This entire thread…
…may be the best single summation of the post-Tea=Party right-of-center landscape I’ve seen since, well, the Tea Party.
It’s going to be the subject of a solid chunk of my show on Saturday.
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I commented on Over the Target that people nowadays are applying the wrong standard of evidence to everyday events. The more I think about it, that’s not so: Liberals insist they can’t be held accountable without Proof Beyond All Doubt whereas Conservatives should be punished based on Any Suspicion At All. It’s that blatant double-standard which rankles people accustomed to good faith and fair dealing.
Scott Adams says the election was “non-transparent by force.” That’s a good characterization because it explains why election observers were chased away just at the time vote totals suddenly reversed, and it explains why people aren’t willing to accept the results of a secret vote count.
People who watched The Big Steal happen expected an investigation and correction. Instead, they were stonewalled. First, the excuse was: “You can’t complain now, you have suffered no harm because the Senate hasn’t confirmed the result.” Next, it was: “You have no evidence and even if you did, we refuse to listen to it.” Then, it became: “You waited too long. The Senate has confirmed the result. There’s nothing anybody can do.”
An honest merchant, accused of miscounting, would open the books and welcome a recount to vindicate the merchant’s reputation. An honest investigator, seeing an endless series of ‘mistakes’ always trending toward one outcome, would scrutinize the procedures to learn why that happened. An honest auditor, seeing the black box spit out numbers which are so statistically improbable as to suggest the likelihood of fraud, would insist on a hand count. Democrats/Liberals did none of those things. They did not act consistent with the character of honest people. They acted as if they were dishonest people who had something to hide. They still do.
In the olden days, Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” Nowadays, Conservatives say: “The more they impugn OUR honor, the more we insist on counting the damned spoons.”
And if it turns out that there was, in fact, massive fraud in the conduct of the election; and if it turns out the Vice-Usurper won’t resign so the Usurper can appoint Donald Trump as Vice-President before the Usurper himself resigns to leave Donald Trump as President; then this nation will be a house divided against itself which cannot long endure. Last time was bad but there were clear geographical battle lines and clear rules of conduct. This time will be much, much worse.
It’s funny. When I blogged this over the weekend, I assumed it would have the usual nodding heads and then disappear. But, man, this took off – Tucker C even devoted a portion of his program just read portions of the thread.
I read the whole thread and it is shattering. Some (maybe many) leftists still believe there was collusion, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. They point out that Barr and the other guy never brought charges against anyone.
And chasing away the poll watchers, do lefties have any answer for that? Spoiler, no, they will just say “shut up”.
I’m kind of surprised that “big tech in the dems pocket” guys haven’t censored this yet. Somebody better make a hard copy.
Kurt Schlichter has a great article up at Townhall today about this crap just ain’t gonna go on forever.
A liberal friend of mine from college is a MSM reporter in Atlanta. He’s taking a solo road trip across the US and stayed in an old-school motor-hotel in Evanston, WY last night. A group of older guys were sitting in lawn chairs out front drinking beer and he asked if he could join them. As an ice-breaker, the leader of the group asked my friend if he hated Nancy Pelosi as much as he did. My friend described a spirited and wide-ranging discussion that had been going on for about 30 minutes when the guy who asked the initial question noticed that my friend’s beer – an IPA from home – was empty. The man got up and went into his room and came out with a Keystone and gave it to my friend. “Here, drink this – it will make you smarter!”
A good time was had by all.
Good story, NW. Passed it on to a number of friends and acquaintances.
If true believing Democrats actually had conversations with Trump supporters, I’m betting that many of them would change their tunes.
How could anyone support, or defend Biden at this time?
The nation is 50-50 at the federal level. Since 2000 we’ve had Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden.
The house has changed hands 4 times.
All they need to control all policy is 50% +1 in the house and in the presidential race.
And if it is close they will cheat.
It will be ostensibly legal cheating, but we all know that if votes on polling day show show an R win, then when the early & absentee votes are counted (using different rules than polling place votes) the dems will pull ahead.
This is like asking for civil unrest.
FYI, I have been warning for YEARS about the idiocy of encouraging absentee and early voting. I can give chapter & verse on why it is stupid and undermines what an election is supposed to determine.
“More votes” in no way results in better or even more represntative government (some of the people who cast early votes are literally in the grave when their vote is — legally — tallied). What it does is give the Party of Government and Lawyers (the dems) a big pile of votes they can count until they win — then stop voting.
