This is a powerful piece about a time in Germany where people couldn't, to paraphrase, see where things could go, and so couldn't really understand when things have started.
I suspect that readers will see this piece as a reflection of their greatest fears about our own Republic. Unfortunately, the message will be lost by those who are most in need of hearing it. That includes many of the readers of this piece who think their side are the victims and the other side are the creeping fascists.
Hate to break it to you, in the United States we're screwed two ways over. Both the left and the right in the US have paramilitaries (antifa, proud boys). Both the left and the right in the US have enemies lists, and have effective propaganda wings that eviscerate opponents and call basic and decent democratic norms into question (free speech, elections). Both sides use identity and demographics to sow division and resentment between groups.
Maybe there's some hope for the shrinking, rational middle that two creeping fascisms cancel each other out, and will in the future. But that's a pretty long bet to make, too.
For the rest of us paying attention and who, in the words of the piece, "think about fundamental things", it has already started and it is very, very scary where it may end up.
Looks like I accidentally started a flame war here! Funtimes.
My answer to some common replies:
1) "But the [left/right] is much worse": you're sorta making my point. Even if the other "side" may be worse now, if you're honest with yourself, I'm sure you can see where your partisans have crossed some lines, too. And the whole point of this piece is authoritarianism and fascism grows slowly over time, so "We're slightly further down the fascism hill right now so we're better" isn't a heartening response
2) "This is 'Both sidesism'!!!" First of all, I don't claim there are good people on both sides, I claim there are bad people on both sides. Very bad, sycophantic people who see the worst in others, assume the worst motives, and are willing to stop at nothing, including murder, to achieve their ends. Yes, for many issues there is a "right" and a "wrong" and these could theoretically be discovered through empirical testing and observation. But we're not talking about individual issues here, we're talking about national / political identities and the complex social and tribal bonds that make people even choose "a side" in the first place.
3) "You have to speak out / choose a side, or are you morally complicit in evil" Don't entirely disagree. That said, extremism is polarizing and destructive of rationality and humane discourse, regardless of where it comes from. Just because we are all sort of forced to "pick a side" when the gravitational forces are so strong, that doesn't mean that the side we pick will be right all the time or even a force for moral good, just a temporary stopgap against moral evil. That doesn't mean you don't have a responsibility to identify evil and speak against it when you see it. It's just a lot harder for those people who see much evil amongst two large constituencies that see themselves as wholly Good, than it is for those people who are wholly convinced of their Good and the absolute Evil of the other side.
And although I don't claim to be either rational or in the middle, I do believe I am right about the creeping fascist tendencies present in the polar extremes of American politics -- and there's no better evidence of the truth of my comment that it is being downvoted and commented into oblivion by partisans on both sides :)
Please neither start nor perpetuate political flamewars on HN. We don't need fiery arguments about endlessly repeated details that are available everywhere else. We need thoughtful, curious conversation on non-obvious topics of intellectual interest. Political interest may intersect with intellectual interest but the two are not the same, and they become disjoint as passions rise.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Hi dang -- I appreciate what you're trying to do, but please understand it was neither my intent to start one or perpetuate a flame war, nor was my comment inflammatory in any reasonable sense of the word. Seems unfair to single me out here, given how perfectly bland my comment was, especially when compared to other comments made in this thread.
I get that it wasn't your intent, but you're underestimating how provocative it was. That's standard for internet comments. Most provocation is unintentional, which why it always feels like other people cause the problem.
There's a sense in which the root comment of a flamewar is responsible for the flamewar whether it was intended or not: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Still, if you hadn't posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25086238, I wouldn't have replied. Note the phrase "nor perpetuate" above! And I certainly didn't single you out:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25086665
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25086711
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25086595
Fair enough. Although to be clear, I was being sarcastic about it being "funtimes." I hate flame wars and really didn't seek to invite or perpetuate it, nor did I think my original or follow-up comment would invite one.
Thanks for the explanation and for the great work you do moderating this community!
Just watched The Sound of Music again a few weeks ago. As a kid I just knew the bad guys come and the heroes outsmart them.
These days, I see more and more the acting chops of Christopher Plummer - the bad guys are already here and all that's left is hope and trying to maintain a bubble for your children. From scene one he is a goose on a pond. Serene above the waterline but roiling below.
Ironically did you ever notice that The Sound of Music is actually sympathetic towards fascism under the surface?
http://www.critical-theory.com/watch-zizek-explain-why-the-s...
The moment you decide that everyone else is crazy and you are the rational guy in the middle, it's time to take a step back.
> Both the left and the right in the US have paramilitaries (antifa, proud boys).
They are both irrelevant comparing to the US military. Germany, when Hitler rose to power, had a bad economy and weak military but I think he did give up to the military choices at the end of the day. The US military is a behemoth who could decimate the left and right paramilitaries in a few days, and then go to invade Argentina.
Having lived in a region where countries changed regimes from dictatorship to democracy to dictatorship multiple times, it seems that there is one similarity: The military has the final shot; and a weak or no military meant chaos (Libya/Yemen/Lebanon) since every paramilitary now has a shot at power.
It'll be much easier to predict the outcome by knowing the US military. Does it support Republican or Democrat values? Does it care for democracy? Is it fed up with current day politics?
In my personal experience, the U.S. military - Army in particular - firmly drills “loyalty to the Constitution, not the President” into every soldier. The top U.S. general gave a speech to that effect earlier this week. You can draw your own conclusions as to the timing of his remarks:
>” We are unique among militaries. We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an oath to a country, a tribe or religion. We take an oath to the Constitution. And every soldier that is represented in this museum, every sailor, airman, Marine, Coast Guardsman, each of us will protect and defend that document, regardless of personal price," Milley said during remarks at the opening of the US Army's museum.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/12/politics/mark-milley-pentagon...
Ah, yes. There were very fine people on both sides!
It is disheartening that a person such as yourself (looked at your bio) would draw these false equivalences between radicalism on the right and left. Four years ago these concepts would not have even remotely been part of your vocabulary, but now you sort of lay down and accept it as "we're screwed two ways over?" This is exactly the kind of psychological creep eluded to in the article.
"Both the left and the right in the US have paramilitaries (antifa, proud boys)." I'm not sure I would consider Antifa "paramilitary". Antifa doesn't have a military style chain of command, nor an organized use of firearms. While the proud boys have more of a hierarchical command structure, it's still a bit of a stretch to call them "paramilitary", there does however seem to be some shared membership with right wing paramilitary militia.
> Both the left and the right in the US have paramilitaries (antifa, proud boys).
If you believe this, you are severely misinformed; if you don't believe this, you are a liar. Either way, it is nefarious.
I've been to every single counter-protest of the proud boys in Portland.
Who brings guns? Proud boys, 3%ers, PatPrayer, and Trump supporters.
Who doesn't bring guns? Counter protestors.
Who gets arrested from bringing guns to a protest? No one.
Who protects the proud boys? The police.
Who gets shot at by police? Counter protestors.
I had a gun pointed at me by a Proud Boy amongst his militia several months ago. I've been bear-sprayed but thugs with ARs strapped to their bloated bellies. Don't for one instant try to pull this "both sides have mililitias" bullshit.
It is so clearly right-wing propaganda.
P.S. And I know what you are about to say next, "But a Trump supporter got shot in portland..." YEs, he did, and it was awful, and then the Feds shot the perp w/o due process, while Rittenhouse gets a pat on the back. There were NOT heavily-armed groups of counter protestors on the left, but there sure as hell are from the right, all the time.
"Great people on both sides", that's the rally chant of the US president...
That's intentionally taken out of context. He specifically said that nazis and racists are not included and that they should be condemned.
Antifascists aren't holding rallies chanting "Jews will not replace us" and showing up to peaceful protests with weapons to kill protesters. The amount of paramilitary activity on the left is minimal, especially when compared to the right, adherents of which been caught in several (edit: at least one, Governor Whitmer, I can't find evidence of others right now) plots over the past few months to kidnap and even murder Democratic government officials.
I'm not denying that the left has ever used extreme violence in the US. The Weather Underground is the most famous example. I will however argue that those days are over for the left, with the vast majority of leftists being nonviolent and pacifists, and a small few committed to armed defense, but not offense.
Instead, they're chanting "White silence equals violence". I'm sure demonization of a group that's on the way to becoming a minority will work out great.
The left and right deploy violence differently. Right wing violence is more precise, organized, surgical. Left wing violence is more chaotic, mob-driven, indiscriminate. Hence the mass rioting and destruction this summer, tacitly supported by major sections of the left-wing power structure in the US (local government and media).
