#Overton Window

[xclowniex]

It's crazy how the overton window for antisemitism has shifted.

The overton window describes the concept that there is a window of what is considered socially acceptable. This window can shift over time in either direction if more people start to believe more in policies from one side

I can't be bothered making a proper graph so I've typed it out going from unthinkable on the red to unthinkable on the blue side, with the ideal overton window in purple with the middle one being the most ideal. (((Zionists))) represents when people say zionist but either directly or indirectly mean jews and is a play on an antisemitic dogwhistle

Killing all jews

Putting all jews in prison

Restricting movement of jews

Restricting jewish businesses

Disliking jews but not doing anything about it

Being against all forms antisemitism

Disliking Israel but not holding jews accountable for Israel's actions

Boycotting (((zionist))) businesses

Preventing (((zionists))) from accessing places

Destroying Israel

Killing all (((zionists)))

The overton window should be the purple I coloured. But unfortunately it has shifted lean so that "disliking jews but not doing anything about it" is pushed into the red and "boycotting (((zionist))) business is now purple and in the overton window. And it is even sadly starting to shift further to push "being against all forms of antisemitism" out and include "preventing (((zionists from accessing places"

Ideally the window should only cover "all forms of antisemitism is bad" but to be a realist, what I typed out should be what it is. It should not be shifted towards any side

[frownyalfred]

(different anon) see now I wondering if actually the Overton window is shifting in the other direction, if we try to clumsily apply real world attitudes to the omegaverse. Would it not be the liberals, claiming that we're better than our "worst/animal" instincts and that in fact moving away from the Pack structure is progress, whereas the conservatives are the ones advocating for "traditional" Pack structures?

I guess they are kind of inverted in that world aren’t they? The “nuclear family unit” is a new concept and not a traditional one. It’s conservative about gender but liberal about secondary dynamic. Which is a mindfuck now that I’m actually typing it out. My head hurts.

…does this make Clark and Bruce social conservatives? Oh god. But I suppose it depends on how you view secondary dynamics and instinct. Are they truly something to defy, or is that inherently harmful no matter how you spin it? I think that’s the through line in all of this, that denying those instinctive structures in pursuit of an artificial family structure only hurts people, even if it’s for good reasons. Hmmm.

[lordandgodoftheobvious]

[odinsblog]

One About The Atmosphere: Want to change minds? Stop trying. Change the atmosphere instead.

Donald Trump in 2016 greets a screaming horde of ecstatic white christian nationalists

Minivan was a nice enough guy. He was easygoing; a happy guy with a frequently deployed smile. I don’t recall much anger from him, nor many strongly held opinions. I wouldn’t call him a philosophical type. No deep late night talks with Stove Minivan is my recollection.

This is the sort of dude I’d hang out with at a party, if there were a party we were both at, but not one with whom I’d maintain a relationship if we both graduated and then moved to different places—which I know for a fact, because that’s what happened. We drifted.

So then what happened is twelve years or so later I got on The Facebook, and Stove Minivan was there, too, and before long, we were friends again, he and I, and so were me and my other college friends, and them with him, and … look, you know the drill. It was The Facebook.

Minivan was no longer a pre-med student at a small northern liberal arts college. He was a doctor—a general care practitioner, if memory serves—in a smallish plains state town, very much like many other towns in the great plains or elsewhere in the country, I imagine.

Anyway, before long I noticed something about Minivan. Even though his feed was full of pictures of him and his lovely family, and he was smiling in them just the same as he always had in college, he was angry.

He was *enraged*

What was he angry about? The Demonrats.

Minivan was absolutely enraged about everything the Demonrats did. He also was out of his mind angry about Killary, and Obummer, the leaders of the Demonrats—or at least they were the front for the real leader of the Demonrats, who even back then I believe was George Soros.

What did the Demonrats do? Oh my heck, what *didn’t* they do? Mostly they hated America and American security and American economic strength, it seems. They engaged in corruption and bowed to foreign powers a lot. They shredded the dignity of the presidency, that’s for sure.

Minivan’s worldview wasn’t particularly coherent, if you want to know the truth.

