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THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty's
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2021-06-04 at 5:37 PM UTCThe really great thing about these radical leftwing nutjobs is they're so stupid they actually think the truth isn't going to come out. Like the Wuhan lab leak and Fraudster Fauci and the stolen 2020 election. They actually think the truth will never come out on anything and they are just going to waltz off into the sunset and live happily ever after. What a bunch of gullible and clueless imbeciles! ALL the truth is going to come out, retards! To think otherwise is just you being what you really are! Stupid!The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2021-06-04 at 5:37 PM UTCMaking
America
Grifter-In-Chief
Awoke
MSNBC
Biden's new anti-corruption memo is a reminder of just how corrupt the Trump White House was
Jessica Levinson
When President Joe Biden released an anti-corruption national security memo on Thursday, at least one thing was made abundantly clear: Biden is the polar opposite of former President Donald Trump.
This could be the worst version of a blue-ribbon commission; i.e., a place where good ideas go to die.
Both Biden and Trump have outwardly contended that corruption is a festering problem facing our country. But while Trump peddled it, Biden is trying to curtail it.
Biden has correctly situated corruption as a national security concern. Biden directed federal agencies and departments to report back to him about the best ways to fight global corruption within 200 days. His Thursday memo outlines the very real and specific problems with corruption: an erosion of public trust, an opportunity for authoritarian leaders to flourish and subvert democracy, an increase in national security concerns and economic harms, among others.
Trump didn’t drain the swamp; he poisoned it, and then flooded it. He used his position of public trust to benefit himself — the typical definition of public corruption. Trump used the presidency to enhance his brand and his bank account. He persistently promoted and visited his properties on the public dime, more than 500 times during his term in office. He appeared to sell access, often at these private properties, in exchange for patronage. Reports indicate that he raked in $8.1 million from taxpayers and donors during visits to Trump-owned properties. By one account he engaged in more than 3,500 conflicts of interest. As president, the man was a walking conflict of interest.
And then there was the time that Trump appeared to dangle the promise of official acts in exchange for a personal favor. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about the first impeachment, back in a time before Trump claimed, contrary to all available evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen and before the “big lie” became part of our common vernacular.
Despite Trump's empty rhetoric regarding the draining of the swamp, his term in office turned out to be a breeding ground for swamp-like creatures.
Trump’s first impeachment was about the 2020 election, at least indirectly. Trump allegedly asked the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation against Biden, his political rival at the time, in exchange for military aid and/or a White House meeting. The House impeached Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The Senate failed to convict.
And so, despite Trump's empty rhetoric regarding the draining of the swamp, his term in office turned out to be a breeding ground for swamp-like creatures.
Given the sheer number of departments and agencies covered by Biden’s anti-corruption memo, and the layers of bureaucracy involved in each department or agency, this review is likely to be, for lack of a better term, bulky. This could be the worst version of a blue-ribbon commission; i.e., a place where good ideas go to die. But there is something to be said for putting foreign and domestic actors on notice that the current president recognizes the problems inherent in corruption and is asking for solutions.
Will Biden ultimately be successful? We don’t know, and it largely depends on our definition of success. But he is trying, and if his decades of experience in elected office are any indication, he is unlikely to become another grifter-in-chief. Because America’s been there, done that. -
2021-06-04 at 5:39 PM UTC
Originally posted by ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ The really great thing about these radical leftwing nutjobs is they're so stupid they actually think the truth isn't going to come out. Like the Wuhan lab leak and Fraudster Fauci and the stolen 2020 election. They actually think the truth will never come out on anything and they are just going to waltz off into the sunset and live happily ever after. What a bunch of gullible and clueless imbeciles! ALL the truth is going to come out, retards! To think otherwise is just you being what you really are! Stupid!
Yes it will.
And...you should be very afraid. -
2021-06-04 at 5:40 PM UTC-JUST IN CASE ANYONE MISSED THIS-
Originally posted by stl1 Making
America
Grateful
Again
Reuters
Facebook suspends former U.S. President Trump's account until 2023
By Elizabeth Culliford
(Reuters) -Facebook Inc on Friday suspended former U.S. President Donald Trump from its platform until at least January 2023 and announced changes to how it will treat rule-breaking world leaders in the future.
Facebook's independent oversight board in May upheld the social media giant's block on Trump, which was enforced in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, because the company said his posts were inciting violence.
However, the board ruled it was wrong to make the ban indefinite and gave it six months to determine a "proportionate response."
Trump's two-year suspension was effective from the initial date he was he was blocked - Jan. 7 this year - and will only be reinstated if the risk of public safety had receded, Facebook said in a blog post. A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Facebook said it would work with experts to make this determination and would evaluate factors including instances of violence, restrictions on peaceful assembly and other markers of civil unrest. It also said there would be a set of escalating sanctions that would be triggered if Trump broke further rules that could lead to his permanent removal.
"Given the gravity of the circumstances that led to Mr. Trump's suspension, we believe his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols," Facebook's head of global affairs Nick Clegg said in the post.
