#but still doesn’t change the fact that trump won the election

[bixy]

the atmosphere at work feels so heavy, like everyone is collectively holding their breath

[amaditalks]

Harris could have chosen to win but she simply chose to lose. It's not hard to beat Trump, it's comically easy, actually. You can convince yourself that it wasn't her choice to lose, but the fact of the matter is that she deliberately lost voters in key swing states. Trump's vote amounts remained mostly the same. Harris lost 10-15 million votes from Biden. Black women voted for her in less amounts than they did Biden or Hillary.

Had she not done genocide, she would've won. No matter how much you try and convince yourself otherwise. Now you have Trump. Accept your choices. Live with them. Because the consequences will remain. This is how it's going to be for the forseeable future because democrats chose to make it this way. You can learn from this or just give up and die i guess.

So people know, this person is following me out of the comments on another post where they have repeatedly asserted that Kamala Harris lost because she “did genocide.“ Apparently, this person believes that Kamala Harris is simultaneously the US vice president and the Prime Minister of Israel — amongst other things that they are deeply confused about.

But let’s be really very clear. It is not easy to beat Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton got more votes than Donald Trump and still did not beat Donald Trump. The only reason Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in 2020 is because of how badly Trump mishandled Covid. Had Biden not entered the 2020 race and the Democratic nominee had ended up being another woman, Trump would have won in 2020.

The voters who mobilized to create the Biden victory were the sometimes voters. The mushy middle that doesn’t pay attention to much until it’s as big as a recession or a global pandemic, and votes or stays at home based on their personal satisfaction with their own lives, not based on issues.

Those voters came out to vote for Biden because they were personally dissatisfied with the course of the pandemic. Those voters either stayed home this year or voted for Trump because they were personally dissatisfied with their finances, which they mistakenly believe is the same thing as “the economy.”

Also, as explained to you in those comments, only 4% of voters said that the situation Israel and Palestine factored into their vote. The overwhelming issue that motivated people was “the economy“ for whatever they understand that to be.

Of that 4% who weighed the Israel-Palestine issue in their decision making, the majority voted for Harris.

You can repeat what is, at this point, an intentional lie about this issue being the reason for Kamala Harris’ loss until the day you literally depart this earth, but it will still be a lie that does not bear any resemblance to the actual facts around this election.

If at some point you wish to get in touch with honesty and integrity, that will be a positive change in your life and the lives of everyone who has the misfortune of encountering you. 

[shining-apollo]

idk if ur tags were specifically toward me i cant tell if it was a general you, to the op, or me. but nobody has been saying don't vote. the trolly problem meme shows that the dems are the "lesser evil" with having less flags or icons or whatever. if we dont vocally complain ESPECIALLY during elections nothing will change, at the very least they can update policies or ideals they're running on. trump lost the popular vote last time he won in electoral college. and being rude to ppl for expressing the facts and wanting more from their candidates is one of the worst things the dems r doing right now esp with the "do you want trump to win?!". highly recommend looking up imani barbarin (aka crutches and spice) who is a communications professional that has been talking about this much better than i can

The tags weren’t towards you directly. My tags were more in response to people I HAVE seen telling people not to vote. I understand people need to demand more from their candidates, I never said that wasn’t the case. The democratic candidates are nowhere near what I would like, and no matter who wins there are still fights to be made. I’m simply frustrated at people saying “well yeah but the democratic nominee still sucks” when so many people already understand that. We know there are still fights to be made, but in the end adding on to the list of things wrong by simply stating “don’t vote for anyone it doesn’t matter if trump wins” (which is in what my tags were in response to) helps no one.

Also I’m not trying to fight and I’m not upset. I overall agree with the original post as well. I was just expressing frustration at more defeatist posts I’ve seen.

[scarlet-rosepetals]

Listen OP, I recognize that you probably didn’t ask the question in earnest because no one on this gods forsaken website asks questions earnestly, but it fucking kills me that even with genocide joe funding an extremely visible genocide right now as I type this we are still doing this shit, so I’m going to answer earnestly.

You are not American, as you said, so I get that from the outside that looks like an innocuous statement, but the reason people get angry about those who’s response to everything is “you should still vote blue” is because it never just means “you should still vote blue”. It is designed, at its core, to be a victim blaming statement, and it directly translates to “the United States would be a perfect country if only those yucky wucky marginalized people weren’t too laaaaaaazy to vote!!!” I recognize that this might sound like an exaggeration to you, but I need you to understand that there are uncomfortably large swaths of people in this country who earnestly believe that every bad thing that has happened in the United States since 2016 happened because Trump won the election, and that he won because young marginalized people didn’t cast their votes. The democratic party is in power right now, choosing to fund genocide right now, and people believe this is happening as a direct result of an insufficient number of young people voting blue no matter who.

I’ll put it in perspective. Imagine walking up to a Palestinian immigrant in the US right now who lost their family to Israel’s bombing and telling them they should still go vote blue next election or things will really get bad. Can you seriously look me in the eye and tell me that sounds like an innocuous practical statement right now?

You bring up what the alternatives are, and in fairness, I’m sure you’re getting a lot of responses that are completely irony poisoned jokes about firebombing a Walmart instead of genuine responses, but also in fairness the fact that those are your ideas for alternative actions is pretty disturbing and suggests that you just don’t think there’s a viable solution other than to keep voting blue and hoping that eventually fixes everything, which it won’t, actually it will make things worse. Frankly, it’s weird how few people seem to think that getting everyone to stand up and say “I will vote for this political party and support them no matter what they do” isn’t an obvious recipe for disaster. The democratic party is explicitly counting on left-leaning people to keep saying that so that they can keep courting centrists and pushing their party further politically right, because that’s the logical thing to do to get the most votes if voting for them is truly the only “moral” option for anyone on the left (and also because the two party system is a farce but that’s another post).

So what are the real, honest alternatives then? Well, honestly the most appropriate answer to that question is “what are you, a cop?”. Detailing your personal political actions on the internet is horribly unsafe regardless of the legal and moral status of your actions. If they genuinely challenge the status quo, it’s dangerous to talk about them. In the broad strokes though the best thing we can do is work together and help each other, because individualist notions about doing your small part in isolation or being an individual crusader for the revolution are bullshit. We’re all going to have to be a little nicer to each other and a little more willing to work as a group. On my end, that starts with providing you with a genuine explanation even though your question was dismissive and carried the victim-blaming sentiment of the “just vote blue” rhetoric. On yours, it starts with listening (and yes it starts with you too, don’t think for a second that whatever country you live in means this all doesn’t apply, the world will not be changed strictly along border lines)

listen i am not american. i understand that even democrats fucking suck and its a genuinely shitty situation to be in. im so sorry. but hey, hey look at me. why are you guys bullying people for saying "you should still vote blue?" Like im curious about the alternatives youve got. voting red? firebombing walmart? tumblr user catboyssepticbutthole, i know you will not be firebombing walmart.

[bllsbailey]

NYT's Whine Fest Over Failed Female Presidential Candidates Buried This Odd Line

This New York Times piece about the failure of female presidential candidates has some good, bad, and ugly parts. Despite the headline, it’s not as insane as you’d expect. It’s fair-ish, though you wouldn’t know if you didn’t get past the first few paragraphs. The Democratic Party is still reeling from its 2016 and 2024 losses, where twice the party has had female candidates that have lost to Donald J. Trump. The article goes through the usual motions about whether it was sexism and the like, which a great many Democrats still cling to despite Kamala Harris being one of the worst candidates in recent memory. Yet, it’s this line that made me recoil. It dealt with erasing the stigma of a female candidate if more ran (via NYT) [emphasis mine]: 

Those candidates have been conservative and liberal, racially diverse, and from big cities, small towns and across the country. Some campaigned on an economic message, others focused on social issues. Only two — Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Harris, both Democrats — captured their party’s nomination. 

Excuse me? Ms. Harris stole that nomination, fellas. Even your own Maureen Dowd called it a coup in the editorial section. No Democrat has ever voted for Kamala Harris in a Democratic primary. Second, the sexism narrative is the place of safe refuge but a false oasis as Harris had the lowest levels of female support in nearly a generation. The Times noted that this go-to coping mechanism could also be blinding Democrats to the serial flaws of the Harris operation: 

For Democrats still scarred by Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald J. Trump in 2016, Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat at the hands of the same man in November has only deepened anxieties over gender bias and prompted a fresh round of debate over the electability of women to the nation’s highest office.  While few will say so aloud, some Democrats are already quietly hoping their party doesn’t nominate a woman in 2028, fearing she could not overcome an enduring hold of sexism on the American electorate. Many others anticipate another — perhaps even more aggressive — round of questions and doubts about female presidential candidates that have plagued the party for the better part of two decades..  “People feel pretty stung by what happened,” said Liz Shuler, the first woman elected to lead the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the largest federation of unions in the country, who supported Ms. Harris and believes she made no significant missteps in the race.   […]  Yet to chalk Ms. Harris’s loss up to sexism alone — and to the idea that women are held to a higher standard when seeking the White House — could also be a way of minimizing campaign missteps.  […]  Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, who won a tough re-election race against a male candidate in November, said she saw more traditional political factors playing a larger role in Ms. Harris’s defeat, noting that she heard “very little focus” on her gender or the barrier-breaking potential of her candidacy.  “This was a change election. People — if people are expressing that they’re concerned about the direction of the country, they’re not going to vote for the incumbent party,” she said. “It has much more to do with that than I think the fact that Kamala Harris is a woman.”  The results indicate that, yet again, voters were not particularly motivated by a desire for greater female representation. Despite the liberal hope that women would flock to her candidacy over issues like abortion rights, Ms. Harris won the lowest level of support from female voters of any Democratic nominee since 2004, according to an analysis by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. 

