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Breaking news. It looks like the jury convicted Donald Trump in the "hush money" case.
This verdict will likely galvanize voters come November – leading to record turnout among Republicans. I might even vote for the old rascal myself as I view this lawfare as both morally wrong and deeply destabilizing.
To make a prediction closer to home, we're now certain to cross 1000 posts on the weekly thread.
As I said downthread, as someone in deep red country the conversations I hear have an underlying apprehension of violence that rises by the day including today. I don't believe in their hearts these people want violence, but as the right is the political alignment predicted by having superior-to-average faculties at assessing danger, I think even if only intuitively they understand and greatly fear how swiftly we approach violence as the only way out. Blessed are the meek, blessed are those who know when to draw the sword. If and when it happens, it will be the right and only time.
The thought of this as being what stops Trump is many things, all of them wrong. There's not one person in this country who has decided this is the moment to hop off the fence, "Okay, now I won't vote for the man." Farcical. There will be topical complaining from RINOs, the establishment-GOP will continue searching, as they surely have since 2016, at finding a way to keep him out, and in November Trump will be on the ballot and receive 100 million votes. This conviction completes the ascendance of the man as the idea of the total rejection of the establishment. The establishment understands this, and is thus why they attack him with a wholly unparalleled ferocity; it is exactly the same reason those who land on the turbo-normie-left-side-of-bell-curve-meme support him. They don't have to think and wordswordswords, they viscerally understand power against power.
People try to contextualize what's happening in so many irrelevant details, ignore the minutiae. It has never been about vice, it has never been about ambiguous business dealings, it has never been about brashness, candor and honesty. Politicians as a category are the least ethical humans in this country, why would they care about any of this? It is about a man who refused to kneel when demanded by seated power and has risen to threaten their entire existence. This conviction heralds the imminent arrival of the pivotal figure of American history. It doesn't have to be Trump, but where we are in the reverberations of history is no earlier than the election of Buchanan.
Elections are won and lost by a percentage point or two. I don't think it's unreasonable to speculate that possibly one to two in a hundred American voters doesn't like Biden but won't vote for Trump after enough messaging about him now being a convicted felon. It also may not have any such effect, or have a reverse effect. Time will tell. But you're overconfident.
Out of the hundreds of posters on the fora I inhabit, not one has plausibly made the claim that they would have voted Trump if not for this -- at least one or two have said that they didn't want to vote for him (and would have gone for a third party), but now feel that they have to in order to send a message. Some of them do have a post history of criticizing the guy, so I think I believe them?
As @VelveteenAmbush points out, it's the people NOT on forums who are going to stop voting for him. The law-n-order conservatives who have never seen a prosecution they don't like.
And those people are going to vote for who exactly? Certainly not Joe 'Mostly Peaceful' Biden -- even among throwaway votes RFK doesn't really appeal to this crowd, and I can't see them getting too excited about putting the 'Libertarian' in LGBTQ.
The cohort you are talking about are also the 'you don't vote, you can't complain' guys -- so I can't even see it hurting on turnout much here.
ETA: I'm not really talking about quirky geek forums here either -- if you wanna put your finger on that particular pulse I'd reccomend ar15.com -- those guys are the most law abiding, letter-of-the-law dudes you will find, and maybe even more right wing than here. I haven't had cause to be down that rabbithole lately, but I guarantee they will have something to say about this.
They'll just stay home and let the Democrats take the purple areas.
The ar15.com guys are familiar with blatant abuse of the law because BATFE does it all the time.
Sure, but they take all the dumb rules to heart -- go on there and ask about cutting an inch off a shotgun barrel or something sometime. And they won't stay home -- voting is a civic duty, remember? And these guys are all about the civic duty.
Yeah, the ar15 guys are serious about the dumb rules because they know if you're not, you risk having your wife shot in the head in front of you. But they're not the guys who will be turning away from Trump. It will be the guys who (at the time Ruby Ridge was in the news) were of the opinion that if Weaver didn't want to get his wife shot, he shouldn't have cut that shotgun too short. Or should have showed up to court (despite getting wrong and conflicting information about the date). There were distressingly many of such people at the time, and they still exist.
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