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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.
The argument that the election was inherently flawed because mail-in voting somehow violated the principle of a secret ballot doesn't hold water and is made in bad faith by those who didn't like the outcome in 2020. Mail-in voting has existed in various states for somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 years, absentee voting has existed for longer, and no one I'm aware of made the argument that it was inherently flawed prior to 2020. Indeed, as late as the fall of 2019 PA's mail-in voting bill sailed through the state legislature with unanimous Republican support.
Claiming that mail-ins are suddenly unconstitutional to the point that we need a redo is a convenient argument to make if your guy loses the election and you're grasping at straws for some excuse undo the result, but let's not pretend that this is an argument based on principle. Would you be making this argument if Trump won?
It's also telling that 2020 is apparently the only election they care about. No one was protesting the 2021 off year elections for local judges and clerks, no one was protesting the midterms, no one was protesting the various special elections that have been held over the past few years, and I doubt anyone will protest this year's elections. Hell, there doesn't even seem to be much of a legislative push in red states to completely do away with mail voting, or any serious court challenges raising the secret ballot issue. It all comes back to Trump—shit only matters when he's involved. The entire system is rigged against him and him alone. I've always thought he was a narcissist but at this point I can't really blame him giving the number of people who do act like the world revolves around him.
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).
(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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