Democrats gambled and lost on abortion. It’s not the only issue, and female voters know that. They misread the Dobbs fallout. You saw that when they chortled over Kansas rejecting a right-to-life amendment to their constitution by an overwhelming margin while remaining oblivious to the fact that there is no state or federal funding, there are parental consent laws. Abortion is banned after 22 weeks except for the usual exceptions (life of the mother et al.).  

Everything I just mentioned would make pro-aborts vomit, though it’s a window into how most of the country views this issue: legal, but with a host of restrictions. For sure, the Left will try to thread gun control into this debate with more restrictions on women’s health than gun purchases, but with Hunter Biden’s pardon and progressives cheering Luigi Mangione—the Left can take a seat for a while. They can sit down for the next four years because they lost.  

Regarding Republicans, no woman has ever won the nomination for a national race, but there’s a bit of a wrinkle here: Donald J. Trump was running. Trump was going to bulldoze any candidate in the GOP field this year, so it will be interesting to see what comes next after the second Trump presidency. This bit was added after the article mentioned Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and former President Bill Clinton admitting that America will elect a female president someday. Still, it’ll likely be from the Republican Party.  

Trending on Townhall Videos

[authorjenniferreynolds]

Janurary 6th, 2021 The Line in the Sand

No matter what Trump did or didn’t do while in office his first four years or what he says he will or won’t during his next term, January 6th should have been our country’s line in the sand. Everyone in this country should have seen those people pushing their way into the capital building and said, “Nope, that’s too far.” When a person can say they won an election despite all the evidence to the contrary, and you believe them and only them so much you willingly take up arms against fellow citizens, erect a gallows to hang you’re vice president on for not doing something he can’t legally do, and storm your Nation’s capital you’ve allowed that person to have too much power over you. The fact that people were willing to go that far should have been the flashing neon sign to the rest of the country that people have gone beyond merely liking a particular president. They’ve started worshiping the person in a cult-like manner, and people with cult-like fanaticism are dangerous, take extreme actions, don’t use logic to think through their decisions (they merely react), and are blind to plain truths.

I’m not saying you and your candidate can’t disagree with the results of an election. That doesn’t make the candidate a cult leader or you a fanatic. The US allows a person to contest a decision. The candidate can request endless recounts. They can take their claims to every court on the planet. That is their right. They can pursue it for as many years as they want. What they can’t do is refuse to step aside when the day comes for them to leave office, and they still haven’t proven they won. What the candidate can’t do is sit back and watch as their followers take a shit in our Nation’s capital. A person who does that isn’t a leader. A person who lets his followers go to such lengths after all the proof given to him that he was wrong, who would have let his people hang our vice president for not doing something he couldn’t legally do, is a cult leader, bordering on dictator. The candidate can continue to believe he won for the rest of his life. He can gather evidence and still pursue his accusations in court. Still, until his claim has been proven, he should be a good role model to his people, stand nonviolently, stand aside, and graciously allow the system to work as it always had.

Sidenote: If Trump had done this and still sought evidence that he’d won, I, and I’m sure many more people, would have started to take him more seriously. But what he looked like was an elementary school bully goading his “friends” into beating up all the children on the playground because he lost his turn in line for the slide because he was picking on another kid.

Yes, I understand that you feel like an injustice was done, but we are a civilized society with rules. Do the rules always work perfectly? No. When we find kinks or prejudices in the rules, we set out to change them. Sometimes, change is slow, but our country has consistently tried to improve. You do that from the inside. You get more involved with your government from the inside.

I’m not saying that a rebellion is never the way to go. But you and your neighbors weren’t being rounded up in concentration camps and put to death because of your race, political affiliation, religion, etc. You weren’t being hung because of your racist comment about Obama. You weren’t being forced into the military and further forced to raid and pillage other countries just because Americans wanted more land. You weren’t being whipped in fields by people who owned you. Once your nation is that far gone, a violent rebellion might be the only thing that brings about change, but nothing even remotely that heinous happened before January 6th.

The most significant motivation anyone had was they were told the election was stolen. Yet, every allegation was disproven. All of the recounts kept Biden as the winner. The few credible accounts of fraud were perpetuated by Republicans, and none were enough to say the election in any way. You can claim all of this is wrong, and that is your right, but it doesn’t change the fact that he went through the proper channels, different channels, many times and was told the same thing. At that point, if there is a conspiracy against him, it's vast, and storming the capital wouldn’t help or change anything. All the violence made him look more in the wrong than before.

Just an FYI, a way to tell someone is lying or has an agenda is when they have another suggestion and another when one has been disproven. When one theory was debunked, there was another and another and another. That’s a sign the person has nothing and is fishing for anything. The new theory is them trying to save face, and they will keep throwing things out until they get something to stick, but nothing stuck. Instead, pole workers were threatened. Innocent people’s lives were put in endanger, and the gullible went to jail in Trump’s place.

You're easily manipulated and controlled if you can actively threaten, risk jail, or becoming a murderer of a stranger over something you were told. I’ve gotten mad over what people close to me have said about others close to me. I’ve had to stay away from the other party before I got their side of the story. Still, I’ve never threatened a life over something I didn’t have empirical truth over, meaning I have threatened the lives of two people whom I know raped other people I know, but there was without doubt evidence to prove they did what they did. I know I could go to jail or prison if I ever acted on my threat, and I’m okay with that. Again, I had evidence. No one, not even the accused could deny said evidence. If you’re willing to throw your life away for one over an election, knowing there will be another one in four years, and over something that has been disputed by many, then you’re an idiot or an asshole just looking for a reason to be an asshole.

Another possible motivation for January 6th is COVID, when people felt their civil liberties were being infringed upon. However, the most prominent issues people had during COVID-19 occurred during Trump’s reign, so that doesn’t make much sense. Do I agree with everything TRUMP and Biden did during COVID? No. Were they the only leaders making some of those same decisions? No.

Shutting down the country could be seen as taking away freedoms, which could cause a rebellion, but the shutdown happened during Trump, not Biden, so storming the capital on January 6th because of that doesn’t make sense. Do I think we should have shut everything down? No. If more COVID deniers died early on, we might be better off. I say this knowing that I could have very well been one of those first to die. I fall in the high-risk category for simply being overweight. I say it also because I believe our world is overpopulated, and we need a good culling. I’m not saying I want to actively kill people or that I want people to die, but a decrease in population, in my opinion, would help some of the world's problems.

I also don’t think we should have shut down because I believe in free will. I believe any business that wanted to stay open should have, that people who wanted to work should have been able to go to work, and those who wanted to go shopping should have been allowed to. We knew the risks of going out into public. It was our choice to do so or not. The same goes for schools. Parents should have two options: online or in school. That goes for the teachers. I don’t think we should have been kept from our loved ones who were in the hospital or elderly in nursing homes. Do I understand that it wasn’t just about me or my loved ones in those cases, and I would have been exposing the virus to to others? Yes, but we could have found some workarounds if we’d gotten creative.

Before I go further, know that I practice what I preach. I was with my mother-in-law when she died in September of 2022 in a local hospital. I respected the ICU rules, but when she was moved to hospice, I was there with her as much as possible. I even nearly went to jail the night she died because a night guard tried to stop me from going to her room after hours. It was my choice to expose myself to whatever was on her floor. I wasn’t violent about it. Pissy and a little mouthy, of course. I was grieving. However, I told the guard where I was going, that I had permission to be there, and he could take it up with people above him, but I would be with my mother-in-law. There was some back and forth, and he wasn’t happy, and he was just doing his job, but in the end, I was at the hospital until her body was removed from her room.

Side note: Because we were under a global pandemic that we didn’t fully understand, I was also okay with people who didn’t want to put their lives at risk getting unemployment during that time. I think we should also implement it during certain weather events so people feel like they have to risk their lives to ensure they can feed their kids. I’m not an asshole. I don’t care if people get money or assistance, but I don’t. Crime goes down when people feel comfortable and can reliably get food and pay their bills. And during a time when most of the world was shut down, and certain things were hard to get, I’m all for people getting as much help as possible.

Back to possible reasons for a rebellion. The mask mandate could be seen as infringing on a person’s rights, which started under Trump, not Biden. I can understand where the anger and pushback for this came from. However, you have to remember that your rights end where another person’s begins. You’re welcome to put your life at risk, but not others. Also, masks are used in hospitals to help prevent the spread of germs, so it was a natural precaution to take. Did I like them? Nope. I hate wearing the mask. I feel like I can’t breathe, and they fog up my glasses. Yet, I’m an adult. I understand why places require them. I also understand they have a right to require them. It is their business, after all. They can make pretty much any rule they want. The same goes for the government and their buildings and employees. Therefore, if you enter a business requiring them, wear them or go elsewhere. This applies to any business and any rule the company has. Don’t make a scene like a three-year-old. You’re just hurting your credibility as an adult.

Sidenote: I’m saying this as someone who hates the masks and refuses to wear them. However, since I’m an adult, I make sure I know the rules before I go or leave if I discover the rule later. Or I sucked it up if it was necessary, like at the hospital. Showing your ass just shows the world what kind of entitled asshole you are, and it shows you haven’t grown up. People won’t take you seriously or will take you too seriously, and we end up with worse rules or no business.

