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I have no doubt that democrats would have done something unseemly had trump won in 2020, and I’m open to arguments that they won by cheating, but the fact of the matter is that there is no evidence of democrats having tried anything like changing the actual vote totals or storming the capitol building, and that 2020 faithless electors were all protest votes anyways(nobody thought ‘faith spotted eagle’ would be the next president of the USA).
Look, the breakdown in civil norms and loss of public neutrality and inferno-like culture wars are like 85-90% the fault of the democrats, let’s not blame them for things they didn’t do(and which didn’t happen either).
Why should storming the capital building be any different than when rioters stormed the White House?
People constantly try to paint the Jan 6 protest as something extraordinary, when it was just the right wing seeing what the left had been doing for the past four years and deciding to use a tool that apparently works.
Don't blame the protestors for assuming good faith and not realizing that left-wing protests were being sponsored and applauded by the various institutions kicking around.
I agree that rioters in general (and those rioters in particular) should be punished much more harshly than they have been, but there is a distinction to be made with Jan 6. In the case of Tarrio in particular, he didn't even storm the capital! But he did engage in a seditious conspiracy to overturn the election, and that's what he copped the 22 year sentence for.
The BLM riots, bad though they were, were not the exact same flavour of bad.
I await with bated breath the Russia-gaters and 2016 faithless electors getting 22+ year sentences then.
‘Lying about your political enemies’ and ‘casting foreseeably meaningless protest votes in a way that is specifically foreseen by the constitution’ are not the same thing as interrupting official proceedings while making terroristic threats(which the J6er’s did, they were chanting ‘hang Mike pence’).
Yes, there’s too much focus on J6 and ‘our democracy’. But dissimilar things are dissimilar.
Yes, I should stop getting into specific comparisons because we have many resident lawyers who will gish gallop around with liberal § characters proving that case A is never exactly like case B. And they’re probably right but I simply don’t care. I have eyes that can see that the law is applied unequally and in one direction more often than not. So whatever § says is irrelevant to me because I view it as illegitimate.
There’s no correcting this within the bounds of “the law” because anything approaching effective dissent is functionally illegal, so I won’t pretend to care about the minutiae of “the law”.
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I'm afraid "hang Mike Pence" is simply shorthand for "put Mike Pence on trial for a capital crime and execute him by hanging", so it's not a terroristic threat? Ridiculous? Sure. But no more ridiculous than claiming ordinary hyperbolic political chants are "terroristic threats". BLM protestors famously chanted "Pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon", referring to police and not S. domesticus, and while distasteful that clearly wasn't a terroristic threat either.
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There you go again - focusing exclusively on elements of an offence and acting like that's the offence in its entirety.
Let's get into the detail. Tarrio was found guilty of seditious conspiracy, 18 USC 2384, which says:
So let's apply this to the 2016 faithless electors. Can we convict them of the same crime?
Two or more persons conspire? Yep, that threshold was met. They agreed on the scheme, and committed overt acts in the furtherance thereof.
In any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States? Definitely.
Conspire to overthrow, put down, or destroy by force the Government of the United States? Nope.
By force prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States? Nope.
By force seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof? Nope.
Similarly, the Russiagaters do not fall foul of this statute.
So, whatever crimes they may have committed, they were not the same ones as Tarrio, and there is no reason to expect them to attract the same sentence - leaving aside that there are many reasons why two people convicted of the same offence may be subject to different sentences anyway.
They will not attract any sentence. That’s the whole point.
In at least some cases, they have attracted sentences - the guy who cast his electoral vote for Faith Spotted Eagle instead of Hillary Clinton got fined $1000, for example.
Now, you may argue that was a manifestly inadequate sentence - and you may be right. But it's insufficient to simply compare it to Tarrio's sentence because he did not commit the same crime that Tarrio did.
If you want to argue that there has been an unfair application of justice, a good starting point would be to specify the particular crime you think particular people should have been convicted of.
lol. lmao even.
Nah. I won’t do that. It’s your job (assuming you’re a lawyer, if not you probably should be) to find US Code §42.a.5.h.65.z “ackshually this crime doesn’t apply because of some tortured logic”. I just don’t care. Whatever “justice system” can result in the manifestly unfair decisions we’ve seen over the past several decades is entirely illegitimate and I won’t legitimize it by citing its scriptures.
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Protest votes that would foreseeably do nothing except draw attention to some Native American activist and telling political lies are not the same thing.
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(1) Lying to create "Russia-gate," including lying to FISA courts in order to ensure that Trump campaign officials' phones were being tapped.
(2) Impeaching Trump over his attempt to investigate what we now know was actual quid-pro-quo corruption in which Ukranian oligarchs paid Joe Biden's son to have Joe Biden leverage U.S. foreign policy to prevent their prosecution.
(3) Rioting outside the White House including setting the next-door church on fire.
(4) Organizing 51 intelligence officials to falsely claim that the Hunter Biden laptop - which the FBI had possessed for over a year previously and knew to be genuine - "bore all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation" in a successful attempt to interfere in the 2020 election.
(5) Organizing social media censorship of stories connected to the Hunter Biden laptop.
and, actually most importantly for the 2020 election:
(6) funnelling hundreds of millions of dollars in ostensible "COVID-relief funds" through private donors to election officials in Democratic-controlled swing-counties, who then proceeded to use almost none of the funds for COVID-relief purposes, and instead used it to hire Democratic activists to run partisan get-out-the-vote operations, and in some cases effectively privatize the actual conduct of the elections themselves:
Hemingway, "Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections," Ch. 7
The quote from Hemingway is referring to work done by the FGA (link to all their "Zuckerbucks" pieces here, which if you look at the website, appears to be one of those dime-a-dozen orgs that just spits out low quality research, infographics, and political talking points (thinly disguised if not actual PACs).
And let me tell you, that quoted conclusion of yours insinuating a causal or even a loose mere correlation in Georgia between Zuckerbucks and Democratic vote counts is an absolutely atrocious case of statistical malpractice. Any real statistician looking at the data (if they even felt this approach was even capable of yielding a real/practical/trustworthy answer, which they likely wouldn't) would say that those kind of margins don't even begin to approach statistical significance. The original source is here, and maybe if I'm feeling spicy I will analyze it tomorrow properly to check, but right now my alarm bells are ringing. I'm pretty tired atm, so I might be wrong, but I think 41 counties getting money vs 118 not is going to have a detectable difference required that's much more than 2.3 points with any sort of decent statistical power.
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The suppression of the Hunter Biden story and the plans outlined in in the TIME Magazine article show that the blob doesn't need to stuff ballots or change totals; they have (had?) enough power over the inputs to the voting system that such crass measures were unnecessary.
I recall reading a study which claimed that the (knowingly deceptive!) suppression of the Biden laptop story changed the outcome of the election. I don't think many people who say the election was rigged are talking about that specifically, but it absolutely was a relevant factor. At the same time, I think the accusations of rigged are going to come back in force given the blatantly political prosecutions with dates chosen specifically to interfere with his election campaign.
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