4 ms·

> but if it avoids a second Trump term I'm no Trump fanatic, but I still do not understand what people's real problem is with him either. Most of their problem

by brink 4y ago

> but if it avoids a second Trump term I'm no Trump fanatic, but I still do not understand what people's real problem is with him either. Most of their problems seem to be made up. You can see it most clearly in the Jan 6th committee, who were committed by any means to suggesting that Trump incited violence even though he directly and plainly called for peaceful protest and spoke against violence that day, yet they showed none of that during the "trials".

spywaregorilla 4y ago
Anyone who denies the legitimacy of democratic elections is an enormous threat to the nature of democracy and should not be given large political power.
- brink 4y ago
  The left did that in '16 and went on a sham witch hunt for meddling Russians for 3 years until they came up with pretty much nothing. So I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Maybe.. "It's only okay when we do it"?
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    The conclusion was that Russia was without a doubt meddling with the election. But the conclusion was not that the election itself was fraudulent or something that we should not abide by.
- seanw444 4y ago
  Sounds awfully totalitarian. "Don't question it, or you don't get to play at all."
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    Telling the masses that your political opponents used fraud to get elected is far beyond the scope of reasonable questions. Undermining the systems of government to benefit your personal power is totalitarian.
    - brink 4y ago
      What's next, protesting the government at all is also undermining the systems of government and is totalitarian? If Trump's (or whatever figure of authority, because plenty of people have done this) claims are false, then do an audit out in the open. Suppressing the discussion through censorship is not the answer. And aside from that - pretending fraud isn't real or is an impossibility in an American election is incredibly naive. That's like saying Chicago can't have gun violence. Elections should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly.
      - ModernMech 4y ago
        > Elections should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly. Sure there's no problem with that. But that's not what Trump and his team did. Trump claimed there was fraud so loudly not because he wanted to find actual fraud (which he had no reason to believe existed), but because he wanted people to be very concerned with the idea the election was potentially fraudulent. He wanted people to be concerned with this idea because it legitimized his true motivations - he wanted power for himself. Trump's team didn't actually want to find fraud; no, their goal was to create an environment of suspicion about fraud, but they had absolutely no intention whatsoever to prove their case. We know this because in all of the 60+ court cases they brought, they never alleged fraud, let alone attempted to prove it. If they did, they would have revealed they had zero evidence for their claims. Of course for this reason, they lost every single case (except I think an early PA case that didn't even relate to claims of fraud). And it needs to be said that the elections were investigated. Georgia investigated every claim made by the President, and found none of them credible. If Trump were genuinely concerned with finding fraud and simply questioning the results of the election, he would have been satisfied with their process. But the process didn't end up with him winning Georgia, so he wasn't satisfied, to the point that he threatened Georgia elections officials with prosecution when they refused to overturn his loss there. So yes, when it comes to elections generally, they should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly. But we must also say in the same breath that we cannot let disingenuous concerns about "election integrity" actually undermine elections. That's a problem too, which has demonstrably lead to a coup attempt and violent insurrection. So I would say "voter fraud hysteria" is actually a worse problem than voter fraud itself, which is proven to be rare and hasn't caused any coups or insurrections.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- starkd 4y ago
  Denying the legitimacy election is something both parties do now. With regular frequency. There was plenty of it in the 2000 election with Bush v. Gore. Its perfectly reasonable given we do not have auditable elections.
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    Hasn't that improved recently with better ballot counting, fewer machines that only stores the result in hard drive somewhere instead of paper trails etc?
    - starkd 4y ago
      If it is not auditable and the source code is not open source, what would dispel fears of a fraudulent election? Virtually every other institution has lost credibility in public opinion polls. Why should elections be any different? The losing side will always cry foul, as they have for multiple elections now: 2000, 2004, 2016 and 2020. It is tempting to look the other way, when the one you voted for happened to win.
- djbebs 4y ago
  So are you going to be protesting against the democratic party for doing so in 2016?
- Dig1t 4y ago
