2021 American Civil War

No doubt about the funding assisting. But these people clearly have nothing going on in their lives if they can spend all day every day online devoted to a deranged fantasy.

The JFK Jr rally for instance - grown men and women really made a journey in the belief a deceased son of a long deceased president was coming back to restore Trump to the presidency. It never occured to any of them to question the lunacy of such an idea or the time wasted that could go to something productive. Don't they have real hobbies? Real friends?
 
Kentonio said:
Generally you don't need to fund people to act like fecking morons, they'll happily pay their own way.
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But someone has to pay for them to go to the place where you want them to be morons.
 
Probably a mix of both. The rabid Trump fan is a lot more wealthier than people think. Just because they are classless doesn't make them lower class. I remember seeing the pictures of boat parades draped in tributes to Trump. You have to be quite rich to own a boat. They're the ones who have the time and money to afford these extreme obsessions.
 
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/t...wouldnt-have-certified-2020-election-results/

.
Georgia gubernatorial candidate David Perdue, who was recently endorsed by Donald Trump, revealed that he would not have certified the state’s 2020 election results if he had been governor at the time.

“Not with the information that was available at the time and not with the information that has come out now,” the former Senate Republican said Wednesday while speaking to Axios. “They had plenty of time to investigate this. And I wouldn’t have signed it until those things had been investigated and that’s all we were asking for.”
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Can there be any doubt now? There will be no legitimate election in 2024. They are going to throw out Democrat wins and bring down the entire process.

Even with all their election laws, if the Dems actually retain Georgia etc they will do anything and everything to invalidate the result.

You're in so much trouble and the Dems just think things are normal. They are running on a platform of purposely trying to invalidate democratic wins.....THAT is their electoral message.
 
WPMUFC said:
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/t...wouldnt-have-certified-2020-election-results/



Can there be any doubt now? There will be no legitimate election in 2024. They are going to throw out Democrat wins and bring down the entire process.

Even with all their election laws, if the Dems actually retain Georgia etc they will do anything and everything to invalidate the result.

You're in so much trouble and the Dems just think this things are normal. They are running on a platform of purposely trying to invalidate democratic wins.....THAT is their electoral message.
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I dont think there will be legitimate election in 22, and in 24 there might not even be a complete election.
 
utdalltheway said:
That’s mad. I mean really mad. How they’re not up in front of a judge on treason charges I’ve no idea.
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Reminder, they went to all this effort to end democracy....because people voted. Their entire insane asylum / fever dream movement is based off nothing more than "hey that's not fair..you counted all the votes and we lost".

All their graphs and conspiracies are based off.....actually counting the votes.

True authoritarians through and through.
 
utdalltheway said:
That’s mad. I mean really mad. How they’re not up in front of a judge on treason charges I’ve no idea.
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Treason in the US is a very specific charge that is pertinent only during war, but I am sure there plenty more insurrection charges that can be thrown at him.
 
Boycott said:
Seems like that Glen Greenwald is totally wrong. Long article here but relevant passage below

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazin...insurrection-trump-coup-2024-election/620843/



This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine where lazy analysts make sweeping judgement on "working class" credentials based on aesthetics when the truth couldn't be further from it. It seems a big hit on twitter especially.
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I listened to a podcast recently that basically said something along the lines of the greatest threat to democracy is a bored (white) middle class.
 
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/14/media/january-6-fox-news-reliable-sources/index.html
Fox stays silent about new texts that expose Hannity and Ingraham's Jan. 6 hypocrisy
Fox News did not bother to air Monday night's meeting of the House committee investigating the 1/6 attack. Neither did Newsmax or One America News. So right-wing TV audiences did not hear when Rep. Liz Cheney revealed that some of Fox's biggest stars pressed Mark Meadows for help during the siege of the Capitol.

"Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home," Laura Ingraham texted Meadows. "This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy."

She knew. They all knew. They all knew the truth right away. But by the night of 1/6, Ingraham was spouting conspiracy theories about "ANTIFA" and excusing the peaceful "patriots" who, let's be clear, paraded into DC based on a lie she pushed over and over again. Fox's pro-Trump programming was partly to blame for the Big Lie, so when that lie led to violence, of course some of the hosts panicked and tried to put out the fire.

