#like come on it's not that hard to find truthful things to attack biden for

[yoursapphicsgirlfriend]

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the two Republican congressional leaders who are into power and party, made a big political mistake last spring in opposing a bipartisan commission to investigate the mob assault on the Capitol.

McConnell pressured enough Republican Senators so the measure couldn’t get the 60 votes necessary for passage. McCarthy ludicrously claimed he was opposed to any inquiry that didn’t investigate left wing activists who had nothing to do with the violent Jan. 6 attack intended to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s presidential victory.

Neither man anticipated that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) would outsmart them, maneuvering a select House committee with two prominent Republicans who are more interested in finding out all that happened that terrible day.

McCarthy appears now to be feverishly trying to cover up any of former President Trump’s complicity in the Jan. 6 riot — and possibly that of some House Republicans.

The old saying that “the cover-up is worse than the crime” is a trite cliche — still, cover-ups often backfire and make things worse: Watergate and Richard Nixon; the tobacco industry lying for decades about smoking and cancer; the Catholic church covering up pedophile priests. All were caught, with consequences.

That’s the company Kevin McCarthy may join as he tries to fend off anything that would hurt his prospects of becoming Speaker with a Republican House.

McCarthy and allies give the impression they have something to hide as they pull out all stops to block inquiries headed by Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming.

The context and totality of Republican actions this year tell the story.

Despite efforts by House right wingers to paint a benign picture of Jan. 6, with just a few troublemakers, it was a lethal assault on the Capitol and the police force in which five people died and hundreds were injured. The intent was to block the pro forma certification of Biden’s presidential victory. The mob was egged on by Trump and his cronies.

After a back-and-forth in Congress, there emerged a bipartisan recommendation for five members of each party on a commission. To sabotage the inquiry, McCarthy and McConnell could have tapped bomb throwers to sow discord and create chaos.

Instead, they thought it safer to simply deep-six any investigation.

Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) explained why: They didn’t want it to get in the way of the party’s agenda and message in the 2022 elections. That was more important to them than looking into the most violent attack since the British burned the Capitol in 1814.

A few Senate Republicans — including Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) — warned this would backfire. The opponents “would be seen as not wanting to let the truth come out,” Romney said.

Pelosi essentially said “OK — the House will appoint its own bipartisan panel.” McCarthy made a mockery of this by tapping Trump sycophants Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) among his five appointees to the panel. The Speaker called his bluff, rejecting those two, but keeping the three others — causing McCarthy to withdraw all his appointees and refuse any cooperation.

Pelosi had already tapped one Republicans on her own — Cheney. The daughter of the former vice president, Cheney is a hard-line conservative and potential future Speaker. She was kicked out of her Republican leadership post and disowned by McCarthy for the sin of insufficient loyalty to Trump, regardless his transgressions.

Pelosi then tapped another: Rep. Adam Kinziger (R-Ill.), an Air Force veteran and lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard. Cheney is vice chair to the nine member committee. To be credible, any final report will have to be unanimous.

The House GOP leader — along with fringe members of the caucus like QAnon-supporting Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — are now doing everything to discredit the inquiry.

The committee recently sent a few dozen companies a special order to preserve phone records and social media contacts, including those of Republican members of Congress who have had frequent contact with Trump or the white nationalist groups that led the Jan. 6 attack.

McCarthy recently seemed to threaten retaliation against any companies that cooperate with the order, implying that if Republicans take control of the House again, they’ll go after those companies. Greene put it more succinctly: “They will be shut down, and that’s a promise.” McCarthy claimed that cooperation would violate laws but didn’t cite any. There is now a question whether McCarthy, with this apparent threat, will face legal or ethical charges himself.

The actions of Trump’s man, Jordan, illustrate why the committee wants to look at such records. When Fox News’s Bret Baier asked him if he’d spoken with Trump on Jan. 6, the usually combative Jordan looked like a deer in the headlights, talking all around the question before finally saying he did. In a subsequent interview, Jordan said they spoke multiple times, but claimed he couldn’t remember when.

Is the Ohio Republican trying to hide something? McCarthy also spoke to the president that day. It’s possible that, scared by the onslaught, they were asking Trump to call the dogs off. That may be something the Thompson-Cheney panel, which worked during the August recess, would like to find out.

It’s imperative to discover as much as possible about what happened on that infamous day — and before: Trump’s role and that of any House member. If there’s an arsonist in the fire department, that fact has to be ferreted out.

Al Hunt is the former executive editor of Bloomberg News. He previously served as reporter, bureau chief and Washington editor for the Wall Street Journal. For almost a quarter century he wrote a column on politics for The Wall Street Journal, then The International New York Times and Bloomberg View. He hosts Politics War Room with James Carville. Follow him on Twitter @AlHuntDC.

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[yukineko-kitty-chan]

Me: Hey can you stop mailing me your election crap and just take me off your mailing list completely? 

State’s Republican party: Oh yeah sure!! 

Me: Cool thanks 

Me a couple weeks later: *gets another anti-biden smear ad in the mail* 

Me: 

Me: MotherfU-

#personal post #politics #the only thing it's good for is highlighting how much they lie #because oh boy they lie a LOT on these ads #which isn't a surprise #but still annoying as all hell #like come on it's not that hard to find truthful things to attack biden for #there's at least a dozen to choose from #y'all are just lazy

[qqueenofhades]

Trump's SCOTUS pick scares the ever loving shit out of me. I'm trying not to have a full blown panic attack actually.

Sigh. I know.

I’m not going to say that picking someone literally, un-exaggeratedly out of The Handmaid’s Tale for SCOTUS, especially to replace someone like RBG, isn’t mother fucking terrifying. It is.  Especially since Mitch McConnell is trying to set her final confirmation vote for October 29, literally five days before the election. Yes indeed, that would be a third Supreme Court seat filled by an impeached president who lost the popular vote by three million votes, (possibly) confirmed by Republican enablers (some of whom are absolutely going to lose their seats in this election) who represent a sizeably smaller fraction of the US population than their Democratic counterparts, in a display of outright, staggering, truly breathtaking hypocrisy about the protocol of election-year vacancies on SCOTUS, which they themselves shouted about to no end with Merrick Garland in 2016. This is how tyranny by minority rule works, and... yeah. It’s bad. It’s awful. When is this going to end.

That said, however: we do not yet exist in this theoretical grimdark future where some dystopian 6-3 (or even 7-2) conservative SCOTUS strips us of our rights at every turn, with no recourse except for us to sit passively and take it, and there are a lot of things that we ourselves can do between now and then to make sure that it never happens. First off, House Democrats have proposed a bill to introduce 18-year term limits for SCOTUS justices, rather than it being an automatic lifetime appointment. This would also give every president the ability to appoint two justices per four-year term. Because SCOTUS has become such an instrument of partisan warfare, and because the obvious implications of having a partisan head of state pick the senior federal judges for a lifetime is part of what has fucked us up now, this would be a GREAT improvement. House Dems can’t make it into law right now, because Democrats do not hold a majority in both chambers of Congress and they do not hold the presidency. You know how this COULD be passed? If Joe Biden was elected with a blue House and Senate. That way, even if God forbid the GOP horror show snuck Coney Barrett onto the bench just before the election, this could be fixed.

Here’s another way to think about it. I myself have a HUGE problem with catastrophizing: a bad thing happens, and then it seems like an inevitable chain of nonstop bad things until everything gets irredeemably, unfixably even worse. This year, obviously, has not done much to help that, because yes, the bad things keep coming. But they’re still individual events and have not yet crystallized into some unbreakable, unavoidable future. History is made up of thousands of millions of choices, accidents, unforeseen developments, total random bullshit, and much more, as much or more as it is made up by the macro-scale actions of oligarchs. Obviously, globalization and capitalism have made us all more connected to each other, and thus changes to the system can ripple more broadly, but they are not the only people who make history. If there’s one thing I can tell you as a historian, it’s this: the future is just history that hasn’t been made yet, and it is subject to the exact same unpredictable bullshit that has constituted history throughout, well, history. Nothing is unavoidable and we have never existed in a world where we can’t do anything at all. Also, authoritarian regimes (especially those imposed without the consent of the people -- willing subjection to authoritarianism is one thing, but the other, yeah) have a relatively short shelf life, historically speaking. That won’t help all of us who could be hurt right now (though we can STILL fight back and speak up and help our neighbors), but it’s the truth. Authoritarian rule (especially when it’s not balanced by economic security, which sure as hell isn’t happening right now) can last for a while, sure. But it is always its own worst enemy, and it will always be ended. How that ends is a choice we can make.

This isn’t the “get out on the streets and Start The Glorious Revolution!!!” nonsense that the armchair internet leftists, none of whom are actually starting a glorious revolution or doing anything except bitching on Twitter about how Biden and Trump are alike, are fond of. This is an active choice to realize that there are always things you can do, that there are things you can do right now, and one of them, most obviously, is voting. This mess was all completely goddamn avoidable if people had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. But well, they didn’t, and we get one last shot to fix this by democratic process. Trump is already openly setting up to contest the election results/try to invalidate them/throw out ballots. This is all old-school fascism. This is what is happening. He is counting on another razor-thin margin of votes that he can then contest in his hand-picked SCOTUS; he wants another Bush v. Gore very, very badly. The only way to blow away any legitimacy for anything like this is to vote in such overwhelming numbers that there’s no question of Biden’s victory, no need to wait for mail-in ballots (another reason the GOP has been trying so hard to destroy the post office) or anything else. At heart, Trump is a coward. He’s also an egomaniac. If it comes to stepping aside peacefully or being dragged out of the White House by the FBI for everyone to laugh at for the rest of time, hmm, I doubt he’s going to go for that. (And if he does, well, I will also savor the sight of him in handcuffs for all eternity.) However, that doesn’t mean the GOP machine won’t TRY, because Trump is not just Trump, but is his entire miserable cabal of enablers. I have written my fingers raw about how badly people need to vote. This is literally your last chance to do it.

I’ve seen a lot of the-sky-is-falling, we’re-doomed, they-have-the-votes-so-don’t-even-bother handwringing in the last few days. To some degree, yes. We all feel doomed. We have all been asked to find strength to deal with massive and unending waves of terrifying bullshit past anyone’s normal capacity, and we’re tired. We want it to end. But it’s SO CLOSE to ending, if we can all just get out and vote for Joe Biden in massive numbers on November 3 (or if your state has early voting, sooner; BANK YOUR VOTE). That’s such an easy thing to do. Nothing is set in stone. We can still fix things and make it so, you know, we’re not living in a fascist state ruled by Gilead. (And besides, all this Chicken Little rhetoric is super easy for the Russian troll farms to exploit. Don’t listen to it. Shut it down. Reject it.)

They want you to think you’re powerless. You’re not.

They want you to think this will never end. It will. We decide how.

They want you to think this is a foregone conclusion and you should just go back home and let it happen. You don’t have to.

They want you to think your vote doesn’t matter. It does.

They want you to think your rights are gone. They’re not.

They want you to think this future is inevitable.

IT’S NOT.

Hang in there.

Lots of hugs.

#politics for ts #anonymous #ask

[dk-thrive]

Thank God for the poets who teach our blinkered eyes to see these gifts the world has given us, and what we owe it in return.

When the poet Amanda Gorman stepped to the lectern at President Biden’s inauguration, she faced a much-diminished crowd of masked people on the National Mall, but she was speaking directly to the heart of a bruised nation:

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: That even as we grieved, we grew, That even as we hurt, we hoped, That even as we tired, we tried.

Ms. Gorman’s poem — addressed to “Americans, and the World” — was timeless in that way of the most necessary poems, but it was more than just timeless. After a year of losses both literal and figurative, she offered a salve that soothed, however briefly, our broken hearts and our broken age.

Poets have always given voice to our losses at times of national calamity. Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is an elegy for Abraham Lincoln. Langston Hughes’s “Mississippi — 1955” came in direct response to the murder of Emmett Till. Denise Levertov wrote one poem after another after another to protest the war in Vietnam. In 2002, Billy Collins delivered a memorial poem for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks before a special joint meeting of Congress.

The poems inspired by Black Lives Matter are almost too numerous to count, and their ranks continue to grow, in spite of the personal cost of “chasing words / like arrows inside the knotted meat between my / shoulder blades,” as Tiana Clark writes in “Nashville.”

Many Americans, probably a vast majority of Americans, feel they can get along just fine without poetry. But tragedy — a breakup, a cancer diagnosis, a sudden death — can change their minds about that, if only because the struggle to find words for something so huge and so devastating can be overwhelming. “Again and again, this constant forsaking,” Natasha Trethewey calls it in her poem “Myth.” [...]

Then I remembered Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” a poem she taught us late in her last year, when her voice was already growing fainter, quavering until she swallowed again:

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

About suffering Auden was also not wrong, and through many seasons of grief in all the years since I was 18, I have remembered that poem.

Nevertheless, as the poets remind us, too, suffering is not our only birthright. Life is also our birthright. Life and love and beauty. “When despair for the world” is all we can feel, as Wendell Berry puts it in “The Peace of Wild Things,” the world itself — with its wood drakes and its blue herons “who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief” — may be our greatest solace.

The poets are forever telling us to look for this kind of peace, to stuff ourselves with sweetness, to fill ourselves up with loveliness. They remind us that “there are, on this planet alone, something like two million naturally occurring sweet things, / some with names so generous as to kick / the steel from my knees,” as Ross Gay notes in “Sorrow Is Not My Name.”

We are a species in love with beauty. In springtime you can drive down any rural road in this part of country — probably in any part of the country — and you will find a row of daffodils blooming next to the shabbiest homesteads and the rustiest trailers. Often they are blooming next to no structure at all, ghostly circles around long-vanished mailboxes, a bright line denoting a fence row where no fence now stands. The daffodils tell us that though we might be poor, we are never too poor for beauty, to find a way to name it while we are still alive to call the gorgeous world by its many generous names.

For isn’t our own impermanence the undisputed truth that lurks beneath all our fears and all our sorrows and even all our pleasures? “Life is short, though I keep this from my children,” writes Maggie Smith in “Good Bones.” “Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine / in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways.”

Carpe diem is the song the poets have ever sung, and it is our song, too. “I think this is / the prettiest world — so long as you don’t mind / a little dying,” Mary Oliver writes in “The Kingfisher.”

This April is the 25th anniversary of National Poetry Month, and it arrives in the midst of a hard year. Last April brought lockdowns and rising infections, but we didn’t know last April just how much harder the year was about to become. We know now. And despite the helpful treatments that have emerged, despite the rising vaccination rates, despite the new political stability and the desperately needed help for a struggling economy, it is hard to trust that the terrors are truly receding.

We know now how vulnerable we are. We understand now that new terrors — and old terrors wearing new guises — will always rise up and come for us.

Thank God for our poets, here in the mildness of April and in the winter storms alike, who help us find the words our own tongues feel too swollen to speak. Thank God for the poets who teach our blinkered eyes to see these gifts the world has given us, and what we owe it in return.

—Margaret Renkl, from “Thank God for the Poets” in New York Times, April 5, 2021 

#poem #poetry #Margaret Renkl #amanda gorman #spring #Ross Gay #Mary Oliver #Wendell Berry #Natasha Trethewey #Tiana Clark #William Auden #gratitude

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 18, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

The Trump administration is winding down as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris prepare to take office on Wednesday.

Trump will leave office with an approval rating of 34%, dismal by any measure. He is the first president since Gallup began polling never to break 50% approval. After the attack on the Capitol on January 6, the House of Representatives impeached him for a second time, and a majority of Americans think he should have been removed from office.