Even when they lose the Democrats believe they have veto power over policy.
https://wcti12.com/news/connect-to-congress/texas-democrats-leaving-state-to-stop-gop-voting-bill
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Good piece. From my personal history: I was in college 1968-1974. Member of SDS, conscientious objector, sat in at the Federal Building with Paul Wellstone and arrested. March on Washington 1971. In the Movement. All of us believed beyond a shadow of doubt the Government spied on us, put people in jail for no reason, suppressed free speech. Fifty years later a lot of those people are members of a government doing the exact same things to the opposition. I did a David Horowitz and came down on the anti-left side. I’ve got plenty of bones to pick with Trump but the “resistance “ that began in 2017 to his lawful election was shameful and shattered the small confidence I held in main stream journalism. Nixon had nothing on these guys.
golfdoc.
Neither did JFK or J. Edgar Hoover.
The thread is definitely worth reading, and tracks with my own sense of conservative sentiment post-election. But it also assigns a certain innocence to its subjects that abstracts from the actual-existing Donald Trump.
I would like to point out that it’s Republicans who think the election was stolen. Yes, those Republicans are Americans, but the headline implies and normalizes this conspiracy theory as a concept that has broader support than it actually does.
Isn’t it curious that no one appears to suggest that voter fraud may have occurred in states that Trump carried. Why couldn’t voter fraud occur in those states if they can occur in some states Biden won?
How is it that Miami-Dade was won by Trump when expectations were that Biden would carry the vote there easily. Why isn’t someone questioning the vote there?
The thread is also totally wrong about the Steele memos being the sole source cited for the investigation. That’s simply untrue. It’s also wrong about the chronology of when most of the spying started. It also leaves out the many things Trump & Company did to court Russians.
Right-wing media have certainly raised the profile of those Steele memos considerably. It’s a fixation. In reality, they were peripheral to any investigation of Trump or his associates
I get the hardboiled case for Trump, but you don’t get to vote for him and then whine about how you’re shocked that the world is a dirty, cynical place.
Emery’s TDS is always there, it kind of simmers below the surface for a while before it erupts.
The Mueller investigation did not find evidence that Trump colluded with Putin to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. To insist otherwise (as Emery does) is to demonstrate that you are not capable of rational thought when it comes to Trump.
Never forget that Emery predicted that the Brexit vote would fail (it didn’t), that Brexit would cause an economic disaster in Britain (it didn’t), that Hillary would win the 2016 election by a landslide (she lost to Trump), and of course that Mueller would deliver evidence that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election (he did not).
In each of these predictions, Emery took the establishment position, the position echoed by the publishers of The Economist, the billionaire CEO’s, and the media newsrooms packed with people with graduate degrees in journalism.
Turns out that these people know nothing.
MO, that TDS travels happily with his shameless plagiarism (the first paragraph is from Ross Douthat).
Every single instance of suspected election fraud (election fraud, not voter fraud) in the 2020 election runs in favor of The Garden.
Not one single instance of switched votes, over-counts, missing signatures, chain of custody, or harvested ballots was identified by Democrats in any district won by Trump.
Naturally, the E-Collective want to audit the locations where no problem has been identified. Because that would waste time and money and deflect attention from the many areas where problems do exist.
Notice I said “2020 election.” Democrats complained about being cheated in elections before that one and after that one, but for a single shining moment, America struck pure gold: the fairest, freest, most perfect election in all of history, which must never be disturbed, investigated, questioned, examined or reviewed.
Seriously, how can Democrats expect anybody to believe that nonsense?
Does this belief in election fraud also mean Trump’s followers think the over 60 courts that have rejected Trump’s claims are also fixed?
Where does it stop?
You should talk to Stacey Abrams about that, Emery. She is a 100% confirmed believer in election fraud.
Maybe you could contrast and compare Abrams’ and Qanon’s beliefs regarding election fraud?
Although the twitter thread was very long — it could have been reduced to one sentence: “Because Trump says so.”
Between 35% and 40% of the country will believe anything Trump says. Even when it’s so obviously wrong that they can’t straight-up believe it, they’ll insist that it’s at least figuratively true, even if the details are off.
This whole “the election was stolen” argument is based on a simple predicate that gets ignored, which is, something Trump himself said all during 2016 and 2020.
“The only way I can lose is if the election is rigged,” ~ Donald Trump
In any contest, in a country as deeply divided as this one is, two candidates have a pretty equal chance of winning—or losing. So why would one make the claim he did, if he didn’t already suspect he might lose?
This was Trump hedging his bets. This is still Trump hedging his bets. I don’t for one minute believe Trump really thinks he lost due to fraud; he just wants to delegitimize Biden.
