‘Democracy dies in darkness’ is on the masthead of the Washington Post. They say it as if it is their fear, but they behave as if it is their hope (for example, when hiding the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop). One thing it isn’t (yet) is literal fact. Despite the efforts of many, there’s still enough light around that anyone who chooses to look can see some of what is happening to democracy in the US today.
PART I: let’s examine an example – Arizona.
PAST PERFORMANCE …
The usual suspects spun the Arizona-State-Senate-mandated audit of the 2020 election and its results like a top – but they could not literally suppress it. Anyone who wanted to could (and still can) watch the presentations and/or read the audit reports themselves, not the spin about them.
“None of the various systems related to elections had numbers that would balance and agree with each other. In some cases, these differences were significant. There appears to be many ballots cast from individuals who had moved prior to the election. Files were missing from the Election Management System (EMS) Server. Ballot images on the EMS were corrupt or missing. Logs appeared to be intentionally rolled over, and all the data in the database related to the 2020 General Election had been fully cleared.
On the ballot side, batches were not always clearly delineated, duplicated ballots were missing the required serial numbers, originals were duplicated more than once, and the Auditors were never provided Chain‐of‐Custody documentation for the ballots for the time‐period prior to the ballot’s movement into the Auditors’ care.” [FYI, this is a reformatted summary from ‘Maricopa County Forensic Election Audit Volume I: Executive Summary & Recommendations’. As there was a draft release of the report shortly before the late september presentation and filing, there is more than one version of this text extant, all very very similar but not quite identical.]
Anyone who wanted to look could also see that the people who administered the 2020 Maricopa County election were very hostile to being audited.
“By the County withholding subpoena items, their unwillingness to answer questions as is normal between auditor and auditee, and in some cases actively interfering with audit research, the County prevented a complete audit,”
They were also keen on deleting records (the MSM tried to spin that too), and they continued to withhold information in the face of pressure from the Arizona Senate and Attorney General:
Arizona Senate President Karen Fann and Arizona Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Warren Petersen have pressed the county and Dominion Voting Systems to produce routers, traffic logs, mail-in ballot envelopes, and other information in their investigation. The county has refused. … in its response MCBOS [the Maricopa county election administrators] failed to explain why it is not required to comply with the legislative subpoena. Its only response was that the Arizona Senate is not currently in session, so MCBOS could not be held in contempt. (August 21st, 2021)
This very cautious audit nevertheless found 23,344 mail-in ballots voted From prior address (and no one with the same last name remaining at the address), 9,041 more ballots returned by voters than were sent to them, and so on and so on for a total of well over fifty thousand flagged ballots (more than five times Joe Biden’s declared margin of victory) – the data breakdown is in the Maricopa County Forensic Election Audit
Volume III: Result Details (scroll to page 5, ‘Findings Summary Table’).
The canvas audit was a private effort (it resembled some of the follow-up checks the official audit advised in its report but was not a state-run activity: hundreds of canvassers went door-to-door verifying registration and voting information for thousands of residents (and, of course, very properly not asking for whom any responder voted). This method found examples of what the state audit’s methods could not:
“American citizens living in Maricopa County who cast a vote, primarily by mail, in the election and yet there is no record of their vote with the county and it was not counted in the reported vote totals for the election.”
Unlike the state audit’s method, the canvas audit’s statistical samples (and so the estimates made from them) are capable of being overstated, not just of being understated – for much the same reason as an opinion poll can be off in either direction (albeit the canvas audit was on a larger scale than typical polls of comparably-sized populations IIUC). People could simply forget that they had not in fact voted. Or they could lie; it is possible (but a bit odd) that someone who had not bothered to post or cast their vote in the election might nevertheless be motivated to lie that they had. Etc. But the canvas audit found enough cases to estimate 173,104 such “missing or lost” votes (plus four times as many unknown-at-address/departed-from-address mail-ins as the state audit reported). That’s enough for a many-times-over result reversal even if your estimate of the unreliability of the canvas’ audit’s estimates is high. (And of course it would be a additional challenge to justify estimating the lying or errors of audit-canvassed voters very high while estimating those same qualities very low in the unprecedented 2020 statistics of mail-in voters from the same population – or in the administrators who verified them.)