In the last days of his term, the area of Washington, D.C., around our government buildings has been locked down to guard against further terrorism. Our tradition of a peaceful transition of power, established in 1800, has been broken. There is a 7-foot black fence around the Capitol and 15,000 National Guard soldiers on duty in a bitterly cold Washington January. There are checkpoints and road closures near the center of the city, and 10,000 more troops are authorized if necessary. Another 4,000 are on duty in their states, protecting key buildings and infrastructure sites.

In the past two days, there have been more indications that members of the Trump administration were behind the January 6 coup attempt. Yesterday, Richard Lardner and Michelle R. Smith of the Associated Press broke the story that, far from being a grassroots rally, the event of January 6 that led to the storming of the Capitol was organized and staffed by members of Trump’s presidential campaign team. These staffers have since tried to distance themselves from it, deleting their social media accounts and refusing to answer questions from reporters.

A number of the arrested insurrectionists have claimed that they were storming the Capitol because the president told them to. According to lawyers Teri Kanefield and Mark Reichel, writing in the Washington Post, this is known as the “public authority” defense, meaning that if someone in authority tells you it’s okay to break a law, that advice is a defense when you are arrested. It doesn’t mean you won’t be punished, but it is a defense. It also means that the person offering you that instruction is more likely to be prosecuted.

The second impeachment, popular outcry, and continuing stories about the likely involvement of administration figures in the coup attempt seem to have trimmed Trump’s wings in his last days in office. He is issuing orders that Biden vows to overturn, and contemplating pardons (stories say those around him are selling access to him to advocate for those pardons), but otherwise today was quiet.

He has tried to install a loyalist as the top lawyer at the National Security Agency, either to burrow him in or to get the green light for dumping NSA documents before he leaves office; Biden’s team will fight what is clearly an attempt to politicize the position. Tonight, Census Director Steven Dillingham resigned after whistleblowers alleged that he and other political appointees were putting pressure on department staffers to issue a hasty and unresearched report on undocumented immigrants.

According to news reports, Trump is planning to leave Washington on the morning of January 20 and should be at his Florida club Mar-a-Lago by the time Biden and Harris are sworn in. The last president to miss a successor’s inauguration was Andrew Johnson, who in 1869 refused to attend Ulysses S. Grant’s swearing-in, and instead spent the morning signing last-minute bills to put in place before Grant took office.

There is a lot of chatter tonight about the release today of the 1776 Report guidelines on American history. This is the administration’s reply to the 1619 Project from the New York Times, which focused on America’s history of racism. As historian Torsten Kathke noted on Twitter, none of the people involved in compiling today’s 41-page document are actually historians. They are political scientists and Republican operatives who have produced a full-throated attack on progressives in American history as well as a whitewashed celebration of the U.S.A. Made up of astonishingly bad history, this document will not stand as anything other than an artifact of Trump’s hatred of today’s progressives and his desperate attempt to wrench American history into the mythology he and his supporters promote so fervently.

But aside from the bad history, the report is a fascinating window into the mindset of this administration and its supporters. In it, the United States of America has been pretty gosh darned wonderful since the beginning, and has remained curiously static. “[T]he American people have ever pursued freedom and justice,” it reads, and while “neither America nor any other nation has perfectly lived up to the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice, and government by consent,” “no nation… has strived harder, or done more, to achieve them.”

America seems to have sprung up in 1776 in a form that was fine and finished. But, according to the document’s authors, trouble began in the 1890s, when “progressives” demanded that the Constitution “should constantly evolve to secure evolving rights.” It was at that moment the teaching of history took a dark turn.

The view that America was born whole, has stayed the same, and is simply a prize worth possessing reminds me of so much of the world of Trump and the people around him, characterized by acquisition: buildings, planes, yachts, clothing, bank accounts. Trump and his people seem to see the world as a zero-sum game in which the winners have the most stuff, and America is just one more thing to possess.

But there is a big difference in this world between having and doing.

America has never fully embodied equality, liberty, and justice. What it has always had was a dream of justice and equality before the law. The 1776 Report authors are right to note that was an astonishing dream in 1776, and it made this country a beacon of radical hope. It was enough to inspire people from all walks of life to try to make that dream a reality. They didn’t have an ideal America; they worked to make one.

The hard work of doing is rarely the stuff of heroic biographies of leading men. It is the story of ordinary Americans who were finally pushed far enough that they put themselves on the line for this nation’s principles.

It is the story, for example, of abolitionist newspaperman Elijah P. Lovejoy, murdered by a pro-slavery mob in 1837, and the U.S. soldiers who twenty-four years later fought to protect the government against a pro-slavery insurrection designed to destroy it. It is the story of Lakota leader Red Cloud, who negotiated with hostile government leaders on behalf of his people, and of his contemporary Booker T. Washington, who tried to find a way for Black people to rise in the heart of the South in a time of widespread lynching. It is the story of Nebraska politician William Jennings Bryan, who gave voice to suffering farmers and workers in the 1890s, and of Frances Perkins, who carried his ideas forward as FDR’s Secretary of Labor and brought us Social Security. It is the story of the American G.I.s, from all races, ethnicities, genders, and walks of life who fought in WWII. It is the story of labor organizer Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the National Farmworkers Association, and Fannie Lou Hamer, who faced down men bent on murdering her and became an advocate for Black voting. It is the story of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who 60 years ago this week warned us against the “military-industrial complex.”

And it is, of course, the story of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose life we celebrate today. King challenged white politicians to take on poverty as well as racism to make the promise of America come true for all of us. “Some forty million of our brothers and sisters are poverty stricken, unable to gain the basic necessities of life,” he reminded white leaders in May 1967. “And so often we allow them to become invisible because our society’s so affluent that we don’t see the poor. Some of them are Mexican Americans. Some of them are Indians. Some are Puerto Ricans. Some are Appalachian whites. The vast majority are Negroes in proportion to their size in the population…. Now there is nothing new about poverty. It’s been with us for years and centuries. What is new at this point though, is that we now have the resources, we now have the skills, we now have the techniques to get rid of poverty. And the question is whether our nation has the will….” Just eleven months later, a white supremacist murdered Dr. King.

These people did not have a perfect nation, they worked to build one. They embraced America so fully they tried to bring its principles to life, sometimes at the cost of their own. Rather than simply trying to own America, the doers put skin in the game.

Today, the Trump administration issued the 1776 Report that presented the United States of America as a prize to be possessed. And yet, the country is demonstrably still in the process of being created: tonight, there are 15,000 soldiers in the cold in Washington, D.C., defending the seat of our government against insurgents.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#quotes #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #history #January 6 2021 #insurrection #corrupt GOP #criminal GOP #worst President in History

[empathdespoina]

Social effect of unhealthy minds hurting others...

This isn’t a post in regards to being an Empath. But it does affect Empaths, because this is happening close to their home...their families, community and towns bordering your own; besides state you live in.

I was reflecting and realized that Donald Trump (I know, I know you don’t want to hear about him, but hear me out, it has a ripple effect) grew up abused by his father and mother and child abuse is something that should seriously be address; due to the mental health issues that stem from this and it’s a cycle that gets put onto the next young innocent victim, or a victim not blood related. Seeing how Trump still refuses to acknowledge that he lost, due to his psychological mindset that he’s still trying to please his father...that’s a very unsettling mindset; especially that his father died so long ago...I honestly don’t know.

So here is a man that’s in charge of a nation, that’s mentally unstable and this is causing others who have been abused as a child and NEVER got psychological help...are ever so lovely continued the sick cycle. I say this because my mother was abused by her mother as a child - it was verbal, emotional and psychological; plus my mother’s older sister (my aunt) was abused and then her sister turned it onto my mom. This has caused my mom to follow in these foot steps. Yet my mother and aunt don’t see anything wrong with the way they treat me and sadly my brother has learned to treat me very similar; but in a worst way...due to him bringing his NYPD job home and blowing up on me for no reason, and I feel he’s not to far away to unleash his physical anger on me. I have suggested to my mother on several times to go to therapy and her response is always... I’m okay there’s nothing wrong with me. As of recently my mom wants very little to do with her sister, on the way her sister treats her. I am my mother’s and brother’s emotional punching bag of dumping their bad days on me...all because I do something small that a healthy minded person would be upset; yet for these two, flip off at me as if I did something so damn horrible as if killed a wild animal in the house and destroyed the house in the process.

Now seeing how my family is...my mom likes Trump and is very pissed that he lost; due to her being very negative towards me, anytime there’s a reference around our new leaders for the nation. And the negativity outburst is nothing more than childish, but her being an adult and the years of how she destroyed my mental health on causing me to have very high stress anxiety; that if I do something similar to what would have upset her in the past...I start freaking out, in an unsettling reaction. Reason why? Because spilling a drink on the floor isn’t a big deal for healthy minded people. Yet for my mother it was the straw that broke the camel’s back and completely lost it with me. My father tried his best to protect me when he was alive; yet reflecting on the past and understanding my mother’s past; he was most likely abused along the same line like me, due to his last famous words to my mother, as he died from cancer: “You did this to me and put me here!” Which I believe was him lashing out on the abuse she did to him and it was always a passive aggressive to then shouting and bringing up every damn past mistake and making you feel worthless and that you’re nothing more then an embarrassment to her. Since she’s always concern of how others perceive her, due to the fact she never was popular in high school and that mindset still hasn’t been let go...seeing how she was ecstatic when my brother was the popular kid back in the day, in school and she could hang out with the popular moms. -face palms herself-

Having a mentally sick man as our president who won’t admit to losing or that he’s fucked up because yeah he was abused as a child...since around that time, it was considered ACCEPTABLE. Now you’re getting all these other people who were abused as a child and mentally sick to be encourage to let all this out, let all the abuse out and to hurt others. To attack people out of nowhere to let racism fly. But for some people at home, to deal with those we know, are getting worst than they were before...all because they admire this man like a Korean Idol or a Kardashian. The most dangerous ones are who are less educated; then following under that is people (more now my mother’s age group compared to my age group...to an extent on my age group), who are getting addicted to FB - which has always used ads and fake news to convince people of what the democrats are doing and to believe everything the republicans are saying...when what they are saying, is very dangerous school of thought; for these people to become nothing more than sheep that can rage and hurt others without a care; since Trump has been doing that in the public eye and social media.

Trump doesn’t want to hear the truth and those who don’t agree with him and make it known on news channels...where he takes comfort in social media; which he can easily bend those to his thought process and believe in it. I shit you not my mother believes in this thought process; which I believe is from FB. She’s now on FB more often and her friend who is too (the one that’s got chemical brain and talks to her daily)...that the three red strips in Biden’s campaign design is related to China...because some asshole who wanted to stir things up and cause chaos; when Biden was mimicking Obama’s campaign design. I couldn’t tell my mother other wise due to her hard belief in this...and this was a woman, who years ago when my father died- she did massive research on the pesticides that cause my dad’s cancer, which lead to his death. And she would always look into things. Yet due to her being chair bound as her ankle heals...she’s been on social media more and more; which I am not addict to social media like I was to an extent 10yrs ago. She believes in the republicans on what the democrats are going to do, on making our American country into one of socialism and the socialism very that is being inferred is the one in which we have no rights. Then there was another time this reference was brought up- note by my mothers and believing that by destroying all the stores, would cause this country to quickly turn into a socialism nation. I told her we have three branches of government and it isn’t going to change, due to how the three branches of government works. She replies go ahead and believe that it will stay the same, once Biden is in office.

This is what I mean about a ripple effect of these dangerous school of thoughts and to be violent to others and keep the cycle of abuse going. My mother is a woman who could think for herself...yet these past four years under Trump it’s more of the social media fake news to scare people in buying guns...in order to “protect” themselves from an uprising of the minorities; who will come and attack our home and to protect ourselves... I am not making this up - this actually came out of my mother’s mouth when I question my mothers on why my brother had three guns and a SNIPER RIFFLE. And the other push for buying guns that Democrats would ban guns-  this causing my brother to buy so much damn ammo for his “guns” that he can be his own militia army...where these people are too stupid to realize the rights to have guns is within our 10 Amendments. It is as if no one remembers our Amendments and how our three branches of government works any more of history.

And if I have to show you dangerous school of thought to cause chaos look to the dr who lost his medical license due to things that endanger a patient, because he was putting his believes onto this woman...instead of the best care to help her. He went on social media on video saying the 5G towers were “causing the COVID” and he would go on and on about it...where he’s clearly not right in the head...but of course you have mental sick idiots who will believe someone that “appears” smarter than them. And what did they do...they went around in Europe and destroying those 5G towers.

Trump’s legacy should be of a different social experiment (which they refereed to the prohibition), on how a man could use social media to bend people to his unhealthy thought process and make others stupid to believe in everything he says. Look how some republicans are believing the election is a fraud still, due to Trump losing, and this is a man who’s always got his way and his energy aura has to be very intimating for no one to say “NO” to him. For an other average person to pull the same shit off as Trump; would be arrested in a heartbeat, yet they are afraid of this man. Which I believe, when it comes time for him to leave office and we know he won’t go peacefully; to get a trank-gun and shoot him with it; then put a straight jacket on him and haul him away to a really heavily secured mental ward. Trump has caused healthy minded people to do things, that were not seen under Obama and Bush’s time in office. I only pick them, due to the fact I was more aware of how the president worked and being able to vote. Trump is a mental disease in his own way and to see others catch this and treat those around them...like Trump treats others, as if they are beneath his feet. I don’t know how much more rage outbursts that I’m going to have to deal with, in regards to my mother as this year ends and Biden will soon be in office. Plus keep in mind, I am the only one of her two children home (due to can’t find a job) to help her out and drive her around and she treats me like this...also I wasn’t the one who left something in my mother’s path of walking for her to fall and hurt herself, it was my brother. Yet he’s not helping out as much more, due to him being happy that his back working Narcotics unit; since he was desked for awhile due to he, himself breaking his leg and ankle of the right side a year ago from mom hurting herself.

I am really concern seeing what this nation has become and seeing how my mother and brother are on board with the words coming out of Trump’s mouth; especially my mom’s friend. I guess I felt compelled to write out my fear on seeing this...awhile ago, I read two articles that psychoanalyzed Trump by some professional therapist, as they watched and observed him on tv and looked into his history, on the life he had growing up. I honestly don’t know how long it will take to make society more...I honestly can’t find the right word....less violent and more willing to hurt others in a sick twisted obsession...? Yet that still happens in this world...maybe I’m looking for is......less negative fuel to fuel the monsters that are wearing masks and are two face to people...pretending by day to be a respectable person of society and when not watched by those people...take the mask off and reveal the monster underneath willing to hurt others; as they see Trump has done, and what he’s encourage to happen in this country.

So if you have family members, friends or co-workers/bosses who have similar thought process like my family... try your best to endure it and make sure you have something you can discreetly touch to ground you... or go for more pee breaks and just say you’re body’s off...if you get questioned.

[bustedbernie]

During 28 years as a state and federal prosecutor, I prosecuted a lot of sexual assault cases. The vast majority came early in my career, when I was a young attorney at a prosecutor’s office outside Detroit.

A year ago, Tara Reade accused former Vice President Joe Biden of touching her shoulder and neck in a way that made her uncomfortable, when she worked for him as a staff assistant in 1993. Then last month, Reade told an interviewer that Biden stuck his hand under her skirt and forcibly penetrated her with his fingers. Biden denies the allegation.

