and why should he hide it? And “rig an election”? How is Trump doing that? The Democrats, on the other hand, … well, suppressing the NY Post’s Hunter story, Pfizer delaying vaccine approval just so Trump wouldn’t get credit before the electoin, changes in voting rules (in PA saying absentee ballots wouldn’t be checked for signature mismatch), the media propagandizing, and the internet platforms throttling conservatives. . .
Argument 4. Whatever bad things the Democrats do or intend to do, Trump would also do if he could get away with it.
Counterargument 4. Maybe he’d like to— he says wild things, but historically he has been all talk and no action. Suppose he *would* like to. Unlike the Democrats, Trump can’t get away with anything. The Democrats have 90% of the media power on their side— of the cable news, of broadcast news, of internet platforms, of newspapers, of magazines, of webzines. . . The Democrats have the Bureaucracy, including the FBI, the Justice Dept., and the armed forces. The Democrats have most lawyers and lobbyists and nonprofits groups, and the most money.
Trump's repeated nickname for her is Comrade Kamala, and he has called her a Marxist and a communist several times, as well as also calling her a fascist.
Thanks. I googled and I see he's called her communist a lot. That's funny about also calling her a fascist. It has some truth in it-- the cooperation of business and government-- but she's not much of a populist nationalist ("garbage" and all that).
Unz promotes theories that really are conspiracy theories, yes, and deranged people follow him and ruin the comments. But occasionally there is something good on his site. He hosted Steve Sailer, who is first-rate.
Eric, I think you're a smart guy (I went to school with your daughter in fact), but you're totally off-base here. I'm just going to focus on the election fraud comments, but the rest of what you say is in the similar naive-yet-well-put vein.
The claims of fraud in 2020 shown to be spurious if you apply even a modicum of scrutiny. Even ignoring the specific accusations of wrongdoing, none of the final results in the "contested states" are suspicious. As a matter of fact, Trump over-performed in the very places where the fraud was alleged! He did better than Hillary in the dense inner-cities of Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and other major cities across the country. Where Trump did poorly was the suburbs, someplace it is unfathomable that a clandestine widespread voter-fraud operation between dozens of municipalities could be carried out. Of course, you could argue that he would have done better in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, etc. had there been no fraud, but that is certainly a bit of a stretch.
It seems deeply naive to me for you to still think the fraud case in 2020 was not properly litigated or that there exist true lingering doubts. You are an economist! Look at the data!
I feel like the motte here is "election security isn't very good in a lot of places, there's some sketchy stuff that happened in a few places, Pennsylvania probably changed their election rules in a way they weren't allowed to" and the bailey is "Venezuelan voting machines cooked the votes, massive numbers of illegal immigrants voted and changed the election outcome, there was massive fraud all over the place." When the bailey got its day in court, it always lost; the motte is true but doesn't seem like it even remotely adds up to a stolen election--instead, it looks like the kind of stuff that happens every single election.
Part III fails to take into account who each side's weapons are aimed at. The Republican weapons of mob violence and threats are aimed squarely at elites, but not at me. I'm nobody. There will never be a Republican mob at my house. The Democrats' weapons of institutional oppression and censorship are aimed at me. They want to control what I can say and what I can read on the internet. You, having been directly in their crosshairs should know that.
>The Republican weapons of mob violence and threats are aimed squarely at elites, but not at me.
No, they're aimed at whoever Trump blasts on Truth Social for the day, and there were multiple defamation lawsuits filed on behalf of private citizens like Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss and private corporations like Dominion and Smartmatic because they were the target of Trump, Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, and his other election denying allies like Giuliani and Powell. There were Republican state offices and Republican government workers that received death threats and bomb threats because Trump convinced his supporters that they were involved in stealing the election. Anybody who crosses Trump gets their business, workplace, family members, and personal life attacked relentlessly. Trump is currently threatening to revoke broadcasting licenses from news stations he doesn't like. He's completely uncalibrated and does unfathomable damage to random people around him.
How would we get an honest count of how many attempts at censoring or silencing dissenters happened under the Trump administration vs the Biden administration?
Your main example of how the Democrats control everything is their suppression of the legal investigation into Hunter Biden's taxes. According to Wikipedia he "pled guilty to all of the tax charges" last month. Interesting that the vast conspiracy was so ineffectual.
In short: the Justice Dept. slow-walked the investigation, purposely sabotaged it, and then were going to have him plead guilty to a minor charge while dismissing all the majors ones (such as not filing tax returns for some years!) and trying to stop any investigation of illegal income from foreign lobbying. The judge noticed the sly scheme and blocked it. It went public, so Justice had to pretend it was being more serious, so they brought some other charges-- again, as weak as they could-- and had Hunter plead guilty. Meanwhile, the IRS agents who were whistleblowers are being demoted and prosecuted.
They didnt'? They have been trying to rush it in a way that almost no criminal trials are conducted to try to get a PR win for the Biden admin in front of the election.
We’ll see. His sentencing is notably in December, after the election. As Eric said, he could have been charged for more if the DOJ didn’t slowdown the case. The judge might not give him anytime in prison, and even if he does, Joe could pardon him in the hour. I would bet money that Hunter doesn’t serve more than a week in prison.
I think Biden pardoning was likely even if Biden stayed in and won the election. It's his son in jail, and if pardoning Hunter hurts his second term, so what? It's his son.
The gun charges are in a weird place, because a protracted legal battle would probably find the specific laws unconstitutional under recent SCOTUS rulings. But that's not certain, and it'd be a messy fight with Rs having to be the ones pushing in favor of gun control during the while. Maybe he pleads though, and it's moot.
Thanks, but I dislike videos-- I can read faster than I can listen. I know Trump is trying, but I don't think he has it in him. He's just not a good manager; what he's good at is dealmaking-- thus his success in foreign policy and failure in domestic.
True! Ya got me! I've never cared about his other policies. He sucked up to Russia when it mattered the most, and that invalidates any resistance to Russia he's displayed before that.
The "matters most" was Ukraine, and Trump was going all he could to get western Europe to spend more money on weapons and to not build NordStream 2.
This is actual real world stuff. Europe's two biggest issues supporting Ukraine have been "but we don't have enough military materiel to spare" and "but we need Russian gas."
It's not secret. Major newspapers wrote about it for weeks. It was a long process. There were news cameras there.
But it's not "Trump is Putin's bitch, ha ha piss tape har har har" so yeah it didn't get your attention.
Very sensible.
You're conflating the woke with the DNC. There's nothing to the idea that e.g. the Biden administration is responsible for "the decline of discussion culture and free speech".
Woke capital is also backpeddling out of their own accord.
I am confused why so many people conflate pointless and toothless culture wars issues with the presidency. First of all, Kamala has never been woke. Second, letting Republicans into power will make "woke" stronger, since there is always a backlash to the incumbent party. Woke peaked under Trump, with MeToo and BLM riots. It has been losing relevancy under Biden because it is no longer countercultural.
Also, are Americans so spoiled now that this is what we are focused on? Do they think their democracy is 100% foolproof from a guy that tried to steal the last election? Who tried to destroy the department of education and the NIH? Do they think they are immune to the religious extremism talking over the government like what happened in Iran and Afghanistan, after Trump appointed Barrett to the Supreme Court? After a third of American women just lost the right to not be forced to give birth against their will? It is genuinely baffling to me that anyone would vote based on BS issues like DEI rather than things that affect real people. I really hate to say this because it is so over-used, but you are really sitting at the height of privilege and self-absorption if you think woke is the highest issue in the country. Woke people can maybe get you banned off a private social media platform. In some cases, maybe get you fired from a private company. There has never been a threat to the first amendment or any censorship from the govt under a Dem president. While on the right, Trump is literally talking about the media being the enemy of the people. He just sued CBS this week trying to punish the news for not taking his side! You know Trump has no morals and no respect for the Constitution. People that think like this make me want to rip my hair out.
<i>Second, letting Republicans into power will make "woke" stronger, since there is always a backlash to the incumbent party. Woke peaked under Trump, with MeToo and BLM riots. It has been losing relevancy under Biden because it is no longer countercultural.</i>
Wokeness, as we all know it, began under Obama, in part because of his actions and policies. And the idea that wokeness has been losing relevancy over the past few years is contrary to my personal experience.
<i>I really hate to say this because it is so over-used, but you are really sitting at the height of privilege and self-absorption if you think woke is the highest issue in the country.</i>
I think it's the other way around, actually. If you're poor, you rely more on having a good ambient culture, because you don't have the resources to insulate yourself from the effects of living in a bad one.
<i>Do they think they are immune to the religious extremism talking over the government like what happened in Iran and Afghanistan, after Trump appointed Barrett to the Supreme Court?</i>
This is just absurd.
1) Which policies of Obama's caused woke? As I understand, it happened over decades as a backlash to the severe oppression of certain groups throughout American history. The word "woke" started in the 1940s. The term "African-American" instead of black started in the 80s. The extreme feminist activism of the 2010s (Slutwalk, FreeTheNipple, etc.) is just another wave of the same brand of bra-burning activist stuff from the 1970s. The stuff coming out of Buzzfeed and Vox today is so unbelievably tame compared to the "woke" books back then. I believe that the social justice movement has been bubbling under for decades, but exploded in the Obama era because the internet first became accessible for teens. And I cannot argue with your personal experience, but I feel like woke reached its peak during Trump and has been dying down. The only "woke" stuff I see now is right wing grifters complaining online about the odd latina actress in a Disney movie. I don't believe there has been any new "woke" protests or movements? I would not count Gaza because it is a war, not a trivial issue.
2. Huh? How is a poor person harmed by woke? Why would they need resources to insulate themselves from it?
3. Everyone thinks a dictator is absurd until it happens in their country. It is weird how people are so mad about woke but not mad that SIX of the nine supreme court justices are Catholic, and use the court to impose their religion on the entire country. Isn't all the extreme religious stuff worse than some occasional, misguided attempts at equity that sometimes goes too far?
<i>I would not count Gaza because it is a war, not a trivial issue.</i>
No true Scotsman thinks Gaza is a woke issue.
<i>And I cannot argue with your personal experience, but I feel like woke reached its peak during Trump and has been dying down.</i>
Anti-white rhetoric is as normalised as ever, for one example.
<i>Huh? How is a poor person harmed by woke? Why would they need resources to insulate themselves from it??</i>
Letting criminals off because systemic racism is absolutely a policy that harms poor people.
<i>It is weird how people are so mad about woke but not mad that SIX of the nine supreme court justices are Catholic, and use the court to impose their religion on the entire country.</i>
Not as weird as people who can't see the difference between "States can decide what they want their abortion laws to be" and "The Taliban".
Ok.
From ABC news: "Woke is defined by the DeSantis administration as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." Gaza is not just a systemic injustice. It is not about harmful language or representation or any of that. It is a literal war that has killed tens of thousands. It is fundamentally different from "woke" issues. Is that hard to see how protesting a war should be in a different category than using the right pronouns?
Where is this anti-white rhetoric? On Twitter? Be honest, does this actually affect your life if you don't go searching for it?
About the criminals, are you talking about Prop 47? What a fluke:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-case-against-proposition-36
I don't know enough about California politics to know if Prop 47 was good or bad. But I live in a woke state with one of the lowest crime rates in the country. Why don't you blame conservatism for states like Alabama and Louisiana, which have way, way worse crime than California? Do you think Alabama has turned woke too?
It's also funny how you hate the woke agenda but are a-ok with the Catholic agenda imposing their religion onto everybody. Makes it hard to believe you actually care about the things you say you care about.
<i>Where is this anti-white rhetoric? On Twitter?</i>
Just read any mainstream media publication or academic journal, and count the number of times "white" is used in a negative sense vs. the number of times it's used in a neutral or positive sense.
<i>Be honest, does this actually affect your life if you don't go searching for it?</i>
Being constantly told that my race is responsible for all the bad things in the world does affect my life, yes.
<i>About the criminals, are you talking about Prop 47?</i>
No, I'm talking about the general woke reluctance to do anything about crime, because that would disproportionately involve locking up underprivileged people, and therefore be racist.
<i>It's also funny how you hate the woke agenda but are a-ok with the Catholic agenda imposing their religion onto everybody.</i>
Be specific. What tenet of Catholic belief has the Supreme Court imposed, and how?
The treatment of Gaza in the years leading up to 10/7/23, is very much considered a "systemic injustice" by the woke left (among others). 10/7, and the ongoing violence by Hamas and Hezbollah, are considered by these people to be side an act of heroic resistance to systemic injustice (see e.g. BLM or Antifa). Israel's assaults, are considered to be brutal genocidal violence meant to perpetuate systemic injustice.
To the woke, Gaza is absolutely a woke issue. I don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that it has distracted so many of them from their other issues.
Yeah, I agree.
It's not certain Trump is going to be the next Chavez. I frankly don't expect a Democrat-counterreaction feedback loop--I just expect the acceptable level of corruption to rise to the point where we look more like Argentina or Brazil and less like Canada than we do now. But the risk is high enough I'm concerned, because it could cause significant negative effects to the country downstream over the next few decades. Further than that, I have no predictive ability whatsoever.
With Kamala in charge, if woke makes a comeback, I'll just come out as bi.
I can and have politically maneuvered against a too-woke office and can tune out a DEI session if it makes no sense. I make my worth very apparent in a workplace. Things move downstream from there. I'm fine. I make $155k a year. So is Elon, he's worth over 100 billion.
I can't maneuver against or tune out a true autocrat like Orban, Putin or Chavez. Most people who live in the democratic West can't even comprehend what that is like. Venezuela is ruined, and Russia is a social trainwreck that sent hundreds of thousands of young men to die as cannon fodder.
Things might be fine if Trump becomes president. Don't come back to me if he gets elected and it is in 2029. But the small but real risk things might not be fine is a small risk of catastrophe. A freedom X-risk if you will. The US, with all it's power and might, has always had a check on the president and an easy way to remove the governing party on a national level.
Left vs right in the US is like that coughing baby vs nuclear bomb meme to me.
>> I'm fine. I make $155k a year. So is Elon, he's worth over 100 billion.
Conditional on Harris winning the presidency, I predict (90% confidence) that Elon goes to prison by 2028.
I would be willing to bet a large sum on this - what's your appetite for a bet here?
In principle I’d be willing to bet a hundred bucks. In practice, I don’t know how one would operationalize a bet on a 4 year timeframe between two pseudonymous internet strangers.
$100 isn't worth it, but it's certainly doable. You put money in escrow and appoint someone to judge it according to criteria that you agree on.
$100? At 90% confidence? It's basically free money! At an even bet, your expected value is 80% of what you are betting! You should bet half your savings or something!
...you should, if you seriously believed what your were saying, that is.
I would also be willing to make a large bet that he doesn't
Wow! You would give 9:1 odds of Elon Musk ending up in prison within 4 years if Kamala wins.
I'll take those odds.
It's a nice thought but you seem not to be aware of the fundamental constant of the American legal-economic system.
Rich people do not go to prison. That's why when they do it makes the papers.
People from the top 10 percentile of socio-economic standing in the United States comprise less than 0.01% of current prison inmates.
Your fantasies about how the world operates have no relation to how it actually operates.
Martha Stewart went to prison,. Jeff Skilling went to prison. Martin Shkreli went to prison. Samuel Bankman-Fried went to prison. Just off the top of my head. I'm not sure all four of those were literal billionaires, but they were certainly in the 1% of the 1%, and they went to prison.
Yes, it's newsworthy when a billionaire goes to prison. It's newsworthy when a billionaire does pretty much anything. But being very very rich, does not endow people with get-out-of-jail-free cards, or anything remotely close to that. It does mean that prosecutors have to bring their A game, and they may not bother if that means giving up five easy convictions of ordinary criminals. But rich + controversial + widely hated, yeah, if there's provable fraud and if it won't get them in trouble with their bosses, it can happen.
Or not, because often billionaires don't commit serious crimes. One thing money is good for, is hiring lawyers who can advise you on how to accomplish your goals legally, and where the line is. That, plus a legal team that can fight against bogus prosecutions based on false accusation, is a pretty good way to be confident you're not going to go to prison. But it only works if you listen to your lawyers, and this is Elon Musk we're talking about.
I wouldn't go to 9:1 odds on Musk without a specifically alleged crime for him to go to prison for. And I wouldn't expect him to actually be incarcerated in four years, because see e.g. the criminal cases against Donald Trump. But if Harris is elected, he is I think at significant risk.
Yes, and they all made the papers like I said.
It's true that famous people are more at risk than non-famous rich people so that prosecutors can make a name for themselves, so I cheated a little bit by pointing out that the prison population is 0.01% from the top 10 percentile, but I figured it was worth pointing out. And with Elon's gazillions I think he's as insulated as your average fellow with just 30 mil to rely on.
The fact that America's economic-legal system matches that of Sodom and Gomorra ought to be brought up every once in a while.
https://youtu.be/I9QAKgC4aiw
Haven't been following that part of the news much - what would Elon be charged with?
I don't know, but I'm sure something could be found. Show me the man and I'll show you the crime, and all that.
Oh, my sweet Summer child.
Ever hear of “Show the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”?
I had hoped that the Democrats would lay off that a bit to distinguish themselves from Trump who would absolutely arrest rich and powerful people on trumped-up charges (sorry that pun is so bad it wasn't meant to be a pun). What's with Vote Harris, get someone who respects the law?
(Though somehow Hilary Clinton stayed out of jail during Trump 1.0, so maybe presidents can't do everything they want.)
This seems like a weak bet because Elon Musk has a very long track record of breaking actual laws and getting into trouble over it. Nothing jail-worthy yet I'd say of course, but the idea that he would step over the line and get a ~6 month sentence seems perfectly possible, particularly in the world where his Trump Gambit failed.
So bet wise I don't think you can really get around that. I ofc would take 95% odds that the Harris administration will not invent charges to jail a political opponent because that is something the Dems don't do, but then you have to decide "is he actually guilty" for the bet - not a good resolution criteria!
(I guess you could just roll "odds Elon Musk will commit an actual crime" into the bet, seems rough though)
The beauty of `3 felonies a day' is that almost everyone is `actually guilty' of an `actual crime.' So you don't need to invent charges, all you need to do (once you've decided that you want to put X in jail) is to figure out which actual (but seldom prosecuted) crime X is guilty of.
So yeah, I'm not predicting that the Harris administration will invent charges either. I'm just predicting that if Harris ends up in the white house, then Musk will be convicted of an actual crime, for which he is actually guilty, but for which there is a ~0% chance he would have been actually prosecuted if he didn't have a political target on his back.
But the "3 felonies a day" thing just isn't true? Like it is a combination of "completely made up" and conflating wildly different things. You could probably find a fine for a improperly filed permit application on most people's backlog, sure, but you absolutely could not find a jailable offense on 95% of people. The bar for criminal offenses is actually very high!
Which you can know because if the majority of politicians had such a record, *their enemies would be jailing them over it!* That hasn't happened to Harris or Romney because they haven't committed crimes. It is happening to Trump because he *has* committed crimes. And Musk has previously committed way-more-than-average levels of "big fines" that have had explicit warnings that repeat offenses could result in criminal prosecution. Bayesian odds made this pretty easy.
This goes back to your question from last open thread about what Trump can actually do — a Presidency is an incredibly contingent thing. You run on one agenda and then in office spend most of your time and energy dealing with the crises of the moment and they either defeat you or empower you. It’s like trying to create a weather report for October 31, 2025.
Thank you.
>"why should we vaccinate against measles when measles is so rare?"
Trump saying he'd put the anti-vaxxer RFK in charge of "health" was just the most recent outrageous thing he's said. By this point I've lost track. There are many things I'd like to change about the Democrats, but a second Trump presidency would be a mistake for America.
If antivaxxers got their way, they would kill more people than Hitler. People like RFK should be nowhere close to the levers of health policy.
Where’d you get your medical degree from?
#doctorsforRFK
You don't need a medical degree to know that vaccines are good. I'm sure if I polled doctors they would support me on this, too.
"You don't need a medical degree to know that vaccines are good"
That's right, you just need to believe every whitecoat on TV.
What are you doing on this blog when you don't believe in one of the most rudimentary, well-established facts in medical science?
You seriously believe vaccines (generally speaking) do more harm than good?
That or be scientifically literate
"Vaccines are good" is like "plastic is recycleable". Not all plastic is recycleable, and historically some vaccines have hurt people, or not been very effective. Blindly trusting everything labeled a vaccine because you "believe in science" is... not good actually.
Actually, it is good! It is way better than believing antivaxxers and getting your kid killed by measles, as happened in Samoa in 2019!
except your kid is absolutely better off if every kid is taking all the prescribed vaccines rather than not taking them.
People like Chastity are retarded and only think in black and white.
Why must one be antivax or non-antivax? I'm against COVID vaccines, but for "real" vaccines, defined (by me) as vaccines that work for longer than a year.
Antivaxxers that are against vaccines on general principles that don't have a better alternative for fighting diseases have a poor position.
Kennedy has been antivax since before Covid, and as such, your nonsense crying about how COVID vaccines aren't "real" vaccines is irrelevant.
A doctor's opinion regarding Kennedy: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein?r=1n32iy&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=74829071
I object to your "nonsense" classification, as my point stands that COVID mutates too fast for vaccine strategy to work well, as mRNA viruses do. Get vaccinated against the common cold; it's certainly possible to develop one, and also certainly not worth the effort, useful though a workable one would be. The point stands that one can be in favor of some vaccines and against others.
What does it mean for a vaccine to “work for longer than a year”? Covid vaccines seem to (in that they reduce infection rates even in people who haven’t been vaccinated in a year) though like many other vaccines, they do lose some effectiveness, and like some other viruses, covid mutates quickly.
Do they not know how long a vaccine "works" by detecting antibodies, or some such combination, against the disease for which the vaccine was developed? I have every confidence a COVID vaccine would work...until COVID mutates again. In that case, you would still have antibodies that are effective against the original strain, but less so against current (and future) ones.
It's hard to tell whether, as you suggest, the vaccine reduces infection rates past, say, three months. You would need a control group, and need to be careful of lots of biases in both the test and control groups.
I got COVID in April of 2021, and again in April of 2022. I did not get any vaccines, as I considered myself to be "naturally vaccinated". What would the artificial vaccine do that the actual disease didn't do? Both involve exposure to proteins to train your immune system.
Yeah it’s very hard to test effectiveness in real-world contexts, given how many confounders there are once vaccines are available and different types of people are choosing whether and when to get them.
There are ways to test blood for the presence of antibodies. My understanding is that most vaccines and infections produce an initial burst of antibodies that gradually fades - but there are some differences (e.g., syphilis antibodies never fade to zero, but many other infections do). And perhaps more importantly, a lot of the protection is provided not by antibodies that are constantly detectable, but by memory cells (B cells?) that can re-emerge when they detect the thing they are remembering.
I think when you get an infection, your body tries to train on everything present at the time of the infection, which includes various proteins on various parts of the virus, and possibly some things not associated with the virus. When you get the COVID vaccines, you only get the spike proteins, so your body especially focuses on learning that. Since the spike protein is the part that is on the outside, it might be more relevant for protection against initial infection, but I don’t know what they’ve actually found about that.
All viruses are constantly mutating, but if the mutation hasn’t changed it too much, then a lot of the antibodies against the old one will still work equally effectively, or perhaps slightly less effectively. Some viruses have more mutation in some parts than others.
Kurzgesagt has had a really interesting series of videos about the immune system (starting several years pre-pandemic), which is much weirder and more complex than we often think. I sometimes wonder if there might even be a second consciousness in our bodies, run by the immune system, which is as complex as the nervous system, but quite separate from it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zQGOcOUBi6s
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lXfEK8G8CUI
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LmpuerlbJu0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-K7mxdN62M
"If antivaxxers got their way, they would kill more people than Hitler."
Please stop posting garbage-level troll comments. It really brings down the possibilities for earnest and informed discussion here. Thank you.
It's simply the actual, factual reality:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/lives-saved-vaccines
There is no point of no return for almost anything. Still, what happens during any cycle matters. Even if we will eventually get to a good place, it’s better if there is less suffering along the way.
> If antivaxers win, disease noticeably goes up... then support for vaccines comes back and antivaxers lose support?
Not necessarily. The first thing the antivaxers would say is that the diseases are actually a result of vaccination, therefore we should have even less of it.
Chastity is a troll. Engagement isn't worth the energy.
This is delusional. Especially because RFK has no plans on banning vaccines you dumb fucking retard.
Trivially: do you think he supports the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act? A repeal of that law would amount to a de facto ban. Retard.
Michelle Obama pushed for healthier school lunches. RFK Jr. pushes for not vaccinating people and bringing back the eras where generations were decimated by (now-preventable) diseases, in addition to at least a dozen other inane and insane ideas. Trying to improve Americans' health is good, but RFK Jr. would do the polar opposite.
This is a blog dedicated to ideas of rationality and RFK Jr. is an excellent example of anti-rationality and anti-intellectualism.
> Michelle Obama pushed for healthier school lunches.
...and look at the results she achieved: smaller portions of lower-quality food, for higher prices. ( https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/hungry-students-send-messages-to-michelle-obama-over-sloppy-school-dinners-9878328.html )
If the country stopped judging politicians on their stated goals, and started judging them based on results produced by their policies, we'd never see another Democrat elected for the next 20 years.
Could not agree more. It would be awesome to put together a dashboard of different metrics to view correlations as different policies are adopted.
A bit like a success rate graph at SaaS companies (products like data dog or grafana). You see when the code changed and look for errors or bad performance as a potential result.
No graphs, but: https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/by-their-fruits-ye-shall-know-them
Don't both parties have a huge failure rate in attaining desired policy results?
Not really.
Just to give a few recent examples:
The Abraham Accords.
Desired result: stabilize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
Achieved result: When war broke out between Israel and various Iranian groups, not only did Israel's Arab neighbors, for the first time ever, decline to pile on, they actively came to Israel's defense.
Remain In Mexico policy.
Desired result: Decrease illegal immigraiton.
Achieved result: Net negative illegal immigration. (More illegals leaving the country — often voluntarily! — than entering.)
If you want to understand why people support Trump look at cases like the above. Despite his many, obvious flaws, he got good results. He got *astoundingly* good results.
And Republican emphasis on lower deficits? Trump's promises to restore coal & manufacturing?
Saying a politician got some results they like risks cherry-picking. Do I give Obama credit for the post-recession recovery and expanding healthcare coverage?
The word "when" in your description of the results of the Abraham Accords is doing a hell of a lot of work.
Sure, but since we'd never see another Republican elected either....
> inane and insane ideas
What would you consider are the top 2 worst ideas he put forward? Whatever we're doing is clearly not working and is in desperate need of change.
...Diabeetus...
Is this limited to RFK Jr, or do ideas from Trump count?
If the latter, I'd like to nominate looking into injecting disinfectant for Covid.
I'm afraid Trump's idea was worse than injecting disinfectant - he wanted to get the covid in their lungs not their blood stream. The idea he proposed in that press conference was to fill their lungs with disinfectant. Since doing this with just water is fatal I'm glad he accepted his advisors' recommendations against this one.
Many Thanks! Ye gods, I hadn't known he suggested _that_. ( Were there two press conferences involved? One that I watched included Trump saying "injected" and "disinfectant" in a suggestion of his. In the same press conference, he was also suggesting using UV... I have no idea how he was thinking of administering _that_ to the inside of someone's lungs... )
You need to watch the whole video. Yeah he says "disinfectant" and he's talking about light, which was just mentioned. No one says bleach.
You mean looking into a proven trearment for other diseases? Do you think he sets medical policy? He was relaying what he was told by doctors.
Many Thanks! If he somehow turned recommendations for external use of disinfectants into suggesting looking into injecting them, that is pretty severe garbling. Most people learn, prior to adulthood, that disinfectants are for _external_ use. Now, Harris is bad enough ( speech censorship proposal, illegal immigration spike, Woke in general ) that Trump may be the lesser evil, but I'd prefer a GOP candidate with better common sense.
I’m a doctor who listens to a lot of what RFK Jr has to say and I could not disagree with you more strongly
Please could you share some examples of his good health policy ideas, or why you think stopping vaccinating people would be good for their health?
Ah, I see you did this below. Thank you!
This is *exactly* the "Biden is bad for Palestinians so I better vote for Trump" argument!
Yes, American health and nutrition is bad. Does your proposal of getting rid of the standardized measles vaccine do anything to *improve* that?
Yes, of course it does Kenny, because the people responsible for America’s bad health and nutrition are meanie assholes, and so are the people responsible
for the measles vax requirement.
Not sure. Vaccine policy is a footnote for rfk jr at this point.
Ending the revolving door between pharmaceutical companies and the FDA seems much more promising to me. Ending advertisements for pharma seems like a good idea too.
Ending pharmaceutical advertisements sounds like a good idea. Has someone proposed that law? (Would an executive like RFK be able to unilaterally impose it without a congressional law?)