… IS A GUIDE TO FUTURE BEHAVIOUR
The 2022 election had the same post-pandemic-look as before: floods of ballots were mailed out, a long postal-voting prologue ended in an election day of bizarre oddities and implausible errors, followed by a dragged-out post-election-day count.
– Beforehand, there was great media hostility to the idea of Elon not controlling voters’ tweeting about any problems they might encounter. There was great DoJ hostility to the idea of checking whether voters were citizens (as there had been to the audit).
– The self-same bureaucrats who ran the Maricopa country election last time were still in place administering it this time (their nominal party affiliations vary but their agenda is shared). They were presided over by secretary of state, Katie Hobbs (who was running for governor). Here’s an earlier example of her approach to election-integrity law:
Arizona has a law against ballot harvesting, A.R.S. 16-1005. After it was passed in 2016, the Democratic National Committee sued to stop it from going into effect, and when Secretary of State Katie Hobbs refused to defend the law, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich stepped in to defend it instead. He ultimately won at the U.S. Supreme Court in Brnovich v. DNC. Hobbs tried to go around the decision by revising the state’s Election Procedures Manual (EPM), resulting in Brnovich suing her, which ended with an impasse that left the 2019 version of the EPM in place – contrary to statute, which requires it to be updated every other year.
– On what we once called election day and should now call in-person-voting day, the opening of the polls instantly revealed printer problems, ballot reader problems, people waiting hours to vote or giving up and visiting another station and finding they could not vote there either, and so on. The administrators said they would sort it all out and ensure everyone got to vote – then issued incorrect instructions to their subordinates on how to work around the problems. Etc., etc.
PART II: what is Arizona an example of?
My main point is not specifically that Arizona risks going the way of Illinois, California, Colorado and Etcetera. My main point is: this is not happening in complete darkness.
FIRSTLY, while the data I’ve reported has been hit by a ton and a half of spin, it is not literally hidden. Nothing I’ve said above cannot be read about by anyone who chooses to seek it out, and even the spun denunciations of audits and certification fights tell readers that these investigations exist and can be found on the web.
SECONDLY, it not does not have the darkness of hard-to-understand-why either.
– In recent years, much criminal law (and much enforcement of that law) has been cut down or weakened by no-cash bail laws, Soros prosecutors, etc., etc. Also in recent years, crime rates have risen. In woke logic, the latter is just a puzzling and/or exaggerated coincidence, unrelated to the former, something prejudiced right-wingers fuss about. In unwoke logic, it’s a simple and very obvious case of cause and effect.
– In these same recent years, many a law against vote fraud (and much enforcement of laws against vote fraud) has also been cut down or weakened. The pandemic was made the excuse for flooding the system with ballots, abolishing or ignoring vote-by-mail restrictions, greatly extending the time period, razing verification laws and/or practices, etc., etc.
So saying that the 2020 election was “the most secure in history”, calling claims of vote fraud in it ‘baseless’, etc. is like believing that crime rates have not risen – both are treated as right-wing lies, and if you can manage to believe that of one then I guess you’ll manage to believe it of the other. However if you think crime rates have risen because corrupted prosecutors, intimidated police, dishonest legislators and activist judges ensure it is less fought, less risky and less punished (and resisting crime more risky and more punished), then you not only can but in logic should apply the same reasoning to vote fraud (example in comments here).
THIRDLY, it not does not have the darkness of ‘everything looks the same’. We all see how gross the change is as we (still) wait to be told the final 2022 election results. As recently as 2016, people in the UK, never mind the US, found out who’d won a US election when they woke up the morning after election day. Now the very people who razed or nullified the anti-vote-fraud laws are the ones most eager to tell everyone to accept the count taking weeks. That is a huge change in how US voting operates – and while 2020’s halting the counts in six states took place in the hours of darkness, the fact that the day after the election is now the week or the month after the election is not hidden. It was aggressively predicted and defended as a good thing beforehand in 2020 and in 2022, and it was (indeed, still is) very visible afterwards.