  The left did the exact same thing with Russiagate back in 2016 when Trump was first elected. It's been happening for a long time. Dems response to this was not good in my opinion. There is obviously a large population of voters that believe that fowl play is happening in elections, instead of working to increase transparency - there are a lot of things we can do like increased auditing or coming up with a more open way to verify votes - they doubled down and are attacking those who are asking questions. These are fellow Americans, they should not be demonized, we should work to improve election integrity and openness, increase everyones' confidence in election integrity.
- gilmore606 4y ago
  > Anyone who denies the legitimacy of democratic elections Were you not alive for Bush v. Gore ? All of us on the left denied the legitimacy of that election, loudly, repeatedly, and I don't remember that being considered an "enormous threat to the nature of democracy".
Dig1t 4y ago
The biggest thing I think is that he was vilified, to an extreme degree, by corporate media. Every step he made and every word he uttered was spun or reworked by every major news outlet (except Fox) to look like he was somehow being racist or some other thing. So most peoples' view of him when they turned on the TV or opened up their news app was just the headlines with which they were bombarded. I'm also not a Trump fanatic either, but I did realize after he left office that there was a considerable amount of spin applied to basically everything he did.
ModernMech 4y ago
> plainly called for peaceful protest and spoke against violence that day, yet they showed none of that during the "trials". If you believe this is what Jan 6 was about, you didn't pay attention to what the Committee found. In fact it was an administrative coup first, which involved various state GOP parties, various GOP House Reps (Biggs, Gosar, Greene, and Jordan among them), various GOP Senators (Johnson and Cruz among them), the White House (President, Vice President, Chief of Staff, and various lawyers including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell). It was a conspiracy to commit fraud at the highest levels of the government, and the Committee lays it all out. Trump knew he lost the election very early on, but wanted to stay in power nonetheless. He admits this to many advisors and the Jan6 committee proves this through under-oath testimony which is not hearsay. They've released the transcripts, you can read them for yourself. John Eastman comes to him with a plan. This was the coup plot he called the "Green Bay Sweep": - Forge state certificates of the vote electing Trump, transmit them to the VP. This is illegal. - Have senators and house members object to real certificates of the vote electing Biden. This is legal - Have VP toss out real certificates. He does not have the power to do this. - These contests start a clock, that when it runs out, if a President Elect is not certified, it goes to state delegations for a majority vote. Republicans controlled the majority of state delegations at the time, so they would have installed Trump despite him losing the popular and electoral college votes. - The next step would probably be the Democrats would sue, it would make it to SCOTUS, and SCOTUS at that point likely wouldn't have taken the case, citing separation of powers (Constitution makes clear the only way to remove POTUS is impeachment or 25th amendment. SCOTUS has no power to do so, and how would they enforce it anyway?). DOJ wouldn't prosecute anyone because it would be controlled by Trump. This would have effectively ended democracy in America. BTW that speech in question? Why did he need everyone there on Jan6? To pressure Pence. He was the key to the whole thing, as he was tasked with overstepping his clear duties as VP at the Jan6 vote counting ceremony, and in doing so would have violated the Constitution. But in the days leading up to Jan6, Pence made clear to Trump that he was going to do the right thing, and that would have been the end of Trump's administrative coup plot. That's where the insurrection comes in. The Jan6 committee found that Trump knew the audience were armed. He instructed his SS to stop taking their weapons. He told the audience to go to the Capitol and "fight like hell". He told them there was a massive fraud and the election was stole, and the rules are very different in those circumstances. He was preceded by his lawyer, who told the audience that a "trial by combat" was in order. He instructed them to go to the Capitol to obstruct the vote count ("stop the steal"), which was exactly what his administrative coup plot required. And they did. They did everything Trump wanted, and he played his part by sitting back and letting it happen, instead of doing, well.... anything. Well, aside from further inciting the mob over Twitter as he watched them attack the Capitol on TV. He did do that. It would have worked too if it wasn't for two things: 1. Pence didn't leave the Capitol. 2. McConnell/Pelosi reconvened the Senate/House and they worked through the night to certify Biden as President Elect. If those two things hadn't happened, Trump's plan (really Eastman's) could have very well worked, and we'd be living in a very different country right now. That is why people don't like Trump -- because he's the kind of person (an authoritarian wannabe dictator) who worked to make that happen. We were saying so the whole time, yet people somehow still don't see it even after an attempted coup, only because he said the word "peaceful" once in an otherwise bloodthirsty and completely fraudulent series of speeches. There was no voter fraud and Trump knew that. Lying to a mob you know is armed that they are being defrauded, and telling them what to do about it, is incitement. And if he gets elected again, he'll do it again except next time he'll have the benefit of experience; failed insurrections usually beget successful ones if the insurrectionists are left unprosecuted and free to try again.

