American Politics Discussion Thread

[Cyneheard]

No, it is not the left's fault that the right decided the reaction to losing a free and fair election

This is the point that the criticizers don't get.  They didn't react that way to a free and fair election.  They reacted that way to the fraud.  They weren't trying to overthrow democracy.  They were trying to save it.

Whether there was enough fraud to swing the election result, I don't know.  The media is misreporting every bit of that.  They keep saying "the courts haven't found fraud" ... which is true ... but it's not because the courts have actually looked at evidence.  Every claim like the Texas lawsuit has been dismissed for procedural or technical reasons like lack of standing, not because fraud wasn't found; they didn't look.  There's still a lot of statistical evidence that there was: the big telltale is that Trump still won almost every bellwether swing county; Biden's margin came from an oversupply of votes in just a few blue counties like Philadelphia, and failed to correlate with downballot races at a historically unprecedented level.  It turns out that the system decided that there's no method to challenge such a statistical outcome in court, or to force a state to follow its own electoral laws.  PA directly violated its own constitution in changing the rules for mail-in balloting.  This was the basis of Ted Cruz's lawsuit.  The courts just shrugged and said not our problem, thus enshrining any fraud as fact, declaring the bug as a feature that we can't force states to follow their own laws.

Let me sum that up shorter: The courts decided there wasn't fraud not because there was no fraud, but because they didn't look at any evidence and thus simply declared the observed result as not-fraud.

If you believed there was sufficient fraud, then what happened (minus the actual injuries and deaths) was the right course of action.  Or else we've just established that the ruling party can commit electoral fraud with no consequence, and then you've got a uniparty dictatorial state forever.

This is willfully misreading the evidence and how the courts handled this.

There were absolutely cases dismissed on the merits. I'm not going to go through all 65 cases looking for all the examples - because there's tens of thousands of pages of legal back-and-forth, but here's one that I was able to find in less than 10 minutes of searching for an explicit discussion of the merits.

Example:
https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-conte...-v-WEC.pdf

"After an evidentiary hearing, the district court rejected the President’s claims on the merits"

Oh, and that's Wisconsin. That is absolutely not the Texas case. Get your facts in order before saying "the media" is misreporting things.

The entire case history for that case is here: https://www.democracydocket.com/cases/wi...challenge/

Your statement might as well say "if you believed that up is down."

[Bobchillingworth]

"Your Honor, I only shot up that pizza place because I thought there were children trapped in the basement by pedophiles! Now, whether there's actually a basement, who can say, the Court never let me bring a structural engineer out to survey the place, but I can't be held accountable! After all, it's the Left's fault for making me think I needed to save nonexistent kids from their fictional conspiracy I learned about on InfoWars!"

[DaveV]

Bill Freaking Barr: election results were not altered by voter fraud.

The people who believe there was fraud believe that because they've been continuously lied to over the course of 4-5 months. As Mitt Romney said, the thing to do with those people is to tell them the truth, not say, "OK, we'll indulge your fantasies because we think we can turn it to our advantage."

[Commodore]

Yawn, that old debate? I'm seeing a surge of very pure and unifying hate this week that seems refreshingly nonpartisan. It might not crash the economy, but there are people funneling their entire meager life savings into GameStop with the avowed hope that it does blow up everything. "Trump as distraction/symptom, not cause" thesis is looking better to me each week.

I'm not going long on anything myself, mostly because that seems like a bad idea when smart money is shorting Western Civilization.

[superdeath]

Well, when the masses found out they could potentially bankrupt rich people... What did anyone else expect? I fully expect regulations or SOMETHING to be put into law that more or less will restrict the buying of stock from people that dont want to have a broker/10k deposit ect. Going to be amazing

[Commodore]

Well, when the masses found out they could potentially bankrupt rich people... What did anyone else expect? I fully expect regulations or SOMETHING to be put into law that more or less will restrict the buying of stock from people that dont want to have a broker/10k deposit ect. Going to be amazing

I don't think this is going to be it, but if the response is "burn more credibility while shutting out a mass of bored smart angry young men without a future" that's... not great. Amazing is a word, but it's also gonna suck.