LASTLY, it not does not have the darkness of ‘how could this happen?’ A century ago, in the days of New York’s Tammany Hall, there were ‘repeaters’ (sometimes party members, often gang members) who each voted many times on election day.
“Even in the most ordinary discussions you are reminded more and more of New York as it used to be when the grip of the Tammany machine was heavy on it. You could have spent weeks in New York in those days and never “run across” Tammany. There were plenty of British visitors who came back thinking that the Tammany grip, the Tammany violence, the Tammany cruelty and corruption of every phase of civic life, were grossly exaggerated. But the New Yorker, when he chose, could tell a different story. He knew. And the Berliner knows too. But he talks less. He looks on.
Sometimes, as among the ardent Christians who see their religion torn to bits, and the walls plastered with the barbaric obscenities of Der Sturmer, or among the working class people with all their traditions of independent organisation, the Berliner not only looks on but works to end all this. But sometimes, like the toads in the Tiergarten, he just sits and looks.” (Picture Post, Spring 1939)
But because election day was just one day, a typical Tammany Hall repeater might vote as little ten times per election. A few decades later, that was still the order of magnitude of Mayor Daley’s “Vote early, vote often!” goons in Chicago, when they had only a single day in which to get each vote, write it and then walk back to a polling station after having it checked by a senior (Mayer Daley needed a lot of goons to reach the amount of fraud he required, and it seems he did not trust every low-level Chicago goon to vote as instructed if the goon’s ballots were secret 🙂 ).
All this limited how much vote fraud was possible back then; the saying was (and among the naive still is)
“If it’s not close then they can’t cheat.”
A year ago, by contrast, California police in Torrance checked on a man who appeared passed out in his parked car – and found 300 ballots for the upcoming governor’s recall election.
“Having 300 ballots in your possession is suspicious. Having the ballots AND several drivers’ licenses clearly establishes intent to commit voter fraud.”
(Some people are slower to suspect vote fraud than others; possessing 300 ballots without lawful explanation would be enough for me. 🙂 ) No single Mayor Daley goon or Tammany Hall repeater could have hoped to vote 300 times in one election, but it’s obvious that Torrance-guy (whom I suspect of not being the most skilled or committed vote fraudster activist that California can boast) had found it straightforward to acquire 300 ballots, and expected to find it easy to post them all in the months available to him before the election, or in the week(s) after, or give them to harvesters. The only hard thing to believe would be the idea that the day the police chanced to find him stoned in his parked car was the only day in all that election’s months of postal voting when his car contained hundreds of ballots. Maybe the pair of California activists who faked 4000 voter registrations each in three months before the 2020 election were caught because they were greedy or maybe they too were just unlucky, but either way it’s clear the feasible-fake-votes-per-activist average has risen by two orders of magnitude or more.
So it’s not exactly happening in pure darkness. Which, alas, means, it cannot exactly be fought solely by saying, ‘look at this’.
In the US, the message morphed from
‘there is no fraud’,
to ‘the fraud is insignificant’,
to ‘the fraud is significant but what can you do’,
to ‘yeah, we’re stealing right in front of you plebs, so just shut up and listen to us’.
But the rest of the world still thinks the US as a shining bastion of ‘democracy’, and are not aware of all these election problems. When I mention it to my friends and colleagues, they all couldn’t believe me until I showed them the links.
I wouldn’t have cared much… except it affects my home mortgage rate.
Wouldn’t it be fun if some impertinent foreign countries pressed the U.N. not to recognize the results of American elections unless the U.N. had observers on the scene?
Old Glyn: Wouldn’t it be fun if some impertinent foreign countries pressed the U.N. not to recognize the results of American elections unless the U.N. had observers on the scene? It would be bemusing if that happened.
What those who keep pressing the “stolen 2020” election line have to justify is whether the result would have been different without any proven skulduggery that has come to light. The more serious issue, in my view, is that millions of people voted for Biden, and the Democrats, and in sufficient numbers to carry the day without fraud. That is, in my view, the crux of the matter. Hoping that a “cleaner” way of voting will deal with the Leftward tilt of the US does not seem a very smart strategy.