The mask mandate leads me to the vaccination mandate, which began Biden’s term in September 2021 for federal employees and Medicaid and Medicare-certified healthcare facilities--not the entire country. There was a proposal to force large companies to give their employees specific options concerning the vaccines, but it fell through. Do I believe schools, businesses, and the like should be able to require their students, employees, etc., to have the vaccine? Yes. I think it is their right as an entity in our free country to require whatever they want (though I imagine there are some things, illegal things, they can’t require). Does this mean you are mandated to have the vaccine? No. You have the right not to attend those schools or work at the company. You can even protest the rules. It’s your right. I also believe it’s the right of the other party to change or not change said rule.

Of all the things leading up to January 6th, these are the most significant things I can think of now that could be considered reasons for violent rebellion against our government. The one under Biden was big, but our governing body worked in favor of those who didn’t want a vaccine mandate, so to pull the stunt during his certification makes no sense.

You can go back to election fraud, but to this date, none of the accusations have held water. I can’t say it didn’t happen. I can’t tell you that you are wrong for thinking or feeling like something is wrong. I don’t think my brother’s death was a suicide, and I don’t believe Trump won Georgia and Pennsylvania this year (2024), but I haven’t found any evidence of either gut feeling. I plan on looking into both, and I’ll follow leads, but until something concrete comes along, I have to let things play out. If the 2020 election was rigged, we would have found out by now, but maybe not. If this one was rigged, we’ll find out. It might be too late to instate the proper person, and I don’t know what the protocol is for such thinking, but if nothing else, how it happens can help us stop it from happening again.

If you think the system is broken, help fix it. Don’t try to further destroy it. That only makes it harder to rebuild.

Is this country a Utopia? No. It never has been, and it never will be. Should you be allowed to protest? Yes. Become violent with it, no. Should you be upset that your person didn’t win? Of course. Should you be allowed to force that person into office anyway, especially after all legal resources said he didn’t win? No. Our system doesn’t work that way. And it shouldn’t. That leads to chaos and our empire crumbling. What you do is pay more attention to politics, especially local politics, and you do what you can to change who’s running your city, county, and state. That helps you change who’s running the entire show. However, you have to remember that 334 billion people live in this country. Laws have to ensure every single one of those people’s rights aren’t being violated. Which makes laws tricky. And the only law that genuinely works for everyone is one that every person doesn’t fully support.

[anthonybialy]

Joe Biden Decides Not to Run Again, He’s Informed

But who will keep inflation going?  Joe Biden’s unceremonious exit from alleged service serves as the first good thing he’s done for America.  Of course, his transition to president of his local Chuck E. Cheese came by coercion, so don’t worry about crediting a wholly unspectacular dunce who’s gotten every last thing wrong with Darth Vader-style decency at reign’s end.

Trump-style reality show drama was a kindly example of bipartisanship on the way out.  Nobody could determine if Biden was still in the race.  Jöedinger’s cat demonstrated quantum mechanics in a White House that doesn’t grasp economics.

A president who spends most of his waking hours holding conversations with his action figures is ostensibly still in charge of our lives.  Democrats think government should run everything and the president should run the government.  Also, they spent every moment up until late last weekend assuring the nation that Jell-O-brained Biden was the most qualified human imaginable.

The dedicated flunkies who claim the prototypical statesman dropped out to benefit America also assure you their choice is performing his present work tasks despite only being occasionally lucid around lunchtime.  The guy who’s not fit to apply for the job in question continues to staff it.

Yet refusing to quit near the end is the least worst problem about a failure from the start.  Biden declaring he’s started a decline that would leave him unable to be effective by the second term’s end is the least worrisome part about dropping out.  The problem remains how doltish he was when he won.

The stubbornness taking this long to subside is the quasi-incumbent’s defining characteristic.  Fuming like a Warner Brothers cartoon character?  Making everything personal?  Putting his interests ahead of the nation’s?  Are you sure this is Joe Biden we’re talking about?

Determining the approach of the replacement candidate will be the first perfect AI prediction.  Such an easy guess constitutes no victory for the cyborgs who’ll replace elections and civilization.  Economy-kicking, America-enervating policies remain identical.  The White House’s platform will not change with a different Democrat any more than Biden is going to start writing his own tweets.

Biden’s not running anymore.  Someone tell him.  I bet the letter’s plagiarized.  Neil Kinnock left office first.  Continuity remains if anyone feels anxious about the sudden need for a new president or the fact the guy who isn’t running still gets the Oval Office’s comfiest chair.  The Biden White House’s greatest innovation is rendering Biden superfluous.  Whatever person holds the official title is irrelevant.  It’s a triumph for a specific type of principles.

The executive branch has already been run by committee for most of this term.  But the panel has created way more egregious constitutional violations than its existence, so don’t fret.

Barack Obama walked off his eternal lieutenant figuratively this time.  Don’t wait for apologies from operatives who called you a Fox-hugging conspiracist meanie for noticing Biden couldn’t think or walk straight a few weeks ago.  The same people who said Biden wouldn’t leave the figurative stage claimed he left  the literal stage all by himself.  It’s a good thing they got all the lies out of their systems.

A coup is in character.  I’m as shocked as you are that Democrats who thought cramming through the forced purchase of lousy insurance would disregard their own primary.  Any member who quaintly thought voting advice would be heeded by a party renowned for mandates surely appreciates the precedent.

The agenda remains.  Whether Kamala Harris is appointed her way to the nomination or there’s a second plot to overthrow the first, the mouthpiece for compulsion will run on the same pushy ideals.

A person never suited to be president won’t be one anymore.  One candidate leaving irks one staying.  Donald Trump will somehow pout even more.  A Democrat who’s marginally better at forming sentences is a big deal since presidential elections are now about the preferred style of getting bossed around.  Removing the addled option offers the best chance to win against the one who’s semi-coherently angry.

Biden won’t have the chance to beat Trump twice.  Simultaneously, the vengeance tour has lost its villain.  A rosy campaign featuring each hope-filled hopeful vying to be slightly less awful than the other created the precisely expected environment.  Likewise, a mutually inspirational example of attempting to win by claiming the other sucks shows that even enemies share common traits.

The patient dropped out on the medical advice of Doctor Jill Biden.  The need to grift only loses out to disappearing opportunity. Those who urged a deteriorated executive born before D-Day to stay were motivated by the utterly selfless goal of using access to power for siphoning easy cash.  Democrats think everyone else also only profits by skimming.

The true test of familial loyalty takes the form of seeing if they keep praising their meal ticket even after the cafeteria’s closed.  Gramps is upset the chicken nuggets are gone by the time he gets there.

Only one campaign survived an assassination attempt.  Biden exhibited resistance to cognitive functioning during his technically successful presidential run.  A mental meltdown wasn’t going to stop the White House cabal from pretending the puppet could perform complicated tasks like shoe-tying.  The faction who idolizes politicians couldn’t find a better one to explain why paying tuition is a moral burden only for those who didn’t attend college.

It’s reassuring to know how many minutes we have left to treasure the Biden presidency.  That’s unless he gives up on giving up in five minutes.  The supposed leader of the free world wouldn’t shock anyone if he announced he forgot he dropped out.  This canceled series has felt like having George Costanza as president, so showing up to work after he quit would be in character.

Smirking about how the most selfish president possible put the country first is merely one of the final lies from Biden’s dwindling diehards about a rather mendacious term.  Framing the diminished nitwit as a dignified commander for resisting bailing as long as possible so his family could continue to mooch is no more of a lie than his ideology.  Biden would think he was being complimented if he thought at all.  Not plotting anything out is his legacy.

[arpov-blog-blog]

Biden Campaign Scorches Media For Ignoring Trump’s Horrifying Behavior

"Are Y'all Actually Paying Attention? Like With Your Eyes and Ears???"

Brett Meiselas Meidas Touch Network

On Friday night, Donald Trump gave a speech at a National Rifle Association event in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in which he slurred his words, bragged about doing nothing to stop gun violence, said “they” would change the name of Pennsylvania if he doesn’t win the election, appeared to not know what day it was, told the crowd he could have been in a nicer place, bragged that he killed the border security deal, attacked prosecutors, mocked the military, had numerous cognitive lapses, and lied repeatedly.

Biden-Harris campaign Senior Advisor for Communications, TJ Ducklo, issued a statement in the aftermath calling the media out for ignoring Trump’s deranged behavior.

The subject line read, "Are Y'all Actually Paying Attention? Like With Your Eyes and Ears???"

The statement continued:

Every single time Donald Trump opens his mouth, he's confused, deranged, lying, or worse. Tonight, he lied more than two dozen times, slurred his words, confused basic facts, and placated the gun lobby weeks after telling parents to "get over it" after their kids were gunned down at school. But you won't hear about any of it if you watch cable news, read this weekend's papers, or watch the Sunday shows. Beltway reporters may be numb to Trump's horrifying candidacy defined by chaos, division, and violence -- but the American people are the ones who will suffer and die if he's allowed anywhere near the Oval Office again. "This is not a drill - Donald Trump is THE fundamental threat facing the American people and everyone needs to act like it. Including the free press - while we still have one."

The campaign then presented a comprehensive list of Trump’s lies from Friday’s speech alone.