by brink 4y ago

spywaregorilla 4y ago

Anyone who denies the legitimacy of democratic elections is an enormous threat to the nature of democracy and should not be given large political power.

brink 4y ago
The left did that in '16 and went on a sham witch hunt for meddling Russians for 3 years until they came up with pretty much nothing. So I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Maybe.. "It's only okay when we do it"?
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  The conclusion was that Russia was without a doubt meddling with the election. But the conclusion was not that the election itself was fraudulent or something that we should not abide by.
seanw444 4y ago
Sounds awfully totalitarian. "Don't question it, or you don't get to play at all."
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Telling the masses that your political opponents used fraud to get elected is far beyond the scope of reasonable questions. Undermining the systems of government to benefit your personal power is totalitarian.
  - brink 4y ago
    What's next, protesting the government at all is also undermining the systems of government and is totalitarian? If Trump's (or whatever figure of authority, because plenty of people have done this) claims are false, then do an audit out in the open. Suppressing the discussion through censorship is not the answer. And aside from that - pretending fraud isn't real or is an impossibility in an American election is incredibly naive. That's like saying Chicago can't have gun violence. Elections should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly.
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      > Elections should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly. Sure there's no problem with that. But that's not what Trump and his team did. Trump claimed there was fraud so loudly not because he wanted to find actual fraud (which he had no reason to believe existed), but because he wanted people to be very concerned with the idea the election was potentially fraudulent. He wanted people to be concerned with this idea because it legitimized his true motivations - he wanted power for himself. Trump's team didn't actually want to find fraud; no, their goal was to create an environment of suspicion about fraud, but they had absolutely no intention whatsoever to prove their case. We know this because in all of the 60+ court cases they brought, they never alleged fraud, let alone attempted to prove it. If they did, they would have revealed they had zero evidence for their claims. Of course for this reason, they lost every single case (except I think an early PA case that didn't even relate to claims of fraud). And it needs to be said that the elections were investigated. Georgia investigated every claim made by the President, and found none of them credible. If Trump were genuinely concerned with finding fraud and simply questioning the results of the election, he would have been satisfied with their process. But the process didn't end up with him winning Georgia, so he wasn't satisfied, to the point that he threatened Georgia elections officials with prosecution when they refused to overturn his loss there. So yes, when it comes to elections generally, they should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly. But we must also say in the same breath that we cannot let disingenuous concerns about "election integrity" actually undermine elections. That's a problem too, which has demonstrably lead to a coup attempt and violent insurrection. So I would say "voter fraud hysteria" is actually a worse problem than voter fraud itself, which is proven to be rare and hasn't caused any coups or insurrections.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
starkd 4y ago
Denying the legitimacy election is something both parties do now. With regular frequency. There was plenty of it in the 2000 election with Bush v. Gore. Its perfectly reasonable given we do not have auditable elections.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  Hasn't that improved recently with better ballot counting, fewer machines that only stores the result in hard drive somewhere instead of paper trails etc?
  - starkd 4y ago
    If it is not auditable and the source code is not open source, what would dispel fears of a fraudulent election? Virtually every other institution has lost credibility in public opinion polls. Why should elections be any different? The losing side will always cry foul, as they have for multiple elections now: 2000, 2004, 2016 and 2020. It is tempting to look the other way, when the one you voted for happened to win.
djbebs 4y ago
So are you going to be protesting against the democratic party for doing so in 2016?
Dig1t 4y ago
The left did the exact same thing with Russiagate back in 2016 when Trump was first elected. It's been happening for a long time. Dems response to this was not good in my opinion. There is obviously a large population of voters that believe that fowl play is happening in elections, instead of working to increase transparency - there are a lot of things we can do like increased auditing or coming up with a more open way to verify votes - they doubled down and are attacking those who are asking questions. These are fellow Americans, they should not be demonized, we should work to improve election integrity and openness, increase everyones' confidence in election integrity.
gilmore606 4y ago
> Anyone who denies the legitimacy of democratic elections Were you not alive for Bush v. Gore ? All of us on the left denied the legitimacy of that election, loudly, repeatedly, and I don't remember that being considered an "enormous threat to the nature of democracy".