Perhaps more importantly, would the current Supreme Court (which has the most expansive view of the first amendment of any court to date) actually allow such a restriction? I know that traditionally commercial speech is held to an intermediate scrutiny standard (instead of strict), but A) the legal reasoning for that distinction is kinda weak and B) even if they maintain intermediate scrutiny as the test, it's a notoriously flexible test to judge prejudices. The common saying on standards of scrutiny is:
Rational Basis: the government wins
Strict Scrutiny: the plaintiff wins
Intermediate Scrutiny: the judge wins.
That sounds plausible. As far as I know, the restriction on tobacco advertising is entirely the result of a voluntary legal settlement that avoided even larger financial penalties, rather than an actual law.
Not sure how RFK's nuttery is supposed to be an improvement.
Can you not take a look at the man and ask yourself, "could he, just maybe, have a good grasp on what being healthy looks like"? And just maybe, with his legal and environmental background he might be a good fit?
Or do you, like many Americans, take health advice from obese people who aren't required to take nutrition classes (44% of doctors are overweight according to Google)?
Why are 44% of physicians overweight?! At this point I don't care about the vaccine element of Bobby's policy, I care that he cares about figuring out the root causes of our chronic disease epidemic.
No I can’t think those things. His theories about health are complete nuttery.
Which theories specifically are you referring to? Top 1 or 2 worst offenders would be adequate in my opinion.
I'll do the same but highlight one I happen to agree with him on: the FDA is overwhelmingly run by the pharmaceutical industry which has outsized influence due to the revolving door.
I'll lean on Scott Gottlieb and Stephen Hahn as example cases. The best rebuttle being that the idiot who put them in charge is the same idiot I'm advocating for.
- vaccines cause autism
- COVID-19 was engineered to target people by race
- mass shootings are caused by prescription drugs
- COVID was exaggerated as plot by Fauci and Gates to give money to pharma
- seeds oils are the cause of all kinds of health woes
If FDA makes any mistake regarding pharmaceuticals it's that they are entirely too risk averse.
I actually don't think being in good shape is all that good a proxy for being able to make sensible policies wrt drug safety, recommended vaccine schedules, and the like.
It shouldn't be the sole qualification, but it is a factor in my opinion.
Unhealthy, overweight people have the position RFK is vying for. Excellent personal health should be the *minimum standard* to be considered for the position.
Banned for this comment, vacuous and unrelated enough that allowing things like this lowers discussion quality.
I too heard Trump say RFK would be out in charge of health!! Completely insane.
Joe Rogan, who interviewed Trump, is entertaining and intelligent but he's not educated deeply on things like vaccines about which he has strong opinions! He and Trump seemed to share opinions about many things.
What strange times we live in.
He’s not antivax. This is another liberal media hoax
If you listen to what RFK actually says, instead of what they report about him, you’d quickly realise this. Look, he has expressed some skepticism about the intensity of the current childhood vaccine schedule and whether that could be related to the dramatic rise in chronic disease among children. Maybe studies will prove that he’s wrong to be skeptical, but the point is that you’re allowed to ask these questions when trying to understand the root causes of the decline in health and the rise in chronic disease, mental illness and obesity over the past decades.
Most of his actual policies are about taking on the powerful lobbying companies who (for example) allow pesticides to be present in the American food supply at levels that are banned in Europe. Or the influence of Big Pharma over medical education.
Make America Healthy Again shouldn’t be controversial.
Besides the fact that Tulsi Gabbard is in a cult and is a grifter, RFK Jr. is insane and Vance support Curtis Yarvin, if there was a billionaire supporting Kamala Harris who would get a spot in her cabinet if she won I'm sure you would be very happy too lmao. Elon Musk might be a successful CEO but he obviously has no place trimming down the government, especially because he would obviously benefit himself
Vance supports Curtis Yarvin? In what way? Do you have a citation?
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24266512/jd-vance-curtis-yarvin-influence-rage-project-2025
Control+F "Curtis Yarvin"
That's... not a very charitable article. First off, I note it tries to imply/claim the Thiel (a libertarian) and Yarvin (an authoritarian monarchist) are aligned (citing a proposition that you could also get the Constitutional Convention to agree with!), and then only details Yarvin's views otherwise. That's a blatant smear vs Thiel.
Next, he does the exact same thing with Vance; Vance claimed that Trump needed to fire the entire federal government (and indeed, cited Yarvin as to why that extreme measure was justified.) But then he drops Vance/Trump entirely, and describes Yarvin's preferred replacement for the bureaucracy (authoritarian monarchy), implying that this was also Vance's goal... while ignoring that it's entirely in opposition to everything Trump and Vance have said about their goals for a WEAKER administrative state.
I do, sincerely, appreciate you replying with a source, but I find that source really unpersuasive of the claim it's trying to make, and generally pretty scuzzy.
He’s also in INCREDIBLY good shape for a 70-year old.
Honestly, as a doctor and someone’s who cares most of all about public health I agree with Rogan. I’d support Kennedy over either Trump or Kamala.
(Covid vaccines still work btw)
RFK is healthier than 85% of the people I see at SSC meetups
Not their fault because they have no free will. Unfortunately I also have no free will and am voting for Trump. Alas...fate is cruel...
RFK has literally said "I do believe that autism comes from vaccines" and "I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated." Whatever you think of the "liberal media," they generally don't outright make up quotes. https://apnews.com/article/rfk-kennedy-election-2024-president-campaign-621c9e9641381a1b2677df9de5a09731
>Make America Healthy Again shouldn’t be controversial.
"The *slogan* for my policy sounds uncontroversial, therefore the actual policy shouldn't be controversial either, right?"
If someone advertised defunding the police as "Make America Safe Again," I expect you'd find that controversial even though the slogan sounds reasonable. That's how I feel about RFK saying "Make America Healthy Again."
Once again, "I'm not anti-vaccine, I'm pro-safe-vaccine" turns out to be "actually I'm anti-vaccine."
I will continue fighting against the straw man that RFK Jr is anti vax for as long as it takes. The truth will win.
https://x.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1845995741833011374
RFK also said Trump was a grave threat to democracy before changing his tune and endorsing him for President. Posting a politician's own propaganda tweet when they have a history of going against what they've publicly said and they've issued far more irresponsible sayings on the specific subject is hilariously epistemically irresponsible.
https://apnews.com/article/rfk-kennedy-election-2024-president-campaign-621c9e9641381a1b2677df9de5a09731
>In July, Kennedy said in a podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told FOX News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.
He said the Democrats were a worse threat to democracy, on CNN. This was all prior to endorsing Trump and it was based on them systemically shutting him out of the primaries and giving him zero media coverage and attacking his campaign via lawfare. Why do you think he changed his tune?
Nah, what’s “hilariously epistemically irresponsible” is posting left wing propaganda on a politician and insisting it better represents their views than actual things that they say.
I’m sure all of your scare quotes are correct, he did say these things at some point, but so what? You’re allowed to express skepticism about the intensity of the vaccine schedule for children, you’re allowed to wonder if it might be linked to the rise in chronic disease such as autism, as long as you acknowledge that you might be wrong and more study is needed.
That’s RFK Jr’s position. It’s pretty reasonable, and maybe you need to think why these mainstream media outlets keep selectively quoting him and misrepresenting him. What else are they doing that with?
I've seen RFkj speaking to both friendly and adversarial audiences. Generally, when I see him speaking to adversarial audiences, he's saying the kind of thing Turtle is talking about and I think, "Yeah, that's a great description of some of the problems with the system I also see. This guy is smart and understands what he's talking about!" When he's speaking to friendly audiences he starts going off on how vaccines cause autism and nobody in their right mind should give one to their children, and I think, "Why did I ever think this guy was anything but an ideologue, again?"
What do I expect from an RFKj-influenced NIH/CDC/etc.? He'd be walking into an adversarial environment, so I would expect him to do things like preside over updating the vaccine schedule* to something more rational, or allow legal action against vaccine manufacturers who hide adverse effects or otherwise try to cheat the system, or implement more stringent testing of adverse effects of pesticides and fertilizers. I don't see him able to do something like banning vaccines, or getting the CDC to declare that they cause autism or anything like that.
In general, I don't expect a big change, since moving the US government system is generally a slow-run thing. I expect a few 'big splash' ideas to punch through, but probably nothing of dramatic consequence. As with any politician, some good, some bad, but nothing dramatic.
So it's a wash? Maybe not. Focusing on improving the public health agencies could significantly improve trust in US heath-related government agencies, which is NEEDED after the last few years. Trust is earned. After COVID, trust was lost for a reason. That needs to be built back up, or it doesn't matter what your vaccine policy is, people won't listen to it. As someone who thinks vaccines are a huge good and who recommends them way more than RFKj would be comfortable with, I suspect RFKj could actually increase uptake in the long run (or at least preside over a decrease in the fall in vaccinations).
*"Like what changes, exactly?" Nearly everyone I know who's anti-vax cites early neonatal vaccination as the thing first piqued their skepticism. In other words: Hep B. But why give any neonatal vaccines, since kids don't develop T-cells for 6-12 months, and maternal antibodies are protective? First, childhood vaccinations don't usually provide much in circulating protective antibodies and most adults don't get boosters. (We should really focus on getting updated vaccinations for WOCBP, but whatever.) Meanwhile, there's some evidence that early neonatal doses of hep B can prevent maternal transmission of hep B (but it's not a 100% thing, and really you should be giving them hep B IG if the baby is in danger of contracting hepatitis from their mother - something we only do if we test mom and discover an active infection).
What's the potential benefit to universal hep B vaccination? Okay, there are approximately 5.8 cases of hep B per 100,000 people in the US. Assuming that rate for pregnant women, of the 3.6 million babies born every year around 209 should have mothers with hep B, of which maybe a hundred might go on to contract it (transmission rate varies based on mother's hep B titers).
Now, I don't know how many mothers are refusing all vaccinations because of the hep B vaccine, but I have personally met at least a dozen and I don't go around asking, so I'm going to say that number is probably pretty big. Large enough to bring equipoise into the discussion: is it overall beneficial to have a policy that might help a hundred kids in exchange for putting millions more at risk?
And more importantly, could there be a BETTER policy that still protects that 100 kids, while improving trust in recommendations by health authorities? For example, by testing women for hepatitis B ahead of time, then only recommending the vaccine if they test positive (at which point we'd also give the hep B IG and monitor infection).
"But the vaccine isn't harmful! We don't have any evidence demonstrating adverse effects of the hepatitis vaccine, so why not just give it to everyone?" Um ... the vaccine *recommendation* appears to be harmful in that it leads to vaccine skepticism, even if the vaccine itself isn't directly harmful. It's not even a choice between fewer kids dying of hep B over more kids dying of not getting MMR/DTaP/etc. We can improve this system, and while RFKj isn't a perfect vessel for doing that, it's certainly better than screaming "trust the science!" while more and more people stop trusting good medical evidence.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
I just want to re-iterate a key point about RFK Jr, because the vaccine stuff is controversial and tends to suck all the oxygen out of the room.
The reason why I support him has nothing to do with his opinions on vaccines, and everything to do with him promising to take on Big Pharma, Big Ag and the profit motive in corporate medicine.
He says stuff that many doctors have known for a long time about how the system cares more about profits for the few than health for the many.
He talks about the prevention of chronic disease for pennies, rather than treating it for millions.
He talks about really looking into the causes of why our health has worsened so much in past decades. What’s going on? These are questions that the establishment has not thought to ask - or rather, prefers not to think about because it might threaten their campaign contributions from the big players in “healthcare.”
I’m really excited about RFK Jr in the administration.
I'm uncertain about his short term efficacy, but encouraged that health policy (and not just health insurance or costs) is becoming a national issue. If this is what it takes to get us there, hopefully we see both parties take an interest in the next election. If so, the long run effect will dramatically outstrip whatever he can do in an administration.
Sure, you can take a couple scare quotes out of context and make it look like he believes no kid should ever be vaccinated.
The media are professionals at doing this type of thing.
Yet when I follow the link in your article, it even admits that he insists he is NOT antivax.
Well I guess if somebody insists they're not x they must not be x. Seriously, do you not hear how crazy all your defenses sound?
Do you have a better way of inferring someone’s beliefs than listening to things that they say?
How would the context justify or change the meaning of the statement that vaccines cause autism?
""liberal media," they generally don't outright make up quotes."
Yeah, just like they didn't claim Rittenhouse was a murderer, AM I RIGHT.
Here's the trump of Trump's transition team talking about withdrawing approval of ALL vaccines: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/robert-f-kennedy-trump-transition-chair-vaccines-public-health.html?utm_source=flipboard.com&utm_medium=social_acct&utm_campaign=feed-part
Personally I have no qualms with them all being approved, I'd just like to remove the liability shield. The government should not be in the business of protecting drug lords from the people. Bad drugs should not be protected. That isn't how free markets are supposed to work.
So I got curious and checked out the guy's campaign website which spends an entirety of 180 words on his healthcare plans (always the sign of a deep thinker). It vaguely suggests banning some food additives, banning (or taxing or whatever, unspecified) ultra-processed food, and ban toxic chemicals "from our air, water, and soil". I.e., regulation, regulation, and more regulation. Great fit for the Trump/GOP agenda of deregulation and kneecapping agencies like the EPA.
I mean, if you want healthier food, what better idea than to vote for the guy whose presidency was full of controversies like these: https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/trumps-toxic-wake-10-ways-epa-has-made-life-more-hazardous
You think banning toxic chemicals from our air, water and soil is a bad idea?
Why?
More like an obvious lie, when said while campaigning for the guy whose last four years of presidency where characterized by removing such bans, and his plans for his next presidency include doing more of that (see e.g. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/project-2025-would-make-it-easier-for-big-corporations-to-dump-dangerous-toxins-that-poison-americans/ ).
One can debate whether the current US regulations strike the right balance between caution and growth, but a pretty clear and consistent pattern is Democratic governments erring more on the side of caution and Republican governments erring more on the side of growth, and everything Trump did before as a president and says now as a presidential candidate fits into that pattern. Health advocates putting their faith in Trump are tied in level of idiocy with the muslims who think Trump is going to stop the war in Palestine.
I think that's an absolutely horrible idea. The dose makes the poison, and there are very few things that aren't toxic at some level. Oxygen, for example, is literally toxic, and I would be amused to see someone banning oxygen from the air in our schools, because Think Of The Children!
*Placing reasonable limits* on toxic chemicals, is a good idea. But you need to establish the limits you're talking about, so the rest of us can decide whether they are reasonable. If your proposal is being described as "banning toxic chemicals", the smart money is on the proposed limits being very unreasonable.
I understand your point now. But it seems to rest on the idea that banning toxic chemicals can’t reasonably be interpreted as banning toxic levels of chemicals.
He is not an anti-vaxxer afaik and I have researched his statements for myself. He thinks too many untested vaccines are in use, and that vaccines are used on the very young in excessive amounts. The dose of vaccines given to US children is actually considered quite excessive in much of the rest of the world.
I think the analysis of who is more evil (Trump) is spot on. That said i think I’m still going Trump because his brand of authoritarianism is hated by the media and a majority of the public. Also his brain is jelly and Ivanka and Jared will be running the show and they are standard chamber of commerce neoliberals which is why Trump didn’t do anything authoritarian last time.
See how little power he has when he moves against popular will - ie republicans have been on the back foot on abortion since Dobbs because abortion is deeply popular and when a ban will be enforced, suddenly a lot of republicans decide to be pro choice. Trump will lose congress in the midterm if he tried and it will be gridlock before that.
If Harris wins, the media and most power centers will back her bid for authoritarianism and things start getting bad real fast.
That’s generally true but Roberts hates Trump, and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch don’t like him either. They won’t bend the law to help him, the immunity decision was restrained in scope - they remanded it to the trial courts to develop facts and explained what kind of acts would and wouldn’t be immune based on the nature of the constitutional power he was exercising. If they wanted to protect him they would have just granted him absolute immunity and spared him from years of litigation.
Roberts also thinks Alito and ACB are hacks - if you read his concurrence in Dobbs it’s him calling them idiots for repealing Casey v PP when they could just boil the frog slowly and roll back abortion window as fetuses become medically viable sooner.
So this court will go right in culture war issues, checking Harris more than Trump, but they also won’t carry any water for Trump personally - even if you’re cynical, Roberts, Gorsucch, Kavanaugh all want to keep getting sweet speaking gigs and teaching boondoggles from moderate never Trump conservatives
"they could just boil the frog slowly and roll back abortion window as fetuses become medically viable sooner"
Yes, and there would still be the clamour for exceptions and heart-rending cases of "rape, incest, threat to life of mother" as to why there should be legal ability to carry out an abortion at twenty weeks even though that's the new viability limit.
'Late-term' (or however you want to define them, the matter is of course controversial) abortions are rare, but do happen:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9321603/
"Conclusions
The inherent limits of medical knowledge and the infeasibility of ensuring early pregnancy recognition in all cases illustrate the impossibility of eliminating the need for third‐trimester abortion. The similarities between respondents' experiences and that of people seeking abortion at other gestations, particularly regarding the impact of barriers to abortion, point to the value of a social conceptualization of need for abortion that eschews a trimester or gestation‐based framework and instead conceptualizes abortion as an option throughout pregnancy."
Another paper thinks "viability" is useless as a legal definition:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8249091/
"In this paper, I explore how viability, meaning the ability of the fetus to survive post-delivery, features in the law regulating abortion provision in England and Wales and the USA. I demonstrate that viability is formalized differently in the criminal law in England and Wales and the USA, such that it is quantified and defined differently. I consider how the law might be applied to the examples of artificial womb technology and anencephalic fetuses. I conclude that there is incoherence in the meaning of viability and argue that it is thus a conceptually illegitimate basis on which to ground abortion regulation. This is both because of the fluidity of the concept and because how it has been thus far understood in the law is unsupported by medical realities. Furthermore, it has the effect of heavily diluting pregnant people’s rights with overly moralistic limitations on access to healthcare."
You may think your proposal will boil the frog, but there are plenty of people waiting to scoop the frog out of the pot on the plea of necessity.
Including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists:
https://www.acog.org/advocacy/facts-are-important/understanding-and-navigating-viability
"Viability is just one factor that patients and health care professionals use when considering whether to proceed with or end a pregnancy, and gestational age is only one factor considered when estimating viability. Legislative bans on abortion care often overlook unique patient needs, medical evidence, individual facts in a given case, and the inherent uncertainty of outcomes in favor of defining viability solely by gestational ages. Therefore, ACOG strongly opposes policy makers defining viability or using viability as a basis to limit access to evidence-based care."
Indeed, "A fetus at X weeks isn't viable" was never a position that Pro-Choice was willing to commit to; it was a fig leaf for absolutism.
I think you're trusting the exact guardrails that authoritarianism tries to subvert. I agree that the guardrails will probably hold this time, but I think attacking them does a little bit of long-term damage each time.
And I think it's pretty hilarious to accuse the GOP of being more in violation of "brightline norms" when close to half of democrats favour internment camps for anti-vaxxers and the BLM/Antifa riots were orders of magnitude worse than Jan 6 along every measurable dimension, along with the minor detail of trying to storm the White House.
We are long past the point of any realistic expectation that the Blue Egregore is going to spontaneously reform itself without putting a lot of their institutions to the torch. I think it's unlikely Trump will turn out to be a literal dictator, but in the worst case scenario I'll take Pinochet over Maduro any day of the week. I'll even take a Hitler over a Mao.
When again was the part where the BLM/Antifa riots tried to overthrow the result of a presidential election?
Do you think killing a president wouldn't count as overthrowing the result of an election?
Perhaps, but depends on how. If it's a singular event, democracy likely holds in this situation, as the succession of power would still be maintained and not subverted.... you are only removing from office, you are not installing into office.
you did say *every* dimension.
What do you actually think happens when a mob storms the white house? Because I'm guessing it's a big pile of dead rioters while the president and his family are in a secure room with several locked doors and armed guards between them and danger.
Why are you treating this as if it were a hypothetical? Trump was, in fact, escorted to a security bunker although so far as I can tell zero rioters were mowed down with assault rifles, and I'd be surprised if many of them were even prosecuted.
And what is the point of this argument? An attempt at overthrowing the government doesn't count if you could reasonably predict it would be futile? How does this not apply to Jan 6?
What do you think actually happens when rioters storm Congress, attempting to overturn the election results? Congress bugs out for a couple of hours, a guy in a Viking costume sits in the big chair for a couple minutes, and then Congress certifies the election later in the day.
Implicit in all the hysteria about January Sixth is that had the rioters managed to get their hands on some paperwork in the House chamber, they could have ticked a few boxes and Donald Trump would be president again... And everyone would just agree to it. Nothing we can do, the rioters got the Magic Paperwork.
I don't know if you knew, but "killing the president" is a pretty popular pastime in the USA. It's just about the most deadly job you can hold, with 4 out of 45 killed and many more attempted. And yet, the *institution* of democracy hasn't taken any damage, which is the whole point of the excercise - democracy holds even if you kill the guy in charge, because there is an agreed-upon, non-violent system of succession.
The only fundamental danger to democracy can come from the top, if the separation of power breaks down for any reason and is exploited by the executive branch to keep it broken down.
This never made any sense to me. How exactly does a mob rampaging through the capitol building constitute a coup? It’s not like if you capture the flag in the basement you become president automatically. Even if they take some congressmen hostage, so what? BLM riots killed a lot more people and broke a lot more things while insisting they were peaceful.
I should acknowledge that Trump did ask his staff if he could have a little coup, as a treat. Trump totally would if he could. But he can’t. His staff ignored him. The same thing will happen this time - the military and security state would put a bullet in Trump before letting him illegally stay in power. The scary antidemocratic move is for republican statehouses to change how electors are chosen - either by legislative vote or by county or congressional district. That could let them engineer lots of EV victories with a minority of the population.
I think Trump would be a little more careful about choosing his staff this time. I liked Tillerson and Mattis, for example, because they were successful in their respective domains and I respected that and was somewhat impressed by Trump choosing them, and dismayed by how the media reported on them. And Pence was... fine... I guess, and establishment. Those are the sorts of people who would ignore Trump and not try to give him his little coup. But they were all pushed out in various ways and are now openly against him.
This time around, he wouldn't pick people like that. Vance, for example, scares me, and strikes me as someone who's intelligent and calculating enough to do damage, and not rein in or ignore Trump.
I think the idea was that having a mob rampaging around would scare Mike Pence into throwing out the electoral votes like Trump wanted.
But what was supposed to happen after that? That's the part where it gets fuzzy for me. I don't see the threat.
>Even if they take some congressmen hostage, so what?
> How exactly does a mob rampaging through the capitol building constitute a coup?
I think you're missing the context. The "mob rampaging through the capitol building" happened during the usually pro-forma electoral vote count. At least some of the rioters intended to intimidate enough officials -- Pence and/or Representatives/Senators -- to refuse to certify a majority of electoral votes for the Biden/Harris ticket. They could have then either declared an outright Trump/Pence victory or thrown the race to the one-vote-per-state tiebreaker mechanism, to the same result.
That's how it constitutes a coup: it is a threat of violence directed at officials precisely when they are taking (nominally ceremonial, but still important) actions to transfer power. Had the intimidation worked, it would have caused a constitutional crisis -- it's not clear that the courts have the authority to intervene in the legislature's duty here, even if they've performed that duty corruptly or incorrectly.
>Even if they take some congressmen hostage, so what?
Trumpers are braindead. To be clear. He intended to force Mike Pence to accept an alternative slate of electors and declare him president. All of this is clear as day if you did the intellectual work of reading something.
I'd say mob to pressure Pence is bad, but sending fake electors is magnitudes worse
I think you may be conflating the Democratic Party and the Blue Tribe. When you say "half of democrats favour internment camps for anti-vaxxers" I'm assuming you mean democratic voters, not politicians. Well, this is an interesting fact about american civics, you actually don't vote for the voters, you vote for the politicians. If you and I vote for the same candidate, and that candidate wins, I don't get to hold any sort of government office out of the deal.
This is relevant because of the massive gap between how much the GOP has been taken over by its most extreme elements, and how much the Democratic party has. If you hate left-wing populists and right-wing populists the same amount, then obviously you should prefer the Democratic Party by a huge margin.
I don't hate them by an equal amount, since the extremists on the left getting their way would literally destroy civilisation, and given that Blue Tribe elites kept much of the planet under borderline house arrest for 18 months I don't see much daylight between them and the 'extremists'.
The rest of us understand that India did not shut down due to "Blue Tribe elites". Other governments did lockdowns because they thought it was a good idea.
Plenty of people disagree with that. But saying it was because a US political faction had enough power to force most of the globe to act against their interests, and burned that overwhelming international influence on... forcing Italians stay at home for 18 months? That's pretty ridiculous.
India shut down for about two months. I don't think anyone is actually all that upset about shutdowns of four weeks to eight weeks, even a bit longer. It was not clear what was going on. It was what followed, a virtual dictatorship of unreason, that was so odious.
Seems worse with the Democrats. I know a lot of Democrat voters and they are reasonable people. None of them believe that thieves should go unpunished, or that schools should be dumbed down for "equality," or that transgenders should be allowed to play in women's sports. A solid majority of Democrat voters are like this. And yet when Democrats get into office, we get those insane policies.
The Republicans seem to have the same general structure with a reasonable electorate and crazy ideas on top, but when they get elected, for whatever reason, we don't get those crazy policies actually in effect (with some notable exceptions in FL).
Depends what you define as crazy, really. I'm pretty liberal, but I would consider it crazy to try to ban IVF or to ban abortions with no exception provided for rape, incest, or nonviable fetuses.
I would consider an iVF ban to be crazy. AFAIK that has not happened anywhere.
I am pro-choice myself, but I do not consider abortion bans crazy. I can see how reasonable people could consider that murder. Lack of exception for non-viable, I consider crazy.
I consider any exceptions for rape and incest to be crazy. Whatever our law about abortion is, it should not take these factors into account. Any such exception creates a situation where we have an entity whose right to live is removed based on the crimes of its parents. Now that's crazy!
Can you share the data about close to half of Democrats favoring internment camps for anti-vaxxers?
I was fairly skeptical on that one, but I think it's coming from this Rasmussen poll in 01/2022: https://bit.ly/3YKoGRP . They ask the question, 'Would you strongly favor, somewhat favor, somewhat oppose or strongly oppose a proposal to limit the spread of the coronavirus by having federal or state governments require that citizens temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine?'; 45% of Democrats said yes (29% of all voters, 22% of Republicans).
That said, I question whether this is representative of overall Democrat sentiment, given that:
- Rasmussen is as far as I know widely considered a low-quality and strongly right-leaning pollster; Wikipedia mentions that 538 dropped it for being low-quality (https://bit.ly/40sQJ9K) and cites a study that rated it 24th of 28 pollsters in accuracy (https://bit.ly/4hrUORq).
- This was at the height of the Omicron spike, when cases were going through the roof and people were panicking (Our World In Data: https://bit.ly/40qF3Er ).
I also think that "favour internment camps for anti-vaxxers" isn't the best summary of the question asked (as shown above).
But it's certainly a real finding from a real poll.
Rasmussen's low quality might shift the needle on what we should believe is the accurate percentage of Democrats want to throw unvaccinated people in internment camps, but it doesn't entirely negate that some people want this. What is an acceptable level of democrat desire for camps? 40%? 30%?
People panicking isn't an excuse for desiring internment camps, because an awful lot of wickedness is preceded by panic including most historic cases of people being thrown in internment camps.
*Democratic, please. EDIT: Either I misread your comment, in which case sorry, or else you yourself edited what I objected to, in which case thanks.
Issue-based (as opposed to candidate-based) polling is notoriously unreliable at determining preferences, because the phrasing of the question (or just the fact that the question is being asked) can mislead people about what the policy is and how reasonable it is. During the height of COVID panic did any influential Democrats call for unvaccinated people to be interned anywhere? If not, it’s hard to see how this poll is relevant to anything.
> People panicking isn't an excuse for desiring internment camps
No, absolutely not. I don't mean to imply that it is, only that I think this poll would have gotten pretty different results at almost any other time (and MA_browsing says 'close to half of democrats favour internment camps', suggesting that it's true currently).
> What is an acceptable level of democrat desire for camps? 40%? 30%?
Reasonable point! I don't feel great about *anyone* advocating for this, although again, I don't think any Democrat I know would endorse this.
But if it's (by assumption of the poll question) temporary, and in the middle of a pandemic that appears to be growing exponentially (and which had had a much higher rate of mortality at the time the poll was taken than it does now)? Sure, I guess somewhere between 30 and 40% I'd stop feeling alarmed by the possibility of that actually happening. There are all *kinds* of terrible things endorsed by at least 30% of each party (not, of course, typically the *same* terrible things across parties). And in this case note that 29% of voters overall were in favor of this at the time.
Worth noting that Nate Silver (whose model still uses Rasmussen) considers it a relatively precise poll with a consistent model bias.