I couldn’t help to notice that the Demonrats weren’t actually doing many of the things that Minivan thought they were doing.

And I noticed other things.

For example, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the policies Minivan supported were directly *causing* the sorts problems that made Minivan so angry.

And I couldn’t help but notice that well-sourced information enraged him more than pretty much anything else.

There was a lot of linking to sites I’d never heard of, like Breitbart and Newsmax, and of course plenty of Fox News. There were a lot of memes. There were a lot of conspiracy theories (a big birther, was Minivan).

Some of his posts contained subtle bigotry. Most of the rest contained not-subtle bigotry. Several of them contained slogans and statements that were, very simply, neo Nazi and white supremacist memes and shibboleths.

There was a lot of commentary accompanying these posts from Minivan, who was saying shocking stuff for a small-town family doctor … the sorts of things that it seemed to me would make people not want to use this person as a doctor, or or sit next to that person on a bus.

I hadn’t heard of Alex Jones, yet, but Minivan sounded a lot like Alex Jones, word for word and beat for beat. He’d even start his posts like a right-wing radio host: Sorry folks, but you can’t even make stuff like this up—ironically, accompanying things that had been made up.

This was all pretty distressing to those of us who had known Minivan back in the day, before he had become so obsessed with Demonrats.

So, a lot of us, myself included, did exactly what The Facebook wants.

We engaged with him.

At the time my belief was, you defeated bad ideas with better ideas, by confronting the bad ideas directly with the better ideas. Debate was for changing minds. You presented your ideas, they presented theirs, you countered, they countered, eventually everybody saw the truth.

But the intention was that I’d change his mind, with facts presented logically, delivered calmly and patiently.

This was my belief.

What happened confounded me, but perhaps you can predict it.

Minivan escalated any correction, however calmly stated or bloodlessly presented, into scorched earth territory. He rejected all proofs by rejecting the source outright as irrevocably tainted by bias, or he’d spiral into non sequitur, spamming our feeds with more misinformation.

He would claim he never said things he had just said, even though the statements were still there for anybody to read, one comment earlier in the thread.

He’d claim that I said things I'd never said, as anyone foolish enough to read through our conversations could discover.

He demonstrated a complete dedication to his ignorance and anger, and a total disinterest in anything like observable truth that contradicted his grievance.

It was confounding and unfamiliar behavior to me, at the time.

At the time.

All of it was larded with grievance, a sense that people like him had never wronged anybody, and everybody else had done nothing but wrong people like him.

The bigotry and authoritarianism grew.

And all the time, on Facebook, he and his family kept smiling their perfect smiles.

I’ll admit that over time my interactions stopped being polite and bloodless, and I’m not particularly sorry for it. I told him some things about himself he seemed not to know, but which I thought really ought to be said.

I have a bit of a penchant for sarcasm, which you may have noticed.

I employed this skill, and you can feel how you want to about sarcasm, but I think it helped convey the correct posture to take toward someone who says the sorts of things Minivan was saying.

The correct posture being "you have proved yourself to be a person who should not be taken seriously, and your positions do not deserve even a modicum of respect."

I found this a more healthy message to convey about Minivan to anybody watching, and I still do.

Eventually he blocked me, and he was out of my life forever. It was the right choice, and I'm very glad he did that.

I’ve pondered the incident since, as it’s become more and more relevant to “the way things are.”

A few things had become clear over time.

Minivan was not somebody whose intentions could be trusted. He was not operating in good faith, and I believe he well knew it, because many of his favorite sources of information have written instruction books on how to engage with people in bad faith.

Minivan was not debating; he was using debate to inject his counterfactual beliefs into the discourse, which were designed to further marginalize already marginalized people while simultaneously cloaking himself in self-exonerating grievance.

More, he was exerting an active effort to not know things that could be easily known, and to demand to be convinced out of deliberate ignorance, not because he was interested in having his ideas challenged, but because he demanded a world in which he got to decide what was real.

Further still: Minivan *learned* from me. The effect of telling him he was using one or another logical fallacy was not to sharpen his reasoning, but to teach him about the existence of logical fallacies, which let him (incorrectly) accuse others of those same logical fallacies.