The supreme irony seems to be that, in trying to convince the electorate that the election was stolen from him, Trump is actually trying to steal the election.
Ballot and election fraud happens. We know it does. Aside from the cases that make it onto the docket, human beings are not perfect. They may honestly believe that they have a right to vote in a place where they are not legally allowed to do so, or may simply make a mistake. Then there are bad actors who have a financial or emotional stake in an election and like the idea of voting twice in different jurisdictions (this was joked about by students at UM back in the 80s). If Reagan is going to start a nuclear war, how wrong is it to vote against him twice?
I’m curious about how much voter fraud there really is, and I note that it is the dems who consistently fight against discovering what this number is. The conversation goes like this:
Conservative: I want to audit the roll of registered voters and votes cast.
Progressive: You are wasting your time, there is no voter fraud.
Conservative: How do we know? We haven’t looked for it.
Progessive: We haven’t looked for it because it isn’t there! Racist!
-Q
It really is this simple. A bit more than a third of the country is in the grip of a cult leader whose words they accept without question.
There’s quite a fair amount of literature about how to deal with cult members, and it’s all united on the fact that simply trying to persuade them of the wrongness of their views is not only ineffective but counterproductive: it only reinforces their beliefs to have them questioned, as long as they’re still inside the cult organization. Cult members can’t be rehabilitated until they’re removed from that environment. In this case, it means that Trump cultists aren’t going to get better until Trump is gone and until they’re brought out of their information bubbles into the real world.
This is the TDS bursting through again.
First an irrational nonsense statement like “Between 35% and 40% of the country will believe anything Trump says.”
It goes downhill from there.
If I thought that I lived in a country where between 35% and 40% of the people believed anything Trump says, I would move. That is truly crazy talk.
I figure only maybe 5% of the population believes anything Biden says and he still managed to win the election.
The conspiracy theorists, like most seemingly un-sane people, have strong logical reasoning that gets them from Point A to “Point Stop-The-Steal”. Logic, like evolution, is the chain between the points, and it is usually pretty sound. the real problem is the initial presumption; the “Point A” that almost demands the conspiracy be formed, and provides the greatest obstacle to arguing folks out of it.
MO even briefly touches on the real problem when he admits that he is too connected to reality to be seen as a trustworthy source by the people building these conspiracies. Their “Point A” is that information that gainsays President Trump is false. From there it is a sound logical progression to the theories supporting Trump’s fraud claims. More importantly, that initial Point makes it almost impossible for anyone to change minds from outside the conspiracy. Anyone who questions that Point is sorted into the “untrustworthy” half of the binary, even the folks at Fox who have been enabling Trump up until this moment.
That’s the real goal of the people intentionally driving the conspiracies: to maintain the underlying big lie and the power it affords them over those who believe it. MO is right that nobody else can get through to their victims. They are the only sources of truth for millions of Americans. So why would any one of those people—the talk-radio hosts and National Review scribes—ever throw that kind of power away?
So the guy who is still a 100% believer in the “Russian collusion “ conspiracy theory is here to lecture us on how to avoid conspiracy theories.
Well MO, it speaks of what it knows, no?
Read my 12:26, E-girls. I explained why courts refusing to do their job did nothing to sooth the people who suspected electoral fraud, but instead exacerbated their anger.
It’s like a child who is denied a cookie but sees a sibling sneak one, reports it to Mother, and is punished for being a tattle-tale. Nope, she won’t even listen to anything you say and refuses to look at the crumbs or the chocolate mouth, much less count the remaining cookies to confirm the theft. Don’t want to hear it, just go outside and find something to do before I get the switch from the hook and give you something to complain about.
The injustice rankles, and lingers, and endless repetitions of “I said no” does nothing to ease it.
A federal judge stated once again yesterday that all 1000 affidavits that the Kraken Krewe presented are worthless and not evidence in federal court. So that leaves Trump with nothing but hearsay.
One of the lawsuits filed by Sidney Powell alleged fraud in a county in Michigan that doesn’t exist. Only the best lawyers for Trump.
At one point, Judge Parker, sitting in the Eastern District of Michigan, asked the nine lawyers who took part in bringing the lawsuit if they had ever followed up to learn if any of their so-called witnessed actually saw a vote being changed.
No one responded. “Let the record reflect,” Parker responded, noting their silence.