For candidates. That doesn't necessarily reflect on their polls on issues, which as I said in another comment is known to be unreliable in general. Arguably them just asking the question—about a policy which to my knowledge no Democratic politician or health official had proposed—is itself a form of bias.
Thanks! Although I don't have a strong opinion on Rasmussen myself (I haven't paid a ton of attention to their quality or accuracy, I don't see their polls enough to care), I did notice that the same Wikipedia page I cited above says that
'An analysis by Nate Silver on FiveThirtyEight ranked Rasmussen 20th out of 23 pollsters for accuracy in the 2012 elections, with an average error of 4.2 points.'
and
'Nate Silver described Rasmussen as "biased and inaccurate", saying Rasmussen "badly missed the margin in many states, and also exhibited a considerable bias toward Republican candidates."'
That said, those are from 10 - 15 years ago; possibly they've improved or he's changed his views for other reasons. Although I agree with Tom Hitchner that it's not clear that their accuracy on candidate polls can be treated as a good representation of their accuracy on issue polling.
Rasmussen and Atlas have been the most accurate pollsters in recent presidential elections although they did not call recent midterms accurately. This is a matter of historical record. They are right wing.
Thanks! Can you point to some evidence of their accuracy over time in presidential elections? I treat Wikipedia as a reasonable first-pass source -- it's certainly wrong sometimes, but I think the burden of proof falls on the person claiming it's wrong.
We now have data on Rasmussen's latest polling, and their polls on the 2024 presidential race were pretty much exactly accurate, unlike almost all of the "mainstream" polls. They called the national election and the states.
That does not make it accurate in general, but I think that the same thing happened in 2020 and 2016.
I agree that if you make things up, then your opponents look much much worse.
I note the shift- how is it relevant what 50% of democrats believe in? Are the survey participants getting elected? Did politicians suddenly swear they'll all obey their voters' every whim when I wasn't looking? If so, why do we suddenly believe them?
Jan 6 was organized by Trump with the intent of intimidating Congress and Pence into refusing to certify. For comparison, even if the BLM riot in front of the White house had a plan to breach the perimeter (instead of... throwing trash at Secret Service and yelling about racism, as all serious assassins do), this would still be a nonsensical comparison because it was organized by randos, not politicians. Torching political institutions would have approximately no effect on such mobs' ability to act like unserious mobs.
These guardrails have held up for so long, it's easy to forget that they were not given by God.
"The guardrails of liberty must be refreshed from time to time (every four years) by the votes of patriots."
That did not turn out as elegantly as I hoped, but I think it's true. If you vote for the guy who is more overtly trying to bash the guardrails, you won't be able to rely on those guardrails for very long.
Partially because it sets a precedent: Trump winning creates more Trumpists in the future. If Trumpism succeeds, it will create more Trumpists.
*While I am not for Trump*, I am amused that the original quote is arguing for the opposite of what you're arguing for. Here, in all its context:
"""
We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted.
"""
[Typos are just the way they wrote at the time, or the site I grabbed it from]
Hey Scott, I have a younger sister who was in her early 30s during Covid. She was a social worker assisting teens just out of Juvenile Detention. During Covid she worked completely remote. Her assessment of the vaccine was that it was risky due to the unprecedented low levels of testing. Between her age, the fact she worked remote, and her risk assessment, she decided not to get the vaccine. Despite having stellar performance reviews, she was fired for this.
I struggle to take your authoritarian claims seriously. The guardrails have effectively prevented the right from becoming authoritarian. They have not done so with the left.
I hate that both parties are walking down this road, but only one seems to be actually effective.
I'm confused. Would it be more authoritarian for a government to enforce certain kinds of employment policy, or the opposite? Does it matter what level of government is doing the enforcement? Does it matter if the employer is themselves a (different level?) government agency? Does authoritarianism have no need for government at all, and can just describes a form of free association between individuals???
IMO one of the predominant political successes of the 20th century was federal recognition of individual rights as a tool to constrain state power, in a result that presently codes as left-wing. I don't think a one-dimensional definition is going to cut it here.
I feel like both candidates attack the guardrails and it's irresponsible to only highlight attacks from one side. It's like standing inside the gates of a besieged city with two rival armies vying for the right to sack your home, and pointing out that you don't like Red armor, so let's let the Blue soldiers be the ones to do pillaging.
How can you affirmatively recommend a vote for Harris without having an honest discussion of how she was instrumental in hiding Biden's decline? As the VP, most of her job is to take over in the event the president is incapacitated. She took over Biden's campaign when he was incapacitated, but not the WH? Indeed, she still insists he's sharp as a tack. How long did she hide Biden's decline, and what role did she play in his ouster after it was too late to hold a real nomination? How did she secure delegates pledged to Biden without ever going to the voters?
Everything about her campaign seems like a corrupt backroom deal to engineer an appointment, as opposed to respect for democratic electoral norms. Indeed, the last 3 Democratic 'nominees' were engineered placements of one type or another (freezing out Sanders in 2016 and 2020, giving Clinton access to party funds during the primaries, etc). A vote for Harris is a vote to perpetuate this corruption of one of the two major parties. There will never be popular input into the Democratic party's nomination process until there are consequences for ignoring the will of Democratic party voters within the party. If party officials perceive that their voters will "vote blue no matter who", they'll eventually jettison party principles to the point where they're willing to campaign with their ideological opponents of yesteryear, like George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, or Dick Cheney.
Meanwhile, there was Crossfire Hurricane, which seems like completely bulldozing the guardrails of American democracy. I guess you could argue that Trump will ALSO weaponize the government. Maybe he will continue/escalate prosecution of his political opponents, control/censorship of media, etc. After all, didn't he team up with Musk and Twitter? Maybe next he'll go after Facebook, Apple, Google, etc. That could be catastrophic, since the censorship apparatus for those companies is already in place. But wait ... who put that dangerous censorship apparatus in place to begin with? And is it responsible to vote in favor of that candidate if the potential to exploit it is an argument against Trump?
When one other party continues something that was started under the other party it becomes Standard Operating Procedure in American politics. But how is that an argument in FAVOR of the initial offending party?
Indeed, if the Harris regime is rewarded with a win, they might conclude that part of the winning strategy was branding her opponent as a felon and proceed to prosecute her next opponent, too. Maybe the next step really is to put them in jail, and then do we really have a different system than a banana republic? There's a possibility that the Trump team will see the prosecutions as having helped him, in which case maybe they'll demur after the election, similar to how they moved on from the "lock her up" chants in 2016.
Or maybe they'll go for revenge. If you believe Trump will prosecute his political opponents, don't vote for him. (He said he would, then suggested later he wouldn't. But he talks a lot about "prosecuting cheaters", whatever that means. With Trump it comes down to who you choose to believe: Trump or Trump.) But if the potential for prosecuting your political opponents is a reason NOT to vote for Trump, how could you also justify a vote for Harris?
Let's talk about what a real authoritarian regime looks like. First-generation regimes are centered around the revolutionary leader who overthrew the last government. They tend to be strongman types who have a close tie to the military that put them in power. Late-generation authoritarianism often goes the opposite direction, setting up some emperor/monarch/dictator in the Sacred City and not allowing him/her contact with the outside world. Then a bunch of bureaucrats fight over the Dear Leader for influence, controlling the country by proxy. Not sure how much that describes a Biden, Trump, or Harris presidency. Probably all of them to some extent.
Let's not be blind to half the argument because we made up our minds already. Arguments that "sure this side is bad, but the other side is worse because of X" don't hold water. You have to earn my vote, you don't get it as a way to prevent the other side from getting in - swing state or no.
While Trump has some alarming rhetoric around authoritarianism, I'm curious as to your take on some of the actions by the Biden administration. For example, do you see the weaponization of the justice department against Trump and Elon as justified? Do you agree with the policy that it should be illegal to spread misinformation? That creating AI-generated parodies of a political figure should be illegal?
Justice system: The question isn't whether a law can, somehow, be used to gain a conviction, but whether it is fairly applied. If large numbers of black people get pulled over and given tickets for infractions like going 5mph over, having a taillight out or whatever that's fine so long as the police are aggressively going after everyone else who's going 5 over. If there's a racial disparity, it could be because of a difference in offending rates or a difference in enforcement. Democrats have been arguing for decades that enforcement in the justice system is unfairly slammed against unfavored groups. Republicans refuse to see it, though, insisting that the problem is a difference in offending rates.
Trump's case looks like an enforcement difference, especially given campaign promises (now fulfilled) to aggressively pursue some kind of legal action against him.
Also, sometimes the process is the punishment. If you're a minority business owner who doesn't trust banks and works only in cash, civil asset forfeiture can seem extremely unfair, especially when you have no recourse to a justice system that effectively assume your a drug dealer because you were carrying cash around. For years, Republicans dismissed concerns like these when it was about minorities. Now they see the Carroll case looking like it may get reduced or overturned, and they're beginning to understand that the point wasn't to take Trump's money permanently, but to ensure he was unable to self-finance. It's legal to self-finance, but if the people in power don't like what you're doing or how you're doing it, they'll find a way to use the justice system against you. This is nothing new, but it's new for Republicans to realize it. (They just think it's limited to Trump , or maybe J6 protesters). Meanwhile, it's disappointing to see Democrats suddenly insist that the justice system is fair. Since when?
(I will say I think Elon has almost certainly done something illegal with his million dollar giveaways. He'll likely get away with it, since the punishment will be some kind of fine and the giveaway will have the desired effect on the election before it's reversed. It's a price he's willing to pay. Meanwhile, if government contacts and launch approvals hadn't been leveraged against him, I think Elon would have stuck to tweets against 'the libs'. He's on a tight deadline to get Starship ready for the next window to Mars. That's the thing he cares about most in the world, and going after it is what clearly activated him - something I think is bad, since Elon is clearly effective in tech development and him getting sucked into politics. The Musk golden goose almost certainly has a few more eggs to lay, and it'd be a shame to lose out on that. However, blowback from powerful people like Elon is why government usually only weaponizes against powerless people.)
Misinformation: I think the worst culprits of misinformation never get censured by the government because they're doing the government's work. Misinformation has been a problem for decades, but when it's combined with government power it allows significantly worse excesses than when it runs rampant on its own. Compare the effects of the demonic preschool scare in the 90's to the WMDs in Iraq lie, or the supposed link between Saddam and Al Qaeda - who hated each other in reality. The government claiming that Russia blew up their own pipeline, that the US was winning in Vietnam, that the Biden laptop was a forgery after they'd internally confirmed its authenticity, that they weren't spying on American citizens, and on and on. Intelligence agencies have executed many misinformation operations against the American people to get things to go their way, but there is never any suggestion of taking corrective actions against them, despite the fact that it's clearly worse when they do it than when it arises organically.
I think a good case study of the problem of misinformation is COVID-19. There was plenty of misinformation circulating during the pandemic, and it took both the organic form and the government-sponsored/supported form. We've now learned the government did a huge amount to crack down on natural misinformation, but that they also clearly eliminated a lot of true information specifically because it cut against their own misinformation they were trying to spread. The government's threshold isn't about whether information is "true" or "false", but whether it advances their interests or not. They are not a disinterested third party, and as such cannot be relied upon as an arbiter of truth.
As an expert in this field, it wasn't difficult for me to spot which was which during the pandemic, but many people I knew weren't able to do the same. They were usually credulous in favor or opposed to the government line. So for my anti-government friends, they would agree when I pointed out obvious government misinformation about COVID-19, but then they'd start talking about some other misinformation and I'd have to correct them. They were generally less responsive to correction when it was something the government had called out, since their experience was that the government wasn't credible (which it wasn't). My friends who were credulous of the government line refused to believe corrections to government misinformation, even after it was proved, until the government came out and explicitly acknowledged wrongdoing, or it became generally acceptable to admit the government line was no longer tenable.
Is misinformation a problem? Yes. Is it a good idea to give the government control over what should be labelled 'misinformation'? No. Sad experience demonstrates that this will only serve to amplify the spread of misinformation - and in particular dangerous misinformation.
AI generated parodies: I feel like we've been hearing the deepfake scare for a long time, without seeing much come from it. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it doesn't seem to have materialized in a meaningful way. I remember the claim Republicans made a few months ago that Harris's campaign had faked a photo at an airport to add to her crowd size, but then it turned out there were a bunch of other photos of the event from hundreds of cell phone cameras, so nothing ever came of it because it wasn't faked.
Except, I don't care about crowd sizes to begin with, so the whole discussion seemed dumb. I'm not sure where the line crosses from parody to fraud, but this is not a question that began with AI-generated images. The best satire is the kind that's as close as possible to believability. I remember Republicans getting really angry in the early 2000's when Onion articles would get circulated as truth by Republican lawmakers and pundits, because the parody was close enough to things they actually believed that they bought it. Back then, they wanted to shut down parody for the same reason Democrats went after the fake Harris campaign video - except the Onion never explicitly labelled its content as parody and the AI-Harris video did.
I know outlets like the Onion and the Babylon Bee have legal departments that review all their content to make sure it doesn't cross the line from parody to fraud. If you're setting up a fundraising website based on fake content and calling it parody, you're potentially fooling people into contributing money to something they believe is real when it isn't. That seems like outright fraud to me. But we have a long tradition in the US of allowing parody to mock people's beliefs without explicitly coming out and telling them they're being mocked. When you start going after the satirists, you know you've lost the argument.
I'm a libertarianish-conservativish person who basically feels the same way about this election that Scott Alexander does. Can you tell me more about what you mean by Kamala's "bid for authoritarianism"?
Fairly liberal and voting for Kamala here; I think a lot of the concern about this is based on Joe Biden's administration pressuring private companies to self-censor and the various legal actions against Trump, especially the hush money trial which is pretty clearly politically motivated IMO.
"That said i think I’m still going Trump because his brand of authoritarianism is hated by the media and a majority of the public"
Is this not just an admission that you are, very literally, motivated by causing harm and spite?
I think he means that since it's a less popular brand of authoritarianism with elites, it's less likely to succeed.
Right. It's similar to what some libertarians have said about voting for the bad Republican: it'll provoke the media into being critical again.
I don't think "critical" is quite the right word. Yes, the media questioned many of the Trump administration's claims when he was in power, but it also credulously hyped a lot of stories that turned out to be false. It didn't seem to me that it was doing its job so much as just trying to help the opposition.
Isn't Trump's (and his most avid followers) bid for authoritarianism, if you will, depend on a circulation of elites, such that the very elite class that you seem to assume will rise up against him will be cut off at the knees and effectively replaced?
>such that the very elite class that you seem to assume will rise up against him will be cut off at the knees and effectively replaced?
Is that even physically feasible? That's probably a large (maybe even overwhelmingly large) fraction of college faculty and mass media people.
Replacing the existing "resistance" elite would be impossible, but it is also unnecessary. It is only important to replace a subset of the elite who effectively leverage power over a larger swathe of the elite class and/or control how funding is distributed to universities, states, cities, etc.
This one reason why he wants to use the impoundment powers of the President (whether it is lawful or not is another question) so that he can distribute favors to those who fall in line and cut off contracts to corporations, grant moneys to universities, funding to local entities. Most of these entities will effectively cave if it means their funding streams dry up.
Or, for example, it is also why he wants to eliminate protections for civil servants. He is not going to fire all of them, he just has to fire a few and ensure that everyone else knows that he has the ability to do the same with them. Most people will fall into line at that point.
Just look at the way big tech (Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc.) are already bending the knee. If he can effectively "control" them, middle management won't matter and the "resistance" will be little more than an aesthetic.
the downside of this is that the media being critical comes with a resurgence of insane leftist activism
" it'll provoke the media into being critical again"
Until their guy wins the election after the bad Republican, and now everything is gas and gaiters. Remember how Covid was so deadly, even the chance of spreading it by attending your local church was too great a risk, so please don't hold religious services - but protest marches are a-okay because racism is a bigger threat than the Most Deadly Disease Ever.
If we're going to have things imposed on us by fiat, at least placate the plebs by being evenhanded about it?
This doesn't make sense to me. If one brand is less popular but it manages to win next week, doesn't that make it significantly more likely to succeed?
Let's say there's a two-step process to bulldozing the guardrails against authoritarianism: gaining sufficient popular support, and gaining support from elites. Whichever party wins the election next time would de facto have crossed the "popular support" pillar. Then we would want to be concerned with preventing whichever party has also completed institutional capture from instituting authoritarian policies, since the guard against less popular authoritarian movements is elections.
Why are you equating something being hated with "causing harm"? In my experience those are barely correlated.
I mean, being motivated by spite implies that you're doing something less because you think it's "good" and more because it will "make your enemies mad". You see a lot of "liberal tears" stuff, not so much "conservative tears". I think this is because conservatives in general kind of care less about "good things" as much as they care about "no good things for people I don't like".
No, sorry to convey that. I’m saying Trump’s authoritarianism is loathed by me, the media, 60-70% of the public, 80% of congress, the military, and the security state. There’s no base of power for him to launch a coup from or more slowly erode our freedoms. We had 4 years of Trump and zero authoritarianism bc of this. Meanwhile the FBI has succeeded in eroding our privacy rights under Clinton/Reno as Bush/Ashcroft. Bush normalized torture when Obama refused to prosecute it. Obama pioneered drone-murdering US citizens overseas without due process. Trump refused to get us entangled with Syria and his strike against Soleimani was the perfect deterrent to Iran, bc it deftly avoided collateral damage or escalation.
That's fair, sorry to jump to conclusions.
That said, I still think this is a wrong way to think, and doesn't result in any good. I think that "Trump is so offensive he won't get anything done" was 65% "true" in 2016 but is closer to 30 or 40% "true" now. Do I think he'll bang his executive gavel and put everyone trans in camps? No. But like... the GOP is obviously a party of Trump now. They tried to replace him with a technically more competent DeSantis and thankfully failed, but even DeSantis couldn't bring himself to seriously criticize Trump *while* actively running against him.
I think the GOP is filled with way more yes-men than it was before, and I think that Trump's influence on their culture will extend past his death. I think him having been elected at all is kind of disastrous long-term in this sense. After he dies, he's going to be replaced by a guy who expresses basically the same opinions, but also isn't so impulsive and narcissistic that he hamstrings himself every time he tries to get something done that takes longer than a week.
This is why I said it's "thankful" DeSantis lost, lol. I think "the guy whose campaign staffers were putting Black Suns in his Twitter videos" combined with "presentationally being a professionalish politician" is far more dangerous than "Trump", and this kind of politician is something enabled by Trump having been elected.
I'm trying to read this in a way that doesn't sound like "my political opponents getting elected is a bad thing."
Could you frame any of this in a way that Trump voters, even hesitant Trump voters, would agree with?
Almost all of the Trump hesitancy (as opposed to fully supportive or opposing) I see is about his temperament, so getting his policies without the temperament would be seen as a good thing.
I get that, for instance, many people oppose his immigration stances. But, like, the majority of the US population actually supports it. What does it mean to live in a democracy? It can't mean that a minority who hold the reigns of power get to block the will of the majority just on their own preferences. The Constitution can stop the majority, but not a self-selected minority. Claims that Trump is undermining democracy rang very hollow in such conversations.
> I'm trying to read this in a way that doesn't sound like "my political opponents getting elected is a bad thing."
I mean... this seems kind of tautological, doesn't it, lol? I'm not sure why you're trying to read it in a way that doesn't imply this - that is what I'm implying. I don't want Republicans to win offices.
> What does it mean to live in a democracy?
I believe that there are certain things that supersede democratic concerns, democracy itself ironically being one of them. If everyone voted to have an absolute monarch, I'd still say we shouldn't allow that! Putin was arguably legitimately democratically elected at some point. He definitely isn't *now*. There should be systems to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
Anyways, I don't think it's possible to convince the average Trump voter. I think it's possible to convince some people on the margins whose opinions seem kind of flippant and random (this is true for most people in general, they just consistently have random opinions within the window of partisanship). But like... anecdotally, a lot of Trump supporters are just kind of stupid and emotional, and the ones I know who are *really* into it just seem mentally ill. The most success I have in converting Trump members (largely through family) comes not from argument but rather "acting like they're being embarrassing" or "refusing to talk to them" or "saying something really pithy and vaguely religious because a lot of people have huge biases towards someone saying a belief is spiritual".
You are, of course, welcome to have an opinion. I thought you were making a case that might try to appeal to general principals or would be convincing to others so that more people would want to choose your stance.
Naked partisanship isn't exactly new. I would prefer a world where there is less of that, such that we may be able to convince one another of important differences in positions. I think that would also make transitions between administrations less jarring and concerning.
>What does it mean to live in a democracy? It can't mean that a minority who hold the reigns of power get to block the will of the majority just on their own preferences.
This is one of the reasons why a lot of ancient authors (notably Thucydides) were so critical of pure democracy. Democracy without any additional protections leads to the domination of demagogues and the tyranny of the majority. That's why we're a constitutional republic and not a pure democracy. The Bill of Rights most definitely says that minorities can block the will of the majority, if the will of the majority is to take your guns, to censor your speech, to keep slaves, etc etc etc. I don't think most conservative policies are bad enough that they violate our rights in this way, but some of the more extreme ones (bans on abortion that don't make clear exceptions for rape, incest, or the safety of the mother, various free speech infringements meant to curtail wokeness and crossdressing, throwing someone in prison for using the wrong bathroom) seem to qualify.
It sounds like you have already determined which issues matter to you more than the ability of others to have an opinion. How do you think your opponents should reconcile *their* list of non-negotiable items when they differ from yours?
My arguments against the zero authoritarianism view is that the Roe v Wade court stacking, his draconian treatreatment of migrants, the overall election effort, both the legal maneuvering and the big lie, were authoritarian. Not categorically denying QAnon was authoritarian. They're as modern authoritarian vs traditional as the quasi-theological social elite oligarchs that Scott is still looking to work against in the long term. But they all had greater negative short term impact. And his support and admiration of authoritarians worldwide builds strength for the growing influence of strong man style politics worldwide.
Would Democratic politicians not "categorically denying" BLM riots be authoritarianism? If so, what makes Republicans/Trump worse on this metric? I'm trying to figure out your definition, and it seems to just run along partisan lines. That's fine for your opinion and your vote, but doesn't seem very convincing.
My comment was directed at there being zero actual authoritarianism during Trump’s presidency, with examples to show where I think there was. I’m saying, for instance, that helping fuel an entire mythology around satanic pedophiles having taken over the government, which people I know actually believe, were as least as modern authoritarian as those done on the left (see sentence 3 - really seems like you skimmed over that, though if you can explain how my describing the left as “quasi-theological social elite oligarchs” is a neutral description, let me know and I’ll try to work harder to make it more negative in the future). So no denials or counterarguments against the existence of left authoritarianism. The fact that left authoritarianism exists doesn’t have any relation to whether or not Trump’s authoritarianism (and I do mean specifcally his, rather than the right as a whole) exists beyond mere rhetoric. Beyond that, the debate’s about relative impact, and yes, there I’m partisan, I believe for the right reasons, but sure I have biases. Those biases do not include believing my side - such that it is, I’m pretty moderate - has absolutely zero authoritarian impulses or impacts. As to my metric, it’s immediacy. Not denying that the right should exist as an opposition party to the left. The “which is worse?” question is a long-term minimization & optimization project. I think individuals should be voting their interests through parties, not letting parties enact party interests through individuals’ votes. By all means, vote straight ticket GOP. I just think if you’re not in the upper echeolons of the Trump’s circle, Trump being back in the Whitehouse will not be in your best interests.
That's fair. I wouldn't classify most of the things you did as authoritarian in the first place, so I was double-checking to see if we were even using the same language. It appears that we are, but you generally include more things as authoritarian than I do, which is fine.
I think this analysis is wrong in a subtle way. It's true that all those institutions dislike Trump and will scrutinize everything he does - but how often does the media's criticism of Trump make you think "yeah, they nailed it! Spot on!"? The media and commentariat haven't prosecuted the case against Trump very well even after 10 years, so Trump being in power again will just enable more caterwauling and less cogent analysis. There's a sense in which he breaks people's brains (not just his supporters'), so the combination of "evil president + bad arguments for why he's evil" just means you're going to get an evil president without effectively persuading people that he's evil, not to mention a very exhausting four years.
Also, respectfully, your Iran comments are a bit off-base. I write about Iran constantly and wouldn't be able to do justice to everything wrong above, but it's unclear if Iran even *can* escalate and what real escalation by them would look like at this point (notably, they did and continue to respond to Soleimani's killing, which led a bunch of symbolic retaliations and 176 passengers of Flight PS752 being pointlessly murdered). It's further unclear whether Trump did anything particularly unique by taking out Soleimani (I think the Obama foreign policy establishment might have done the same). Characterizing this as "the perfect deterrent to Iran" is really misleading - a year later they elected a crazy hardliner!
Trump ramped up drone strikes amount by a factor 10x.
See, I agree with what you're saying, but to me, that's another reason not to vote for Trump. If he wins, it will absolutely accelerate the bad tendencies in "the media and most power centers" due to backlash. Left wing people got way crazier 2016 -> 2020, and moderated 2020 -> 2024.
This seems like just giving in to the heckler's veto.
Kind of, yeah? We have a democracy with millions of people. That a candidate (and I include Trump, Hillary Clinton and anyone else with ridiculously high disapproval ratings) is absolutely straight up hated by ~30 million of them, and we absolutely have evidence that "hatred of specific other side candidate" leads to extremism and violence in "our" side, then I am fine with biasing my vote on avoiding that backlash.
I might rephrase it as "when you nominate a hated candidate, it gives the other side license to adopt more extreme policies because the relative cost for doing so goes down, so I want to disincentivize parties from doing that."
What is the relative rate of hatred of republicans for Harris vs Democrats for Trump?
I don't know a perfect way to measure it, because normally I would use previous elections and long-running disapproval ratings, and there's less of that info available for Harris (though for similar reasons I would have suggested the Dems running a candidate who actually had been thru those things, so as to avoid backlash-y behavior from their own party members), but I feel pretty confident that the former is less than the latter.
The Democrats cut the rod for their own backs, and they're stuck with Harris because of the denial around Biden until the bitter end. After that, they couldn't pick anyone else, but the impression the 'party of democracy' gives by putting up a candidate without even a pretence of having a convention to choose from a selection, that the party in general could vote for, instead of the elites saying "this is who you have to approve and it doesn't really matter either if you don't approve because we've already decided" isn't too great.
This is exceptional circumstance, but the idea that Kamala is the people's choice is really bending reality.
Yeah, but the hatred for Clinton was explained as "sexism! hate for strong women! anti-reproductive rights!" (and race got pulled in when the black women feminist voters were angry with the white women feminist voters for not coming out and voting enough for Hillary). It wasn't "gosh, maybe we shouldn't have picked the most unpopular choice possible" reflection, it was "the people are wrong and we have to double down on educating them to be better".
I'm astounded that Trump has been as successful as he has been, but he's resonating with *someone* on *some* issues, and just beating that away with "Fascism! Racism! Sexism! Homophobia! Transphobia! Christofascists!" is not going to fix the problem of "what is he getting right that we aren't? what candidate can we put forward that appeals to the deplorables/garbage?" (and that's part of the problem right there: the deplorables and garbage attitude to something like a quarter of the country, if I'm being generous to Hillary in her division of Trump voters into 'half of them are sincere but too stupid to know what's good for them, the other half are evil').
Harris is pretty historically underwater, at least compared to pre Trump/Clinton candidates. Long term I hope both parties start nominating candidates that are at least 50% popular. In the meantime, how does this help us determine who to vote for now? Someone (whether it were Trump or Harris) being slightly less unpopular is not a convincing argument.
The heckler’s veto plus threats of violence is what got so many Republicans to capitulate.
Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney were harassed at the airport.
Adam Kinziger and Liz Cheney have both said they talked to several Republicans who wanted to vote for impeachment but feared violence against their families.
A Republican legislator in Michigan was hounded out of the party after his exhaustive investigation found no evidence of election fraud. Same for the former Arizona speaker of the house.
Not just "threats" of violence. I notice that two attempted assassination attempts - including one that almost worked - against Trump didn't merit even a mention in ACX's spiel about "threats to democracy".
Assassination attempts are bad, be it against Trump or Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
There was an attempt against George Wallace but still I am glad he didn’t become president
Not to mention that, like...it wasn't the Democrats behind those assassinations? The constant equivocation between Democrats, anyone who hates Trump, and left-wingers more generally is getting old, as someone who would be considered a left-wing extremist by 80% of the commenters here, it seems.
Genuinely, Democrats are almost all neoliberal corporate shills. It's just that they're not actively trying to roll back civil rights and make life actively harder for myself and my loved ones. Deepest hope of this election would be that the Republican party shatters and the Democratic party splits in half with the most centrist/center-right elements linking up with the remnants of what was once the GOP to have a new paradigm with a genuine progressive party as an option for once.