The following is a lists of lies Donald Trump told tonight in Harrisburg, PA. Like literally hours ago: Trump falsely said he won the Virgin Islands caucus "100%." Trump falsely said he won PA twice. Trump falsely said Biden wants an open border. Trump falsely said terrorists were taken into this country by the millions. Trump falsely said we had the safest borders under his presidency. Trump falsely said Biden will confiscate guns and take away the right to self-defense. "Biden has implemented a vicious zero tolerance policy. Do you know what that is? It's not good. That revokes the license of independent firearms dealers if they make a single minor error, little tiny error.” Trump falsely said no one died in Afghanistan during his presidency. Trump falsely claims "nothing happens" to people who commit assault or murder. Trump falsely said he worked with the FBI and said that Biden made recovering the documents very difficult. Trump falsely claimed he was "covered by the Presidential Records Act" when he destroyed documents. Trump falsely says Catholics are being persecuted. Trump falsely said electric cars don't work in cold weather. Trump falsely said "We never had a country that was doing so well as it was during the Trump four years," but he left office with fewer jobs than he entered Trump falsely claimed he got Mexico to send 28,000 soldiers to the border. Trump falsely said Mexico took 32% of our car industry. Trump falsely said everyone coming to the country is a man between 18 and 25. Trump falsely says there were no terror attacks during his administration. Trump falsely said Biden tried to ram through an "open border bill." Trump falsely said if the bill was passed unions would be out of business. Trump falsely said Democrats cheat in elections. Trump falsely said Democrats cheated in the 2020 election. Trump falsely said President Biden can close the border and the bill is a hoax. Trump falsely said we don't have free speech. Trump falsely said we don't have a free and fair press. Trump falsely said he did better in PA in 2020 than 2016. Trump falsely said they'll change the name of PA if he's not elected. Trump falsely said we're a failing nation and a nation in decline. “Joe Biden is the worst and most incompetent and most corrupt president in the history of our country.” Falsely said Biden is going to empower America's enemies, unleash misery throughout your state and throughout our country, bedlam and chaos at home and abroad.

The Biden-Harris campaign is correct. Trump’s behavior continues to become even more deranged and unhinged, yet it is constantly ignored by the mainstream media as they amplify every minor and inconsequential gaffe made by President Biden.

Trump represents an existential threat to the nation and the world — and it’s time for the media to wake up."

[qqueenofhades]

With 2016, people just don’t understand how everything works. Getting the popular vote isn’t how the game is played, getting the electoral vote is. The popular vote doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things because candidate’s strategies would completely change if they were trying to get the popular vote rather than win individual states. Did I vote for Hillary? Yes. Do I still think she didn’t approach the vote with the right strategy and played it for the popular vote rather than the electoral vote and lost as a result? Also yes.

Okay, but you do get how that's a flawed metric for an argument, right? Hillary DID win the popular vote by three million plus, and in any sane system, that would have been enough to net her the presidency. "Hillary ran a flawed campaign" is to some extent, a true statement, as is "Hillary didn't focus enough on Michigan/Wisconsin/Pennsylvania because the Democrats assumed she had them on lockdown and didn't take into account the amount of Midwestern white people voting for Trump because of white backlash against Obama." But that is something that a) only became clear in hindsight and b) yet again, in any sane universe, should not have decided the election. Because:

Hillary was, and is, possibly the single most qualified presidential candidate the Democrats have ever had;

Voters were predisposed to hate her not because she "wasn't likable" or was "too corporate," but because the Republicans had been running literal decades of virulent smear campaigns against her to poison the well for this very eventuality;

The media almost never bothered to point this out at all and spent endless airtime on BUT HER EEEEEEEMAILS and doing sympathetic pieces about Trump voters, implying that their vote for Trump was a justified or moral protest against Both Sides Badism, and this was even the so-called "mainstream" media;

Fox News, of course, pumped out endless hit pieces and then some, all of which was echoed in some degree by those outlets;

James Comey announced TEN DAYS BEFORE THE ELECTION that suddenly oops, he was investigating her emails again;

Even though there was nothing there and it is absolutely small potatoes compared to the much worse things Republicans are doing on the regular, because SELLING NUCLEAR SECRETS TO FOREIGN ENEMIES is okay as long as it is Trump doing it;

America is still so fucking racist and misogynistic that even after Trump spewed off terrible things about every non-white group, scapegoated Mexicans and Muslims and black people, and was caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by the pussy, this didn't actually make much of an impact on people planning to vote for him, because they evidently figured it "wasn't real" or "he would change" once he became president, while for others, the open hatred was the main attraction;

Bernie refused to concede until the actual convention, implied that if you couldn't vote for him, you shouldn't vote for anyone, and generally fanned the kind of I'll Take My Pony and Go Home rhetoric that is a poison in "progressive" online circles today;

Almost 10% of Bernie voters voted for Trump instead of Clinton;

Gary Johnson and Jill Fucking "Russian Asset" Stein were somehow treated as valid "protest vote" options, even while Hillary was warning everyone left and right about how much Trump sucked, how much SCOTUS (AND SPECIFICALLY ROE) was at risk, and how much democracy would be damaged if he won, which -- GUESS WHAT -- happened exactly as she predicted;

Speaking of the Russians, they were interfering the hell out of it, whether through Wikileaks/the DNC email hack, social media psyops, organized troll farms, or anything else they could think of;

And on and on. Against the backdrop of sheer and unmitigated fuckery that was the 2016 election, and the fact that so many people couldn't be bothered to vote for Hillary because she was a Smart Woman who was Too Corporate when the alternative was literally Trump, "Hillary didn't campaign enough in MI/WI/PA" is.... hardly a valid way to explain or excuse the many, many bad-faith actors, bad choices, and general lethargy, misinformation, deliberate destruction of faith in democracy, racism, Russian interference, misogyny, and white fragility that fucked us over and continues to do so.

[dragonkeeper19600]

It’s a little weird to accuse someone of being overly emotional when your response consists of nothing but childish taunts.

Biden’s an old man. No one is denying that. I’m not denying it, you’re not denying it, he’s not denying it. But Trump is an old man, too. He’s older now than Biden was in 2020. The two are close enough in age that they could have conceivably attended the same middle school. Not to mention Trump’s health is not great. He’s overweight, he’s confused enough that his doctor felt the need to give him a cognitive test, and according to himself, he wasn’t fit enough to serve in the military decades ago. (Oh, those pesky bone spurs!)

Besides, if, as you said, Trump’s unhinged lying at debate night was nothing new, it’s also been well established that Biden is low key. Back in 2020, a lot of conservatives gave him the nickname Sleepy Joe Biden, and his stutter had also made its appearance in tons of speeches, interviews, press conferences, etc. But he still won the election because of a fact that’s still true today: Biden is the only major party candidate qualified to be president. He has a better administrative record, he has more experience, he doesn’t have a personality disorder or a criminal record like Trump does, and he’s actually thinking about the American people and not just himself. That he sometimes stumbles over his words and isn’t high-strung like Trump changes nothing about that. Hell, if we’re talking about the guy whine going to wield America’s nuclear codes, I’d say that being high-strung is actually a very negative quality in a president.

Biden objectively performed better than Trump during debate night last week.

Because he actually answered the questions and outlined his policies.

CNN’s fact checker after the debate determined that almost every statement Trump made that night was a lie.

But because the guy who’s been convicted of 34 felonies was louder than the guy who spoke the truth, people think the honest guy with no felonies should drop out. It boggles the mind.

Biden doesn’t scare me. Shallow interpretations of presidential candidates scare me.

Biden 2024

[wearepaladin]

As a Republican Paladin, I am struggling with how my own people failed by supposedly electing a known criminal to office and how this could mean the end of freedom as we know it. There is still hope that the election was rigged, but in the worst case scenario that Biden remains, how do I find hope when the darkness has won?

Woooooh boy. Ok. The sad thing Davion is that I realize you sincerely believe this. You’re a longtime follower and you’ve been consistent with your outwardly stated politics so I know you’re being sincere and not an anonymous troll.

That doesn’t change the fact that you’re just utterly wrong about a lot of things, but I’ll start with the simplest: the election outcome isn’t in doubt. Joe Biden won. The American citizenry voted and you have to live the results. Living in denial will be the slowest detriment to any level of acceptance you can evolve to.

Secondly, the darkness hasn’t won, and Donald Trump Republicanism isn’t a Light(it’s fascism but you’re not ready for that conversation). In the real world, where you really need to take a walk in, more people voted for one leadership for another, and in a few years we’ll get to repeat the process because we have that right as citizens in a representative democracy. And as a member of that democracy, you need to occasionally not get what you want because more people chose something you didn’t want. Their voices matter.

And, most importantly if you want to really imagine yourself as a protector of the people, you need to remember that people aren’t perfect, and they still deserve what protection you can give. That’s the very most basic thing a champion of light needs to understand: that you don’t need to like people to value them. Believe me, I have to deal with assholes all the time as a med technician, but they’re all vulnerable people that depend on whatever I and other people in my field can give them.

That’s a key thing I want you to try to remember as you go forward in life and aspire to a Paladin life, and will hopefully help you bridge the gap between where you and I are on what is worthy of hope and despair: people matter, even if you don’t care for all of them, and a Paladin doesn’t rescind his aid and care from others merely due to dislike.

[route22ny]

The split-screen reality of the Trump era became all too real for Stephen Richer recently, and in a very literal way. On May 15, the Arizona election official — a Republican — was looking at two computer screens. On one was former President Trump’s claim that a key election database had been deleted, an “unbelievable election crime.” On the other screen was that very database, quite intact.

“Wow,” Richer tweeted. “This is unhinged. I’m literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now.”

A couple of days later, he made his dismay even more explicit.

“What can we do here?” he asked in an interview with CNN. “This is tantamount to saying that the pencil sitting on my desk in front of me doesn’t exist.”

When Richer unseated a Democratic incumbent to become Maricopa County’s recorder in November, he thought he had won the most boring job in politics: maintaining the county’s voter files. But he had not reckoned on Trump, #StopTheSteal, and the most massive, audacious and successful propaganda campaign in modern American history — a campaign that has adapted Russian-style disinformation to U.S. politics with alarming success.

Fortunately, Richer and his local Republican colleagues have refused to be victimized. Instead, they have shown how to fight back.