When women make allegations of sexual assault, my default response is to believe them. But as the news media have investigated Reade’s allegations, I’ve become increasingly skeptical. Here are some of the reasons why:

►Delayed reporting … twice. Reade waited 27 years to publicly report her allegation that Biden sexually assaulted her. I understand that victims of sexual assault often do not come forward immediately because recounting the most violent and degrading experience of their lives, to a bunch of strangers, is the proverbial insult to injury. That so many women were willing to wait in my dreary government office, as I ran to the restroom to pull myself together after listening to their stories, is a testament to their fortitude.

Even so, it is reasonable to consider a 27-year reporting delay when assessing the believability of any criminal allegation. More significant perhaps, is Reade’s decision to sit down with a newspaper last year and accuse Biden of touching her in a sexual way that made her uncomfortable — but neglect to mention her claim that he forcibly penetrated her with his fingers.

As a lawyer and victims’ rights advocate, Reade was better equipped than most to appreciate that dramatic changes in sexual assault allegations severely undercut an accuser’s credibility — especially when the change is from an uncomfortable shoulder touch to vaginal penetration.

►Implausible explanation for changing story. When Reade went public with her sexual assault allegation in March, she said she wanted to do it in an interview with The Union newspaper in California last April. She said the reporter’s tone made her feel uncomfortable and "I just really got shut down” and didn't tell the whole story.

It is hard to believe a reporter would discourage this kind of scoop. Regardless, it's also hard to accept that it took Reade 12 months to find another reporter eager to break that bombshell story. This unlikely explanation damages her credibility.

►People who contradict Reade’s claim. After the alleged assault, Reade said she complained about Biden's harassment to Marianne Baker, Biden’s executive assistant, as well as to top aides Dennis Toner and Ted Kaufman. All three Biden staffers recently told The New York Times that she made no complaint to them.

And they did not offer the standard, noncommittal “I don’t remember any such complaint.” The denials were firm. “She did not come to me. If she had, I would have remembered her,” Kaufman said. Toner made a similar statement. And from Baker: “I never once witnessed, or heard of, or received, any reports of inappropriate conduct (by Biden), period." Baker said such a complaint, had Reade made it, "would have left a searing impression on me as a woman professional, and as a manager.”

►Missing formal complaint. Reade told The Times she filed a written complaint against Biden with the Senate personnel office. But The Times could not find any complaint. When The Times asked Reade for a copy of the complaint, she said she did not have it. Yet she maintained and provided a copy of her 1993 Senate employment records.

It is odd that Reade kept a copy of her employment records but did not keep a copy of a complaint documenting criminal conduct by a man whose improprieties changed “the trajectory” of her life. It’s equally odd The Times was unable to find a copy of the alleged Senate complaint.

►Memory lapse. Reade has said that she cannot remember the date, time or exact location of the alleged assault, except that it occurred in a “semiprivate” area in corridors connecting Senate buildings. After I left the Justice Department, I was appointed by the federal court in Los Angeles to represent indigent defendants. The first thing that comes to mind from my defense attorney perspective is that Reade’s amnesia about specifics makes it impossible for Biden to go through records and prove he could not have committed the assault, because he was somewhere else at the time.

For instance, if Reade alleged Biden assaulted her on the afternoon of June 3, 1993, Biden might be able to prove he was on the Senate floor or at the dentist. Her memory lapses could easily be perceived as bulletproofing a false allegation.  

►The lie about losing her job. Reade told The Union that Biden wanted her to serve drinks at an event. After she refused, "she felt pushed out and left Biden's employ," the newspaper said last April. But Reade claimed this month in her Times interview that after she filed a sexual harassment complaint with the Senate personnel office, she faced retaliation and was fired by Biden’s chief of staff.

Leaving a job after refusing to serve drinks at a Biden fundraiser is vastly different than being fired as retaliation for filing a sexual harassment complaint with the Senate. The disparity raises questions about Reade’s credibility and account of events.

►Compliments for Biden. In the 1990s, Biden worked to pass the Violence Against Women Act. In 2017, on multiple occasions, Reade retweeted or “liked” praise for Biden and his work combating sexual assault. In the same year, Reade tweeted other compliments of Biden, including: “My old boss speaks truth. Listen.” It is bizarre that Reade would publicly laud Biden for combating the very thing she would later accuse him of doing to her.

►Rejecting Biden, embracing Sanders. By this January, Reade was all in for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Her unwavering support was accompanied by an unbridled attack on Biden. In an article on Medium, Reade referred to Biden as “the blue version of Trump.” Reade also pushed a Sanders/Elizabeth Warren ticket, while complaining that the Democratic National Committee was trying to “shove” Biden “down Democrat voters throats.”

Despite her effusive 2017 praise for Biden’s efforts on behalf of women, after pledging her support to Sanders, Reade turned on Biden and contradicted all she said before. She claimed that her decision to publicly accuse Biden of inappropriately touching her was due to “the hypocrisy that Biden is supposed to be the champion of women’s rights.”

►Love of Russia and Putin. During 2017 when Reade was praising Biden, she was condemning Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s efforts to hijack American democracy in the 2016 election. This changed in November 2018, when Reade trashed the United States as a country of “hypocrisy and imperialism” and “not a democracy at all but a corporate autocracy.”

Reade’s distaste for America closely tracked her new infatuation with Russia and Putin. She referred to Putin as a “genius” with an athletic prowess that “is intoxicating to American women.” Then there’s this gem: “President Putin has an alluring combination of strength with gentleness. His sensuous image projects his love for life, the embodiment of grace while facing adversity.”

In March 2019, Reade essentially dismissed the idea of Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election as hype. She said she loved Russia and her Russian relatives — and "like most women across the world, I like President Putin … a lot, his shirt on or shirt off.”

Believe all women?Now that Reade has accused Joe Biden of sexual assault, never mind.

Pivoting again this month, Reade said that she “did not support Putin, and that her comments were pulled out of context from a novel she was writing,” according to The Times. The quotations above, however, are from political opinion pieces she published, and she did not offer any other "context" to The Times.

Reade's writings shed light on her political alliance with Sanders, who has a long history of ties to Russia and whose stump speech is focused largely on his position that American inequality is due to a corporate autocracy. But at a very minimum, Reade's wild shifts in political ideology and her sexual infatuation with a brutal dictator of a foreign adversary raise questions about her emotional stability.

►Suspect timing. For 27 years, Reade did not publicly accuse Biden of sexually assaulting her. But then Biden's string of March primary victories threw Sanders off his seemingly unstoppable path to the Democratic nomination. On March 25, as Sanders was pondering his political future, Reade finally went public with her claim. The confluence of Reade’s support of Sanders, distaste for the traditional American democracy epitomized by Biden, and the timing of her allegation should give pause to even the most strident Biden critics.  

►The Larry King call. Last week, new "evidence" surfaced: a recorded call by an anonymous woman to CNN's "Larry King Live" show in 1993. Reade says the caller was her mother, who's now deceased. Assuming Reade is correct, her mother said: "I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him."

As a prosecutor, this would not make me happy. Given that the call was anonymous, Reade’s mother should have felt comfortable relaying the worst version of events. When trying to obtain someone’s assistance, people typically do not downplay the seriousness of an incident. They exaggerate it. That Reade’s mother said nothing about her daughter being sexually assaulted would lead many reasonable people to conclude that sexual assault was not the problem that prompted the call to King.

Reade’s mother also said her daughter did not go to the press with her problem “out of respect” for the senator. I’ve never met a woman who stayed silent out of “respect” for the man who sexually assaulted her. And it is inconceivable that a mother would learn of her daughter’s sexual assault and suggest that respect for the assailant is what stands between a life of painful silence and justice.

The "out of respect" explanation sounds more like an office squabble with staff that resulted in leaving the job. Indeed, in last year's interview with The Washington Post, Reade laid the blame on Biden’s staff for “bullying” her. She also said, “I want to emphasize: It’s not him. It’s the people around him.”

►Statements to others. Reade’s brother, Collin Moulton, told The Post recently that he remembers Reade telling him Biden inappropriately touched her neck and shoulders. He said nothing about a sexual assault until a few days later, when he texted The Post that he remembered Reade saying Biden put his hand "under her clothes.”

That Reade’s brother neglected to remember the most important part of her allegation initially could lead people to believe he recounted his Post interview to Reade, was told he left out the most important part, and texted it to The Post to avoid a discussion about why he failed to mention it in the first place.

In interviews with The Times, one friend of Reade’s said Reade told her she was sexually assaulted by Biden. Another friend said Reade told her that Biden touched her inappropriately. Both friends insisted that The Times maintain their anonymity.  

On Monday, Business Insider published an interview with a friend of Reade’s who said that in 1995 or 1996, Reade told her she was assaulted by Biden. Insider called this friend, Lynda LaCasse, the “first person to independently corroborate, in detail and on the record, that Reade had told others about her assault allegations contemporaneously.”

But Reade alleged she was assaulted in 1993. Telling a friend two or three years later is not contemporaneous. Legal references to a contemporaneous recounting typically refer to hours or days — the point being that facts are still fresh in a person's mind and the statement is more likely to be accurate.

The Insider also quoted a colleague of Reade’s in the mid-1990s, Lorraine Sanchez, who said Reade told her she had been sexually harassed by a former boss. Reade did not mention Biden by name and did not provide details of the alleged harassment.

In prior interviews, Reade gave what appeared be an exhaustive list of people she told of the alleged assault. Neither of the women who talked to Business Insider were on that list.

The problem with statements from friends is that the information they recount is only as good as the information given to them. Let’s say Reade left her job because she was angry about being asked to serve drinks or because she was fired for a legitimate reason. If she tried to save face by telling friends that she left because she was sexually assaulted, that’s all her friends would know and all they could repeat.

Prior statements made by a sexual assault victim can carry some weight, but only if the accuser is credible. In Reade’s case, the statements coming from her friends are only of value if people believe Reade can be relied on to tell the truth, regardless of the light in which it paints her.  

►Lack of other sexual assault allegations. Last year, several women claimed that Biden made them uncomfortable with things like a shoulder touch or a hug. (I wrote a column critical of one such allegation by Lucy Flores.) The Times and Post found no allegation of sexual assault against Biden except Reade's.

It is possible that in his 77 years, Biden committed one sexual assault and it was against Reade. But in my experience, men who commit a sexual assault are accused more than once ... like Donald Trump, who has had more than a dozen allegations of sexual assault leveled against him and who was recorded bragging about grabbing women’s genitalia.  

►What remains. There are no third-party eyewitnesses or videos to support Tara Reade’s allegation that she was assaulted by Joe Biden. No one but Reade and Biden know whether an assault occurred. This is typical of sexual assault allegations. Jurors, in this case the voting public, have to consider the facts and circumstances to assess whether Reade’s allegation is credible. To do that, they have to determine whether Reade herself is believable.

I’ve dreaded writing this piece because I do not want it to be used as a guidebook to dismantling legitimate allegations of sexual assault. But not every claim of sexual assault is legitimate. During almost three decades as a prosecutor, I can remember dismissing two cases because I felt the defendant had not committed the charged crime. One of those cases was a rape charge.

The facts of that case made me question the credibility of the woman who claimed she was raped. In the end, she acknowledged that she fabricated the allegation after her boyfriend caught her with a man with whom she was having an affair.

I know that “Believe Women” is the mantra of the new decade. It is a response to a century of ignoring and excusing men’s sexual assaults against women. But men and women alike should not be forced to blindly accept every allegation of sexual assault for fear of being labeled a misogynist or enabler.

We can support the #MeToo movement and not support allegations of sexual assault that do not ring true. If these two positions cannot coexist, the movement is no more than a hit squad. That’s not how I see the #MeToo movement. It’s too important, for too many victims of sexual assault and their allies, to be no more than that.  

#tarareade #tara reade #joebiden #joe biden #biden #usa today

[cultml]

Breaking of Now

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"

That’s what I should have said to my sister when she asked genuinely what my problem with wearing a mask was.  On this occasion I had gotten trapped and was pretty pissed about the whole situation. The week before one of the big retailer announced a mandate masks. Virtue signalling group think as far as I was concerned and assumed, wrongly that if i bought a little more I would have time to finally workaround them. The day the mandate took effect and the day i talked to her,  I stopped by one of the more expensive less convenient workaround places to find a mask mandate. An couple hours latter i find out my main grocery store and the others options where going to mandate as well. Online is feeding a different beast and sending someone in my place is out sourcing my acquiescence. Trapped. In the end I just told her no one knows what they are doing (the failure to still count the deaths correctly), it's ridiculous (contradictory studies and disparate rules), that i suddenly didn't have a choice and it was going to take me a few days to adjust.

What was really going through my head was about USSR.  “ It wasn’t the just the necessary lies it was the absurd little pointless ones that broke the spirit of the people” to paraphrase badly from a place I don’t remember. That is clearer statement of Voltaire and a simple explanation of why we shouldn’t lie. It’s not the childish notion that we should not because the truth is easier. Most see mask wearing a virtuous, for me it’s an affirmation of a lie, of several, of the ones closer to the roots. It’s not a herculean feat to see for me it’s just stupid hard wired reflexive contrarian angst , not hell no so much as why the hell . It leads you to question anti-vax, reduced fat, publish or die, replication crisis, Russell conjugation, virtues signalling, Overton window, attacks on moral relativism destroying gradation of sin and virtue, cognitive biases , government building as nation building, gas lighting, the church defending itself and the existence of God but not the moral order(not that it knew the difference), the irreconcilability of socialist thought and Jihadists with the west, big government as government playing god, half the people are dumper than the other, death of the common, the long list of what’s called the regressive left we focus so much on (more of a symptom than a cause),cultural relativism, common human behavior dressing up common human behavior as conspiracy, fragility of high civilization, economics standing in for moral order, monogamy, “perfect as your are” drowning the phoenix, nuclear family, woke rewrites hiding more subtle rewrites of western mythos, the prison of two ideas, deep silos of knowledge standing in for wider wisdom, and....

At some point you find yourself  outside and not in some sort of edgy artsy way, not quite smart enough to figure out why no one else is there. I am sliding back into the hope I have gone insane. You deal with the whirling nightmare as little as possible, you don’t call it out at every turn, you don’t cheer it on, you don’t help it, and YOU DO NOT FUCKING LIE ABOUT IT. 

So sitting in the parking lot,deciding if one of the innocent creatures that lives with me, approaching month four of the six the vet said she had left, gets the food she prefers at the moment...  She had other food that was better for her anyway.., not that it matters now. I have a duty of care especially now. She won’t understand the problem or the cost to my honor, for lack of a better word. She will just miss the thing she is used to. In reality avoiding the mask is likely impracticality anyway.  On the verge of throwing up, crying, punching the dashboard or screaming fuck over an over... a car pulls into the spot across from me and a woman starts unpacking a kid out or the back seat... none of the above. A few deep breaths and fuck it, the easy way it is.  Never thought about actually punching a stranger or really anyone but the assigned finger wager at the door.... “I am a virtuous little citizen and those who know better know better” and not “we aren’t all writhing around in the liquefying corps of a great civilization” On queue they where still out of or ran out of again of the food I was after.

I didn’t feel anything brake that day. Thinking about it since something is missing. Maybe things are just numb and will come back in time. As of now thinking about what may have to be done in defense of a civilization worth defending against those that can not be reconciled with it, elicits little. The little emotional triggers that made question if I could if i had to, are gone.... I am pretty weak willed and was happy to stand on the side lines. Muse at what might untangle this mess. I am not a hard man by any imagining, but you made me lie exactly in the way that end civilizations. Not that mask work. Not that I was virtuous for doing so. Not that “we are all in this together”. Not that those in charge know. Not that anyone is in charge. Not that some version of normal coming. Not that this version of the west isn’t dead. It’s the lie that there isn’t a massive upheaval coming.