Much of the violence at protests this past summer was actually organized by right-wing extremists, possibly as a false flag: https://theintercept.com/2020/07/15/george-floyd-protests-po...
Fake spin meant to assuage the girondins, the well-to-do leftists. The footage and evidence is extensive and obvious.
This is based on information from BlueLeaks, which you're free to call fake spin, and I am free to disagree with you on.
There's nothing in that article suggesting a false flag. At most Hina Shamsi suggests that leftist actions are being judged more harshly.
Fair enough. Why would right-wingers show up to a left-wing protest with violent intentions? There's no legitimate reason, but I apologize for extrapolating from their actions.
Escalating the situation and change public perception to "hurt the left" seems what I interpret from the situation.
Left-wing protests throughout the summer have frequently turned violent, with it being directed at random passersby, police, businesses, etc. I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to by "violent intentions" but that it has happened frequently in the past is a legitimate reason why right-wingers would show up prepared for the fact that violence will likely commence.
You're dodging the question though. Why are right-wingers showing up to a left-wing protest movement in the first place, if they aren't counterprotesting? Wandering around with rifles is not a protest.
Their presence is in itself counterprotest if you're able to figure out they're right-wing in the first place. I'm not sure what type of arbitrary behaviour you're looking for here.
It's intimidating to be walking around with guns drawn. That's what I'm trying to get at.
It's also intimidating to try to counterprotest in the face of such a huge mob when there's been numerous instances of violence from them in the past. I certainly wouldn't go without a gun if I were to show up at one of these things lest someone see me as an easy victim.
You're just vastly overstating the prevalence of violence at these protests. Do you have evidence for these assertions or are you just throwing them blindly?
Is it a surprise that armed people would show up to oppose the trashing of their cities?
Yes, it is, because taking up arms is not how we deal with social problems in civilized society, and civilians are not authorized to use force against other civilians except in extreme circumstances involving a direct threat against one's life.
I can imagine arming myself if I felt my neighbors or myself were in danger, but the idea of arming myself and my friends to drive to some other neighborhood or city to “protect” them is beyond anything that makes sense to me.
You really can’t imagine why vigilates’ sense of citizenship would extend beyond a neighborhood? And if we are assuming only selfish self interest, what happens in one neighborhood doesn’t stay there. I’m not saying their actions were right, but they’re not hard to understand.
Would you please stop using HN for political and ideological flamewar? As you know, this is not what HN is supposed to be for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/15/george-floyd-protests-po...
> But while the White House beat the drum for a crackdown on a leaderless movement on the left, law enforcement offices across the country were sharing detailed reports of far-right extremists seeking to attack the protesters and police during the country’s historic demonstrations, a trove of newly leaked documents reveals.
According to what I saw and interpreted, it was mostly right influence attempting to escalate the situation to "hurt the left".
Saying "fake spin" is not going to convince me otherwise. I'd prefer statistics though.
( Belgian, so not in the US)
It's not necessarily the actions, but the perceived intent by "the other side" that is important. Events become provocation draws provocation draws backlash, etc etc.
I'm a fairly liberal person, but it doesn't take an inhuman amount of mental gymnastics to look at riots, anti-police sentiment, etc, and see a coordinated hostile agenda. I am lucky that I get to talk to both hardcore right and hardcore left people regularly, and they both tend to follow logical interpretations to inevitably polarizing and unhealthy conclusions. Both are not living in current reality, they are projecting their beliefs about the other side's agenda based on what they see on the news, and saying "I don't want to live in that world".
What am I supposed to think about the intent of the other side when they're trying to get a legitimate election result overturned to support their preferred presidential candidate? Who isn't living in reality here? This is not a far left position, and it's not the left that is driving FUD about US election integrity.
You're supposed to recognize that many of your positions look equally bizarre and scary to the other side, and conclude that to a significant degree this is a gap in understanding rather than a gap in morals.
Yes, but what matters most is not how my beliefs appear to the other side, but whose beliefs are closest to the truth. I have little control over what other people believe, but I have some control over what I believe, and I strive to be rational and realistic and follow the truth.
That depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve. If you want to move beyond self satisfaction and actually effect change, you need to be concerned with how your message is conveyed.
What are your beliefs for?
>That depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve. If you want to move beyond self satisfaction and actually effect change, you need to be concerned with how your message is conveyed.
This is a conflation. Trying to be rational is valuable independent of what message you have. Messaging is secondary. When messaging becomes primary, the truth suffers, and freedom dies. I'd rather be self-satisfied and correct than highly influential and wrong. The latter is far more dangerous.
I recall a scant four years ago when many on the left were suggesting that the electors be faithless electors to get Clinton in office. After all, she won the popular vote, right?
"What am I supposed to think about the intent of the other side when they're trying to get a legitimate election result overturned to support their preferred presidential candidate" indeed?
"Many on the left" meaning every Democratic senator and congressperson, and the Democratic president himself too?
What, you think Obama and the Clintons would have minded terribly if it turned out that way?
Anyway, we're not shifting the goalposts to the leaders, we're talking about the people, which is the subject of the article. The people of the left were completely down with the faithless electorate concept, whoopie!
And somehow you missed this point. Which leads me to a question: why? Perhaps you didn't hear about it. Perhaps you forgot it. Maybe you brushed it aside. Or maybe you recalled it and decided it wasn't worth mentioning. Each of these are mechanisms through which people are steered.
You accuse the far right of doing something that the far left was doing just four years ago, and still you have thought yourself objective, but it doesn't work.
You can find people of any background who will spout contradictory rhetoric. I don't think you're making this argument in good faith. 2016 was a whole lot closer than 2020, and Clinton conceded and there was no serious calculated attempt to overturn the election results by either the public at large, or people who had any power to do so.
Equating that with what's going on now does not seem like an argument made in good faith.
I was hanging out in lefty circles in 2016; the faithless electorate idea was wildly popular, as was the "the popular vote should win." These were the last hope for many who were previously so confident.
It's true that the popular vote should decide the presidency but unfortunately it doesn't in the US. It's a bad sign that we keep electing presidents who didn't win a majority of the popular vote. Nonetheless, we have to follow the rules and processes in the Constitution until we get the opportunity to change them.
The popular vote should win is still popular on left. In large part because both Clinton on Biden won popular vote.
And partly because they don't count as real Americans in popular rhetoric and are getting increasingly ressentful about that.
>The people of the left were completely down with the faithless electorate concept, whoopie!
Well, I certainly wasn't, and I contest that this belief was widespread within the left, but without evidence one way or another we're not going to resolve this aspect of the disagreement. What I do know is that no significant number of people with political positions and political power used that power to throw the election results into doubt, as Mitch McConnell and GOP congresspeople are now doing.
I don't think Obama would have supported it as he called Clinton urging her to concede early on election night.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/307536-obama-urged-cli...
Admittedly, I wasn’t following as closely in 16, but I really don’t remember much of this coming from authorities at all. Was it senators and Ms. Clinton herself? Because that is what is happening this year
Maybe you overlooked a multi-year investigation and failed impeachment over the notion that the president in collusion with Russia interfered with the '16 election?
The impeachment succeeded but the senate refused to even investigate so he wasn't convicted.
This has gotten extremely off topic, and in the worst direction: generic, tedious, partisan flamewar. You posted 41 comments moving the thread in this undesirable direction. Could you please refrain from doing that here? The more threads go in this direction, the more off topic for HN they become.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not disagreeing with you, I respect your views and feelings and the importance of the issues. But HN's mandate is curious, thoughtful conversation about topics of intellectual interest. When the thread gets reaches this degree of fiery political minutiae, it has left that far behind. In fact it's at the far end of the solution space from ontopicness.
One could argue that the electoral college (and in the past, Senators elected by state legislatures) was intended to be a circuit breaker or hurdle to prevent grossly unqualified candidates from reaching office. I challenge you to find a candidate that was less qualified and more dangerous than Trump.
Yes, we can simultaneously recognize that the Electoral College was intended to stop candidates like Trump, while also accepting that once it actually voted for Trump, he was in fact the legally and constitutionally legitimate President.
Right. But then none of that ever happened.
And Meanwhile, Clinton admitted defeat and Obama invited Trump to while house as every other president before. And Obama cooperated on power handover. Was not threatening to fire people for cooperating with new President.
You really can't bothside this.
I agree they are being sore losers, but you should think that they are exercising the legal rights they are entitled to in order to challenge what they perceive to be irregularities in the process. If irregularities are found (which they probably won't be) then cases should be heard by the courts. If they are not, Trump should ultimately concede or be forced from office.