That pretty much says it all
Notice how all those hyperventilating claims of mass voter fraud from Trump’s lawyers immediately melt down into a puddle of “please don’t take my law license away!” when they have to appear in an actual court room?
https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2021/07/12/michigan-elections-lawsuit-sidney-powell/5334859001/
In the meantime in real world:
Most new allegations and evidence are based on a VoterGA data team’s analysis of Fulton’s November 2020 mail-in ballot images made public after petitioners won a court order on April 13th and VoterGA lobbying efforts led the Georgia General Assembly to make all images public under Open Records Requests beginning March 25th.
The team’s analysis revealed that 923 of 1539 mail-in ballot batch files contained votes incorrectly reported in Fulton’s official November 3rd 2020 results. These inaccuracies are due to discrepancies in votes for Donald Trump, Joe Biden and total votes cast compared to their reported audit totals for respective batches. Thus, the error reporting rate in Fulton’s hand count audit is a whopping 60%.
One type of error discovered involved duplicate results reporting for batches of ballots. The team found at least 36 batches of mail-in ballots with 4,255 total extra votes were redundantly added into Fulton Co. audit results for the November election. These illicit votes include 3,390 extra votes for Joe Biden, 865 extra votes for Donald Trump and 43 extra votes for Jo Jorgenson.
But it is not simply a case of errors. The VoterGA team found 7 falsified audit tally sheets containing fabricated vote totals for their respective batches. For example, a batch containing 59 actual ballot images for Joe Biden, 42 for Donald Trump and 0 for Jo Jorgenson was reported as 100 for Biden and 0 for Trump. The seven batches of ballot images with 554 votes for Joe Biden, 140 votes for Donald Trump and 11 votes for Jo Jorgenson had tally sheets in the audit falsified to show 850 votes for Biden, 0 votes for Trump and 0 votes for Jorgenson.
^ Yeah, that’s a VoterGA press release right, and its details their assertion…
The absolute best way the tech oligopoly to deal with rumors it helped Biden’s vote count?
Obviously, it is for the tech oligopoly to forbid and discussion of election integrity on its platform.
Really, take a look at the bios of Bezos, Cook, and Dempsey. There is nothing in them that would make you think “this guy has more political sense than the average guy and is fit to be Censor of the Internet.” They are nerds and financial people, they aren’t philosophers or even politicians. They will do no better than a person picked at random to judge what should and should not be discussed in the public square.
Here is what Wikipedia tells us about Tim Cook:
Early life and education
Cook was born in Mobile, Alabama, United States.[11][12] He was baptized in a Baptist church[13] and grew up in nearby Robertsdale. His father, Donald, was a shipyard worker, and his mother, Geraldine, worked at a pharmacy.[11][14]
Cook graduated from Robertsdale High School in 1978.[15] He earned a Bachelor of Science in industrial engineering from Auburn University in 1982,[16] and his Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in 1988.[17]
That’s it. Darned if I can blame him for being an inept fool when it comes to policing speech, he exhibited zero interest in it — until he came to control a speech platform.
@jpa: This is why you can’t tell satire from reality.
Crikey, has emetic ever posted a sentence here which he composed on his own?
What speech platform does Tim Cook control and manage.
The E-Bunch’s 11:18 mis-states the procedural posture of the case.
A lawsuit was brought alleging massive fraud in the conduct of the election. In December 2020, Judge Linda Parker dismissed lawsuit, writing that the lawyers asked “this court to ignore the orderly statutory scheme established to challenge elections and to ignore the will of millions of voters. This, the Court cannot, and will not, do. The people have spoken.”
To be clear, the election fraud case was dismissed on procedural grounds, not evidentiary grounds. It’s exactly as I said before: even when you produce evidence of electoral fraud, the court won’t listen to it.
After the case was dismissed, the government demanded the Court punish the lawyers who had the temerity to challenge the election, to intimidate others into dropping their cases. The hearing at which the judge criticized the affidavits was a motion for sanctions. The irony of using the affidavits as evidence against the lawyers after refusing to use the affidavits as evidence against the government, was apparently lost on everyone involved.
The judge? She’s a Black woman and a native of Detroit, which was ground zero for the election fraud. She was an activist and civil rights lawyer who was nominated to the bench by Barak Obama. It’s hard to imagine someone more thoroughly invested in defending the corrupt Democrat scheme to steal the election.
The example does not support your argument, E’s. It supports mine. And it’s one more car in a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object which evinces a design to reduce us under absolute Despotism.
JD, you are wrong again. Nothing was misstated, it was absolutely, correctly copied and pasted. Word for word.
John Kraephammer on July 13, 2021 at 2:05 pm said:
What speech platform does Tim Cook control and manage.