On Monday, Cheney read two other texts from Fox stars to Meadows from 1/6. One was from Brian Kilmeade: "Please, get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished." The other was from Sean Hannity: "Can he make a statement, ask people to leave the Capitol?" Cheney didn't specify what time those texts were sent. But I was struck by Hannity's casual tone about the unfolding terror. At least Kilmeade said "please, get him on TV."

The 1/6 committee has thousands of other texts and emails. Cheney shared just a tiny sampling on Monday. But the tiny sampling is deeply embarrassing for Fox and the Murdochs. As Maggie Haberman said, this "undercuts efforts by everyone whose name she read who might say Jan. 6 wasn't that bad." It "wasn't that bad" has been one of Fox's dominant themes this year. This banner on "Don Lemon Tonight" captured it perfectly: "Fox hosts and Donald Trump Jr. knew exactly what was happening and now they pretend it didn't happen."

"These texts prove something essential"
"These texts prove something essential," Amanda Carpenter wrote for The Bulwark. "No matter what they say now, Trump's loyalists knew at the time that what was happening at the Capitol was not a peaceful protest. They knew that it was a dangerous attack on American democracy. And they knew that Trump was responsible for it. That's why they sent the texts pleading with him, through his staff, to make it stop."

Or as SE Cupp put it on CNN just now, "Fox News viewers, you have been had."

Yes -- but here's what the Fox hosts will likely say if they're ever challenged about this. They'll say they condemned the riot at the time. And they all did, if only briefly. But Hannity and Ingraham also continued to lie about the election and strongly suggest that leftists were to blame for the Capitol chaos. And many Fox hosts have bashed other media outlets for continuing to report on the prosecutions and the probes -- in other words, for continuing to care about the terror. The memory-holing effort has been so extensive precisely because figures like Ingraham knew how bad it was. When she wrote "this is hurting all of us," I'm certain she wasn't thinking about America or the rule of law. She was thinking about "us" in the Trump-controlled Republican party. But she was right: This is hurting all of us.

Total silence from Fox
It's crucial to note that Fox didn't air the 7pm ET hearing live or address the revelations about the texts later in the day. "Fox viewers are being shielded from the Fox hosts' urgent texts to Meadows," MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell commented.

Hannity actually gabbed with Meadows during the 9pm hour but "did not mention the texts at all," as The Daily Beast's Justin Baragona noted here. (Hannity hit back at Cheney, however, by saying "I love how Liz is now partnered with the people that called her father a war criminal, a murderer, and a crook. Pretty amazing!")

During the chat, Meadows acknowledged that he is about to be held in criminal contempt. But here's how Hannity opened the hour: "The hyperpartisan predetermined-outcome anti-Trump January 6 committee just voted 9 to 0 to hold Mark Meadows in contempt for refusing to comply with their orders." With that framing, why would any Fox viewer take any committee action seriously? Further, Hannity focused on Capitol security failures; blamed Democrats for those failures; and brought up the rioting in the wake of George Floyd's death. This is Fox's tried-and-true approach whenever faced with the awfulness of 1/6: Dodge or distort or deflect.

A Fox spokesperson did not respond to my request for comment about the texts on Monday night.
 
Sky1981 said:
They should stop digging, the more they did the more they look like an idiot for not being able to do anything against trump
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Yea, the Fox News hosts do keep digging their own hole, don't they?
 
The Firestarter said:
Interesting take as usual.
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At this rate, even if they finally got their "You're goddamn right I ordered the Code Red" moment, he'd still walk away.



Trump has too much political capital to be indicted and thrown to jail. If he managed to pull this in live TV half of American would literally took arms to safe him from Jail.
 
The thing is you can't convince a decent chunk of the population. Treat it like religion, or more accurately, a cult - which is what it is. You can't rationalise to them. Fine.

