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Notes -
There Are No Machines
Over the past 2 years, I’ve heard a number of election denialists, both online and in the media, that suggest that “machine politics” were somehow involved in rigging the 2020 election. What these theories all have in common is that they simply take for granted the existence of political machines in large cities, mostly in the Northeast and Upper Midwest; indeed, in some cases the city is simply mentioned as if it were understood that a corrupt political machine had its finger on every vote. This post originated as a response to @jkf from the other night, where he said:
What Is a Machine?
The first part of the quote betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what a machine actually is, so it’s worth exploring that. Political machines maintain their power through a system of patronage. An example of how this could have been done would be that the machine boss makes sure a crony gets appointed to chair the parks department. The crony’s appointment is not based on his qualifications as an administrator as much as it is based in his ability to use his position to obtain votes for machine candidates. So he coordinates with the boss of a ward full of poor Italian immigrants to get them all maintenance jobs. He coordinates with another ward boss to make sure that a prominent and loyal contractor in his ward gets a no-bid contract for facility renovation that will provide a ton of work to the Polish and Hungarian immigrants in his ward. And then when election time rolls around the ward boss makes sure everybody knows who they have to thank for all of this largesse and that if the machine loses control to the reformers the first thing that will happen is that they’ll get cut off. That’s just one example but there are all kinds of favors politicians can do to help normal people, down to anodyne stuff like helping them navigate bureaucracy through a few well-placed phone calls; stuff that’s so anodyne that (good) politicians still do it today. And it goes without saying that if you dare elect an opponent to lead your ward, all those services get cut off, and in the next election the machine pick will point to his inability to get anything done, even though that inability is machine-driven.
Of course, something has to give in a system like this, and it’s that problems never actually get solved. Richard Daley may not have been able to deal with poverty, but he was good enough at helping individual poor people that the machine never paid an electoral price for it. But the Chicago machine was an outlier in terms of longevity; machine politics started to die out in the 1930s, and the decline accelerated after the war. Historically, machines would get voted out of power during times of economic hardship in favor of reformers, as there wasn’t enough largess to distribute to keep the machine going. But the machine would normally make a comeback when things got better. The Depression meant that things didn’t get better for a long time. A lot of people needed help, there wasn’t much to go around, and local government was forced to focus on structural changes rather than individual favors. Some individual machines weren’t directly affected, but reforms at the state and Federal level in areas like the civil service and contract requirements gradually eroded away the machines’ ability to operate.
The upshot of all of this is that machines aren’t “faceless and anonymous” entities. Their very nature prevents them from being so. Handing out anonymous favors may be good as an act of charity, but it’s a terrible way to buy votes for your party. And when somebody sees that the town has gone to shit and wants to challenge the status quo, what do you do? Send them an anonymous threat? No; anyone trying to challenge a political machine must be aware of the fact that the machine runs the town and the machine will crush them if they try to interfere and if they’re smart enough to run the town then they’re smart enough to geta nice sinecure and maybe someday they’ll get the keys to the executive washroom. From Boss Tweed in the early days to Richard Daly at the tail end of the machine era, everyone knew who was in charge, and if they didn’t, the boss wouldn’t hesitate to let them know.
The Pittsburgh Machine
I can’t speak to every city in which fraud was alleged, but I live in SWPA and can provide a pretty detailed picture of how Pittsburgh’s government works. First, unless otherwise stated, everyone named here is a Democrat; the city hasn’t had a Republican mayor since the 1930s and that’s just the way it is. It’s also what gives rise to accusations of machine politics. But hear me out. There are 3 big players in Pittsburgh politics: The mayor, the Allegheny County Executive, and the Allegheny County Democratic Committee. The current mayor is Ed Gainey, a former state rep who beat incumbent Bill Peduto in the 2021 primary. Peduto didn’t seek the committee’s nomination and he accordingly didn’t get it; Gainey won it over Tony Moreno, a MAGA Democrat and former cop who thought Peduto was too soft on the 2020 protestors (of which we had relatively few that became problematic). Peduto also didn’t campaign, but nonetheless managed to win 39% of the vote to Gainey’s 46%, a testament to either the cluelessness of the electorate or the unwillingness of Peduto’s white, upper middle class base to support a black progressive reformer like Gainey or a cretin like Moreno. Gainey’s election was both surprising and not surprising at the same time. Had Peduto done anything to indicate that he actually wanted to be mayor he would have easily won. Before becoming mayor himself, Peduto made a name for himself by mercilessly criticizing the two previous mayors from his position on city council representing the wealthiest part of town.
Peduto was mayor during the 2020 election, but that is of little consequence since the city doesn’t run elections, the county does. The County Executive is (and was) Rich Fitzgerald. He was elected in 2011 after beating Mark Patrick Flaherty in the primary and Republican D. Raja in the general. Flaherty was County Controller, the son of a judge, nephew of a former mayor, and that isn’t the half of it. Fitzgerald was a county councilman. Fitzgerald won by about ten points. Allegheny County operates differently than other counties. Most counties in PA are run by three elected commissioners and there are a slew of row offices like prothonotary, register of wills, etc. Allegheny County’s system was dysfunctional and dominated by city interests so a home rule charter was adopted in 1999 that would put power in the hands of a unified executive and a geographically-based council. Most row offices were eliminated and replaced by civil service employees. The county runs the elections.
Finally, there’s the Democratic Committee. In theory this has over 2600 members (one man and one woman from each precinct), but in reality many of these seats are vacant since not all precincts can find enough people to fill their allotment. Most committee elections involve fewer than 1000 participants, and if you live in a precinct with a vacant spot, they’ll pretty much give it to you. The committee’s main job is (obviously) to get Democrats elected, but they also endorse primary candidates. And it’s currently a mess. Ahead of the 2020 election, there were a number of stories about how the committee had a MAGA problem; some committee members were making Facebook posts supporting right-wing policies, and committee leadership was ambivalent. Then the committee went on to endorse some of these MAGA sympathizers in local races over progressive candidates. With Peduto not seeking their endorsement, nearly 40% of the committee voted to endorse former cop and current asshole Tony Moreno for mayor. With Fitzgerald’s time as executive coming to a close, the committee is endorsing moderate and longtime county Treasurer John Weinstein. Mayor Gainey, however, has endorsed progressive state legislator Sara Innamorato. But the board failed to endorse incumbent DA Stephen Zappala in favor of the more progressive Matt Dugan. And no one has yet endorsed longtime city Controller Michael Lamb for County Executive, even though he’s from a prominent political family that includes his nephew, former US Rep Conor Lamb.
If this is supposed to be some kind of machine, it’s a pretty dysfunctional one. Politicians with long pedigrees can’t get endorsements. Politicians who endorse views antithetical to the party platform do get endorsements. Politicians with endorsements lose primary elections. Prominent figures in the party can’t agree on whom to endorse. Mayors tend to be replaced by their strongest critics. This group was supposed to have participated in the rigging of a presidential election? They couldn’t rig an election for dogcatcher. This isn’t because they’re incompetent, it’s because this is the way the system is supposed to operate.
As someone who grow up in that area I never felt like Pittsburgh had the same partisan lines like that for machine politics. All the leaders also seem random. It’s the place where Fetterman came from. Does he seem like the kind of guy who rises the ranks in a machine? It’s sort of whose ever bored enough to run place.
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On the object level, I think you are wrong machines still exist. Chicago's machine even in your classic sense is about 80% intact. Regardless of patronage, that sort of political power doesn't evaporate organically. In fact, it typically accumulates. As we saw in 1982, 1/10 votes in Chicago was a fraudulent vote. I've tried looking for statistical evidence that Chicago voter turnout collapsed post 1982, but it is not evident. So roughly the same amount of "people" kept voting.
Thus, the fraud machine is durable and undetectable. Why is it so different than the highly visible patronage system you think has evaporated? Well, because instead of structure, it thrives off chaos. Go to any polling place in a poorer area of a major city. What do you see? Well, firstly you will see illegal electioneering at the entrance. So, its obvious that basic laws are not being followed. Second, when you get inside, ballots will be strewn about. Boxes will contain them, or not. The voter roll is a piece of paper with checkboxes filled out by a woman with glaucoma. Signature verification to receive your ballot is impossible to fail. Over 50% of the voters on the roll haven't voted in 3+ elections. In other words, there are nearly an unlimited array of options to infiltrate the system. One competent person at one polling place could easily produce 5000 votes with 0% chance of detection. Bang.
Just going through Chicago mayoral election results since Daley was first elected
1955: 1,290,000 votes cast Daley wins 54-45
1959 1,090,000.votes cast Daley wins 71-28
1963 1,220,000 votes cast Daley wins 55-44
1967 1,084,000 votes cast Daley wins 73-25
1971: 1,056,000 votes cast Daley wins 70-30
1975: 698,000 votes cast Daley wins 77-19
1977: special election cause Daley died: 634,000 votes cast, Bilandic (D) wins 77-21
1979: 854,000 votes cast Byrne (D) wins 82-16
The FBI finds tons of fraudulent ballots in the 1982 federal election, this could be breakpoint though I don't know exactly when reforms in response to this went into effect
1983: 1,290,000 votes cast, Washington (D) wins 51-48
1987 1,160,000 votes cast Washington (D) wins 53-42
1989 Special Election Cause Washington died: 1,040,000 votes cast, Daley Jr. (D) wins 55-41
1991: 637,000 votes cast, Daley Jr. (D) wins 71-26
1995 598,000 votes cast, Daley Jr. (D) wins 60-36
1999: 595,000 votes cast, Daley Jr. (D) wins 71-28.
You're suggesting that a ~10% decline in voter turnout would be a good indication that the machine stopped working, but that roughly the same number of people voted so it was will still working. But there was a massive surge in voting after 1982 not a collapse. Does that mean the machine faked more votes than ever, or that people who had given up started to believe elections were fair and turned out to vote.
I don't know but it just doesn't seem like raw vote totals are a good indication of whether "a machine" is in operation. The lowest total votes cast seem to coincide with the largest margins for the incumbent.
That is another plausible explanation. But it also, IMO, overly privledges the position of free and fair elections, which from my POV is what the law generally overly does, and instead I'd prefer people take election integrity much more seriously.
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I don't have a fixed POV on this issue, but I think your accurate historical definition of "political machine" is beside the point. My "election truther" buddies, if they were to refer to a "machine" behind ballot fraud, would be using a known old term to refer to something new and different, a difference that is key to their argument. In their worldview, a paradigm shift has taken place that has removed the common man from the political machine (this is the essence of Trumpism). Now that the titans of industry are predominantly Democrats, they have conspired with Democrat politicians to circumvent the inconvenience of getting votes from regular people. The argument is that they have figured out how to rig the game at a higher level, and everything else is kayfabe. They use "current thing" to distract the public from realizing that the public is now irrelevant. Meanwhile, a closed loop of graft and favors is making everyone in the elite richer and richer. (Add to this recipe some degree of Satanic grooming, if you want a full picture of this theory of the world.)