So Minivan was deploying the language of logic, in ways that betrayed a total lack of understanding about what those fallacies were, granted, but in ways that likely made him seem more knowledgeable and reasonable to a casual or sympathetic observer.

He learned to ape our phrases and arguments, in much the way he’d learned to ape the style of Alex Jones and all the various Breitbart and Newsmax contributors he used to inform himself.

And these days it occurs to me: I hear a lot about "groomers."

We were not changing him by engaging with him thoughtfully.

We certainly weren’t changing him by engaging with him in kind.

Rather: we were making him better at what he was doing, and we were validating his world view—to himself and others—as one that merited engagement.

And week after week on Facebook, Minivan kept smiling and smiling and getting angrier and angrier, at us and Obummer and all the other Demonrats and liberals and every member of every minority group who dared to fail to ceaselessly assure him that he was right about everything.

I don’t miss Minivan's black-hole-sun smile. I think of it as my first hint of MAGA: politically overrepresented, socially coddled people, often living outwardly happy privileged lives, while seething inwardly that other people might be getting anything, anything at all.

Indeed, soon enough, another figure would come on the scene, whose behavior matched that of Minivan almost exactly, a perfect avatar for this spirit of aggrieved bigotry and supremacy that seemed to be moving through my former friend.

And sure enough, as I saw, there were millions and millions of smiling seething people who loved him.

And that guy became president.

Nobody believed he would. And then he did.

Because Stove Minivan, it turns out, wasn’t some weird outlier.

He was part of a growing new normal, a group of people who had been offered a chance to immigrate from observable reality and enter a dark world of constant hostility, misinformation, and self-loving grievance.

It's an invitation they leapt at, to which they cling even now.

It's a constituency immune to proof, angered by equality, cheered by cruelty, who blame others for the foulness of the shallow puddle of reasoning within which they have demand to be seated, even though we can all see them fouling it themselves, every day.

And afterward, a huge number of those shocked by this development decided the proper reaction was to accommodate it, in the name of unity—a belief, it seems, grounded in the idea that what you choose to get along with isn’t as important as getting along no matter what.

I’ll finish with the question that all of Minivan’s former friends would eventually ask, whenever they gathered together long enough for the subject to arise.

"What the hell happened to Minivan?"

Here’s the answer, I think: nothing.

Nothing happened to Minivan. Nothing at all.

He was always that guy, and he always thought the things he thought.

What changed was that he was given a lot of language with which to express those ideas, and access to enough other people who thought that way too, that it created a critical mass of permission.

The permission allowed him to change his attitudes and actions, and created a lot of other people willing to accommodate and normalize his antisocial anti-reality behavior, rather than reject it out of hand.

In college you could be pretty conservative, honestly. It was a pretty conservative place. But you couldn't behave like Minivan later would.

You’d be understood to be a far-right extremist, and people would then treat you like a far-right extremist.

Which is what you'd be.

I think it just wasn't possible for Minivan to be what he later became, because the atmosphere wasn't conducive to the possibility.

But then the atmosphere changed.

If we want to change it back, it's worth thinking about how atmospheres change.

(source)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day:

This week, a Georgia woman was arrested for her miscarriage. I’ll let that sit with you a moment. The 24-year-old—found bleeding and unconscious outside her apartment complex—was charged with ‘concealing a death’ and ‘abandoning a dead body’ after placing fetal remains in the trash. Georgia has no law dictating how to dispose of miscarriage remains, but police arrested her anyway. Her mugshot is already splashed across the local crime pages. Did you know that one million American women miscarry every year? I hope the cops are ready to run out of film. While this young woman sat behind bars, Georgia lawmakers considered a bill that would lock up even more women: The Prenatal Equal Protection Act (HB 441) would charge abortion patients as murderers—a crime punishable by life in prison or the death penalty. You wouldn’t know it from looking at the headlines. From the Associated Press to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, HB 441 is being covered as a “total abortion ban” rather than a radical step toward punishing women. Fertility doctors could also be jailed for life; under HB 441, discarding frozen embryos would be a criminal offense. Fertility specialist Dr. Karenne Fru asked lawmakers at a Thursday hearing, “Am I guilty of murder? That makes me a serial killer.” This isn’t an issue of a single extremist state. The legislation in Georgia is one of eleven ‘equal protection’ bills that have been introduced across the country since the start of the year. All of them seek to punish women who have abortions. The rest of us, of course, remain suspect: An Idaho legislator explained to a reporter last month that his ‘equal protection’ bill would allow for the investigation of miscarriages. We’re barely three years out from the end of Roe. Still think feminists are ‘hysterical’?

