Holy Crap - The Revolution is about to start

[Jimmy Higgins]

Trump has never won an election.

Whether you acknowledge it or not, this is you challenging the legitimacy of an election. This is the left's tactic toward delegitimizing the results of a fair election by the rules of the country.

Trump won in 2016. That is factual. Biden won in 2020. That is also factual.

Not factual, saying TomC is delegitimizing Trump's victory in 2016.

 

[Gospel]

In 2016 the state legislatures appointed enough EC delegates for Trump to take the White House.

@Emily Lake I think this is suggesting that Trump didn’t truly win the election on his own; rather, it was handed to him. While he did win in the traditional definition by becoming president, it was state legislatures that effectively gave it to him. I think that's what TomC was getting at.

Maybe the legislatures were using DEI? I mean we never had a complete moron as president.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

All of these things you're saying are justifications for expected future violence.

No. They are motivations for turning out to vote in numbers sufficient not only to create an electoral landslide, but also to discourage people from participating in the ensuing coup attempt. That is the only path to a peaceful transfer of power in January. And by peaceful, I mean body counts of no more than three digits.

That might be how you intend it, but I really really don't think that's going to be the consequence.

"Vote for Harris or else Trump is going to be a dictator and destroy democracy, and turn the miltary against US Citizens and it's going to be Hitler all over again. Trump is an existential threat to democracy, if he wins he's going to persecute liberals and round up immigrants and deport them or put them in camps!"

He has literally said he is doing this. The immigrant thing was a Day One promise, though technically he said "criminals" at the MSG event.

And you think that the only repercussion of that message is to get people to go to the voting booth?

The effort to win an election by voting is a lot easier and cleaner than trying to overthrow the election results via force. So yes, get out and fucking vote like it matters, because it does! Had people done this when the warning alarms were out in 2000, this country, the world could be so much different.

You don't think there's any chance at all that anyone is going to take that seriously? You don't think anyone is going to take it further than that if Trump wins?

Well, maybe you. You seem to be pushing the 'use violence' angle in this thread so much, I'm wondering if you are inciting violence and your posts need to be moderated.

Even in your own post, you're messaging that the ONLY POSSIBLE WAY we can have a peaceful transfer of power is if Harris wins by a landslide. You've already internalized and repeated that Harris has to win or else...

Man, talk about taking someone out of context. Perhaps why you didn't actually quote them on that.

So you make up an outlandish (both sides) hypothesis and when people aren't supporting, you just keep assuming your baseless assumptions are accurate.

Sure, sure... progressives and leftists NEVER engage in unwarranted violence.

Skipping the peculiarity of you including the adjective "unwarranted" for violence, that wasn't your actual claim.

You were claiming that the DNC is inciting violence with their rhetoric. Yet, Harris isn't saying the election is all her's and it only goes to Trump via election fraud, where as Trump actually is.

It is my position that the narrative of existential threat, fascist, and dictator that are being applied to Trump have primed the powderkeg for violence if Trump wins.

If Trump wins, he wins. You think the left wing was happy with W winning re-election '04 or Trump in '16?

No, they weren't happy. But they also weren't preaching the same message in the lead-up.

W arguably stole the election 2000. There was much angst over that. There were protests, but ultimately Gore conceded, America moved on. Trump was an awful option in 2016. Clearly unqualified for the job as we'd see. Much depression, and his first term really is a massive red flag for a second term. So yes, the language is a bit different because in 2016, Hillary Clinton didn't know Trump would try to seize the election with a violent mob on January 6, 2021.

Thus, I believe that if Trump wins, there will be violence initiated by the left.

That is a baseless assertion and repeating it doesn't make it any less baseless.

If Harris wins, I think it's a foregone conclusion that there will be violence initiated by the right.

I don't think violence is set in stone in either case. Trump sure the heck is setting it up though. He has made questioning the veracity of our elections a mainstream right-wing thing. This isn't just him now.