This isn't my worldview -- I expect more uncoordinated chaos in how things fold and unfold -- but I hear it a lot, in different degrees of eloquence. Like most other machines that have been around since the dawn of the industrial revolution, political machines have gone through technological changes that would now confuse the mechanics of that earlier time.
But that is his point - the word isn't adding anything to 'dems rig elections', neither what happened nor what they allege happened resembles the old 'political machines' at all, so it's just increasing confusion. Analogies can be informative, even if mostly inaccurate literally, and this sometimes gives words new - and useful - meaning. It wouldn't be unreasonable for, if a novel form of political organization sprang up that took some things from the old 'political machines' but was very different, to use the term, and maybe for its meaning to evolve. But that analogy or new meaning, like anything interesting, can be uninformative - which is what's happening here.
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If that's the case then it's a classic motte and bailey. The reason they use the word "machine" is to invoke images of Daly stuffing ballot boxes in Chicago and the like. But when you point out that the system of political organization that allowed this to happen doesn't exist anymore in any meaningful sense, they retreat back to saying that it's really just a vague understanding among elites.
I don't think the "motte" version of the argument is just "a vague understanding among elites." There would be a lot of discussion of the various blue-team "pop-up" NGOs funded by elites (e.g. IDEX and that network of shell-charities in D.C. that got coverage about six months ago whose name I've forgotten - Blue something?), progressive capture of institutional philanthropy, the illegible and incestuous relationships between various "civil society" groups, and the ways in which this funding and influence can reach deep into official government functions, like voting.
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Premise: A machine in politics is X
Premise: There is not a machine in Pittsburgh
Conclusion: There are no machine politics in the USA
???
Detroit is what I was talking about at least. Detroit had ballot harvesting introduced just before the 2020 election. It is dominated by Democrats, about 95%. It's notoriously crime-ridden and corrupt. Amongst other things, the city recently started awarding marijuana sales licenses, essentially a license to make money. Half of these licenses go to 'social equity' candidates. It's easy to see how they could arrange that these licenses go to trustworthy local leaders who can be relied upon to ensure that plenty of votes arrive.
Or if they didn't do that, they could arrange for other aspects of the vast welfare apparatus to flow through
In the words of Sam Riddle, "The only difference between Detroit and third world nations -- where corruption is concerned -- is goats in the street". He should know - he was found guilty of corruption in Detroit! Rigged elections are part and parcel for third world nations. You have backroom deals where sinecures are distributed and agreements made.
Even if there's internal division as to who should get more or less of the spoils, the interests of Detroit's leaders are surely all to favor higher spending and more social services, as opposed to fiscal or other kinds of conservatism.
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This is good effort post, but it sounds to me a bit like proving that communist USSR didn't exist, because look how dysfunctional the ruling system was, how many dissidents were there, how if you look at any particular party functionary, they were regularly removed from their posts and assigned to random places or even just sent into retirement (or sometimes worse). I mean, if the communist dictatorship was as real as the conspiracy theorists claim, would it not be able to function much more efficiently and would something like removal of Khrushchev (who was supposed to be an all-powerful communist dictator, following right into the footsteps of the mythical uber-tyrant Joseph Stalin figure!) ever happen? Clearly, the supposed "dictatorship" and "totalitarian society" there is nothing but a conspiratorial fakery, and not even a well done one.
Of course The Machine would be full of infighting for who exactly controls the levers and who gets to be in the driver seat. Of course you can be the Chief Machinist one day and cast out by a coup on another. Of course mafia bosses would order hits on each other and sometimes even rat out each other to the feds. That doesn't mean the Machine or the mafia does not exist. A better test would be - can an outsider - or, horrible dictu, even a deplorable - ever get to the levers at all? What challenges would they encounter - besides the obvious "convince the voters" ones?
Outsiders get in all the time. Ed Gainey was a state rep before he became mayor, and he was elected to that post after defeating a 30-year incumbent on the third try. Plus, Pittsburgh's one of the whitest major cities in the country and Gainey is probably the first black guy to get elected to any city office that isn't a council seat representing a heavily black area. He's endorsing Sara Innamorato for county exec. She's another state rep, a DSA member who beat an incumbent who belongs to another prominent local family in a white working-class district. As I alluded to earlier, the ACDC endorsed a vocal Trump supporter and ACA opponent over an autistic LGBT activist. the Trump supporter lost the primary, but if the litmus test for a political system not being a machine would be something akin to a Republican who loves AOC and tweets against Trump's immigration policy winning a GOP primary in the Bible Belt, I don't know what to tell you.
I know Wikipedia should be taken with a grain of salt, but this is not exactly what I think of when I say "outsider".
DSA is an outsider to Dem party like Sanders is an "Independent" senator - formally it's true, but we all know what they'd be voting for. If they are "outside" it's the part of "outside" that the mainstream body can't venture to go without risk losing the independents, but not the part which they disagree with.
Not sure about AOC, but there are plenty of Republicans tweeting against Trump's anything, from his hair color to his politices, real or imagined. That said, if I would discover that there's a Republican Machine in, say, Wyoming, I wouldn't be exactly shocked. I'm not saying there necessary is, just saying it wouldn't be a huge surprise for me if there were.
I think that's conflating national and local political dynamics. If you're part of the Democratic establishment in a solidly blue city your personal political career is never meaningfully threatened by Republicans, it's threatened by challengers from the left. If Trump wins by 1 point you're still gonna win by 19, keep your job and be paying your dues with the party establishment so you can move up over time. If the DSA wins you have to find a different job and all that time you put in at low low level functionary positions was for nothing.
This is anecdotal but I know a former city council member of a solidly blue small Midwestern college town who is still involved in local politics. He hates Republicans, but what he wants to talk about day in and day out is how bad the the local hard left student organizations and Sander's aligned groups like Justice Democrats are. It's a "heretics are a bigger threat then pagane" dynamic.
That's to say that If Pittsburgh election administration is controlled by a corrupt tight knit organization capable of casting fraudulent ballots en masse without any defectors; they're also going to use that power to consistently rig local elections in favor of their organization. If local candidates outside of the democratic establishment can win then either this group is deeply principled enough not to interfere in intra-left fights, or they just don't actually have the ability to rig elections.
Well, as you proved, in local matters there is no unified local control - DSA people watch the establishment types like a hawk for shenanigans. However, both the establishment Dems and the DSA-types are on the same side when it comes to presidential general election politics. So if there was to be fraudulent efforts in presidential elections, you would not expect the DSA to complain about it; to the contrary you would expect them to participate.
Why does the DSA have a capacity to "watch establishment types like a hawk" and prevent voter fraud against them in local elections but the larger and better funded Republican party does not?
From 1982 to 2018, the Republicans were subject to a consent decree which prevented them from doing so, and in that time their organization withered.
Also, I suspect the DSA is better-funded than the Republican Party in the relevant jurisdictions.
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It depends on conditions on the ground. In deep blue counties the local DSA chapter is likely to be far better manned, resourced, and organized - at least because more likely to succeed in day-to-day politics - than the local GOP. Likewise, in deep red areas, I would expect the local insurgent right-wing group (Tea Partie, MAGA, etc.) to be at least as well-organized and active in local politics as the local Democratic party operation (though Dems are better at springing grass-roots activism up in inhospitable terrain than the GOP because the left has a longer tradition of activism, more sophisticated techniques, popularity among demographic groups willing and able to forego lucrative careers to engage in activism work, and, at least these days, much more money and PMC support, plus a friendly media and educational environment).
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But when people claiming there was foul play in the 2020 election point to "machine politics" as evidence, the implication is that this is a well-run political organization that does this kind of thing all the time to maintain their own power and thus already has the mechanisms in place to commit fraud. What you're arguing is that an ad hoc group of political opponents conspired to rig an election due to ideological consensus regarding one issue, despite that fact that none of them had ever done something like that before. That's the opposite of machine politics.
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It's more like proving the USSR isn't feudalist, because its social structure has little resemblance to one with lords, vassals, or peasants. This doesn't prove it's not dysfunctional or malicious, just that it isn't so in that way.
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To summarize your post:
Machines had a specific organizational structure in 1910.
Pittsburg does not meet this model.
Therefore a different - but related - organizational structure in 2020 could not have interfered with elections.
You may object to the term "political machine" by insisting that the term apply only to the 1910 structure. That's fine. But then lets just apply the term Machina to the 2020 version.
A Machina is a group of organizations with a shared interest in maintaining a stream of graft and they also have some political leanings. The visible elected official at the top is not of primary importance because the graft is no longer vulnerable to interruption by a single elected official. So concretely speaking, Bloomberg or Guliani can get elected mayor of NYC. The net result is that NYC still spends 10x what the rest of the world spends on subways and that money is spread around the Machina, while Bloomberg - a competent adminstrator with no desire to continue this - has no power to do anything about it.
Similarly, Trump has no real power over the federal Machina and it mostly continues doing what it wants.
And the main thing that is known within the Machina is that you should keep quiet about stuff because even if you speak up, the court will come up with a reason to dismiss your case, the media won't say anything, the administrative procedure will find a reason to delay it, etc.
The latter is where a small conspiracy to rig votes by the small but more ideological wing can live. Nothing you've presented contradicts this thesis.
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I have no particular claims regarding the 2020 election, but the 1997 Miami mayor race in which Xavier Suarez was removed from office for ballot fraud is probably the most obvious recent memory example of what some are claiming happened. Per the wiki article:
The 1997 race was particularly recent during the 2000 election controversy in Florida. I have no information regarding more recent elections, but while I'd like to think it can't happen these days it doesn't seem completely impossible.
I tried to find numbers for the magnitude of that shitshow, but this was the best I got.
Now the invalidation was technically for the initial election, not the runoff, but I think it's safe to expect similar turnout. That suggests in an election with circa 50,000 votes, the state was not only able to find various examples, but publicize and prosecute them. But in 2020, despite having 3,000x the number of ballots, such cases were vanishingly rare.
It's not at all impossible. Just improbable.
Yes, plus you'd expect the personnel involved and the potential for whistleblowers to increase dramatically. You'd also need to avoid producing statistical irregularities by overstuffing in certain places so you'd have to coordinate between different groups. The complexity is just much higher.
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How many sting operations were conducted by the FBI? How many undercover agents acted as fake poll workers in Atlanta and Miami?
No idea. It sounds like the commission relied on overwhelming witness testimony.
Why do you ask?
If you are not actively searching from within the process, almost all fraud will be invisible to you. There is a reason the only time the Chicago machine was ever caught was due to a disgruntled fraudster outing them. Its because voting is inscrutable the way it is done in urban environments.
So why didn't that apply in the very urban, very visible Miami case?
It should be strictly harder to organize a national voter fraud campaign with no leaks even in the face of considerable public and private effort.
Why would it be national? It would just happen every year. The people who end up getting caught typically get snitched on.