The timing of Trump's suspension means Trump will not be able to use his accounts ahead of the November 2022 national midterm elections, when his party will be competing for Congressional seats, but may be able to return to social media well before the next presidential election in late 2024.
Social media companies have grappled in recent years with how to handle world leaders and politicians who violate their guidelines.
Trump's suspension was the first time Facebook had blocked a current president, prime minister or head of state.
Facebook has come under fire from those who think it should abandon its hands-off approach to political speech. But it has also been criticized by those, including Republican lawmakers and some free-expression advocates, who saw the Trump ban as a disturbing act of censorship.
The company also announced, in response to the board's recommendations, that it would make changes to how it handles world leaders on its site. In one reversal, it is ending its policy that shields politicians from some content moderation rules because their content is considered "newsworthy." It will also disclose when it does use this exemption. -
2021-06-04 at 5:44 PM UTCImagine how dumbed down you'd have to be to think you could steal a national election and get away with it for long.
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2021-06-04 at 5:47 PM UTCMartin Sheen
Against
Grifting
Always
Mediaite
Martin Sheen Demolishes ‘Bum’ Donald Trump for His ‘Selfishness and Lies’: He’s a ‘Bad Man and He’s a Hustler’
Leia Idliby
The West Wing alum Martin Sheen did not hold back when asked about former President Donald Trump in a recent interview with Forbes contributor Jeff Conway.
“We’re stuck with the lie in the throat, and I think we’ve got to clear our throats and see through this fog of deception, divisiveness,” Sheen said when asked about today’s political climate. “I think we’ve forgotten something that is a deep part of our humanity, and that is we serve ourselves best when we serve others first.”
Sheen, who played fictional President Josiah Bartlet on Aaron Sorkin’s political drama, additionally asserted that Trump “hurt the country and all of his followers,” adding, “The worst part of it is that so many good people have followed this bad man and he’s a hustler.”
The actor stressed that Trump is only concerned with himself, adding that the United States needs to “see through his selfishness and greed and anger.”
“He has led the country in such a desperate way, of selfishness and lies, and we’ve got to shake this guy off,” Sheen added. “This guy does not deserve that much attention. He deserves a lot of pity, and we’ve got to call this bum out. To stand up, be a man, and say it’s all a lie, and show some respect and love for the country.”
The actor also recalled a time that Republicans and Democrats were held in the same regard, adding that both parties were once “equally admired,” as “there wasn’t a selfishness or power or dishonesty.” -
2021-06-04 at 5:49 PM UTCMartin Sheen... another washed up elite Hollywood pedophile with Trump Derangement Syndrome. Loads of credibility there.
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2021-06-04 at 6:23 PM UTCSpeculum follows and believes Sydney Powell as his truth teller.
WAKE UP AND SMELL THE SHIT! -
2021-06-04 at 6:25 PM UTCONE DAY UR GONNA FLIP THE FUCK OUT
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2021-06-04 at 6:48 PM UTCDemocrat priorities:
- killing babies
- higher taxes, higher food prices, higher fuel prices, higher rent prices
- skyrocketing crime rates
- teaching kindergarten kids to get sex changes
- promotion of voter fraud
- burning down churches, cities and towns
- toppling statues, defacing roads and buildings
- erasing history
- labelling all whites racist by default
- censure, bannings, mainstream media propaganda, using government agencies for political purposes
- conspiring with enemy nations like China and Russia
- banning pipelines
- banning religion
- attacking people physically and doxxing them because they have a different political opinion
- orchestrating reputation smears with empty lies and half-truths
- banning borders and allowing the world to come in and swamp the country
- stealing elections
What's not to like? -
2021-06-05 at 5:44 AM UTCThe Washington Post
Mike Lindell’s ‘fraud’ allegations are even more ridiculous than you might think
Philip Bump
If you were familiar with Mike Lindell a year or two ago, it was probably because you watch Fox News and had seen the ubiquitous ads for his company, MyPillow. Lindell appears in those ads to hype his pillows with Billy Mays levels of gruff enthusiasm.
Over the past six months, though, Lindell’s become better known as a salesperson for something far less comforting: former president Donald Trump’s unfounded claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Lindell’s wealth has made him a particularly loud voice among those clamoring about the election. He has the resources to hire various dubious “investigators” and to produce shakily constructed videos detailing what they’ve found. He also has the resources to respond to a 10-figure defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, not by acquiescing to having spread unverifiable claims but, instead, with a countersuit of his own in which he repeats and elevates those claims.
That countersuit, filed this week, is the written version of Lindell’s “documentaries,” melodramatic, glitchy, sweeping and deeply flawed in both obvious and non-obvious ways. Central to the effort are those claims that the election was stolen, a claim that the suit reiterates explicitly as an exculpatory point for Lindell’s assertions about Dominion’s voting machines.