Be patient and let the process play out in a legitimate way.
Nobody's saying they don't have a right to challenge irregularities, but many government officials say this was the most secure election in American history and deny any evidence of systemic fraud: https://apnews.com/article/top-officials-elections-most-secu...
I agree it was a secure election. What I mean to say is that this is a perception issue. There is a belief along many on the right that elements of the civil service, the media, and the educated classes are strongly biased against Donald Trump and would like to undermine him. To be honest, they are probably right (although I would argue that the bias is warranted given Trump's abysmal job performance). They therefore think that the left would try to undermine the electoral process to remove Trump at all costs and that their intent is fundamentally malicious. The way you deal with this problem is through transparency and patience. You allow Trump unencumbered access to the largely republican courts and if any irregularities exist Trump is allowed his day in court. Once that is over, you then say we have dealt with you in good faith and you can see we weren't trying to screw you over. We now expect the same from you. This gives you the moral high ground and makes you look reasonable. If Trump refuses to cooperate you can then say he is breaking the law and remove him.
There will be some on the right that will never be convinced that this election was legitimate, but this pacifies the more reasonable people on the right. Trying to kick the Republicans while they are down , chastising them them for using legal means to fight the outcome of the election, or engaging in grievance politics just further reinforces the perception that the left isn't operating in good faith.
Remember once all of this is over we still have to live with these people.
> Trying to kick the Republicans while they are down , chastising them them for using legal means to fight the outcome of the election, or engaging in grievance politics just further reinforces the perception that the left isn't operating in good faith.
You're getting this backwards. The legal means are not there to fight the outcome of the election, they are there to make sure every vote is counted properly. This is a subtle but important difference: nobody denies that there may be minor and insignificant improprieties in this election, as there are whenever a country of 300 million people votes. What is being denied is that there was whole-scale interference with the election system. I'm fairly confident that they will not be able to convince a court that there was, but that doesn't make it ok that they are filing lawsuits on no evidence. People being upset about an election outcome is no reason to ignore the reality of this situation.
> I'm fairly confident that they will not be able to convince a court that there was, but that doesn't make it ok that they are filing lawsuits on no evidence.
I agree and so do the courts which is why this problem will likely solve itself if you just let it play out.
I'm not arguing doing anything more than letting it play out and reporting accurately on what's going on. You seem to think we shouldn't be discussing it as such. I think it's important to talk about what they're doing, because it's poisonous to our democracy.
Trump was not prevented access to court. He and his prior are however not allowed to make public claims about fraud unopposed. The patience you suggest would lead to public that hears what he says, but does not hear about claims being bogus.
The kind of pacification you call about is not something Trump or republican party awarded to anyone last 4 years. They enjoyed to trigger libtards. There was no patience I could detect.
What you suggest does not work, because it demands one side to follow norms that other side does not have to follow.
There is no real right to file frivolous lawsuits (which the lawyers know in their hearts are frivolous, let's be abundantly clear), that is a complete myth.
I never said there was. The lawsuits that have been frivolous have been swiftly thrown out by the courts so frivolous lawsuits are largely a non-issue.
That's wrong. Frivolous lawsuits made with the intent to overturn a legitimate election result may be legal, but they're incredibly dangerous for the health of our democracy.
The probability of a frivolous lawsuit succeeding in such a way that it could overturn the results is literally zero. Frivolous suits are not legal, the courts have identified and nullified all frivolous lawsuit attempts so far, and they have signaled that they will not be tolerated. If Trump wants to bring frivolous suits then it only makes him look less legitimate in the eyes of everyone and bolsters the case for forced removal if need be. These events really don't pose any danger to our democracy. The danger to our democracy occurs when you allow one side to build a narrative that the election isn't legitimate and that one side (the left) is refusing to even hear out the right when they claim a lack of legitimacy.
Give them their time and then we can all move on.
So to clarify, you're agreeing that the GOP is trying to overturn a solid election result, but you think the left poses a greater danger to democracy, because they are talking about what the GOP is doing? If we're sitting next to each other reading books and you start yelling about how I just hit you and stole your wallet, I'm not in fact required to hear you out on that if I did not just hit you and steal your wallet.
> So to clarify, you're agreeing that the GOP is trying to overturn a solid election result, but you think the left poses a greater danger to democracy, because they are talking about what the GOP is doing?
No, I don't think this and never said anything like that. I believe the right ultimately poses the greater danger in this context. What I am saying is it's very obvious what Trump wants to do: he wants to build and support a narrative that this election is illegitimate. He wants to do it through stoking resentment against the left and center and suggesting systemic bias. We resist this by calmly saying that we as a nation are committed to fair elections, and we agree that we need to investigate any cases of impropriety that he can find in courts which are independent (and if anything are largely friendly towards his party).
If he fails to discover any issues, we say we cooperated fairly / openly, he failed to produce evidence of impropriety, this suggests the process was fair, and now we can move on. What we don't do is scream that he's wasting our time, that Republicans are assholes, that they're trying to undermine democracy, and that this whole process is bullshit. If we do, it allows Trump to say "SEE?! I told you they are biased against us! What are they trying to hide??? Why are they so impatient?!" It hands him the ammunition to build the narrative that there has been a conspiracy. If there was no conspiracy, why is the left so impatient and hostile? Why are they trying to subvert the process? Politics isn't just about facts it's about feelings and opinions. At the end of the day we want Republicans to accept the results willingly, and in my opinion that's best served by being calm and patient in our dealings with them rather than by being angry or impatient. This is a lesson the left generally fails to grasp: screaming at people and calling them assholes is not a particularly effective way to get them to agree with you.
The most effective thing we can do is allow Trump et al to burn themselves out.
>At the end of the day we want Republicans to accept the results willingly, and in my opinion that's best served by being calm and patient in our dealings with them rather than by being angry or impatient.
The thing is, most Republicans already accept the result. And I'm not saying the whole process is bullshit! Nobody is saying that. It is pretty bad that we can have an election with the popular vote won by five million and counting and have the result disputed, but that's mostly orthogonal to this situation.
The country has voted. The election is still in progress. There are allegations of malfeasance and even fraud that need to be investigated and adjudicated. This has been true in many previous elections. The rule is to count every legal vote and only legal votes.
Once this all plays out, and it will in the near future, then we can determine the "legitimate election result", per the Electoral College.
Should Biden continue to prevail, I'm not expecting any significant unrest. Unhappiness, yes, but that is normal.
>There are allegations of malfeasance and even fraud that need to be investigated and adjudicated. This has been true in many previous elections. The rule is to count every legal vote and only legal votes.
There are allegations by enormously unscrupulous people which have as yet been completely debunked by the courts and labeled by government officials as misinformation attempts: https://apnews.com/article/top-officials-elections-most-secu...
"And if there are legitimate problems to be found, they will be, the coalition declared. Its statement said that all of the states with close results have paper records, which allow for the recounting of each ballot, if necessary, and for “the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. ... Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.”
That's right.
> What am I supposed to think about the intent of the other side when they're trying to get a legitimate election result overturned to support their preferred presidential candidate?
You should think the same way about this as you do about the "russia hacked the election" cries about how the 2016 election was illegitimate.
I don't ever recall hearing that Russia hacked the election, not even in internet memes.
Russian interference however in the 2016 election is well documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20....
The impeachment vote could have been easily avoided if Trump had come out and denounced Russian meddling and let the investigators do their jobs.
The NYT has a URL and web page dedicated to russia election hacking: https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/russian-election-hacking
Let's hypothetically assume that Trump was ahead in the counts right now. Would Biden concede? Hillary Clinton is on record as having said "under no circumstances" concede the election. Would Biden's team not be looking at their legal options to challenge the result? Would Biden supporters not be losing their minds on social media, news media, and in the streets?
This was a very partisian election, in which half the country was not going to be happy with the result. I don't see a smooth acceptance of the outcome regardless of how it comes out.
> It's not necessarily the actions, but the perceived intent by "the other side" that is important.
We should regard "perceived intent by the other side" as most important, and there's no way that dishonest actors could weaponise that? No risk of concern trolling, double standards or phoney outrage?
Are you not paying any attention at all to modern politics?
> showing up to peaceful protests with weapons to kill protesters.
In Portland, an anti-fascist protestor shot a man (rightly or wrongly). Anti-fascists can and do show up with weapons. It is not a false equivalence to say so.
That man never got a trial, he was killed extrajudicially: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/us/michael-reinoehl-antif....