We warned that this would happen. For decades, feminists screamed from the rooftops that banning abortion would kill women and jail miscarriage patients. In response, we were accused of fear-mongering—called career overreactors desperate to paint all women as victims. I don’t know if it was a knee-jerk distaste of feminism or straight-up denial, but too many Americans never believed we would get here. Now that we are here, too many Americans don’t seem to realize it. Maybe that’s because it barely warrants a mention in the country’s top publications. You can blame it on the constant overwhelm of political news and overstretched newsrooms, but think about it this way: One in four American women will have an abortion. If nearly a dozen states were considering legislation to jail a quarter of all American men, do you think the front pages would be silent? One in five women will have a miscarriage. If police started arresting men for something that happens to 20 percent of them, do you think anyone would stand for it? We all know the answer. I first wrote about the young woman arrested in Georgia three days ago. That’s an eternity in journalism, yet the story still hasn’t been picked up by a single major news outlet. I’d like to demand outrage, but at this point I’d settle for acknowledgement. Is this just our new normal? Women being arrested if a cop doesn’t like how they miscarried, and lawmakers debating whether to put us to death before breaking for fucking lunch? Has everyone lost their minds? I know there’s a lot going on, but surely the personhood of half the population rates a smattering of attention!

Anti-abortion insanity: a 24-year old Georgia woman was arrested for her miscarriage.

[titleknown]

If one of these options made you very mad, feel free to dig yourself deeper in the reblogs.

[unitedfrontvarietyhour]

"The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organization of force, an organization of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population - the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians - in the work of organizing a socialist economy." - Lenin

(Pt.2)

[creature-wizard]

I think some people on this site need to study the concept of the Overton window.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Source

[sophieinwonderland]

u dont have to answer this publicly but i lowk thought you posted stuff that made people angry on purpose so theyd engage with your posts that then more people would see, thus spreading ur ideology further. like strategic ragebait

Lol!

Sometimes... I wouldn't say completely rage bait, per se. But I certainly don't think that I should censor myself. Generally, what you get on this blog is basically my actual opinion. I might present sometimes in an aggressive or condescending way to get a reaction and get more engagement. I might pull stunts here and there to get people talking. But I'm not lying or being someone I'm not.

Some people like to try to play moderate so that they can change the minds of the other side. But I think this can be a dangerous trap to fall into. If everyone tries to be moderate, then it's easier for the enemy to paint the moderates as extremists. And then the moderates have to move closer to the enemy to appease them so that they can still be moderate.

Let's talk about X-Men for a moment.

Personally, I think that if Magneto didn't exist, then it would be easier for the non-mutants to paint the X-Men as the villains. That might sound weird because Magneto also has the effect of causing a lot of hate towards mutants. But the thing about hate is that it's not necessarily rational anyway. I mean, in real life, you can point to some instances of hate being driven by actual bad people on that side. Islamophobia massively increased after 9/11, for instance...

But there was no reason for the satanic panic. There is no reason for homophobia or transphobia. These groups haven't committed any crimes against humanity. They are hated just for existing and being different.

Magneto doesn't cause mutants to be hated. Mutants were already hated and that's what drove Magneto to his extreme position.

I believe that we should love and accept everyone for who they are. I believe that should be the reasonable moderate position.

But for that to be the moderate position... You need an extreme on the other side.

You need that Magneto who can make the X-Men appear as the compromise.

You need radicals and extremists if you want to be able to shift the overton window on an issue.