“Fact,” the suit states at one point: “Direct and circumstantial evidence demonstrates that, during the 2020 General Election, electronic voting machines like those manufactured and sold by Dominion were manipulated and hacked in a manner that caused votes for one candidate to be tallied for the opposing candidate.”
This is, of course, not a fact, since it isn’t true. But this claim — that Lindell can prove or has proved that fraud occurred — is meant to bolster his public assertions about the company. After all, if rampant fraud occurred in places where Dominion’s machines were used, how could he be to blame for saying that they made that possible?
The catch here is that Lindell offers very little that’s actually intended to serve as direct evidence of malfeasance. There is a lot of hand-waving about questions that had been raised about Dominion’s machines and lots of ad hominem assertions about the company and its employees, but the suit introduces very little that might be considered actual, direct evidence that votes were manipulated.
Instead, there’s a lot of circumstantial stuff — like that Dominion wouldn’t turn over proprietary passwords to the team in Arizona that’s working on behalf of the Republican majority in the state Senate — to gin up questions about the election results. This was addressed in a scathing letter from county officials in Arizona explaining that the problem is the “auditors” chosen by the senators lacked the necessary credentials to do the research they wanted to do. The existence of that effort is itself presented by Lindell as evidence that something untoward happened, which is a bit like spending $250,000 on Bigfoot deterrents and then pointing to that investment as evidence that Bigfoot must exist.
There were some minor questions raised. One was that reported vote totals in Bibb County, Ga., changed on election night — a common occurrence during elections, given that thousands of locations are inputting vote totals in a short time period. Another was that Dominion had unexpectedly updated software the night before the election, marring voting in one Georgia county; this was later shown not to be the case.
Another bit of evidence presented by Lindell cites a complaint filed by an attorney named Matthew DePerno on behalf of his client in a lawsuit targeting Antrim County, Mich., where a vote adjustment also occurred on election night. Lindell’s lawsuit quotes a determination about Dominion’s machines made by an organization called Allied Security Operations Group: “The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors ... The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail.”
His lawsuit leaves out the part preceding that line: “We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”
It also leaves out that this analysis of Antrim County has been debunked repeatedly. It also leaves out that Allied Security Operations Group is so unreliable that it was viewed as too partisan even to participate in the Arizona “audit.”
At its heart, Lindell’s lawsuit narrows in on two pieces of purported evidence.
The algorithm
One claim made in the lawsuit is that the vote results in several swing states show evidence of manipulation.
From the lawsuit:
“In early 2021, a data scientist, Douglas G. Frank, PhD, uncovered an algorithm or ‘key’ — a sixth degree polynomial — that operates in the electronic voting machines in a number of states to determine the ballots cast. These algorithms are unique to each particular state. In other words, the algorithm used in Minnesota does not work next door in Wisconsin.”
Frank argues that he identified a pattern — that complicated sounding polynomial — that the results in nearly every county in a state that he looks at will almost precisely match. In a video of his own, Frank marvels at the fact that election results should so closely fit that pattern.
I actually looked at this claim last month. Unsurprisingly, it’s utter nonsense.
What Frank did to generate the key in Michigan, for example, is take the results in four counties in the state and average turnout by age in those four counties. Then he generated a line that was curvy enough to fit the average closely and fit it to the counties he was tasked with analyzing.
Nine counties in total, four of them being the ones used to generate the average.
This is like taking four Usain Bolt 100-meter races, averaging his time in those four and then comparing that average to those four races and then another five. Guess what? The average is going to be pretty close to the results across the board. Because the average was derived from the data it was evaluating.
Anyway, my prior article goes into this in more depth if you require more evidence. But I will point out one quote from Frank.
“There are a few little wiggles that don’t perfectly line up, but that’s not unusual because, after all, we’re dealing with human behavior,” he says in his video — despite his point being that what his key shows is not human behavior. “But for me to be able to predict that that well, you know there’s an algorithm function.”
Yeah, there is: the average that you yourself generated.
A fun aside: one of the people who’s being most actively hyping Frank’s research is a lawyer named Matthew DePerno.
The hacking
The other primary piece of evidence presented by Lindell in his lawsuit is that his analysts have found evidence that Chinese actors manipulated vote totals in a number of states.
From the lawsuit:
“Exhibit 12 shows a subset of 20 documented successful hacks through the election management system in the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wiscinsin, [sic] and Arizona resulting in a total 555,864 votes switched from President Trump to candidate Vice President Biden in the 2020 general election. These hacks came primarily from within China and are identified by the date, location, and the network from which the hack orginated [sic] and the location and network that was the target of the hack.”
For further explication of the findings, the lawsuit points readers to the most recent of Lindell’s documentaries, “Absolute 9-0.” It includes a lengthy list of complicated-looking data scrolling rapidly over the screen, the analyst himself — his face blurred — and a table of information about the points of origin of the purported hacks.
That scrolling text is supposed to represent PCAPs, packets of Internet traffic. What’s shown, though, is what appears to be voter database information rendered into hexadecimal digits.