Information warfare takes many forms, but it has an overarching goal: to divide, demoralize and disorient a political foe by manipulating the social and media environments. As Yuri Bezmenov, a Soviet intelligence defector, explained in a chilling 1983 interview, “What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their family, their community and their country.”

One potent weapon of mass distraction is the “fire hose of falsehood,” a torrent of lies that aims not so much to persuade as to confuse and disorient. After Russian intelligence services got caught poisoning a defector and his daughter in the U.K. in 2018, the Russian government responded with a blizzard of mutually contradictory lies: Britain did it, Ukraine did it, a jealous lover did it, it was a suicide attempt and so on.

Another standard technique: conspiracy bootstrapping. First you spread a rumor. Then you demand an investigation. Failure to investigate just confirms the conspiracy, but so does an investigation with a negative finding. It’s a trap: either ignoring or debunking the conspiracy theory propagates it.

Those techniques are not new. Intelligence services and propaganda experts understand them well, and master propagandists like Josef Goebbels and Vladimir Putin have used them to powerful effect. What no one imagined was that they could be deployed by an American president and his party — and not against a foreign antagonist, but against the American public.

Pundits often say that, whatever his authoritarian tendencies, Trump is too inept and inattentive to have done much lasting damage to democracy. They are wrong: In the realm of information warfare, Trump is a genius-level innovator. It was he who figured out how to adapt Russia-style disinformation to the U.S. political environment, no mean accomplishment.

His use of the fire hose of falsehood was masterly. In his 2016 campaign, according to PolitiFact, 70% of his checkable claims were false or mostly false, a flood of untruths whose like had never been seen in a presidential campaign. He began his presidency by lying about the weather at his inauguration and also lying about the size of the crowd. By the time his presidency was over, Washington Post fact-checkers had clocked him at more than 30,000 confirmed falsehoods, with nearly half coming in his final year.

Similarly, he was a master of conspiracy bootstrapping. He retailed conspiracy theories and falsehoods on the grounds that a lot of people were saying them, although of course he was the sayer-in-chief. Truth and common decency need not apply; when a prominent cable news host criticized him, Trump peddled an absurd (and deeply cruel) lie that the host was suspected of murder.

The black arts of disinformation had the intended effect, at least from Trump’s point of view. They exacerbated the country’s divisions, commandeered the country’s attention, dominated his opponents, disoriented the media and helped him establish a cult of personality among followers who trusted no one else.

Still, he saved the worst for last. His pièce de résistance was the propaganda attack on the 2020 election. Beginning months before the election, he launched a drumbeat of unfounded attacks on mail-in voting. Pundits were puzzled. Many Republicans vote by mail, and the pandemic was especially dangerous to older voters who lean toward Trump; why discourage them from voting safely and conveniently?

But Trump was aiming for the post-election. He saw he was in electoral trouble. With the anti-mail campaign, he was organizing, priming, and testing an unprecedented propaganda network, ready for use if he lost.

And then came #StopTheSteal itself, a disinformation campaign whose likes the country had never witnessed. It mobilized the White House, Republican politicians, social media, conservative cable news and talk radio, frivolous litigation, and every other available channel to broadcast the message that the election was rigged. The Big Lie, as it was aptly named, failed to keep Trump in office, but it succeeded at its secondary goal: turning the Republican Party itself into a propaganda organ.

In April, only a fourth of Republicans believed Joe Biden was legitimately elected, and GOP politicians who insisted on truth were persona non grata.

With that as background, we can see more clearly what is going on right now in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest. In 2020, Biden carried Maricopa by more than 45,000 votes, and with it the state. The result was certified by the Republican governor, double-checked twice by the county’s election officials, and then confirmed by two independent audits.

But in classic bootstrapping fashion, Trump and state Republican leaders seized on conspiracy theories, such as that phony ballots had been smuggled in from Asia, to launch an unnecessary recount conducted by an unqualified company whose boss had promoted uncorroborated charges of election fraud. In textbook fashion, the controversial recount drove yet more public attention to the conspiracy theories, engendering yet more suspicion and spawning me-too demands for partisan “audits” across the country.

The Arizona shenanigans will not change the outcome of the 2020 election, but that is not the point. A great propaganda campaign is cyclonic and self-propelled: once unleashed, it takes on a life of its own, heedless of any underlying reality. By that yardstick, the Arizona recount is a great propaganda campaign.

Americans have never been exposed to Russian-style disinformation tactics, at least not coming from a major political party and deployed on a national scale. We are thus dangerously vulnerable to them. What can we do? There are no quick or simple answers; developing immunity requires everything from more sophisticated journalism and better-designed social media platforms to teaching media literacy, and much more.

But here is where to start: Do what Stephen Richer did. Insist loudly, unwaveringly and bravely on calling out lies, even at the cost of partisan solidarity.

Once it became clear that the #StopTheSteal campaign was escalating instead of dying out, Richer went public with a no-holds-barred denunciation of what Trump and his enablers were up to. “Just stop indulging this,” he told CNN. “Stop giving space for lies.”

At his side were all five of the Maricopa County supervisors — four of whom are Republicans. Calling the recount a sham, a con, and a “spectacle that is harming all of us,” they declared they “stand united together to defend the Constitution and the republic in our opposition to the Big Lie. We ask everyone to join us in standing for truth.” They also wrote a blistering 14-page letter shredding the alt-audit in detail.

Propaganda attacks succeed when critical points of resistance collapse; they stumble when trusted voices expose lies for what they are. Individuals and small groups may not be able to shut down a propaganda campaign or neutralize all its effects, but they can strip away its facade of legitimacy and act as an anchor against runaway fabulism. That was why the Soviet Union struggled so mightily to silence Andrei Sakharov and other dissident voices, and why those voices ultimately brought down the evil empire.

And it is why Rep. Liz Cheney made a difference when she chose truthfulness over her job in the Republican congressional leadership. The day she was booted, she read her colleagues John 8:32: “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” She could not end #StopTheSteal, but she could, and did, dent its credibility and embarrass Republicans whose equivocation and silence abetted the Big Lie.

In the same way, Richer and his colleagues in Arizona laid down a marker. They risked their political standing and even their personal safety (Richer has needed security protection) to expose their own party’s propaganda and shame those who spread it.

The deployment of Russian-style information warfare has allowed Trump and his authoritarian cult to usurp the Republican Party. And they are not finished. Now that they have succeeded with mass disinformation, it will be a fixture of American politics for years to come.

Countermeasures begin, though do not end, with personal integrity: standing up for facts and staying reality-based, whatever the short-term political costs. Think of it as epistemic patriotism, and pray for more of it, especially from Republicans.

***

The author, Jonathan Rauch, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.”

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-arizona-dreaming-20210522-uyd6ivuv75hd5gof2geyd5adtu-story.html

[arcticdementor]

In September of 2020, I published a book entitled The Stakes. It was billed as a “current events” or election-year title. The election behind us, the candidate I recommended is no longer president. But the analysis which led me to that recommendation is very much still “current.”

To recap briefly (but read the whole thing!), the book explains how every prominent and powerful American institution, including the federal government, has been taken over by a hostile elite who use their vast powers to attack, despoil, and insult about half the nation. In the sixth chapter (excerpted here), I outline what I think America will look like if the present ruling class refuses to moderate, cannot be forced to share power, and has the wherewithal to keep its regime going. In the seventh chapter, I sketch several possibilities—from secession to Caesarism to collapse—that might result if it turns out that our overlords are a lot less competent than they think. And in the final chapter (excerpted here), I offer policy and other ideas that might enable America to avoid those fates.

That chapter (from which this essay is adapted) culminated with a proposal now being talked about widely, namely, to allow counties, cities, and towns unhappy with their current state government to join another. This would be a practical, and practicable, way to ease Blue and Red Americans’ present discontent and exasperation with each other.

There are precedents. The counties that became Maine split from Massachusetts in 1820, and—more famously—those that became West Virginia left Virginia during the Civil War. Fittingly, when I wrote the chapter, West Virginia had generously offered to welcome western Virginia counties unhappy with rule from newly, aggressively Blue Richmond. Today, a year later, West Virginia’s governor says the offer still stands.

There are similar movements throughout the country—most, though not all, driven by disaffected Reds. The most recent, news-making example was five Oregon counties joining two others in voting to leave the Beaver State and become part of Idaho.

So far nothing has come of any of this. But why shouldn’t these efforts be allowed to proceed if both the welcoming state and the exiting counties want it? Wouldn’t that be “democracy”?

…

Classical philosophers and historians alike condemn democracy as a bad form of government, in part because of its partiality but mostly because of the specific nature of the demos, which they contend is the polis’s least wise and least moderate part.

I would here add that it’s both sad and hilarious to see classically-trained academics and intellectuals bleat on about the sanctity of “democracy.” The worst offenders are the Straussians, who really should know better. Haven’t we all read Republic VIII and Politics VI, to say nothing of the warnings from Strauss himself on the dangers and shortcomings of democracy? Their failure as analysts is worse. The present American regime that they celebrate as “our democracy” is all but identical to classical oligarchy (discussed in those same books) while the “populism” that gives them the vapors is much closer to the democracy they claim to revere. But even more embarrassing, the Straussians’ central boast is to stand above, in Olympian detachment and even disdain, all regime pieties and see through them as self-serving rationalizations. Yet when extolling “democracy,” they sound no different than an Assistant Secretary of State, foundation president, or CNN host.

…

States such as California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, and now Virginia are utterly dominated by one party, and often one city, which amounts to the same thing. This is how Virginia—cradle of the American Revolution and home to four of our first five presidents—suddenly, just like that, became implacably hostile to the first two amendments to the United States Constitution. Five cities and counties, three adjacent to Washington, D.C., essentially dictate to the other 128.

