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The Proud Boy sentences being quite severe is on my mind today. 22 years for Tarrio who was not there on Jan 6. He does have text saying it was them who did it. A few others got in the high teens sentences who were there.
I will admit I respect the Proud Boys and agree with a lot of their statements. I do believe the 2020 election was stolen. The lack of a secret ballot thru mass mail-in voting violates every principle of Democracy. Without violating the secret ballot Trump would have easily won in my opinion. The Proud Boys official position from memory was a desire for a new election following Democratic principles. Seems fair to me. So I feel they are directionally correct even if they took things too far.
The right won’t get equal treatment in the court. It seems like the key courts are in cities that are going to have unsympathetic juries and judges. If you flip these courts to rural areas then my guess antifa types are getting 20 years and Proud Boys 2 years. In rural areas they would have judges very sympathetic that the election wasn’t proper and their anger was justified in the same way BLM protestors get courts sympathetic that America is a racists nation.
I think the left is making a mistake with these massive sentences. If they gave them a couple years I would feel it was fair as they went too far. But now I want them pardoned. If Trump pardons them as he should then it’s a slap in the face of the court decision. Delegitimizes the court to have the court decide these are really bad people deserving long sentences for overturning Democracy but then have the next guy release them. It feels very third worldish to me. With other lawfare attempts it seems as though any future POTUS should do mass pardons. I’m not sure how balance of powers can survive this.
The punishment for Proud Boys seems to have some connection to the debates and Biden declaring them “white supremacists” and Trump telling them to “stand by and stand down” (which felt coded). It made it important these guys got long sentences to confirm that they are the bad guys because then a court confirmed what they told you. Same thing with Floyd officers and long sentences which confirmed that they were bad murderous cops. A jury convicted therefore we know it’s true.
It’s another example of punishment for exercising your right to a jury trial.
I agree with Garrett Jones books “10% Less Democracy” and America would be better with less activision and less voting. But America looks more and more like a third word spoils system. Win you get the spoils, lose you go to jail. Which makes elections far more important.
Links aren’t important just sometimes people asks for articles.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1172530436/proud-boys-jan-6-sedition-trial-verdict
https://apnews.com/article/enrique-tarrio-capitol-riot-seditious-conspiracy-sentencing-da60222b3e1e54902db2bbbb219dc3fb#:~:text=WASHINGTON%20(AP)%20—%20Former%20Proud,for%20the%20U.S.%20Capitol%20attack.
https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/1503603571
https://reason.com/2023/09/06/with-22-year-sentence-ex-proud-boys-leader-enrique-tarrio-pays-hefty-trial-penalty/
Edit: Focus on the punishments and any results from the severity. I used a certain frame to put it in their view. We don’t need to discuss election legitimacy again.
This is silly. Ballot secrecy serves to stop a specific problem of coercion and bribery when voting, which were a big problem back in the Gilded Age but which are far less prevalent now. Ballot secrecy when voting by mail should be a concern to be addressed going forward, but you haven't provided any evidence it had a major impact on the 2020 election. This argument is like one from those right-wing blogs that assert (without evidence) that 30 million illegal immigrants vote and so we don't have real democracy.
What would evidence of this look like exactly? I'm not a huge fan of most of the "election was rigged theory" but it seems to me that there's nowhere for any manipulation to blatantly show up if it did happen. The system isn't built to catch it.
Any evidence in favor of it will just show up as more irregularities than usual, each of which is explainable by itself.
Evidence could be of stuff like people claiming their employer/landlord or whoever else that's in a position of influence over them demanding to see them fill out their ballot. That, on a large scale. Given how US politics is dominated by toxic negative partisanship, people would be screaming absolutely bloody murder if they thought they were being coerced to voting for the other side.
My prior is that if employers and landlords had been pressuring people to vote in a particular direction, it would have been for trump, and that’s not even alleged.
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So do all the people screaming absolute bloody murder about the fact that their mail-in-ballot was filled out and submitted without their knowledge (until they checked) count?
Now I have to admit that my experience may be somewhat unusual: I worked as an on-the-ground political activist for about a year during 2020, and was simultaneously working for a tier 2 news organization.
What this means is that I talked to a LOT of people (>10,000) about politics during that period spread over a very wide area of a purple state. For many, I was the only target they had to complain or yell about what was upsetting them, so they did.
Most common fraudish complaints I heard were:
Such complaints were primarily, though not exclusively, from Republicans, and almost exclusively those in and around Republican stronghold areas.
I heard these things many, many times, at least a couple hundred each. This combined with my own experience with activism (we were actively told to lie and commit crimes to convince people, though I did not ever do so) makes me extra suspicious of the more partisan campaigns.
There were only 2 cases where someone said they were pressured by their partner into voting for someone they didn't want to. Both seemed somewhat politically disengaged, and I discovered this only because I was like "oh, did you vote for Biden/Trump?" and they responded with "yeah, but not because I wanted to" and explained. They didn't seem particularly upset about it.
So, is that evidence, or does the hysterical screaming only count if it's for the exact reason you wanted?
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