If you don’t believe me, you can type in examples of the text yourself and convert it to readable text. Incidentally, the Pennsylvania voter file, from which these data appear to come, can be purchased from the state or a data vendor.
In other words, it’s not clear where this data came from or what it’s supposed to show. If it was Internet traffic, it’s being sent unencrypted and, for some reason, in hexadecimal instead of binary. What it doesn’t show is votes being flipped.
It’s not really clear what that would even mean, in fact, though Lindell’s analyst does explain that they had to do some translation from Chinese.
“We, so we, you know, because we’re dealing with other languages,” he says at one point, “we validated the validation that was validated.”
Okay, got it.
The “Exhibit 12” referenced in Lindell’s lawsuit includes a list of 20 connections from foreign countries that purportedly involved reducing Trump’s vote total. Again, how this supposedly happened isn’t explained. What that translated and triple-validated Chinese discussion included in the PCAPs (and maybe in the Pennsylvania voter file?) actually says isn’t mentioned. It’s just, here are 20 times Trump had votes stolen.
Similar data also appears in Lindell’s first documentary. In that video, the alleged vote-stealing data includes more information, including what are called MAC addresses, unique identifiers for Internet-connected hardware. It appears to be the same data (as Twitter user “zedster,” cited above, notes) that was cited in a book written by former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. The full spreadsheet of purported connections is on Byrne’s website, though the list of places where votes were changed is different in the two documents.
It’s also the case that the MAC addresses presented in the Byrne document and the first Lindell video are obviously made up. A MAC address is composed of six numbers, from 0 to 255, encoded in hexadecimal from 00 to FF. Some of the digits have particular meaning; the second character of the first number, for example, can be used to identify how it is administered and how it receives information. Yet, despite those differences in functionality, the second characters in each address in that file are evenly distributed from 0 to F (that is, 0 to 16). None is significantly more common than any of the others.
I know this is confusing, so let me use an analogy. Imagine that you had a list purporting to show a random collection of license plates. In your state, cars are given plates that start with the letter “A,” trucks get the letter “B” and tractors get a letter “C.” You analyze your list and find that it includes 1,000 “A” plates, 998 “B” plates and 1,003 “C” plates. You might suspect that something was up.
In fact, the same holds true for nearly every number included in the MAC addresses in that file. They all appear about as frequently as the others, within a narrow range. All except 255, “FF” — as though someone was generating random numbers less than 255, forgetting that 255 should be a permissible value.
Maybe Lindell’s “Absolute 9-0” video is using some other set of data that just happens to comport entirely with individual parts of Byrne’s spreadsheet. And maybe Lindell’s analyst has some way of verifying that votes were flipped besides literally doing nothing more than claiming that they were. Then the question becomes how: how did this happen without anyone noticing, how did it route through the Internet in a process that’s localized in states and why did it happen in some cases days after the election (purportedly) and from eight different countries?
Oh, and how did someone figure out how to do all this but not figure out how to actually encrypt what they were doing?
The short answer is that there’s simply no reason to assume that this is true. Literally none. It is much more likely that the conspiracy here is that some tech-savvy guys figured out how to bill a credulous billionaire for weeks of work than it is that this unnamed guy found actual evidence of vote-flipping and, instead of going to the police and becoming a celebrity, he went to a pillow salesman.
In other words, one assumes that Dominion’s lawyers aren’t that worried about this lawsuit. -
2021-06-05 at 9:29 AM UTCWHAT A FUCKING GOD DAMN NUTTER
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2021-06-05 at 2:33 PM UTCThe Hill
The Memo: Trump seizes spotlight to distract from defeat
Niall Stanage
It's like he's never been away.
Former President Trump will return to a campaign-style setting on Saturday, when he addresses the North Carolina Republican Party's convention.
It will be only Trump's second major public speech since his remarks near the White House on Jan. 6 - an address that became central to his second impeachment, on the charge of inciting the insurrection that followed.
Trump's appearance in Greenville, N.C., presumably won't have quite so big an impact.
But it is almost certain to include wild allegations glossing over the reality of his November defeat. Jabs at Facebook and Anthony Fauci are also likely, given that the former announced Friday it would uphold its ban on Trump until at least 2023 and the latter is the subject of renewed controversy over the origins of the coronavirus.
There are larger issues at play too. Trump's speech is sure to stoke more speculation about his intentions in 2024. And it will sharpen the question of whether the former president's refusal to concede defeat or cede the limelight hurts his party.
"If he did disappear, there would not be many Republican members of Congress looking for him," said former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.), who has become one of the former president's sharpest GOP critics. "They don't like him, they don't like what he is doing to the party. One of the reasons I am publicly saying this is because I know it is difficult for many members to say."
Other skeptics inside the GOP focus on Trump's willingness to encourage extreme or conspiratorial elements that could harm the party's long-term health.
Another former Republican member of Congress told this column in recent days that the former president was, in the big picture, "not the cause of our problems but an accelerant of them."
Some Republicans who hold a more sympathetic view of Trump still worry that his fixation on the 2020 election turns off persuadable voters, even as it delights the base.