Apple phones, computers, etc. You may have heard of them.
At Apple, we believe that technology needs to have a clear point of view on this challenge,” Cook said, referring to how to handle the influx of hate on tech platforms. “There is no time to get tied up in knots. That’s why we only have one message for those who seek to push hate, division and violence: You have no place on our platforms.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/04/apple-ceo-tim-cook-says-hate-has-no-place-on-tech-platforms-at-adl.html
Because the world was just waiting for some engineer — with an MBA! — to tell us the allowable limits of speech.
Emery,
Quit being a useful idiot.
Once again, I ask you, if the election were the most secure in history, why is the left not cooperating in the audits to prove it? They are actually proving they rigged the election by their actions. Millions of dollars are being spent to obfuscate, delay or stop any audits, hide information and destroy ballots. With the aid of their media propaganda machine, they call anyone supporting the audits conspiracy theorists. If they were legitimate elections, why not say, “OK, we’ll prove it. Here are all of the records, the passwords and the ballots. Let’s go!” But, that ain’t what’s happening. Also, what’s up with the lawsuits by Dominion against Mike Lindell and a couple of Senators? Nada! Zip! Bupkis! The lying bass turds know they were royally screwed as soon as Lindell said, “Bring it!!” Discovery is a bitch and they know it.
MO wrote: “Because the world was just waiting for some engineer — with an MBA! — to tell us the allowable limits of speech.”
Someone doesn’t know the difference between “First Amendment” and a “Terms of Service” contract.
I really wish that every time a comment on this topic comes out, it would be emphasized that the decision by a private company not to publish the words of a person — however public his or her status — is not censorship, particularly and specifically when he or she is not barred by the government from expression through other means.
Emery,you should educate yourself.
Apple is a monopoly created by US law. As such is subject to public (aka government) oversight.
And of course you simply bypass the important question, which is “is it proper for a billionaire capitalist to restrict the speech of Americans by denying them access to a platform created by US law?”
You make a bad apologist for capitalism, Emery.
rKind of typical of the mental gymnastics played by people who call themselves “progressives.” One baker among thousands in CO refuses to bake a gay wedding cake?
Prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law!
The biggest corporation in the history of the planet bans Parley from its platform? “Well, it is a private company.”
You would think that you would get tired of shooting yourself in the foot, Voice of the Establishment. but no amount of being shown to have been wrong affects you. That is the definition of an unsound mind.
This is utter nonsense. You are far overemphasizing both the importance of social networks in terms of dissemination of free speech, and the impact of banning some user on that user’s ability to have his speech heard.
There are hundreds of cable channels, hundreds of newspapers, all of whom can cross post to these websites and platforms if they need to.
And there are only two ways out of this legally, which is what I was pointing out. (1) you force these platforms to accept all users, which is inconceivable, or (2) you let them run their private businesses.
Emery, you seem to think that social media corporations are like newspaper publishers.
They aren’t.
Newpapers aren’t allowed to publish libel. Social media companies are.
Remove the CDA 320 carve out, turn them into common carriers like the phone company.
Your notion that being banned from FB or Twitter does not impact a user’s ability to communicate is laughable. I mean that. It is ridiculous. You can’t be serious.
So wait — MO is complaining about Facebook’s social media monopoly via another social media platform? Got it.
Facebook is not a utility, no one needs to use Facebook to survive their day to day life, and the fact people choose to use Facebook as a utility is their choice.
Recently the FTC was trying to attack Facebook because of how it’s users choose to use the site, that’s not how you rein in big tech.
Ambitious politicians, columnists and blog posters tend to forget that antitrust laws are not exactly what they wish them to be and that courts apply the law, not the twitterverse bubble.
Imagine a world where emery knew what he was talking about . . .
Or at least stoped shifting the goal posts every time he was shown to be wrong.
Let’s not forget his 8;02 where he wrote: “And there are only two ways out of this legally, which is what I was pointing out. (1) you force these platforms to accept all users, which is inconceivable, or (2) you let them run their private businesses.”
Poor soul has never heard of a “common carrier.” Or usenet, apparently. Or an open source BBS.
Nice little box you’ve created for yourself MO…
Censorship is an act of the government, not a Zuckerberg or Dorsey.
The decision of Random House not to carry my novel about squirrels forming a softball league is not censorship.
The former president’s failure to attract readers to his own attempt at a blog is on him, not Facebook or Twitter.
My novel would certainly do better if published by Random House, but nothing requires them to publish it,