The mass of rubble , ideological and real that will have to be cleared. Unfortunately a fair amount of blood that is likely to be spilled. Driving now the phrase “ the ugliness of modern architecture” rings in my ears. Affordable little canvases of our own that last only a life time is not the worst thing, but churches in strip malls? Regardless if this is just contrivance of my head or not I have been pushed a few degrees off of where i was. For now, a reprieve as there is still the innocence creatures in my care. It sadly is not open ended.

This kinda of thing might not have pushed as hard as it did if the ground wasn’t already soft. Before all that a few thing had pushed me to wrap up what i was thinking and walk from my online musings. So. Brit Hume has been one of the perennial “ this is the most important election of our lives... til the next one”  He and Thomas Sowell, calling it a point of no return have both come to the conclusion that it actually is. If Biden wins the next election wouldn't matter and any other road blocks would be gone.

Charlie Hurt calling it a make it stop election and latter Victor David Hanson questioning if a silent major exists leads one to believe that reason may have been locked out. That this is a who ever can convince enough people they can save them election. It really fell like the argument don’t matter at all. My suspicion is that if you had really solid polling and knew the outcome of a handful of thing you could easily predict this election now, nothing the candidate did would mean anything. I have kind of gotten used to the idea that thing are going to get well... bloody when the left takes power and finally nails the door shut behind its self.

I was under the illusion that there are a number people that “know” where that leads and would as a last resort raise the black flag. Someone “on the inter webs” I thought was one (for no good reason on my part) when asked opted for the benedictine option. “The monasteries survived”. The monasteries where not an existential threat to the king. Little literacy. little printing and no internet. The parallels to the Maoist and the jihadists to our current insurgents? rebels? look pretty clear. What makes anyone thing they going to be left alone by this “madness”. I got very worried. Those you think might keep Trump in power surrender to the mob.... and those who would fight might decide to hide..... A number of things start looking pretty frivolous.

Author Brooks among a legion of others, well meaning I am sure, prescribe kindness and reason and be patient. I short you don’t hug the guy with the suicide vest.... clear? For the jihadists anything said buy outsiders is meaningless, faith isn’t easily to question on the best of days. For the utopians, you can’t understands till it finally works and usually the censors and secret police help.  To our little friends if your the oppressor you have no room to speak even if you think you understand how evil you are or your so oppressed that your don’t know what your taking about. It all insulated ideology, and all of it gets people killed. They haven't officially taken power so i guess you could try it one a time, cult deprogramming. However the cult isn’t living in the middle of nowhere, we are all living in it.

Jordan Peterson comes at it from a reasoned position focused more on the broader problems of the West. “Orientate your self properly,aye”. You raise yourself up and it raises those around you. Don’t think saving the West was at the top of his list when it all started  Again a one at a time, bottom up approach. At the time I was sure it was far to slow and he never seemed to have a handle on American politics though he knows how badly societies can go wrong. He and many other I don’t think quite understood how bad intentioned the left really was, or how much the compromises made with them where always seeding ground. It seems like a great many people are still living there.

The other problem is the lack of a common. “if there is no common understanding there is no common sense” Mark Steyn if memory serves. My past understanding of the malignant “God is dead” quote was just that and it was a good thing. In part from Peterson, my understanding now is “the common belief in a common God / moral order is dead”.  A strong civil society might be able to hold things together and let people do generally what they want....... as long as the reap the consequences of their choices.  The problem comes when all choices become valid because there are no consequence . A strong moral order would have put the brakes on.

This is the general problem with the various libertarian imaginings.  Over time it will always be a problem. Any significantly democratic organization will trend left or as to hear the left tell it “the long arch of history tend toward justice”... social justice.... popular judgement..... mob rule. Entropy.  We all want to be nice and liked so we let the margins slide, leave a little wiggle room in the rules. Eventually it ticks over. Instead of allowing it’s restricting. I doesn’t matter now whatever the case. There is no way now to go any where near letting people reap their own consequences, what would the bureaucrats do with themselves.

So come at it from the other side? The moment the Enlightenment or the industrial revolution started the church was in existential peril. The less the average person need God to explain their day to day the less the ethereal wonder holds. The explosion of knowledge even if they didn’t understand all of it, become a surer path.  Defense of the moral order was what was called for. The church defended itself and eventually the existence of God. I would like one of these fill in the blank “nationalist”, common good conservatives, new theocrat types explain to me how governmental policy is going to fix it? They seem to see it as a problem caused by the left. The left is just taking advantage. If it wasn’t them now it would be something else in a generation or four. Not only are they misidentifying the problem their solution is making it harder to solve.  Setting government policy to favor what worked is not a guarantee it works going forward. There are plenty of good studies and sound arguments and some policies may work well. The problem, it introduces rigidity. It will help stave off the known worse, meanwhile  staving off the unknown both for the worse and for the better. It slows the development of better.

There is this notion that the “left and the “right” should just get a divorce. The “left” will never be satisfied with that. There is as well the notion that we are to diverse to coexist. This is another result of the lack of a common. If a civilization or a country in this case, are bound together even loosely by a civil order an a moral order diversity isn’t a fatal issue. To say it isn’t possible is to reject  the American experiment out right.

Those who have accepted a civil war is inevitable talk as if the fight will be to restore something? The war is between who? One side is usually the government. Not sure what is gained by pickling fight with Antifa et al.

I had thought after Ferguson leadership would have leaned it’s lesson.  APCs for riot control, yes. For no knock warrant, not so much. It’s become abundantly clear I assume far to many things. We went from throw a water bottle at a cop, jail and the protest is over to everything is acceptable up until your try to burn people alive in a public building. As far as I am concerned those mayors and governors who allow this signed there own resignation letters.

It is has become clear Trump or likely any president can’t fix this. Trump specifically doesn’t have the tack to talk us off this ledge. Suspend the campaign for a week and talk about the consequences, the nature of and solution for the problem.... and never mention himself? I don’t know that and president would have the resources to declare an insurrection, deploy enough federal agents and national guard (assuming the governors allow it) and hold on til the local government went back to arresting the first bottle thrower. I doesn’t look like the decades long hold the “left” has had on these city is going to be broken by this, so no major change in policy that will stop this short term is coming. Those who decide to leave are likely to bring the same ideas that lead to the policies that lead to the chaos where ever they go. It’s not going to stay contained.

It sounded like there where the start of some defensive militia and there are always community deescalation groups. This is driven by policy fuel by ideology that can not be question (though they used to act as if it could). All solutions look to be outside our normal acceptable practice. Comment by Mark Steyn about Islam are instructive. Surrender, destroy, or reform. As with Islam this is a self fulfilling ideology.  So? a form of colonization inside our country, an insurrection? Remove the mayors, city counsel and the prosecutors, none of which are doing their jobs. If the rule is that the feds don’t declare insurrections, and it is not declared as such then it is not. What about the governors?  Then what..? What policies changes the culture? What are the markers for holding the next election? It is outside our norm, not so much for history in general.

If Trump wins whatever the left does including secession will be responded to by the federal government, our little city experiment aside. That at best will just reimpose the status quo. It is very unlikely to force the “left” ideology into retreat. If Biden gets elected? Play the city experiment out writ large . The constitution almost by definition can’t survive. So... just reprint the thing and put a new start date on it?  What does that solve? Maybe I am not digging in the parts of the internet where these this are being hashed out. If they are I not sure it’s by the type of people I want running things.

A list of systemic grievances going into all this would be useful both as a guild for what comes after and as set of red lines. I am sure most libertarians could give you a library full of outrages. It is not the day to day bureaucratic nonsense that’s the problem or police outrages. It’s things like deferential impact, judicial realism, popular election of senators, and the supposed precondition in which regulation is allowed just to start. The last line may be when the left has easily won two or three elections in a row while everyone is being forced to do things they don’t want and never hear a word in the press about it.  It may be to late by then. I believed that would be the result if Hilary got elected and it looks to be a certainty if Biden gets in.

Whatever the case maybe the violence has started and to what degree it escalate who knows. The idea that violence is never the answer was always a myth, one we are coming face to face with now. The fact is violence on very rare occasions is the only answer unless you are prepared to surrender everything, to live on your knees in agony. That is why the idea that the constitution is not a suicide pact never made any sense. We seeing it now to with the virus. “we must sacrifice everything even if it save one life”. What childishness. If you won’t die or worse live in pain for your principles they only hold until someone or thing threatens you with just that. If others know it your principles don’t mean much. Further more at societal level if leadership isn’t prepared to risk the live of civilian to protect those principles they aren’t going to last long either

All that in the end still solves nothing. You have beaten back the enemy for what? If violence comes or not we have to have something to go to, to strive for as a civilization. We are a fractured mess of half thoughts and endless “problems” to solve. We have no common understanding of what the moral order or any order is or should be. As is we are done.

“We are very unlikely to come up with entirely new definition or invention. We are very unlikely to invent new Gods, very unlikely to come up with new religion, ...very unlikely to be able to go anything this good again.” Douglas Murray.

 A similar sentiment two plus years ago sent me in this direction.

“ Where the road we’re traveling takes us. Where do the above events and that one trend leave us? Not in a good place. Unless there’s a black swan somewhere down the line, we are heading inevitably towards a socialist America. “  “ I’m praying for a Black Swan. My prayers aren’t usually answered, though. That’s why I’m assuming that the American future will be totalitarian — either Marxist or Islamic — and that it might happen within my lifetime and will definitely happen within my children’s. “ - Bookworm

So what we are looking for is a Black swan, a new god, a new religion. In an ocean of ignorance with an occasional mist of wisdom let me see if I can puzzle this out a bit. First there  is no puppet master just us. Though they took full advantage ,even the “left” isn’t the problem. We began to gain knowledge abundantly, with certainty if not ease. It distracted, if not overwhelmed the the ethereal of the church and rendered the judgement of the wise mute. So what do we need? We need to temper knowledge. We need not just the facts or the working of the parts we see. We need to pursue the truth, not exactly the truth. Not the truth of the tangible world or that of the ethereal. It is the truth of the moment. Our best understanding of the working of the two combined.  And an understanding that some day it will change. And that is what we should pursue. The honest truth of what we know and a drive to find more. To try, succeed and fail, to find what is actually better. It is an extension of the road humanity was on before this diversion.

How to paint the picture? A discovered / revealed God/ devil/ saint/ mythic hero, a torch bearer along the path humanity has always been traveling. The path of our increasing understanding, the path that raised our civilization. A light that only shines on the path behind us, to illuminate the things we missed and on our figure calling us forward. One who demands that those who obscure the past repent. One who demands that those who misrepresent the path their on to get others to follow repent. One that asks us to forgive those who do and use the shape of their misdeeds  to search for our own misunderstandings and mistakes.

In practice, a secular church that is neither. A voluntary body with neither the force of law or a claim to the moral order. A nondemocratic organization because the long arc of history tending toward social justice. An organization the is trusted to ask better questions. A group of people that will put themselves in the experiments in order and be brutally honest about the results. 

So for instance the question about transmission of wisdom from one generation to the next is about how we raise children and that is about family and marriage. What is best? what do we really know?  Follow the path all the way back. Romantic marriage is new, so why not practical or arranged marriage? We see the obvious problems with polygamy, with polyamory? Maybe some combination? maybe not one big romantic marriage but three,may be four people, one marriage is practical, one arrange, and one romantic. I have no idea. We can’t just default to the wisdom of religion or assume the recklessness of the “left”. Let Go. If it works or not we are better for knowing. We will have surer footing on the path ahead at least in the understanding of this moment.

If don’t like that formulation good. You build a black swan. If there’s a flock of them maybe one survives. Maybe we avoid generations of brutality. Maybe something of what we have done survives.

All I can do now is try to find a way not to live on my knees before anyone, anything, any ideology or idea. Try. That is all I can do.

Credit to those i stole ideas from that i can no longer remember if they're mine or not. I am going to put away my crayons down, shut my mouth give my mind a rest, deal with only what i must, and hopefully find a way to wonder at the world again.

or try to

#black swan #god gap #reversion is not reformation #CultML

[robert-c]

Reconciliation

I started this blog, and especially its political content, with the idea that there were mostly good people on both sides and that (with the exception of a small group of extremists) most of us could agree on the kind of country we wanted, even if we disagreed on the best way to get there.

It was my hope that by careful exposition of facts and logical development of philosophy that I might have a part in pointing us all that way. While that is still the end result I believe in, one where sensible debate over the facts can be had to determine the best path forward; I’m no longer confident it is something I will see happen.

The strident, at times even violent, way in which defenders of this president behave, despite his attacks on the separation of powers, the truth, and anyone who disagrees with him, have made me doubt the good will and the ability to reason of his core supporters.

I’ve tried to understand how they feel alienated and left out of the world. Such feelings surely feed the sense of victimhood and even betrayal they feel. But my empathy is blunted by the nature of their loss. It seems the loss is that their casual use of racial and ethnic slurs, and presumption that their religious beliefs could and should be imposed on others is no longer commonly and quietly accepted.

I’ve tried to relate to the idea that their lack of education has left them particularly vulnerable in an economy that is both more technical and knowledge based than the days of sweat and muscle. I can feel for them, because as a boy who was more brain than brawn, I felt left out. Brains were all I had to deal with a world where “manhandling” machines and athletic prowess was considered the basic requirements for success as a man. Nevertheless, none of us can deny or resist these changes, any more than people could, or would have wanted to, resist the emergence of factories mass producing goods that were cheaper and therefor available to more people. Those factories put many small craftsmen out of business, but that is just what happens when we move from buggy whip makers to auto mechanics. I wish I had the wisdom to find an answer that was easy and acceptable to them.

Likewise I’m disappointed in some on the extreme Left. While I agree with most of the end results they’d like to see, giving in to violence only provides the Right with exactly what they need. I know there are reliable cases of Right wing groups or individuals fomenting violence that would appear to have come from the Left. I’m even willing to believe that there is more of that behavior than we know. Nevertheless, as understandable as the outrage is, giving in to violence only validates the Right’s lies. Fear, and especially fear of violence and anarchy, is one of the main things that holds them together and attracts support for their methods. In times and places at least as bad, if not worse, Dr. King managed to eschew violence and retain both the moral high ground as well as force the racist reactionaries to reveal their true selves.

Learning, growing and changing are the constants in life. Attempting to stop it is both ultimately futile, and destructively suicidal. I’m sorry if that is hard work, but life has always been hard. Our ancient ancestors knew this, and making our creature comforts easier to obtain doesn’t change the basic truth of it.

Things cannot remain the same, and that is just a fact of Nature. The emotional and religious attachment to the idea that they can, only makes the destructive nature of this next change more inevitable.

The United States of America was founded with a flaw, an inherent contradiction, in her existence – slavery. It took almost a hundred years and a devastating war to end it and set us on a path to live up to our ideals – a path we have not yet completely followed. The adamant stands of those defending this president make me fear that another civil war is inevitable. The rights of people of color, as well as those of any sexual or religious preference, are at stake here and I just don’t see any sort of compromise that could be acceptable to that core group.

Some say that the American Civil War wasn’t about slavery. They claim that it was all about the Constitutional question of States Rights and the different cultures of the north and south. That’s at least partly true; there was a culture clash, because southern culture was all about an entire way of life that depended on and was sustained by slavery.  