Katon Dawson, a former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, told Yahoo News in a story published Friday that Trump's return to a more active and public role "will be massive and it ought to be in a good way." But Dawson also noted that it was important for Trump to stay "on message," adding, "reliving history is not a good political strategy."
It has always been debatable how much Trump cares about the Republican Party, aside from as a vehicle for his own ambitions. He has repeatedly feuded with its congressional leaders past and present, and has deviated from its traditional positions on everything from foreign wars to trade.
His supporters argue his personal traits and breaches of orthodoxy have enabled the party to appeal to a new cohort of working-class voters - including Latinos, with whom the GOP boosted its vote-share last November.
But his detractors claim he has fostered a cult of personality that has unmoored the party from any real ideological foundation. They point to the GOP's failure to even formulate a policy platform for the 2020 election as just one example.
Does Trump care? Maybe not. Some internal dissenters, like Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), have been marginalized. Others, like Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), are plainly in a minority even among their party colleagues in the Senate. And Trump remains the dominant figure among the base. An Economist/YouGov poll conducted May 29-June 1 indicated that 77 percent of Republican voters hold a favorable view of him.
Trump's return to public events is also about something else, however - an all-out effort to avoid the slow slide from relevance suffered by most losers in past presidential elections.
To his critics' chagrin, Trump's push to maintain his influence appears to be succeeding - even though they say his tactics are exacting a price on American democracy itself.
The speech in North Carolina - a state that Trump retained narrowly in November - comes amid media reports that he believes he could be "reinstated" to the presidency as soon as August.
Trump purportedly contends that a so-called audit of votes in Arizona's largest county will make the Grand Canyon State - won by President Biden by less than half a percentage point - reverse its results. This will then, in Trump's reported telling, become the first domino to fall, setting in chain a series of events that will lead to his restoration to power.
None of this is remotely likely to happen, as even many on the right acknowledge.
The notion of a Trump reinstatement would be "a rejection of reality, a rejection of law, and, ultimately, a rejection of the entire system of American government," Charles C.W. Cooke wrote in the conservative National Review on Thursday.
The Arizona "audit," meanwhile, is so risible - it has involved, among other things, searching for traces of bamboo in ballot papers - that even one Republican state senator has complained it "makes us look like idiots."
But all of that may be beside the point. As any illusionist knows, the key to most tricks is to get the audience to look in the wrong place. Trump, by keeping the focus on the idea of a restoration, or claims of fraud, or feuds with Facebook, keeps the focus off the realities behind his loss.
Trump lost the popular vote twice, never registered an approval rating of more than 50 percent in major polling averages, and saw his party lose control of both the Senate and the House during his tenure.
He often notes that, in November, he got the highest total number of votes of any Republican presidential nominee ever. He never notes Biden got 7 million more.
Most politicians with that kind of record would be shuffled off stage as their party turns the page.
But there's no turning the page from Trump, so far, by the GOP.
"If anyone in the past was saying the kinds of things he is saying, we would be laughing at them or putting them away," Comstock said.
Trump has avoided that fate. It looks like he can continue to do so.
It is a victory, of a kind, in the wake of a clear defeat. -
2021-06-05 at 2:35 PM UTC
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2021-06-05 at 2:54 PM UTCThe Guardian
Is America heading to a place where it can no longer call itself a democracy?
David Smith in Washington
If Donald Trump’s inaugural address can be summed up in two words – “American carnage” – Joe Biden’s might be remembered for three: “Democracy has prevailed.”
The new president, speaking from the spot where just two weeks earlier a pro-Trump mob had stormed the US Capitol, promised that the worst was over in a battered, bruised yet resilient Washington.
But now, four and a half months later the alarm bells are sounding on American democracy again. Even as the coronavirus retreats, the pandemic of Trump’s “big lie” about a stolen election spreads, manifest in Republicans’ blocking of a commission to investigate the insurrection. And state after state is imposing new voting restrictions and Trump allies are now vying to run future election themselves.
With Republicans still in thrall to Trump and odds-on to win control of the House of Representatives next year, there are growing fears that his presidency was less a historical blip than a harbinger of systemic decline.
“There was a momentary sigh of relief but the level of anxiety is actually strangely higher now than in 2016 in the sense that it’s not just about one person but there are broader structural issues,” said Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die. “The weird emails that I get are more ominous now than they were in 2016: there seems to be a much deeper level of misinformation and conspiracy theories.”
‘There was a momentary sigh of relief but the level of anxiety is actually strangely higher now than in 2016,’ said Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die.
There seems to be a much deeper level of misinformation and conspiracy theories
Daniel Ziblatt
Just hours after the terror of 6 January, 147 Republicans in Congress voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election despite no evidence of irregularities. Trump was impeached for inciting the violence but Senate Republicans ensured his acquittal – a fork in the road where the party could have chosen another destiny.