Neither of the failed assassins was a Democrat/on the left. One was a depressed teen who wanted to go out with a bang via suicide by cop. The other one a guy with some meth problems who became crazy in Ukraine, and said he voted Trump in 2016.
Perhaps it is time to consider whether democracy is in a ratchet death spiral, everywhere in the world. Perhaps now that we have the society, prosperity, and technology we have, there is no way to prevent each side's strong incentive to be worse tomorrow than they were today.
What do *you* do if democracy is irretrievably broken? I hope the answer isn't "lay down and die", because historically a ton of people have been very happy living in not-democracies.
I'm utterly sick of this claim that wokeness and left-wing extremism was in any way caused by a backlash to Trump. It's completely and demonstrably false.
The first recognisable instance of cancel culture I know of was in February 2013, a campaign to get Orson Scott Card removed from co-writing a Marvel comic storyline because he opposed gay marriage. (It succeeded IIRC by convincing his co-writer to drop out, killing the storyline). The two canonical and famous defining examples were Justine Sacco (December 2013) and Brendan Eich (April 2014). By mid 2015 there had been dozens of such cases, the realignment of society towards these unprecedented new norms of "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom to dissent from the progressive orthodoxy" was well underway, and the only reason it didn't have a clear name yet was because there was so little pushback to this among the elite institutions that it wasn't thought to need a name other than "basic decency" or "correct opinions". And all this was before Trump had even announced an intention to run for president.
So I think three things are undeniable. (1) This was not at all caused by Trump's election but by Obama's re-election. Far from being a fearful reaction to losing power it was a triumphant "now we can freely hurt the people we hate" reaction to winning. (2) Two of those three defining cases were based around the issue that the left was most clearly and overwhelming winning on (homosexuality/gay marriage), further proof that cancel culture had nothing to do with desperately resisting the powerful and everything to do with sadistically crushing the losers. (3) Trump was a backlash to (among other things) wokeness and cancel culture, and the narrative that it was the other way around is unbelievable memory-holing and past-rewriting. Kind of like the Nazis/Bolsheviks justifying their seizure of power as justified by the Allied wars against them!
The more proximate thing was the end of Occupy Wall Street after it had gotten infested by the woke and subsequently petered out. These terms see a sharp uptick starting in 2011-2014, depending on term and publication:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening
I am sick and tired of people claiming the Dixie Chicks are an example of right-wing cancel culture. They were "cancelled" for things they said in public, as part of their public performance and deliberately made in front of an audience.
What actually got them into trouble was trying to say one thing in front of one audience that another audience would be angered by. Honest people shouldn't be doing this, and dishonest people shouldn't be surprised if they're caught at it.
Also, notice that this is pretty much the only right-wing example anyone can ever find?
I did not see Justine Sacco as a triumph of liberal or left-wing cancel culture; the position that she was stupidly claimed to hold by people who didn't or didn't want to understand irony was one that no conservative with a brain would actually consciously hold (white people don't get AIDS). Rather, I saw it as an example of an online mob, and how easily it could form in social media. That did predate Trump's election, but it does not seem to be inherently political, let alone in the narrow sense of having one particular political coloring. Rather, it is a phenomenon that fed into online wokedom later, and not only there; it would be silly to claim that right-wing online mobs can't form - it's just that we associate "mobs of righteousness" with the woke.
It is clear to me that wokeness has helped Trump and is helping him now, though it's unclear by how much. But Trump I was not somehow a reaction to the Justine Sacco case. How much Trump was a reaction to then-incipient woke - that's an open question to me, though I have much stronger doubts than I would now. The wave of woke had only barely lapped the shores of most people's consciousness during Trump's ascent, even if it was already a thing in some circles.
I don't think that's an accurate description of the Justine Sacco mob. I think it consisted of tweets like "this bitch just insulted Africa" and "welcome to black twitter" and endless accusations of her being privileged and flaunting her privilege. In other words, these were woke people (not apolitical or centrist), and their anger was not thinking she wasn't joking, but thinking it wasn't an acceptable thing to joke about. (And not because of a concern for the feelings of AIDS victims specifically, but for much more general woke reasons of racism and marginalisation and privilege).
As for wokeness barely lapping the shores, I think that's clearly wrong as well. Look at the comments on Scott's 2016 version of this post. There's heaps and heaps of references to voting for Trump to fight against wokeness (or "social justice", "political correctness" or "SJWs" as it was known then). It was a widely recognised phenomenon that had been taking over society for several years, among anyone who was paying attention, by that point. The main change during the Trump administration was giving it a clear name--the terms "woke" and "cancel culture" were popularised 2018-2019 or so. But this is an example of rising *resistance* to wokeness: naming it means acknowledging it as something that can be criticised and opposed and as something that certainly isn't remotely equivalent to "kindness" or even to "progressivism" in any way.
I said lapping the shores of *most people*'s consciousness. Of course the average reader of Slate Star Codex was overexposed to the woke early on.
Ok fine, but I maintain that it was far more widely known. Brendan Eich was a household name in conservative media regarding the excesses of the left. So were people like the British scientist (I forget his name) who joked about falling in love with female co-workers. BLM started in 2013 I believe, and by late 2015 was a household name, doing things like aggressively shutting down a Bernie Sanders speech and shutting down the dedication of a Christmas tree (!), and other things that had nothing to do with Trump but were left-extremist attacks on centrists, fellow leftists, and apolitical people. And Hillary Clinton ran her campaign on extremely heavy and blatant identity politics, as well as using woke language in her speeches.
I think if you look at archived online discussions from 2016 from many sources you'll see many references to wokeness in numerous forms.
Very astute analysis, thank you for giving me some context to consider. I lean more heavily to the idea that Obama's reelection started it all. The smugness with which he approached Romney and his other opponents publicly (and, yes, the winking at the IRS to punish enemies privately) created more threat to democracy than Trump did in his actual presidency.
Kind of infuriating to watch Obama drift back into the picture now with the same progressiver-than-thou rhetoric that marked his presidency (e.g., telling black men that they're not voting for Harris solely because they're afraid of women). There's probably a good book to be written about all the cultural things that soured in and after his presidency.
I don’t it caused it, I think it’s a repeated game of escalation/arms race. The extremists on both sides empower each other, and becoming more extreme increases the likelihood of the other side doing so as well. Their true enemies are the moderates.
Who fired the first shot in this latest, ongoing culture war? I could be convinced that the left started it, but partisan extremists on both sides have been gleefully making the vicious cycle turn faster.
I think that a lot of the guardrails against Trump have eroded since last time. For instance, previously Mike Pence refused to put Trump above the constitution (and Pence has now stated that Trump should never be president again). Now J.D. Vance has explicitly said that he *would* overturn the election in Trump’s favor if it happened again. Similarly, Trump now has a Supreme Court that will support him to the degree of offering presidential immunity. Trump has explicitly been trying to attract followers who will be personally loyal to him and support his bids for power, and it seems like he has been succeeding even with his endless parade of scandals.
Contrast that with the supporters Harris has, who initially supported Biden and then (reasonably) decided that they wanted him replaced when he seemed too old and addled. Compared with Trump, Harris’s support is more fragile, and we should expect that it would pivot to favoring some other generic Democrat for reelection if Harris did anything too egregious.
I have a different take on the facts but your position is well thought out and if i agreed with you on the facts I’d be voting for Harris for the same reasons.
Thank you! Out of curiosity, what facts do you disagree with? It can definitely be tricky to say *for sure* how dangerous Trump would be with the people around him trying to keep him in check, but it seems to me that some of the people in the best position to know those facts would be the people who have been in those positions before.
And it’s not just Pence, but also Kelly (Trump’s former chief of staff), Grisham (his former press secretary), Scaramucci (his former communications director), and at least 10 other notable officials that worked under Trump who are standing against him. These include people with largely conservative values, who are presumably aware of the problems with the Democratic Party, who still think Trump is more dangerous. Same thing with Dick Cheney and Mitt Romney (to my knowledge, McCain was also not a fan of Trump).
That’s a pretty big update for me. Whenever I see people acting in opposition to the way they would normally be biased, I take those views a lot more seriously.
>Now J.D. Vance has explicitly said that he *would* overturn the election in Trump’s favor if it happened again.
I'm not entirely sure how this is supposed to operationalise. I mean, if there's an election in 2028 and Vance is VP that means Trump got elected now, which means Trump would be indisputably ineligible due to term limit and Vance couldn't "overturn the election in Trump's favour" (since the SCOTUS and/or military would step in at that point).
>Similarly, Trump now has a Supreme Court that will support him to the degree of offering presidential immunity.
I will note that while the scope of presidential immunity is debatable, the *existence* of a "things that are illegal for private citizens aren't always illegal for government agents performing official business" rule is kind of inherent in society. Protection money vs. taxes. Kidnapping vs. arrests/imprisonment. Murder vs. death sentence. Piracy/freebooting vs. warfare.
Ivanka has been missing from action and reportedly wants nothing to do with politics any more.
His other sons like Don Jr are ascendant, recommended Vance, and are in charge of purging the party and administration from people willing to stand up to Trump.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/vance-walz-vice-presidential-debate-election-2024/card/donald-trump-jr-s-main-job-keeping-bad-actors-out-of-transition-team-6HLZI8Lo6dNw41ueWKbh
I agree, I also find it absurd that Trump will easily turn the entire country into a fascist state when literally most of the elite is against him, whereas it is much more feasible for Kamala Harris to enact terrible left-wing economic policies that will harm capitalism and make everyone miserable.
Does Trump need to succeed at fascism to degrade the country in bigger ways than bad policy?
Yes.
The question was rhetorical.
The president has a lot of ability to weaken norms, damage foreign relations, or increase corruption that don't end in fascism.
The answer to the rhetorical question was "no"
What is 'the elite'? Academics have near-zero hard power, and their soft power has been much damaged by overzealous sophomores (in the literal or general sense: people whose intellectual development stopped in their sophomore year) who cherry-picked some terms here and there and ran away with them.
Yes, I also found this part of the comment strange. Usually when people refer to the 'elite' they either mean academics, policymakers, or rich people. It's definitely not academics, who as you say have little sway, policymakers, who the Trump admin would be putting into or taking out of power, or rich people, who... I mean, just look at the WaPo nonendorsement scandal. At the very least there are plenty of extremely powerful 'elites' who do not want a Harris presidency.
Why then do economists across the political spectrum support Harris?
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/23/politics/nobel-prize-economists-harris-economic-plan/index.html
Why do even Trump's supporters say that his policies will cause higher prices, higher inflation, a larger budget deficit, and a market crash?
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/29/elon-musk-trump-allies-economy-plan-short-term-pain-harris-election.html
> Ivanka and Jared will be running the show and they are standard chamber of commerce neoliberals which is why Trump didn’t do anything authoritarian last time
FYI: Ivanka and Jared reiterated that they're not coming back into politics just yesterday. ( https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/style/ivanka-trump.html ) Jared Kushner said that he "wouldn't accept the offer" to work in another Trump administration. ( https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/will-trumps-son-in-law-jared-kushner-return-to-white-house-if-ex-us-president-wins-2024-race-101707912942378.html )
Yeah bc they want to be allowed back into polite society if he loses. But if he wins all bets are off and they’ll find themselves drafted back in.
Seems like you're betting a lot on a speculative assertion about someone's motives.
Unless you live in a swing state, your vote does nothing anyway, so cast it for Oliver and make a firm statement against that sort of thing.
>That said i think I’m still going Trump because his brand of authoritarianism is hated by the media and a majority of the public.
"No one goes to that bar, it's too crowded."
If Trump wins, can you really claim that his brand is less popular?
>If Harris wins, the media and most power centers will back her bid for authoritarianism and things start getting bad real fast.
I'm not totally sure what authoritarianism you're referring to, aside from Harris saying platforms like X should have more restrictions. Given that the Supreme Court is dominated by conservatives, I don't expect Kamala to be successful in challenging freedom of speech.
They don't need to actually get a ruling in their favor. They can just suppress whatever speech they want, the 9th Circuit rules for them, and then, much later, the Supreme Court overturns it. Then they do it over again.
The same slow authoritarianism (both a combo of gov policies and elite non-gov policies) that has been turning people towards trump for 8 years.
Examples being: affirmative action, speech restrictions at schools/workplaces, COVID mandates, nation’s capital “black lives matter” painted on the street, etc.
I am definitely looking forward to the "mostly peaceful" Dem protests and attempts to overturn the election/s when Trump is elected and inaugured, just like last time. Maybe people won't forget the second time?
The guardrails that held last time were name Bill Barr and Mike Pence. The fact that he replaced Pence with Vance shows that the guardrails will not be nearly as strong next time
I would argue the right's SCOTUS control is one of the more concerning authoritarianism issues at the moment, particularly if they get more control than they currently have and so no relatively reasonable justice/s can swing a verdict. I am also concerned that popular will does not support policies that will keep this country stable and properly running, and may support really awful things, and that a right-wing administration will ignore this issue even when the Constitution would normally protect people. Probably one of the more obvious points here is related to free speech; most people on the left and on the right want to censor their political opponents, and a party that doesn't respect the rule of law is more likely to fully and directly subvert that (and specifically, more likely to use the government to severely persecute private individuals who disagree with them) than a party that at least allegedly does.
But I'm also a single-issue voter on whether I'll be able to keep my passport, so take my words with a grain of salt.
There are thousands of quotes, articles, and interviews with members of Trump's staff from the first term talking about how they had to constantly distract and delay him in order to avoid doing the insane things he asked for, and instead just do their job normally in spite of him. That's why he couldn't cause too much damage the first time (this is what he and supporters call the 'deep state', career bureaucrats just doing their job normally and resisting bad orders from on high).
The last 4 years has been Trump and his closest allies vowing to correct this injustice, and building a huge network of cronies plus loyalty tests and plans for who to fire and replace on day one. Vance was chosen on the back of a long campaign of arguing that democracy was violated during Trump's first term by bureaucrats ignoring Trump's demands, and vowing to implement anything Trump wants including not certifying electors.
'Trump didn't accomplish many crazy things in the first term so he won't in the second term' is a good outside-view prior on how the world probably works. But the inside view contains mountains of specific evidence on why that's not likely to be actually true in this one case.
"It went fine last time" isn't a totally reassuring argument when Trump and all the yes-men around him have been talking for the last four years about how much better they're going to vet executive branch appointments for yes-men and prevent the internal resistance that kept his previous administration in check.
Countless members of his former administration have openly admitted to ignoring Trump's requests, distracting and delaying him, and functionally treating his whims like that of a grumpy toddler. Most of them have said he's not fit to be president, and have endorsed Harris. Those people aren't going to be in the White House this time around. The guard rails will be weaker.
Thank you for the psychodrama angle and the analogue to New Atheism. It’s a pretty powerful metaphor for me personally as well and I felt that pang of recognition as you elaborated on why you tend to react more viscerally to left-leaning malpractice than the reverse. You’re not alone.
Most people, though, including myself, react more viscerally to wrongdoing by the opposite side than by their own.
But what "opposite side" means depends on where you're standing. I think most ACX readers wouldn't necessarily consider a Trump fan their direct opposite, politically.
Scott already mentioned the near group/out group/far group formulation.
Most people react viscerally to wrongs by their out group, not by their far group.
For lots of people the political out group is the other party, BUT for lots of people (Like Scott) it is not.
> I would feel like a total hypocrite with no ground to stand on if I claimed to be pro-freedom, pro-liberalism, and pro-democracy, but didn’t really take a stand against somebody trying to attack enemy politicians and rig an election.
Oddly, this is one of the main reasons I will be voting for Trump despite being in a Blue Safe State. I guess everybody has their own take on events.
Yeah. My brain started composing a top level response to this one, but it was just going to be a list of "Hey, this bad thing that you said that Republicans did, here's a place where Democrats did something comparable or worse!"
But what happens then? There'e be a massive tree of replies going "But actually that thing is not as bad, the Republican thing is worse!" with replies going "No way, actually the Democrat thing is way worse". It seems like a boring discussion.
What depresses me is that someone as smart as Scott and someone as smart as I can see the world so differently, and see it as something so obvious it hardly even needs to be argued. I mourn for my nation.
Post-truth is a depressingly accurate term
Except that it is based on the fantasy that there was a time that was truth time.
In my opinion, the enlightenment thinkers sought after, believed, and argued for absolute Truth.
In the modern/post-modern thinkers, everything is relative. Isn't the braindead, but popular meme, "find your truth"?
You're right in that lies have always abounded, but we've quit putting a premium on even the attempt to uncover Truth.
So the post-truth era started before WWI, and was preceded by the "basically in favour of truth, albeit don't know much of it" era.
Most contemporary thinkers do believe in truth too. And plenty of thinkers in the 1700s didn’t. It’s just that the direction of movement was different. We are still in a much more truth oriented academic world than we were for most of history (and certainly for the general public).
"Post-media-consensus" might be more accurate but doesn't have that ring.
That sounds right.
Things were beyond repair long, long ago. As for this essay, it's not his fault, and obviously raw intelligence is no more a protection against drowning in misinformation than it is against drowning in water. It's just not the right tool. I hope none of us are here on ACX because we think Scott is right about everything, or even most things.
"Repair" is the wrong word, because it sounds like you want to return something that used to work well to its former well-working state.
I don't know what this time is that people talk about where there aren't people who are smart and yet obviously deluded.
When propaganda was more centralized, things certainly had the appearance of working better, and I suspect that plenty of people are nostalgic for those simpler times.
>plenty of people are nostalgic for those simpler times.
"And that's the way it is." - Walter Cronkite
I'm using the wrong word because you're hallucinating my opinion? That's not how language works - I used an old phrase correctly and to express what I wanted to express, mind your business.
<quote>I hope none of us are here on ACX because we think Scott is right about everything</quote>
Or that we're right about everything.
Only use Scott's opinion to update your priors. I think most of us are here because his opinion is evidence to update in the same direction.
Not for politics
I'm here because of Unsong, hoping for more like it. Sometimes, I get it, such as the (fake) Republican primary debate.
>someone as smart as Scott and someone as smart as I can see the world so differently
Convergence from updates from evidence is _hard_ . Did you follow the lab leak/zoonosis debate, and see how far apart even the judges were at the end, a factor of 50? And that was with everyone doing their best to present all of the evidence they had. Depressing, but I think unavoidable. ( And politics is worse - much that we want to know is not "What _did_ happen?", but "What will this person do in the future?" )
A good explanation to rectify the disparity may be that one of you is not as intelligent as you previously imagined.
So, if you see the situation as an escalating tit-for-tat, with each side becoming terrible in response to the other, then surely it's incredibly important that we break that cycle. It's not a conflict that one side can win in way that doesn't leave us an economically broken one-party state, so we're going to have to deescalate- which means political norm-breaking, fewer power grabs, less fighting of cultural battles with governmental force, and so on, even when these things feel like justified responses to provocation.
A liberal democracy is like a nuclear reactor containing and running on the dangerous fuel of political competition. When that competition leaks outside of democratic norms, it becomes something deadly rather than useful.
It may be the case that neither party is willing to fully commit to keeping their competition contained, in which case the question becomes: which side is more likely to escalate? Which is willing to go further to "win"?
Okay, but the question is how to vote in this election. Is there any choice that breaks the cycle in this election?
If Harris wins, Trump's federal prosecutions go forward. Now I'll say that I think the Florida documents case is legitimate. But the other three contain various levels of bullshit, and I'm not even a Trump partisan. And 1/3 of the country views the whole thing as illegitimate lawfare. So electing Harris doesn't break the cycle; that 1/3 will be in power eventually and looking for revenge.
What's it's going to take to start breaking the cycle now is for the Democrats to decide that the prosecutions of Trump must stop. They would have to decide, to borrow Scott's example, that these were crimes but maybe they didn't actually harm anyone the way that shoplifting really doesn't do much harm.
Trump got Presidential immunity for most of his actions he took as President and the Jack Smith indictment had to be refiled. Why would he need Democrats to stop prosecuting him?
I agree that Trump may not *need* for a Biden and/or Harris administration (along with Georgia and New York) to drop his prosecutions. He may yet avoid legal punishments by a combination of appellate decisions and acquittals. But my response was to concerns about escalating tit-for-tat lawfare and weaponization of political power, and what those could do to the country. I want to live in high-trust society and those things work against it. To the extent that these persecutions are political, the only way out that doesn't leave somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the country feeling angry and defeated is a political compromise.
No, my comment was rhetorical. Trump obviously needs a federal pardon because he not only committed crimes as official acts of the President but as a private citizen seeking reelection. I also think the best resolution to uniting the country would be trying Trump for treason and everybody who intended to vote to decertify the results of the 2020 election. Also, borrowing on Trump's plan to delicense news media, we should probably delicense Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax for their peddling of election fraud lies that they either have admitted to lying about or are in the process of losing their multiple defamation suits in court. Ideally this would bring back normalcy to the conspiracy laden right wing in our country and show that there are consequences for trying to sow this much division in the country, especially through illegal means.
Surely it's more boring to just say Democrats did worse without giving any examples?
If it helps you there is a large contingent of people desperate to vote for Trump but are turned off by his authoritarianism.
It's more boring, but it's shorter.
What specifically is the claim that Kamala Harris tried to attack enemy politicians and rig an election? I genuinely haven't heard this allegation but I don't follow American politics closely.
Not Kamala personally but Democrats in general.
Regarding rigging an election: the concerted suppression of information harmful to Biden in the last election, the "fortification" of that election by Zuckerberg et al. in ways that (surprise) only helped Democrats, the unConstitutional changes to state election rules by people other than the state legislatures, the mysterious and unprecedented suspension of vote-counting in precincts of swing states, the videos of mishandled ballots and testimony of whistle-blowers, and the endless fraud that Trump was a Russian agent, which the FBI knew from Day One was bogus. In this election, attempts to disqualify Trump from the ballot on grounds of insurrection when neither he nor *anybody else* has been even charged with insurrection.
Regarding attacking an enemy politician: Denying RFK Secret Service protection; constant equation of Trump with Hitler, doubtless contributing to three different assassination attempts; and the invention of historically unprecedented accusations of bogus felonies in the hopes of jailing him before the election.
Trump has been threatening his opponents generally with jail time.
No Democrat has done that, even though Trump personally has been prosecuted for various credibly-alleged crimes.
If Democrats were threatening their opponents generally, we would have seen a lot of investigations of Ron DeSantis and Milo Yiannopoulos and Joe Rogan and Kristi Noem. Instead, when we look past our Trump-focused-syndrome, we see that the investigations of politicians are basically a mix of various corrupt types of all parties (Eric Adams, Bob Menendez, Hunter Biden, locally in Southern California Andrew Do, etc.)
Banned for this comment.
Trump threatens to throw people in jail, but he's just bloviating. He never actually tried, even when he had the power. Democrats have an actual track record of wielding the legal system to try to imprison their defeated opposition.
There were at least a dozen lawsuits trying to prove voter frtaud and overturning the election. Mostly by that Krakedn lady who I've forgotten the name of, and Giuliani. All failed.
When you run for attorney general or prosecutor on a platform of "I will find something I can charge Donald Trump with and then prosecute the heck out of him," that is pretty close to threatening your opponent with jail time.
You can hardly compare private owners of social media companies slowing the spread of new, potentially bad information right before an election to Donald Trump (the guy I assume you're voting for!) literally manufacturing false slates of electors to try and get Mike Pence to overthrow the results of the election.
Have you read the Twitter Files? The “private owners” of social media companies were leaned on *very* heavily by government entities.
I acknowledge that “overthrow the election” is the Leftist way of describing what went down when it came time to count the votes. You must know that your opponents describe it differently, as the last legal and Constitutional opportunity to correct what they saw as fraudulent votes.
Non state-legislative approved slates of electors is not legal *or* consitutional. Does this look lawful to you? https://youtu.be/P_NgLQxMV9c
I think most rank and file Republican believe this, but I do not think many Republican federal elected officials or appointees actually believed it.
I saw the messages rather melodramatically so named. I saw nothing except suggestions which could be freely ignored. Social media companies have $ for lots of lawyers.
Seriously. It's just beyond belief that we're now both-sides-ing as disingenously as _that_.
One thing I've learned during this past decade is how few Americans actually take seriously the central importance of protecting our Constitutional system. I already knew that about some, mostly on far left. I had no idea, and would not have believed if it told, just how wide a swath of people to the right of me have zero actual respect for our Constitutional structure and norms.
Turns out to be _far_ more people than to my left. It's an example of something that Donald Trump had intuited by the time he came down that golden elevator, and he was right about it and I was way wrong.
The left wing in the United States of America has benefitted from Constitutional protections far, far more often than it has been stymied by them. Free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press? These are all things that favor iconoclasts and boundary-pushers, and regardless of which side one might think today's iconoclasts are one, historically, it's mostly been the left, and we remember our history. We actually fully give up on respecting some constitutional protection, collectively and legally? Next time the pendulum swings it'll be the latest strain of McCarthyism, complete with life-ruining prison sentences. That's the whole reason so-called "cancel culture" became a thing: it's vigilante social consequences to try to force behavior change through non-governmental avenues.
The leftists who don't give a shit about constitutional norms and protections are often just straight up tankies. Fuck tankies.
There's too much wrong in your understanding of the history to even begin on, but I agree with your closing statement and always have.
Doesn't change the shock of learning how many _more_ Americans to my right bluntly consider our Constitution worthwhile only to the degree that it supports their particular priors and wishes. If a leftie 20 or 30 years ago had predicted the extent of that I'd have dismissed it as the usual tankie bullshit...in fact I'm pretty sure that happened given where I was residing during that period. On that point, sadly, they were right and I was wrong.
It's amazing and a credit to the Democrat propaganda machine (corporate news) that people believe this. Appointing a set of alternate electors is what state law prescribes, generally, when challenging election results. This allows you to have people ready if your challenge is successful. They actually discuss this in the recorded phone call, if you bother to listen.
It's true that states decide themselves if they want to issue alternate electors, like Hawaii in 1960. Now which state legislature, governor, attorney general, or any other higherup authorized Trump's alternate electors? None of them, that's why they're fradulent. Not a single state representative authorized Trump's electors, despite him lying about all the supposed states rescinding their certified electors during the Raffensperger call.
Do you count all campaign advertisement as "rigging an election"?
I think the attempts to disqualify Trump from the ballot on grounds of insurrection involved attempting to charge him with insurrection - which the courts struck down.
No, of course not. Where did I say anything about advertising?
Neither Colorado nor Maine brought charges for insurrection. How could they, it being a Federal crime?
Your only allegation of election rigging was about someone spreading or not spreading information. That’s what advertising is. Even if you think these informational maneuvers are violations of law, they really don’t seem like “rigging”. They’re comparable to what Russia did on behalf of Trump during the 2016 election, not to what Trump tried to do after the 2020 election.
Reread please. You missed the unconstitutional changes to election rules, the governmental interference in the news, and the mishandling of ballots.
This is not even remotely comparable. This is all looks and sounds like a complete farce.
Trump had tried to overturn an election on the false claims of fraud. Democrats had never ever done anything even remotely close.
Why draw a distinction between making fraudulent claims after the fact vs fabricating and suppressing evidence alike before an election to throw it?
Because one is free speech and the other is treason? Free speech isn't required to be good, but at least you can counter it with other speech (or in this case, other platforms). You can't really reverse in the same way someone overturning an election like Trump tried to do.
>Free speech isn't required to be good, but at least you can counter it with other speech (or in this case, other platforms).
Well...
1) I don't think it's accurate to refer to "government actors leaned on platform operators to censor other people saying X" as "free speech".
2) In practice, no, you can't actually counter such censorship with "other platforms" if all of the big platforms are in lockstep, because 90% of people are not actually *on* other platforms to hear you. See Scott's article (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/). Elon Musk buying Twitter ended this regime for real because Twitter already is a big platform... except that Biden's been harassing him ever since and Harris/Walz seem if anything less moderate.
This was more believable before a group of tech companies colluded in broad daylight to kill the fastest growing app/social media company (Parler). The claim that people used it to coordinator January 6 was a barest fig leaf for that effort, considering how Twitter had been effectively used by the likes of active terrorists including ISIS/Daesh for years.
Why make a distinction between two completely different things? Interesting question. But kinda expected from the post truth crowd.
One of these pro Trump commenters is not like the others
With respect, Scott's saying Trump is a uniquely bad individual to vote for president and he'd make a stand to vote against him because he personally tried to "attack enemy politicians and rig an election."
Coming back and saying Democrats 'in general' have done the same and therefore not vote for Harris seems quite different and is a much more sweeping claim. I mean, you could use this as an argument to always vote Republican in every election in the USA. At that point are you really 'taking a stand'?
Also just to nitpick one item on your list, uhh, what's especially bad about 'attempts to disqualify Trump from the ballot on grounds of insurrection'. Seems perfectly legal to me, certainly doesn't seem to have anything to do with rigging.
Like, back in the day, didn't Trump, among others, attempt to disqualify Obama on the grounds that he wasn't born in the USA, despite Obama never having been charged with immigration fraud? Was that somehow rigging too?