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Not national, just a lot of local things like this: friendly outreach organizations signing homeless up for the rolls using the charity's own address. Is there a plausible good faith explanation for this? Sure! Is it a gaping opportunity for vote fraud? Also yes!
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A bit further back than 1997, but still after the purported demise of the machine politics era, the grand jury report for the 1982 Chicago election is informative on the different fraud strategies used to generate over 100,000 fraudulent votes in the midterms that year. The specific strategies included
Absent voter canvassing - paid canvassers who were supposed to correct voter rolls instead used canvassing to identify voters who had died, moved, or had no intention of voting as targets for fraudulent votes.
Fraudulent use of absentee registration - precinct captains and canvassers would convince residents to sign up for absentee ballots, then fill out the ballots themselves voting party line
Paying drunks, homeless and aliens to vote
Manually altering the vote counts
Harvesting ballots from nursing homes
Of those methods, manually altering the vote counts is more difficult now. The other methods are no more difficult or much, much easier to pull off. In the 41 years since then, we have expanded the mail-in vote to be broad enough to cover everyone. Ballot harvesting is now explicitly legal in quite a few jurisdictions with minimum verifications in place to ensure that the ballots are actually cast by the person on the registration card. In jurisdictions where it is illegal, there is an awful lot of wink and nod non-enforcement.
Much of the opportunity for fraud is now outsourced to GOTV organizations tied to both the local and national parties. They conduct the registration drives, canvassing, and harvesting with a degree of separation from the party proper so that when an employee is caught being "inadequately supervised" it doesn't implicate the party.
While I assume that both parties engage in fraud to the extent they can get away with it, I would expect that Democrats benefit from it more simply due to the parties' positions on whether greater voter fraud protections are needed. I think it's unlikely but not impossible that the 2020 presidential election was within the margin of fraud.
Number one doesn't work anymore (at least in Pennsylvania) since maintaining voter rolls isn't the responsibility of the parties. In PA when someone dies the department of vital records notifies the county election board within 60 days so they can be removed from the rolls. Obviously people who recently died or died out of state can still slip through, but we aren't talking huge numbers of people. As for the fraudulent absentee registrations, I think that widespread mail-in voting actually makes it less likely for this kind of fraud to happen. Absentee balloting used to be rare enough that unscrupulous people could take advantage of the lack of familiarity with the system. If someone from your own party came to your door and told you about an easier way to vote that you weren't familiar with, it might seem okay that, yeah, just give the ballot to him, he'll mark all the Democrats for me. In the run up to the 2020 election there was a media blitz about how to properly fill out mail ballots. There were news stories on regularly, and I got tons of emails from both the party and the election commission with instructions on how to request and fill mine out, just in case I decided to vote by mail.
Registration fraud I'm not worried about because registration forms require enough verifiable information that it would be impossible to register enough fake applicants at scale to make it worthwhile. At the very least, you need to be able to match a name with a state ID# or Social and the kind of person willing to give that information to a stranger apropo of nothing probably isn't the kind of person you can rely on to provide accurate information.
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Before the 2020 election, the Republicans' campaign for tougher rules against voter fraud focussed on the rarest type of voter fraud - retail in-person voter fraud such as non-citizen immigrants registering and voting - and conspicuously ignored postal vote fraud. This doesn't necessarily mean that the Republicans expected to benefit from postal vote fraud - it is more likely that they were worried about military being tossed on technicalities as a result of harsh laws against postal vote fraud, in the same way that the Democrats are worried about Republican voter-ID laws which de facto require a driving license to vote disenfranchising poor urbanites.
If the Republicans thought that the Democrats routinely committed postal vote fraud of the type they are now complaining about, the True the Vote crowd would have spent more time talking about it.
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That Jury Report lists the use of a computer to check whether deceased people voted or whether people voted twice as a novel investigative technique used by the FBI. They say the FBI targeted precincts where lots of people voted twice or where dead people voted and then checked the handwriting of precinct officials against the handwriting on ballots cast twice. Once that started they were able to get lots of people to flip and testify.
That's one way technology makes this all harder. Fraudulent absentee scheme and ballot harvesting are going to have some error rate where double ballots get cast and if a whole bunch of them are cast in one precinct then that suggests that a lot is going on. Just scrolling through Heritage.org's list of voter fraud convictions there's tons of people who got caught voting in two states or for their dead relatives. It's just a much harder crime to pull off in an era of digital voter rolls and databases of obituaries.
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2020 stolen election time! There's been some rather big developments with my favorite cute little hobby horse. I haven't had the time to make a deep-dive write-up, but it's has already been extensively reported on elsewhere (e.g. this post by Jacob Sullum). To summarize, Dominion voting systems sued Fox News (and Newsmax, and OAN) for defamation. Dominion has been past the discovery stage for more than a year now but their filings only recently became public and, no way to say this lightly, it's been extremely humiliating for Fox. Tons of text messages from the big names (Carlson, Hannity, etc.) either talking shit about how crazy Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani are, or (especially for Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo) credulously accepting and repeating the stolen election theories.
One especially funny example involved Sidney Powell credulously forwarding an email to Bartiromo from a complete rando claiming they had "Election Fraud Info". In that same email, the anonymous rando claimed that they got their information from their dreams, that the wind tells them they're a ghost, and that Justice Scalia was murdered during a human hunting expedition. As evidenced by the filings she submitted to court, Powell's skepticism faculties appear to be basically non-existent, and the fact that so many people took her seriously at first is a good illustration of the pitfalls of siloed reasoning.
Maybe the most damning revelation of how Fox was operating (from both a legal liability as well as a journalistic ethics perspective) is how they treated their fact-checking process. When Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted on November 12 that "there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised" Carlson texted Hannity "Please get her fired. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke." If Dominion needed to prove the actual malice (and it's not yet clear if they would need to) in a defamation case, they couldn't have asked for better evidence.
There isn't much for me to say that I haven't said before. My operating theory has long been that some people seemed to earnestly believe the crazy theories they were spouting about Hugo Chavez or whatever (e.g. Powell, Giuliani, maybe Dobbs) while many others were just pretending to entertain it because it was in their best financial interests (e.g. Carlson, Hannity, Murdoch, etc.) and the text messages confirm this. To Carlson's credit though, he endured a lot of negative pushback from his criticism of Powell.
I've already done my hand-wringing on how the media seems to love shooting itself in the foot, except it was framed in context of how liberal outlets fucked up the Covington debacle from four years ago. The Dominion lawsuit demonstrates the problem behind audience capture; Fox pundits and reporters had to deal with a credible financial pressure to cater to the crazy fringes of their audience for fear of losing them to their less scrupulous competitors. If so, it would be a demand-side problem. I'm not sure if the problem with liberal media fuck-ups follows the same framework, but I'm open to arguments. My general impression there is that the call is coming from inside the house: liberal journalists too afraid of their fellow cohort to break ranks. I suppose a good test-case scenario would be to see how NYT's current "trans youth reporting controversy" plays out. They obviously already got a severe amount of criticism from the activist fringe, but would a significant portion of their audience care? And if so, where would they go?
One last question: has anyone here changed their opinion on the 2020 stolen election theories?
Yes: watching this campaign to exterminate all non-regime media has made me certain the exact same groups would use dirty tricks to "fortify" an election, and that denying it is just an exercise in sadistic gaslighting.
Truth is a defense to defamation. Why do you think Fox isn't trying that approach?
I hadn't realized you were literally a member of the party's terrorist wing.
That explains why I smelled sadistic glee in bragging about getting away with it in all your posts about the 2020 violence and election.
I follow your buddies in "Redneck Revolt" and all the affiliated groups. They're open about what their goals are, and so it's easy to see what you're up to.
Tell us about your activities with them.
Edit: engaging with people we disagree with is a good use of time. But leftists aren't people: burn in hell.
You have been warned about this kind of personal antagonism and attack-dogging repeatedly. You have been told to stop playing political commissar.
You have one of the lengthiest rap sheets here in our short time on the new site, and clearly you don't care; you're not here to discuss anything, you're here to snarl, spit, count coup and try to score gotchas.
Banned for 2 weeks, pending mod discussion (I will be arguing for a permaban).
ETA: Following mod discussion, general consensus is that you're a terrible commenter with a terrible history, and while there was some ambivalence about permabanning you over this comment in particular, your track record justifies it. You were warned repeatedly to knock it off or you'd be banned, and you very intentionally chose not to knock it off, even continuing your petty aggression and personal grudges in DMs and reports.
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I assume that you chose to avoid answering what I thought was a simple question because it challenged your worldview to an uncomfortable degree. Ideally, you could introspect and openly scrutinize why your feelings do not match up with reality. Less ideally, radio silence is an option. The least ideal is trying to evade scrutiny by throwing a ball of confetti in the air. This only serves to draw attention to the fact that you don't have an answer. It's especially obvious when done with such little finesse and subtlety.
As a last note, I do sincerely commend you for the transparency in linking to my writing directly so that everyone can judge for themselves how much your feelings match up with reality. I should note that I've never heard of Minnesota SRA before but in case it needs to be said, I support 2A for everyone and do not support ending capitalism. Hope that clears things up!
Should we assume that every time you don't answer a question, change a hypothetical scenario, etc, you do that for the same reason?
I think that would be a reasonable assumption, yes. Are you aware of any instances where this happened?
Sure, off the top of my head I can recall when I posted the example involving Kurt Eichenwald and his tentacle porn tab, and modified the IRL scenario to create a hypothetical where telling the truth would make you look worse than "confessing" to something that didn't happen. You ignored the hypothetical, and debated the IRL case. I was happy to put that down to a misunderstanding, but it seems like I shouldn't have done so.
I thought I did address your hypothetical. I admit I didn't really understand what it had to do with my original question, which was asking "If Nixon was the victim of a deep-state conspiracy, why didn't he tell anyone?" I interpreted your response as essentially "well what if Nixon thought about telling the truth but worried it would make it him look like he's digging his own hole further so he chose to stay quiet to avoid that worse outcome" which certainly is a possibility, but I didn't find that explanation plausible enough to take seriously.
You're welcome to ask me whatever other questions you want, or point out whatever misunderstanding I made.
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Here you go.
Here's another.
And another.
That's just this thread.
An unanswered question is very weak evidence of someone doing so because they're uncomfortably challenged because there's plenty of innocent explanations for why someone wouldn't respond (e.g. touch grass, etc.). The context of what I was responding to here is an instance of someone having the time and nevertheless acrobatically evading the question. This scenario is strong evidence of my assertion.
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Come on man, @ymeskhout is routinely one of the highest quality and most evidence based posters here. Plus he’s got great legal knowledge.
We’re lucky to have him, especially if we actually care about not becoming a far right echo chamber.