The uncomprehending angst of people who’ve lived the same way, in the same places, for generations suddenly finding themselves harassed by a hostile government—ostensibly “theirs”—is mocked by the ruling class as a lament over “lost privilege.” After Virginia flipped from purple to Blue in 2019, the state legislature immediately enacted draconian gun restrictions that flew in the face of centuries of tradition and peaceful practice. Too bad! You lost! That’s “democracy.” As Joel Kotkin has remarked, “The worst thing in the world to be is the Red part of a Blue state.”

We should not, however, give the powers-that-be too much credit for principled consistency. If and when popular majorities produce outcomes the rulers don’t like, their devotion to “democracy” instantly evaporates. Judges, administrative state agencies, private companies—whichever is most able in the moment to overturn the will of unruly voters—will intervene to restore ruling class diktats. On the other hand, when voters can be counted on to vote the right way, then voting becomes the necessary and sufficient step for sanctifying any political outcome. It doesn’t even matter where the votes (or voters) come from, so long as they vote the right way. The fact that they vote the right way is sufficient to justify and even ennoble their participation in “our democracy.”

Blues perpetually outvoting Reds and ruling unopposed: this, and only this, is what “democracy” means today.

Bad Faith Objections

Reds, increasingly, are catching on. They know the game is rigged, that they cannot win, and the veneer of their participation and consent is a sham.

This is why the gaslighting is being dialed up to the lumen levels of blue stars. Every objection to Blue despoilation is now openly ascribed to “white supremacy.” Don’t want to be late for work because regime-favored thugs “protesters” are illegally blocking an intersection? White supremacy! Object to being beaten on the streets? White supremacy! Want to see the laws enforced equally and impartially? White supremacy!

Obviously, nothing is more susceptible to this dread charge than calls for “secession.” Hence the entirely apples-to-oranges cases of redrawing state lines better to reflect residents’ preferences and interests will be—already is being—compared to the events of 1860-61.

…

Some opponents of Red attempts to leave Blue states will disingenuously point to Lincoln’s first inaugural address, the ne plus ultra anti-secession argument. But there Lincoln was talking about replacing ballots with bullets throughout a sovereign state—overturning not merely the outcome of one election but the form of government itself. The peaceful rearrangement of political and administrative boundaries within a sovereign state is an entirely different act, with far lesser—and less grave—consequences. Indeed, in the latter case the consequences may be entirely salutary: there is ample precedent in history and around the world of countries redrawing internal lines to suit shifts in population and interests.

Others will try to muddy the waters by facilely equating the peculiarly American use of the word “state” for our 50 regional governments with the far more common meaning of state as “sovereign and independent country.” Lincoln said secession was unlawful, unconstitutional, and immoral—but this hypocrite Anton who claims to be a Lincolnite is endorsing the very practice! The argument is false and will be offered in bad faith. If you wish to waste a moment of your time, which I don’t recommend, remind such liars that the anti-secessionist Lincoln not only supported but presided over the division of Virginia. The decisive point is that this proposal is here proffered for precisely Lincolnite reasons: to save the Union and keep the current territory and population of the United States together.

…

Article IV, Section 3 states that “no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.”

In the Maine and West Virginia cases, new states were formed, hence the legislatures of the original and prospective states, plus the Congress, had to consent. (In the case of Virginia, then in rebellion against the government of the United States, two competing state governments existed. The Unionist government, recognized by the federal government, voted to allow the separation.)

The Constitution is, however, silent on the question of transferring a county from one state to another. No doubt should rural Virginia counties seek to join Charleston, Richmond wouldn’t like it—all that lost tax revenue! Look how many fewer people to boss around! Fewer Electoral votes!

But, constitutionally speaking, the state government’s power to stop it would be dubious. As would, if we want to speculate along such lines, the means. It could, and almost certainly would, take the issue to federal court where, admittedly, any outcome is possible regardless of law, and any outcome favorable to Red interests extremely unlikely. There’s little question that a Blue state capital could easily join with the federal judiciary and the Biden administration to block any such action. That may or may not be “constitutional” as you and I understand the term, but we don’t rule.

Or suppose we interpret Article IV, Section 3 to mean that moving just one county from one state to another constitutes creating a “new state.” That makes things harder, but hardly impossible. It simply means that legislative victories would have to be won. That may seem impossible now; no empire ever seeks to become smaller. But, dare I say, the election of Donald Trump seemed impossible as late as 9 p.m. on November 3rd, 2016. Public opinion is changing fast. Reds, who’ve put up with a lot only to face repeated demands that they put up with even more, are getting fed up.

Not only do they get nothing but abuse from the political system, increasingly they don’t even get to talk. Any dissent against regime ideology is swiftly and ruthlessly censored on Blue media platforms, which is to say, all of them. Reds’ elected leaders (to the extent that they have any) are declared “domestic enemies” by the Speaker of the House. Blue wise men talk of “cleansing” Reds from the political system. Nils Gilman—a man who called for my death—declaimed that “These people need to be extirpated from politics.” To have no say and no voice, forever, means that one’s only option is exit.

It would be an act of magnanimity, and even self-interest, for a sufficient number of Blues to recognize Red concerns and let the state-county reorganization proceed. Right now, at least half of Red America feels trapped in an abusive marriage, endlessly told they’re worthless, racist, and evil—but also that under no circumstances may they even broach the topic of leaving. Stay and take your deserved punishment is Blue America’s constant message to Red, the political philosophy of Judge Smails: You’ll get nothing and like it.

Besides, as Blues never tire of reminding us, aren’t we Reds poor, weak, and dumb? Who wants such dross as fellow citizens? Imagine (say) Virginia’s glorious future without all those retrograde hicks getting in the way of NoVa’s progressive utopian vision.

If Blues cannot see their way to letting such peaceful means proceed as a way of improving civic harmony and extending the life of the republic, they’re placing a giant bet that they can, through sheer brute force, rule Reds forever. Can they? They’d also be admitting that, in New America, “democracy” just means Blues outvoting Reds, effectively nullifying their franchise.

…

It’s worth pointing out, in this context, the utter hypocrisy of Blues who cry “Jeff Davis!” at the mere suggestion of some rural counties in a Blue State seeking refuge with fellow Reds, which almost certainly would not change the composition of the Senate, but who blithely demand that D.C. and Puerto Rico be made states so the Democrats can get four extra Senators and (likely) four more Electoral votes.

[phroyd]

Joe Biden is going to be the next president of the United States. He will be inaugurated on January 20 and take power at noon that day. There is nothing, legally, that Trump can do to stop that.

What Trump and his feckless Republican Party might do illegally to try to overturn the results of the election and prevent Biden from taking power is a different matter. Trump has evidently intimidated the administrator of the General Services Administration into refusing to acknowledge Biden’s victory and thus prevent his team from starting the transition process. Only a smattering of Republicans have acknowledged that Biden won, and most of those who have, like George W. Bush, no longer hold any political power. Trump has already filed a raft of baseless lawsuits. His people are drumming up talk of some kind of Electoral College devilry to overthrow the popular will. And Trump fired the secretary of defense, Mike Esper, yesterday, which seems like the kind of thing one does before launching a coup d’état.

Years of watching Democrats snatch defeat from the jaws of victory gives many the sinking feeling that “it’s happening, again.” But rational thought tells us that these Trump gambits, all of them, are pointless. Biden won and his ascension to power is now inevitable, whether Trump accedes to that reality or not. As a wise man once sang: Gravity always wins.

Still, we’ve all seen Trump wriggle out of approximately a billion other defeats and scandals. He’s exposed the weakness of our democratic institutions, revealing just how useless they are in the face of his norm-breaking assaults. So it feels somehow naive to believe that his loss at the ballot box will translate into his loss of an actual job. It feels smart to consider that he might have a secret plan to retain that job, despite being voted out of it. Trump is the Michael Myers of our politics: He can’t be defeated, because the horror movie franchise makes too much money to ever end.

And yet, despite all this, I have gone to bed every night since Friday confident that President-elect Biden will become President Biden. I’ve come to this peace over the objection of my amygdala, which is the part of the brain that screams in fear and anxiety and tries to overpower rational thought. Here’s what I tell myself in order to help me sleep at night. Perhaps these are conversations others can have to achieve my level of forced serenity. (Amygdala in bold italics.)

Who won the election?

Joe Biden.

Who won the election if we only count legal votes?

Only legal votes are being counted. Joe Biden won those.

What about the possibility of a recount in swing states like Michigan or Pennsylvania?

Recounts traditionally do not change more than a thousand votes. Even if we’ve gone completely through the looking glass and this recount changes an unprecedented number of votes, like 5,000, which is completely unheard of, Biden’s margin of victory is too great to overcome. A recount would not change the result in states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin. If Trump wants to lose twice, that’s up to him.

What about all the lawsuits, especially the ones they keep filing in Arizona and Pennsylvania?

Trump’s election lawsuits fall, broadly, into three categories: lawsuits alleging poll watchers were too far away, lawsuits complaining about the established rules for submitting mail-in ballots, and lawsuits alleging Trump voters were denied their vote because of some kind of ballot machine malfunction.

None of these lawsuits provide evidence of massive voter fraud. None of the lawsuits provide evidence of voter fraud at all. Some of the lawsuits allege some accidents, but the remedy for those accidents is counting more votes, not fewer. Trump’s claims that his poll watchers were not allowed to watch the counting of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania is flatly untrue, and his lawyers have had to admit in court that they were allowed in the room. They’ve been reduced to arguing that their poll watchers were not close enough, which, whatever. The remedy for that is to move them closer, not throw out tens of thousands of votes.