Oh yeah, I had forgotten about the fortification thing.
"Our shadow campaign fortified the election so the right candidate would win" doesn't sound like something you should be boasting about, but of course since it was against Literal Hitler all methods are legitimate, right?
https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-secret-history-of-the-shadow-campaign-part-1/
"In February 2021, Molly Ball of Time magazine published an article titled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” that took both sides of the aisle by storm. Depending on the reader’s perspective, the story was a tell-all confession or a story of epic heroism about a massive, multi-faceted, and secret campaign to “save” the 2020 election by helping President Joseph Biden win and defend his win from legal challenges by President Donald Trump and his allies. Now, as the 2024 election seems destined to be something like a rematch, it’s time to revisit the old article and see what the conspirators—or heroes, depending on one’s view—are doing now.
... Ms. Ball, undoubtedly aware of the opposite ways readers might interpret her article, concluded the introduction with the following lines:
That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream—a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures."
Wow, you Americans are so lucky the secret cabal is only out there to do good! They only work behind the scenes to change the bad laws that would prevent a clean sweep by the right candidate!
I don't understand how your epistemology is so fucked that you think somebody writing a flowery article about a "secret cabal" is in any way shape or form strong evidence that Democrats tried to steal an election, but Trump falsifying electoral votes and directing his AG to confiscate voting machines isn't. What is a single alleged crime that took place from that Time magazine piece?
All of which is to say, "It's okay when *we* do it".
No, it's to say that you have no object level facts that any fraud took place on behalf of the Democrats, and are instead so ideologically poisoned that you're reading tea leaves on the meta level by accusing Democrats of fraud because somebody wrote a Time piece using spooky language to characterize legal coordination between Democrat operatives during and mostly after election time.
You seem to be equating "literally called up the governor of a state and asked him to find more votes" with "said mean things about your opponent." As Scott put it, there are different levels to this sort of thing, and punishing open, blatantly illegal attempts to subvert democracy is much more important than punishing attempts to get an advantage legally-but-scummily.
(Also, all 2-3 assassination attempts (the third one it's debatable if he was actually an assassin or just a sovereign citizen who didn't understand gun laws) came from right-wingers, inasmuch as crazy assassins have coherent politics. It's hard to explain that as a product of comparing Trump to Hitler.)
I am equating no such things; I disagree with both characterizations of the events in question.
And I am astonished to hear somebody claim that the first two assassins were right-wingers. Crazy I’ll grant, but if everything they had read or heard for eight years told them that Biden was the Antichrist, do you really think Biden would not have been their target?
I could grudgingly forgive the Democrats if after the first attempt they had moderated their rhetoric, but no, they doubled down. That tells me it had the desired effect.
Why then did Trump appointed judges shoot all of those election fraud lawsuits down? The MAGAs couldnt make anything significant stick
I don’t know. But it would have been a service to the country to actually resolve these questions one way or the other, rather than sidestep them. We might not be having this argument if they had.
Well it was resolved. Trump supporters brought cases before Conservative judges and almost every single one was shot down due to lack of evidence.
If there really is evidence of significant voter fraud out there, you should be mad at the Trump faction for not being able to bring the required evidence in front of fairly friendly judges.
Or consider that maybe this evidence did not exist after all.
I believe there were still cases pending that were deemed moot after Congress met, and appeals for those dismissed for lack of standing. But that’s not germane to my main point, which is that the merits should have been resolved rather than sidestepped.
Propaganda is there everywhere, all the time. Yes, it's there with the Hunter Biden laptop story just like it was there with the Russians leaking DNC emails.
What makes Trump special is that he took steps to decertify actual election results.
Unfairly fighting in the information war isn't good but it simply doesn't measure up to what Trump tried.
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/08/what-trump-asked-of-pence/
I know that’s the description of events that the left prefers. Your opponents do not believe he was attempting to decertify actual election results, but rather attempting to use the last legal, Constitutional means to correct improprieties.
Your flat phraseology settles the matter for you, but will not convert somebody not already on your side.
Explain to me this "legal Constitutional means to correct improprieties"
How does it work?
The Constitution states that Congress counts the Electoral Votes. It puts that responsibility on the members of Congress rather than on some clerk with an adding machine because it is a vitally important operation. They are expected not only to do arithmetic but to certify to the nation that the numbers they are adding up were validly obtained and correctly reported.
Most of the time this certification process is trivial. Sometimes it is obviously contentious. During the years of and following the Civil War there were bona fide arguments about what the actual results of some state elections were, and the Congress stepped up to resolve them.
There were a number of discrepancies, as I have described, in the 2020 elections -- changes in the election rules that were made by minor officials rather than (as mandated by the Constitution) the state legislatures; weird and unprecedented suspensions in vote-counting in some swing districts, and resumption after Republican poll-watchers had left; bales of ballots that showed up with shaky provenances. Some of these led to litigation that was pending right up until January 6, and Republicans very properly put together slates of Electors who would cast their votes if the litigation went their way. Many of these problems are unsurprising considering the challenges of holding an election in the depths of a global pandemic, so it's also unsurprising that Congress in 2021 faced an unusually contentious task.
If the Congress had decided that it was necessary to wait a short time for these cases to be resolved, or that the issues in question merited recognizing the alternate slates outright, that is their job. They chose not to, and that too is their job. Because the Congress made the choice they did, Joe Biden won the election and was peacefully inaugurated on January 20. Had they made a different choice, Donald Trump would have won and would have been peacefully inaugurated. That's the way it works.
I'm not one of those that say Trump "really" won in 2020. But I don't see any impropriety in his attempts to plead his case, any more than I see impropriety in Gore's gamesmanship about recounts in 2000.
https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/why-do-i-think-there-was-fraud-in
https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/329614-election-crimes-were-detected
Neither of these posts even tries to link specific actions to Kamala Harris. Like you even say "maybe the Democratic Party was just better at taking advantage of the absentee voting rules"
Honestly of lot of stuff here just comes accross as conspiratorial to me.
"Despite nobody much liking Biden as a candidate, he received a record number of votes nationwide. There were 19 bellwether counties that voted for the winner in every presidential election from 1980 through 2016, but in 2020, 18 of the 19 voted for Trump. In all but one election since 1964, the candidate who won the Presidency saw his party gain seats in the House of Representatives. Not so in 2020: the Democrats lost House seats. Biden came up with just the votes he needed at just the right time. Republicans wondered how."
Come on man, how are statistics like that supposed to be convincing evidence of rigging? I just looked up that New York voted for the winner every election but one between 1880 and 1944... But then they voted for Dewey in a tight election in 48, something fishy I say, fraud.
Right-- I have nothing on Harris personally, or Clinton for that matter. That does't alter the fact that the election looks rigged-- by somebody, and it wasn't Trump.
I find the voting pattern in 2020 odd, and I haven't seen a good explanation except the one you and I both mentioned: that the Dems were just really good at targeting in that year. I am on the lookout for an explanation. I haven't seen one. Some professor ought to write an article on it-- it really is an interesting question as to what happened.
The first article says:
> One’s belief in whether Biden really won is rather like one’s belief in God: the evidence is insufficient for proof or disproof
This is uh, refreshingly frank, I guess. Usually if there's no evidence of a crime and no suspects, you do not assume a crime has taken place, but there's a certain logic to a religious person having *faith* in such a thing. It's also fair to think that if security was poor enough, the election should be repeated, but I wonder whether Mr. Rasmusen (Edit: just noticed that he is you) was outraged about the Supreme Court halting the recount in 2000 and declaring Bush the winner.
While he acts like it's easy to commit voting fraud (both in person and absentee, just with more fraud possible for absentee) I expect this to be untrue and therefore expect evidence of the claim. Surely election officials would notice that the same person voted twice, let alone 1000 times? You need a name on the ballot, and the name is checked against voter rolls, right? How is large-scale fraud supposed to go unnoticed?
And then in the later article he says, well, it *was* detected for 329,614 ballots in the country. I wasn't sure where that number came from at first, but after plugging some numbers in my calculator I think he is saying that “Non-matching signature” (the most common case), “No voter signature” and “Voter already voted in person” all count as attempts at fraud.
By coincidence, we recently asked one of my few friends to sign documents on our passport applications (they required someone outside the household to sign it for some reason). But multiple signatures were required and we didn't notice that our friend used quite different signatures in different places, which almost derailed the process after the application was submitted. My friend then explained to us that she doesn't have a consistent signature. Mr. Rasmusen is saying that 0.26% of all ballots had mismatching signatures which is "fraud at first look", and essentially says "even if 90% of those aren't *really* fraud that would leave 0.047% in the three categories combined which is still a *lot* of fraud". Um, okay, but (1) why assume a minimum of 10% were real fraud attempts, or that a fraudster's technique would *ever* be to leave the signature line blank? (2) 0.047% countrywide surely wouldn't swing the election, (3) all of this was detected which means none of the alleged fraud attempts succeeded.
So then he's like ahh, but sometimes they don't bother to compare signatures at all, or are lenient about matching them". Okay, but still, why should you actually believe large-scale fraud really happened? I mean, take me through the process. You are a ne'er-do-well who wants to vote 1000 times.
(1) How do you actually pull if off without being detected?
(2) How do you know that most of these undetected fraudsters voted for Biden?
And then he's like "I’d guess more like a million [were fraudulent]" and justifies this by linking to the first article, which explains how it's faith-based.
This is a sincere attempt to clarify your perspective:
Are these two translations the way you are thinking about the key claims
"attack enemy politicians" = "legal cases against Trump"
"Rig an election" = "early voting and mail in ballots?"
The legal cases against Trump are "attack enemy politicians".
Early voting is fine. Mail-in ballots are not by themselves rigging, but they make rigging much much easier. https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/cheating-with-absentee-ballots
The legal cases against Trump are the crimes he very obviously, blatantly, committed. He was convicted of the Stormy Daniels case and you can just read the indictments for the other cases. It's actually insane how you people mindfucked yourself into believing that the American court system can just be trivially suborned. I guess in that reading the most trustworthy person to take control of it is the guy who constantly talks about how he needs to crush the "enemy within" (his political opponents).
> He was convicted of the Stormy Daniels case and you can just read the indictments for the other cases.
You can. And if you don't know anything about the law, you might even end up coming away thinking that he did something wrong. But to anyone who knows what they're looking at, the entire thing is a joke.
The thing he was alleged to have done in the Stormy Daniels case *was not a crime.* It would have been laughed out of court had it not been a court run by a politicized judge, and it will never survive on appeal.
The Bragg persecution is even more laughable. Read the analyses by Andy McCarthy, a career prosecutor from SDNY (Southern District of New York, where the trial was held.) The trial was a farce from beginning to end, and contains at least half a dozen severe, obvious errors, any one of which is enough to completely overturn the case on appeal.
I actually believe in our court system. The thing he did was a crime, that's why he was convicted. You cannot convict people for things that aren't crimes.
If you don't believe in our court system, again, I don't understand why you want to put the guy who talks about locking up every single political opponent (or even people who didn't dicksuck him about his election denial claims) in charge of it.
> You cannot convict people for things that aren't crimes.
Oh, you sweet, summer child...
They say that the average American commits three felonies a day. (Yes, I understand the median would be a better measure, but this is the famous stat.) Of course he has committed SOME crime. The problem is the selective (and this case, obviously politically motivated) enforcement.
I still don't understand what exactly the crime was, I took away from it that he was convicted of paying a bribe out of the wrong bank account? That he should have claimed it as a campaign expense? I don't know, but I do see that nobody seems to have gone after Stormy Daniels to return the stolen money that was the proceeds of crime, so colour me unconvinced that this was the Crime of the Century.
https://gwern.net/modus - one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens.
You look at your court system doing all sorts of outrageous nonsense against Trump and you think: well, I'm not a lawyer, the judges know better, our court system is respectable, I don't understand how or why, but my own lying eyes are deceiving me probably.
Another man looks at this and thinks: well, that's it, the court system has been subverted, we can no longer trust it.
An interesting thing is that there doesn't seem to be an object level disagreement even. You agree which way the evidence points in each individual case. If I asked about more of them, like for example the novel legal theory that you don't have to give a person the right to any legal representation to judge them a traitor if you're not going to impose any penalties, and then another court can cite that judgment to remove them from ballots, again without any representation because this time they are not doing any judgment, you'd probably agree that that too is outrageous nonsense.
The only disagreement is that you think that there's not enough evidence yet to stop trusting the court system. But if you agree that you will probably change your opinion in the future if things continue to go the way they are doing, then why not change your opinion now?
Hmm...
I tend to think of the classified documents case as having merit. Other politicians who retained classified documents returned them when asked, Trump, not so much.
The other three look essentially purely politically motivated to me:
Stormy Daniels - basically mislabelling a payment - when the statute of limitations had run out. The legal theory used is more twisted than a pretzel.
The real estate valuation estimate thing - basically accused of being a realtor.
The Jan 6th - Yeah, he used inflammatory language, as if Biden and Harris don't use similarly inflammatory language against him. If Jan 6th had _really_ been intended as a coup, he would have told the rioters to arm themselves.
I would recommend actually reading the January 6 indictment. He did not just "use inflammatory language," he knowingly spread lies, put together false slates of electors, and attempted to pressure Mike Pence into throwing out the results of the 2020 elections.
I think the Mike Pence thing is the most blatant attempt to overturn an election I've ever seen. He wanted the vice president, a single man, to unilaterally choose to overturn the election, despite having no authority to do so by his own admission. If that's not a coup attempt I don't know what else to call it.
> You can. And if you don't know anything about the law, you might even end up coming away thinking that he did something wrong. But to anyone who knows what they're looking at, the entire thing is a joke.
Not really. The facts there were pretty clear. The conviction is sketchy, because it relies on a questionable legal framework to bypass the statute of limitations on the misdemeanor version of the law, so I suspect it might get overturned on appeal.
But "can't be prosecuted for a crime he clearly committed and that a jury determined he committed because of a procedural bar" is not the same as saying he did nothing wrong. He did something wrong and didn't get caught until the statute of limitations ran out.
Be civil. Seriously. This website has a good comment section, and civility is part of that (and more easily policed than stupidity).
>It's actually insane how you people mindfucked yourself into believing that the American court system can just be trivially suborned.
Have you heard of all-white juries in the Jim Crow South? The peremptory-strike process in jury selection actually makes it very easy to wipe out a minority from a jury, because knocking out a juror who's part of the minority will probably result in replacement with a member of the majority, but the other side knocking out a juror who's part of the majority will probably result in replacement with another member of the majority - and both sides get equal numbers of peremptory strikes.
And, well, Manhattan is 85% Democrat, and Trump is so incredibly polarising that most jurors would vote their party.
I'm not saying I like Trump (I don't), and I'm not saying all the cases against him are baseless (there's a case to answer for some of them). I am saying that I treated the Stormy Daniels conviction as a null update regarding Trump's character because the circumstances rendered the verdict nearly a foregone conclusion regardless of the facts of the case.
If you believe that Trump (or any other person) raped somebody in the changing room of a department store and got away with it, I have a bridge to sell you.
I have actually read quite a lot about sexual assault - it was one of my hobbyist interests in college, having read cover-to-cover multiple books on the subject, regularly going through Google Scholar on it, etc. The idea that somebody raped somebody else in a private location that was otherwise "public" is so insanely banal that your comment suggests nothing but your own ignorance.
e: For example, from Anna Salter's Predators:
> An offender may molest a child in a room with the door open and the other parent in the next room. He may molest a child with other children present who are witnesses and can confirm the child’s testimony. He may meet friends who have moved far away in a motel halfway between their two towns, play cards in one room, and take breaks to “check” on the kids sleeping in the next room, but instead molest them with the door open but out of sight. He may take a break from watching a ball game at a friend’s house to go to the bathroom but walk, instead, into a child’s room to molest her.
>All these are real cases of offenders who have been caught because their detection apprehension was too low. Every once in a while a parent walks in on one of the above scenes and cannot be convinced they didn’t see what they saw. But the sad fact is that for detection apprehension to be that low, the offender has to be successful at molesting children for many years.
This sounds a hell of a lot more crazy to me than raping somebody in a bathroom, changing room, or other semi-public location.
Do you have Trump Derangement Syndrome? Because there are very, very many "enemy politicians" under *any* definition of "enemy politicians", and this list of enemy politicians has very little overlap with the list of politicians who are in the middle of prosecution for crimes right now.
How many Republican members of Congress, or Republican governors, or Republican mayors, are currently being prosecuted? How many Democratic members of Congress, or Democratic governors, or Democratic mayors, are currently being prosecuted?
There is literally one person who is an "enemy" of Joe Biden who is being prosecuted right now, and it's not Hunter Biden, or Bob Menendez, or Eric Adams, all of whom *are* being prosecuted.
John Eastman was disbarred. Peter Navarro was jailed. Giuliani was disbarred and ordered to pay $150 million for defaming a Georgian election worker.
I forgot there were a few others like them. But do you claim they weren’t guilty? Criminals should be prosecuted even if they have enemies who are in power.
Depends if the laws are sufficiently broad and vague that everyone is technically guilty of something. The offences on which Trump has been actually convicted seem to have this flavor.
The Giuliani damages bill was, frankly, insane, but is just part of the general US issue of juries setting insanely high figures for punitive/exemplary damages. Navarro could have showed up and pleaded the fifth, so that doesn't look like unfair treatment (sure, it was a witch-hunt-y house committee, but that's more of an Americanism than a Democrat thing). Eastman being disbarred looks like partisan targeting,* but I haven't gone through the California Bar Court proceedings.
*It all comes down to the general issue of whether "conspiracy to attempt to incite Mike Pence to do a thing" is a treasonous plot, or a bunch of morons larping at being hardball political operators. I can see the argument that if he'd actually done it successfully then it's in coup territory, but I just can't take it seriously as it's so obviously the least serious parts of the Trump circus clowning around.
I have no objection in principle to early voting and mail-in ballots. It is clear that they open the door to fraud in a way that must be guarded against, and it is far from clear that they were adequately guarded against in 2020: Several states eliminated the requirement of comparing the signature on the envelope to the signature on the registration, to give one trivial example, and there were several stories about boxes of ballots appearing with inadequate provenance. Those stories might all have been false, but the system gives us no way of knowing. My biggest objection is that many states started doing mail-ins without being ready for it, and the decision was made in ways that did not involve the state legislature, which is the one firm requirement stated in the Constitution. In the light of Covid neither is surprising, but given the fact that all the worst anomalies happened in swing states that (in the end) favored Biden, it's hard not to conclude that the Democrats made sure not to let the crisis go to waste.
Continuing with the spirit of my original question, is it fair for me to summarize your answer as, "yes, 'rigged elections' = 'early voting and mail-in ballots'?"
Putting aside the specific claims you are making, I agree with you that there is something deeply troubling about all of this. Democracy clearly does not lead to choosing perfect policies or amazing leaders. At a minimum, though, it should deliver legitimacy. IF US elections are clouded with a fog of illegitimacy, then they are not delivering the most important and only expected benefit from the process.
When a large enough group of people don't believe the election result is legitimate, it creates a pressure that threatens to be relieved through violence.
I don't think either major party sees this risk or has taken the necessary steps to address it.
I don’t agree that that is a fair summary. Equating early ballots and mail-in voting with rigged elections is pessimistic and simplistic. It may be that there is no way to have the former without the latter, but I don’t believe it.
But I think I do agree with everything else you said. I have read lots of people who see the risk you point to and who have described ways to address it. (Most of these do involve drastically cutting back on early voting and mail-ins, which I think is overkill.) But I don’t recall ever hearing anybody you’d call a party bigwig address it.
Sorry, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth. My original intention was to expand on your statement:
>this is one of the main reasons I will be voting for Trump
by working out what "this" meant. I grabbed the two specific items in the Scott comment that you quoted and assumed "this" was pointing at those. I think I've misunderstood, but not necessarily gotten closer to the "this."
My guess is that you've already clarified in response to other comments, but I'm not sure that I will have time to go through and find the answer. Sorry that this attempt to start bridging between alternative realities didn't bear fruit.
I don't think the election was rigged (beyond the usual amount of fraud or stupidity) but the way it was handled, I also don't think there is a way to stand over the process as "absolutely 100% secure, no possibility at all of something going wrong".
Very small changes in voting patterns in places like Maricopa County flipped the state to Biden, and that's the kind of thing that on first glance looks very suspicious - this county voted red all the other times, but *this* time it's blue? - until you dig into it. But most people are not going to dig into every single strange-looking result, so the perception can legitimately be "this was fraud" and not "this was a small number of swing voters who did change their minds from last time, just enough to tip over the line".
Also the flip-flopping about voting machines: 2016 - the Russians hacked them to give Trump the victory! 2020 - impossible to hack so the result is impeccable! 2024 - looks like revving up the hacking story again in case Trump wins/loses:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/12/hackers-vulnerabilities-voting-machines-elections-00173668
"Those discoveries come amid ongoing foreign and criminal targeting of U.S. elections. In 2016, Russian hackers both targeted the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and compromised voter registration databases in multiple U.S. states. It’s affecting this election cycle already, as POLITICO first reported Saturday that the presidential campaign of former President Donald Trump was hacked, a breach the campaign attributed to Iran.
While there’ve been no foreign cyberattacks taking wide swaths of voting machines offline on election day or evidence of hacks that affected results, the risk is always there."
> Also the flip-flopping about voting machines: 2016 - the Russians hacked them to give Trump the victory! 2020 - impossible to hack so the result is impeccable!
Do you have in mind any specific people who said both of those things explicitly? It's very easy to falsely perceive flipflopping just by not paying close attention to who said any specific thing and imagining everyone who disagrees with you as some sort of giant hivemind. And yes, I have been guilty of that as well - being careful is hard work. But that doesn't make it any less important.
I agree, we absolutely need elections we can trust. And, unfortunately, as a weird artifact of our two-party system, there's one party that has decided to officially oppose strengthening elections in basically every possible way. They've even decided it's a good idea to - uniquely among Western democracies - oppose _requiring an ID to vote_! I don't believe that Democrats are doing this because they're planning to commit systemic fraud, but I also suspect they think that any low-level fraud that occurs is likely to benefit them. (Otherwise, I don't understand why they would pay the political cost of loudly and proudly being against election integrity, rather than just having no official stance on matters like mail-in voting and voter ID.)
As a left-wing person? Because it's much easier to pass a requirement for voter ID than it is to simultaneously also pass a requirement to make acquiring that voter ID easy enough to ensure every citizen/voter who wants to get one can get one. The left is far more worried about voter disenfranchisement, a real historical thing that has happened to minority groups throughout our history quite often, than it is about voter fraud. And voter ID laws set by state legislatures are often one means of enacting voter disenfranchisement through careful selectivity of which methods of identification count and which don't. Do state university student IDs count? How expensive is the process to get an ID that counts? How much time does the process take? Are there readily available places within walking or bus distance of voters who may not own a car? We already have voter turnout manipulation with polling station placements and removals in many states. There are what we consider to be genuine and real threats to meaningful democracy already demonstrably occurring, and so we oppose the solution put forward to something which is not yet demonstrably a problem and could reinforce the problems we do see.
I would rather have an election where voter turnout in every state is improved by 100,000 voters and there end up being 10,000 fraudulent votes cast in every state than one in which we lose 100,000 voters in turnout and only prevent 10,000 fraudulent votes. The mathematics of which one is preferable seem patently obvious to me, personally, even in what I consider an egregiously extreme scenario that favors the idea of voter fraud being more of a problem to a degree I find farcical based on the evidence I have available to me.
I'm genuinely curious - what exactly would "demonstrate" to your satisfaction that it is a problem that _you do not have to prove who you are to vote_? To me this is at the level of needing a double-blind study to prove that parachutes save lives. As far as I know, no other democracy in the Western world is so weirdly stupid about this (sometimes they allow minor exceptions to ID requirements, but they're principled and limited).
I understand that disenfranchisement is the party line, but as you said yourself, the other solution to the problem is to make it easier to get ID. There was no reason Democrats had to hitch their wagon to the dumber solution.
I do appreciate your honesty about your fraud tolerance. I think I have a fundamental disagreement with you there. I would absolutely prefer a system with zero fraud, where sometimes people don't manage to vote because it's not as convenient as they'd like. When issues are truly important (ie, democracy is on the line because Trump is Hitler^WChavez), people will overcome minor inconveniences to vote, and the system still works. But if people can't trust that the results of an election are legitimate, everything starts to break down. All Trump's sore losing in 2020 would have convinced far fewer people, and caused much less trouble, if Democrats weren't actively taking the position that election security isn't "demonstrably a problem".
>They've even decided it's a good idea to - uniquely among Western democracies - oppose _requiring an ID to vote_!
Why do I see this repeated so often? Canada doesn't require an ID to vote. Having someone vouch for your identity is the legal requirement.
I'm Canadian, FYI. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_identification_laws#Federal_elections
The only exception to having an ID is:
"Take an oath and have an elector who knows the voter vouch for them (both of whom must make a sworn statement). This person must have authorized identification and their name must appear on the list of electors in the same polling division as the voter. This person can only vouch for one person and the person who is vouched for cannot vouch for another elector."
As you can see, the exception is strict, and careful to avoid the potential for abuse. If you intended to make some point that Canada's voting security is just as lackadaisical as the non-voter-ID states, well, you're flatly wrong.
Mostly, I agree with you, though:
(0) It probably won't surprise you that some D's think working for better voting security would be repurposed to support criticism of the 2020 POTUS result
(1) I encourage you to read about the disparate impact of ID availability (as mentioned by another respondent)
(2) my understanding is that R's oppose a national ID solution (for reasons, but this helps illustrate that the issue has nuance that may lurk beneath the surface)
(3) a sincere effort from both parties to make voting accessible and secure seems like an extremely reasonable ask.
I'd note that I don't agree with the respondent below about the threshold of election fraud they would tolerate for the extra participation. That's because (a) I don't think we are nearly so close to the technical efficient frontier that those trade-offs are necessary and (b) many factors influence legitimacy and I think that amount of fraud would blow-up the system. Part of my reasoning for (b) is that the structure of POTUS elections already makes the vast majority of voters feel disenfranchised, so the baseline level of feeling legitimate is already low, and the overall result is sensitive to small numbers of votes in a small number of places.
Finally, on that point (a) about the efficient frontier. I originally left out the word "technical" and then realized that we might be at the efficient frontier on what is politically/practically achievable.
I'm curious: when you read that ID access and voter suppression is a concern, did you update your model of the world? Note: this is a sincere question and I'm not making an implied claim that you did not update.
> I'm curious: when you read that ID access and voter suppression is a concern, did you update your model of the world? Note: this is a sincere question and I'm not making an implied claim that you did not update.
Well, no. It wasn't new information, of course. It's basically impossible to navigate society without hearing each and every left-wing argument 100 times. I probably should have been clear that I knew the official party line about "disenfranchisement" and considered it at the level of most political tropes: silly, but virtuous-sounding enough to be yelled at rallies without thinking about it too hard. For one thing, it stretches the definition of "disenfranchisement" to an almost absurd extent - would it be "disenfranchisement" if I have to cross the street to vote, and I'm too lazy? Putting an absolutely _trivial_ step in front of voting, that has a _very good_ justification for existing, is not racism. There were real examples of disenfranchisement in the past, and they do not resemble modern voter ID laws.
I had thought that serious people were not serious about that justification. However, I'll say that I did update (slightly) because @Rolepgeek seems both smart and sincere about it.
> I have no objection in principle to early voting and mail-in ballots. It is clear that they open the door to fraud in a way that must be guarded against
Why is that, in and of itself, not sufficient grounds for objection-in-principle?
And if it's not, here's another clear objection: In addition to integrity/fraud problems, they open the door to vote-security problems as well. Just look at the multiple cases we've seen in the last few days of ballot drop boxes being firebombed by Antifa terrorists, destroying hundreds of ballots.
All true. But I’m techy enough to believe that it’s a solvable problem.
In my Substack I suggest a way to improve absentee ballot procedures to reduce the ease of cheating somewhat, but it's an intractable problem, because it makes vote-buying too easy. That's why most countries in the world don't allow it, or allow it only for citizens who are abroad. https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/cheating-with-absentee-ballots
In 2020, I rather liked the convenience of mail-in voting. But, AFAIK, it has one unsolvable problem. Since the vote is cast in a home, away from a voting booth with a poll worker observing who is in the voting booth, one can never know that the vote wasn't coerced.
Good idea. We'll make the ballots out of asbestos.
>Those stories might all have been false, but the system gives us no way of knowing.
The system gives you plenty of ways of knowing. Georgia had two state recounts and an internal audit. There was video footage released the day of Rudy Giuliani lying about Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss running multiple ballots, bringing out hidden suitcases, being professional fraudsters, and dozens of news sources reporting on it. Pennsylvania had recounts in multiple contested counties. Any and every audit of Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines showed they were more accurate than hand counted ballots. There is an infinite amount of evidence that our elections are safe and secure and the leading proponents of the negation of that proposition are literally all liars, some of which like Giuliani admitted to lying in court or Powell saying she wasn't making statements of fact.