What's your first recollection of the outcome of a presidential election being challenged? It's been escalating for several election cycles, and it's not an exclusively right wing issue. The tactics employed differ by party, but the tendency to challenge or call into question either the legitimacy or the fairness of the outcome has been going on since Gore v Bush.

Actually, you couldn't be further from the truth. Yes, 2000 was glitch in Florida which led to a W win, via a lot of legal chicanery (and lets not forget the Brooks Bros 'Riot' which include Stone). A faulty ballot design was the difference, which is why Gore's data said one thing and the outcome said another. 2004 was a problem because the idiot CEO of Diebold said he'd guarantee a victory for W. Something the owner of a voting machine company shouldn't be saying. Things cleared up between 2006 and 2022. The reality is, Trump NEVER CHALLENGED THE ELECTION in 2020. What the press today forgets to mention, and what MAGA heads apparently don't know, is that Trump never once challenged, in court, the legitimacy of the election. All of that was outside of the courts where things like oaths and lawyers keeping their licensing aren't an issue.

So no, the fairness of the outcome of election has NOT actually been in actual question since 2004, which is 20 years ago.

I don't know how to get this across. This is a conceptual issue, based on the abstract impact of learned behaviors, and the way they get amplified over time.

Donald Trump tried to steal an election. Holding him accountable for that and holding him accountable for his actual statements and the Project 2025 document which his political allies put together is in bounds and legitimate fodder.

The tactics differ by party, but the strategy is the same.

That schism, that inability to find or even tolerate common ground and a shared objective...

Is it now? What party took political advantage of the failure of the W Admin on 9/11? No party did. Which party took the tragic case of Benghazi and tried to turn that into a political scandal? Which party has played political potato over national emergency response funding? Which party voted to save the Republican Speaker in May 2024? Which party made concessions for border related issues to go with Ukraine funding with the Republicans in the US Senate? Is it harder to get stuff done in Congress? Sure is. But crossing the aisles has been happening by one party much more often than the other. And the GOP'ers that do likewise are being phased out.

that's a far bigger risk to democracy than any specific individual.

That is interesting because your initial case was the Democrats are inciting violence... but you seem to have whittled that down to, the parties don't work well together. And you seem to think that is the biggest problem, worse than re-electing a man who refused to concede an election loss while not contesting the election in court.

The biggest problem America actually has is one party is up in arms over issues that aren't that important (immigration) or that common / even exist (child sex change operations).

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

There’s a fine line we need to avoid crossing if we truly want to deter the encouragement of extremism—whether it’s from the left or the right. We all know extremists exist on both sides, and regardless of where you stand, there are people within your camp who may intend to cause serious harm. So, while you may not consider Trump’s impact equal to Harris’s, I think it’s fair to ask that we all proceed with caution. I think that's all Emily is getting at here.

That is polite of you. But no, Emily isn't saying that. She is creating a false equivalence (beyond that of Moore-Coulter), where there isn't even a viable comparison to be made. Gaslighting via the cloak of false equivalence.

YES I AM! Unplug your goddamned ears, and let go of your made-up self-aggrandizing pretend fallacy and use your brain, Jimmy.

If I'm using my ears to do the Internet'ing, I'm doing it wrong.

 

[Politesse]

Maybe the legislatures were using DEI? I mean we never had a complete moron as president.

Bush Jr, Ronnie Reagan, Warren Harding, Silent Cal, Tricky Dick, Andrew Johnson, Andrew Jackson...

We fall for the "he seems like he'd want to have a beer with me" act a lot...

 

[Gospel]

Sure, but honestly, none of those presidents made false statements to the extent and quantity that Trump has. That's what I'm actually saying here.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Nixon was beer company? Andrew Jackson was a military alpha, not as much a beer company guy.

I'm not certain where Andrew Johnson is coming from here. He was a desperate attempt to appease the South post war.