That does not contradict my point.
You're saying he shot someone. That was alleged, and he was never arrested or charged. Like I said, some leftists are believers in armed self defense. I am not. But the fact of the matter is we will never know the full details of that case. I condemn bringing weapons to protests as fully as I condemn equating the role of violence on the left and the right in America right now.
Vice interviewed the person who killed the Trump supporter in cold blood. Yes, there was no official case against the person. But the police knew who the murderer was. This is why a shootout occurred and no other individual is being charged or sought after AFAIK.
> the police knew who the murderer was.
This is not how the justice system works in America, just so you know. The system you describe is horrifying.
Does it also apply for you to terrorists that commit suicide attacks? By definition they will never be arrested nor charged. Would you say that "we will never know" if they did kill people?
This is a red herring and a non-sequitur.
We've banned this account for using HN for political/ideological battle. That's not what this site is for.
Please don't create accounts to break the site rules with; it eventually gets your main account banned as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I loathe this online obsession with painting an amorphous group of "leftists" with the largest, most inaccurate brush known to man.
And even when they don't show up with guns, they show up with molotov cocktails and water bottles filled with cement (and urine). Those aren't guns, but they aren't Girl Scout cookies, either.
Antifa have committed numerous enough acts of violence to be labeled a domestic terrorist group and instead of plots you have actual congressmen (Steve Scalise) being shot by a leftist. HN is a place for avoiding our biases not doubling down on them.
Don’t forget Aaron Danielson, Lee Keltner, David Dorn, and Antonio Mays Jr., if for not other reason than to understand anger on the right (and from moderates) at their deaths.
edit: Downvoted for relevant, if uncomfortable factual statements on HN? I thought we were better than this.
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/08/aaron-jay-daniel...
https://denver.cbslocal.com/2020/10/16/lee-keltner-wife-want...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_David_Dorn
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/everybody-down-wha...
Why not double down? Go on - a few more clicks and you won't even see be reminded anymore of what everyone has seen over the summer in many US cities. And it worked!
Anybody can label anybody as a terrorist group. I’m not sure that says anything useful. The shooting does count though, as far as I know.
How quickly we forget the heavily-armed antifa militia that occupied 3 city blocks in downtown Seattle, whose assault rifle-wielding “security team” assaulted journalists, intimidated residents, and murdered an unarmed black teenager.
Residents and businesses owners are currently suing the city for abandoning the neighborhood’s police station, providing porta-potties to the armed occupiers, and ceding control of this area to the violent mob for roughly a month.
edit: Downvoted for relevant, if uncomfortable factual statements on HN? I thought we were better than this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Autonomous_Zone
https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2020/07/seattle-times-rep...
I'm friends with several people that participated in CHAZ and your assessment of it is incorrect. It was doomed from the start but calling the people occupying it a violent mob is not correct. I personally believe it was a mistake because the people occupying it did not have or want a monopoly on the use of force in their area, meaning that it became a site of unrelated mob and gang violence because the police were not present. That's different from saying it was a violent mob who occupied it with the intent to harm others.
The armed occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge was also “mostly peaceful.” Much more peaceful than CHAZ/CHOP, in fact.
I am friends with people who lived close by and visited the CHAZ/CHOP, and I watched live-streams from the CHAZ nearly 24/7 for the entire span of its existence. It was a lawless area patrolled by gun wielding far-left activists who routinely harassed journalists, ripped phones out of streamers’ hands to delete footage of the “security team’s” deadly mistakes, assaulted visitors of the wrong political stripe, and ultimately were responsible for the shooting deaths of several people. While the atmosphere was more “street festival” during the day, at least for a while, at night and as the occupation wore on it swiftly devolved into violent anarchy.
Remember Raz Simone, the local rapper who showed up on the first night with an AK-47? Remember how he handed out rifles to seemingly random untrained people from the trunk of a car? Remember how his crew assaulted and pistol-whipped a graffiti tagger on the very first night of CHAZ/CHOP, on a Facebook Live stream, saying “we are the police now?” Many similar incidents.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/seattle-autonomous-zone-leaders-w...
Precisely this. It was unacceptable when Bundy et al performed their actions, and what occurred in CHAZ / CHOP was equally unacceptable. The fact that people do not see these events as roughly analogous is amazing to me.
It's amazing what people overlook when the offenders belong to the same tribe as you.
It's pretty hard to be sure you've got the right story with the latter, though. Makes it hard to pass judgement. I think Bundy et al was fairly cut and dried, generally everybody agreed on what happened, and disagreed on whether it was OK.
Where's your evidence that the security team were responsible for the shooting deaths of several people?
umm this? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53224445
No one disputes there was violence. What is disputed is who perpetrated it. As far as I know, there is no evidence it was committed by CHOP participants.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Bigoleboy420/status/1287132537329...
Here is a protestor describing in vivid detail the killing of Antonio Mays Jr. by CHOP security, minutes after it happened while his blood is still wet on the ground. Clipped from Omari Salisbury’s stream (warning - disturbing):
https://youtube.com/watch?v=q5bA-iUPvqI&t=1m27s
Lorenzo Anderson was shot inside CHOP (though not by the “security team”), and died after amateur CHOP medics and confused city EMS flubbed his medevac. EMS couldn’t get to him quickly since the shooting scene wasn’t able to be secured.
https://www.kuow.org/stories/seattle-police-and-fire-confusi...
The guy who murdered the teenager had nothing to do with the CHAZ security team. He snuck in specifically to murder the other kid.
I have a feeling you know this.
You are probably referring to a separate shooting death in CHOP, that of Lorenzo Anderson. I am referring to the murder of Antonio Mays Jr. by antifa security. This murder was filmed from multiple angles and recordings are widely available.
Short clips from several of the vantage points (skip to roughly 1:40 - warning, disturbing):
https://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=_K0tXOBPMHA
Not really sure what I saw on that video. It's a mess.
The last I heard Antonio Mays murder was an active investigation with no arrests made: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/everybody-down-wha...
If it's an open and shut case and the shooter is clearly identifiable why is that? Is the Seattle Police in on this conspiracy?
I of course assumed you meant the other kid because the murderer was actually, yknow, detained and charged so their identity is obviously known.
Once again, I'm sure you actually know all of this.
My understanding is that the shooter is not clearly identifiable, but people that night were bragging on Twitter about the "beautiful shot placement" by "security on the ground": https://twitter.com/EffInvictus/status/1277828963369353216/p...
Video taken in the aftermath captures people discussing how they will collect and hide the evidence. Seattle Police found and questioned the woman who filmed that video, but she told them she didn't know anything: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/woman-releas...
> Once again, I'm sure you actually know all of this.
This kind of talk is quite small.
Here is a protestor describing in vivid detail the killing of Antonio Mays Jr. by CHOP security, minutes after it happened while his blood is still wet on the street. The video was clipped from a stream recorded by Omari Salisbury, an independent reporter who lives and works on Capitol Hill. His coverage was some of the most immediately on-the-scene (warning - disturbing):
https://youtube.com/watch?v=q5bA-iUPvqI&t=1m27s
You’re right that witnesses aren’t talking. This is part and parcel with the “didn’t see shit, don’t know shit” mantra of BLM/antifa protestors. As another user linked, there is video of protestors intentionally destroying the crime scene. Due to this lack of cooperation, Antonio Mays’ family may never receive justice.
> I have a feeling you know this.
they call that feeling "paranoia"
How quickly people who don't live in Seattle shout nonsense about the CHAZ.
Let's break down what actually happened.
1. After weeks of protests, police intimidation, beatings, and frequent gassing of the entire street (much to the delight of people living there, who were unable to breathe inside their own apartments), including a right wing chap driving a car through a crowd, and shooting someone trying to pull him out of his vehicle, the police leave the east precinct, based on an FBI claim that it will be burnt down.
2. The protest moves into the blocks around it, and starts protecting the precinct.
3. The precinct does not burn down.
4. The protest moves elsewhere, and a block party starts.
5. An idiot called Raz, and his boys start providing 'security'. Nobody asked them for it. People who ran the protest didn't ask for it. People living in the area didn't ask for it. Smells like a gang moving into a power vaccumm to me.
6. Homeless folks move into the park area of CHAZ. The area gets a bit rough at night, but is still a block party during the day.
7. Someone in the homeless encampment gets killed in the early hours of the morning, presumably over drugs, but who knows.
8. A teenager steals a car and takes it on a joyride through the pedestrian areas of the CHAZ. (Remember all the car attacks against protest areas over the past few weeks in both Seattle, and the rest of the country? Not a smart move.)