Look at Obamacare! This was a middle-of-the-road compromise solution to our healthcare crisis. It was basically a Republican policy, being a repackaged version of Mitt Romney's healthcare plan! But the right-wing propagandists managed to make it out to be some extreme leftist socialist policy somehow!

If there's one thing that looking at politics has taught us, it's that every time you move towards the enemy to appease them, they move to more extreme positions so they can paint you as being radical in your compromise. Then you have to move closer to them to try to appease them again. Appeasement of hate is an endless cycle that drags you ever closer to self-defeat.

Back to syscourse, when I made this blog, I tried playing the moderate. But I was seen as an extremist anyways. So I just decided to play into that. 🤷‍♀️

I used to avoid using the word "sysmed" because I didn't want to offend the bigots. I used to not call sysmeds a hate group or call them bigots for the same reason.

What I realized about my past tactics is...

I was wrong!

I was wrong to play their game. I was wrong to try to appease them or self-censor. I was wrong to not call hate for what it is. I was wrong to avoid offending them.

Because when I tried to be more moderate in syscourse, they still painted me as an extremist. Which meant that they were able to paint my moderate positions as extremism.

In contrast, the more extreme my rhetoric is against sysmeds, the more moderate the less extreme pro-endos will look. The more moderate it appears to be pro-endo, as long as you "aren't like Sophie."

I'm done playing the game of bigots. I'm done playing by rules being set by people who hate me for my existence. I'm playing my own game now, and setting my own rules. 😁

[jules-not-juuls]

I want to throw a brick through the fucking overton window send post

[heliophile-oxon]

That window, Mr. Overton, it's moving such an awful lot - why, a fellow can scarce keep track of the dashed thing!

[olena]

The firehose of falsehood, also known as firehosing, is a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels (such as news and social media) without regard for truth or consistency. An outgrowth of Soviet propaganda techniques, the firehose of falsehood is a contemporary model for Russian propaganda under Russian President Vladimir Putin.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

(fuck that guy 🇺🇦🖕)

+

A big lie (German: große Lüge) is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique.

The German expression was first used by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (1925) to describe how people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Hitler claimed that the technique had been used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic.

According to historian Jeffrey Herf, the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and justify the Holocaust. Herf maintains that Nazi Germany's chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie technique that they described – and that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie

+

Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage coined in 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer, that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The law states:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

The rise of easy popularization of ideas through the internet has greatly increased the relevant examples, but the asymmetry principle itself has long been recognized.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

+

The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by abandoning formal debating principles, providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments and that are impossible to address adequately in the time allotted to the opponent. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

+

The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

[odinsblog]

For a very long time mainstream media has been conflating the word “moderate” with the word “conservative,” and moving the Overton Window further to the right.

And at the same time, the words “leftist” and “radical” and “extremists” are also being conflated, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Liz Cheney is not a moderate. Chris Christie is not a moderate. Nikki Haley definitely is not a moderate. I guess it’s nice that they are finally calling out Trump, but they all voted for Trump (twice!) and none of them are good people. (How do I know they aren’t good people? Because they spent most of their adult lives and careers supporting harmful conservative policies that intentionally target women and poor/Black/disabled/LGBTQ people to harm.)

The same goes for pundits like Ana Navarro and the other MSNBC “former” Republicans and Republican strategists who don’t like Trump anymore, but are still “proud conservatives.” They support most of Trump’s policies even if they don’t support Trump anymore. And Nikki Haley has even said that if the choice in November comes down to Biden or Trump, she believes that it’s who is Biden the bigger threat to America. (source)

And Nikki Haley has repeatedly said that she would pardon Trump, so that’s another big NOAP for me.

Look, I understand that neoliberals and conservative leaning Democrats have a tendency to kick left + kiss right, but people have GOT to learn that just because a conservative might occasionally do something right, like oppose Trump, that does not magically transform them into good people™ worth elevating or supporting.

One last thing: I’ve seen a lot of Biden supporters get all caught up in their feelings because Jon Stewart made fun of (gasp) Biden’s age. Listen: WE are not the ones who are in a cult! It is 100% okay for voters to joke about and criticize people in power. It’s MAGA who cannot criticize their dear leader, remember? It's the other guys, THE CULTISTS, who cannot accept even the lightest of criticisms.