Dig1t 4y ago

The biggest thing I think is that he was vilified, to an extreme degree, by corporate media. Every step he made and every word he uttered was spun or reworked by every major news outlet (except Fox) to look like he was somehow being racist or some other thing. So most peoples' view of him when they turned on the TV or opened up their news app was just the headlines with which they were bombarded. I'm also not a Trump fanatic either, but I did realize after he left office that there was a considerable amount of spin applied to basically everything he did.

ModernMech 4y ago

> plainly called for peaceful protest and spoke against violence that day, yet they showed none of that during the "trials". If you believe this is what Jan 6 was about, you didn't pay attention to what the Committee found. In fact it was an administrative coup first, which involved various state GOP parties, various GOP House Reps (Biggs, Gosar, Greene, and Jordan among them), various GOP Senators (Johnson and Cruz among them), the White House (President, Vice President, Chief of Staff, and various lawyers including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell). It was a conspiracy to commit fraud at the highest levels of the government, and the Committee lays it all out. Trump knew he lost the election very early on, but wanted to stay in power nonetheless. He admits this to many advisors and the Jan6 committee proves this through under-oath testimony which is not hearsay. They've released the transcripts, you can read them for yourself. John Eastman comes to him with a plan. This was the coup plot he called the "Green Bay Sweep": - Forge state certificates of the vote electing Trump, transmit them to the VP. This is illegal. - Have senators and house members object to real certificates of the vote electing Biden. This is legal - Have VP toss out real certificates. He does not have the power to do this. - These contests start a clock, that when it runs out, if a President Elect is not certified, it goes to state delegations for a majority vote. Republicans controlled the majority of state delegations at the time, so they would have installed Trump despite him losing the popular and electoral college votes. - The next step would probably be the Democrats would sue, it would make it to SCOTUS, and SCOTUS at that point likely wouldn't have taken the case, citing separation of powers (Constitution makes clear the only way to remove POTUS is impeachment or 25th amendment. SCOTUS has no power to do so, and how would they enforce it anyway?). DOJ wouldn't prosecute anyone because it would be controlled by Trump. This would have effectively ended democracy in America. BTW that speech in question? Why did he need everyone there on Jan6? To pressure Pence. He was the key to the whole thing, as he was tasked with overstepping his clear duties as VP at the Jan6 vote counting ceremony, and in doing so would have violated the Constitution. But in the days leading up to Jan6, Pence made clear to Trump that he was going to do the right thing, and that would have been the end of Trump's administrative coup plot. That's where the insurrection comes in. The Jan6 committee found that Trump knew the audience were armed. He instructed his SS to stop taking their weapons. He told the audience to go to the Capitol and "fight like hell". He told them there was a massive fraud and the election was stole, and the rules are very different in those circumstances. He was preceded by his lawyer, who told the audience that a "trial by combat" was in order. He instructed them to go to the Capitol to obstruct the vote count ("stop the steal"), which was exactly what his administrative coup plot required. And they did. They did everything Trump wanted, and he played his part by sitting back and letting it happen, instead of doing, well.... anything. Well, aside from further inciting the mob over Twitter as he watched them attack the Capitol on TV. He did do that. It would have worked too if it wasn't for two things: 1. Pence didn't leave the Capitol. 2. McConnell/Pelosi reconvened the Senate/House and they worked through the night to certify Biden as President Elect. If those two things hadn't happened, Trump's plan (really Eastman's) could have very well worked, and we'd be living in a very different country right now. That is why people don't like Trump -- because he's the kind of person (an authoritarian wannabe dictator) who worked to make that happen. We were saying so the whole time, yet people somehow still don't see it even after an attempted coup, only because he said the word "peaceful" once in an otherwise bloodthirsty and completely fraudulent series of speeches. There was no voter fraud and Trump knew that. Lying to a mob you know is armed that they are being defrauded, and telling them what to do about it, is incitement. And if he gets elected again, he'll do it again except next time he'll have the benefit of experience; failed insurrections usually beget successful ones if the insurrectionists are left unprosecuted and free to try again.