But here is the point I hope we can all understand. I don’t believe that anyone in either the North or the South would have preferred to have the death and destruction the Civil War brought, versus some other solution. The egos and absolutism of the South forced the solution into a literal life or death conflict for the country and hundreds of thousands of people.

The horror of a new civil war is that it won’t be state against state, it will more likely be neighborhood against neighborhood. And that doesn’t leave many, if any, safe places to flee. The model for this kind of civil war isn’t the 1860’s, it’s modern day Syria and Jordan. Fueled by individual fanatics, instead of governmental chains of command there is virtually no way to stop it, to receive a surrender that is respected by all parties.

I remain committed to the defeat of this wannabe tyrant, but I fear that his hardest core of truly deplorable, racist supporters will not go quietly back under the rocks that they have crawled out from. The energizing and validating of their points of view have given them a peek at power they previously could only dream about.

That means it is up to the rest of us, who may not completely agree on policies or programs, to oppose their agenda because it would eliminate dissent, liberty and the due process of our republic. Only an overwhelming defeat of their candidate and his ideas might convince them that they have no chance of taking over.

In the 2016 election many people voted for Trump without expectation he would win, or even without much approval of his platform. It was a protest vote, a message that they wanted to shake things up a little. Well things have been shaken up. Now it is time to vote for Biden, even if you aren’t completely on board with his ideas. Like before when you were voting against “business as usual”, now you must be voting against Trump and Trumpism, or you may not get a vote again.

My pledge is that if Biden is elected I will continue to write in this blog about how we can find solutions together; the reasonable group of conservatives and progressives.

#election 2020

[exxar1]

Episode 10: We Don’t Win

1/23/2021

I recently started subscribing to John MacArthur’s sermon podcasts. I’d never heard of him until he and his congregation began defying the lockdown mandates in California last summer. Although I’d added his podcasts to my library, I had never actually listened to any of them until three days ago when his sermon from this past Sunday began playing automatically as soon as my phone’s Bluetooth connected to my car. I was about to stop the playback as I was in the mood for some upbeat music, but then changed my mind when I looked at the dashboard display and saw what podcast had started.

John began his sermon by listing all the blessings God had bestowed upon him and his church in the last six months of 2020. The more that he and his congregation defied Governor Newsom’s tyranny, the more God blessed their ministry. He said that 2020 had given him, personally, an immense amount of clarity, and I knew exactly what he was talking about. 2020, for many of us, helped us to see exactly what matters most in this world and what our priorities should be. As John moved on to the heart of his sermon, he said three words that have been rattling around in the back of my brain ever since.

“We don’t win.”

We Christians do not win in this world. This world belongs to Satan. It always has ever since the Fall. It is not the destiny of the believers in Christ “…to win on this battleground,” as John puts it.

“We don’t win.”

I first heard this sermon on Wednesday, the day of President Biden’s inauguration. In the two days since he took the oath of office, we Americans have seen quite clearly what this president has in mind for the future of this country. One of his first acts was to sign an order that gives boys and girls the right to roam freely in the public restrooms of the opposite sex. Boys who “identify” as girls will also have the right to thus compete in women’s sports if they so wish. Biden and his administration also made announcements that they plan to not only roll back all the restrictions that President Trump had enacted to try to stop the public finding of international and domestic organizations that support abortion, but to also expand the current laws of “reproductive and women’s rights” to allow abortions up to and including the moment of birth. (He even campaigned on this abhorrent promise.) Abortions will soon be allowed for ANY reason and will be made as convenient as a checkup at your local dentist.

It’s that latter part that should bet striking fear and sorrow in the hearts of EVERY American citizen, regardless of religious affiliation. Roe v. Wade was just the beginning of America’s fall from grace and prosperity, and if Biden and his administration succeeds in their enactment of these new laws and permissions, then our country’s fate is truly sealed. Any nation — any people — that allows the willful, rampant murder of the unborn will not survive very long. It is among the last, deadliest signs of genuine, moral decay, and that — along with all the social movements that are currently fighting to erase gender and promote tolerance of ANYTHING regarding sexuality — are why I firmly believe that we are closer than ever to the Second Coming of Christ.

“We don’t win.”

The Biden administration is under the power and firm control of the another insidious, deceptive, and abhorrent social movement that has gripped this nation since last June: Black Lives Matter. There is no longer true justice in America. John MacArthur stated in his sermon that America is now under a new form of law and order known as “social justice”. Under this new justice, the only ones who are right are the oppressed, and the guilty are the oppressors. Justice is now based on race and skin color, rather than truth and right. All the garbage surrounding “white fragility” and “anti-racism” has made it perfectly acceptable for everyone to racially discriminate and hate anyone whose skin is white.

“We don’t win.”

Black Lives Matter, in its efforts to alter and/or erase American history have set the stage for America’s very foundation, the system of capitalism, to also be destroyed. All the economic plans of the Biden administration — as well as a democrat controlled congress — will ensure that socialism will take hold in this country even worse than when Obama was president. The current leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement are proud, outspoken Marxists, and they have never tried to disguise or obfuscate their beliefs. They have already succeeded in getting their insidious doctrine of “critical race theory” into public schools at every grade level in all the major cities in the U.S. Within one or two generations, our country will be overflowing with the same brainwashed population that brought about the Russian Revolution, which plunged that country into decades of economic and moral darkness.

“We don’t win.”

I am not writing this blog to frighten or depress you. (Well, actually, yes you should be scared shitless right now. I know I am.) John ended his sermon by reminding all Christians that yes, we don’t win. We don’t win down here, that is. Earth has already been claimed by Satan and his forces of darkness. But, if we have accepted Christ as our Lord and Savior, then we will not have to suffer much longer in this mortal realm. Our only task right now is to serve God by staying faithful to him and spreading the gospel. And, when our life is over, we will join our Heavenly Father at his throne, and we will have a front row seat to His final plan. His heavenly forces will make war with the corrupted world and its lord, Satan, in that great final battle of Armageddon, and it’s here, where it matters most, that we will win.

Part of my reason for writing this post today was to remind myself of the true power of God. We serve and worship the same God that made a covenant with Abraham and Isaac. The same God that brought the Israelites out of Egypt and watched over them as they traveled in the desert. No matter how often His people forgot Him or sinned against Him, God never forgot them. His wrath was great, yes, and there were many times the Israelites were punished for their sins, but God always provided a way of forgiveness and redemption.

In the back of my Bible is a listed reading plan for the year. I decided to embark on this as part of my daily devotional and as a new year’s resolution. I have already finished the books of Genesis and Exodus, and, while I still remember from so long ago the stories of creation; of Abraham, Isaac, Esau, and Jacob; of Joseph getting sold into slavery in Egypt only to be in the right place and right time to save his brothers and family; of God delivering His people out of slavery in Egypt — I was now reading all of those accounts with fresh eyes. Right now, when our country is on a rapidly descending slope into sin, darkness, and moral decay, it gives my heart and soul a much needed peace to know that that God of the Bible is the same God that still watches over his people. I want to add the phrase “protects them”, but I’m honestly not sure that’s appropriate. God is watching over us, make no mistake about that, but He’s also a vengeful God, and his wrath is great.

America was once a Christian nation, but I have a hard time uttering that phrase just now. I don’t believe it’s true anymore, and we Christians are about to enter a new era of persecution and tribulation. The government mandates that were issued last year in response to the manufactured “pandemic” are a perfect example of the new persecution. As John put it in his sermon, “Satan did his best to shut down our church.” The Lord of Darkness did his damndest to shut down ALL churches in this nation, and he succeeded in many states — most of them blue. Here in Nevada, for example, almost all churches are still shut down for worship. Services can only be attended from home via livestream.

This is just the first step. The new laws and policies that the Biden administration has already enacted — or plans to enact — will only serve the heathen and the wicked. But we Christians still have the power to fight back, and we most definitely should while we still can. Just look at John’s church in California. I won’t go into the whole list here, but John’s ministry did not shrink or fail during 2020. Quite the opposite, in fact. He stated that his congregation expanded by more than 1,200 members in just the last quarter of the year. People were driving in from out of state to attend services! The church more than tripled its funding from offering and donations in 2020, more than they’ve received in the last decade alone, in fact!

It is in times of great adversity and great trials, that Christianity grows. America is the modern equivalent of the Roman Empire, and, like those Christians in the days of Nero and Caesar, the believers in America today will be shunned, spit upon, arrested, and yes, even put to death, while the rest of the nation celebrates “diversity” and “tolerance” and continues to slaughter the unborn in record numbers.

No, it’s not quite that bad for us believers just yet. But within one or two generations, perhaps even sooner, it will be. The current “cancel culture” that is serving as the militant arm of movements such as Black Lives Matter will very soon turn their wrath upon anything that is religious. True Christians, the believers that will not compromise on “diversity” and “tolerance” by watering down the gospel or allowing immorality such as gay marriage and transgender “affirmation services”, among other things, will be attacked and cursed as being un-American and “evil”.

No, we don’t win down here.

But we will one day. Our suffering here is but for a time. Soon enough, we shall be reunited in Heaven with our Lord and Savior at the foot of his throne. All trials and tribulations will cease and we shall rejoice with Him evermore.

Amen, hallelujah!

#john macarthur #Christian #faith #God #black lives matter

[novitskewriter55]

Luke Novitske

English 102-06

Instructor: Jill Sumstad

10/4/20

Commentary Essay

Does Social Media Cause Division?

(Believing/Doubting)

Social media plays a bigger role in politics, race relations, and society now than it ever has before. Some people will debate that these effects are negative and others believe they are positive. The way the media runs nowadays, news can spread like wildfire, and everybody owns technology so they have access to all of the information. There are both advantages and disadvantages to anybody being able to put anything they want out to the public in a blink of an eye. Many sources will tell that social media creates a divide between Republicans and Democrats and only provides them with a larger platform to hash out their differences. Other sources argue that technology allows us the ability to speak our minds to greater crowds which is healthy for society. 

Living in the year 2020, we tend to see a lot of negativity in the media which makes it hard to stay positive. It seems that whenever you turn on the TV to Fox News or CNN, all you see is Republicans and Democrats bashing each other. This creates the idea that the media is using its popular platform to cause a divide in society. When I scroll through my social media feed nowadays, I see a lot of hate being exchanged between the two main political parties, “Another trend on experts’ minds is how the algorithms behind these massively influential social media platforms may contribute to the rise of extremism and hate online,” (Social Media’s Impact on Society). Currently, millions of Americans are preparing for November 3rd to vote for either Joe Biden or President Donald Trump. After the political debates my mom and I flipped back and forth between CNN and Fox News. On CNN, we didn’t hear one good thing about Donald Trump, so based on the news that they are telling their viewers Donald Trump lost the debate. On Fox, the spokesperson made it seem like Joe Biden had no good points throughout the debate creating the idea that he lost by a landslide. These two different television networks are speaking about two completely opposite narratives which creates the illusion that the right and the left cannot agree on anything. This is what makes it easier for people to believe that the media is the main cause behind the division. It is being reported that large corporations such as google and amazon are creating rigorous fact checking methods in order to promote post-truth politics, however, Richard Muirhead believes that these methods will be ineffective, “...while these features and services are useful, they are unlikely to change the minds of those who have already been exposed to the echo-chamber effect for many years.” Muirhead is explaining the difficulty of seeing through these false narratives that each party is hammering into their voters brains. Recently it has become a stereotype that if you are Republican you watch Fox and if you are Democratic you watch CNN. This concept generates biased opinions on the information you are receiving which builds echo chambers, “A study of Facebook users found a high degree of polarization within the social network, with users tending to interact most frequently with the people and narratives they agreed with — creating an echo chamber,” (Richard Muirhead, Technology as a force for division - and unification - in politics.) These two completely contrasting narratives have polarized our country into a political stalemate with both sides of the spectrum refusing to budge. 

Social media is similar to the news networks. When scrolling through my instagram feed it seems like everything is political. Most social media nowadays is like this as politicians just use it to push their version of the story. The wise Plato once said, “those who tell the stories rule society.” Many politicians would rather tell a lie to boost their morale, than tell the truth and receive criticism, “Politicians from all sides use the web to push their own version of the story, and frequently it is not so important to be seen as honest as it is to be pushing a populist message that fits in with a group’s existing world view — however untrue it might be,” (Richard Muirhead). After watching the fact checking programs of the debates, it seemed that even those were a lie as each political party couldn’t even agree on the “facts.”

 It was rare for former presidents to be active on social media, but that isn’t the case currently. President Trump uses twitter all the time and it causes quite a stir. Whenever he tweets it only adds fuel to the fire. When social media wasn’t as prevalent, back in the early 2000’s, our country seemed more together than ever. We even dealt with the national catastrophe of 9/11 which made our country even stronger, “The immediate aftermath of the attacks saw a nation come together – in acts of defiance and expressions of patriotism,” (Ryan Ramgobin). During the time we are going through right now, in an era where technology is way more advanced and social media is more popular, our country hasn’t stayed united during this pandemic. People use social media as their platform to spread hate which is the root cause of our separation. 

Living in 2020 we have realized that there is a lot of negativity so it is hard to stay positive. It seems like everything you see whether you are watching the news, searching the internet or scrolling through social media is political. This is normally common while in an election year. There is actually a lot of positivity that goes on in these platforms, however, sometimes it is hard to find while in the midst of a pandemic. Just as I said earlier, social media uses algorithms that will sway your compass to what you want to see. If you enjoy following the hate between the two parties, then this is what you will continue to see on the apps. In contrast, if you are a more positive person and enjoy helpful content, then this is what you will see. 

In regards to racial injustice, social media has been very beneficial. It has provided many African American citizens the opportunity to be heard. After the the murder of George Floyd, the black lives matter movement spoke up and even started multiple protests. This would have never been possible without the use of technology. Furthermore, there have been multiple celebrities such as professional athletes who have used their fans to promote change. All of these celebrities have thousands to millions of followers who look up to them, so when they say something powerful, people take it to heart. The NBA also used it’s platform to support the black lives matter movement. Throughout the NBA playoffs, the protests even got as serious as boycotting games. Some of the teams decided not to play because of the death of Breonna Taylor.

Social media, when used properly, can be the perfect way to spread positivity during a time where it is rare. During the vice presidential debate, Mike Pence the Republican candidate, said that even though he and Kamala Harris were debating which made it seem like they hate each other, at the end of the day they were both American and unified. Even if you disagree with someone’s political views, it is important that our country remains unified. Social media is the perfect way to spread positivity which will do just that!

Living in the 21st century we have seen a large spike in the usage of social media. With this comes advantages and disadvantages. According to Richard Muirhead, a disadvantage of social media is the political echo chambers that come with it. The only way our country is going to settle the dispute between Republicans and Democrats is by communicating. When a social media user is sucked into the echo chambers of their political party, they will lose the ability to be open minded about the ideas of the other party. Another negative effect social media has on our society is its ability to blow news out of proportion. We reviewed the difference between how the US reacted to the tragedy of 911 when social media wasn’t as prevalent, and now when we are dealing with this deadly virus. In contrast, we saw that social media can also boost positivity throughout communities. For example, the NBA players used their platform on social media to spread awareness about social injustice, which was very productive for our country. After reviewing both arguments; the first being that social media divides the two political parties and the second telling that social media unifies them, it is time for you to decide.

Luke Novitske

English 102-06

Instructor: Jill Sumstad

11/1/20

Annotated Bibliography

Anderson, Josh. “How Does Technology Impact Politics?” Acquia, 25 June 2019, Josh Anderson.

