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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.
I do not know whether the election was rigged or not. Has someone thought through the mechanism by which the election could be rigged on a sufficiently large scale?
However, one way or another, I disagree that Trump would easily have won a fair election.
He barely won in 2016. In 2020, he was no longer fresh and exciting, he just mostly repeated his 2016 campaign rhetoric. Plus the Democrats had had 4 years to attack him in the media. Plus he had failed to deliver on many of his promises. And then COVID did a lot to hurt the boost he would otherwise have gotten from the good economy.
In any case, instead of constantly trying to squeeze out narrow victories, maybe the Republicans could figure out how to put together a platform that would appeal to a greater number of voters, while also at the same time doing more stuff like what Musk has been to take away some of Democrats' domination of the media?
If they cannot do that, then I cannot think of any viable option for them other than secession. A coup would be very unlikely to work. Republicans do not have enough country-wide public support for that and federal law enforcement and the federal military are unlikely to back a coup.
At this point I really don't understand why people keep making this argument. Yes, technically you're right. On the other hand, he barely won against Hillary fucking Clinton! Surely we can notice the significance of that!
How significant is it though? Most elections since 2000 have been pretty close, so saying that it’s somehow significant that Trump barely beat Hillary, when either party can get 45% in polls just for a block of wood baring their label.
I suspect it’s down to big data managing to dig deeply enough to predict and identify potential voters and messaging good enough to attract those likely red or blue voters with targeted advertising. The era of broad-based appeal ended with social media data mining and targeted messaging.
I say the 2016 election was different in that a) the 2000 and 2004 elections were between candidates who had roughly equal charisma (well, lack of it, really) and institutional backing b) the 2008 and 2012 elections were largely decided by the GOP candidates being cucky, plus also lacking institutional backing.
The 2008 election was determined by 1)the economy; and 2) the fact that the incumbent party had been in power for two terms. There was essentially no chance of the Republican candidate winning in 2008.
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Polarization is sufficient to explain this. There were a lot of Democrats who were utterly unenthused about Hillary Clinton (especially after the primaries) but held their noses to vote for her; likewise I know Republicans who voted for Trump despite disparaging him beforehand and drinking to dull the pain afterward. Many of them would have done so even if their other party had managed to put up a good opponent, because negative views of the opposing party as a whole just kept going up. (Is there any much more recent data than that 2014 Pew report? A quick hunt isn't finding me anything post-2016.)
Does that explain the data? Those Pew graphs do seem to roughly show Democrats' polarization rising from the late 90s and Republicans from the early 2000s, which I guess is right around when I'd guess a significant fraction of Democrats and Republicans started getting their news from the internet. (at which point, who needs Big Data? people like to bubble themselves among sources they already agree with...) There are so many possible explanations, though, I think I'd need more than one piece of very rough evidence.
Polarización exists because the elites can better tailor their messages to appeal to one or the other ideology and since the advent of Cable have been able to do so in ways that effectively keep their own constituents from being contaminated even accidentally by opposing news or viewpoints. The Left uses sources like Vox, MSNBC, CNN and the New York Times to become informed. The Right uses FOX, Breitbart, OANN, and talk radio. The logic is much like a drug dealer. Hook people on condensed versions of their political opinions, crank up the potency, and have a voter for life. Plus, it allows for targeted advertising not only of candidates (the right candidates won’t buy time on CNN where very few of the right leaning voters get their news) but of organizations and products (for example Black Rifle Coffee as a “conservative coffee” meant to be a replacement for Starbucks).
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