I'll always remain amenable to substantive criticism about the way I write about this topic or any other topic, as seen here. The challenge here is that good faith criticism is indistinguishable from bad faith attacks when details are absent. Sometimes people just have a particularly fragile worldview, and so they get really reflexively upset when I present a conclusion that they viscerally dislike. I put effort in laying out my arguments and citations in a transparent manner, so if I happen to be wrong, it should be rather trivial to demonstrate how and why. If someone refuses to do this and instead chooses to resort to an irrelevant drive-by snipe, I have to assume they're just airing out their frustrations because they lack the ability to show where I'm wrong.
So I welcome any substantive criticism you have about anything I've written. In this instance, if you believe I'm acting in bad faith or just here to shit on the so-called other side, as an example one thing you could do is take any sentence in my post above and show me how you would rewrite it. If your criticism is not related to the specific way I string words together, you're welcome to tell me what other meta changes I can make which would address your concerns. After all, if there isn't even an illusion of good faith on my part, it should be fairly easy for you to demonstrate so with specificity.
I have no real rebuttal that this topic isn't a waste of my time. I'm aware that if someone is immune to evidence or otherwise unwilling to falsify their theory, then they're not going to change their mind, but perhaps there is some residual utility in drawing broadly applicable lessons from the scenarios (for instance, the incentives that people in the media face, why/how so many people claim to believe things that were so fanciful, etc.). I do concede that I find this topic very entertaining in addition to just interesting, but that's also true of many other topics we talk about here. The world is dreary so it's nice to laugh a little.
Regarding the Italian satellite issue, I conceded that I used the motte-and-bailey in an erroneous manner (you may not have caught the edit to my post when you linked it). I do maintain it's fair of me to bring up what a top level Trump official earnestly asked the investigative arm of the US government to investigate. I can't be accused of nutpacking when I'm highlighting the actions of someone so central to the issue. I gather that much of the negative reaction I get when I mention the Italian satellite thing is that it's acutely embarrassing and impossible to handwave away. it's relevant because it's illustrative of the credulity the Trump administration was operating on regarding the stolen election theories, it shows they were willing to entertaining virtually any theory, no matter how implausible it was on its face. I understand it's an extremely inconvenient fact for anyone who wants to argue that Trump was acting in good faith in investigating election fraud, but as Abe Lincoln said, facts don't care about your feelings.
I really appreciate your feedback.
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I’d hope that most of us are having fun as we’re shitting on the other side. There’s a reason this is called the Culture War thread!
As long as people are reasonably intelligent and polite while doing the shitting I don’t see a problem.
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If you aren't here to talk to people you disagree with, you probably shouldn't be here.
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Is truth a defense to being suppressed on Twitter/Facebook/Google/YouTube/NYT/WaPo/AllTheOutletsThatPeopleUse? To being universally derided as mis/dis/mal-information? Truth may eventually prevent some actors from having to pay legal costs (and others might be liars), but in the meantime, why do you think Twitter/Facebook/Google/YouTube/NYT/WaPo/AllTheOutletsThatPeopleUse aren'te trying that approach?
Being suppressed by a private entity and defamation claims are not governed by the same legal standard so no, truth would not be a defense to suppression. I don't understand the rest of your post.
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It's ironic or bittersweet how Dominion, a private company, is now Fox's greatest adversary, not the Biden administration. Usually government is framed as being tyrannical or overreaching, compared to the private sector as the 'little guy' or victim, but it's flipped.
It shows that free speech does not apply to libel. Unlike governments and bureaucrats, private companies and individuals can fight back. being targeted by a private entity is worse than being targeted by a government, unless it's something really bad like terrorism or Jan 6th. There are many people who have years of back taxes and the IRS waits years or longer, if ever, to do anything, except sometimes arresting celebrities to make examples. Private lawsuits are slow only because the courts are slow, not out apathy of the plaintiff.
It is still very much up in the air that suits so political in nature and related to political debate will be allowed in the reverse scenario. Is the owner of that computer repair shop going to succeed against people who called him a Russian plant? Will lab leak hypothesizers ever recover for being called agents of various states. Indeed, will anyone called a Russian agent in the 2016-current era recover?
Does CNN and WaPo settling with the Coventry Catholic kids qualify? The same lawyer is now representing Rittenhouse in his own suits; if he recovers does that work?
Defamation law is kind of complicated, and I'm not super familiar with it myself, so we're likely to see results that strike our basic moral barometer as screwy, or things that seem inconsistent along a normal morality but are consistent with the law. I see statements all the time that strike me as libelous but aren't, and I probably make statements that are factually outside the law but don't really matter every now and then.
Not close. Covington kids were made into a news story by the media themselves, so the media didn't qualify for the full NYT v. Sullivan protections.
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I'm not sure your first example works as a pure counter-argument since they settled before the case went to court but the rest that waited got their cases thrown out. Though, it's possible CNN and WaPo were considerably more defamatory, I don't know, but based on the wording in the ruling it seems like the judge would've likely thrown the lawsuit against them out as well.
If there was no chance they'd collect then they wouldn't have settled. No indication as to the amount, but settling is a good outcome for the plaintiff.
It's possible but I think it's also possible that the culture-war could've played a role in the judge's decision to throw the cases out. Part of what the judge says is that there was a valid reason to cover Sandmann because the video was "of great public interest". It's like a cito-genesis blank check for the media to just call out and cover whomever they want because they have enough sway to make anything "of great public interest." A bunch of reporters share a video between each other and stir a huge outrage and then cover it in the real media based on the outrage they stirred up. Anyway, I've yet to see anything from anyone about how CNN and Wapo's coverage was substantially different and I find it hard not to be cynical.
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Uneven application of the law is always a fair concern. What evidence would you need to see before you'd agree it's no longer a concern? Keep in mind that while defamation law does not apply to opinions, discerning between fact and opinion can often be a tough call.
What evidence would you need to see to agree it's a concern?
I already think uneven application of the law is a problem, depending on which axis we're talking about. I'm not aware of any evidence that defamation cases are treated differently because of the political persuasion, but I'd be convinced it's a concern if there was either a pattern of cases or one significant instance where comparable cases were treated differently, with the only substantial difference being the political affiliation of the respective parties.
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I think this case proceeding this far is pretty good evidence of a double standard. These "facts" alleged to be false would be gifted the privilege of being called speculative political opinion if appearing in the Times.
Can you cite a parallel case that received the privilege you're describing or are you just speculating that's what would happen?
Your question was "What evidence would you need to see before..." so he does not need to cite a parallel case to answer that.
This is correct, but I found the response somewhat ambiguous (is @anti_dan committing to changing their mind if such a case exists? or are they just reiterating why their opinion is correct?) so I was seeking some precision.
Yes, I'm willing to change my mind if there's a high profile left wing media company that loses a court battle for defamation over speculation and arguably political opinion relating to a very high profile political campaign issue.
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I'd expect the pivot point to be around the time he won the primary, at the beginning of 2020.
COVID popped up almost immediately and formed mask/antimask battle lines, but the real rallying flag was vaccines, which weren't available until Trump had lost. It's possible that his alignment with the R party line there kept him front and center; I'm not clear on how early he adopted COVID-skeptic rhetoric.
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Yes, Trump's stolen election claims are best read as a move to salvage his position with the conservative base rather than to hold on to power. Everyone hates losers, the Dem's ditched Hillary when she lost, R's turned on Romney.
Trump set it up so that other Republicans would 'stab him in the back' rather than personally taking drastic action. He said Mike Pence had some ability to throw out the electoral count, he didn't try to use executive agencies to seize voting machines. Now it's an article of faith with the base that he was robbed so he's set up to run again which is pretty unprecedented in recent political history.
It reads to me more as classic real estate developer strategy. There are big complex transactions all the time where who had the rights to what gets complicated due to involvement of realtors, closing conditions, non-binding-but-kinda-binding letters of intent, often with poor or intentionally vague drafting mixed in. If you have a cognizable claim on a big deal, even a tiny and shitty low percentage one, you bang on about it until you get paid out. Trump kept up his claim because it had value, and he expected to get paid out to shut up, everyone involved simply refused to pay him. I truly believe if he had been offered something, I have no idea what it would be in context, but something to save face, he would have dropped it. But politics in America is not set up to work that way right now. Biden probably lacked enough strength with his own base to give him anything!
As an aside to @ymeshkout:
I saw Lou Dobbs on TV a couple times since about 2020...dude just doesn't have it. It's sad. It's like watching an old boxer who was once a heavyweight contender but whose chin is shot just getting massacred in undercard fights.
Same with Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Lin Wood. All were well-respected lawyers (Giuliani most of all) and then...
Short of some serious disease, I have no clue how someone's faculties can get so degraded like that
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Presumably their audience was willing to tolerate some internal criticism - especially if it was in a way that validated group loyalty - until the stakes got too high.
Just as a lot of progressives would talk shit about Obama for not being progressive enough but fall in line and/or excoriate anyone who talks about voting third party. I can't imagine the shitstorm if prominent liberal outlets were seemingly throwing a contentious (as they see it) election to Republicans.
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The election was 100% rigged. It’s a real shame that we’re even talking about dominion machines changing votes and I don’t even know who to blame.
It was rigged because of widespread voting rules being changed unilaterally immediately prior to the election to facilitate mail in voting. I have no doubt that votes were harvested and the spirit of the law behind how voting works was violated in mass.
It was rigged because the media “fortified the election” with a deluge of lies and messaging about trump, as per the Time Magazine article.
It was rigged because intelligence community and deep state spent years lying about Russiagate and using every lever they have to oust trump.
It was rigged because Twitter and Facebook and nearly every other tech company used all of their institutional power to actively influence voters minds and hide relevant information such as the Biden laptop. They don’t even have plausible deniability on this. They actively mislead and lied to people.
Maybe there is no proof that election administrators in deep blue territory like Atlanta and Philadelphai were changing or finding votes at the last minute. And that’s a big maybe because I do believe that these administrators are both curruport and capable of actively rigging the results in their counties. These are true believer Democrats that have been told Trump is an existential threat to democracy and the free world. They have the means, motive, and incentive.
The fact that we’re talking about the dominion machines is a shame.
Yes, it's true that many stolen election advocates engaged in motte-and-bailey acrobatics* [see edit], oscillating between "Italian satellites changed the voting tally" baileys and then retreating into "All we meant was that the rules were unfair" motte. Obviously this wasn't helped by Trump's credulity and proclivity towards surrounding himself with Yes Men who would just repeat whatever flattering theories he preferred. Who else would you blame for the confusion you're criticizing?
Edit: As @Supah_Schmendrick points out below, this was an erroneous application of the motte-and-bailey fallacy. Repost:
I framed the motte/bailey in an erroneous way. It is not true that anyone who had a negative opinion of the 2020 election necessarily wants to believe in Italian satellites. Although inadvertent on my part, it was wrong of me to frame the argument with that insinuation. Some version of what @orthoxerox wrote below is what I should've said:
I don't think "Italian satellites changed the voting tally" is actually the bailey - it's not terrain that everyone wants to occupy; it's not the goal in and of itself. From the stolen-election perspective, the end goal (thus the bailey) is "the election results do not represent a fair vote or a small-d democratic mandate."