The author of this article, Josh Anderson, makes really good points about how technology, or to be more specific, social media, is used in politics today. This article is relevant to my topic because I am writing a believing/doubting essay which explores the pros and cons of the effect social media has on politics and society in general. This is such a useful article because Anderson is practically writing about the same topics that I am and, he too, explored the pros and cons. He talked about how politicians nowadays use social media more frequently than they ever have before. Back in the day, Franklin D Roosevelt used fireside chats to address his people, now we see Donald Trump going crazy with his twitter fingers. Politicians use social media to promote themselves now more than they ever have. Anderson provides great points that support both sides of the argument which makes this such a useful article for me.

Bolter, Jay David. “Social Media Are Ruining Political Discourse.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 20 May 2019, Jay David Bolter.

This article by Jay David Bolter discusses the cons of social media and what it is doing to our society. It is relevant to my topic because it will give me information that I can use when talking about how social media has had negative effects on our society. Bolter goes into detail about echo chambers and how social media contributes to them. An echo chamber is when you are hearing the information from a biased source that will only tell you what you want to hear. For example, most people who are Republican’s will follow networks such as Fox news and they will only see and hear information that supports that side of the political spectrum. Bolter believes that the problem that arises with social media is that a lot of people use it as their main source of information. He says that 68 percent of Americans receive at least some of their news from social media. This means that a lot of our potential voters are prone to being sucked into these echo chambers of social media.

Kleinnijenhuis, Jan. “The Combined Effects of Mass Media and Social Media on Political Perceptions and Preferences.” Journal of Communication, 23 Dec. 2019, Jan Kleinnijenhuis. 

This is a credible article written by Jan Kleinnijenhuis that ironically speaks towards the discredibility of information you receive on social media. This will help me make my points about both sides of the argument in my believing/doubting essay. I will use the angle that explains how just about anybody can go on social media and write whatever they would like to. This makes social media a misleading source of information that tries to trick people into believing fake news. This obviously preaches to the idea that social media is unproductive in politics and in society. I can also twist this and say that anybody being able to speak their mind can be helpful for society. Being able to talk through tough times like we are experiencing currently can be helpful for people. These points that were made will gel with the points I have made in my own essay which makes this source beneficial to me.

Muirhead, Richard. “Technology as a Force for Division - and Unification - in Politics.” TechCrunch, TechCrunch, 27 Nov. 2016, Richard Muirhead. 

This article was probably the most beneficial to my essay because it is a believing/doubting commentary essay in itself. You can recognize this in the title by looking at the type of words the author decided to use. First, Murihead said technology was a dividing force in politics, but then he went on to say that it was also a unifying force as well. The author of this article, like many others, writes about the idea of echo chambers, and how people tend to interact with the people and narratives they already agree with which creates polarization. This speaks towards the dividing force of politics. He talks about the unifying side of his argument by talking about the benefits social media has on politics. He talks about how it has become much easier to be more politically active thanks to social media. He also proposes the idea that social media has made it a lot easier for people to register to vote. Both of these arguments will help make my essay stronger.

Ramgobin, Ryan. “9/11 Brought a Country Together - 15 Years Later It Could Not Be More Divided.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 6 Sept. 2016, Ryan Ramgobin. 

When you look at the title of this article, you may be wondering how I implemented it into my essay. It is odd that a connection was drawn between 911 and the effects social media has on society. This article wasn’t that relevant to my essay as a whole, but it helped me make a very crucial point in a body paragraph of mine. I drew the comparison between life after 911 when social media wasn’t as prevalent and how our country came together, to now when we are also facing chaos, but how our country has divided. People go on social media frequently with the intention to divide, so this article helped me make that point about how social media divides. As I said before, this article wasn’t used much throughout my essay as a whole, but it helped me make a very important point with a quote I used, therefore, it is relevant to my topic.

[bopinion]

2021 / 03 - US-President-Edition

Aperçu of the Week:

The point is that you can't be too greedy (Donald J. Trump).

Bad News of the Week:

To the very end, Donald Trump refused to acknowledge the victory of the Democrats in the election. To the very end, he spoke of the theft of the White House by the Radical Left. To the very end, he swore his supporters to the decline of the American Dream. And to the very end, he was backed up by "dignitaries" like Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, who retain their quite power effective seats in the Senate.

The result of this campaign of lies, which is almost inconceivable for a European, is devastating: one third of all US citizens doubt the legitimacy of Biden's presidency. No matter how hard he tries to build bridges, his appeals to the unity of the people will fall flat if many people don't even listen to him. Even on the day he took office, Trump could not bring himself to congratulate his victorious opponent. No wonder after weeks of a minimal program of assistance in the transition period. And spicy details are still coming to light: before yesterday, the New York Times reported that Trump wanted to install a loyalist at the head of the Justice Department in the last days of his power to overturn the Georgia election results.

And despite everything, the vast majority of Republican senators find themselves unable to support Trump's impeachment. Were the last four years perhaps not a bad dream at all, but the twilight of the gods for the Grand Old Party to finally become an opportunistic fig leaf for the rich white elite? As a reminder, a two-thirds majority is needed to censure Trump. So at least 17 Republicans would have to "switch sides" - that's more than unlikely. So Trump won't be barred for life from all public office, either. As a full-time narcissist, he won't be able to resist the temptation to seize an opportunity that presents itself to him to be back in the spotlight. Especially in Florida, anything is possible. Well, good night then!

Good News of the Week:

There are times when the message "Nothing happened!" is close to sensational. So it was last Wednesday in Washington DC. Despite large-scale closures of downtown, despite the elimination of parades, despite the non-admission of the public, an assassination attempt on the inauguration ceremony of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was to be expected. After all, around the world we have learned that the average van can be an effective weapon, even if it is not loaded with a homemade bomb.

In the meantime, the FBI even assumed that riots, perhaps even attacks, could be expected at all 50 state capitols in the United States. And in the days leading up to the inauguration of the Biden Harris Administration, the number of troops in the capital rose to 25,000 - many times the U.S. military presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. Presumably it is thanks to these massive security precautions that misguided extremists from QAnon to Proud Boys, from Oath Keepers to Three Percenters, have not dared to use violence to press the White Supremacists' supposed right to remain in power. Let's hope it stays that way.

And then a lot did happen that day. Harris swore in the three new Senators and even laughed in the process (sidenote: has anyone seen Mike Pence laugh in all four years? Not to mention wearing Converse Chucks...). And Biden signed a whole stack of Executive Orders: Return to the Paris Climate Agreement, Stop Building the Wall on the Mexican Border, Return to the WHO, Lift the Muslim Ban, Eviction Protection for Tenants in Default, Logistical Foundations for the Vaccine Campaign, and on and on. In the coming days, he intends to rebuild the largely destroyed relations with his allies and re-establish the U.S. as a reliable partner. You are welcome any time, Mr. President!

Personal happy Moment of the Week:

While the entire world could hardly contain its - justified - enthusiasm for the young poet Amanda Gorman and its - justified - amusement at Bernie Sander's fashion statement during the inauguration of the 46th U.S. president, my personal happy moment was a different one. In his accomplished and appropriate speech, Biden enumerated U.S. ideals: "What are the common objects that define us as Americans? I think we know. Opportunity, security, liberty, dignity, respect, honor and yes (dramatic pause) the truth." And applause erupted. Sometimes it makes you happy that supposedly self-evident things are mentioned. It can't hurt. Thank you!

As I write this...

...I'm debating with my wife which movie we could stream tonight. Right now it's "Pieces of a woman" versus "Ant-Man and the Wasp" - so it probably boils down to CNN to ventilate expectations for Biden's first 100 days in office.

#aperçu #thoughts #bad news #good news #News of the Week #happy moments #donald trump #joe biden #kamala harris #washington dc #inauguration #white house #capitol #impeachment #cnn #white supremism #republicans #democrats

[aunti-christ-ine]

As much as I dislike Biden, this guy makes a very good point.

...several of them, in fact. 

____________________________________ 

Why I'm skeptical about Reade's sexual assault claim against Biden  

     by Ex-Prosecutor  MICHAEL J. STERN 

A former staffer to Joe Biden in the early '90s has accused the presidential candidate of sexual assault. Here's everything you need to know about it. 

During 28 years as a state and federal prosecutor, I prosecuted a lot of sexual assault cases. The vast majority came early in my career, when I was a young attorney at a prosecutor’s office outside Detroit. 

A year ago, Tara Reade accused former Vice President Joe Biden of touching her shoulder and neck in a way that made her uncomfortable, when she worked for him as a staff assistant in 1993. Then last month, Reade told an interviewer that Biden stuck his hand under her skirt and forcibly penetrated her with his fingers. Biden denies the allegation. 

When women make allegations of sexual assault, my default response is to believe them. But as the news media have investigated Reade’s allegations, I’ve become increasingly skeptical. Here are some of the reasons why: 

►Delayed reporting … twice. Reade waited 27 years to publicly report her allegation that Biden sexually assaulted her. I understand that victims of sexual assault often do not come forward immediately because recounting the most violent and degrading experience of their lives, to a bunch of strangers, is the proverbial insult to injury. That so many women were willing to wait in my dreary government office, as I ran to the restroom to pull myself together after listening to their stories, is a testament to their fortitude. 

Even so, it is reasonable to consider a 27-year reporting delay when assessing the believability of any criminal allegation. More significant perhaps, is Reade’s decision to sit down with a newspaper last year and accuse Biden of touching her in a sexual way that made her uncomfortable — but neglect to mention her claim that he forcibly penetrated her with his fingers. 

As a lawyer and victims’ rights advocate, Reade was better equipped than most to appreciate that dramatic changes in sexual assault allegations severely undercut an accuser’s credibility — especially when the change is from an uncomfortable shoulder touch to vaginal penetration. 

►Implausible explanation for changing story. When Reade went public with her sexual assault allegation in March, she said she wanted to do it in an interview with The Union newspaper in California last April. She said the reporter’s tone made her feel uncomfortable and "I just really got shut down” and didn't tell the whole story. 

It is hard to believe a reporter would discourage this kind of scoop. Regardless, it's also hard to accept that it took Reade 12 months to find another reporter eager to break that bombshell story. This unlikely explanation damages her credibility. 

►People who contradict Reade’s claim. After the alleged assault, Reade said she complained about Biden's harassment to Marianne Baker, Biden’s executive assistant, as well as to top aides Dennis Toner and Ted Kaufman. All three Biden staffers recently told The New York Times that she made no complaint to them. 

And they did not offer the standard, noncommittal “I don’t remember any such complaint.” The denials were firm. “She did not come to me. If she had, I would have remembered her,” Kaufman said. Toner made a similar statement. And from Baker: “I never once witnessed, or heard of, or received, any reports of inappropriate conduct (by Biden), period." Baker said such a complaint, had Reade made it, "would have left a searing impression on me as a woman professional, and as a manager.” 

►Missing formal complaint. Reade told The Times she filed a written complaint against Biden with the Senate personnel office. But The Times could not find any complaint. When The Times asked Reade for a copy of the complaint, she said she did not have it. Yet she maintained and provided a copy of her 1993 Senate employment records. 

It is odd that Reade kept a copy of her employment records but did not keep a copy of a complaint documenting criminal conduct by a man whose improprieties changed “the trajectory” of her life. It’s equally odd The Times was unable to find a copy of the alleged Senate complaint. 

►Memory lapse. Reade has said that she cannot remember the date, time or exact location of the alleged assault, except that it occurred in a “semiprivate” area in corridors connecting Senate buildings. After I left the Justice Department, I was appointed by the federal court in Los Angeles to represent indigent defendants. The first thing that comes to mind from my defense attorney perspective is that Reade’s amnesia about specifics makes it impossible for Biden to go through records and prove he could not have committed the assault, because he was somewhere else at the time. 

For instance, if Reade alleged Biden assaulted her on the afternoon of June 3, 1993, Biden might be able to prove he was on the Senate floor or at the dentist. Her memory lapses could easily be perceived as bulletproofing a false allegation.  

►The lie about losing her job. Reade told The Union that Biden wanted her to serve drinks at an event. After she refused, "she felt pushed out and left Biden's employ," the newspaper said last April. But Reade claimed this month in her Times interview that after she filed a sexual harassment complaint with the Senate personnel office, she faced retaliation and was fired by Biden’s chief of staff. 

Leaving a job after refusing to serve drinks at a Biden fundraiser is vastly different than being fired as retaliation for filing a sexual harassment complaint with the Senate. The disparity raises questions about Reade’s credibility and account of events. 

►Compliments for Biden. In the 1990s, Biden worked to pass the Violence Against Women Act. In 2017, on multiple occasions, Reade retweeted or “liked” praise for Biden and his work combating sexual assault. In the same year, Reade tweeted other compliments of Biden, including: “My old boss speaks truth. Listen.” It is bizarre that Reade would publicly laud Biden for combating the very thing she would later accuse him of doing to her. 

►Rejecting Biden, embracing Sanders. By this January, Reade was all in for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Her unwavering support was accompanied by an unbridled attack on Biden. In an article on Medium, Reade referred to Biden as “the blue version of Trump.” Reade also pushed a Sanders/Elizabeth Warren ticket, while complaining that the Democratic National Committee was trying to “shove” Biden “down Democrat voters throats.” 

Despite her effusive 2017 praise for Biden’s efforts on behalf of women, after pledging her support to Sanders, Reade turned on Biden and contradicted all she said before. She claimed that her decision to publicly accuse Biden of inappropriately touching her was due to “the hypocrisy that Biden is supposed to be the champion of women’s rights.” 

►Love of Russia and Putin. During 2017 when Reade was praising Biden, she was condemning Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s efforts to hijack American democracy in the 2016 election. This changed in November 2018, when Reade trashed the United States as a country of “hypocrisy and imperialism” and “not a democracy at all but a corporate autocracy.” 

Reade’s distaste for America closely tracked her new infatuation with Russia and Putin. She referred to Putin as a “genius” with an athletic prowess that “is intoxicating to American women.” Then there’s this gem: “President Putin has an alluring combination of strength with gentleness. His sensuous image projects his love for life, the embodiment of grace while facing adversity.” 

In March 2019, Reade essentially dismissed the idea of Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election as hype. She said she loved Russia and her Russian relatives — and "like most women across the world, I like President Putin … a lot, his shirt on or shirt off.” 

Believe all women? Now that Reade has accused Joe Biden of sexual assault, never mind. 

Pivoting again this month, Reade said that she “did not support Putin, and that her comments were pulled out of context from a novel she was writing,” according to The Times. The quotations above, however, are from political opinion pieces she published, and she did not offer any other "context" to The Times. 

Reade's writings shed light on her political alliance with Sanders, who has a long history of ties to Russia and whose stump speech is focused largely on his position that American inequality is due to a corporate autocracy. But at a very minimum, Reade's wild shifts in political ideology and her sexual infatuation with a brutal dictator of a foreign adversary raise questions about her emotional stability. 

►Suspect timing. For 27 years, Reade did not publicly accuse Biden of sexually assaulting her. But then Biden's string of March primary victories threw Sanders off his seemingly unstoppable path to the Democratic nomination. On March 25, as Sanders was pondering his political future, Reade finally went public with her claim. The confluence of Reade’s support of Sanders, distaste for the traditional American democracy epitomized by Biden, and the timing of her allegation should give pause to even the most strident Biden critics. 