9. Some unknown person kills him and injures his friend.
10. The police move back in to an unburnt district. They then set up a multi-block checkpoint, that demanded all entrants into the former CHAZ to show their ID to be allowed entrance. (When we were under the thrall of Warlord Raz, only drivers had to show ID at his checkpoint.)
That's right. My girlfriend in fact lived on Capital Hill at the time right outside, so I have a pretty good idea of the details.
There’s a lot to unpack in your post, but I’d just like to focus on “car attacks” here. You mention a “car attack” in Seattle. In actual fact, the incident I assume you mean was by all outward indicators a tragic accident, not a planned attack such as Charlottesville in 2017.
Driver Dawit Kelete (who is black, and not politically affiliated) was high on pills when he plowed through BLM protestors occupying a section of the freeway in the middle of the night. Tragically, one protestor died and another was seriously injured.
Most “car attacks” this summer have turned out to be simply reckless or confused drivers caught in the middle of unplanned, unannounced, often heavily-armed and aggressive street protests. Armed protestors have shot or shot at several such drivers, such as in Provo, UT and Aurora, CO.
https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/6/30/21308526/gunman-shot-...
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/08/03/man-charged-murder-sho...
By my reckoning, the actual count of “car attacks” this summer where a politically-motivated driver rammed a BLM/antifa protest can be counted on one hand. There has been a greater number of unprovoked attacks on drivers by protestors. This is the product of extreme paranoia among armed protestors, amplified by social media.
No, what I'm talking about is the one that took place on CH, during the East Precinct protests, not the freeway. You obviously don't live in Seattle.
The driver 'accidentally' turned, with speed, off an arterial, into the protest street, and despite having clear visibility of hundreds of people in his line of travel, kept driving, with people scattering out of his way.
He stopped when he hit a blockade, shot at one person who tried to open his car door, waved his gun around (With extra magazines jungle-taped together), and ran through the crowd directly into the police line. So much for being lost and confused, he seemed to know exactly where he was.
He was either planning a mass shooting, and lost his nerve at the last second, or was trying his damned hardest to provoke an attack on himself, presumably so he could respond with violence.
For an exercise - you try driving your car into a line of right wing militants protesting (or into a police line), and then shoot one of them. I doubt you will succeed in running to a line of safety, and I doubt their press will describe you as lost and confused.
Enough with the "You obviously don't live in Seattle." The event described by _iyig really did happen and was described accurately (except the "high on pills" part, I haven't seen any report of that, news I saw said he took a field sobriety test and was found to be unimpaired).
Unless you directly witnessed these events (which few people did, even amongst Seattleites), then you're getting your information second-hand just like everyone else.
Regarding pills, I read he had Percocet addiction problems and that drugs were found in the car:
>The charges say Kelete told jail officials that he was withdrawing from the narcotic Percocet and that he struggled with an “untreated addiction.” Washington State Patrol accident investigators found “several implements commonly used to smoke illegal substances” and a substance “that appears similar to crystal methamphetamine” in the car, according to the charges.
I hadn’t read about the field sobriety test (so thank you for providing that information!), only the drugs in the car and his opioid addiction. I don’t know whether a field sobriety test would detect that type of intoxication.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/seattle-man-...
> Unless you directly witnessed these events (which few people did, even amongst Seattleites), then you're getting your information second-hand just like everyone else.
I live here. I've spent weeks going to sleep to the sound of police grenades going off. I've been to CHAZ. I've watched, in bafflement, for weeks, at how news coverage - particularly national, but also local has painted an entirely different picture from what I've seen with my own two eyes.
The events he cites have taken place - but because of the superficial level of knowledge he has of the situation, he is omitting vital context.
I will absolutely gatekeep on this. Everyone's entitled to an opinion, but it's quite clear that _iyig has no first-hand knowledge, and only superficial second-hand knowledge of what he's talking about.
At least, that's my most charitable interpretation of the situation.
>5. An idiot called Raz, and his boys start providing 'security'. Nobody asked them for it. People who ran the protest didn't ask for it. People living in the area didn't ask for it. Smells like a gang moving into a power vaccumm to me.
So you blocked the police out of a whole neighborhood of a few square blocks, and a gang moving into the power vacuum is a surprise? Come on!
> So you blocked the police out of a whole neighborhood of a few square blocks, and a gang moving into the power vacuum is a surprise?
It was completely unexpected. And it will be completely unexpected the next time, and the next time, and the next time...
Nobody blocked the police out of a neighborhood. They chose to leave, because they could not handle a peaceful protest outside their precinct, and could not restrain themselves from initiating violence.
And because they ran out of gas.
Contrast the SPD's behavior to how the Bellevue police department handled BLM protests. The police chief met with the protest organizers, treated everyone involved with respect, set some ground rules, and did not start a dozen unprovoked attacks on the public.
When all you have is a warrior cop, every problem looks like an insurgency to be put down. The SPD has an incredibly antagonistic attitude towards the public, and is institutionally incapable of de-escalating. It also seems to not actually be subject to any form of democratic oversight - as city council, despite passing many, many resolutions, is unable to reign them in.
Your links do not support your statement. While the wikipedia article mentions some armed presence, it clearly puts that as a response to outside right-wing violence. No mention of is made of an "rifle-wielding “security team” assaulted journalists, intimidated residents, and murdered an unarmed black teenager" in either article. There certainly have been some unfortunate shooting deaths in the area at the time, but not much is known about either the perpetrators or their motivation.
This is demonstrably false.
Feel free to demonstrate it :)
Certainly there has been far more violence from the left than from the right over the past few years as a read through any newspaper will indicate. I suppose I wouldn't classify most of it as paramilitary in nature though. I would describe antifa as an organized violent mob, at least.
"I've read a lot about it in a newspaper" is not a demonstration. Here, I'll give you some evidence for my position: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/us/domestic-terrorist-gro...
You honestly dispute the claim that the large majority of political violence in the United States over the past year was leftist in origin?
> Unfortunately, the message will be lost by those who are most in need of hearing it.
It’s amazing. The top reply to his post does just this.
I care more about what is true than I care about trying to provide false balance between unequal positions. If you see me as missing the message, so be it. A request to treat "both sides" of this situation as equals is a request to ignore reality, which I refuse to do.
You are, again, simply speaking of your own reality. Simply because you hold an idea to be true does not make that idea true. This is not mathematics. You cannot ‘prove‘ one side to be true. This applies to my side as well as yours.
I believe there is a mentally-ill man down the hall that thinks he is Antifa, and definitely plans violence all the time, but he is too weak and unstable to do it in reality.. perhaps a powerful image for his weak and unstable mind to fixate on.. does this equate to a real threat? hard to say, he lives largely in a fantasy world and has few contacts with people..
Its no secret that the mentally ill, badly damaged and socially disadvantaged have historially flocked to extreme campaigns -> on either side <- of this inflamed debate
Peace as espoused by various religions, becomes a powerful antidote as a social message -- I support that messege, personally
It's not primarily mentally ill people who call themselves antifascists or Proud Boys though, and believing that is going to severely hamper your analysis of them.
Man accused of hatching plot to kidnap Whitmer is BLM supporter and made comments critical of police >> https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/man-accused-of-hatching-pl...
In the age of agent provocateurs[0], it is hard to really know the truth even if you are present at the scene. There is only so much time in a day.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/oct/21/viral-imag...
>There’s no evidence that the suspects arrested in connection with a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer are antifa activists.
>Before his arrest, one of the suspects attended a Black Lives Matter protest. Another suspect criticized the movement.
>State and federal documents make no mention of antifa or Black Lives Matter. Rather, they reference an anti-government militia group.
>Michigan’s attorney general has said white supremacist and anti-government groups acted “in concert based on a shared extreme ideology.”
What should the left do about the looting? Police confronting protesters in the front, looting going on in the rear..
(Here is a reminder video:)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3LrRUfJsY
I am all for BLM protests in general, but the looting only provokes more extreme responses from the right. I also blame the police- they rather confront peaceful protesters than go after actual thugs. Having a class of people redlined into ghettos who have no stake in the wealthier parts of society is the root of this, but what to do about it?
>Antifascists aren't holding rallies chanting "Jews will not replace us" and showing up to peaceful protests with weapons to kill protesters.
They're not [1][2]?
[1] -- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/aug/08/wearea...
[2] -- https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/29/key-finding...
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological or political flamewar. The last thing we need here is yet another angry, generic argument between left ideology and right ideology. Those are utterly repetitive, and therefore tedious, and therefore off topic on HN.