[The Black Sword]

There's still a lot of statistical evidence that there was: the big telltale is that Trump still won almost every bellwether swing county; Biden's margin came from an oversupply of votes in just a few blue counties like Philadelphia, and failed to correlate with downballot races at a historically unprecedented level. 

A candidate who acted in historically unprecedented ways resulted in historically unprecedented voting patterns, that does not sound like a statistical anomaly to me. It just sounds like people didn't like his actions.

[Bobchillingworth]

I fully expect regulations or SOMETHING to be put into law that more or less will restrict the buying of stock from people that dont want to have a broker/10k deposit ect. Going to be amazing

No need, people are trading via apps produced by privately-owned companies with deep ties to the very hedge funds they're trying to screw; the capitalist overlords of the Free Market will have no problem shutting down the little guy if and when they choose, confident that morons will then turn around and blame the Federal government.


That said, there's going to be investigations of the some of the players from Reddit who started the scheme and made millions in profits; it's one thing for someone to invest a nominal sum as a statement signaling their displeasure with how certain firms are operating or being treated, it's another to orchestrate a pump & dump fraud.


Also anyone investing their "meager life savings" on this (admittedly hilarious) stupidity has nobody to blame but their own dumb asses for their imminent misery.

[Mjmd]

The problem is of course people are historically awful at admitting they are wrong or what they believed in is wrong. Or what they believed in has been horribly corrupted.

I actually had the whole was the election stolen therefore they were actually trying to save democracy argument with someone I know 2 days ago. The problem is there is literally infinite conspiracy theories you have to try fighting through. The smell tests of: republican controlled states, republican controlled courts, republican officials coming out saying it wasn't, Republicans still doing way better than they should have overall. None of those phase people who can't admit to themselves the quote above. I asked this person if they believe Trump had EVER lied..... They said he had just exaggerated....... I then asked about how back last year everything they had been fed and then said about Covid not being as bad about the flu. Conversation strangely ended there.

[Jowy]

No, it is not the left's fault that the right decided the reaction to losing a free and fair election

This is the point that the criticizers don't get.  They didn't react that way to a free and fair election.  They reacted that way to the fraud.  They weren't trying to overthrow democracy.  They were trying to save it.

Whether there was enough fraud to swing the election result, I don't know.  The media is misreporting every bit of that.  They keep saying "the courts haven't found fraud" ... which is true ... but it's not because the courts have actually looked at evidence.  Every claim like the Texas lawsuit has been dismissed for procedural or technical reasons like lack of standing, not because fraud wasn't found; they didn't look.  There's still a lot of statistical evidence that there was: the big telltale is that Trump still won almost every bellwether swing county; Biden's margin came from an oversupply of votes in just a few blue counties like Philadelphia, and failed to correlate with downballot races at a historically unprecedented level.  It turns out that the system decided that there's no method to challenge such a statistical outcome in court, or to force a state to follow its own electoral laws.  PA directly violated its own constitution in changing the rules for mail-in balloting.  This was the basis of Ted Cruz's lawsuit.  The courts just shrugged and said not our problem, thus enshrining any fraud as fact, declaring the bug as a feature that we can't force states to follow their own laws.

Let me sum that up shorter: The courts decided there wasn't fraud not because there was no fraud, but because they didn't look at any evidence and thus simply declared the observed result as not-fraud.

If you believed there was sufficient fraud, then what happened (minus the actual injuries and deaths) was the right course of action.  Or else we've just established that the ruling party can commit electoral fraud with no consequence, and then you've got a uniparty dictatorial state forever.

There was never any evidence of fraud. Republicans kept claiming in media that there is so much evidence, but in the courts they never presented any of it, because it didn't exist. The states where votes were hand-counted, like Georgia, we found out there was no meaningful difference in the vote count despite Republican claims of hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots. It's all bullshit to try to negate the election because they lost, and to increase voter suppression in the future based on made up fraud claims. Democrats doing better in the presidential race than the downballot races should not come at any surprise because Trump was one of the worst and most hated presidents in history. T-Hawk you are drinking the kool-aid. Stop believing conspiracy theories.