As Trump continued to push his false claims of election fraud, rightwing media and Republican state parties fell into line. A farcical “audit” of votes is under way in Arizona with more states threatening to follow suit. Trump is reportedly so fixated on the audits that he has even suggested – wrongly – he could be reinstated as president later this year.
Perhaps more insidiously, Trump supporters who tried to overturn the 2020 election are maneuvering to serve as election officials in swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada. If they succeed in becoming secretaries of state, they would exercise huge influence over the conduct of future elections and certifying their results. Some moderate Republican secretaries of state were crucial bulwarks against Trump’s toxic conspiracy theories last year.
The offensive is coupled with a dramatic and sweeping assault on voting rights. Republican-controlled state legislatures have rammed through bills that make it harder to vote in states such as Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Montana. Their all-out effort in Texas was temporarily derailed when Democrats walked out of the chamber, denying them a quorum.
Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University, commented: “The most worrying threat is at the state level, the effort to change voting rules, which I think is prompted by the failed effort to alter the election outcome of 2020.
“The lesson Republicans have learnt from that is they don’t really suffer any electoral consequences from their base pursuing this kind of thing. In fact, they’re rewarded for it. That’s very ominous because that suggests they’ll continue to try to do this until they pay an electoral price for it, and so far they don’t sense they’re paying an electoral price for it.”
Where is this authoritarian ecosystem heading? For many, the nightmare scenario is that Trump will run again in 2024 and, with the benefit of voter suppression, sneak a win in the electoral college as he did in 2016. If that fails, plan B would be for a Republican-controlled House to refuse to certify a Democratic winner and overturn the result in Trump’s favour.
Disputed presidential elections have been thrown to the House before, Ziblatt noted. “It’s not unprecedented but in those earlier periods you had two parties that were constitutional, fully democratic parties. The thought of having a dispute like that when one of the parties is only questionably committed to democratic rules and norms is very frightening.”
People use elections to get into power and then, once in power, assault democratic institutions
Daniel Ziblatt
In How Democracies Die, Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky argue that democracies often come under threat not from invading armies or violent revolutions but at the ballot box: death by a thousand cuts. “People use elections to get into power and then, once in power, assault democratic institutions,” Ziblatt said.
“That’s Viktor Orbán [in Hungary], that’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan [in Turkey], that’s Hugo Chávez [in Venezuela] and what’s distinctive about that is that it often begins incrementally. So people continue to go about their lives, continue to vote, parliament continues to meet and so you think, ‘Is there really a threat?’ But the power concentrates so it becomes harder and harder to unseat an incumbent.”
He added: “We shouldn’t overlook that fact that we had a change in government in January. What that suggests is our electoral institutions do work better than they do in Hungary. The opposition in the United States is more well-organised and financed than the Hungarian opposition or the Turkish opposition, so we shouldn’t overstate that. But on the other hand, the tendencies are very similar.”
Republicans are also playing a very long game, rewiring democracy’s hard drive in an attempt to consolidate power. Trump is arguably both cause and effect of the lurch right, which takes place in the wider context of white Christians losing majority status in America’s changing demographics.
His grip on the party appears only to have tightened since his defeat, as evidenced by the ousting of Trump critic Liz Cheney from House leadership and their use of a procedural move known as the filibuster to block the 6 January commission. Critics say that, in an atmosphere of partisan tribalism, the party is now driven by a conviction that Democratic victories are by definition illegitimate.
Kurt Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide who is now a Democrat, said: “It’s very clear that the next time there is a violent effort to overthrow our government, Republicans in Congress will be knowing accomplices in that effort. They are the getaway driver for the democratic arsonists.”
Bardella, a political commentator, added: “It has become painfully transparent that the Republican party platform is 100% anti-democratic and it is their ambition to impose minority rule on the majority going forward, because they know that when the playing field is level, they can’t win and so they have instead decided to double down on supporting a wannabe autocrat, and are doing everything they can to destabilise the democratic safeguards that we’ve had in place since the founding of our country.
“We cannot underestimate the gravity of this moment in time because what happens over the next month or year could be the turning point in this battle to preserve our democracy.”
The threat poses a dilemma for Biden, who was elected on a promise of building bridges and seeking bipartisanship. He continues to do so while issuing increasingly stark calls to arms. Speaking in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this week, he repeated his “democracy prevailed” mantra but then warned of a “truly unprecedented assault on our democracy” and announced that the vice-president, Kamala Harris, would lead an effort to strengthen voting rights.
Proposed national legislation to address the issue, however, depends on a Senate currently split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans (Harris has the tie-breaking vote). In order to pass it with a simple majority, Democrats would first have to abolish the filibuster but at least two senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have ruled out such a step.
Facing this stalemate, activists and civil society are trying to create a sense of urgency. More than a hundred scholars this week released a joint statement, posted by the New America thinktank, expressing “deep concern” at “radical changes to core electoral procedures” that jeopardise free and fair elections. “Our entire democracy is now at risk,” the scholars wrote.