 

[Gospel]

Andrew Johnson made inflammatory statements like 'This is a country for white men.' While shocking, this reflected the reality of the time, as U.S. laws and the historical treatment of people of color were deeply biased in favor of white men. So, it wasn’t entirely false in the way claims like 'Haitians are eating people’s pets' are.

Edit: When I used 'was,' I intended it purely in the past-tense sense—not to suggest that the U.S. is free from biases favoring white men in all areas today. I've started adding these clarifications because some readers (often white) tend to read too much into certain statements.

 

[Politesse]

Nixon was beer company? Andrew Jackson was a military alpha, not as much a beer company guy.

I'm not certain where Andrew Johnson is coming from here. He was a desperate attempt to appease the South post war.

They were all morons, though. Absolute blithering idiots.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Nixon wasn't stupid. He wasn't remotely stupid. Harding, Johnson yes. Jackson might not have been the smartest, but he had a plan and was good at moving things in a direction. W was a political lightweight, in way over his head. I don't know enough about Reagan. All I do know is his ideas in politics were almost exclusively all wrong.

 

[Gospel]

Nixon, not stupid? Are we talking about the same Nixon who was notoriously self-sabotaging, misjudged trust and loyalty, and failed to predict the consequences of his actions? Being shrewd and politically savvy doesn't mean you aren't stupid.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Nixon wasn't stupid. He had flaws, serious flaws, but he wasn't stupid.

PBS

Richard Nixon was an introvert in the extroverted calling of the politician. And as if that were not problem enough for him, he was an intellectual appealing to a public that puts low value on eggheads. I don't mean an intellectual in the stereotypical sense of a cloistered scholar; I mean that Nixon was a highly intelligent man who relied greatly on his own intelligence and that of others, who had a considerable capacity to read and understand technical papers, who retreated to a room alone and wrote in longhand on a yellow legal pad the gist of his major speeches, who impressed associates with his ability to evaluate disinterestedly the pros and cons of a problem, who in the opinion of Arthur Burns, whom he appointed to head the Federal Reserve, could have "held down a chair in political science or law in any of our major universities."

 

[Politesse]

Nixon wasn't stupid. He wasn't remotely stupid. Harding, Johnson yes. Jackson might not have been the smartest, but he had a plan and was good at moving things in a direction. W was a political lightweight, in way over his head. I don't know enough about Reagan. All I do know is his ideas in politics were almost exclusively all wrong.

Nixon was pretty stupid. He was bookish, and people often mistake that for intelligence. But he was wrong about nearly everything, and his administration had the same tone of "staff drawing straws to see who's going to try and explain this to the boss" that we still often see in the White House.

Some brainless Nixon ideas:
Watergate.
Letting Kissinger run military operations without oversight.
"Odious blurting".
Gas price ceilings and other attempts at price controls.
Wage freezing stunts.
Anti-Semitism.
Anti-Communism.
"I hate intellectuals."
Taking toxic pharmaxological mix of uppers and downers... before trying to run meetings.
Torpedoing the Vietnam peace talks.
The "enemy list", and general paranoia.
Vast increases in spending beyond a growing deficit.

 

[Gospel]

Intelligence isn’t just about what you know but how you apply it. In the short term, Nixon’s diplomatic relations with China—often cited as evidence of his intelligence—helped ease Cold War tensions. However, he didn’t foresee how swiftly China would leverage this access to become a major economic power and competitor, all while remaining aligned with and supporting Russia. Who would’ve guessed a communist country would keep supporting another communist country? Anyone who isn't stupid, that’s who.

 

[pood]

So you make up an outlandish (both sides) hypothesis and when people aren't supporting, you just keep assuming your baseless assumptions are accurate.

Sure, sure... progressives and leftists NEVER engage in unwarranted violence.

Skipping the peculiarity of you including the adjective "unwarranted" for violence, that wasn't your actual claim.

You were claiming that the DNC is inciting violence with their rhetoric. Yet, Harris isn't saying the election is all her's and it only goes to Trump via election fraud, where as Trump actually is.