The "Italian satellites" and "unfair rules/elite lies" are the various types of argument-soldiers sent out to secure the bailey. If the "Italian satellites" thing were true, it would be extremely good evidence for the bailey position - actually fiddling with vote totals is a very good reason to declare an election void. Unfortunately, the audacity and putative strength of the claim is betrayed by its falsity.
The "unfair rules/elite lites" arguments are much weaker evidence for the bailey position, precisely because they can be pattern-matched to other dirty tricks in American political history that we've just learned to shrug and accept. However, they have much stronger basis, and are harder to dismiss as groundless.
The reason I make this distinction is because the way you phrased it suggests to me that you think anyone who has a negative opinion of the 2020 election would like to or perhaps wants to accept the "Italian satellites"-style arguments, but falls back on the true "election fortification/information suppression/media manipulation/weaponized intelligence community" arguments when they're forced to. This is not true. There are people who believe in the wild conspiracy theories, and there are people who have digested true reportage. That both may arrive at similar conclusions about the election, the media, the Democratic party, or politics more generally, is beside the point.
You are correct, I framed the motte/bailey in an erroneous way. It is not true that anyone who had a negative opinion of the 2020 election necessarily wants to believe in Italian satellites. Although inadvertent on my part, it was wrong of me to frame the argument with that insinuation. Some version of what @orthoxerox wrote below is what I should've said:
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If that's the bailey for "stolen elections" then every US presidental election ever has been stolen due to the electoral college.
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That's the motte. The bailey is "the election results have been tampered with in a felonious way, and if these crimes were successfully prosecuted that would change the winner of the election". That's the territory you want to occupy, to make people think Biden won illegally.
When pressured, you can retreat to the "we have no countermeasures against the cathedral influencing the voters to vote for Biden and influencing the election officials to interpret the legislation in a way that is biased toward helping more Dem voters vote" motte.
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Not at all -- most of the plausible "machine politics" rigging theories are strictly manual fraudulent ballot schemes. (Which, granted, have been happening in the US off and on since ~1776 -- but I don't think that makes them not count as "rigging"?)
Except all the "machine politics" theories I've heard wrt the 2020 election simply think that stating "machine politics" is sufficient to allege fraud. Most of these people who talk about machines in Detroit, or Pittsburgh, or Philadelphia have no idea what they're talking about insofar as they have no idea what the politics of these cities actually look like, and couldn't name a single person who would have even been involved, let alone a mechanism of action.
I'm not sure why you would think anybody would be able to name people in these machines -- the whole point of these is that the functionaries are faceless and anonymous.
The mechanism is the same as always: sneak some fraudulent ballots into the system via machine aligned poll workers, who simply neglect to perform the usual checks that make this more difficult.
It's more "machine politics plus extremely suspicious behaviour" -- excluding scrutineers at critical moments, etc.
While I think it's quite possible that these people were acting suspicious mostly because they'd been so mindkilled that they thought that being physically close to Republicans would result in a covid death sentence, either way the procedures that result in both sides trusting the system were not followed -- so it serves them right if people don't trust the system now, whether they were actively rigging the election or not.
I mean, ironically, in most super blue districts you're talking about, they actually shifted a couple of points to the right (from like 95-5 to 92-8) because of the shift in the non-college educated minority vote.
This doesn't really indicate anything about the prevalence of fraud one way or the other though -- Trump's assertion is that it would have been 85-15 (or some other yuge number) if it weren't for the rigging.
? Of course it is evidence against fraud in those districts. It isn't proof, but it is evidence.
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I say rigged quite specifically. A game can be rigged without secretly changing the score.
Suggesting that the massive changes to mail in voting is just par for the course is intellectually dishonest. The total vote increasing something like 20 million is evidence that something significant changed in how elections were operated. The fact these were pushed through so quickly is another major problem even if in principle the concept is sound (in opinion, it is not sound).
I strongly disagree that all of my points are just a continuation the same old gaming of the system. But perhaps you are right and I am wrong. If that’s the case, perhaps democracy has always and will always be total bullshit.
Either way, they may have gotten rid of trump, but at what cost. This is not an ingediant for a stable political system.
The idea that massive changes to mail voting that were pushed through quickly had anything to do with the election outcome is a myth that election deniers have been pushing without even looking at the actual facts. While some states did loosen absentee ballot requirements due to COVID, none of this happened in any of the states that were contested. The closest you'll come to finding it is in Pennsylvania, which held its first-ever general election with non-excuse mail voting in 2020. However, the law that allowed that had been passed in 2019 with unanimous Republican support, and the changes would have taken place in 2020 regardless of COVID. In every other contested state, mail voting had been permitted in prior elections without incident. It's certainly true that a lot more people voted by mail in 2020 than in prior elections due to pandemic concerns (except in Arizona and Nevada, which were pretty much all mail by that point anyway), but I don't hear anyone making the argument that legislatures should have rushed back to the statehouses to require in-person voting on the grounds that too many people were going to take advantage of a duly enacted provision of the law.
Wisconsin? Didn't the number of remote votes coming from the "indefinitely confined" (which the state explicitly said they would not check up on) increase by like 5x?
I mean you could Google that and provide a source for it instead of asserting it. Throwing a bunch of half remembered claims out there and expecting others to provide counter evidence is basically gish gallop.
Don't tell me what to do.
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Wisconsin has had no excuse mail-in voting since 2001. The "indefinitely confined" qualification only comes into play if you're requesting a permanent absentee ballot, meaning the ballot will be automatically mailed every election without your requesting it. The only caveat with this is that if you don't return every ballot you're sent you'll be taken off the voter rolls, so it doesn't make sense unless you actually intend to vote in every election, and most people simply don't vote in off-year elections, especially primaries and special elections, so it's a double-edged sword if you apply for one on the assumption you'll always be sent one and don't get one for an election you intend to vote in.
Fair enough -- still sounds like something that should be looked into though, as if voters are claiming to be indefinitely confined when they are not, the rules are not being followed.
Also it looks like the dropboxes widely deployed in 2020 were against state law: (and a potential fraud vector)
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/08/1100696685/wisconsin-supreme-court-ballot-drop-boxes-disability-assistance
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i think the thing is, for every election the losing side can find reasons why it was rigged or stolen. But no one is talking about how the '84, '80, or '96 elections were rigged or stolen or fraud. Closer, higher stakes elections means that refereeing becomes more important, so foul play is blamed for losing, not the candidate or positions being unpopular.
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I agree and disagree that it was just normal games elections games in 2020 (excluding discussions on mail-in ballots). I feel like the information environment in 2020 still has my head in a blender.
Trump isn’t great at this either but it just felt like no one even cared about telling the truth anymore. It was all narrative building all the time. I remember reading articles of lab leak proponent doctors/researchers being afraid to publish because their career would be destroyed and then after the election coming out. All of mainstream media joining into “peaceful protests”. COVID being a don’t go to Church and then a week later gather downtown and protests with a million people is ok. And I thought we always had a real in America that the CIA doesn’t propagandize the American people on domestic politics and then we had 50 former CIA agents saying Hunters laptop was Russian (with small print that they had no evidence but the media never mentioned the small print). I thought some of the left biased media like the NYT still mostly tried to get to the truth. I thought the msm would call out Joe Biden on the Charlottesville hoax and his claims being inaccurate. That ABC reporters or the supposedly little biased big cable news would asks Joe a few hard questions about Hunters laptops contents.
Something just feels different in that election. Politicians misinform and tell white lies etc. But it felt like trusted institutions began to play sides in politics and went full narrative regardless of facts. If a Harvard researcher discovered good evidence that COVID was a lab leak and even though the politics might help Trump I would have assumed they would tell us the evidence. And the CIA wouldn’t propagandize Americans. And NYT and WaPo would tilt to their side but mostly tell the truth. Twitter might be all leftist but they wouldn’t get in the way of factual information.
I felt these things were the rules before 2020. After 2020 every and any American institution is a spook pretending their the CIA working some colored revolution in South America except now their doing it to Americans. And that colored revolution was the removal of Donald Trump from office at any costs.
That being said if the Dems just played 2020 normal like say 2008 I think they win in a landslide. Every thing in 2020 that put my mind in a blender made me want to vote Trump instead of being a non-voter. Should have just been like 2008 when losing side accepts defeat because something bad happened on their watch. I think a lot of Americans felt information games were played all around them in 2020 and a lot of those people would have been non-voters or voted Dem just because of COVID existing.
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While I suspected for a long time, the Trump fisa documents and the Twitter files laid bare that deep state actors broke norms and in some cases the law to “get Trump.” It is really a stretch to believe the deep state was willing to cross certain lines but not others?
Moreover, it is clear there was an unholy alliance between media, NGOs, and the government to facilitate these transgressions.
So we have a new election scheme supplemented heavily ran by last second NGOs that the media stated was 100% above board.
Then we had some weird shit on election night that still hasn’t been fully explained (eg the water main break that wasn’t).
Is any of this proof? Of course not. Should the election have been overturned? Of course not. But given these facts, how many people would be truly surprised if solid evidence turned up? I wouldn’t.
What attempts have you made to research this issue, and what evidence would you accept that it was investigated satisfactorily?
I read a lot in the months following the election. The attempt to refute the water main break story never passed mustered.
Which one are you referring to and why didn't it pass muster? What do you wish was done differently?
Well, there was a Georgia official who attempted to refute the story. However, there was clear documented statements made at the time that directly contradicted the later story.
I don't understand why you are being so vague. The uncharitable explanation is that you wish to avoid having your opinion scrutinized. So:
"Don't restart counting after telling the scrutineers you were stopping, and don't lie/hairplit/gaslight the public about that afterwards"?
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I think this sentiment is universal amongst trump voters that are paying attention. I wonder if it will significantly demoralize and hurt turnout in 2024. I was significantly engaged with electoral politics till the 2020 election. Now I couldn’t care less about the latest Washington drama. I wonder if they will suck me back in once the presidential season commences.
To be clear, I’m not really a Trump supporter. I was very disappointed in his response to Covid (especially compared to DeSantis). It seems he had the right instincts but was too afraid of the political repercussions of telling Fauci et al to fuck off and fire them.
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What was Zuckerberg buying with his $400,000,000 donation to a couple of NGOs administrating US elections under the pandemic? Are we to believe that these NGOs are truly politically impartial? I had a quick look at The Center for Tech and Civic Life board of directors - these do not look like people who'd greatly like Trump or even be evenly split on him. That one of their members is supposedly a Republican is not sufficient - she founded a non-profit management consultancy company! A non-profit based in Chicago - I think it's clear that they're left aligned at the board level and probably employ even more left-aligned people on the rank-and-file level. (edited to make clearer that I think the above non-profit is left-leaning)
I personally believe the US election was rigged. It's already been admitted by the media, they only use the word 'fortified' instead of rigged. I'm sure everyone is aware of that article.
