After the 2020 election, a tweet that caught my eye said something like, "I don't know for sure that the election was stolen, but I know they couldn't have made it look any dirtier if they'd tried." This thread makes the same point at greater length, and closely approximates my own views. We're in a new place.
This is profoundly disorienting. Many [election skeptics] don't know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it's probably true.
... They always claimed the media had liberal bias, fine, whatever. They still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered. Now they don't. It's a different thing to watch them invent stories whole cloth in order to destroy regular lives and spark mass violence.
... The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, "no fair!" That's how they felt about Romney's "binders of women" in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.
My main, perhaps my only objection is his mind-reading of the judges reaching their conclusions because of fear of harm. He doesn't know that, and I always reject those lines of reasoning. However, what he puts forward is close to my own thinking as well.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that Antifa can get turned on and off like a switch, and they plainly have plenty of money. We've seen this movie before. They won't be able to monopolize street enforcement forever--and then things start to go to hell much more quickly. IIRC, the type of people who like being street enforcers don't always have great loyalty--German Communists enforcers joined the Nazis. Granted, that wasn't the greatest ideological leap, but they'd been bitter enemies.
ReplyDeleteIt was abundantly clear that the fix was in, as this post says, on election night when they quit counting in the swing states. What wasn't clear until later was how complete the fix was. The FBI was tasked by Barr with looking at election fraud claims; they arrested no one and looked at nothing, not even in Fulton County where there was literal security footage of people hauling out cases of ballots after the poll watchers and press were sent home. (The current story about that, in the 29-page Secretary of State document, is that there was in fact some 'double counting' of ballots during this episode, which is said to be the product of confusion among the on-site managers.)
ReplyDeleteThe courts wouldn't hear the cases. Not one court held an evidentiary hearing in spite of thousands of affidavits. Legislatures tried to get called into special sessions, and the governors refused -- even Republican governors. Every court, all the way to SCOTUS, found standing reasons or procedural reasons to dismiss the cases; even when states sued, they were granted no hearing; even when the President himself sued.
It is a very basic betrayal, and it was root-and-branch.
In a divided nation, a 50/50 nation, many elections might as well be a coin flip. Though some jurisdictions use a two-headed coin. New York for instance always turns up the same way.
ReplyDeleteThen there were "bell wether" counties. It's not so much that for a series of elections they always matched the national outcome. It's mostly statistical accident that, of thousands of counties, some dozen or score match. But it's clear that they proved themselves to be flipping a fair coin. Sometimes heads, sometimes tails. It's (statistically, again) very odd and striking that all these counties went "wrong", at the same time. Then the media went deathly silent about bellwethers...