In fact, none of the Trump lawsuits allege anything that can be used to throw out tens of thousands of votes. Throwing out votes that have already been counted is not something that courts do. We can recount votes, this time with Trump watchers breathing down the necks of ballot counters and giving them Covid-19, but again, recounts don’t usually change the balance of votes by all that much.

The important thing to ask with each new Trump lawsuit is this: What is the remedy? If the remedy is “throw away tens of thousands of votes from people whose votes were clear in their choice and timely in their submission,” then that lawsuit is going nowhere. And if the remedy is not throwing out those entirely timely and legal votes, then the lawsuit will not change the results of the election.

Why would the Trump people be pushing these lawsuits if there was no chance for them to change the outcome?

Because Trump people are dumb? Hanlon’s Razor tells us: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Joking aside, there might be many malicious reasons for the Trump campaign to be pushing lawsuits they know are destined to fail. Stirring up doubt in Biden’s victory is a prelude to refusing to acknowledge his authority as president. Trump, or one of his kids, or somebody “Trump-approved” is surely going to run for president in 2024, and making Trump’s rabid, white-supremacist base feel like the election was “stolen” from them has a political upside as they fight for their new “Lost Cause.”

And, there’s also the grift. Trump’s campaign is broke. They’ve literally written checks they can’t cash. Trump doesn’t like spending his own money on these things (to the extent he actually has any). These lawsuits purportedly challenging the election are a huge money-making opportunity for the Trump campaign. If you read the fine print on the new fundraising e-mails Trump’s campaign is sending out to supporters, they say that “60 percent of contributions” will go toward retiring campaign debt.

Would the Trump campaign put America through 70 days of trauma to make a buck? You better believe it. The whole Trump presidency is a guerrilla marketing campaign for the Trump brand that went too far.

But the Republican Senate is going along. This is just like impeachment. Republicans wouldn’t remove Trump then and they won’t now.

Well, it’s not up to Republicans to remove Trump from office. The Constitution does all that work on January 20. Joe Biden is the president on that day whether Republicans acknowledge it or not.

But now Bill Barr has gotten in on the game, and he is the worst of Trump’s henchman.

Yes.

He’s given federal prosecutors the green light to open up investigations into possible voter fraud.

So?

SO?

There wasn’t election fraud. Trump’s legal team has no evidence of election fraud and has no money to investigate to find such evidence, so they’re using the taxpayers’ money to look for it. But Barr’s prosecutors won’t find anything because there’s nothing there. This is going to turn out the same way it did when Barr investigated but didn’t arrest Hunter or Joe Biden.

The head of the Election Crimes Branch, Richard Pilger, resigned. That should tell us how wrong this is. But Barr is not going to succeeded. It’s just another thing to remember in 70 days when Barr is out of a job. We should arrest him and charge him with abuse of power.

What if Trump refuses to leave the White House?

Biden can be president from Delaware until the White House runs out of cheeseburgers. He’ll come out of hiding eventually.

But what if Republicans never acknowledged that Biden is the president?

How’s that different from the way they treated Barack Obama?

Good point, but what about a re-vote? I’ve seen MAGA people online calling for a re-vote.

Re-voting is not a thing. There is no statutory or constitutional language that can compel a nationwide re-vote. States will certify the results of their elections in the coming weeks. And then the Electoral College will meet on December 14 in a pro-forma session to…

WHAT ABOUT THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE?

Damn it.

Can Republican state legislatures put forward a slate of electors who will vote for Trump even though Biden won those states?

Let’s be very clear: The states get to choose how they will determine their own electors, but that determination has to be made before the election. A state with a Republican legislature—let’s say, Pennsylvania—could have decided to choose electors based on a simple vote of the legislature. In fact, Republican legislators contemplated doing such a thing. But they didn’t. Instead they decided, like every other state, to let the popular will in their state determine the slate of electors.

They can’t change the method of picking electors after the election has taken place. Remember, when voters showed up to vote, they technically weren’t voting for “Joe Biden” or “Donald Trump” but for a slate of electors who would vote for Biden or Trump. If Pennsylvania wanted to change those rules, it would have had to tell its voters before they voted. It can’t run a bait-and-switch on an election. It can’t say that a vote for Biden’s electors was actually a vote for the Pennsylvania legislature to choose the electors. This is an election, not a Groupon.

The only legal recourse, which some Republicans are arguing for, is to determine that the voters “failed to make a choice” on which slate of electors to nominate, or that the results of that choice are somehow unclear. But the results will be clear once Pennsylvania certifies its election results (and, in this case, the governor and secretary of state, who certifies the results, are Democrats). It will be a close election, but voters made a choice and that choice will be clear upon certification.

States have until December 8 to certify the results of their elections.

But what if Pennsylvania’s Republican legislators insist that the results weren’t clear? Would the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority allow the state’s Republican legislature to choose a Republican slate of electors, even though it’s unconstitutional?

Maybe? Conservatives on the Supreme Court act in bad faith all the time. But consider that Biden has likely won this election with 306 electoral votes. For this gambit to work, legislatures in Pennsylvania and at least two of the other states Biden won would have to submit a slate of Trump electors. The Supreme Court would have to OK this upending of the popular will three times in total. That’s incredibly unlikely and would spark almost immediate civil unrest directed right at the Supreme Court, which has no army to enforce its rulings.

Well, what’s our plan for that?

My dude, I don’t have a plan for “nothing matters anymore.” The end of democratic self-government is not a thing one has a legal plan for. That’s like asking what my plan is for closing a demonic hell mouth that opens in my backyard. Die. My plan would be to die. I’m not Keanu Reeves.

What if Trump fires FBI Director Chris Wray and CIA Director Gina Haspel and gets the “deep state” to keep him in power indefinitely?

I’m not Kiefer Sutherland either. I cannot find the mole.

What if Trump launches a full-scale coup d’état and uses the military to keep him in power?

Then we’re at war. Honestly, what do you want from me? Yes, there is a non-zero chance that Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the election leads to a civil war and, in such a conflict, Abigail Spanberger forms a Vichy government to “compromise” with Trump supporters, and I have to pilot a jet carrying Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez off of Naboo in hopes of finding friendly Jedis willing to fight for our cause.

But there is no legitimate way for Trump to stay in power now. There’s no peaceful way for Trump to stay in power. Either he’s gone on January 20 or he remains atop a military junta willing to use violence to enforce his will.

This makes you feel better?

I find it comforting that a full-scale military takeover is now the only way for Trump to stay in power. Because if there’s one thing I know about Trump, it’s that he is a coward. President Bone Spurs is not the guy to cross the Rubicon.

I look at it this way: Captain von Trapp hiked his enormous family over the Alps to get away; all I have to do is drive my people to the Thousand Islands Bridge while we all sing “Edelweiss.” Thinking much beyond that is pointless.

Well, you could get your lazy ass on the elliptical trainer in case you’re needed to fight.

Don’t start this with me again. Goodbye.

Phroyd

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

democracy was on the ballot and it won

I am a slow-boring-of-hard-boards realist about politics. I am delightedly surprised when I get what I want AT ALL. Months and months ago, I said that my number one issue in this election was the desperate need to put the brakes on democratic backsliding in the United States. I’m not sure how to process the fact that I’ve started to get what I wanted even before the transition.

There is a real path forward for democracy reform in this country. EVEN WITH an aspiring autocrat doing everything he could to rig this election, EVEN WITH a pandemic raging, EVEN WITH malicious foreign actors still trying cause problems, EVEN THOUGH we still have not restored the Voting Rights Act, EVEN WITH all the structural imbalances built into our creaky eighteenth-century constitutional system:

Voter participation went way up! People voted over the course of several weeks from the comfort of their own homes, or on weekends, or on Election Day. And because people took responsibility and spread out their votes like that, it was safer to go to polling places. That was a huge collective choice to prevent a lot of suffering and even some deaths.

A big part of why they could do that is the enormous number of citizens who rallied to work at the polls so that the retirees who usually do the job could sit this year out.

Cities and states around the country took the time they need to count carefully.

Media gatekeepers, for the most part, had the discipline and the patience to be helpful to users about what we knew and what we didn’t. If anything, they’re erring on the side of being too cautious. This is after weeks of most media gatekeepers having the discipline to debunk a disinformation campaign by Trump’s allies and Russian backers, instead of aggressively participating in it.

Social media companies took the most aggressive countermeasures yet against election misinformation.

The person who got the most votes is also the person who won the election, which is pretty cool!

That is a huge improvement from EVERY PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Just in terms of how well the election itself was administered, my only major criticism is that we still did not do something called risk-limiting audits. In the case of an election, audits are basically a carefully calibrated statistical smell test. They’re not a recount. They are a reliable and cost-effective way of figuring out if a recount or some other type of scrutiny should be done for the sake of public confidence in the results – and that makes them a cost-effective deterrence against any bad actors who are considering sabotage. Audits are important whether an election goes your way or not, just like smoke detectors are important whether your building catches fire or not.

But that absolutely should not take away from the fact that we overcame all the new problems that were introduced this year and took some big steps toward solving a lot of old ones – despite the best efforts of Trump and all his enablers. Imagine what we could do under an administration that is helping democracy revitalization instead of aggressively hindering it.

The easiest way for us to make the most comprehensive change would be to win the Senate, which would allow a Biden administration to pass a revitalized Voting Rights Act and restore legitimacy to the federal courts. If you have any time or money to spare in the next few weeks, consider sharing it with the two excellent Democratic candidates in the Georgia Senate runoffs.