What exactly were these people doing, if not projecting influence and power such that Biden would be elected? Is that not rigging? If you can quietly threaten that there'll be riots, suppression, endless legal warfare, career implications against officials who don't use their leeway to come to the correct procedural/administrative conclusions, is that not rigging? Or perhaps the vast donations to election-administration groups from left-wing billionaires will disappear if the correct conclusions aren't found.
And why would the election not be rigged? It is enormously important to control who is in power in an extremely powerful country like the US. It's like papal elections pre-Reformation. The Papacy was very influential, they had immense wealth and could give out all kinds of sinecures. The College of Cardinals was immensely seedy and corrupt as a result.
Was the media impartial? No, obviously not. Why would the election officials be impartial? There are methods to influence outcomes. The US has a long history of machine politics in urban centres. There's nothing you can easily point to that proves this election was rigged, yet it stands to reason. That we can easily find articles 'debunking' the various claims of election fraud is not sufficient to show that there wasn't election fraud. Nobody would buy a 'debunking' from a bank saying that they did not embezzle user's funds, that it's just misinformation. Or say the CIA debunks the claim that they were involved in regime-change, is that believable? A bank would only admit its embezzlement if it thought it would be revealed anyway, the CIA only admits decades after the event.
There is no trustworthy party that could be relied upon to show that these elections are rigged, or not rigged for that matter. The information environment is so bad we should only operate from first principles. Logically, if the entrenched institutions of the NGO-bureaucracy-media apparatus are opposed to a candidate, they can flex their muscles against him covertly. There is no outside supervisor who can oversee elections in the most powerful country in the West. In a time of chaos and confusion under COVID, the blob has more and better opportunities to interfere than in 2016, when most were very comfortable that he wouldn't win. This time they knuckled down, coordinated and got to work on the fortifications. Dominion might've been involved or it might not. Who knows?
Rigging involves everything from stuffing votes, ballot harvesting, procedural manipulation to media manipulation. A more expansive definition would include education and demographic policies, which do not favor the right. Even a narrow definition is more than satisfied by the 2020 elections with overt media manipulation in the Hunter story and vast opportunities for procedural manipulation. I cannot believe that Zuckerberg's hundreds of millions don't buy him influence.
That Trump's people can't find evidence of election interference only shows they're incompetent and outclassed. This isn't new information! They didn't manage to do much during the presidency, the administrative machinery ran rings around them. They clearly didn't have the necessary influence to get results and impose pressure - in what universe would we expect a weak administration like Trump's to overpower a stronger administrative base in a test of influence and 'prove' that the election was rigged against them?
Good idea! Suppose there's a foreign country with a two party system where each party wins roughly half the time and economic performance and thermostatic effects strongly predict electoral outcomes. Which conclusion does Occam's razor support, that this is a fair competitive system or that it's massively tilted in favor of one party? On which position does the burden of proof lie, that the elections are fair and both parties are pretty good at triangulating, or that they're rigged completely but only so that the party rigging them wins by a small margin half the time?
I'm not sure that the institutional delegitimisation of the Republican Party is old enough to confidently state "each party wins roughly half the time".
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This rebuttal hardly makes sense. Lets say one party can steal 1/10 votes in a metro area. that just gets baked into triangulation. Lets say the media collaborates with portions of the government and a party to shift views in a direction. That gets baked into "triangulation", but even then there can be inflection points, such as the 2020 election which indicate a discontinuity in election results, which is fishy.
Governments are not like people, there is little advantage in giving them the privilege of guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Don't you find is suspicious that election fraud is the only area of the world where statistical and circumstantial evidence are routinely called "no evidence?"
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The parties are secondary, the essence of the administrative/establishment machine is primary. Say that Jeb Bush was elected in 2016 and went on to go up against Biden in 2020. The reaction against him would not be very great as it was with Trump.
The differences between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton exist but are fairly small. Both are from well-connected families, enmeshed in the US political establishment. They espouse basically similar policies on globalization, immigration and an interventionist foreign policy. Trump is the outlier here. He had markedly different desires with regard to globalization, immigration and foreign policy, amongst other things. There was considerable conflict between Trump and the Republican Party, they are not the same thing. The Republican Party wanted Jeb Bush or someone who wasn't Trump.
The parties aren't important as actors in and of themselves, they're more like factions of a large distributed entity. At no point did I say that US elections were consistently rigged against the Republican Party, they've rigged elections themselves. 2000 for example. I say that the 2020 election specifically was rigged against the populist right in the form of Trump. There was a much weaker attempt in 2016, they were much less coordinated and effective in inventing and amplifying nonsense like Russiagate and so on.
Both parties, most of the time, represent the establishment and field tolerable candidates for that establishment. There's no triangulation where it's important, the establishment has their own interests as opposed to the general public. For example: wrecking MENA with pointless wars, wrecking education with stupid policies, wrecking the health system by bad regulations, wrecking the food supply with subsidized corn syrup, wrecking inner cities with pro-crime policies. I suppose you can go all chicken and egg as to who leads who on making it fashionable to blow up MENA countries or introducing stupid fads in education. I believe that the elites lead - they aren't paying the price for the policies they introduce and they have the most media power to propagandize their goals. From time to time they change course, bolstering policing or withdrawing from failed wars. But that's usually only when the failures become spectacularly obvious.
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What the "rigged" narratives claim about the system doesn't necessarily result in one party wiping the floor with the other every time even if it's strongly true. After having been the case for a long time, the machines of both parties adjust to the system and obey the rigger's desires to a much greater extent than they ever do the voters they are supposed to represent. As such, they may continue to trade wins back and forth a normal amount of times, yet somehow never actually enact policies that are strongly desired by their bases.
Say, that sounds an awful lot like what both political parties are actually doing. Even aside from how the Trump phenomenon has affected the Republican side the last few cycles, don't forget how mad much of the Democrat base seems to get that they keep getting standard machine politician candidates like Hillary and Biden for their presidential candidates rather than anyone more exciting.
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I am not aware of that article. Could you link it, please?
Groups "projecting influence and power" to get someone elected is called an election campaign. It's part of every election. What is the dividing line between legitimate campaigning and "election rigging"?
I doubt many people were going to vote for Trump but ended up voting for Biden because they were afraid of riots.
I'm not sure what you mean by "suppression".
Trump, having lost the election, is now the one engaging in "endless legal warfare".
What "career implications" would there be, for which officials, and for what kind of "procedural/administrative" decisions?
My understanding of the word "rigging" only includes ballot stuffing and similar practices such as destroying or just not counting certain ballots. I believe this is the common understanding of the word, and broadening it as you do is a motte-and-bailey.
I hadn't heard of "ballot harvesting" before. Having looked up an explanation, it doesn't seem to be inherently fraudulent, but it probably does make certain kinds of "rigging" as described above easier. Do you have any reason to believe ballot harvesting had a significant effect on the outcome of the 2020 election?
I'm not sure what you mean by "procedural manipulation".
If by "media manipulation", you mean biased media coverage, then yes, that clearly did happen, but I don't think many people would classify it as "rigging". If biased media coverage is a form rigging, has there ever been an election that wasn't rigged?
Wouldn't that encompass literally all of politics, given that obtaining votes is ultimately a politician's biggest concern and any policy they implement or support is designed to increase their chance of re-election?
This is the article in question: https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
I do not know if it had been edited since publication, do you might check some archives.
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https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
There's a distinction between making an argument about why you should lead the country and using resources to ensure the right outcome. Left-aligned NGOs controlling the actual mechanics of elections (in this case funded by left-aligned billionaires) is effectively election rigging. How could anyone know that they actually oversaw it properly? From the above link, these people seem to think that Trump was assaulting democracy, so they could conceptualize themselves as defending democracy by ensuring that Trump lost the election. The changes in rules regarding mail-in ballots just prior to this particular election are also significant.
Say people find evidence that the election is rigged against Trump. This evidence has to go through a judge before any kind of actual action can happen. The judge has the freedom to decide it's inconclusive, or that they don't have jurisdiction or find some technical reason against it. That's what the Supreme Court did with Texas. Likewise, the officials who are in charge of reporting these things have careers and aspirations that could be snuffed out if they make the wrong choices. You don't find many Chinese officials willing to criticize Xi Xinping, he has a very high level of control over the bureaucracy. There were vast legions of officials and judges coming out to attack Trump through his whole term, he had a very low level of control over the bureaucracy. 92% of DC voted Biden, 5% Trump.
These lawyers got harassed, for example. There are all kinds of informal methods that can be used. If you don't like someone's politics, you can refuse to hire them or get rid of them for unrelated character reasons. It could be made known that there are grants or generous donations that will become available for those who make the right decision.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/26/michigan-judge-sanctions-pro-trump-lawyers
For example, Pfizer could delay the results of its vaccine development plan (accelerated by Trump under Operation Warp Speed) such that their positive results would only be apparent after the election:
https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/09/covid-19-vaccine-from-pfizer-and-biontech-is-strongly-effective-early-data-from-large-trial-indicate/comment-page-7/#comment-3047884
Adjusting mail-in ballot rules such that fraud becomes easier. Or making it such that voters can vote without showing ID.
Donald Trump lost Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by a tiny margin, a few tens of thousands. Biden won Michigan by 3% but Michigan is dominated by 95% Democrat voting Detroit, where ballot harvesting was made legal and Republicans were very angry about it: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2020/09/23/opinion-judges-ballot-decision-threatens-election-integrity/3506593001/
Detroit is probably the most corrupt city in the US, or at least in the top 5 for machine politics. 95% Dem? Really? The big swing in the middle of the night that moved everything away from Trump is also pretty dubious.
You can persuade people that you're right, or you can indoctrinate them when they're young and impressionable, or you can bring in new people who semi-automatically become part of your patronage network, or you can cover up any evidence that you're wrong. There are more or less appropriate methods to ensure your re-election.
I mean, yes. That sort of voting pattern has been consistent in Detroit for decades. It seems people don't really get there can be very red and very blue areas in this country. Like, there are countries in the rural part of Texas, et al that vote 90%+ Trump. I don't think there's any fraud there.
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https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
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No, spell it out. And I'm being serious.
However obvious you may think what you're implying is, do not assume everyone here is on board with your conclusions.
(I'm not even saying you're wrong. I'm saying you have to make the argument, not just assume a consensus is on your side and understands what you are implying.)
Sure, I meant to say that they were left-leaning or at least anti-Trump. I thought that was apparent from non-profit based in Chicago.
Biden won 82% of the vote there in 2020: https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/11/04/just-1-chicago-ward-voted-for-president-trump-over-joe-biden/
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This is, interestingly, only true in the narrow election law area of jurisprudence. In all other areas of the law, like criminal law, lots of evidence exists, circumstantial evidence, statistical evidence, motive evidence, means evidence, opportunity evidence.
care to elaborate?