As I told a friend of mine, when he asked why the Democrats had selected a brain damaged person, who had never had a real job, to be their candidate for the United States Senate from Pennsylvania – “they are making a statement” – the statement the Democrats (and their RINO playthings) were making was “we can steal this election right in front of you – and THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT”.
Arizonia is another “statement” – the Democrats could have been subtle, there are many ways to steal an election – but they choose (choose) to make the stealing of the election blatant and obvious.
After 2020 someone like Johnathan Pearce could honestly believe that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizonia were not stolen – even though they were. Unless one actually investigated the matter, the fraud was not obvious.
That is NOT a “statement” – and this time the Democrats wanted to make a statement.
The Democrats (and their RINO playthings) even exaggerated the fraud in Arizona – taunting Republican voters “you cannot vote – there are equipment problems” with “there are equipment problems” said in a deliberately ironic voice, mocking the would-be voters.
There were other taunts – implying that all the mail-in ballots were fake, actually many of the mail-in ballots were real (for example from the brainwashed students in the universities) – the mail-in ballots were not ALL fake, so why were officials implying that they were? To TAUNT Republicans – stealing the election was not enough, everyone had to KNOW they had stolen the election.
This time they wanted to make the fraud obvious – totally obvious. In order to make a statement – a statement of power.
And it worked – the international media have said nothing about the election fraud in Arizonia and other States. And the education system (those brainwashed students – who provide real main-in ballots) will teach that the election is straight – and that temperatures are going up when they are going down, and-so-on.
“Democracy dies in darkness” says the Washington Post – which, like the rest of the mainstream media, hates-and-despises democracy – as the rule of “inferior” people who have not been “educated”.
No, it did not – democracy did not die in darkness, it died in the full light of an election, with the laughter and mockery of the officials, ringing in the ears of the “reactionary” would-be voters.
Remember what the education system, and the mainstream media, and the Corporations (the “educated” Corporate managers) are all based upon – they are based upon (long before the ideas of Karl Marx) the ideas of Rousseau and others going all the way back to Plato – the first “academic” in the groves of academe.
These people do not want “the will of all”, the rule of the “scum” (as they think of ordinary people) – they want the “General Will” as decided by the “Law Giver”. The rule of the “educated”, the “enlightened ones”, not us scum with our obsession with the “shadows on the cave wall”.
But it is not enough fun to rig elections – everyone must KNOW they are rigging elections.
“We are going to rub-your-noses-in-it – and if you object, the FBI will shove a rifle in your face as an “insurrectionist” and “election denier” and drag you off to prison to be raped and abused”.
That is the message – both of the Democrats and their RINO playthings (the other part of the “uniparty”).
Did untold millions vote for Biden, or more accurately against Trump, in 2020? Yes. Was it enough to carry the day without fraud? Probably not, which is why we ended up with suspended counting at 2am and when we picked up again in the morning Biden “somehow” got a couple hundred thousand here and there. Or mail in balloting with zero accountability. Or ballot harvesting. Or closed counting where neither the Republicans nor the general public were allowed to watch the counting.
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. And there were simply too many “irregularities” in the 2020 election to brush off as mere conspiracy theory.
It was no different than any other close election where during the recount the Democrats conveniently find a couple of boxes of uncounted ballots that give them just enough votes to win. Or we find boxes of uncounted votes months after the election moldering in some back office in the county courthouse.
But we’ll never really know because the courts flat out refused to hear any cases relating to it and so whatever evidence exists will never be shown to the public once and for all.
Politics is a contact sport and notions like fair play don’t exist. The Dems are in it for power and they’ll get it by hook or by crook. That’s why they’ve effectively opened the borders for decades: they know they can’t honestly sell their product to the American people, and they know they’re willing to play the long game, and they know all those people from South of the Border that come from Socialist shitholes will vote for the same policies. In the meantime, they’ll steal elections when they can just to keep their thumb on the scale and keep creeping left.
Don’t get me wrong, the Republicans are just as corrupt and evil as the Dems, but in their own way.
The Dems stole the 2020 election and We The People did nothing about it except seethe online. Except for a couple dozen knuckleheads that rioted through the Capitol Building (all but billed as the biggest threat to DEMOCRACY!!! since the Reichstag Fire) and we’ve seen how that ended.