►The Larry King call. Last week, new "evidence" surfaced: a recorded call by an anonymous woman to CNN's "Larry King Live" show in 1993. Reade says the caller was her mother, who's now deceased. Assuming Reade is correct, her mother said: "I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him." 

As a prosecutor, this would not make me happy. Given that the call was anonymous, Reade’s mother should have felt comfortable relaying the worst version of events. When trying to obtain someone’s assistance, people typically do not downplay the seriousness of an incident. They exaggerate it. That Reade’s mother said nothing about her daughter being sexually assaulted would lead many reasonable people to conclude that sexual assault was not the problem that prompted the call to King. 

Reade’s mother also said her daughter did not go to the press with her problem “out of respect” for the senator. I’ve never met a woman who stayed silent out of “respect” for the man who sexually assaulted her. And it is inconceivable that a mother would learn of her daughter’s sexual assault and suggest that respect for the assailant is what stands between a life of painful silence and justice. 

The "out of respect" explanation sounds more like an office squabble with staff that resulted in leaving the job. Indeed, in last year's interview with The Washington Post, Reade laid the blame on Biden’s staff for “bullying” her. She also said, “I want to emphasize: It’s not him. It’s the people around him.” 

►Statements to others. Reade’s brother, Collin Moulton, told The Post recently that he remembers Reade telling him Biden inappropriately touched her neck and shoulders. He said nothing about a sexual assault until a few days later, when he texted The Post that he remembered Reade saying Biden put his hand "under her clothes.” 

That Reade’s brother neglected to remember the most important part of her allegation initially could lead people to believe he recounted his Post interview to Reade, was told he left out the most important part, and texted it to The Post to avoid a discussion about why he failed to mention it in the first place. 

In interviews with The Times, one friend of Reade’s said Reade told her she was sexually assaulted by Biden. Another friend said Reade told her that Biden touched her inappropriately. Both friends insisted that The Times maintain their anonymity. 

On Monday, Business Insider published an interview with a friend of Reade’s who said that in 1995 or 1996, Reade told her she was assaulted by Biden. Insider called this friend, Lynda LaCasse, the “first person to independently corroborate, in detail and on the record, that Reade had told others about her assault allegations contemporaneously.” 

But Reade alleged she was assaulted in 1993. Telling a friend two or three years later is not contemporaneous. Legal references to a contemporaneous recounting typically refer to hours or days — the point being that facts are still fresh in a person's mind and the statement is more likely to be accurate. 

The Insider also quoted a colleague of Reade’s in the mid-1990s, Lorraine Sanchez, who said Reade told her she had been sexually harassed by a former boss. Reade did not mention Biden by name and did not provide details of the alleged harassment. 

In prior interviews, Reade gave what appeared be an exhaustive list of people she told of the alleged assault. Neither of the women who talked to Business Insider were on that list. 

The problem with statements from friends is that the information they recount is only as good as the information given to them. Let’s say Reade left her job because she was angry about being asked to serve drinks or because she was fired for a legitimate reason. If she tried to save face by telling friends that she left because she was sexually assaulted, that’s all her friends would know and all they could repeat. 

Prior statements made by a sexual assault victim can carry some weight, but only if the accuser is credible. In Reade’s case, the statements coming from her friends are only of value if people believe Reade can be relied on to tell the truth, regardless of the light in which it paints her. 

►Lack of other sexual assault allegations. Last year, several women claimed that Biden made them uncomfortable with things like a shoulder touch or a hug. (I wrote a column critical of one such allegation by Lucy Flores.) The Times and Post found no allegation of sexual assault against Biden except Reade's. 

It is possible that in his 77 years, Biden committed one sexual assault and it was against Reade. But in my experience, men who commit a sexual assault are accused more than once ... like Donald Trump, who has had more than a dozen allegations of sexual assault leveled against him and who was recorded bragging about grabbing women’s genitalia.  

►What remains. There are no third-party eyewitnesses or videos to support Tara Reade’s allegation that she was assaulted by Joe Biden. No one but Reade and Biden know whether an assault occurred. This is typical of sexual assault allegations. Jurors, in this case the voting public, have to consider the facts and circumstances to assess whether Reade’s allegation is credible. To do that, they have to determine whether Reade herself is believable. 

I’ve dreaded writing this piece because I do not want it to be used as a guidebook to dismantling legitimate allegations of sexual assault. But not every claim of sexual assault is legitimate. During almost three decades as a prosecutor, I can remember dismissing two cases because I felt the defendant had not committed the charged crime. One of those cases was a rape charge.  

Reopen the Biden campaign: Ramp up social media and name a vice president now. 

The facts of that case made me question the credibility of the woman who claimed she was raped. In the end, she acknowledged that she fabricated the allegation after her boyfriend caught her with a man with whom she was having an affair. 

I know that “Believe Women” is the mantra of the new decade. It is a response to a century of ignoring and excusing men’s sexual assaults against women. But men and women alike should not be forced to blindly accept every allegation of sexual assault for fear of being labeled a misogynist or enabler. 

We can support the #MeToo movement and not support allegations of sexual assault that do not ring true. If these two positions cannot coexist, the movement is no more than a hit squad. That’s not how I see the #MeToo movement. It’s too important, for too many victims of sexual assault and their allies, to be no more than that. 

Michael J. Stern, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, was a federal prosecutor for 25 years in Detroit and Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter:  @MichaelJStern1

#Joe Biden #tara reade #metoo

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

Spooky Stories at Camp Quarantine: The Tale of the Swift Boat

Campfire story (n): a ritual where we all sit under the vast darkness of a midnight sky and tell ourselves a story about the big, scary monster that isn’t lurking just out of sight. You know. Probably.

2004 was a dark and stormy year.

The world pulsed with the still-raw trauma of the September 11 attacks. It was an anxious year of denial and bargaining, a desperate search for the loophole after Sirius Black fell through the veil. The twentieth century was dying and the third millennium was struggling to be born. It was the time of the Swift Boat.

The Usurper Bush the Lesser was in a tough place. If you were paying attention, you could see the signs that his stolen presidency was going to end in disaster and disgrace. And it was an election year, so people were about to start paying attention. So he took a lesson from his dear old Dad: he would unleash the hired help to unload a relentless fusillade of lies against his opponent.

Lying was an important part of the strategy because he was up against a strong challenger. John Kerry of Massachusetts was one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate; he was also a tall, fit, well-educated, impeccably diplomatic, Irish Catholic patrician who didn’t challenge anyone’s idea of what a president looked like. He talked like Barack Obama and looked like Mitt Romney. He was allowed to get pneumonia without anyone losing their goddamn minds, that’s how white and manly he was.

Most critically, though, he seemed to have almost unique standing to campaign against the Bush administration’s spectacular failure in Iraq. At the time, Republicans had – cynically, but effectively – made themselves synonymous with The Troops. Anyone who questioned their lies or challenged their reckless foreign policy was axiomatically discredited as “hating the troops.” Kerry, however, was A Troop, with a track record of telling the hard truth about an unjustified war. He had earned five medals in Vietnam and then used that moral authority to call for an end to the bloodshed. His service gave him a way to connect to a massive group of voters for whom the war had been a generational trauma – and it was a strong contrast to Bush, who had used his wealth and family connections to dodge the draft.

Enter the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. This was a group of Vietnam veterans who, in mid-2004, collectively realized that Kerry had lied about his heroism, hoodwinked the military into giving him an award, not once but five times, and successfully covered up his perfidy for thirty-odd years, despite having been scrutinized by Massachusetts voters and press in half a dozen statewide elections. This fantastical tale was largely spun by Jerome Corsi, now known for spreading birtherism (the racist conspiracy theory that former President Obama was not an American citizen), narrowly escaping prosecution by special prosecutor Robert Mueller, and, most recently, hawking Trump’s favorite quack coronavirus cure. They were, naturally, bankrolled by obscenely wealthy Bush supporters.

Maybe these Swift boat veterans were purposefully lying; maybe they were sad old men whose trauma was manipulated by right-wing propagandists. But they did what they were supposed to do. Kerry’s campaign lost its footing and never quite got it back. Instead of being able to challenge Bush’s lies about about the war in Iraq that was happening at the time, he was stuck on the defensive against Bush’s lies about the Vietnam war, which had ended decades before. In one retrospectively critical moment of priming the conservative base for Donald “I like the people who weren’t captured” Trump, delegates at the Republican convention wore silly purple heart bandaids to mock the wounds Kerry received in combat.

We know how that ended. Bush won the popular vote by around 2%, which back in the day actually used to be enough to win the election. Thus, ISIS rose and New Orleans drowned.

The thing is, the bad guys don’t actually forget the past as easily as they hope you do. When a play works, they run it again. When a play almost works, they run it again but better. When a play doesn’t immediately work, it still rallies the right-wing base and softens up the general public for their authoritarian politics of lies and abuse, so they keep it in their back pocket. So we should probably try to understand the specific elements that made the Swift boat propaganda campaign particularly effective.

Imagine you’re an amoral Republican candidate and I’m your mercenary sociopath of a campaign manager. I’ve just said, “look, you’re getting your ass kicked, we’re going to have to swiftboat your opponent” and you’re like “what’s a swiftboat? Write me a memo!” So, here it is. (You may be thinking “but you don’t know anything about me, and I’d never be a Republican candidate for anything!” Lesson the first: it doesn’t matter, because your swiftboat attack has nothing to do with you.) 

A swiftboat attack is bullshit. We like to think the truth is the most effective political weapon, but what if there really aren’t any disqualifying skeletons in your opponent’s closet? If you’re going to sabotage them anyway, that’s kind of liberating. After all, true stories depend on facts, which can be too boring to stick with people, and don’t have made-to-spec story arcs that conveniently fit with your campaign’s themes. Plus, if you’re relying on some actual truth that exists in the universe, you’re running the risk that there’s some mitigating factor out there, some witness who can give different context or a wronged party who can say they’ve buried the hatchet. Worse, your opponent already knows about stuff they actually did. Campaigns do a ton of background research into their own candidates, specifically so that they’re prepared for a predictable attack. They can’t prepare themselves for literally anything your army of political strategists can imagine, so you will always have the element of surprise.

Swiftboating isn’t an attack on your opponent’s policy. It’s an accusation that they’ve violated some taboo. There’s some sticky detail that people won’t quite be able to forget, even if they are exposed to the eventual debunking. The story, whatever it is, should be most upsetting to a large, important block of voters who are inclined to support your opponent.

The allegations don’t come from you, your campaign, or even a sympathetic journalist. They’re laundered through apparent private citizens who are part of a group of people that the general public tends to find sympathetic. This makes your story seem more credible to at first glance, wrong-foots anyone who wants to defend your opponent against the allegations, and lets you get credit for insincerely denouncing the attack while continuing to benefit from it.

This is a dick-swinging exercise, so be shameless. You’re not just putting your opponent in their place by showing you can get away with lying about them, and maddeningly rejecting responsibility for your lies. You’re showing off an authoritarian contempt for truth itself.

You need a relentless multimedia assault, impossible for people to miss. You might have to bully legitimate media into teaching the controversy, but they’re wimps. You’re not trying to convince most people that this specific story is true, you’re just trying to plant some seeds of doubt, and to sap time and enthusiasm from your opponent and their supporters. Make the election as miserable as possible and voters will reward you for it.

The most important thing is that you want your swiftboat attack to be on some area where you have a real liability and your opponent has a real strength. You want them to have to defend themselves on something they should get to use as a selling point. Even better, you neutralize a totally fair criticism of yourself – no matter how accurate they are or how ridiculous you sound, the press will dismiss it as “both sides point fingers.”

Kerry’s campaign gets used as some kind of object lesson about the futility of primary voters trying to pick a candidate they think will win: “Kerry was supposed to be electable and Kerry lost, so there.” (You’ve probably heard the even stupider cover version, “if Hillary was so electable, why’d she let herself get targeted by all those criminal conspiracies, HMMMM?”) This is 20/20 hindsight spiked with the just world fallacy. John Kerry seemed like a good candidate because he was, in fact, a good candidate, which is why he did significantly better expected, and he came pretty close to beating the odds. If there’s a lesson here, maybe it’s that swiftboating can keep a clearly electable candidate from being elected.

That’s a real buzzkill because it means we can’t treat the primaries like a round of playoffs where we root for the most exciting player and then kick back to watch the finals. But what it lacks in self-gratification, it makes up for with agency. If a swiftboat attack is supposed to affect how people respond to a candidate, then people get to choose whether or not we play along.

Trump, a textbook narcissist who instinctively projects his infinite failings onto others, is almost a swiftboating savant. His campaign is being handled by the professional Republican operatives behind the original Swift Boat campaign. (Literally, some of the same guys.) So as we move into the general election, know that this is in their bag of tricks. If you start to hear alarming stories about presumptive Democratic nominee former Vice President Biden or any other prominent Democrats on the ballot …. give it the smell test, is all I’m saying.

#disinformation #2004 election #2020 election #swiftboating #john kerry #george w bush

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): This is the first debate of 2020 and the last debate before the voting starts in Iowa in less than three weeks. There are six candidates (the smallest debate stage yet), and we’ve finally published our primary forecast (!!!), which shows the field (especially in Iowa) is pretty wide open.

So how are you thinking about tonight’s debate? Do you think it has the potential to really shake things up?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): I think the big story on Monday — and potentially the big story of the debate — is what’s going on with the rivalry between Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. First, there is the Sanders campaign’s talking points that reportedly had volunteers paint Warren as “the candidate of the elite.” And then a story leaked on Monday that’s pretty damn unflattering to Sanders, claiming he told Warren he didn’t think a woman could win the presidency. So … I would say there’s some jostling on the progressive end of the spectrum that could play out tonight!

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): Definitely. One thing I’ll be watching for is whether some of the tacit alliances we’ve seen between the candidates start to break down. That story really did not reflect well on Sanders. On the other hand, it’s generally risky for women to go on the offensive in debates like these, so it might be a little tricky for Warren to turn that to her advantage.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Yeah, it seems like the theme of this debate is somewhat inevitably going to be SANDERS-WARREN BATTLE. Unless they really do decide to turn the other cheek.

clare.malone: I mean, I do think the Warren people have been savvier about dropping opposition research like this.

natesilver: That’s a pretty serious oppo drop.

clare.malone: Sanders’s defense is generally “the mainstream media is stirring up conflict.”