“But Republicans will use it against us”

Yes, Republicans will use anything and everything against us, whether we said it or not. That’s what they dO. They lie, make shit up and try to use literally anything—true or false, good or bad—against non-Trump supporters. Being good and honest and not saying anything Republicans disagree with will not gain you any votes with Republicans.

Look, Idgaf about what Republicans and other people on the right think. About anything. Idc. Idgaf. Their opinions don’t matter and they aren’t going to change who I vote for in November 2024. I’m not worried about trying to change their hearts and minds, because they’re heartless and mindless.

At the end of the day, I dO think that msm tends to run with rightwing narratives, but once again, none of that foolishness will change my vote.

Put your grownup pants on and don’t get caught up in the drama.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Lisa Needham at Daily Kos:

The one thing that conservatives are excellent at is grabbing hold of the Overton Window and yanking it so hard to the right that we end up in the ditch.  But it’s not just right-wing politicians and activists who find ways to get their most unhinged and unacceptable ideas to the mainstream—some conservative attorneys and legal scholars are in on it, too, creating legal justifications for all of President Donald Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional moves.  The current project is to scrape up some historical and legal support for Trump’s increasing musings about serving a third term despite the 22nd Amendment clearly forbidding it.  But this is exactly what happened when Trump wanted to ignore the 14th Amendment and eliminate birthright citizenship, and when he wanted to ignore the Electoral College and stay in power after losing the 2020 presidential election. Since the effort to deform the 22nd Amendment to create a loophole for Trump to slide through in 2028 is relatively new, it doesn’t have as much fake support yet. Mostly, conservatives are stuck with a single Minnesota Law Review article by Professor Bruce Peabody, originally from 1999 and updated in 2016, that examines how a president could circumvent the 22nd Amendment’s bar on a third term.  To be scrupulously fair, this particular article predates Trump’s ambition to occupy the White House until death do us part, and it’s far more of a thought experiment than a political polemic. But it’s precisely those types of thought experiments that get laundered into conservative discourse as articles of faith.  It’s Peabody’s article, really, that launched the possibility for Trump to slide into a third term, thanks to a tortured and hyper-literal reading of the 22nd Amendment. 

The language of the 22nd Amendment forbids anyone from being “elected to the office of the president more than twice.” It does not, however, say that someone could not serve in the office more than twice, leading to complicated possibilities for Trump to remain in the White House. But this is nonsense. The 22nd Amendment was literally pushed by Republicans in the wake of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s three full terms and part of a fourth. There’s no credible way to say that what was really intended by the 22nd Amendment was to generally bar more than two terms—unless someone really, really wants a third term.  But now conservatives have Peabody’s hypothetical explanation of how to slither through loopholes in the Constitution to help them make their case. 

[...] Fortunately for Trump, there are other soulless ghouls with better credentials who were happy to step up. Kurt Lash, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, rushed out an incomplete 8-page draft in late February, and he fleshed that out to a tedious 92 pages late last month.  University of Minnesota Law School Professor Ilan Wurman and Georgetown University Professor Randy Barnett took a different route, penning an op-ed for The New York Times to help launder these hard-right ideas into the mainstream.  But both of their arguments boil down to the same thing: The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the 14th Amendment means that “allegiance” to the United States is required, and undocumented immigrants can’t show allegiance because they broke the law by entering improperly. Therefore, their U.S.-born children are not U.S. citizens.  Lash, Barnett, and Wurman might be dressing up their theories in fancier ways, but they’re following the same tawdry playbook that Eastman used after the 2020 election, when he and Wisconsin attorney Kenneth Chesebro arranged to submit slates of fake electors to vote for Trump in states won by Biden.  The flimsy legal and historical support was dissimilar from the 1960 scheme when Hawaii sent electors for both John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, which only happened because a statewide recount stretched past the date for electors to cast their votes. 

Some conservative legal scholars are seeking tortured justifications for a 3rd Trump term.