That's not to say the issues aren't important; of course they are. But this site has a particular scope and repetitive flamewars aren't in it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25086595. 40+ comments in a thread like this is beyond excessive.
I'm sorry, but there is no moral equivalence in the U.S. between the left and the right. It's certainly true that neither side is squeaky clean, but the left does not deny basic facts, and in particular, it does not attempt to dispute the outcomes of elections when the results are clear (and indeed has in the past thrown in the towel even when the results were not clear). I could go on and on, but those two things are key. Once you subscribe to the idea that whatever the Dear Leader says is true, evidence be damned, you are lost. The right is doing this even as I write this. The left never has.
> does not attempt to dispute the outcomes of elections
You may not be old enough to remember, but Al Gore (democrat) did _exactly_ this 20 years ago.
Al Gore never claimed that he was the only legitimate winner months before the election began and that any result in which he lost would be fraudulent.
It's quite the revisionist stretch to claim "exactly". There were many very different circumstances.
Relevant article posted on NPR just today:
FACT CHECK: What's Happening In This Election Is Not Like Florida In 2000
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/13/934190243/fact-check-whats-ha...
You left out an important piece of context:
"does not attempt to dispute the outcomes of elections when the results are clear"
In 2000 the results were not clear. This year they are.
Furthermore, once the Supreme Court shut down the Florida recount, effectively handing the White House to George Bush (on very questionable legal grounds [1]), Al Gore conceded.
[1] https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/please-dona8217t-cite-t...
Came down to 500 votes in a single state. This ain't that.
Al Gore gave a decent concession speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq5YdkYSyEE
I didn't recall the date though, I checked and it was on December 13th, 2000.
Come back on 14 December 2020 and tell me if that aspect is "exactly this".
because the narrow vote count margin aspect that time really isn't, and the claims of fraud and rigging this time really isn't. And neither bode well for a hypothetical Trump concession speech.
Al Gore disputed the outcome of a single state where he lost by a few hundred votes. He did not dispute the outcome of the entire electoral process or make baseless claims that it was rigged for months leading up to and after the election.
You're missing substantial historical perspective here. In both 2000 and 2004 - the last two Republican presidential victories that are old enough to talk about without inflaming modern political tensions - Congressional representatives on the left attempted to block the counting of electoral college votes from a crucial swing state. I don't mean to defend these kinds of challenges, I think they're dumb, but they're sadly quite common.
> Congressional representatives on the left attempted to block the counting of electoral college votes from a crucial swing state
Reference?
Florida in 2000: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-07-mn-9426-...
Ohio in 2004: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Boxer-delays-preside... . (It should be noted for the sake of fairness that the leaders of this attempt claimed they weren't trying to overturn the election results by blocking the count.)
Florida in 2000 bears no resemblance to this situation. Trump and his supporters are alleging widespread, systemic fraud for which there is no evidence whatsoever. Florida in 2000 was a historically close election for which there should have been a recount, but the election was handed to Bush by the Supreme Court instead.
Right. And in 2004 Boxer's action was a symbolic protest designed to draw attention to voting irregularities. She never seriously sought to change the outcome.
Again: there is no moral equivalence here.
Do you dispute that Ohio in 2004 bears a resemblance? Every Presidential election of course has its own unique context, so if you want to discuss broader patterns you have to be willing to step back from the nitty-gritty of each individual year.
I do, because Ohio was a single state with apparently some irregularities in the vote, and the effort to challenge was not even broadly supported within the Democratic party. What is being alleged here is that Democrats "stole" the election. Nonsense.
I think we're talking across each other here. I'm not attempting to draw a strict equivalence; I'm not saying this year is as bad as that year, this side is as bad as that side, this argument is as bad as that argument. I'm just saying that the original claim - that only one part of the political spectrum attempts to dispute clear election results - is flawed.
I'm not talking about in general though, I am talking about this year. And moreover, one senator and one representative cannot be taken as representative of a whole side. One objection is an aberration. A whole party objecting is a political strategy.
That sounds like we are indeed talking across each other, then. I'm not talking about this year.
You were bringing in historical perspective to justify the idea that the left commonly denies basic facts to dispute clear election results. I have argued, and I believe demonstrated, that the context you present does not support the conclusion you argue. This is disagreement, not misunderstanding.
Florida 2000 was indeed very different. That said, Gore was hoisted by his own petard and not by SCOTUS. It's important to remember that Gore did not wish to recount the entire state and all the ballots in the same way, but only in areas and ways considered favourable to Gore.
If Gore hadn't tried that stunt, the process wouldn't have dragged on until December, and the Court wouldn't have been able to interfere. Even more ironically, later attempts to check the count show that all of the recounting standards Gore had actually asked for would have led to Bush winning; Only a complete and fair recount may have allowed Gore to win.
Do you have a source for these allegations? It doesn't track my understanding of the Florida recount, and moreover it's pretty indisputable that SCOTUS acted illegitimately, regardless of what the outcome would have been.
See [0] for a SCOTUS-favourable perspective on Gore's original request and how even the Florida court version was tilted. As for recount results, wiki has a decent overview [1].
[0] http://www.floridalawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/L...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
See especially the NORC results. The wiki entry argues that if the Florida court had continued the proceedings, it may have applied a uniform standard where Gore would have won - but none of the existing orders did that, they used standards where Bush would have won [based on NORC]. Anyway, by Dec. 12 time was running out, the Federal deadline was Dec. 18.
I believe that if Gore had pursued the fair strategy from the beginning than there would have been time enough for the uniform standard recount and no cause for the partial recounts and the appeals that wasted so much time.
The governor of that swing state happened to be the brother of the Republican presidential candidate. That governor's secretary of state also purged the registrations of 90,000 black voters months before the election.
After the last election there was the attempted impeachment and RussiaGate witch hunt which found no evidence that Trump conspired with Russia to influence the election. It's pretty brazen to ignore that ans say the left never disputed the election outcome.
> which found no evidence that Trump conspired with Russia to influence the election
This is a straight-up lie. Mueller said explicitly they found evidence, but left it to Congress to pursue prosecution.
> Mueller said explicitly they found evidence
Instead of reading what "he said" I'd appreciate reading what the evidence is and what it shows. I'd honestly like to learn.
Edit: just checked, the linked Time's "debunking" confirms that there was no evidence of collusion: the best that they can come to is to claim:
"But the fact that the conduct did not technically amount to conspiracy does not mean that it was acceptable."
So the fact is, as I read it, there was no evidence of conspiracy. And that's it.
Edit 2: The quote in the answer doesn't say anything better:
"While none of these acts amounted to the crime of conspiracy, all could be described as “collusion.”"
Again, the fact in there is "none of these acts amounted to the crime of conspiracy." Then, claiming that it "could be described" ([by whom?] -- there would be at least such mark in a Wikipedia article) is just an attempt to rationalize that fact to these who were emotionally invested. The Democrats could have invested their energy in many other much more important problems they have among them. IMHO Hillary failed not because Trump or any foreign action but because there was awareness of Democrats rigging their party's election process and of she as a war hawk:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magazine/how-hillary-clin...
You can start with Time's debunking[1], but really should read what Mueller has written and said, both the report and following articles and interviews.
[1] https://time.com/5610317/mueller-report-myths-breakdown/
Edited in response to Parent's edit:
"While none of these acts amounted to the crime of conspiracy, all could be described as “collusion.”
You don't appear to be having an honest conversation, so I'll bid you good day.
2nd edit: what the heck, let's just quote justsecurity.org's summary of the Mueller report[2]:
"1. Trump was receptive to a Campaign national security adviser’s (George Papadopoulos) pursuit of a back channel to Putin.
2. Kremlin operatives provided the Campaign a preview of the Russian plan to distribute stolen emails.
3. The Trump Campaign chairman and deputy chairman (Paul Manafort and Rick Gates) knowingly shared internal polling data and information on battleground states with a Russian spy; and the Campaign chairman worked with the Russian spy on a pro-Russia “peace” plan for Ukraine.
4. The Trump Campaign chairman periodically shared internal polling data with the Russian spy with the expectation it would be shared with Putin-linked oligarch, Oleg Deripaska.
5. Trump Campaign chairman Manafort expected Trump’s winning the presidency would mean Deripaska would want to use Manafort to advance Deripaska’s interests in the United States and elsewhere.