Interesting test for Mr Nigel Farage – for almost two years he has been saying that Donald John Trump should stop “banging on” about election fraud. Well Mr Farage was in Arizona on election day – he knows very well that the election there was rigged, that the fraud was blatant – obvious. The Democrats (and their playthings) could have been subtle – but they choose NOT to be subtle, in order to make-a-point.
As Donald John Trump kept telling you Mr Farage – if one does not deal with the election fraud, the Democrats (and their RINO playthings) will DO IT AGAIN.
Well, they have done it again – will you start “banging on” about the election fraud now Mr Farage?
The Wobbly Guy, “affects my mortgage”…and your privacy rights, property rights, gun rights, parenting rights, right to a fair trial, basically everything discussed in the US founding documents and the history leading to those.
The original agreement between Citizen and government was something like, “ok, I won’t abuse my neighbor or anyone else in return for which you will protect my God-given rights against anyone, foreign or domestic, who interferes with their free exercise.” As far as I can tell that deal is off.
Way off.
And has been for a long time.
The road ahead is frightening if they have now taken the vote from us which this article clearly demonstrates they have, at least in enough States to determine the outcome of elections for POTUS and who controls the Congress.
And don’t get me started on how the UniParty controls all this at the precinct level such that UniParty members are the only choices allowed.
I loved the blatantness of it all – for example that the election officials were openly members of a Political Action Committee dedicated to preventing “MAGA” (i.e. non RINO plaything) candidates being elected.
The Democrats and their RINO playthings could have been subtle (I repeat – there are many ways to steal an election) – they decided to make the election fraud blatant, obvious, in order to make-a-point.
The government and Corporations (yes do not forget the “Woke” Corporations – with their “educated” Corporate bureaucracy) rule, with their endless Credit Money created, from NOTHING, by the banks – and ordinary people are just “reactionary” cattle.
This is the point that has been made – very graphically. They have been “in your face” about it.
After all a million people turned up on January 6th 2021 – but only a tiny fraction of that number went on to the Capitol building (and they were the fools who were directed by Roy Epps and other servants of the Secret Police – the FBI), and NONE (none) of the people who went on to the Capitol building were armed.
The election could be stolen from the people – and the people would just shout and wave flags in reply.
So why not steal more elections?
Why not make it totally obvious that you are stealing elections? And why not taunt the people as you steal elections?
After all, it has already established that the people are not going to do anything in response.
Nothing real – the people will just go to the media (who will laugh at the people – and call them names), or the courts (who will say “you do not have standing” and then laugh at them).
In spite of all the above – I still have hope.
My hope is that economic collapse will bring the corrupt system down – both the Democrats and their RINO playthings, the “educated” regime of the government and corporate bureaucracy, with their fiat money and their Credit Bubble finance (which has made “business” about pleasing the elite – NOT about pleasing the customers).
Johnathan Pearce rightly points out that such policies have been going on for a very long time – so why should the system fall now?
So perhaps my hope is a fool’s hope (with me as the fool) – but I still cling to the hope that this system will fall and NOT be replaced by something even worse.
I still (in my old age) cling to the hope that honest money, sound finance (from Real Savings) and honest elections, will return.
Two minor points to supplement others’ remarks:
Democracy, as embraced by Biden and his cohorts, is not dying in the US. The democratic principles used to form a representative govt are dying.
Rule of the majority is not only alive but also the preeminently dominant political reality in the US. Education system being what it is, the progs can rely on propaganda to quell the masses and ‘win’ elections by ‘counting’ the most ballots: “Well, we had an election yesterday. (Laughter.) And it was a good day, I think, for democracy.” [Pres Biden, 11/9/22]
It is not democracy that WaPo and mainstream media hate/despise but liberty. The word they cannot abide, that they cannot even utter, is ‘liberty.’ They will cling to ‘democracy’ with every ounce of being for it shall assure them electoral victories just as it did for Soviet tyrants for 70 years.
@GregWA,
Except I’m not a citizen of the US, so everything else except mortgage rates don’t quite apply to me. My own country has its own take, and our traditions come from Westminster. But suffice to say, the integrity of our elections are never in question.