It is my position that the narrative of existential threat, fascist, and dictator that are being applied to Trump have primed the powderkeg for violence if Trump wins.

If Trump wins, he wins. You think the left wing was happy with W winning re-election '04 or Trump in '16?

No, they weren't happy. But they also weren't preaching the same message in the lead-up. They weren't banging the drum about fascist dictator for life, imprison political enemies, hunt down us citizens, repeat of hitler, existential threat.

The reason they are banging this drum is because it is TRUE. Trump is TELLING US that he intends mass deportations, even of legal immigrants; that he intends to shut down the press as “enemies of the people’; that he intends to use the military to suppress internal dissent, that he ADMIRES Putin, Xi, and other dictators; he is TELLING US all these things. So people are rightly calling out this EXISTENTIAL THREAT to what democracy we have in this country.

 

[Elixir]

“They weren't banging the drum about fascist dictator for life, imprison political enemies, hunt down us citizens, repeat of hitler, existential threat.”

I was. Who is “they”?
I’ve been mouthing those truths since the orange shitbag first announced back in ‘15.
Actually since the 1980’s not much has changed about him other than dementia.
Remember The Central Park Five? Remember the full page ad he took out?
He probably didn’t mean it though - they were never executed so no harm done, right?

 

[Gospel]

So you make up an outlandish (both sides) hypothesis and when people aren't supporting, you just keep assuming your baseless assumptions are accurate.

Sure, sure... progressives and leftists NEVER engage in unwarranted violence.

Skipping the peculiarity of you including the adjective "unwarranted" for violence, that wasn't your actual claim.

You were claiming that the DNC is inciting violence with their rhetoric. Yet, Harris isn't saying the election is all her's and it only goes to Trump via election fraud, where as Trump actually is.

It is my position that the narrative of existential threat, fascist, and dictator that are being applied to Trump have primed the powderkeg for violence if Trump wins.

If Trump wins, he wins. You think the left wing was happy with W winning re-election '04 or Trump in '16?

No, they weren't happy. But they also weren't preaching the same message in the lead-up. They weren't banging the drum about fascist dictator for life, imprison political enemies, hunt down us citizens, repeat of hitler, existential threat.

The reason they are banging this drum is because it is TRUE. Trump is TELLING US that he intends mass deportations, even of legal immigrants; that he intends to shut down the press as “enemies of the people’; that he intends to use the military to suppress internal dissent, that he ADMIRES Putin, Xi, and other dictators; he is TELLING US all these things. So people are rightly calling out this EXISTENTIAL THREAT to what democracy we have in this country.

You know what's telling about the whole 'Trump doesn’t literally mean what he says; he means something else' argument? They don’t apply that same logic to liberals.

 

[Gospel]

Let’s get back to Nixon's blunder for a moment. China and Russia only disliked each other because they had different ideas on how to shape the communist empire. They were essentially competing for leadership of the same movement. At times, Russia tried to leverage the U.S. to gain the upper hand, and China did the same. Ultimately, the rivalry never ended, and it continues today, but now, thanks in part to years of U.S. policy (with Nixon’s being a particularly pivotal one), they’re skipping down the track holding hands like happy toddlers right now.

 

[Gospel]

A U.S. revolution leading to the fall of democracy might resemble the USSR’s collapse from an Eastern perspective. China or Russia could seize the opportunity to offer aid and work to rebuild America’s economy over time, aligning it more closely with their own—rather than repeating the West’s mistakes with post-Soviet Russia, where a mix of power grabs and standoffish treatment ultimately backfired.

 

[pood]

I do not think Nixon was stupid at all. Stupid people don’t get offered full scholarships to Harvard, as NIxon did but had to turn down because of family obligations. Stupid people don’t receive, as Nixon did, a full scholarship to Duke University Law School.

Nixon’s problem was not lack of intelligence, but lack of character.