But to win elections you only need to sway less than 5% of 'fence sitters'. That in my mind is the point of all this. The media (and us) are far more focussed on the peripheries of both parties, but the vast majority of Americans are actually centrist.

And if even if the politics of this still didn't work, it's still one of the most important, insidious events in American democracy and deserves investigation.
 
Beachryan said:
The thing is you can't convince a decent chunk of the population. Treat it like religion, or more accurately, a cult - which is what it is. You can't rationalise to them. Fine.

But to win elections you only need to sway less than 5% of 'fence sitters'. That in my mind is the point of all this. The media (and us) are far more focussed on the peripheries of both parties, but the vast majority of Americans are actually centrist.

And if even if the politics of this still didn't work, it's still one of the most important, insidious events in American democracy and deserves investigation.
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I just don't know how much of a centrist you can be when you vote for Trump.

This seems like the pragmatic, sober approach, but the problem is we live in a world where the sitting US President essentially attempted a coup when he lost the election, and it's still his party. If anyone other than him runs in 2024, it'll just be because they're Trumpian without Trump's baggage. Add on top of that the shaky popularity of Biden, and it gets scary. I'm not even American, and I don't live in the US, but I was still glued to the screen watching Jan 6th in foreboding disbelief.
 
Video interview inside link. Was an interesting segment I caught this morning before departing the residence.

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/poli...r-study-barbara-walter-intvu-intl-ovn-vpx.cnn

How close is the US to civil war? Closer than you think, study says
CNN's Michael Holmes talks with Professor Barbara Walter of the University of California San Diego about her work on a task force that tries to predict where outside the US a civil war is likely to break out. Walter says the two best predictors of whether violence is likely to occur currently exist in the US and have emerged at a "surprisingly fast rate."
 
Anyone interested in what's coming up in 2022 and 2024 should read this article


TRUMP’S NEXT COUP HAS ALREADY BEGUN
January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election.

The thing that got our attention first was the age,” Pape said. He had been studying violent political extremists in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East for decades. Consistently, around the world, they tended to be in their 20s and early 30s. Among the January 6 insurgents, the median age was 41.8. That was wildly atypical.

Then there were economic anomalies. Over the previous decade, one in four violent extremists arrested by the FBI had been unemployed. But only 7 percent of the January 6 insurgents were jobless, and more than half of the group had a white-collar job or owned their own business. There were doctors, architects, a Google field-operations specialist, the CEO of a marketing firm, a State Department official. “The last time America saw middle-class whites involved in violence was the expansion of the second KKK in the 1920s,” Pape told me.

Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.
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A year ago I asked the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse how he explained the integrity of the Republican officials who said no, under pressure, to the attempted coup in 2020 and early ’21. “I think it did depend on the personalities,” he told me. “I think you replace those officials, those judges, with ones who are more willing to follow the party line, and you get a different set of outcomes.”

Today that reads like a coup plotter’s to-do list. Since the 2020 election, Trump’s acolytes have set about methodically identifying patches of resistance and pulling them out by the roots. Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, who refused to “find” extra votes for Trump? Formally censured by his state party, primaried, and stripped of his power as chief election officer. Aaron Van Langevelde in Michigan, who certified Biden’s victory? Hounded off the Board of State Canvassers. Governor Doug Ducey in Arizona, who signed his state’s “certificate of ascertainment” for Biden? Trump has endorsed a former Fox 10 news anchor named Kari Lake to succeed him, predicting that she “will fight to restore Election Integrity (both past and future!).” Future, here, is the operative word. Lake says she would not have certified Biden’s victory in Arizona, and even promises to revoke it (somehow) if she wins. None of this is normal.

Arizona’s legislature, meanwhile, has passed a law forbidding Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, to take part in election lawsuits, as she did at crucial junctures last year. The legislature is also debating an extraordinary bill asserting its own prerogative, “by majority vote at any time before the presidential inauguration,” to “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election.” There was no such thing under law as a method to “decertify” electors when Trump demanded it in 2020, but state Republicans think they have invented one for 2024.

