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I think there's a midground here, because I occupy it. The 2020 election was a titanic clusterfuck, and whatever you think happened, explicit belief statements need a giant asterisk.
Gun to my head, one word answer or I get shot, I say Biden. In any other context, I want to spend a half hour driving caveat shivs in before getting to that conclusion, and no one in any kind of government hearing ever gets to explain a nuanced position.
I think I'm fairly close to this also. There's the Hunter Biden Laptop Story, where the NY Post's reporting was suppressed before the election, and it's even documented on Wikipedia. There's also the suspicious timing of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trial results, which in a pre-mandate world would have handed a massive win to Trump just before the election, via Operation Warp Speed; I've seen it argued that it was political, that there was "no evidence" it was political, and that changes to the assessment schedule could plausibly have been done for scientifically justified reasons. I can't find a smoking gun document either way; interested people can probably argue forever about that one without ever making progress. TIME Magazine also came out in Feb 2021 and laid out how they "fortified" the election result to make it all-but-impossible to contest, revealing significant command-and-control capabilities among those who wanted to see a Biden presidency.
Do I believe they did anything so crude as to manipulate the count or the voting machines themselves? Not really; I think isolated manipulation is almost certain and uncoordinated widespread manipulation plausible, but I don't think anyone will be able to meet the standard of proof to convince anyone who has already chosen a side. I do think the environment in 2020 was stacked to favor D as much as possible as the country went to the polls. On top of that, vote-by-mail is always less secure than in-person-only elections, and there's a fair amount of means/motive/opportunity to harvest and submit ballots.
It is disappointing that the result of the contested 2020 election was not a bipartisan effort to secure the elections to the satisfaction of both parties, and that Voter ID seems to be impossible to pass even now.
A Democracy is dependent on certain institutions/people broadly acting fairly and honestly so that the voters can essentially be like a baseball umpire and call balls and strikes with a reasonable set of trusted information.
That being said we also accept that certain actors get to be partisan and try to shape public opinion. Politicians and PACs get to run attack ads which do not need to be nice to the opposing side and can give colorful takes on current events. We would probably assume more groups than these get to be partisans but the exact line of who gets to be partisan is not clearly defined.
And this is where 2020 gets really confusing because there are actors who are not allowed to be partisan using professional credentials to be partisan. The withholding of the vaccine data feels like it was for partisan and probably actually killed a lot of people. Fauci feels like he had other motives (in his case his own ego). The CIA is not suppose to be propagandizing the American people and acting in a partisan way in US elections. So when 50 revolving door CIA agents write an op-ed citing their CIA spy credentials to declare Hunters laptop a Russian Op I feel like that crossed some lines.
The environment stacking felt to me like it crossed a lot of lines on how institutions are required to play in a Democracy that go far beyond the dirty politics that happen in a Democracy.
That being said the Dems probably win the election in a landslide if they didn’t go down the path of fortifying an election. The riots really did costs them a lot of votes. If they had done that then Trump probably just goes down as a one term POTUS who did Republican stuff like cut taxes and appoint conservative judges.
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I'll add the revelations from Fauci's diary that Rand Paul just released. That motherfucker apparently knew the wet market theory wasn't true, believed it was only as bad as the flu, and was having a narcissism gooning session about how famous and important he was even as he destroyed the economy with lies.
I know many of the skeptics here remain insistent that COVID wasn't a big deal but that belief is nearly absent within healthcare itself, even the people who have concerns about the vaccine, social distancing plans, and other factors...they all think it was a big deal and if they worked inpatient they watched a lot of people die.
Even if he and they (us, really) were wrong...that's what we thought.
Also...the flu is bad and has been catastrophic before?
My understanding is that Fauci wrote in his diary that the mortality rate was one figure, and then went on TV and publicly claimed it was roughly ten times higher, and worked to get anyone repeating the accurate mortality he himself had privately accepted as genuine shouted down and censored.
Also, he knew it was lab made, and appeared outside a lab where he and his underlings had been funding research to produce exactly this sort of virus, despite such research explicitly being banned by the federal government. I'm planning a larger post on the subject, but my understanding is that it's straightforwardly true that Fauci generated one of the worst clusters of bad policy decisions of the last century, is directly responsible for something like 32 million human deaths and dozens of trillions of dollars in economic damage, along with vast and pernicious violations of a variety of human rights.
The fact that this is now all out in the open and the elite class is choosing to attempt, even at this late date, to aw shucks it back under the rug is... well, "enlightening" is a start. Personally, I intend to employ these facts as a cudgel from this point forward, and find it difficult to imagine why I shouldn't.
At this point we aren't going to get anywhere with the whole "how real" COVID was discussion, but I am here to point out that we really authentically were worried. Healthcare was about to collapse (not because this was The One pandemic but because the system has little slack). The dominos are still falling directly from COVID.
Additionally, people zigzagged between it was a far right conspiracy theory to no this is real to scary Italian estimates to bad flu and all over the place but throughout we knew that some bad shit was going down.
What we did with that information is a much more debatable thing, but I'm here to remind the conspiracy types that if nothing else the healthcare and public health people believed it was a big deal.
There's a lot of ways to seriously defend some COVID responses. I was a COVID hawk, and if not as aggressive as what coastals had to deal with, not only a hawk by Tophattington standards, and I'm still more mid-position than most here. But the trouble here is that people either need to seriously defend, or actively eject, bad actors. Fauci isn't some rando, and whether he was actively lying, rather than mistaken, is a massive deal even and especially if you want a serious public health response to ever work ever again.
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Nobody who doesn't already believe you will change their mind. Their control over the normies is total.
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Flu is bad. COVID was as bad as some of the worst pandemic flus of the past (aside from 1919)... that we pretty much forgot about until COVID. Healthcare people obviously tend to see the worst cases; public health people should avoid that bias.
See response to FC, trying to call out one narrow bit.
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One, there was a separation of several weeks between the diary entries and the Congressional testimony; new information could easily have fit in that temporal gap.
Two, 'as bad as influenza' covers some rather alarming territory (e. g. 1918).
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