Now if only you could back up your stance by pointing to the Democrats actually trying to rig the election, then you might have a point.
Chase Oliver supports none of that; libertarianism is liberalism taken to logical extreme. A vote for Trump in a solidly Dem state has no effect, so why not make a truly pro-freedom statement?
I am pretty confused by this, assuming "attacking enemy politicians and rigging an election" is mostly around January 6th.
I am not American but would have voted for Trump in 2016 - like explained in this post I strongly subscribed to the "furniture must be smashed in the Capital" view so I just wanted to vote for whoever was anti-establishment (naive "fuck the system" and all that).
But any and all support I could possibly have had for Trump completely died on January 6th. What is the take on these events that someone smart can take that is pro-Trump? I have tried as a mental exercise and I just cant find it. Maybe my Overton window needs expanding but the more reasonable answer just seems to be you cant be pro-democracy, pro-freedom, and pro-liberalism if you also believe January 6th happened the way that virtually all evidence seems to suggest it happened.
Look around this thread. There are multiple explanations.
If you want a more concentrated take, there's a thread on DataSecretsLox titled "Change Your Mind: Trump's Behaviors on Jan 6 are Sufficient Reason to Vote for Kamala", where someone makes a college effort to present the other side, and gets a lot of counter-responses. There's not much one can do to summarize it, unfortunately, given the number of charges made against Trump, but my attempt at a gist is that many of the accusations against Trump are for things he didn't actually do, or are theoretically possible but incompatible with what we know of his public face; there are a few irregularities that were conspicuously not investigated by the other side; and while there are some things one could lay at Trump's feet, they're relatively minor and also the sort of thing one could lay at the feet of anyone else.
I doubt I agree with all of the counter responses (or the OP), but it's a pretty long thread, so anything you have a question about is likely to have been mentioned there by now, including a general counternarrative.
I appreciate the response and the pointer on where to learn more, but if I go to https://www.datasecretslox.com/ I cannot find "Change Your Mind: Trump's Behaviors on Jan 6 are Sufficient Reason to Vote for Kamala"
"Many of the accusations against Trump are for things he didn't actually do... and while there are some things one could lay at Trump's feet, they're relatively minor and also the sort of thing one could lay at the feet of anyone else. "
Ok, well which are false/minor from this list below - that as far as I can tell actually happened? Surely there has to be some go-to pro-republican article/website or something somewhere that open-minded intellectually rigorous people tend to be recommended to read if these are all demonstrably false/minor?
1. Trump had knowledge that he lost the 2020 election but spread misinformation to the American public and made false statements claiming significant voter fraud led to his defeat;
2. Trump planned to remove and replace the Attorney General and Justice Department officials in an effort to force the DOJ to support false allegations of election fraud;
3. Trump pressured Vice President Pence to refuse certified electoral votes in the official count on January 6, in violation of the U.S. Constitution;
4. Trump pressured state lawmakers and election officials to alter election results in his favor;
5. Trump's legal team and associates directed Republicans in seven states to produce and send fake "alternate" electoral slates to Congress and the National Archives;
6. Trump summoned and assembled a destructive mob in Washington and sent them to march on the U.S. Capitol; and
7. Trump ignored multiple requests to speak out in real time against the mob violence, refused to instruct his supporters to disband, and failed to take any immediate actions to halt attacks on the Capitol.
Despite the fact that this thread in general seems to generate more heat than light and I'm sorry I started it, I was about to take you seriously and put together a summary. This list makes me think you are trolling; each item is phrased in such a way as to put it in the worst possible light. The link Paul Brinkley cites is https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,12502.0.html.
But for the record:
1. Trump believed that he had won the election and publicized that belief in an effort to correct for what he saw as fraud. Which statement is correct? Neither you nor I can read his mind.
2. "Planned to remove and replace"; "false allegations". Did he in fact remove and replace? What if the allegations were true? Do you know? Complaining about "planned to" is pretty weak sauce.
3. Trump argued strongly for Pence to take actions that Trump and Trump's lawyers believed were unusual, but nevertheless both legal and arguably Constitutional. That was his right. Pence chose not to take those actions. That was *his* right. I discussed this at greater length earlier in this thread (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein/comment/74940194)
4. Trump believed there had been counting errors or perhaps even malfeasance in Georgia, and he requested officials there to investigate. What "pressure" was he even in a position to apply? Do you imagine he was about to send troops, or a cruise missile?
5. Alternate slates of electors is the normal way to deal with contested votes.
6. Trump held a rally. At its end, he requested the attendees to "peacefully and patriotically" march to the Capitol to make their feelings known. He did not advocate violence. There were a few troublemakers like Ray Epps who were waiting there even before Trump started his speech, and directed the arriving protesters to enter the Capitol, after removing the signs and obstacles that would have made it clear this was impermissible; there are reasons to suspect that Epps and his compatriots were Feds trying to incite violence. They were remarkably unsuccessful; the protesters lined up and were admitted to the building by Capitol guards who held the door for them. Video of the event mostly shows people wandering around, sightseeing, while guards stood by to make sure nothing untoward happened.
Protests at the Capitol are not rare occurrences. This one got very slightly out of hand (or was pushed) but neither you nor I have any reason to believe Trump planned for it to do so.
7. Trump did speak out, urging people to remain peaceful. And why wouldn't he? His plan was to convince the Congress to act, in their Constitutional capacity as certifier of the vote counts. It would have been stupid to muddy the waters with violence. You may say he waited too long, but Monday morning quarterbacks are seldom convincing.
The list was simply copied verbatim from Wikipedia. Sorry, I wanted to change them to something that are more in line with what I actually believe. But I honestly got overwhelmed by the prospect and thought it was good enough to start a good faith discussion.
1. (point 1 is again verbatim from Wikipedia):
Many in Trump's inner circle informed the president he had lost and there was no evidence of widespread fraud. According to several video clips of prior testimony shown by the committee:
1.1 A senior adviser to the Trump campaign, Jason Miller, testified that Trump was internally advised he had lost the election. According to Miller, the campaign's top data aide, Matt Oczkowski, told Trump very shortly after the election "in pretty blunt terms, that he was going to lose".
1.2 Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon testified he had spoken to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in November 2020 soon after the election and told Meadows there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. According to Cannon, Meadows replied: "So there's no there there."
1.3 According to his testimony, attorney general Bill Barr "said that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were 'bullshit'".
1.4 Ivanka Trump said she "accepted" Barr's assessment.
To me with all this you start with "he knows he lost" and if there is strong evidence to the contrary we update. It seems silly to be neutral "we cant read his mind." That's infantilizing. Trump isn't a child. He had all the evidence presented to him and so many in his circle telling him he had lost and he still decided to go against it all and spread "alternative facts" to his constituents.
There was no "I commit to a peaceful transfer of power but I must get to the bottom of what I believe are irregularities as is my right." No it was just "The election has been stolen! Rile up your emotions!" or to quote him directly "This is going to escalate dramatically. This is a very dangerous moment in our history. ... The fact that our country is being stolen. A coup is taking place in front of our eyes, and the public can't take this anymore."
2.
Last I checked planning to overthrow the results of a democratic election is pretty fucking bad even if you didn't succeed. And worst when the president does it. I'm kinda like weirded out you don't think that's a big deal. Wouldn't you think it a big deal if you found out Kamala planned to overthrow the election results even if she didn't succeed? Would you tell anyone she only "planning to" is weak sauce?
- On December 14, two weeks after Barr stated there was no evidence of significant election fraud, Trump announced that Barr would be leaving as attorney general by Christmas.
I'm a "take people at their word" kinda guy.
Particulars on this point I am not interested in. I should not have copy-pasted this point. The main crux is just that he clearly pressured the hell out of so many lawmakers. If Harris had done the same - even if she *actually* believed her election was stolen - it would be just as appalling. Same goes for Trump. i.e. See points 3-4.
3.
- In late December, Pence called former vice president Dan Quayle for advice, and Quayle told him (according to reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa): "Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. ... I do know the position you're in. I also know what the law is. ... You have no power."
- Although the fourth Wednesday had passed, Trump still believed that Pence had the authority to reject electoral votes, and kept asking him to do so; however, over lunch on January 5, Pence informed Trump that he did not believe he had any such authority.
- Attorney John Eastman incorrectly told Pence in a January 5 Oval Office meeting that Pence had the constitutional authority to block the certification, which Trump reportedly urged Pence to consider.
- By January 5, Trump was continuing to assert that Pence had unilateral power to throw out states' official electoral certificates on grounds of fraud.
- In March, when ABC News' Jonathan Karl asked Trump if he was worried about Pence while the crowd was chanting, Trump defended the crowd, saying they were "very angry" and that it was "common sense" that they would want to stop Congress from certifying the election result. (you know after the whole "hang Mike Pence" stuff)
- Trump released a statement asserting, falsely, that Pence did have such power: "Unfortunately, he didn't exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!" and "they now want to take that right away".
- Pence: "President Trump is wrong. ... Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election."
Your quote:
"""
I'm not one of those that say Trump "really" won in 2020. But I don't see any impropriety in his attempts to plead his case, any more than I see impropriety in Gore's gamesmanship about recounts in 2000.
"""
Maybe I just don't know what the 2000s were like. Did Gore really pressure anyone as hard as Trump clearly deliberately pressured Pence? Is there anyone like Pence in the Gore story that did a complete 180 and was appalled by Gore and no longer endorses him?
4. Same as with the disinformation he spreads. He knows how much power he has wielding his base. Here are a few republican remarks:
- She [Kim Ward] stated that Republican leaders were expected to support Trump's claims and if she had announced opposition to the letter, "I'd get my house bombed tonight"
- The day the suit was filed, Trump warned Georgia attorney general Chris Carr to not rally other Republican officials in opposition to the suit
- After Georgia had twice recounted and twice certified its results, Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger received death threats. He was pressured to resign by others in his party, including the state's two senators.
- Trump called the investigations chief in the Georgia Secretary of State's office, who was then investigating allegations of mail ballot fraud, and urged the official to "find the fraud"
- Trump blocked government officials from cooperating in the presidential transition to Joe Biden.
- He repeatedly urged Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to convene a special session of the legislature to overturn Biden's certified victory in the state, and he made a similar plea to the Pennsylvania Speaker of the House.
- In an early January 2021 phone call, he pressed the Georgia secretary of state to "find" the 11,780 votes needed to secure his victory in the state
That last one was a particular holy shit for me. Would help a lot if that one was debunked thoroughly...
Anyway, these are not the actions of a truthseeker whose goal is the truth regardless of whether the truth is there is or is not fraud. These are the actions of someone that has an end-goal goal regardless of the truth.
It's not like he was trying to talk to fellow republicans and have them explain to him how things can "look weird" but still be likely he lost.
5. Is it now? Again, Wikipedia:
"The intent of the scheme was to pass the fraudulent certificates to then-vice president Mike Pence in the hope he would count them, rather than the authentic certificates, and thus overturn Joe Biden's victory. This scheme was defended by a fringe legal theory developed by Trump attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, detailed in the Eastman memos, which claimed a vice president has the constitutional discretion to swap official electors with an alternate slate during the certification process, thus changing the outcome of the electoral college vote and the overall winner of the presidential race. The scheme came to be known as the Pence Card. By June 2024, dozens of Republican state officials and Trump associates had been indicted in four states for their alleged involvement... According to testimony Trump was aware of the fake electors scheme, and knew that Eastman's plan for Pence to obstruct the certification of electoral votes was a violation of the Electoral Count Act."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_memos
This doesn't seem like a "normal way to deal with contested votes." Granted there seem to be weird loopholes to make it legal, but seems pretty damn fringe and done in bad faith. i.e. this is not a tactic someone who believes the election was stolen would use. This is the tactic of someone who desperately wants to stay in power at all cost would use.
Also, this takes us back to "there was clearly a concerted plan" from point 2.
6.
"there are reasons to suspect that Epps and his compatriots were Feds trying to incite violence"
I presume you aren't going to drop a bombshell like that without evidence?
"""
the protesters lined up and were admitted to the building by Capitol guards who held the door for them. Video of the event mostly shows people wandering around, sightseeing, while guards stood by to make sure nothing untoward happened.
"""
What the actual fuck? Did you like watch ANY of the video footage? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:January_6_select_committee_new_footage.webm
Police were fucking knocked out blood over their head. And if there is to be any conspiracy theorizing it should probably start with why there was so little police support at the Capital that day - something the current government in power during the riot (Trump) had a say over.
Haven't looked into this myself so don't mean to insinuate anything. But it seems a totally fair question to ask.
""""
Protests at the Capitol are not rare occurrences. This one got very *slightly* out of hand
"""
Can you point to any protest in the Capital that is similarly violent (at least at the level of police being knocked out and suicide-level trauma) that the media considers only considers getting "slightly" out of hand? Like if you can find something similar that was some pro-leftist riot at the Capital where police committed suicide after from the trauma sustained that would help your claim that this was a normal-level thing to happen in the American Capital.
If not, what I am left with is something that fully looks like a concerted effort by Trump to use a mob to pressure the government to get what he wants. I mean hell, he resisted sending in the National Guard and at the rally said he would *never* concede the election. On social media, Trump was suggesting that his supporters had the power to prevent Biden from taking office and One of his tweets, posted on January 6, 2021, at 5:43 a.m., was "Get smart Republicans. FIGHT."
Seriously, what has to be true about the events that unfolded that we must definitively conclude that Trump was using the mob to pressure Pence to overturn the election? What is missing or has to be different?
What about what happened *has* to be different that point 6 is a very reasonable conclusion given all the evidence we have? Tell me what we need to find that you would change your mind. And then commit to changing your mind if we do find it. I am happy to do the same for the reverse. I have already noted some cruxes earlier.
Some other quotes at his rally:
- As to counting Biden's electoral votes, Trump said, "We can't let that happen" and suggested Biden would be an "illegitimate president".
- 'Something's wrong here. Something's really wrong. [It] can't have happened.' And we fight. We fight like Hell and if you don't fight like Hell, you're not going to have a country anymore".
- "going to the Capitol and we're going to try and give [Republicans] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country"
- "you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated"
- He called upon his supporters to "fight much harder" against "bad people"; told the crowd that "you are allowed to go by very different rules"; said that his supporters were "not going to take it any longer"
Let's assume Trump has many lawyers on his side that can tell him what he can and cant say if he wanted to rile up a mob. Isn't everything he said and did consistent with what someone smart and careful would do to try and deliberately rile up a mob without getting caught?
7.
Yea but that was after a ton of pressure from his aides. It was only after being pressured by his cabinet, the threat of removal, and many resignations. I forgot which one but on the phone one of his aides even had to say "who do you think you are?" in disbelief when telling Trump he has to end the riot and things are getting out of hand. Because Trump's response was basically something like "well you have to find a way to make this work." I don't like this memory being tenuous so I'll be sure to link evidence to it if I can find the call again (otherwise I'll retract and point out if I find it was a lie)
He used the word "fight" 20 times and the word "peacefully" once in his entire rally.
For me the waiting too long to act isn't nearly as damning as how much damn pressure was needed to get him to talk down the rioters.
There was also the whole trying to seize voting machines thing. Which just by itself is damning.
Ah yes, once again if a Democrat will be elected, it'll be "on the bold platform of not being Donald Trump". The wrong lizard musn't get in.
I mean, I basically agree with this. I think it's a dumb situation to be in, but I blame the Republicans who nominated Trump. Yes, if you nominate a bad enough guy, you can force voters to vote for the other party's crappy candidate just to avoid him. That's not a criticism of the voters' decision algorithm, that's a criticism of the nomination process.
How much effort did the Democrats put in to making sure their opponent would be Trump, however?
I think not much? If parties are that good at hacking other parties' nomination process, the GOP should have made the Dems stick with Biden.
It's not easy for the Republicans, just the Democrats. Back in 2016, the propaganda press gave Trump lots and lots of free publicity, so he could win the primaries.
What's probably not intentional, but still true, is that in 2019 the Democrats, controlling various government units, started criminal cases and lawsuits against Trump, to his considerable benefit as far as getting the nomination went, because of the sympathy vote.
>Back in 2016, the propaganda press gave Trump lots and lots of free publicity, so he could win the primaries.
Was this a concerted effort or just failing businesses chasing ratings? If anything, their "mea culpa" from that situation made them intolerable during Trump's term.
Not a concerted effort, I think. Trump was getting big ratings for them and they followed that incentive gradient, which led in part to his election. They should have ignored him, should have went "huh, interesting, Trump's running again" and moved on, and maybe none of this would ever have happened.
Maybe. There are a lot of other factors for Trump's 2016 win.
It's not even a speculation: https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/
I don't think a single democrat I know wouldn't instantly push a button to replace Trump with McCain, or Romney, or Liz Cheney. Trump running is a nightmare opponent for them.
That sounds plausible, but with enough time, you can probably Dutch book them: pick a candidate, let them call him a Nazi fascist racist etc., work themselves into a frenzy, and then offer them the option to replace him with someone else. Then they call HIM a Nazi fascist racist, and so on.
I don't think most of the "free publicity" in 2016 was intended to make Trump the candidate. It was mostly because he was often outrageous and controversial, which pulls in eyeballs. And I don't think liberals expected the unending torrent of negative coverage to help him. David Shor was on the rationally speaking podcast talking about this a while ago, and most Democrat campaigners were wildly wrong about what sort of ads would help persuade swing voters that year.
Quite possible. He made good copy.
"The Democrats prosecuted Trump not because they wanted him to be punished but because they wanted to ensure he would be re-nominated in 2020" is an absolutely galaxy-brained take.
In 2016 Hillary preferred Trump, thinking he'd be easy to best. That doesn't make Trump their fault, but it is an irony.
It's like, if you will, Israel supporting Hamas way back because they figured they were so outrageous that they could be leveraged to work against the real, concrete villain, the PLO.
Way back, Israel supported Fatah against Hamas (during the civil war in Gaza, 2006). Are you referring to even before that?
Yea like the 80s or 90s? I'm not super knowledgeable here.
Gotcha. I don't know much about Hamas pre-2006 either
I assumed this was about this: https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
<quote>In 2016 Hillary preferred Trump, thinking he'd be easy to best. That doesn't make Trump their fault, but it is an irony.</quote>
It's the monkey paw wish
LOL! Many Thanks!
A better analogy might be the USA arming and supporting the Taliban against the Russians in Afghanistan, then in the end the Taliban became *their* problem to deal with.
I accepted this argument in 2016, and think it was largely (if not majority) true, but a lot of the "let's get the GOP to nominate Trump, then we'll win" doofus really learned a lesson.
I'm not sure I'm following the implied argument here.
Suppose your threat model is "Democrats can effectively choose the nominees of both the Democrats and the Republicans". Then the way you should act is...what? Vote for the Republican candidate (that the Democrats selected)?
Personally I'm voting third party.
Where are the Yang Gang? Why are they all keeping silent? Surely now is the time that cometh the hour, cometh the man!
Yang would have been nice, but we didn't get Yang, and I don't care for any of the jokers we did get. Between the two choices who have a chance, I vaguely prefer Trump, but that's mostly because I want the Democratic party to be a real political party again and so I want them to fail miserably, rather than having a legitimate preference for the man himself.
Also if Trump has his second term we never have to hear about him again.
Good comment!
The model isn't quite that, or you're right. Rather, it's: The Democrats can influence who the Republican nominee is, to be either someone they like more (Jeb Bush) or someone they like less (Trump), but not somebody ideal (Bernie Sanders). If they help Jeb, though, they lose in the general election, and Jeb is almost as bad as Trump (or maybe even worse, since Jeb would be mor effective in office).
I think the Democrats really dodged a bullet, twice, when Cruz and DeSantis lost the nomination. Their rhetoric is milder, but those two know how to fight a bureaucracy and win.
None?
~all evil is downstream of our voting systems
electoral college bad
choose-one bad (give us STAR voting or, more palatably, Approval Top-Two Jungle Primaries)
I think replacing the electoral college with sortition would also help.
Any kind of cardinal voting system please! I'll even take approval voting if I have to!
My preferred ones though are quadratic, score, STAR, or perhaps even liquid democracy if I'm feeling fancy.
Why shouldn't Republican states support the "popular vote" thing, too?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
I remember very well Trump saying back then that yes, he didn't win the popular vote, but he didn't campaign for that; he could have won the popular vote if he'd had to, in fact, it would have been easier.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/26/trump-electoral-college-popular-vote-555148
So why shouldn't Texas join the National Popular Vote compact?
What kind of Republican would you ever vote for? Any actual names, if the democrats started to become more authoritarian
Could you list some current “Republicans” who aren’t in the Trump cult?
Romney, McCain, Howard Baker, Manchin (lol)… hell, even hippie Goldwater today.
What does "being in the Trump cult" mean?
There were a whole bunch of primary candidates this time around, would any one of them do?
A perfect example of a strawman.
This is called a "party switch." What used to be the Democratic Party before June 28 became the Republican Party of today.
Since when was the Democratic Party line ever "Kamala Harris is absolutely useless"? Not to mention that there was a lot of dissent against Biden between the debate and him stepping down...
Whole “bunch” who all got less than 1% besides today’s man-hating Nikki?
Ok, you got me - Doug Burgum. I’ll write him in if you do the same for Jason Palmer.
It's not a question of whether the Republicans would vote for one of them, but whether someone currently voting for Harris or another Democrat if the Democrats became "too authoritarian." If Democrats will not support any Republicans even if the Democrats are acting as authoritarians, then the argument that we should vote for Harris because "Trump is authoritarian" doesn't mean much.
I’m not American but I could name a few - schwarzenegger is a recent obvious example.
Larry Hogan, Charlie Baker, Phil Scott, maybe Spencer Cox. I probably wouldn’t vote for Brian Kemp but if he won I wouldn’t be especially upset about it.
None of those would have won a Republican primary in 1980-today. None would have gotten even if you magicked away the winner. High probability of them failing even if you did it to the top 3. Significant even if you removed the top 5.
Kemp could win in some of the 3/5 scenarios. But you still said you wouldnt vote for him. So your opinion is kinda moot. Its like a Republican saying they wouldn't vote for Joe Manchin but wouldn't be terribly upset if he ended as president.
A *federal* primary, you mean? But that just brings us full circle - I'm willing to vote for a Republican and have in fact voted for one of the names listed - and he won! The Republican primary process is such that they'd never pass it to the presidential general, sure, but that doesn't make *me* more of a partisan.
As someone who would not have voted for a Republican presidential candidate in the last 30 years, McCain seemed kind of okay to me, just really hard to vote for because I hated Bush and Obama's speeches were so good. But ~last year I heard McCain talking off-the-cuff about the Ukraine war in 2014, and everything he said precisely matched my own understanding of Ukraine-in-2014 (which I mostly learned about in 2022) so I went away very impressed, especially after these many years of Orange Man, and I really wish he hadn't died.
Romney was more suspicious to me rather than clearly bad, and his vote to impeach Trump really does him credit. So I'd vote Romney if the Democrat was particularly bad. In a Romney-Hillary matchup, I think I could at least stay home on election day without remorse.
Since Schwarzenegger ran as Republican I would've been biased against at the time, but I recently saw he's actually the leader of a climate and environmental action group which makes me go "oh I guess I like you now", and I listened to one of his speeches for it and it was quite good―and pragmatic, a common virtue of Republicans. No native American invited to give a prayer, no irrational worries about all the places microplastics have been located, +1 Arnold.
You can also blame the 8 republicans who agreed he was to blame for Jan 6, but failed to vote to convict because they said “he was no longer president so it doesn’t matter.”
Those are the cowards who could have protected their own party from him but didn’t, who gave in to fears of death threats to their family and mob threats.
With those 8 votes you’d have hit the supermajority needed to convict at 66/100
The supermajority needed to convict is 67/100 and there were 57 votes for conviction.
Thanks, I must’ve wrong somewhere. I’ll do some research. Appreciate the correction
I think this heuristic is basically a good analog to what most people are choosing this election. People either are voting:
1) on the bold platform of not being Donald Trump OR
2) on the bold platform of not being a democrat
People choose which heuristic to use based on whether they think democrats OR Trump has the highest chance of ending American civilization as we know it.
IMO one might as well flip a coin, but with a slight edge towards democrats edging the chance higher.
The options I see are trump turning USA into some authoritarian South American-like country, or democrats turning us into a slowly dying and useless EU.
Authoritarian countries are worse now, but I suspect EU-like ideals will lead to an eventual total decay of the west without USA to prop it up, eventually being worse.
At the end of the day this decision on the coin flip probably comes down to who one associates with. On the internet I associate with a combo of people, but IRL I associate with rural blue-collar people who I love and respect. Group-think leads to One Obvious Answer, so fuck it I’ll go with it.
I can’t wait to listen in to the results via satellite radio from my hunting camp in national forest where there’s no cell service/internet.
Yeah. Basically "the one pro-Trump argument that genuinely bothers me" from the post, right? I definitely agree with you, including that the worst case with the democrats is probably worse. I'm going with a simple cautious heuristic, though: avoid any short-term disasters. The democrats are just going to keep making things gradually worse. Trump could plausibly make things suddenly greatly worse.
Ah strategic voting, the quickest way to make your vote meaningless. If nothing Trump could do would keep you from voting for him, your vote doesn't matter ... to him. Same with Harris. This is why campaign promises get broken, because your revealed preference is that you don't care whether they actually govern after they get into office.
Contrast this with, say, a vote for Stein or Oliver in a suburb of Philadelphia (assuming Stein/Oliver earned your vote). If Harris wins, her staff will want to win the next election by shoring up support. They will notice that they can get XX,000 voters in certain suburbs of swing state cities if they pursue policies these voters care about. So in the next 4 years, they're going to start governing in a way that they hope will persuade these voters. If Trump wins, his team will make some of the same calculations, ensuring some policy proposals from persuadable voters are incorporated into the next administration to shore up support.
Meanwhile, if you're not a persuadable voter, but are going to vote for "the other candidate" no matter what, there's no reason for a politician to change the way they govern in order to earn your vote next time. They got it without having to earn it.
IMO this was one of Douglas Adams's worst takes. If a randomly chosen ordinary "non-lizard" American magically got a major party nomination, they would likely be crushed in the election, because they wouldn't have anywhere near the star quality of their opponent. Voters largely (and mostly correctly) prefer typical politicians, because they are more charismatic, more competent, and smarter than average people.
smarter than average people [citation needed].
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23120 "[Swedish] politicians are on average significantly smarter and better leaders than the population they represent."
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4166034 "We document that electoral candidates nominated by political parties fare better than the office-eligible population in multi-dimensional tests of cognitive and non-cognitive ability conducted by the Finnish Defense Forces. The politicians elected by voters demonstrate even higher levels of ability."
It's also the case that politicians generally have much higher education than the average person, and educational attainment is strongly correlated with intelligence.
Does this apply to Swedish local politicians, or to national politicians only? Because I've seen local guys up close and I'm not convinced they are that much smarter, better, stronger, faster, we can rebuild him, we have the technology - sorry, where was I going?
Yeah, there's not a whole heap to choose between Local Politician and Average Citizen.
MPs do best but local politicians are also substantially better than the average population, especially mayors. See the figure in section 8 in the paper (p. 29 or 31).
You might be confusing smarter and better.
Yes, but not all smart/competent/charismatic people are lizards!
Being smart/competent/charismatic is needed to succeed with general voters, sure. But the lizard analogy is also pointing at worse traits needed to succeed behind the scenes and get on the ballot in the first place, relating to being power-hungry, two-faced, open to power-brokering with special interests and party insiders, etc.
I think there are a lot of genuinely good people that voters would vote for, who can't make it through the gauntlet to get their party's support.
So stop nominating him then.
Listen, I very badly want Approval voting so that we can break teh two-party system. Any time you want to throw your weight behind that reform, you will be welcomed to the movement.
Until then, it's a two party system, and yes that means choosing the lesser of two evils.
If you don't like the opposing party, nominate someone less evil!
Yes, it's a low bar, but It's certainly better than the platform of "being Donald Trump."
I mean sure if I agreed with you that Jan 6 was so terrible I might be against trump too. If you hurt someone, then yeah you should get prison but what I saw was people entering already open doors, with cops welcoming them in and chatting it up as they wandered the halls. Until Jan6 I actually had no idea that entering the capital was illegal - protesters do it all the time in state capitals and it's celebrated.
I am not a January-6-ologist in the way that some people are, but I predict that people will show up here with evidence that it was pretty hard for people to do January 6 by accident without realizing it was illegal.
I think the argument is that as far as riots go, it wasn't that bad*, and the extent to which the people who participated in it had the book thrown at them was unprecedented.