Last year’s poll was dubbed “the election that could break America” and the nation was widely considered to have dodged a bullet; it may not be so fortunate in 2024. Yvette Simpson, chief executive of the progressive group Democracy for Action, added: “We’re getting to the place where we might not be able to call ourselves a democracy any more. That’s how dire it is.
“It is not just the fact that there is an orchestrated, concerted effort across our country to interfere with the most fundamental right of any democracy but that they’re doing it so blatantly, so out in the open and so unapologetically, and that there have been many attempts and there’s no easy way to stop it.”
Simpson compared Democrats’ victory over Trump to the film Avengers: Endgame and warned against complacency. “We just defeated Thanos and everybody was like, ‘OK, let’s take a break,’ and I’m like, ‘No, we cannot take a break because the GOP never take a break’. They know that we’re taking a break and that’s why they’re doing it now and so aggressively: ‘You think you won because Trump is out? Oh, we got you.’”
Ibram X Kendi, a historian and author of How to Be an Antiracist, added: “At the end of the day, there is an all out war on American voters, particularly younger voters, particularly younger voters of colour, and it’s happening from Texas to Florida and it’s really causing the American people to decide whether we want our democracy or not.” -
2021-06-05 at 4:01 PM UTC
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2021-06-05 at 4:11 PM UTC
Originally posted by stl1 The Guardian
Is America heading to a place where it can no longer call itself a democracy?
David Smith in Washington
If Donald Trump’s inaugural address can be summed up in two words – “American carnage” – Joe Biden’s might be remembered for three: “Democracy has prevailed.”
The new president, speaking from the spot where just two weeks earlier a pro-Trump mob had stormed the US Capitol, promised that the worst was over in a battered, bruised yet resilient Washington.
But now, four and a half months later the alarm bells are sounding on American democracy again. Even as the coronavirus retreats, the pandemic of Trump’s “big lie” about a stolen election spreads, manifest in Republicans’ blocking of a commission to investigate the insurrection. And state after state is imposing new voting restrictions and Trump allies are now vying to run future election themselves.
With Republicans still in thrall to Trump and odds-on to win control of the House of Representatives next year, there are growing fears that his presidency was less a historical blip than a harbinger of systemic decline.
“There was a momentary sigh of relief but the level of anxiety is actually strangely higher now than in 2016 in the sense that it’s not just about one person but there are broader structural issues,” said Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die. “The weird emails that I get are more ominous now than they were in 2016: there seems to be a much deeper level of misinformation and conspiracy theories.”
‘There was a momentary sigh of relief but the level of anxiety is actually strangely higher now than in 2016,’ said Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die.
There seems to be a much deeper level of misinformation and conspiracy theories
Daniel Ziblatt
Just hours after the terror of 6 January, 147 Republicans in Congress voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election despite no evidence of irregularities. Trump was impeached for inciting the violence but Senate Republicans ensured his acquittal – a fork in the road where the party could have chosen another destiny.
As Trump continued to push his false claims of election fraud, rightwing media and Republican state parties fell into line. A farcical “audit” of votes is under way in Arizona with more states threatening to follow suit. Trump is reportedly so fixated on the audits that he has even suggested – wrongly – he could be reinstated as president later this year.
Perhaps more insidiously, Trump supporters who tried to overturn the 2020 election are maneuvering to serve as election officials in swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada. If they succeed in becoming secretaries of state, they would exercise huge influence over the conduct of future elections and certifying their results. Some moderate Republican secretaries of state were crucial bulwarks against Trump’s toxic conspiracy theories last year.
The offensive is coupled with a dramatic and sweeping assault on voting rights. Republican-controlled state legislatures have rammed through bills that make it harder to vote in states such as Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Montana. Their all-out effort in Texas was temporarily derailed when Democrats walked out of the chamber, denying them a quorum.
Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University, commented: “The most worrying threat is at the state level, the effort to change voting rules, which I think is prompted by the failed effort to alter the election outcome of 2020.
“The lesson Republicans have learnt from that is they don’t really suffer any electoral consequences from their base pursuing this kind of thing. In fact, they’re rewarded for it. That’s very ominous because that suggests they’ll continue to try to do this until they pay an electoral price for it, and so far they don’t sense they’re paying an electoral price for it.”
Where is this authoritarian ecosystem heading? For many, the nightmare scenario is that Trump will run again in 2024 and, with the benefit of voter suppression, sneak a win in the electoral college as he did in 2016. If that fails, plan B would be for a Republican-controlled House to refuse to certify a Democratic winner and overturn the result in Trump’s favour.
Disputed presidential elections have been thrown to the House before, Ziblatt noted. “It’s not unprecedented but in those earlier periods you had two parties that were constitutional, fully democratic parties. The thought of having a dispute like that when one of the parties is only questionably committed to democratic rules and norms is very frightening.”
People use elections to get into power and then, once in power, assault democratic institutions
Daniel Ziblatt
In How Democracies Die, Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky argue that democracies often come under threat not from invading armies or violent revolutions but at the ballot box: death by a thousand cuts. “People use elections to get into power and then, once in power, assault democratic institutions,” Ziblatt said.