6. Trump Tower meeting: (1) On receiving an email offering derogatory information on Clinton coming from a Russian government official, Donald Trump Jr. “appears to have accepted that offer;” (2) members of the Campaign discussed the Trump Tower meeting beforehand; (3) Donald Trump Jr. told the Russians during the meeting that Trump could revisit the issue of the Magnitsky Act if elected.
7. A Trump Campaign official told the Special Counsel he “felt obliged to object” to a GOP Platform change on Ukraine because it contradicted Trump’s wishes; however, the investigation did not establish that Gordon was directed by Trump.
8. Russian military hackers may have followed Trump’s July 27, 2016 public statement “Russia if you’re listening …” within hours by targeting Clinton’s personal office for the first time.
9. Trump requested campaign affiliates to get Clinton’s emails, which resulted in an individual apparently acting in coordination with the Campaign claiming to have successfully contacted Russian hackers.
10. The Trump Campaign—and Trump personally—appeared to have advanced knowledge of future WikiLeaks releases.
11. The Trump Campaign coordinated campaign-related public communications based on future WikiLeaks releases.
12. Michael Cohen, on behalf of the Trump Organization, brokered a secret deal for a Trump Tower Moscow project directly involving Putin’s inner circle, at least until June 2016.
13. During the presidential transition, Jared Kushner and Eric Prince engaged in secret back channel communications with Russian agents. (1) Kushner suggested to the Russian Ambassador that they use a secure communication line from within the Russian Embassy to speak with Russian Generals; and (2) Prince and Kushner’s friend Rick Gerson conducted secret back channel meetings with a Putin agent to develop a plan for U.S.-Russian relations.
14. During the presidential transition, in coordination with other members of the Transition Team, Michael Flynn spoke with the Russian Ambassador to prevent a tit for tat Russian response to the Obama administration’s imposition of sanctions for election interference; the Russians agreed not to retaliate saying they wanted a good relationship with the incoming administration."
[2] https://www.justsecurity.org/63838/guide-to-the-mueller-repo...
You omit, from the very article there:
"Although the Mueller Report does not squarely address these questions of “collusion” that fall outside the scope of potential criminal liability, it can be mined for substantive information that provides some meaningful answers." Which precedes all the claims.
So even there it's written as scare quotes "collusion" while admitting that that "falls outside the scope of potential criminal liability."
In short, Trump's yes men behaved then as stupid as they continued to behave later, including now, but being stupid wasn't a crime. Sadly, the obsession of Democrats with all that wasn't less stupid (obviously, I'm writing completely non-partisan).
There was no attempted impeachment. Donald Trump was in fact impeached.
And yes, there was an investigation into possible collusion with the Russians. That investigation was launched and conducted by Republicans.
What does any of that have to do with disputing election outcomes or denying basic facts?
You can read the report, released by the Republican-controlled senate intelligence committee, for yourself:
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
This is the redacted report, correct?
Eg. Part of the redacting were removed and this was an example:
> But there are a few shreds of information that are really, genuinely new, and they’re damning of the president. Namely: Trump had direct knowledge of Roger Stone’s outreach to WikiLeaks, according to multiple witnesses interviewed by Mueller. He encouraged that outreach and asked his campaign chairman to pursue it further, those witnesses said. And Mueller’s office appears to have strongly suspected, without putting it in so many words, that Trump lied to the special counsel in his written answers to Mueller’s questions about the Stone affair.
I'm not going to read the version where they hide the important bits.
I would read a complete one though.
There is no question there was Russian interference in the 2016 election with reams of evidence to back it up. It was then spun that Trump specifically did not conspire.
Conspiring does not matter. It is entirely irrelevant to the goal of validating the integrity of the election. If they care so much about fraud they would have continued to investigate all of the irregularities around the 2016 election.
Give us the frigging evidence at last !!!
"they" blocked witnesses, lied under oath and released a "redacted" transcript.
Biden also said at least once that he might not accept the result of the election if he lost. (Sorry, don't have a reference handy, but I saw it.) I believe that his point was that he would also have to look at fraud. And he said it much less often than Trump did. Still it was rather scary to have both sides saying it.
> Sorry, don't have a reference handy
Res ipsa loquitur.
I believe that what you're thinking of was that Biden was counseled not to concede early (1)
Which is not the same thing. And given the way it turned out with late-counted postal votes, quite wise.
1) https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/hillary-clint...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-clinton-idUS...
Clinton said, rather injudiciously, that Biden shouldn’t concede. What she probably meant was that the mail-in ballots have historically favored the Democratic Party, and are in most cases counted after Election Day.
Neither side should concede until the ballots are sufficiently evident. We’ve reached that point.
> Sorry, don't have a reference handy, but I saw it.
The unfortunate refrain of too many people repeating falsehoods online and in person these days.
the left does not deny basic facts, and in particular, it does not attempt to dispute the outcomes of elections when the results are clear
Hillary Clinton has been claiming that Trump's election was illegitimate for years: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum.... 66% of Democrats believe that Russia directly hacked and manipulated vote counts in the 2016 election: https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
> Trump's election was illegitimate
But she does not deny the fact that he did win. She's just saying that he won because of dirty tricks (voter suppression, intentional promulgation of falsehoods), which is plausible. Certainly within the bounds of an opinion one could legitimately hold.
> 66% of Democrats believe that Russia directly hacked and manipulated vote counts in the 2016 election
Sure. A fair percentage of Democrats would probably say that they think that Trump is Satan incarnate. That doesn't change the fact that Democrats do in fact recognize the fact that Trump won the 2016 election. Republicans by and large are not conceding that Biden has won the 2020 election. (They also deny basic facts about climate change, COVID, etc.)
Left denies basic facts about:
1. Trump's legitimate election in 2016 - see all the hysterical reactions like "Not my president" protests or urging faithless elector to vote for anyone else but trump route or "Russia-gate" (left's Benghazi?) or the impeachment farce. (I don't think I need to provide any citations here).
2. Illegal immigration - left doesn't acknowledge that this is a problem. And then you see left's contradictory messaging ("illegal immigration has slowed down to a trickle") to thousands of children showing up on our borders. Couple that with ridiculous demands like "Abolish the ICE" or calling Obama the "Deporter in Chief". Concrete example of a prominent leftist: https://www.newsweek.com/aoc-abolish-ice-hysterectomy-whistl...
3. Economics: there is a broad agreement among the economists (including someone like Krugman) that rent control doesn't work. Yet you keep seeing repeated attempts from the left. Latest example: CA Prop 21.
Read the Ukraine transcript and say it wasn't a flagrant abuse of power with a straight face.
The transcript combined with the many House testimonies.
It amazes me that because the Senate didn't convict or even have a trial (for political self-preservation alone), people just think it's a farce.
> Illegal immigration - left doesn't acknowledge that this is a problem
It certainly does. That's why the left supports policies like DACA.
The disagreement is not about whether or not illegal immigration is a problem. The disagreement is very much about what the right way to fix the problem is, which is well within the bounds of legitimate policy disagreement.
> rent control doesn't work
Of course it does. Rent control keeps rents from going up. Whether or not this is desirable, or whether it has undesirable ancillary effects that outweigh the benefits, is again the subject of legitimate disagreement over policy.
> impeachment farce. (I don't think I need to provide any citations here).
You could just watch the House testimony? Trump clearly tried to use the United States' leverage to get another country's leader to create bad press for the man who he saw as his biggest threat to the re-election.
Imagine if nobody blew the whistle and the Ukrainian president did what Trump wanted. Trump could've beaten Biden off the back of that. Off the back of abuse of power!
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological or political flamewar. The last thing we need here is yet another angry, generic argument between left ideology and right ideology. Those are utterly repetitive, and therefore tedious, and therefore off topic on HN.
That's not to say the issues aren't important; of course they are. But this site has a particular scope and repetitive flamewars aren't in it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I sympathize, and I've been doing my best to keep my comments narrowly focused on matters of fact rather than policy. This is one of the problems we face: facts have been politicized. And the politicization of facts is not evenly distributed along the ideological spectrum. That, too, is simply a fact.
Who exactly is rational middle in your view? Who exactly is right wing side and who exactly is left wing side? Is democratic party along with Joe Biden really controlling violent antifa? Is antifa actually killing people and attempting kidnappings? Is democratic party really attacking elections the way president is now?
The rational middle will be dwindling as long as they are always referred to in abstract without ever naming names.
I can’t speak for the person you’re asking, but Tulsi Gabbard is representative of what I see as the rational middle.
The only way you can see Tulsi as the "middle" is because the overton window has slammed so far right. In a rational society, Biden and Obama would be considered middle and AOC/Bernie left.
In most countries around the world, Sanders' policies are mainstream.