For your statistical evidence, there have been many implausible precinct analyses done.
Circumstantial evidence includes things such as the GPS data highlighted in 1000 mules, the fake broken pipe in GA, etc
Motive evidence is pretty obvious, everyone wants their way to win.
Means/opportunity includes things such as the Maricopa county report that indicates there was almost no real control over chain of custody over ballots in the county.
What's your best explanation for why True The Vote (the primary source for 2000 Mules's data) refused to hand over their evidence to law enforcement, and lied about working with the FBI?? I certainly have a theory.
Because its circumstantial evidence and in all these cases transparency is never rewarded for conservative organizations. By sharing the data they'd be accused of making specific allegations against specific individuals which would then be construed as defamation by the courts because thats defamation when conservatives do it.
Do you believe that it's just too implausible to think TTV avoided providing evidence to law enforcement because...they lied about ever having any? You do realize that your explanation is just replaying the dragon in my garage story of excuses almost beat by beat. If that doesn't interest you, I also have an old family recipe for steamed hams.
It is entirely plausible they lied. I don't think that it makes much sense though from the POV that others could have replicated the GPS data and said it was false. There are dozens of motivated orgs that could have done that including multiple government agencies. A major issue I have with your position is akin to the position I have with race-IQ gap deniers: You gain incredible prestige and money for refuting it fully. Instead you just deny it vaguely. You have to look at where incentives are. They are open and obvious. If I could conduct a Wunderlicht that said black IQ is 101 and white is 99 I'd become a multimillionaire and tenured Yale professor. If you showed that dropboxes were totally not stuffed you'd be in a similar position in a different space.
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one of the replies or sub-replies to this might be a strictly better target for this comment but from reddit to here you've been loudest on the subject. i understand why some people can't see it, i understand why my brother can't see it. he doesn't understand how a person can be deeply cynical and deeply hopeful. i don't blame him for choosing the latter, i don't blame most people. but most people don't come to this place, or places like it, few as they must be. this is a place to say truths, like how your hope has lead you astray. i don't have a strict stance on fraud, i don't know what happened. i know what not to assume, and i can reason from that.
in american politics it is unjustifiable to assert and then operate from a presumption of governance in good faith, ethics, and lawful behavior. ours is a capricious leadership, rapidly shifting between utilitarianism or deontology depending on political utility. there is no enduring standard for ethics, "democracy" or even "constitutionality." what's right is ours, what's wrong is theirs.
key high-population elections districts lack methods of independent hard audit; it is not possible to verify every ballot has a unique corresponding voter.
for (2) it is not possible to verify those districts have not engaged in fraud.
the two previous major american elections saw those key districts experience bureaucratic mishaps and procedural issues the US state department has historically identified as hallmarks of fraud and often thereby used to justify sanctions on foreign states.
american politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, and pundits commonly express (a) earnest belief their oppositions' victory poses a threat to life itself.
for (1; 5) claims of adherence to law in elections are dubious.
owing to the seriousness of the allegations of (5a), if (¬5a) and their expressions are rhetoric and sophistry, claims of adherence to law and ethics in any pursuit may be assumed as the falsehoods of the profoundly antisocial.
(2; 3; 4) if fraud is possible, (1; 4; 5; 6; 7) it is probable.
for all, the burden of proof logically falls on elections officials. elections are presumed fraudulent unless proved authentic.
So the default dial for the central way of putting someone into power in the West should be set on fraudulent until proven otherwise.
What do you suggest as the practical consequences of an election not having successfully cleared the threshold to being authentic? Should we just leave those in power at time t do what they want for however long they wish? Or do we default on anarchy instead? Or something else (maybe draw [classes of] politicians by lot)?
While I can see where you are coming from, it seems to me that your idea would be most likely severely impractical, and at worst trigger the mother of perverse incentives.
The USA is not a hive mind, and it is possible to question election results without descending into anarchy. Who is 'we' in this "Should we"? Who is the final judge as to whether an election has "cleared the threshold to being authentic"?
These are not nitpicks. In ancient Rome, the person who decided whether elections were legitimate were the outgoing consuls for that year (consuls are like co-presidents who serve for one year terms, Rome had two). Pompey and Crassus were the consuls overseeing the elections for 55 BCE. When it looked like one of Pompey's enemies would win his election, Pompey would suddenly discover bad omens and cancel the vote. Then his men would go around the voting pens having 'discussions' with people, and when the vote resumed the outcome would be the way Pompey wanted it to be. This wasn't technically illegal. Consuls did have the right to cancel public events when the omens were bad. A partisan in ancient Rome could argue that there was nothing fraudulent about the outcomes of those elections.
A few years later, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and marched an army into Rome.
Not long after that, Pompey was beheaded in Egypt.
Not long after that, Julius Caesar was assassinated on the floor of the Senate.
Not long after that, a special election was called. A centurion stood at the gate of Rome and said, "If the Senate will not make Octavian* a consul, this will," resting a hand on the hilt of his sword.**
A few years after that Octavian became Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome. So it goes.
Octavian wasn't legally old enough to run for consul, but that didn't mean anything anymore. The laws that were supposed to guarantee fair elections had been destroyed in spirit. Elections weren't fair. Given that, who can blame the centurion for demanding his own brand of fairness? Julius Caesar was, to the thousands of men who served him, their man in Rome. He was the only person they could trust to stand up for their interests. The Senate tried to put him on trial for treason, rewrote laws to stop him from running for office, and ultimately assassinated him. Who can blame the centurion for doing with the sword what the Senate had already been doing for years with paper-thin legal justifications, and ignoring Republican tradition to put his picked man into office?
Thus the Roman Republic was destroyed and the Roman Empire created in its place.
*By this point Gaius Octavius had legally changed his name to Gaius Julius Caesar, but we call him Octavian to avoid confusing him with his more famous uncle. We could just as easily call him Caesar II, though. It does highlight the fact that, after the Senate assassinated Caesar, Caesar's army returned to Rome with another Caesar to replace him.
**This exchange probably didn't actually happen. Ancient historians tended to make up speeches and conversations to highlight important events.
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Most of what you lay out are reasonable concerns. I wouldn't have much criticism if that's where the concerns stopped, but the 2020 stolen election advocates made claims much more specific than just "fraud is possible". Consider the parallel to the "The Dragon in My Garage" from Carl Sagan. There's a dragon in my garage, but you can't ask to see it because it's invisible, and you can't check for breathing sounds because it's silent, and you can't ask to throw flour on it because it's not corporeal, and so on.
Let's say that substantial election fraud in fact happened, does that mean that both parties engaged in it and so it's a wash in the end? No, because said fraud specifically favored one candidate. Ok does that mean that the safeguards we have to prevent this kind of widespread fraud (judges, election officials, journalists, etc.) were able to uncover it? No, because for some reason they all decided to uniformly abdicate their duty. And so forth. The problem is that each successive step gets increasingly implausible and also indistinguishable from just someone who is coming up with rationalizations for why their theory can't be falsified, and so long as they can come up for an excuse, they can remain within the dais of "sure seems fishy".
the first premise of my statement rejects this exact assumption of good-faith governance as unjustifiable. your response was to reassert that assumption without substantiation.
if possible, probable is a statement of expected evidence, i didn't write all that trying to get you to admit fraud is technically possible. it's irrational and to emphasize discursively illegitimate to demand evidence from skeptical outsiders when the system they scrutinize lacks the ability to prove its own authenticity.
we have motive, means, and procedural issues the state itself has historically considered evidence of fraud. this is what i mean by expected evidence. i expect the system is fraudulent and has been fraudulent. if this system can't prove it's authentic, that's strong evidence it's not.
No, I don't have to assume good faith. All I'm asking is for you substantiate your asserted premise. If you're saying that they did abdicate their duties and incentives, it would be helpful to explain why instead of just saying saying so.
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Yeah, that's politics. Politicians have said what they need to to get elected since the dawn of time. If you don't do that, you don't get elected.
This has always been true to an extent. It's hard to say it's more true now than at any other time, though - I have trouble saying 20162020 was in any way worse than the machine politics in america's history or the 2000 election in that regard.
I'm pretty sure similar issues, with similarly convincing evidence, can be raised about 1 in 2-3 US elections. Like bush v gore, or the 2004 voting controversies. And picking random elections + googling "fraud" gives headlines like "Thousands of voter registration forms faked, officials say", "Election Fraud in the 2008 Indiana Presidential Campaign: A Case Study in Corruption", etc.
The same goes for other countries. Do politicians there make self-serving, dishonest statements less? Really?
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How would you "verify every ballot has a unique corresponding voter" without getting rid of the secret ballot?
Block chain and crypto shenanigans. Essentially make it possible to instantaneously record/check if a government issued id has voted or not. Also completely remove mail-in-votes. Force unique govt ids for everyone. It's a solved problem on a technical level.
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Purple thumb dye rather than those insipid stickers? Both parties can watch the citizenship verification and thumb imprinting then easily check with the precinct count against the validated thumbs they watched be inked.
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"Check their ID against the voter database before letting them vote, and then maintain a strict chain of custody for cast ballots under bipartisan supervision" is this typical approach.
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Fox is an interesting case study because it is so clearly from top to bottom a media organization that exists to advance right wing politics in the United States but it's still driven powerfully by commercial interests and its audience. Rupert Murdoch is alleged by Dominion to have passed Biden campaign ads to Jared Kushner before they aired, the highest levels of the company have a strong political leaning. But if you read their internal communications they're not arguing whether promoting theories of a stolen election advance the long term goals of the American political right, but whether it will cost them audience share and stock price.
The big changes in political media have been unbundling and advances in user metrics. I don't subscribe to the local newspaper for sports news and the classifieds, you go to craigslist, /r/NFL and read substacks of the exact writers I like. I don't know if this is the case for Substack but NYT writers have said they can get metrics on exactly what point in the article most people stop reading. The upshot is that politics writers are now extremely responsive to small communities of political obsessives rather than broad constituencies. Even when corporate leadership is clearly aligned with one political party the audience's interests rather than strategic logic seems to drive their behavior.
The right has always complained about 'the media' and academia, but what has changed recently is not the ideological leanings of professors and reporters but the technologies of media distribution. The classic Burnham theory that management concedes to the political desires of in demand workers makes sense at tech companies where skilled programmers are scarce, but not as much digital media where writers aren't in great demand unless they can generate a personal following.
My guess is that the NYT trans open letter war is probably indicative of a genuine disagreement within the NYT's audience that falls along generational lines. Management is probably in conflict with the younger writers class on this, and I'm not sure how it'll play out. But I get the sense that management feels they conceded too much to staff during the Floyd summer and the firing of James Bennet after Tom Cotton's op-ed and they want to reel in the workforce. My guess is that this is a local maxima for coverage of the issue just because people lose interest, and there will be alignment against right wing anti-drag bills. But I don't think it's over and I expect continued coverage of the issue off an on over time because that division within the audience will persist.