Despite this being a UK based site, the ‘provincial’ attitude of the commentariat here is striking.
[…] Read this and its comments. Dying in the light […]
Maricopa county took nearly a week to count their ballots. The 1862 midterm, counted by candlelight, without computers, with no telephone or internet, no fast transportation in the middle of the civil war took three days to fully count the whole country.
On election day in Maricopa county not 20, not 2% but 20% of the voting machines didn’t work.
Nobody got fired for any of this. Nobody had the decency to resign in shame. What more needs to be said?
The Republicans went to the country in an environment where inflation is the highest in fifty years, inflation people felt EVERY day at the gas station or the grocery store, in the middle of a pointless war, a recession, everybody’s retirement funds are down 30%, the President is self evidently completely incompetent, in fact ga-ga, and still they massively underperformed. Again, nobody in the Republican leadership got fired. Nobody had the decency to resign in shame. What more needs to be said?
And even with all the jiggery pokery with the election counting, given the circumstances the Republicans should have won by a 25% margin, something that no amount of fraud can cover up short of Stalinesque activities. Which tells you that the American people are, on average, to stupid to vote their own self interest. What more needs to be said?
The rubes don’t need to vote “correctly” when the guys in charge of the counting said “everything thing worked just fine and we’re going with this result because I say so” even when it was painfully obvious the process didn’t work.
At this point, the only thing that is going to fix this problem is for the people in charge of the voting process to start feeling the pain. If a few houses of election officials were to suddenly burn in the middle of the day, a few of them were to be gunned down in the street, a few of them were to simply disappear, then when the next election rolls around in 2024 there might be a little less willingness to fix elections by the people on the ground doing the work of their political masters.
And that sucks because I really, really, don’t want to live in a country where actual violence is needed to make sure elections aren’t fixed.
@Steven R
At this point, the only thing that is going to fix this problem is for the people in charge of the voting process to start feeling the pain.
This is a dreadful concept. Even if it were acceptable as is (which it isn’t, it is vile), one has to remember that if you do it, you justify the other doing it, and so we end in a spiral of violence and death, ending up as the Lord of the Flies. I assume you didn’t care for people protesting and threatening Supreme Court Justices? It isn’t much different.
The problem is nothing to do with election officials or politicians, they are just symptoms. The fundamental problem is that the American people are too stupid to vote for their own self interest. They say you can’t fix stupid, but, insofar as there is a fix, it is to fix the stupid.
The alternative is to accept the reality that the America and the Western civilization you love and which is the foundation of our civilization, our wealth, our soft easy life, is entirely gone. America today is a completely different country than American of 20 years ago. What is gone? Free speech, free elections, work-hard-and-you-can-succeed, help-up-not-a-hand-out, sexualizing-children-is-bad, free public education of some level of quality, support-the-police, support-the-troops, hand-over-the-heart-and-tear-in-the-eye for the national anthem and flag.
So I think a wise person is clear eyed about this, realize that you can’t fix stupid, and all the forces are arrayed against you to fix it. So you have to find a bubble to live in among the crazy people. It isn’t what we’d like to hear. It isn’t what they taught us in civics class in school. But it is the naked reality, and living a happy, prosperous life requires staring in the the naked maw of reality.
The fix is to re-take the education system. We have ceded it to the crazies, and so our kids and our society are trending towards crazy.
The left recognized this power long before we did.
@bobby b
The fix is to re-take the education system. We have ceded it to the crazies, and so our kids and our society are trending towards crazy.
But the people who run the education system are our most implacable foes. We had the opportunity to do amazing things to the education system. It has been utterly eviscerated publically, in a way most people know. Good god they are forcing kindergarteners to go to drag queen shows. It is reductio ad absurdum, except that to question the absurd is now considered immoral. And yet despite the total degradation, the nadir of our public education system, a system where regularly ALL the kids in a system are three or four grades behind in their academics, a system that high school graduates kids that can barely read; despite this utter abomination the conservatives couldn’t trounce the left in an election? Conservatives pushing school choice to give parents back control over their children’s education, and still they were rejected by the voters.
