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Giuliani was naively trusting an honest and traditional democratic system. He didn’t expect that the institutions and public forums would conspire together to thwart the democratic process from unfolding. This was the largest escalation of the culture war in history: information indicating that the Vice President’s own son took bribes from foreign adversaries to influence his father’s politics was hidden from the voter’s access through a cabal of anti-democratic figures behind the scenes at major tech companies and news websites.
This is why I don’t care at all if “Republicans lied about the election!” My response is, “brother, the Republicans should be out there telling the Public the most persuasive possible lies they can conceive”. That’s the natural response to the anti-Democratic manipulation we saw in 2020. It is morally permissible, in fact obligatory, to match your enemy’s escalation when that very escalation thwarted the democratic process and destroyed the fabric of American democracy. When you destroy the rules of conduct, we go back to millennia-old idea of just proportional response — this is the nature of “just [culture] war” theory. The Republicans ought to be treating Democrats like we treat Russia: you have violated the borders and agreements, we will do whatever we can to push you back and reestablish a rules-based national order.
A better response to any misgivings about the FBI is to have R politicians probe the organization and gradually escalate if it's found to be breaking the law to assist Dems. On the other hand, saying "the enemy's misdeeds justify our own lies" is pure toxoplasma.
Did the FBI break any laws here? I don’t think so. But they (and ex CIA people) heavily tilted informational warfare in favor of the Dems and against truth.
Are there serious ethical and spirit of Democracy things at play - yes. Illegal probably not. FBI doesn’t seem to have been neutral as they are suppose to be but that isn’t illegal.
I don't know if they broke laws specifically, but if they did then that's an easy target to nail them for. If they didn't, then it's just another battle of "why are almost all institutions left-leaning?"
The latter is why a bunch of us advocate for raising the temperature and just playing the same games. Lie. Because there’s no other choice besides acceleration. Or a bit of a Russian tactic of offensive for peace.
That logical endpoint of that sort of escalation is a violent right-wing insurgency like the Troubles in Ireland, but with every major institution aligned against them the conservatives will almost certainly lose.
I mean, the IRA did get significant concessions.
The IRA wasn't universally loathed by every institution within Ireland though.
I think if we look into the specifics you'd have a hard time making the case that conservatives have less power in American institutions than nationalists had in Northern Ireland at the outbreak of the Troubles.
Even in the Republic it's not as simple as it seems, the Irish government was sympathetic to nationalists but not to the IRA. Ireland still has a secret juryless court which was set up specifically to jail paramilitaries.
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