Compare and contrast to 96% of journalist political donations in 2016 going to Clinton, journalists running article drafts by the Clinton campaign before sending them to press, etc.
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I was a huge fan of right wing media losing their mind on election fraud. I never saw hard evidence it happened and hoped it did not happen. That being said I loved it. I feel like we did have election interference in 2020. I thought it was deeply wrong when 50 former spooks used their credentials to say the Biden laptop was Russian (without evidence and I don’t think they believed it). Was just pure elites propagandizing commoners. Or the FBI telling twitter what they wanted suppressed. Despite being in possession of the laptop which should have proved it wasn’t Russian. And besides the interference I felt like I lived thru a half dozen leftist psyops. So loved the right losing their mind like the left.
That being said if theirs one failure in this by Fox it’s that they didn’t do it the RIGHT way. Like Scott’s recent post that the media tells you factually correct information but by selective disclosure and narrative building they can shape beliefs. Fox should have stayed in this wheelhouse. Perhaps they did and will win these lawsuits. Misinform by telling the truth. But always tell the truth.
The right anger after the election I believe was justified. Just need to funnel the anger correctly and within the law.
Have you read this https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/author-of-the-mega-viral-thread-on article or the twitter thread it was based on? I think you're articulating similar sentiments and if you haven't read it you might find it an interesting read.
Ya everyone has read that. It just hits you as correct for everything you are feeling. And I never much cared for Trump. But the regime I oppose.
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That’s kinda been my take. I don’t believe in a “stolen election” in the Dominion or ballots being either harvested or dumped. I base that on the fact that most polls actually overcounted the support Biden had, which shouldn’t happen if the fraud is in Biden’s favor. Adding Biden votes would’ve made Biden undercounted, not overcounted.
But you can interfere without committing fraud. You can spread lies through social media. You can block discussions. You can selectively cover the election. You can prevent unfavorable stories from being spread. A lot of this actually happened. The laptop story was withheld and prevented from going viral from the few outlets that did carry it. Trump was accused of trying to slow the mail service so Biden ballots wouldn’t be delivered on time. Trump was accused— before a single ballot was cast — of preparing to dispute the election. Trump was also often slandered with the accusation of being helped by Putin, to the point that SNL had a skit of Trump French-kissing Putin. Twitter and really most social media was pushing Biden and silencing Trump.
If we're going to start counting "media conspires to suppress stories harmful to their favored candidates during an election cycle" as "stolen elections" then every major election since the invention of democracy has probably been stolen.
Well, yes. This election happened with the entire weight of the establishment trying it’s best to elect Joe Biden. Negative news about Biden was pretty systemically repressed, even when that information was relevant to whether the man should be president. It’s pretty clear looking at Biden’s unscripted moments that he’s probably pretty deep in dementia. He turns the wrong way leaving podiums, attempts to shake hands with nobody, looks for people who died years before — these things if known before the election would have been causes for concern. Things like Biden’s cognitive ability, the Hunter laptop, these would have had a negative impact if actually reported on. And if such systemic one sided shilling by the media doesn’t count toward an unfree election, we owe an apology to a lot of “failed democratic states” who have elections and a controlled press.
A government controlled press is different than a press that is loosely tribally (in the Blue/Red Tribe sense) affiliated though. Over 90% of farmers are Republican and Red Tribe. They have generally the kind of opinions you would expect. over 90% of journalists are Democrats and Blue tribe, they generally have the kind of opinions you would expect.
If Democrats want better penetration in the farmer's market (heh) they have to change their positions to do so. If Republicans want better penetration in the journalist market they have to change their positions to do so. Or they can each not and understand that most members of specific groups are going to be hostile to them and plan accordingly.
Biden is almost certainly not (in my opinion) deep in dementia, having worked with people in Adult Social Care in the past, if he is suffering it is very mild and in the early stages. Having met him personally a couple of times before he was President (or even vice President) he looks to have declined slightly but not much more than the passing of 20 odd years would indicate since then. Old people are gonna old people. That is not the same thing as dementia.
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Times, technology, and visibility into these things change.
Is it normal to have former intelligence leaders and staff imply a candidate is committing or enabling treason? Is it normal to have the wider mainstream media actively suppress and turn eyeballs away from a scandal, against their usual approach? Normal for the adults in the room to heavily imply or outright claim their opponents are the literal reincarnation of Nazis?
Maybe it is. Perhaps all that's changed is the advent of Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, and ever-watchful eye of the internet to record everything for future analysis and dissection. And maybe now is the time to cut this beast down a size or two.
I'm used to media bias and political acrimony being things. I grew up through Clinton-Obama. The Trump years were fucking inexcusable.
It seems to me that American politics goes through cycles of greater or lesser political acrimony. The period roughly between Watergate and Trump (with a nadir in the early Clinton years and a gradual ramp-up afterwards) was one with outwardly good behavior and fair play on the part of politicians and the media. Before that we had the 60's with all their unrest, political assassinations, riots at party conventions, and the infamous daisy ad. Before that we had a president-for-life whose predecessor denounced his programs as socialistic and fascistic.
Growing up in a time of relative tranquility may have given many of us the impression that that state of affairs was normal rather than astoundingly and miraculously unpartisan, but like another era of good feelings it was bound to come to an end as all the problems we put on the backburner for decades finally burst back into public awareness.
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Kennedy did a lesser version of it to Nixon with the "missile gap" line which he and Nixon knew to be false (because they were both getting classified briefings), but which Nixon couldn't rebut without disclosing classified info.
Yeah, and to most people born after their presidencies, all that is behind the smoky curtain of history. It's the perpetual meme that all that shady stuff that happened in the past is just the messy, unglamorous history of an imperfect nation - but we certainly don't act like that any more!
And I feel extremely silly for writing that, because the naivete is blinding by now. I considered myself more cynical than most, and the degree to which people went mask-off during Trump was shocking to me. At the very least, I expected them to manage their appearance better.
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Yes. The issue is you expect a bit of pushing the boundaries in your direction and misrepresentation but this felt different. I don’t expect a political commercial to tell me honest messages. I do expect journalist to broadly be accurate. I do expect non-politicos to tell relative truths or be quiet - former spooks to not say we know we are spooks and then lie about a political story.
I don’t know the line but full fledged mis/dis information being spread by people I didn’t expect to do that seemed to have occurred all of 2020.
Whatever was going on in the narrative building world trusted sources had lost the ability to control trump from lying about election fraud. Because if real fraud occurred I don’t think ABC would report it. They would cover it. Like literally to the extent of a guying saying mostly free elections with a bag of Bidens needed ballots dropped off (play on peaceful protest pronouncements with a backdrop of a city on fire).
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I feel like I see this take consistently and it doesn't make any sense. Tucker internally says he doesn't think the Dominion story adds up. Has on a guest who's a Dominion story advocate, tells said advocate he doesn't think it adds up. And then??? What is the story here?
Sure, Carlson did indeed openly express some skepticism about Powell's theories. Did you happen to notice that Carlson was not the only person mentioned? Dobbs in particular is probably the network's biggest liability.
I still don't get how the story is some big gotcha. Dobbs is one guy who said his peace on the issue. How is it worse for Fox's reputation if not everyone was on board with their one guy's biggest conspiracy theory. How is it somehow better that everyone at MSNBC genuinely believed the Hunter laptop was a geniusly schemed Russian plant? T
I think it's bad for any news outlet to ask a fact-checker to be fired not because they're bad at their job but because their fact-check is inconvenient to a news outlet's preferred narrative.
Is there any part of the above that you disagree with?
"Tweeting random fact-checks without clearing it with the policy people" seems like a good way to get fired from many, many jobs -- anyways the fact check is demonstrably untrue, assuming that human factors are part of the voting system:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8956449/Georgia-recount-finds-2-600-uncounted-ballots-Republican-leaning-Floyd-County.html
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That is how I would prefer media to work, but it doesn't so demanding it only of Fox is unilateral disarmament.
I wouldn't want that standard to be only demanded from Fox, so I suppose we are in agreement.
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I'm surprised at the poor security practices of the people involved. Especially for a big organization, they could hire anyone passingly familiar with infosec to tell leadership not to send incriminating things via SMS. Same goes for the Biden family with that laptop. These are easily avoided situations.
You know, these are examples where the interests of elites (at least, specific elites) are aligned with the digital privacy/anti-surveillance movement. Another is ElonJetTracker. To date this topic hasn't been very politicized along the left-right axis. I wonder if one of the parties will pick it up as a wedge issue?
That sounds like good advice until you realize that practically anything could be considered incriminating given the right context. Take something as anodyne as a team of engineers exchanging emails about a product design. Sounds pretty benign, and 99% of the time it is, except when someone sues the company claiming the design was defective all those emails may give the plaintiff's expert all the fuel he needs to demonstrate that the team lead was incompetent and that the product's fatal flaw was a result of incorrect assumptions mad during the design process. Even in this case, all you really had was a bunch of TV journalists commenting to each other about stories that were run on their network, and if you're going to prohibit any such communications in any written form whatsoever (or have incredibly short document retention policies) it's probably going to hurt your business more than it will protect you from lawsuits. The reason so many companies use email and text messaging is because it's simply more efficient than running a 1970s-style office. If Fox wanted bang for their buck they could have had their legal team prepare a presentation about libel and how to avoid it, gotten buy-in from management, and put some kind of monitoring system in place to flag problematic content before it causes too much of a problem. Something along the lines of "If you're sending emails to your colleagues about how much of a crackpot someone is, you may want to take a close look at whether the bullshit she's spewing on your program could be construed as libel and give us a heads-up".
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Tucker Carlson destroyed Sidney Powell
when Powell wenton Carlson’s show, though. Interesting that he texted thatedit: Powell did not go on the Tucker Carlson show, but Tucker did talk about her
And then walked it back as the OANN folks got up in arms.
Actually, I can't tell when she actually went on his show. Looks like this happened first?
Is that actually "walking it back"? People tend to love narratives like that about their political enemies regardless of whether they're true, so I tend to be skeptical of them. Saying that even Trump's legal team hasn't seen any evidence for it is clearly a very harsh argument against it. Saying that it might be true but they don't have evidence for it isn't a contradiction. Watching the second segment linked in the article, it is entirely about how nobody else has evidence supporting Powell's claims, with no defense of Powell at all. The closest it comes to being positive towards her is the end where he says that if she can prove her claims she'll have uncovered one of the the greatest crimes in U.S. history - but the implication comes across as "so put up or shut up". The idea that the update took a different stance from the original segment due to backlash seems like a narrative created by the USA Today journalist based on nothing. (Possibly aided by the fact that he's an Entertainment reporter, it's possible they have higher standards for actual political reporting.)
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My bad, I guess Tucker talked about her and didn't have her on.
This is what I'm remembering: https://www.foxnews.com/video/6211087016001
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