I continue to be impressed with the wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempts_to_overturn_the_2020_United_States_presidential_election is a great summary of Trump’s attempt to cheat thus far. (Of course, looking at things like gerrymandering and voter suppression, we can, to quote the 80s drug ads, say “Republicans, he learned it by watching you.”)
One does sometimes wonder to what extent Trump’s money enables him to buy his way out of trouble, to what extent his ‘word salad’ mode, stubbornness, and apparent stupidity and immaturity enable im to get out of trouble, and to what extent his bizarre facial expressions and orange tint short-circuit some part of people’s brains. In any case, he clearly has lived his whole life never having to deal with the consequences most people would face for their actions..
.. until now. I think a lot of us rejoiced to see his twitter account shut down, although many have had to be reminded that twitter is a private entity that has no requirement to carry anyone, so it is not a first amendment issue that they are censoring his attempts to cause a armed revolution. I have run numerous online forums and I have more than once had to explain to people that me refusing to carry their warmongering/trolling/etc was not a violation of their freedom of the press. This gets complicated and very messy and the lines get less than totally black and white – I gesture you to the problem of the cakemakers and the gay wedding cake – but in Twitter’s cause it wasn’t. They had a published AUP that Trump has been violating for *years* – and IMO they should have shut him down the first time he threatened a world leader using Twitter. Hopefully in the future they will not give presidents quite so much rope with which to hang all of us.
I admit I am very apprehensive about what happens on the 20th. It’s easy for me to imagine enough MAGA-whackjobs with guns to simply kill their way across the mall, although on the other paw, my suspicion is many of these people are armchair warriors who will come undone when faced with the actual carnage and horror that is war.
My hope remains that we’ll move forward in some kind of positive direction from this, with the republican party hopefully burning to the ground and some sort of entity that actually represents conservative thinking in either the traditional sense of “let’s keep what we have” or “he who governs least governs best” instead of “Let’s be as evil as we can because these people are so gullible we can fool all the people on the right all the time!”. Part of the horror of Trump is that true right-wingers no longer really have a party. Of course from my point of view, the Dems chose someone so centerist they could well be a moderate republican. I voted for him myself, understanding that the alternative (Trump) was much, much, much worse – I like to think even some of his followers are starting to understand just how evil, unprincipled, and even unhinged the man was. But Biden was a looooong way from my dream candidate, and Kamala even more so. While I like that she represents minority and female leadership finally being slightly less underrepresented, my opinion of prosecutors as a class is extraordinarily low. I do not think it is possible to be both a prosecutor and a good person in America. Back to Biden, though, he was who we could all agree on, but he was almost no one’s first choice. Still, I wish him the absolute best of luck and hopefully wisdom will guide his words and deeds. It sure didn’t guide his predecessor’s.
The real hope, beyond positive growth, is that there’s not a violent uprising on the 20th (many people on horror-sites like thedonald.win are calling for one) and that if there is, it is quickly quelled. I like to think that the number of people willing to talk on the internet about how they’d kill every cop and soldier and democrat they could get their crosshairs is much much lower than the number of people that would do such a thing. I don’t envy the FBI the challenge of trying to determine a actual threat level and take appropriate response. I do think this is the first time in my life I have been grateful for the efforts of the feds.
One thing I am reminded of, not for the first time, is why even though I feel we need to retune the police, I continue to believe that police are a necessary part of human society. Without police, I would never have the freedom to not own a gun, and it is a freedom I cherish.
Anyway, back to the wikipedia. The wikipedia is not run by the left or the right, and they try very hard to achieve neutral point of view. This is not a easy thing to do on controversial subjects, and one often has to wonder how well a government would run that was run by lawmakers editing laws on a wiki, using the wikipedia’s rules.
If you want to see the ensuing drama for any given subject – and there quite often is, everyone has strong feelings about *something* – go look at the talk pages. Often they are archived from time to time, so you may have to find the archive page and click back several pages to get to the real drama. I admit I find them fascinating – and sometimes even entertaining – reading.
However, on almost all thinks Trumpian, I find the Wikipedia’s summaries well compiled. Yet another example of how collectivism works.