*people usually point generally to the BLM riots, but the specific example I always think of is CHAZ/CHOP, which was way closer to what I'd call an insurrection, and had a bunch of people end up murdered.
I agree that CHAZ was probably more violent and lawbreakingy than 1/6, but CHAZ was just futzing around with part of Seattle, whereas 1/6 was going against the US Capitol as they were trying to certify an election. Worst case scenario for CHAZ was approximately what happened, worst case scenario for 1/6 is they ... threaten? rough up? Pence into declaring the election for Trump, and then we have some kind of coup or civil war or something. So I think it's fair to classify CHAZ as "random criminality" and 1/6 as something sort of like "attempted coup" (coup is a strong word and I prefer "insurrection", but something along that pathway).
Also, AFAIK Kamala Harris wasn't personally responsible for CHAZ.
> Worst case scenario for CHAZ was approximately what happened, worst case scenario for 1/6 is they ... threaten? rough up? Pence into declaring the election for Trump, and then we have some kind of coup or civil war or something
I don't think the law works that way. You can't just force the Vice President to say some magic words and bam, the election is overturned. I don't know what happens exactly, I assume the Senate reconvenes later once the immediate physical danger was passed and passes a "well actually" resolution. And if that doesn't happen then I'm sure there's all sorts of Supreme Court challenges. There's
If anyone thought the "VP says magic words" theory really worked, then the legislature's top priority in 2021 should have been to change the procedure by which the nomination is confirmed, because it's currently ridiculously non-robust... not against a random group of protestors entering the Capitol but against a VP less scrupulous than Pence.
(I also don't think any of this is physically possible, not for an unarmed group of citizens. Capitol security was shit, apparently, but not close to being that shit.)
That makes me wonder, who would be next in line to certify the election if the Vice President is murdered?
Xe does that in capacity as President of the Senate. Presumably the Senate pro tem
There were separate slates of electors set to go for Pence to approve.
This all gets overshadowed by the riot. There was a plan separate from the riot.
Correct. It was one aspect of a multi-pronged coup attempt by Trump and some of his lawyers.
I recommend everyone here read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
1. It wasn’t just “magic words.” The plan involved trying to get Mike Pence to accept fake electors along with the certified ones. They wanted him to announce there were competing electors and ultimately throw the election to the House. Ron Johnson and Mike Lee were both part of this scheme, as were a few House members.
2. The Electoral Count Act was updated last year to clarify that the VP’s role is strictly ministerial, and raised the objection threshold to 20% from the previous one each from the House and Senate.
You can force the Vice President to say some allegedly-magic words and then millions of idiot Trumpists will believe that Trump is so obviously and legitimately President that it's their duty to back his play with their AR-15s. Even the possibility of that, makes 1/6 far more dangerous than CHAZ.
Under the law as it existed four years ago, it basically explicitly said that the Vice President's magic words determined the President. They have now changed the law.
Fair enough, I stand corrected on that particular aspect.
(I still don't believe that the VP's magic words would have determined the President in practice, particularly not if uttered under duress, but it's good to hear that they changed the law to make it more explicit.)
My understanding is that, under the law as it existed four years ago, it was just about possible to argue with a straight face that the Vice President's words determined the President. It has now been explicitly foreclosed.
"I don't think the law works that way."
My threat model is something like:
- Under duress, Pence says Trump won the election
- There's some Plan B but it takes 66% of Congress and nobody can get 66% of Congress to do anything these days.
- There's some Plan C, but the guy in charge of the relevant Congressional committee is a Republican, plus he just saw Pence get beaten up for defying Trump and he's not that excited about tempting the same fate.
- Trump is inaugurated on January 20, this wasn't "legal" according to the best and smartest interpretation of the law, but who's gonna stop him?
In this specific example, the relevant law dictates that both chambers of Congress have to agree if dual slates of electors are submitted. Say the House backs Trump and the Senate backs Biden. Now the tie is split by which elector slate is certified by the relevant state government executive. None of the Trump alternate slates were certified, so Biden wins. Even if Trump somehow subverted that system, he still has to survive a court challenge. The only way his plan works is if he can convince the state legislatures to throw out the legitimate Biden electors. And all of the relevant statute was amended in 2022 precisely to prevent another incident like this from happening.
This is roughly my model of Trump's plan. With the caveat that it probably wouldn't have worked.
The law is not a magic contract enforced by invisible gods. It's a human construct whose enforcement rests on legitimacy and belief. Consider how many times in the past countries had a civil war over whether the dead King's brother or the dead King's bastard son was supposed to be the heir to the throne. Didn't they have a succession law? Sure, but it was muddy enough that both those people could say to have some legitimate claim, and then the fact that various prominent aristocrats had conflicting interests did the rest.
Similarly, there is no magic word that makes the President. But if comes to the point where one political body says that the president is A, and another says that's invalid for <reason>, the president is B, then you have a succession crisis. If roughly 50% of your army's generals are persuaded that their sworn duty is to A, and the rest that it's to B, then odds are you also have a civil war.
I think that's fair but also, maybe Jan 6 also went about as bad as it could've? Like, what if the protestors were not let in? What if there was an actual security detail in place? Even if they got there and threatened pence, would that actually do anything?
> whereas 1/6 was going against the US Capitol as they were trying to certify an election.
Hmm. I wouldn’t vote for Trump were I American, because he’s as mad as a box of frogs. Stability is what is needed now.
However, even insurrection is too big a word here. Coup is ridiculous.
Let’s say the protestors had entered the Capitol and had stopped the ratification. What then?
Is it essential that the vote take place in that building? At that hour? Could the politicians not reconvene in the Tennis Court? You will get the reference.
Does it have to be on Jan 6th? Would Trump have been dictator for ever if the protestors occupied the building until Jan 7th? Jan 8th?
If the vote isn’t timely, does the Supreme Court throw its hands up in the air and issue a judgement saying because the constitution is ambivalent here, and even though the election looks like it went to Biden, with there being no vote because of an illegal entry into Congress the presidency is now Trump’s for life. He can proclaim himself King if he cares, nothing can be done. Meanwhile we might as well disband the court and let’s have no more discussion of constitutions. It was a vote on 3pm Jan 6th or Tyranny.
The word insurrection sounds more formidable to me, I’d expect a tank or two.
> Is it essential that the vote take place in that building? At that hour? Could the politicians not reconvene in the Tennis Court? You will get the reference.
> Does it have to be on Jan 6th?
Legally speaking, yes it had to be in that place at that time, according to the law. Meeting in the tennis courts would technically be a constitutional revolution of sorts.
I believe they've now changed the law so that the event is a formality, rather than the actual determination.
The word "insurrection" is used specifically because it sounds formidable. My personal feeling is that it's like the word "racist". You don't need to microanalyze dog whistles to determine who's secretly racist - an actual racist is all too happy to tell you their racist ideas. (Since they're so rare in modern society, it's too easy to forget what real racists actually look and act like.) And you don't need to pick out whether 3 words in Trump's speech could be interpreted as maybe kinda leaning towards insurrection. An actual "insurrection" would require somebody - ANYBODY - involved to know that they were trying to commit an insurrection. The people merrily tromping through and taking selfies in a building that's mostly open to the public sure weren't thinking that.
>and then we have some kind of coup or civil war
Come on, there is no plausible scenario where that happens. Trump made a perfectly legal (though tasteless) challenge of the electors. That is in no way an attempted coup. I agree that he disrupted the perception of the normal transfer of power, but that's all he did. It was a superficial interference with the ceremony and nothing more. I agree that it was tasteless and a black mark on his character, but honestly not any more tasteless than we already knew he was. "Coup" and "Insurrection" are intellectually dishonest political framings. Frankly it's beneath you. It's like accusing Colin Kaepernick of treason because he knelt for the national anthem. Yes it's tasteless, yes it means he's kind of a terrible person, but he's perfectly entitled to do it.
It wasn’t a perfectly legal challenge. He tried to submit fake electors. Dozens of fake electors have been indicted in Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Michigan, as were a few of Trump’s attorneys.
Fine, that's election fraud, or would have been had it gotten to the point where he was able to submit them. But it didn't. It wouldn't have worked anyway (the Senate wouldn't have voted for them) and it definitely wasn't an insurrection. I don't know the details there but at worst he's guilty of conspiracy to commit election fraud, which if you're honest with yourself you know probably happens on some level in every election. You don't think the Clintons ever did anything shady?
Alternate slates of electors are not "fake electors;" it's a standard practice that Republicans and Democrats have both participated in plenty of times throughout the nation's history. The fact that people got indicted over doing it this time is evidence of Democrat depravity and political persecution, not of those people having done anything wrong.
>CHAZ was just futzing around with part of Seattle
It obviously lacked the national significance of the attack on American democracy on Jan 6, but it should be noted that CHAZ involved multiple shootings, an unarmed Black teenager who was murdered by a lynch mob, and a warlord (who was repeatedly accused of sex trafficking) handing out rifles to random people, and assaulting people on camera, with a Seattle council member not only allowing the carnage to continue, but apologizing for their murders, and praising their occupation of the police station that precipitated the violence.
The aforementioned warlord was never charged for his atrocities and the city instead coordinated with him as a de facto leader.
Multiple city officials illegally destroyed evidence regarding the crimes there.
For more, see: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-murder-in-chaz/.
I wish we could upvote comments
It was entirely possible that several members of Congress, and maybe Mike Pence, could have been taken hostage or killed. If Pence was killed and a state of emergency was declared, Trump might have tried to do other emergency actions justified by that.
The thing is, the foundational mythology for America *is* that kind of "private citizens rise up against a corrupt/unrepresentative government and take control of their own affairs and declare their own rulers". You have an entire day, 4th July, celebrating that! By force of arms, even!
So I think it's easier for Americans to believe that they are acting in the spirit of the Minutemen and the Founding Fathers by engaging in this sort of protest: of course the cronies of the illegitimate regime call us lawbreakers, but we are the true patriots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution
" In 1767, tensions flared again following the British Parliament's passage of the Townshend Acts. In an effort to quell the mounting rebellion, King George III deployed troops to Boston. A local confrontation resulted in the troops killing protesters in the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. In 1772, anti-tax demonstrators in Rhode Island destroyed the Royal Navy customs schooner Gaspee. On December 16, 1773, activists disguised as Indians instigated the Boston Tea Party and dumped chests of tea owned by the British East India Company into Boston Harbor. London closed Boston Harbor and enacted a series of punitive laws, which effectively ended self-government in Massachusetts.
In late 1774, 12 of the Thirteen Colonies (Georgia joined in 1775) sent delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. It began coordinating Patriot resistance through underground networks of committees. In April 1775 British forces attempted to disarm local militias around Boston and engaged them."
'Underground networks of committees' can be construed as 'domestic terrorists'. It all depends who ends up writing the history.
By contrast, the Irish foundational myth is "they went forth to battle, but they always fell". Our successful rebellion succeeded by failing and having the response crushing us be so hard, it got other countries to put pressure on Britain (particularly America, due to the Irish-American campaigning).
http://www.ricorso.net/rx/az-data/authors/o/OSheel_S/life.htm
Shaemus O'Sheel
"They went forth to battle, but they always fell;
Their eyes were fixed above the sullen shields;
Nobly they fought and bravely, but not well,
And sank heart-wounded by a subtle spell.
They knew not fear that to the foeman yields,
They were not weak, as one who vainly wields
A futile weapon; yet the sad scrolls tell
How on the hard-fought field they always fell.
It was a secret music that they heard,
A sad sweet plea for pity and for peace;
And that which pierced the heart was but a word,
Though the white breast was red-lipped where the sword
Pressed a fierce cruel kiss, to put surcease
On its hot thirst, but drank a hot increase.
Ah, they by some strange troubling doubt were stirred,
And died for hearing what no foeman heard.
They went forth to battle, but they always fell;
Their might was not the might of lifted spears;
Over the battle-clamor came a spell
Of troubling music, and they fought not well.
Their wreaths are willows and their tribute, tears;
Their names are old sad stories in men's ears;
Yet they will scatter the red hordes of Hell,
Who went to battle forth and always fell."
If so, that's really bad. That was 250 years ago and what was appropriate and valor-worthy then is no longer now. That mythos needs to die because it is a dangerous one in the world and the country we have today, IMO.
It’s actually very hard to find out about the circumstances of CHAZ; the mayor and chief of police who presumably made the decisions to withdraw police from the area have been mum about it.
January 6, and especially the fake electors scheme, was organized by the sitting president. CHAZ and BLM were not. Biden condemned BLM violence from the very beginning and has made no effort to pardon anyone associated with it.
The fake electors thing, sure. I've said as much in the increasingly Trump-centric open thread.
But, genuine question, what is the evidence that Trump organized the J6 riot?
For one thing, he used a burner phone all day on the sixth.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a41396235/the-breach-denver-riggleman-jan-6-excerpt/
And even if the didn’t organize it, he did nothing to stop it for three hours despite please from his staff, daughter and various Fox News personalities.
Also, the day before, there was a strange announcement that Charles Grassley would preside instead of Mike Pence, but Pence shut that down. When that didn’t work they apparently were hoping to get Pence out during the chaos, something the Secret Service tried to do but which Pence resisted.
Then there’s the weird fact that all the Secret Service text massages were deleted.
This seems kind of weak?
I understand why the riot and other stuff gets conflated: it creates striking imagery and bolsters the coup rethoric. But it doesn't seem like a winning message: as an (admittedly somewhat unsympathetic) outside observer to the BLM riots, I could appreciate the left-wing approach on libertarian grounds, but after J6 I don't know jf I can reconcile it as anything but "I want my guys to go free and their guys to rot in jail forever".
Okay, then why have 4 times more people been prosecuted in connection with Jan 6 than in connection with BLM/Antifa violence during the summer of Floyd, despite the latter involving hundreds of times more violent actors over a span of months, not hours, and resulting in orders of magnitude more deaths and property damage?
I’m not here to defend to BLM rioters. I’ll just note that we’ve had thousands of riots in our history, many of them extremely bloody. But we’ve only had one president who wouldn’t commit to the peaceful transfer of power.
Fine, Trump is the first. How does this make him the greater evil, compared to an entire political party that is obviously far more willing and able to inflict politicised violence?
They were not fake electors, they were alternate slates.
It was fraud. They broke the law. Dozens of them have been indicted for it.
The worst case scenario for the BLM riots was that the rioters succeeded in storming the White House and killed Trump and/or his family. That's, uh... also another way to impact election outcomes, and probably more reliable than roughing up whoever was in the capitol that day.
> The worst case scenario for the BLM riots was that the rioters succeeded in storming the White House and killed Trump and/or his family
Or one or more Supreme Court justices. Remember, at least one actual assassination attempt was made, and only averted because the guy's sister (I think it was his sister, at least) talked him down at the last minute.
Also true. It amazes me that people somehow forget how Trump survived at least two assassination attempts, enabled by what can charitably be described as conspicuous ineptitude on the part of the secret service.
Only one of them was an attempt. The other was an attempt at making an attempt, but didn't actually rise to the level of an attempt. There are many other attempted attempts in history that no one pays attention to.
You also have to be pretty naive to say Trump had nothing to do with 1/6, he was just holding a rally a couple of blocks away from the capitol on the day of the certification after losing an election that he didn't admit on losing.
I was going to go to DC on Jan 6 to enjoy a laugh at the loons, but I can assure you that once the dumb mob and smart provocateurs broke through and the police were ushering people in an orderly fashion I would have entered as well. Judging the 700th guy to enter the capital building as having committed any kind of crime at all is quite sickening.
What way are you a January-6-ologist? Have you written about it? Sorry to ask if it is trivial to find - I personally cant find it
Jan 6 isn't principally about the riot per se. The trespassing, even the violence, is just what's most visibly striking, but it's not what makes it terrible. I would agree with you that it's not that big a deal if it was just a protest-turned-riot.
The real story of Jan 6 is the story of Trump's attempt to overturn the results of the election by every possible means. The riot was the last-ditch attempt in a long series of attempts that had been going on for months prior. The real story of Jan 6 is that it was part of an attempted coup. That's what makes it completely disqualifying, what makes it so terrible that this election isn't about politics-as-usual.
> The real story of Jan 6 is the story of Trump's attempt to overturn the results of the election by every possible means. ... The real story of Jan 6 is that it was part of an attempted coup.
No. It was not. Please don't go spreading around wild allegations so far removed from the facts that even the New York Times has debunked them.
The simple, undeniable fact of the matter is, while the Trump rally in which he allegedly incited the riot was still going on, the riot was already in full swing. Before he ever spoke the allegedly inciting words, the Capitol had already been breached. Unless you wish to submit evidence that President Trump or one of his surrogates *literally has a time machine,* it is physically impossible for this accusation to be true.
What I understood from Matt's comment is: the January 6 rioters were inspired by exactly the same election denial from Trump that underpinned his refusal to concede, his pressuring of swing state election officials, his endless frivolous litigation, his refusal to initiate the presidential transition, and his holding of the same day's rally in the first place.
The Trump campaign had been sowing the seeds of that riot literally for months before Jan 6. The plan to pressure Mike Pence to reject the Presidential Elector votes had been in swing since the results were known. The rally, the speeches by Trump's cronies (like Eastman and Giuliani), and the speech by Trump himself, were all part of this same plot. They were the last ditch effort to prevent the ordinary procedure from continuing.
None of what you said contradicts any of that. Again, the point isn't "Trump incited people to violence at the Capitol." The point is the whole series of events that led there. In other words, the deliberate, months-long attempt to coup the government in favor of Trump.
Your assertion that “the riot was in full swing” is misleading. Trump’s entire speech concluded at around 1:10 pm. The first barriers well outside the Capitol were breached at 12:50, 20 minutes prior. The actual Capitol Building wasn’t entered by force until around 2:10, a full hour after Trump’s speech. No one would reasonably consider the Capitol riot was in “full swing” until the rioters at least entered the Capitol Building. And by that time they’d certainly know of Trump’s remarks more than an hour prior.
Also, I can find no evidence that the NYT debunked the claim that Trump played a role on January 6th in inciting the Capitol riot. Can you link to it?
> No. It was not.
Yes it was. Why did the protestors say "Hang Mike Pence"? What did the protestors, and Donald Trump, want Pence to do? What did Pence mean when he later said that Trump asked him to "choose between Trump and the constitution"? January 6 was the final part of the "fake electors plot", which is well documented.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
This is a deep misunderstanding of the issue. Even if Trump *hadn't even asked anyone to go to the Capitol during his speech at all*, he would still be responsible for most of what happened at the Capitol that day.
Does he bear full responsibility? No. Would he bear more responsibility if he had said "go there and break in and show those people who we are"? Yes. But these standards are absurd.
I recommend everyone here read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
Yes it was. You are just uninformed or are trying to burry your head in the sand. Which is more likely. Trump absolutely did try to overturn the election. He was pretty incompetent about it, because he is not the smartest. But he absolutely did try. And it is obvious.
What's amazing is how nobody remembers the faithless electors and related efforts of 2016/17, and the rioting and attempts to disrupt the EC voting and inauguration.
I think you are focusing on a single tree that is wrong about what Trump did and missing the forest of all the stuff Trump seems to have actually done.
It is possible both that the liberal media spread misinformation about Trump's allegedly inciting words AND for him to have spent over a month of concerted effort to attempt a coup.
It is a Motte and Bailey fallacy. Your Motte is that Trump never spoke the alleged inciting words. Your Bailey is that Trump never actually tried to overturn the election through over a month of concerted effort that resembles a coup.
Also... this even seems besides the point because event your Motte isn't that strong. I watched it all live. I only thought "holy shit that is not a protest that is a now a riot" after Trump was done speaking. As someone further down posted:
> The first barriers well outside the Capitol were breached at 12:50, 20 minutes prior. The actual Capitol Building wasn’t entered by force until around 2:10, a full hour after Trump’s speech. No one would reasonably consider the Capitol riot was in “full swing” until the rioters at least entered the Capitol Building. And by that time they’d certainly know of Trump’s remarks more than an hour prior.
Where's this NYT debunking you are referencing btw?
I think that if "the forest of all the stuff Trump seems to have actually done" is on the table, then so must be the forest of things Clinton, Biden, Harris, and the DNC have done, which puts us close enough to square one that you might want to rethink that.
Rethink what? Square one what? Did you even read the article this is a comment section to? The 4 counterarguments Scott brings up I think argue convincingly that the leftist monoculture can be very bad but it is still better to support right now than Trump.
Also if you pointed out something bad Harris did and my response was "well if that's on the table we need to consider the bad things Trump did and you might want to rethink that" I would look avoidant at best and like I am simply conceding that it doesn't matter and Harris is that bad at worst.
It doesn't counter-argue the claim that Harris is bad at all. Same goes for you simply pointing at Clinton, Biden, Harris. I don't care about these politicians nor particularly support them anyway.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910/
This is some of the info about Trump that makes a difference for me. They didn’t necessarily succeed in making obvious any ties to Russian organized crime per se, but he’s been swimming in “organized crime” water for a long time due to the old school NY crime families and his business deals.
His “normal” is this tradition of dominance at any cost. It’s fundamentally contrary to literal democracy. He didn’t do a good enough job last time partly because he incorrectly assessed the people around him. That problem has no doubt been addressed and he has different people visible around him now, plus all the old connections.
The quasi-tourist riot didn’t work because most of the rest of the system did their jobs. People think the ones they like will win the revolution. I am not looking forward to the mangled monstrosity of a gutted government I think Trump would usher in. I don’t see “satisfying, seamless conservatism” coming, I see a big mess with plenty more opportunities for organized crime and other outside infiltration. Jan 6 had volunteers and a Hollywood quality but his Act II would be weirder and worse. I think.
The first people to break in smashed in windows.
https://youtu.be/jWJVMoe7OY0?t=905
Tell me if you think those people were welcomed in by police, and that they would not have reasonably known they were violating the law.
The point of January 6 was to coerce Mike Pence into throwing out the electoral votes of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Mexico, Georgia, and Arizona. As part of his plot to get these EVs thrown out - representing tens of millions of voters - Donald Trump engaged in a criminal conspiracy to create seven false slates of electors. Loraine Pellegrino, one of these false electors for Arizona, has already plead guilty; many others are in the process of being charged for falsely representing themselves as the legitimate electors. The riot is just the cherry on top of an attempted coup.
I'm not sure if you're interested in changing your mind, but on the off chance that you are, you should read the Eastman memos (https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf). They detail exactly what Trump's plan was on J6. It's a very short document, but a quick summary is:
- Manufacture claims of fraud
- Use those claims as a justification to throw out electoral votes from blue swing states
- Claim that with the remaining electoral votes, Trump won
It's a really dangerous idea, one that is about as close to 'only counting the votes with my name on it and discarding the rest'. I would focus less on the riots, they are a bit of a distraction, and instead focus on the legal play that almost would have worked if Pence was a weaker man.
There were extensive violent clashes between the rioters and capitol police on January 6, including one police officer who was beaten to death by Trump's supporters.
This is a blatant lie. The autopsy of Brian Sicknick is publicly available, anyone can read it. He died of multiple strokes that were ruled natural causes; there was no evidence of blunt trauma or allergic reaction to the chemical (pepper spray) the rioters used on him.
Once the MSM say something it is forever true in the minds of MSM devotees.
Ditto for FOX devotees in reverse.
Hey, just wanted to say thanx for posting this comment. I believed for a long time the death was a direct result of the rioters and never rechecked on the news later. I just did a double-take and you are indeed correct. I believed an untruth.
This does interestingly mean the rioters didn't actually directly kill a single person. This is an important update for me.
No problem. I think the culture war nature of this thread drew in a lot of low quality posts. Stuff that was just wrong, and could be verified as wrong with a cursory effort.
Yea kinda embarrassing how quickly it is verifiable. Up until recently also didn't believe how many Isrealis the IDF's helicopters killed after October 7th. The Hannibal Directive I knew existed, but I read some debunking article of it at the time and concluded it was Hamas propaganda. Had a friend point out actually they were used so did a double-take like I did with your comment and... sure enough. Same story as the fire extinguisher. The debunking article I read closer to October 7th was just lies.
If I am any evidence - I think it is just too useful to lie when something crucially damning is happening for implicated parties. Because even truth-seeking people cannot properly fact check so close to the event (or it is very difficult). Then they believe the wrong thing and don't self-correct until only months later when the lie can no longer be propped up and it becomes easily verifiable it was a lie all along.
This is laughably bad faith. We all watched it, the video and photos are readily available. Police were being bashed with fire extinguishers. Police were defending barriers with water cannons. It was abundantly obvious you can't storm the capitol. Congress people were fleeing for their lives and hiding in closets. Quite honestly, you should be ashamed to be either this ignorant or this apologist of terrorism on US soil.
https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1gftmjw/do_not_repeat_history_end_this_chaos_and/
Ok, so I believed the exact same thing as you. Except if you look on say the wikipedia page now it says this about his death:
"Multiple media outlets reported Sicknick's death was due to injuries he sustained, but months later the Washington, D.C. medical examiner reported there were no injuries to Sicknick... The media, however, continued to incorrectly report for weeks that Sicknick had died after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher during the unrest, citing two "anonymous law enforcement officials" as their source"
And NONE of the reddit photos you linked show police being bashed by fire extinguishers.
I've changed my mind. It does look like it was a lie from from the leftist side to get more clicks. The left lies as well unfortunately.
I remember seeing people attacking cops on video, including with a fire extinguisher, it just wasn't Sicknick who was attacked that way. Google offers https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/jan-6-rioter-gets-four-years-hitting-officers-fire-extinguisher-rcna79141
Yup, also pretty easy to find this appalling video which is a good reminder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:January_6_select_committee_new_footage.webm
Plenty of evidence of police getting violently curb-stomped. There is a reason multiple officers committed suicide from the trauma.
I clearly didn't read the comment I was responding to clearly enough. I thought it was solely talking about Sicknick. Kinda dumb of me in hindsight.
Kindly watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:January_6_select_committee_new_footage.webm
I won't be following your endorsement but I appreciate how balanced this article was, without resorting to 'Trump is a Nazi dictator' histrionics. One of the best election articles I've seen this cycle.
One thing you did not mention at all was Trump's age and VP choice - I like Vance and would be happy for him to step up a leadership role within the party, if not take over the Presidency, and his career would obviously be benefited substantially by a Trump win.
I did find this bit quite remarkable after yesterday's post on Prop 36, which seemed totally fine with shoplifters and drug addicts violating norms: "A single shoplifter or paint-thrower does very little damage, but this is true only because we jealously protect the norms against these kinds of people. If we truly gave up on punishing shoplifters, everyone would steal from everyone else and civilization would collapse. Asking “why should we punish shoplifters when they do so little damage?” is like asking “why should we vaccinate against measles when measles is so rare?”
Clara included a slightly different set of caveats than I would have. If I'd written that article, it would have stressed that current law mandates six months in jail for shoplifting, the new law mandates three years in jail, and [long collection of studies that I would have rounded up] shows us that criminals aren't especially moved by the difference between six months and three years of jail time when "deciding" whether to commit crimes.
I definitely don't think "don't punish shoplifters at all" is a good strategy.
If we want to get all game-theory about it, the punishment should be set at the equilibrium between where the resulting people sitting in prison are more of a loss to society than the negative externalities from the shoplifting feedback loop.
Ideally though you'd be able to think up cheaper alternatives than prison for disincentivizing shoplifting. Maybe some combination of good surveillance + high policing and better economic/welfare policies such as zoning reform, better transit, an LVT, and a minimal UBI?
Fresh off of jury duty, I decided that we should stop worrying so much about deterrence and incapacitation and such.
Punishments should be set no more harshly than the jury pool can bear. They won’t convict if they feel it’s too harsh, or they’ll want an unreasonably high standard of proof.
My impression is that probability of punishment matters more to deterrence than severity of punishment. I'm also under the impression that CCTV security tapes _potentially_ make a lot of shoplifting straightforward to prosecute, but that stores don't find it worthwhile. Maybe, instead of changing the sentence, the change should be to give the stores more of an incentive to prosecute? It is tricky to avoid incentivizing perverse outcomes, but maybe subsidize prosecution in cases leading to a conviction? ( but not so much that stores start faking evidence... )
Yeah, I'm thinking if there's like a way to easily catch and civily fine shoplifters, even for minimal sums, that might be ideal at discouraging people at the start from taking more. No one starts out shoplifting hundreds of dollars of merchandise after all. Maybe big box stores should be empowered to hire employees that follow shoplifters home, report the addresses they find to the police so the police can verify that the person caught on video shoplifting lives at the address. If so, write them a ticket (like a traffic ticket), put their face, address, and name in a database, and leave.
Many Thanks! Yes, something like that might work. I'm not sure if civil fines will work (a shoplifter with zero assets can't be effectively fined), but something that costs them even minimal amounts of time, _if_ it has a high probability of happening, might be enough to discourage them.
"Maybe some combination of good surveillance + high policing and better economic/welfare policies such as zoning reform, better transit, an LVT, and a minimal UBI?"