We should be realistic about the situation: we’re probably not going to get to do it the easy way, at least, not until after the midterms. But we’re not going to be doing it the hard way any more. The hard way is what we’re doing now. We’re about to get a Department of Justice that opposes civil rights violations and enforces what’s left of the current Voting Rights Act. The intelligence and military cybersecurity units are going to be able to work with the administration instead of around it. And we aren’t going to have to deal with a 24/7 fusillade of lies and voter intimidation coming from the Oval Office. To spin out the “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” metaphor: we’ve been running a marathon uphill carrying forty-pound backpacks. We’ve reached the top where the path levels out, and someone just took our bags and gave us protein bars.

And while we have our protein bars, let’s look around, because the view is as clear and as beautiful as it’s going to get. Donald Trump had every intention of wrecking American democracy, and the entire Republican party had every intention of supporting his aspiring dictatorship. And, while Trump himself is and always has been a clown, the person occupying the Oval Office is the most powerful person on the planet. Actually, that’s an understatement. Since Truman gave the order to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our technology has grown stronger and our government has concentrated more and more power in the executive branch, which means that every holder of that office has arguably been the most powerful person in the history of the world. Every other holder of that office has at least wanted to think of himself as using that power for the advancement of democracy and humanity. Donald Trump affirmatively tried to use all that power to entrench himself there permanently.

We stopped him. We stopped him peacefully. We stopped him without further harming the many vulnerable people he holds hostage in a hundred different ways. We stopped him not by elevating an equal-but-opposite charismatic demagogue for a two-men-enter-one-man-leaves smackdown, but by building a vibrant, heterogenous coalition and finding competent, experienced, principled leaders who respect that coalition in all its raucous power. We stopped him, in short, by choosing to do democracy.

That feels good today and it’s enormously consequential. It is also proof of concept. It is something that can happen, because it has happened.

Something that political scientists and democracy advocates have been saying for the past few years is that Trump has been a propaganda gold mine for dictators. They use him as a cautionary tale against liberal democracy or even against hoping that things can ever get better: see, even the Americans are no better than we are! Dictators can artificially insulate themselves from accountability in the short term, which makes them ill-equipped to think about backfire. Train your people’s eyes on the aspiring American autocrat, and they can all see his humiliating fall.

To our sisters and brothers around the world, from Idlib to Hong Kong, from São Paolo to Moscow, and along every wide country road in between: this is the only true thing your oppressors have ever told you. We are no better than you are. We are no more suited for or entitled to liberation. Look what we have done. Imagine what you can do.

There’s kind of a false dichotomy going on where people swung from “Trump is going to successfully rig the election for himself” pessimism to “oh, Biden only ousted an incumbent by a freakishly large margin, it wasn’t an immediate electoral college landslide, why did Trump get so close.” This take has set in before deep blue California and New York have come close to completing their mail-in ballot counts, which tells you that it isn’t serious, but it’s also beside the point. Trump succeeded in making the election unfair. If he hadn’t illegitimately put a whole lot of thumbs on the scale in his favor, if we’d actually had the free and fair election we deserved, I think he probably would have lost in a landslide. We did the work and showed up in numbers that were ultimately too big to rig. That led to victory, although not a victory you can quantifiably measure against the dozen or so American elections that were more or less free and fair. That doesn’t mean the rigging didn’t happen or have any impact. It means we beat the spread. As the world’s most prominent train enthusiast once said, that is a big fucking deal.

A government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the earth. One day soon, it may even exist. That is our charge. That is our choice.

So take a moment to recharge. Enjoy the view. Breathe. We got work to do.

[emerald-studies]

The powerful  John Lewis

Early Life

John Robert Lewis was born outside of Troy, Alabama, on February 21, 1940. Lewis had a happy childhood — though he needed to work hard to assist his sharecropper parents — but he chafed against the unfairness of segregation. He was particularly disappointed when the Supreme Court ruling in 1954's Brown v. The Board of Education didn't affect his school life. However, hearing Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermons and news of the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott inspired Lewis to act for the changes he wanted to see.

Civil Rights Struggle

In 1957, Lewis left Alabama to attend the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee. There, he learned about nonviolent protest and helped to organize sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. He was arrested during these demonstrations, which upset his mother, but Lewis was committed to the Civil Rights Movement and went on to participate in the Freedom Rides of 1961.

Freedom Riders challenged the segregated facilities they encountered at interstate bus terminals in the South, which had been deemed illegal by the Supreme Court. It was dangerous work that resulted in arrests and beatings for many involved, including Lewis.

In 1963, Lewis became chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. That same year, as one of the "Big Six" leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, he helped plan the March on Washington. Lewis—the youngest speaker at the event—had to alter his speech in order to please other organizers, but still delivered a powerful oration that declared, "We all recognize the fact that if any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses, must bring them about."

After the March on Washington, in 1964, the Civil Rights Act became law. However, this did not make it easier for African Americans to vote in the South. To bring attention to this struggle, Lewis and Hosea Williams led a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, on March 7, 1965. After crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the marchers were attacked by state troopers. Lewis was severely beaten once more, this time suffering a fractured skull.

The violent attacks were recorded and disseminated throughout the country, and the images proved too powerful to ignore. "Bloody Sunday," as the day was labeled, sped up the passage of 1965's Voting Rights Act.

U.S. Congressman

Lewis left the SNCC in 1966. Though devastated by the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, Lewis continued his work to enfranchise minorities. In 1970, he became director of the Voter Education Project. During his tenure, the VEP helped to register millions of minority voters.

Lewis ran for office himself in 1981, winning a seat on the Atlanta City Council. In 1986, he was elected to the House of Representatives. Today, representing Georgia's 5th District, he is one of the most respected members of Congress. Since entering office, he has called for healthcare reform, measures to fight poverty and improvements in education. Most importantly, he oversaw multiple renewals of the Voting Rights Act. When the Supreme Court struck down part of the law in 2013's Shelby County v. Holder, Lewis decried the decision as a "dagger into the heart" of voting rights.

In the wake of the mass shooting that took place on June 12, 2016, in Orlando, Florida, Lewis led a sit-in comprised of approximately 40 House Democrats on the floor of the House of Representatives on June 22nd in an attempt to bring attention and force Congress to address gun violence by taking definitive legislative action. “We have been too quiet for too long,” Lewis said. “There comes a time when you have to say something. You have to make a little noise. You have to move your feet. This is the time.”

The protest came just days after several measures including a bill regarding background checks and adding restrictions on the purchase of guns by people on the federal no-fly list, failed in the Senate. Senator Chris Murphy applauded the protest. Murphy had previously led a filibuster in the Senate which led to the subsequent vote.

Clashing With Donald Trump

Lewis also spoke out against the presidency of Donald Trump, who was elected on November 8, 2016. In an interview with Chuck Todd for NBC News’ Meet the Press, which aired on January 15, 2017, Lewis said he didn’t believe Trump was a “legitimate president” because of Russian interference in the election. “I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected and they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton,” Lewis said in the interview. He also said he would not attend Trump’s inauguration.

Trump responded on Twitter, criticizing Lewis’ work as a congressman and tweeting that Lewis was “All talk, talk, talk - no action or results. Sad!” The president-elect's attack on Lewis came just days before the Martin Luther King holiday, and prompted vocal support of the civil rights icon across social media. Several Democratic lawmakers also joined in support of Lewis, and boycotted Trump’s inauguration.

Trump continued his war of words, tweeting: “John Lewis said about my inauguration, ‘It will be the first one that I've missed.’ WRONG (or lie)! He boycotted Bush 43 also because he...thought it would be hypocritical to attend Bush's swearing-in....he doesn't believe Bush is the true elected president. Sound familiar!”

A spokeswoman for Lewis confirmed that he had missed the inauguration of George W. Bush: "His absence at that time was also a form of dissent. He did not believe the outcome of that election, including the controversies around the results in Florida and the unprecedented intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court, reflected a free, fair and open democratic process.”

Cancer Diagnosis

In December 2019, Lewis announced that he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

Although he was "clear-eyed about the prognosis," Lewis said he felt encouraged that medical advancements had made this type of cancer treatable in many cases, adding that he intended to return to work as soon as possible.

Legacy

Though the Supreme Court's decision about the Voting Rights Act was a blow to Lewis, he has been encouraged by the progress that has occurred in his lifetime. After Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Lewis stated that "When we were organizing voter-registration drives, going on the Freedom Rides, sitting in, coming here to Washington for the first time, getting arrested, going to jail, being beaten, I never thought—I never dreamed—of the possibility that an African American would one day be elected president of the United States."

In addition to continuing his work in Congress, Lewis has reached out to a younger generation by helping to create a series of graphic novels about his work in the Civil Rights Movement. In 2016, he won the National Book Award for the third installment in the series March: Book Three, which marks the first time a graphic novel has received the honor.

He accepted the award with co-writer Andrew Aydin and illustrator Nate Powell and spoke of its significance in an emotional acceptance speech. “Some of you know I grew up in rural Alabama, very poor, very few books in our home,” Lewis said. “I remember in 1956, when I was 16 years old, going to the public library to get library cards, and we were told the library was for whites only and not for coloreds. And to come here and receive this honor, it’s too much.”

He also spoke about the importance of books in his life. “I had a wonderful teacher in elementary school who told me: ‘Read, my child, read’, and I tried to read everything," he said. "I love books.”

The civil rights icon has also been honored with numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the NAACP's Spingarn Medal and the sole John F. Kennedy "Profile in Courage Award" for Lifetime Achievement.” (source)

Glad he’s still around!