That isn’t a problem with politicians. There are always terrible,evil politicians. No that is problem with the stupidity of the people who voted. Sure that stupidity could be fixed by better education, but education is spiraling down not up.
I remember back in 1971 (?) in eighth grade, my frumpy 50’s woke English teacher structuring her class for three months on how Bob Dylan’s lyrics made it clear that Nixon and the Republicans were evil. Most other teachers in my district were similarly inclined.
The Dems have been playing the long game, and we just react. They’ve been pushing socialist woke education for half a century, while we looked the other way and fiddled with tax rates. Now, finally, the student cohort that was raised in that environment for half a century hold at least 51% of the vote.
I made it out of that way of thinking (not until my twenties!) not because of my brilliance, but because my life experiences made me question what they were selling. Many people never have such experiences, and so the mindset is never put to a test. And, if your education tells you that conservative thought is evil, it’s comforting to avoid it. You get to keep your friends and have status.
We need a long game. We keep getting excited (Trump will win 2020! R’s will sweep 2022!) but we have no real long game in mind. We’ll keep losing until we do.
I offer a critique of this specific argument: either “if you do it, you justify the other doing it” cuts both ways or it cuts neither way. The Floyd riots are two years old now. Either they ‘justify’ an anti-woke mob marching into a woke district and burning a lot of things down, while describing the act as ‘a mostly peaceful protest’, or else, this argument has a flaw.
As an aside, would the (to overt appearances) cringing response of Minneapolis justify this hypothetical anti-woke mob marching into the same Minneapolis districts as the woke-mob chose in 2020 and burning them down again?
(Reigning-in my dark humour) I remark that the US only exists as a country because the English colonials living there in the late 18th century did stuff that was (very largely) different from vehmic arson – but was both violent and thoroughly illegal in English law of the time. The result, more than a decade later, was a new republic with a new constitution, but that was not the foreseen intent of the initial rebels. As Benjamin Franklin explained to Edmund Burke in 1775 (when the rebellion was just getting started), the colonies’ citizens had previously enjoyed great liberty (for that time) under English suzerainty:
so the immediate question agitating those considering becoming rebels was not the hope of creating some improved government,
(quoted from ‘An appeal from the New to the Old Whigs’ – whose modern US title would be ‘An appeal from the New to the Old Liberals’).
[…] I offer this Burke quote for when things look bleak (when elections look stolen, for example): “The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at least, it never can […]
When I was looking at specifics in my post, I focussed on Arizona, not Pennsylvania. However I was reminded of one of my general arguments by recent news from Philadelphia.
The city of brotherly love has made the 10pm curfew it imposed from summer (i.e. from before the election) permanent. Why?
My post argues (see its paragraph beginning ‘SECONDLY’) that if you believe that weak enforcement of law causes a rise in crime, then you should believe that weak enforcement of laws against vote-fraud similarly cause a rise in vote-fraud. In the recent senatorial contest, Dr Oz (Rep senate candidate) won the rest of Pennsylvania, but was pushed behind Warnock (Dem senate candidate) because the latter had 82% of the Philadelphia vote, compared to 17% for Dr Oz.
Anyone who argues it’s a mere right-wing plot to suggest that their woke prosecutor has anything to do with Philadelphia having a crime-caused-curfew can, consistently, argue it’s a mere conspiracy theory to doubt Philadelphians voted 82-versus-17 to continue this state of affairs.
I have doubts.
I wouldn’t care how the locals screwed themselves over by voting for a soft-on-crime prosecutor, except when it gets too bad, they’ll sell and move to a safe area and then repeat the exact same madness at the polling stations that lead them down that particular path in the first place.
If Democrats successfully pressure Rep-elect Santos (R-NY) to resign, then they need only 4 more.
Over/under on Democrats regaining control of the House is currently posted at 5 months.
Odds will be primarily influenced by the number of Rep Jeffries’s news releases and public appearances. Fewer appearances means it will happen sooner, as he and his team work behind the scenes to generate/promulgate incendiary headlines and oust GOP members.
It still amazes me that the American public started to think it’s a good thing to elect crim-defense lawyers as head prosecutors. What do they expect is going to happen? Fox/henhouse.