According to this law firm's website, it's not a blanket six months in jail, it's *up to* six month. And there are ways to avoid that, if you (or your lawyers) can wangle your way onto a 'diversion program':
https://www.egattorneys.com/shoplifting-penal-code-459-5
"What Are the Penalties for PC 459.5 Shoplifting?
Shoplifting in California is normally a misdemeanor offense that carries a maximum potential penalty of:
- up to six months in the county jail, and
- a fine of up to $1,000.
If someone is accused of stealing or attempting to steal items valued at more than $950, then that individual can be charged with Penal Code 487 PC grand theft.
Grand theft can be charged as a felony that carries up to three years in state prison.
There are situations where a defendant can face felony charges punishable by up to 3 years in jail and a $10,000 fine.
Felony penalties apply if defendant has a prior conviction for any of the following crimes:
- a sex crime that requires registration as a sex offender,
- any sex crime on a minor under 14 years old,
- any sex crime committed by using force, violence, or threats,
- gross vehicular manslaughter under Penal Code 191.5 PC,
- murder, attempted murder, or solicitation under Penal Code 187 PC,
- any serious or violent felony punishable by life in prison or death
Civil demand letter
Business owners that shoplifters victimize will also often make civil demands under California Penal Code 490.5 PC.
A civil demand requires the shoplifter to pay restitution to repay the business owner for the items stolen or damaged by the alleged shoplifter.
These letters are sent by law firms representing the business owners and can demand up to $500 to recover costs incurred by the alleged shoplifting.
Proposition 47
Before Proposition 47 was passed in 2014, you could face Penal Code 459 burglary charges with felony penalties, but now you must be charged with misdemeanor PC 459.5 shoplifting.
Anyone convicted of burglary prior to the new [law] who actually committed shoplifting, are eligible to apply for resentencing.
What Are Some Defenses to Shoplifting?
The crime of shoplifting requires a specific criminal intent to steal the items from a store prior to entry.
Thus, perhaps we can make an argument you developed the intent to steal after you entered the business.
While this defense still can result in a conviction for petty theft, it may help avoid a conviction of shoplifting in certain cases.
If an individual forgot to pay for an item or was planning to pay for an item they were carrying in a bag or pocket while inside the store, then a mistake defense can be raised.
Prosecutors will look to every fact and circumstance in a shoplifting case to prove an individual's criminal intent as it is often the key element that needs to be proven in a shoplifting case.
While not technically defenses, there are other ways that you may be able to resolve your shoplifting case without ending up with a criminal conviction. These methods include:
Diversion program: if accepted into a diversion program, you will have to agree to abide by a number of conditions set by the court, such as community service or restitution. If you complete these conditions successfully, your case will be dismissed, and you will not end up with a criminal record.
Civil compromise: this is an agreement between a shoplifter and the business where the items were alleged to have been stolen. In a civil compromise, the shoplifter agrees to repay the costs incurred because of the theft or attempted theft, and the business agrees not to prosecute the shoplifter.
Further, through prefiling intervention, we might be able to negotiate with the prosecutor to avoid filing criminal charges before court.
If you have questions about a criminal case, then it is important that you speak to an experienced criminal defense attorney."
Increasing jail sentences for petty crimes is prosocial even if it doesn't a priori disincentivize the crimes, because it reduces both time available for recidivism and the birth rate of petty criminals
The current law doesn't mandate six months in prison though. That's a huge misrepresentation of how our justice system actually works in practice. The maximum allowable sentence is 6 months under Prop 47. Nobody actually serves 6 months. I'm not an expert but probably judges give out an average sentence of 2-3 months after a trial. But 95+% of cases end in a plea bargain, and a plea bargain is less, maybe 2-3 weeks of jail time. And that's before we even start talking about progressive DAs giving offenders 1 week or less. So the comparison should be more like 2 weeks in jail vs 12 weeks in prison, which is much more significant.
I'd be interested to learn more if any commentors can post more info about the average sentence, maximum observed sentence, plea bargain process, etc. for shoplifting . I'd be impressed if someone could find a case of anyone serving more than 3 months for shoplifting in the whole state, or 1 month for shoplifting in SF specifically. Also the plea bargain negotiation seems interesting. The criminal has no leverage because they're poor and they only have a public defender. But the DA has no leverage because they don't want to spend an exorbitant amount paying a judge, prosecutor, court secretary, etc. for a trial about shoplifting less than $950, and then some progressive jury member who doesn't want to prosecute non-violent crime causes a hung jury.
+1 on this take. I support Trump but I appreciate Scott’s good faith attempt to articulate positions for both sides. His fair-mindedness, which spills over into his commenters, is the reason I hang out in this corner of the Internet.
Trump: "let's decapitate that reporter and round up the enemies within", "Hitler did some good things!","I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had"
You: 'Trump is a Nazi dictator' histrionics
Can any Republican argue in good faith?
Many of them can, especially around here. But reasonableness is anticorrelated with popularity these days, so I don't blame you if you haven't noticed.
When did Trump say "let's decapitate that reporter"? I'm pretty sure if that were a thing, Google could've found it when I searched for it. I remember he "urged the military to handle 'radical left lunatics' on Election Day", but for Trump that kind of rhetoric just seems like an average Tuesday, and his actual conduct as president suggests the kinds of things he'll do in a second term, which is to say: he'll do a wide variety of bad things, divide the country even more, weaken democracy even more, maybe cause some economic problems that benefit at least some of the wealthiest, suck up to dictators and seem overly approving of them...
but probably not decapitate any reporters, commit any genocides, or become a genuine dictator even if he wants to. I think 'Trump is a Nazi dictator' histrionics are counterproductive.
I'm not voting for Trump/Vance, but I would probably vote Vance/Trump. (Assuming it wouldn't be some power-behind-the-throne deal)
Yeah regardless of your stance, you can bet that ACX take will be top notch
Good piece! I particularly like the point about how nearly all the bad things that Harris advocates like price controls are also things Trump advocates and the comparison to Chavez. I think it's worth emphasizing the J6 stuff: like, he attempted to pull off a coup. The day of January 6 where the mob stormed the capitol is a much less big deal than the months long conspiracy to get fake electors to unilaterally declare him president in violation of the law.
Remind me again, Bulldog, who were the people fawning over Chavez before it all went to hell in a handbasket? 😀
Venezuelans, mainly.
Checks out.
Does it? Were the people fawning over Stalin Russians?
I...imagine at least some of them were?
I have no idea if he was, but I am not particularly sure why pointing out that someone was wrong on a single issue 15 years ago indicates something wrong with their judgement now. It would be different if you could point to a consistent record of errors or point out a continuing systematic error that has lasted well over a decade but in their absence it provides little illumination.
My once liking Chavez, who ended up becoming a dictator, contributes to me now shunning politicians with strong authoritarian tendencies, which is why I supported neither Trump nor Sanders eight years ago.
I think it were socialists.
I'm unsure what this is supposed to illustrate.
Has anyone done a deep dive on the fake electors scheme? And have there been other instances of similar behavior in American history?
This is the second reference I've seen to it and Google results are trash. To that end, any good search engine recommendations out there?
This is the best video going over it that I've found: https://youtu.be/FzMTeopD6f4?si=PIcN_u4y-ev0duxW
They weren't "fake" electors, alternate elector slates are part of the process of legal challenges to elections. The electoral college results have a submission deadline in mid December, and if they aren't submitted they can't be used in any circumstance. So if Trump won an election lawsuit after Dec 14 2020, but didn't have alternate electors submitted, there would be no remedy and Trump would still lose even though he proved in court there was election fraud. Alternate electors were used in the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy election, in Hawaii, because there was a recount underway at the time of the deadline. You can find op-eds arguing that Al Gore should have used an alternate elector slate in Florida if he wanted to drag out his election challenge, or the Democrats should have used them in Pennsylvania in 2020 if things dragged on too long there. Alternate electors are not illegal or even necessarily shady.
The Electoral Count Act of 1887 lays out how alternate elector slates are handled. The process is to have the Senate and House independently determine which slate is legitimate; if they can't agree, the slate verified by the governor of the state in question wins. If you want to know where Trump went wrong, search for the Eastman memo. The VP does not have the authority to unilaterally choose elector slates.
No, they were fake electors, that's why they are being charged. Loraine Pellegrino has already plead guilty, and others are in the process of being prosecuted.
Alternate slates of electors have to be empowered by the legitimate legislature.
I don't think this is true, or otherwise the 1960 electors would also have been illegal. The ECA is rather vague and only requires that the electors be ratified by the state executive. Further, I don't think the alternate slates have to be certified to be legitimate or that wouldn't be the proposed tie breaking method. But I'm not sure and if you have any links to the relevant US code or such I would appreciate it.
The 1960 electors were all done in the open, with the state government ultimately agreeing they should be the slate. On Dec 19, the Dem slate cast their ballots one minute after the Rep slate, at the same place. That's different from getting eleven of your buddies to sign a document saying that they're "duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America from the State of Arizona" with no involvement from the state legislature whatsoever. Otherwise I could just make a slate of electors myself for every state and try to send it to Congress, and it would be all gucci, when that's obviously filing false documents (and illegal, and basically what Trump did*).
*: In most cases. PA and NM both included hedging in their language, so their electors aren't being charged.
The electors were the appointed electors in each state, for the Republicans, and they met in the capital to cast the alternate votes. This is from WaPo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-backers-electoral-college/2020/12/14/f0fcc59c-3e52-11eb-9453-fc36ba051781_story.html
Their votes didn't have any legal value because they were contingent on the various state elections being declared fraudulent, which obviously never happened. But the text of the ECA only stipulates that the electors must be officially selected by the states, which they were. The text of it here: https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/24/STATUTE-24-Pg373.pdf
The ECA was amended in 2022, because it was rather vague and didn't prevent these kinds of things from happening.
Yes, they were. What insane news sources are you reading? People are being prosecuted for exactly this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
They were indicted, which doesn't mean much. A couple people took plea deals before trial, but again this doesn't get into the legal theory of why what they did was unlawful. AFAICT, the alternate electors were within the legal process established by Article II and the ECA.
Now, it's entirely possible they violated state law in their individual jurisdictions. I don't know the penal code for every single state where this happened, but all of the indictments seem to be some form of a filing false documents charge.
> Has anyone done a deep dive on the fake electors scheme? And have there been other instances of similar behavior in American history?
It's called "submitting an alternate slate of electors," and it's been a common practice throughout American history. Practically any time there's been a state where the race was close enough to be contested, both parties, as a standard practice, will submit their electors and then wait for the recounts to resolve which slate becomes "official."
Democrats calling this completely standard practice, which they have engaged in plenty of times over the years, a "scheme" to submit "fake electors" in this particular instance, is nothing more than a game of Calvinball.
Was this before or after the recounts happened?
Purely as a matter of empirics, in how many previous elections has a state sent more than one slate of electoral votes to the senate? My understanding is that it happened once, in the 1880s, and it almost caused a constitutional crisis that led to the ECA. And then it happened again, once, in the 1960s in the Nixon/Kennedy case. And that's it. If it happened more than that, I'd love to hear about it, because I have done a lot of research on this and may have missed something.
The first time was 1876. Also apparently someone in Oregon sent in an alternate slate in 1888, but it was regarded as a joke (possibly about the ECA that was passed the year before?) and ignored. 1960 in Hawaii was the second (real) time, and that's it afaik.
Problem is that the way in which they went about alternative electors would have ended up with them losing 0-9 in the supreme court in the opinion of the people who orchestrated the whole alternative electors plot. This should give you a clear indication that what they were doing was not legal.
I'd take a look at the Eastman memos as a primary source. It's really short (https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf).
A quick summary is:
- Manufacture claims of fraud
- Use those claims as a justification to throw out electoral votes from blue swing states
- Claim that with the remaining electoral votes, Trump won
It's a really dangerous idea, one that is about as close to 'only counting the votes with my name on it and discarding the rest'. I would focus less on the riots, they are a bit of a distraction, and instead focus on the legal play that almost would have worked if Pence was a weaker man.
Thank you. This is what I was looking for. Definitely a shady play. I agree with you, the riot was mostly just noise the media could cry about for 4 years.
To play devil's advocate: Does the lack of voter id laws in many blue and swing states concern you?
A question that cuts to the point: is it possible to legally demonstrate fraud under circumstances where ID is not checked?
I haven't felt the need to consider whether voter ID laws are good or bad because I don't think they are material to how I feel about J6. The Trump team filed 60 (!) cases alleging fraud in a variety of ways. By the time of J6, all but 4 had been dismissed, including from R appointed judges. So a lot of people with a lot of motivation looked into this and couldn't find anything.
(And even if you ignore the cases, Trump's DOJ, Republican state officials, and Republican election officials ALSO couldn't find anything, even when directly asked by Trump. Here's an example transcript of a call where Trump is trying to get a Georgia official to admit there was fraud, and the official goes, paraphrasing, "I'm sorry man, I really wish there was, but there isn't": https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/03/politics/trump-brad-raffensperger-phone-call-transcript/index.html)
I had an article about it https://benthams.substack.com/p/trump-attempted-a-coup
Now look up the term "faithless elector" in conjunction with 2016.
Yes. Some obvious differences there:
- More faithless electors defected against Clinton than against Trump
- The 2020 schemes were completely driven by Trump; Clinton did not create or promote the 2016 faithless elector campaign
- The 2016 pro-Clinton faithless elector campaign was conducted in public, whereas Trump/Eastman's secret plan was designed to blindside everyone who wasn't in on it.
- Electors' freedom is clearly implied by the constitution, otherwise there's no reason for electors to exist in the first place. Even if state law creates a penalty for faithless voting, once a faithless vote is cast, people might raise their eyebrows, but the vote is valid and will be counted. Thus, no conspiracy was necessary. But Trump/Eastman's plan involved misleading their so-called "fake electors", i.e. if the electors knew what Trump/Eastman were planning to do, they likely never would have agreed to act as a second slate of electors in the first place. The plan also required Pence to disregard federal law without seeking a court ruling on their ad-hoc self-serving theory that the law was unconstitutional.
- In 2016 Clinton won the popular vote, which motivated the campaign
- In 2020 Trump knew that he lost both the popular vote and electoral college, after convincing his fans beforehand that the election would be rigged and encouraging them to prepare to intervene ("Proud Boys? Stand up and stand by!")
- The 2016 campaign was simple; Trump's scheme was elaborate, with many moving parts
- After losing, Trump attempted to mislead the public and convince many officials to act immorally and/or illegally in order to produce an outcome that was arguably, itself, constitutional in a narrow technical sense.
I just learned that Nick Fuentes prefers Game of Thrones to Lord of the Rings, so he's dead to me. Or he would be, if I ever knew anything about him or cared 😁
I say, It's Her Turn Now! For Jill Stein - this is her third bite at the cherry, after 2012 and 2016. She was even accused of the dreaded Russian collusion, God bless her. So I think she should have her chance to sit in the White House and introduce her own Green Party bills if she wants to do so.
> I just learned that Nick Fuentes prefers Game of Thrones to Lord of the Rings, so he's dead to me.
Are there really adults who consume Nick Fuentes content?
https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/the-biggest-reason-to-vote-for-trump
Trump was President 4 years, and couldn't keep the bureaucracy from defeating him or even to stop the Justice Dept. from suppressing the Hunter Biden tax investigation or using lawfare against him. He's no dictator; he couldn't even dictate to a secretary if she had civil service protection.
The Democrats, on the other hand, has the media, the FBI, the CIA, the State Dept., the military, and the rest of the bureaucracy. And they don't even bother to pretend that it's Joe Biden or Kamala Harris who is running things. Don't you find that disturbing?
Did you read Part III? If so, what was your specific disagreement with my four counterarguments to this?
I agree that one small shoplifter can't damage the company. But if you get lots of them, because shoplifting is easy/fun/not a crime/not prosecuted, it adds up. Idiot teenager who steals a lipstick because she's on a sub-reddit that boasts about boosting stuff from stores isn't a problem. Gangs of teenagers doing it? That starts to become "we have to lock up our goods, or at least keep them behind the counter where the sales assistant hands them out, and this inconveniences our ordinary customers, who may become so aggravated, they stop coming to our store".
Then add in organised criminal shoplifting, and it does become a real problem.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/courtandcrime/arid-41470993.html
"A man who carried out 12 shoplifting offences in Cork City was jailed for seven months as the sentencing judge said shopkeepers were challenged by such thefts as they strive to pay their staff, rates and other business expenses.
...Previous to the 12 new theft offences, the defendant had 205 convictions, including 37 for theft, 31 for being threatening and abusive and 50 for being drunk and a danger."
People are naturally sympathetic to stories of "person arrested for small theft, wanted to feed their children" and I'm sympathetic to that myself, *when* it's genuine. But again, professional criminals use children as decoys when going in to steal, and use pleas of "I was only trying to feed my kids" when the fact is that they routinely engage in theft:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/courtandcrime/arid-41323417.html
"A mother of three is starting a 10-month jail term as a result of the theft of €24 worth of groceries from an Aldi supermarket.
What made the shoplifting offence by Mary Cash more serious was the fact that she had 36 previous convictions for theft, the court was told.
A sentence of three months was imposed on her for this latest offence committed on September 25, 2023, in Aldi at The Elysian building in Cork.
Compounding matters, the 38-year-old woman had a 10-month suspended jail sentence hanging over her. That sentence had been imposed for previous thefts but suspended on the condition that she would not commit any more offences for the following year.
The September 25 offence triggered an application by the prosecution to revoke that suspension."
I do see why courts and police don't bother with 'small' crimes as a waste of time and effort, but on the other hand, a lot of small crimes add up, and someone who gets away with small crimes may be likely to keep committing them, or to move on to more serious offences.
Some are even brazen about it:
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/district-court/woman-shoplifted-items-from-penneys-moments-before-court-shoplifting-case-1.4707886
"A woman allegedly shoplifted a number of items from Penneys on her way to court to appear on other shoplifting charges, a court has heard.
Lisa Mongan appeared at Letterkenny District Court in Co Donegal charged with stealing property valued at between €400 and €600 of cosmetics and clothing from Penneys at Letterkenny Shopping Centre.
The court was told that gardaí have CCTV footage which shows Ms Mongan (33) lifting items and placing them into her bag before walking out without paying. None of the items were recovered.
The incident happened at around 10am on Wednesday morning, moments before she was due in court on similar charges."
Declaration of bias: worked in retail many, many moons ago; was targeted by organised shoplifters, they distracted me and made off with lottery ticket cash, I got hauled over the coals by my manager for it, so I am on the side of "yes arrest the so-and-sos" 😀
Mary Cash in Cash and Carry
Had no cash but went to carry
Caught again and in a fix
Prior priors three tens six
"All I took was food and drink!"
Now she's right back in the clink
Yes, I did read Part III. I've just written up some disagreements. It's embarassingly long, but that's because I respect you and wanted to give as good a reply as I could in half an hour.
Argument 1. The Democrats are slowly and quietly eroding democracy, but Trump is attacking it outright.
Counterargument 1. First, think about what Trump’s done to democracy. Nothing, except cast doubt on the integrity of the 2020 election. There, the real question is whether there was really zero cheating as almost all the media says, or at least a trivial amount of cheating, whcih is what some intellectuals say. It is begging the question to say that complaining about a stolen election is anti-democratic.
What about January 6? That was a riot, never truly investigated, probably instigated by the Left, possibly even with FBI help. Who benefited from it? Who *could* have benefited from it? The riot cut off the planned debate on whether the election was stolen, and gave the Democrats a cudgel to use for 4 years. See https://www.unz.com/article/remembering-the-reichstag-fire/ .
What Trump *has* done is talk very wildly about things like throwing Hillary Clinton in jail. But we all know that he is constantly hyperbolic. His talk is poetry, not prose, in the sense that it conveys meaning well, but not the literal meaning. He never did put Hillary in jail, and she undoubtedly committed an illegality (was it criminal or civil? I think it was criminal for Genl. Schwarzkopf) with her use of confidential info.
What about the Democrats? The reason their illegalities seem mild is because the media won’t cover them as anti-democratic. The unilateral forgiveness of student loans was illegal and an offense against democracy, even though it doesn’t sound dangerous. What about the hundreds of Jan 6 felonies misusing a false-records statute, which the Supreme Court threw out recently? What about the prosecutions of numerous Trump officials, and of Trump himself? Don’t say: “Republicans deserve it; Democrats don’t.”
The Democrats have seriously proposed packing the Supreme Court, and getting rid of the electoral college. They have overthrown a President— the Biden disappearance— and chosen a presidential candidate who had no popular support even in the Democratic Party.
So, the Democrats walk softly but carry a big stick. Trump does the opposite.
Argument 2. The Democrats have two serious obstacles to destroying democracy: the Supreme Court, and their lack of internal unity. Both of those favor the Republicans.
Counterargument 2. The Supreme Court would also stop Trump from becoming a dictator. We have no evidence to the contrary. The 6 more Republican justices, unlike the 3 Democratic justices, do not vote in lockstep. Also, it is not true that the Democrats have less unity. How many Democratic officeholders have condemned Joe Biden or Kamala Harris? Trump has lots of his former officials and lots of Republican leaders who hate him, and are willing to say so in public. Half the party, at least, has distaste for him— I, myself, am an example— and he is actually to the left of the Republican Party, a feature concealed by how willing he is to talk big about how bad the establishment is.
Argument 3. It’s bad if you want to “be pro-freedom, pro-liberalism, and pro-democracy, but didn’t really take a stand against somebody trying to attack enemy politicians and rig an election.”
Counterargument 3. I think maybe you were getting tired of writing at that point, as I am now myself! Otherwise, you’d think about how viciously the Democrats attack Trump. Has Trump even called Harris a Communist? He has obvious contempt for her, but that’s his opinion and why should he hide it? And “rig an election”? How is Trump doing that? The Democrats, on the other hand, … well, suppressing the NY Post’s Hunter story, Pfizer delaying vaccine approval just so Trump wouldn’t get credit before the electoin, changes in voting rules (in PA saying absentee ballots wouldn’t be checked for signature mismatch), the media propagandizing, and the internet platforms throttling conservatives. . .
Argument 4. Whatever bad things the Democrats do or intend to do, Trump would also do if he could get away with it.
Counterargument 4. Maybe he’d like to— he says wild things, but historically he has been all talk and no action. Suppose he *would* like to. Unlike the Democrats, Trump can’t get away with anything. The Democrats have 90% of the media power on their side— of the cable news, of broadcast news, of internet platforms, of newspapers, of magazines, of webzines. . . The Democrats have the Bureaucracy, including the FBI, the Justice Dept., and the armed forces. The Democrats have most lawyers and lobbyists and nonprofits groups, and the most money.
Have you read the article at all?
Trump's repeated nickname for her is Comrade Kamala, and he has called her a Marxist and a communist several times, as well as also calling her a fascist.
Thanks. I googled and I see he's called her communist a lot. That's funny about also calling her a fascist. It has some truth in it-- the cooperation of business and government-- but she's not much of a populist nationalist ("garbage" and all that).
Any link to Unz is automatic trash. The guys a holocaust denying nut .
Unz promotes theories that really are conspiracy theories, yes, and deranged people follow him and ruin the comments. But occasionally there is something good on his site. He hosted Steve Sailer, who is first-rate.
That of course is not who you've linked to...
Eric, I think you're a smart guy (I went to school with your daughter in fact), but you're totally off-base here. I'm just going to focus on the election fraud comments, but the rest of what you say is in the similar naive-yet-well-put vein.
The claims of fraud in 2020 shown to be spurious if you apply even a modicum of scrutiny. Even ignoring the specific accusations of wrongdoing, none of the final results in the "contested states" are suspicious. As a matter of fact, Trump over-performed in the very places where the fraud was alleged! He did better than Hillary in the dense inner-cities of Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and other major cities across the country. Where Trump did poorly was the suburbs, someplace it is unfathomable that a clandestine widespread voter-fraud operation between dozens of municipalities could be carried out. Of course, you could argue that he would have done better in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, etc. had there been no fraud, but that is certainly a bit of a stretch.
It seems deeply naive to me for you to still think the fraud case in 2020 was not properly litigated or that there exist true lingering doubts. You are an economist! Look at the data!
I feel like the motte here is "election security isn't very good in a lot of places, there's some sketchy stuff that happened in a few places, Pennsylvania probably changed their election rules in a way they weren't allowed to" and the bailey is "Venezuelan voting machines cooked the votes, massive numbers of illegal immigrants voted and changed the election outcome, there was massive fraud all over the place." When the bailey got its day in court, it always lost; the motte is true but doesn't seem like it even remotely adds up to a stolen election--instead, it looks like the kind of stuff that happens every single election.
Part III fails to take into account who each side's weapons are aimed at. The Republican weapons of mob violence and threats are aimed squarely at elites, but not at me. I'm nobody. There will never be a Republican mob at my house. The Democrats' weapons of institutional oppression and censorship are aimed at me. They want to control what I can say and what I can read on the internet. You, having been directly in their crosshairs should know that.
>The Republican weapons of mob violence and threats are aimed squarely at elites, but not at me.
No, they're aimed at whoever Trump blasts on Truth Social for the day, and there were multiple defamation lawsuits filed on behalf of private citizens like Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss and private corporations like Dominion and Smartmatic because they were the target of Trump, Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, and his other election denying allies like Giuliani and Powell. There were Republican state offices and Republican government workers that received death threats and bomb threats because Trump convinced his supporters that they were involved in stealing the election. Anybody who crosses Trump gets their business, workplace, family members, and personal life attacked relentlessly. Trump is currently threatening to revoke broadcasting licenses from news stations he doesn't like. He's completely uncalibrated and does unfathomable damage to random people around him.
How would we get an honest count of how many attempts at censoring or silencing dissenters happened under the Trump administration vs the Biden administration?
Your main example of how the Democrats control everything is their suppression of the legal investigation into Hunter Biden's taxes. According to Wikipedia he "pled guilty to all of the tax charges" last month. Interesting that the vast conspiracy was so ineffectual.
1. For details of what happened, see my three articles starting from https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/hunter-was-too-clever-by-half-part?utm_source=publication-search.
In short: the Justice Dept. slow-walked the investigation, purposely sabotaged it, and then were going to have him plead guilty to a minor charge while dismissing all the majors ones (such as not filing tax returns for some years!) and trying to stop any investigation of illegal income from foreign lobbying. The judge noticed the sly scheme and blocked it. It went public, so Justice had to pretend it was being more serious, so they brought some other charges-- again, as weak as they could-- and had Hunter plead guilty. Meanwhile, the IRS agents who were whistleblowers are being demoted and prosecuted.
What about when they slow-walked the prosecution of Trump's criminal conspiracy to overthrow the government? Maybe the DOJ is actually just slow.
They didnt'? They have been trying to rush it in a way that almost no criminal trials are conducted to try to get a PR win for the Biden admin in front of the election.
????
They took like three fucking years to charge him lmao.
We’ll see. His sentencing is notably in December, after the election. As Eric said, he could have been charged for more if the DOJ didn’t slowdown the case. The judge might not give him anytime in prison, and even if he does, Joe could pardon him in the hour. I would bet money that Hunter doesn’t serve more than a week in prison.
I think Biden pardoning was likely even if Biden stayed in and won the election. It's his son in jail, and if pardoning Hunter hurts his second term, so what? It's his son.
Yeah, if Biden is mentally aware enough to exercise power, I assume he signs a pardon for his son on Nov 6.
Weren't there gun charges as well?
The gun charges are in a weird place, because a protracted legal battle would probably find the specific laws unconstitutional under recent SCOTUS rulings. But that's not certain, and it'd be a messy fight with Rs having to be the ones pushing in favor of gun control during the while. Maybe he pleads though, and it's moot.
Trumpworld has spent the past four years largely purging itself of exactly the sort of people who stifled Trump in his first term. For a pretty thorough exploration of this: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5Vru5lYLRStdEMFJjOd0Hn?si=e14022970686499f
Thanks, but I dislike videos-- I can read faster than I can listen. I know Trump is trying, but I don't think he has it in him. He's just not a good manager; what he's good at is dealmaking-- thus his success in foreign policy and failure in domestic.
His successful foreign policies such as being Putin's whipping boy?
Trump was out there trying to stop Europe from becoming depending on Russian gas, but you wouldn't know because you've never cared.
True! Ya got me! I've never cared about his other policies. He sucked up to Russia when it mattered the most, and that invalidates any resistance to Russia he's displayed before that.
The "matters most" was Ukraine, and Trump was going all he could to get western Europe to spend more money on weapons and to not build NordStream 2.
This is actual real world stuff. Europe's two biggest issues supporting Ukraine have been "but we don't have enough military materiel to spare" and "but we need Russian gas."
It's not secret. Major newspapers wrote about it for weeks. It was a long process. There were news cameras there.
But it's not "Trump is Putin's bitch, ha ha piss tape har har har" so yeah it didn't get your attention.