Which is true, partially, in the sense that the media is the one publishing this stuff, but there are, indeed, real tensions between those two campaigns!

natesilver: Like, 95 percent of these oppo drops are dumb as fuck, concerning things that ordinarily voters couldn’t possibly care about. But this would be a big deal if it’s somehow confirmed or if Warren repeats the accusation herself.

sarahf: Yeah, it’s amazing how fast the news cycle moves, I had thought the situation with Iran would be the dominant thread of conversation tonight, but agree that between the Selzer & Co. Iowa poll that put Sanders in first in Iowa, and now the breakdown of Warren and Sanders’s truce to not attack each other, that will be a big part of tonight’s debate. And going in, it doesn’t seem great for Sanders …

ameliatd: Warren could really benefit from getting some more support from lefty Democrats who might be undecided or mostly seem to be sticking with Sanders. But if this accusation comes off as a cheap shot from Warren, I think that could hurt her. Or at least, not endear her further to those on the left.

clare.malone: Sanders’s support is pretty sticky, though, so it’s hard for me to see her winning over any of his supporters. Honestly, at this point, I think she has to worry about losing her supporters to Sanders or Pete Buttigieg — or even Joe Biden.

natesilver: Part of the dynamic is that Sanders hasn’t really been considered a front-runner. But now the media is covering him like one, even though it’s not really clear how much has actually changed in his candidacy. (If you look at the odds in our primary model — where we ran older forecasts retroactively before we launched — Sanders’s chances of winning the majority of pledged delegates have been pretty steady since November.)

sarahf: So let’s say tonight is the Sanders “wine cave” edition, where he’s at the center of attacks like Buttigieg was in the December debate. That debate seemed to have actually dampened some enthusiasm for Buttigieg — for instance, he fell pretty substantially in that Selzer poll from where he was in November. Do we see Sanders as the candidate tonight who has the most at stake? What about Biden? He is after all, the front-runner in our model even if he’s not the clear favorite to win; i.e., he’s still an underdog relative to the rest of the field.

natesilver: So on the one hand, I agree that Sanders’s support is likely to be pretty sticky, as Clare puts it. There’s evidence from polls that his supporters are the most firmly committed to any one candidate. But on the other hand, he hasn’t really gotten the same front-runner-type scrutiny that Warren DID get at some points this fall. So whether he holds up, once that level of scrutiny is applied, is very much up in the air.

ameliatd: And it’s not a low-stakes debate for Warren either, because she’s been actively trying to revitalize her campaign. When I was in Iowa on a reporting trip a few weeks ago, she was kind of trying to hit the “reset” button by hammering her core message on corruption and the economy. And of course, she’s now campaigning with Julián Castro.

clare.malone: I mean, we’ll just have to wait and see what the attacks are. I’m not entirely sure Warren, for instance, would go for “Bernie is sexist” on stage. That just doesn’t seem like her temperament. I would expect more of an attack on Sanders from Warren to be like, “his plans are implausible and therefore, bad for the general election.” But then again, he could also push back (as he’s been doing on the campaign trail), saying that HE is actually the most electable in a general. And there’s some truth to it, especially in comparison to Warren. Our polling with Ipsos shows the same thing — voters generally rate Sanders next after Biden in terms of his ability to defeat Trump.

Also, Sanders benefits from everyone kinda knowing what his thing is — socialism, baby! — which takes some of the sting out of “he’s too far out there!!” attacks. The brand is strong, as the kids say.

sarahf: Right, but to Amelia’s point, tonight could be a big night for Warren. She was only 3 points behind Sanders in that Selzer poll, which is a good sign for her considering her national numbers had dipped in late November and through December. And you can already see the slightest of upticks already in our national polling average:

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): Yeah, that Selzer poll had Sanders in the lead in Iowa as we’ve discussed, but then that Monmouth poll out on Monday showed Biden in the lead with 24 percent in Iowa and Sanders in second at 18 percent, suggesting that Iowa is very wide open and very difficult to predict.

clare.malone: Like the state itself!

sarahf: Right, Biden is either in first or fourth, depending on which poll you look at.

geoffrey.skelley: So far, the debates haven’t seemed to have affected the polls all that much, at least not since Sen. Kamala Harris’s surge after the June debate.

The first Democratic debate shifted polls the most

Average change* in national polls and the candidates who moved the most after the first four Democratic primary debates

Debate Avg. Change Biggest gainer Biggest loser June 26-27 +/- 2.4 Harris +8.3 Biden -6.5 July 30-31 0.9 Warren +3.0 Harris -3.0 Sept. 12 1.1 Warren +4.4 Sanders -2.0 Oct. 15 1.0 Buttigieg +1.6 Warren -3.5

*Average change in national polls evaluates the average absolute change in polling averages before and after each debate across the 10 candidates with the highest post-debate polling average. Polling averages were calculated using national polls conducted during the two weeks before and two weeks after each debate.

Source: Polls

Although I haven’t run the numbers the same way for the November and December debates, one look at the polls suggests there wasn’t a dramatic shakeup after those events, either. Now, tonight’s debate could be different since there are fewer candidates and voting is right around the corner. But then again, maybe not.

clare.malone: My spidey sense is that this debate will matter, especially to Iowans. These people are tuned in to a deranged degree!

natesilver: And polls also find that a high proportion of Iowans haven’t yet made their final decision.

clare.malone: Right.

sarahf: So if many Iowans haven’t made their final decision … how many do you think are actively considering Amy Klobuchar or Tom Steyer?

Klobuchar didn’t do as well in that Selzer poll as I thought she might, given how respondents in our poll with Ipsos rated her December debate performance. Granted, a lot of time has passed since Dec. 19, but there also haven’t been that many polls.

And then Steyer had a kind of weird surge in South Carolina and Nevada? It’s too soon to really make sense of what’s happening there (although he has spent a ton of money on TV ads).

natesilver: Klobuchar is actually in a pretty weird place. She’s at 6.6 percent in our Iowa polling average, but usually candidates either rise up to at least ~15 percent in Iowa — which matters, given how the caucus process itself works — or fall back into the low single digits.

clare.malone: The Steyer stuff is interesting in the sense that yes, he’s doing well in polls, probably because of advertising in those two states that have fewer ads in general than, say, Iowa or New Hampshire. But other candidates are going to start to get into that media-market scrum. Let’s see how much those numbers stick for him.

What I will say, though, is that the ads themselves cannily talk about the economy, not impeachment or climate change, subjects with which Steyer is more closely associated.

ameliatd: Steyer has been kind of defensive, too, about the fact that he made the debate at all — the implication being that he’s only there because he spent a ton of money on ads. That makes him a potential target, particularly for someone like Sanders or Warren. But attacking him also runs the risk of making him look like a more serious threat, so it’s somewhat complicated.

clare.malone: I think he won’t really be a big factor, tbh.

natesilver: I just don’t think Steyer is very interesting.

ameliatd: Right, maybe the other candidates won’t think it’s worth their time to question why he’s even there.

natesilver: So long as he’s at 3 percent in Iowa and New Hampshire, I don’t really care where he is in Nevada and South Carolina.

clare.malone: I mean, I don’t think he’s half bad in debates! I just think the scrum will go a little more the Sanders/Warren and the Buttigieg/Klobuchar.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): We touched on this a bit earlier, but Biden is currently winning the race for the nomination. And I think, as a result, you are seeing blunter criticism of him. Buttigieg and Sanders have both taken Biden to task for his vote for the Iraq War, and Sanders has also criticized Biden’s record on issues of racial justice.

I’m not sure his rivals will attack Biden on Tuesday, but that’s the thing I’m watching most closely: Does anyone decide this is the last real chance to take on the person mostly likely to win? I have been confused by how much Warren’s allies are attacking Buttigieg, and now it seems like Warren is attacking Sanders — but Biden is winning!

It feels like 2016 a bit — Christie attacking Rubio instead of Trump — what is the point?

natesilver: If somehow Biden gets through the debate, and all the focus is on Sanders vs. Warren, Buttigieg, etc. — that seems like a very fortunate outcome for the former vice president.

ameliatd: Yes, Biden clearly benefited from being able to float above the fray in the December debate. And the other candidates mostly let him do that, which was a little weird.

natesilver: Biden does have a tendency to cause trouble for himself, of course.

It’s also probably worth noting that his relatively smooth debate in December has been followed up by quite a few endorsements, etc. Party elites seem to have fewer concerns than they once did about his steadiness as a candidate.

perry: Harris was kind of limited in taking on Biden, in my view, since she will be high on the VP list. But I don’t think Biden is going to pick Buttigieg, Warren or Sanders for VP, so they have very little incentive to hold back. Buttigieg, in particular, has been very good at attacking people — it would be interesting to see if one was the one to push the Iraq issue, because Biden seems, at times, unwilling to concede he voted for the war.

clare.malone: Yeah, I gotta say, that whole thing is really weird.

John Kerry, a Biden surrogate, was trying to say that other candidates were misrepresenting his record, but it’s clear as day that Biden voted for the Iraq War. If you want to complicate the narrative and say it was a mistake, and you were misled — fine. But that whole talking point is weak sauce, in my opinion.

sarahf: OK, this is our last debate before the voting starts in Iowa, and as I said at the outset of the chat — it’s pretty much a four-way race with Biden, Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg all projected to get some delegates. Biden is in the lead in our forecast, but as we’ve said in our chat, a lot of Iowans are still on the fence. What will you be keeping a close eye on tonight to see if it moves the needle at all?

perry: Biden seems poised to win the nomination — perhaps even Iowa. I’ll be watching to see whether any of the other top three really take him on — and if they do, on what issues?

ameliatd: I will be interested to see, as Perry mentioned, if Biden’s Iraq war vote — and his strange unwillingness to admit to it — gets turned against him, or if he can turn the general foreign policy conversation/discussion of what’s happening with Iran in his favor. Because in general, that’s an issue where he has a clear advantage over the other candidates.

clare.malone: I mean, it’s trite, but I’ll be curious to see what Warren and Sanders do on stage, given the conflict they’ve had. And I’ll be curious to see if Sanders, in particular, challenges Biden on a general-election electability front.

natesilver: Repeating myself a bit, but it feels to me like Sanders is liable to play a central role in this debate with perceptions that he’s now a front-runner, and those sorts of debates tend to be pretty high stakes.

ameliatd: Basically, tonight comes down to who’s taking the gloves off, and who are they going after?

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #A FiveThirtyEight Chat

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 24, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Shortly after noon today, President Biden announced to reporters, “We have a deal.” After weeks of negotiations, a bipartisan group of 5 Democratic and 5 Republican senators have agreed to a blueprint for an infrastructure bill with $973 billion in spending, $579 billion of it new. If 5 more Republicans sign on—and if all the Democrats vote yes—this bill can overcome any filibusters thrown in its path.

In this case, progressive Democrats are as much a sticking point as Republicans, for in order to get Republicans on board, the measure abandons a number of key Democratic priorities. So Democratic leaders have planned for the measure to move forward in tandem with a much larger package that includes Democratic priorities, including funding to combat climate change and to support the caregiver economy. It will likely also start to undo the cuts in the corporate tax rate Republicans pushed through in 2017. The bill is currently estimated to cost about $6 trillion, and it would pass through the budget reconciliation process, which cannot be filibustered and thus will require only a simple majority.

Both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Biden say they will not finish the infrastructure bill without the larger companion bill. Passing the infrastructure package gives Biden a major bipartisan win at the same time it lets Republicans take credit for infrastructure funding that most Americans like very much indeed. But if Republicans refuse to pass it, Democrats have the option of simply passing the larger measure without them.

This is a remarkably delicate balancing act that shows a lot of hard work. We’ll see how it plays out.

Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, Speaker Pelosi is starting to force a reckoning with the January 6 insurrection. Last month, the House of Representatives passed a bill to create an independent, bipartisan committee to investigate that crisis. The positive House vote included 35 Republicans, but in the Senate, Republicans killed the bill with the filibuster. Today, Pelosi announced she is establishing a select committee to investigate the insurrection. While the distribution of seats on the committee is not yet clear, it will have subpoena power and will publish its findings.

Unlike the independent committee Republicans shot down, this one is under no time constraint, leaving Republicans afraid the investigation will affect the 2022 election. In 2015, now–House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity that Republicans had put together one of the investigations of the attack on the U.S. compound at Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, to hurt then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s political future. Now leaders are afraid the Democrats will do the same thing to them.

Pressure is mounting on those who supported former president Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Today, an appellate court in New York suspended Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani from practicing law, concluding that he had made “demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump’s failed effort at reelection in 2020.” Since he lied to spread the Big Lie that Trump had won the election, the court concluded that his “conduct immediately threatens the public interest.”

The court continued: "The seriousness of respondent's uncontroverted misconduct cannot be overstated…. This country is being torn apart by continued attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election and of our current president, Joseph R. Biden. The hallmark of our democracy is predicated on free and fair elections. False statements intended to foment a loss of confidence in our elections and resulting loss of confidence in government generally damage the proper functioning of a free society."

It is an astonishing fall for a man who was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the top federal lawyer in Manhattan, before he was mayor of New York City.

Meanwhile, more information about the Trump administration continues to come to light. Earlier this week we learned that the White House response to coronavirus was determined by what officials thought would look good; today we learned that Trump was far closer to death with Covid-19 than the White House let on, surviving only thanks to rare experimental drugs. His science advisers hoped his brush with death would convince him to take the pandemic seriously, but it did not.

According to CNN, a forthcoming book by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender says that last summer, Trump wanted law enforcement and military officials to go in and "beat the f--k out" of the civil rights protesters. “Just shoot them,” he is alleged to have said repeatedly. The book suggests that it was then–Attorney General William Barr and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mike Milley, who held him back.

Like the former president, his supporters are talking more and more violently as the country seems to be slipping out of their control.

Will Sommer, politics reporter at the Daily Beast who is currently writing a book on QAnon, yesterday flagged a clip from a contributor to the right-wing conspiracy network OAN. The contributor repeated the lie that “voter fraud” undermined the 2020 election, but then went further: “What are the consequences for traitors who meddled with our sacred democratic process and tried to steal power by taking away the voices of the American people?” he asked.

"In the past, America had a very good solution for dealing with such traitors,” he said. “Execution.”

"Exactly how many people were involved in these efforts to undermine the election?" he asked. "Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? How many people does it take to carry out a coup against the presidency?"

Historians rightly recognize this rhetoric as deadly dangerous, but we are not the only ones. On Twitter, California Democratic Representative Ted Lieu begged House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to stop this escalation while it is still possible: “You are in a position to reduce violence. Lives are potentially at stake. Please just say one simple, truthful sentence: the election was not stolen.”

Michigan Representative Peter Meijer was more specific: “Let me be clear,” he tweeted. “[M]ore people will die [because] of craven propaganda like this. People who believe [the] election was a “coup” + view [government] officials as traitors will seek what they view as ‘justice.’ When there are no arrests [because] this is all a lie they will take matters into their own hands.”

Indeed, Sommer tweeted: “I came across the clip because QAnon people… see it as proof that the mass executions are right around the corner. Lots of glee in the Q chat rooms, demands for how exactly their imagined executions will be carried out and complaints they had to wait too long.”

Yesterday, an official from the Department of Homeland Security told members of the House Committee on Homeland Security that the department is following online discussions among extremists who believe the conspiracy theory that former president Trump will be reinstated in August. They fear that expectation could trigger violence.

—-

Notes:

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/24/dhs-concerned-trump-reinstatement-496050

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/560103-biden-says-he-wont-sign-bipartisan-bill-without-reconciliation-bill

https://www.rollcall.com/2021/06/24/investors-press-firms-on-donations-as-political-spending-jumps/

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/pelosi-no-vote-on-infrastructure-deal-until-dem-priorities-passed-through-reconciliation

https://www.rawstory.com/amp/oan-election-conspiracy-2653522376

Will Sommer @willsommerI came across the clip because QAnon people are see it as proof that the mass executions are right around the corner. Lots of glee in the Q chat rooms, demands for how exactly their imagined executions will be carried out and complaints they had to wait too long.480 Retweets2,517 Likes

June 24th 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pelosi-announces-a-select-committee-will-investigate-the-jan-6-attack-on-the-capitol-by-a-pro-trump-mob/2021/06/24/55497282-d4f5-11eb-ae54-515e2f63d37d_story.html

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/24/politics/read-giuliani-law-license-ruling/index.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/24/nightmare-scenario-book-excerpt/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kevin-mccarthys-truthful-gaffe/2015/09/30/f12a9fac-67a8-11e5-8325-a42b5a459b1e_story.html

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/24/politics/bender-book-trump-milley-protests/index.html

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#politics #political #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #corrupt GOP #the big lie #Criminal GOP #Infrastructure