“That’s Viktor Orbán [in Hungary], that’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan [in Turkey], that’s Hugo Chávez [in Venezuela] and what’s distinctive about that is that it often begins incrementally. So people continue to go about their lives, continue to vote, parliament continues to meet and so you think, ‘Is there really a threat?’ But the power concentrates so it becomes harder and harder to unseat an incumbent.”
He added: “We shouldn’t overlook that fact that we had a change in government in January. What that suggests is our electoral institutions do work better than they do in Hungary. The opposition in the United States is more well-organised and financed than the Hungarian opposition or the Turkish opposition, so we shouldn’t overstate that. But on the other hand, the tendencies are very similar.”
Republicans are also playing a very long game, rewiring democracy’s hard drive in an attempt to consolidate power. Trump is arguably both cause and effect of the lurch right, which takes place in the wider context of white Christians losing majority status in America’s changing demographics.
His grip on the party appears only to have tightened since his defeat, as evidenced by the ousting of Trump critic Liz Cheney from House leadership and their use of a procedural move known as the filibuster to block the 6 January commission. Critics say that, in an atmosphere of partisan tribalism, the party is now driven by a conviction that Democratic victories are by definition illegitimate.
Kurt Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide who is now a Democrat, said: “It’s very clear that the next time there is a violent effort to overthrow our government, Republicans in Congress will be knowing accomplices in that effort. They are the getaway driver for the democratic arsonists.”
Bardella, a political commentator, added: “It has become painfully transparent that the Republican party platform is 100% anti-democratic and it is their ambition to impose minority rule on the majority going forward, because they know that when the playing field is level, they can’t win and so they have instead decided to double down on supporting a wannabe autocrat, and are doing everything they can to destabilise the democratic safeguards that we’ve had in place since the founding of our country.
“We cannot underestimate the gravity of this moment in time because what happens over the next month or year could be the turning point in this battle to preserve our democracy.”
The threat poses a dilemma for Biden, who was elected on a promise of building bridges and seeking bipartisanship. He continues to do so while issuing increasingly stark calls to arms. Speaking in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this week, he repeated his “democracy prevailed” mantra but then warned of a “truly unprecedented assault on our democracy” and announced that the vice-president, Kamala Harris, would lead an effort to strengthen voting rights.
Proposed national legislation to address the issue, however, depends on a Senate currently split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans (Harris has the tie-breaking vote). In order to pass it with a simple majority, Democrats would first have to abolish the filibuster but at least two senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have ruled out such a step.
Facing this stalemate, activists and civil society are trying to create a sense of urgency. More than a hundred scholars this week released a joint statement, posted by the New America thinktank, expressing “deep concern” at “radical changes to core electoral procedures” that jeopardise free and fair elections. “Our entire democracy is now at risk,” the scholars wrote.
Last year’s poll was dubbed “the election that could break America” and the nation was widely considered to have dodged a bullet; it may not be so fortunate in 2024. Yvette Simpson, chief executive of the progressive group Democracy for Action, added: “We’re getting to the place where we might not be able to call ourselves a democracy any more. That’s how dire it is.
“It is not just the fact that there is an orchestrated, concerted effort across our country to interfere with the most fundamental right of any democracy but that they’re doing it so blatantly, so out in the open and so unapologetically, and that there have been many attempts and there’s no easy way to stop it.”
Simpson compared Democrats’ victory over Trump to the film Avengers: Endgame and warned against complacency. “We just defeated Thanos and everybody was like, ‘OK, let’s take a break,’ and I’m like, ‘No, we cannot take a break because the GOP never take a break’. They know that we’re taking a break and that’s why they’re doing it now and so aggressively: ‘You think you won because Trump is out? Oh, we got you.’”
Ibram X Kendi, a historian and author of How to Be an Antiracist, added: “At the end of the day, there is an all out war on American voters, particularly younger voters, particularly younger voters of colour, and it’s happening from Texas to Florida and it’s really causing the American people to decide whether we want our democracy or not.”
tl/drThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2021-06-05 at 4:20 PM UTCI DIDNT READ IT CUZ IT WAS FROM UNRELIABLE SOURCE'S POSTED BY A LEFT WING NUT JOB THAT IS ONLY ABLE TO FIND HIS OWN ANUS CUZ HE LOOKS IN THE MIRROR
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2021-06-05 at 4:55 PM UTCFire up the bong, Skunk. You seem a little triggered this morning.
Finally realize that Trump lost the election and WON'T EVER be returning too power, did ya? -
2021-06-05 at 5:15 PM UTCNOT HARDLY NIGGER. WE THE PEOPLE ARE TAKING BACK OUR COUNTRY,, AND WHO THE FUCK IS STILL SMOKING BONGS???
I'M A ZIGZAG MAN, ORANGE ZIGZAG'S 4 LIFE, ORANGE TRUMP FOR MY PREZ 4 LIFE