In at least 15 more states, Republicans have advanced new laws to shift authority over elections from governors and career officials in the executive branch to the legislature. Under the Orwellian banner of “election integrity,” even more have rewritten laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote. Death threats and harassment from Trump supporters have meanwhile driven nonpartisan voting administrators to contemplate retirement.

Vernetta Keith Nuriddin, 52, who left the Fulton County, Georgia, election board in June, told me she had been bombarded with menacing emails from Trump supporters. One email, she recalled, said, “You guys need to be publicly executed … on pay per view.” Another, a copy of which she provided me, said, “Tick, Tick, Tick” in the subject line and “Not long now” as the message. Nuriddin said she knows colleagues on at least four county election boards who resigned in 2021 or chose not to renew their positions.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, excommunicated and primaried at Trump’s behest for certifying Biden’s victory, nonetheless signed a new law in March that undercuts the power of the county authorities who normally manage elections. Now a GOP-dominated state board, beholden to the legislature, may overrule and take control of voting tallies in any jurisdiction—for example, a heavily Black and Democratic one like Fulton County. The State Election Board can suspend a county board if it deems the board to be “underperforming” and replace it with a handpicked administrator. The administrator, in turn, will have final say on disqualifying voters and declaring ballots null and void. Instead of complaining about balls and strikes, Team Trump will now own the referee.

The coming midterm elections, meanwhile, could tip the balance further. Among the 36 states that will choose new governors in 2022, three are presidential battlegrounds—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—where Democratic governors until now have thwarted attempts by Republican legislatures to cancel Biden’s victory and rewrite election rules. Republican challengers in those states have pledged allegiance to the Big Lie, and the contests look to be competitive. In at least seven states, Big Lie Republicans have been vying for Trump’s endorsement for secretary of state, the office that will oversee the 2024 election. Trump has already endorsed three of them, in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan.
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Amid all this ferment, Trump’s legal team is fine-tuning a constitutional argument that is pitched to appeal to a five-justice majority if the 2024 election reaches the Supreme Court. This, too, exploits the GOP advantage in statehouse control. Republicans are promoting an “independent state legislature” doctrine, which holds that statehouses have “plenary,” or exclusive, control of the rules for choosing presidential electors. Taken to its logical conclusion, it could provide a legal basis for any state legislature to throw out an election result it dislikes and appoint its preferred electors instead.
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https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/21/...term-candidates-2020-election-lies/index.html
Republican candidates across the country refuse to acknowledge Biden won legitimately

One of the worrisome parts I stumbled on within this article is that apparently in America a person that directly placed himself as part of the actual insurrection attempt can run for political office. It is true many inside the political apparatus helped push the insurrection boiling point but none took part during the storming of Capitol, that I know of. Yet this clown, Joey Gilbert, was present but claims he did not go inside. Every one of these fecks should have been made an example of through a public execution. A "we will not tolerate you attempting to overthrow the government" warning to future nutjobs.
 
Boycott said:
On this I have no evidence but I suspect a lot of Qanon believers are pretty financially well off too. These political hobbies take up a lot of time and they are going around paying money to attend events together. How do people have the time to spend all day on twitter or facebook if they were destitute? I was in a bad state before and among the luxury items I sacrificed was actually to cut down on internet broadband until I could afford to. It was not a necessity and I was working long hours anyway so by the time I got home there was no use for it.
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it’s often said that the crisis in Western democracy is caused by those left-behind, but is the greatest threat to security actually a bored middle-class? University Professor and author of Our Own Worst Enemy Tom Nichols talks to Arthur Snell about why unchecked narcissism is to blame for rising illiberalism, which factors are accelerating our democratic demise, and why building coalitions is our only way out.



  • “We’ve become used to being hyper-connected to each other, which turns out to be a pretty bad thing for maintaining democracy.”
  • “The people who vote for populists are overwhelmingly white, middle-class and well-off.”
  • “In the US anti-immigration feeling is sky-high in areas where there are no immigrants, it’s driven by television.”
  • “We now have millions of people who have become so detached from reality that it’s impossible to have a rational conversation with them.”
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