That's not entirely true, Sanders often doesn't support gun control
Yeah. Compared to the rest of the world, the entire left half of the political spectrum is more or less missing in the US.
The democrats are a center right party. The republicans are at this point, a far right party. It has been a deliberate strategy of the far right to paint the center as "socialism" (which a lot of Americans seem to mistake for communism...), because it makes their ideology seem less extreme. A lot of Americans have fallen for that nonsense, unfortunately. Definitions and framing and perspective matters a lot.
Honestly, socialism should be re-branded in the US as "Canadianism" or "Scandanavianism" to break free of that branding problem.
Americans aren't against socialized medicine or safety nets, just the "socialism" boogieman.
That’s not true. America, or at least its coastal big cities, leads the world in identity leftism. That is, the kind of leftism that finds its base in gays, transgenders, criminals, and other social “losers” (as opposed to economic losers) and their sympathizers. In fact, American leftists have contempt for the working class that used to form the base of old, economic leftism. They despise crass, vulgar, manly working men.
It’s obviously more complicated than this, but that’s the 5000 foot view.
You may be right. I may be right. You may view my response here as a false equivalency. Others might be frustrated and view one position as extreme and another as not. There likely is a false equivalency, but it will differ depending on who you ask.
This gets to a larger point. When the country was first founded, the different religious and political factions deeply distrusted each other. Religion was extremely important, and those who differed were considered wrong and/or corrupted in a way much deeper than I think modern, non religious people fully understand.
And yet despite this, they managed to cooperate with each other. It wasn’t perfect. And it didn’t always work; we did have a civil war. But it allowed for a regional plurality between peoples that were deeply different and factional, and no doubt considered the others evil or dangerous or a threat.
The only means by which I think we can escape this is a return to a respect for local autonomy. Allow people to shape the law where they live as they desire and reduce nationwide impositions. Give more authority to the states to create the world in which the people there want. If you think others would be trapped in repressive systems, give them a means by which to escape to yours.
Evil is perpetrated by violent coercion. The beliefs might be come to voluntarily, and may be more common in one framework than another. But the actual execution of evil requires coercion, which usually seems justified to the person perpetrating it.
Because the law inevitably requires coercion, coercion itself cannot be eliminated without lawlessness. But the laws people concede to can and should be varied. The social contract is only valid if the people have a choice. If we allow people that choice, people will flee the systems which coerce them unjustly, and they will wither. It will be painful to endure systems that seem obviously terrible without intervening. But there is no other way to audit your own biases then to let the people in each system decide which is better over time themselves, and no other way to avoid the inevitable violent conflict of imposing your values onto others who fundamentally disagree with them.
You misrepresent Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. She is no rightist. She has been one of the few voices for pacifism in Congress in the last decade.
There is no rational middle. Liberalism, the 18th and 19th century ideology that America was built on, is really just a truce between the monarchists and the jacobins. Everyone in between is simply confused.
Long time lurker, made an account just to commend the parent post. Then I read your post and made the account just to commend you. While everything he said is true, that doesn't necessarily mean that the truth is between the two candidates or two parties as it may imply. There is a status quo of mild corruption that has happened throughout almost any leadership, and there is an acute enemy to principles that hold modern and just societies in place.
Having thought about this carefully¹, I have concluded that my position is the rational middle. All other positions are inexplicably extremist while I have carefully cultivated an intelligent rational position. Unusual among Mankind, I have been blessed with the power to apply reason to terrible subjects. It is sad that all the other people are such extremists for if they weren't we could have had such productive discourse. I could've convinced them of how right I am by application of reasoned discussion of evidence. But alas, I stand beset on all sides by irrational fear-mongers, violent identitarians, and wishful communists. Disgusting.
Naturally, any rebuke of my position is evidence of their extremism, for steeped in their emotion they are unable to be rational. I, on the other hand, am wise beyond belief, empowered by the reason that Nature and my own path to self-growth have given me.
¹ To be clear, I always think about things carefully. I only mention this because it is clear that almost everyone else doesn't, as evinced by the fact that they do not agree with me.
This is a terrible opinion dressed up in nice writing and this approach is usually used as a tactic by far right conspiracy theorists to recruit people in doubt to their side. The left/liberal/progressive side is not nearly as offensive, manipulative, or fascist as the right/conservatives even in the most extreme cases, and saying so is harmful.
This is both-sidesism, which is an intellectually lazy excuse to avoid taking action while appearing morally above the fray.
Trump literally uses cult-like techniques to control his followers, traffics in conspiracy theories, attacks as "fake" any news media which doesn't praise him effusively, and is actively undermining democracy itself by claiming that any votes against him are illegitimate. There is no vaguely liberal or left politician in US history who has done what Trump has.
"antifa" isn't paramilitary or any other sort of group. It's a contraction of "anti-fascist" and is simply a tenet that many people hold.
"Proud Boys" are an organized domestic terrorist group, not a label for a set of beliefs.
There was real, violent, semi-organized left-wing radicalism in the USA in the 1970's. Not since. It may return! But it hasn't yet.
You might want to be more skeptical of the media you're consuming that led you to believe this. Or the persons you've been talking to.
I broadly agree with you. That being said, I don't think it's fair at this point to equate what's going on on the left to what's going on on the right. They are leagues apart.
That's not to say that the same thing couldn't happen on the left or that the people on the left in some way are superior. Quite the opposite. I think the people on the left are just as susceptible to the type of effects happening on the right.
I often wonder what would have happened if Trump had run as a democrat in 2016 instead talking about being pro-choice and how we need to get medicare for all etc. If he had run against someone like Ted Cruz, I would not be surprised if a lot of the left (myself included) had voted for Trump and excused all his talk as "locker room talk" or "speaking his mind" just like the right ultimately did. It may be nothing more than an accident that the right was the side that "fell victim" to his antics.
This brings me to a serious worry of mine. A lot of people are talking about how Trump is too incompetent to successfully install himself as a dictator, but that the next person may be much more competent. These "warnings" are directed toward the right. However, there's nothing that prevents the next dictator wanna-be from being on the left, and the left needs to be equally vigilant.
The left had something similar in 2016, in Bernie Sanders. The differences were that he didn't have the locker room talk (that I know of), and he didn't have the dictatorial tendencies (that I know of). But he was an insurgent from outside the party (he wasn't a Democrat, though he may have joined the party in 2016 for his run). In the same way, Trump wasn't really a Republican. (He did join the party, but somewhat recently.) Yes, I realize that this is degenerating into No True Scotsman, but both were outsiders who tried to hijack the parties. Trump succeeded, Bernie failed because the Democratic Party manipulated things and the Republican Party let things happen.
The groundwork has been laid, on both sides. And the Democrats got raked over the coals for tilting the scales against Bernie, so they might not do it next time.
To be fair, the Republican Party only let things happen after they tried really hard to get rid of Trump themselves.
I guess while he was an outsider I'm not sure that he would have proven to be authoritarian in the way Trump is. I'm mostly worried about our democracy and not necessarily so much about policies.
I agree; I specifically said that I had no basis for claiming that he was authoritarian. The rest is quite similar, though - the outside insurgency and the populism. So the playbook is there for it to happen on the left as well as on the right.
I don’t think the guy who said Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. was going to have a shot on the Democratic side.
Yeah, I was a little surprised at the assumption that Trump would be feasible in a Democratic Primary. Or, a larger segment of the party wanted to support people like Sanders and Warren for a specific ideological reasons. Plus, a lot of Democrats felt Biden’s views and past behaviour made him unsuitable to be president. It’s hard to imagine those same factions in the party nominating Trump.
I’m not an American though, so I may be missing some context.
I'm not necessarily saying that it could have happened, I'm mostly exploring how it would have played out if it had.
The left seems to suggest that only an immoral (or possibly dumb) person could possibly vote for Trump and that we need to put country over politics. That's easy to say when putting country over politics happens to agree with your own political views. I don't know if many democrats would have voted for a person like Ted Cruz in 2016 if Trump (or someone like him) had been the democratic candidate. I can almost certainly say that I personally would have played the same games of semantics that the right was playing then (and still are).
There's a lot of "right-shaming" going on when I suspect that it's just an accident that the right was the side that fell for it this time. The left should be extra vigilant to make sure that we don't fall for it ourselves.
>Both the left and the right [...] call basic and decent democratic norms into question (free speech, elections).
I only see Republicans doing this, but I am not American so perhaps my perspective is not as acute as someone "on the inside". Can you link to instances of Democrats calling free speech and elections into question?
I suppose you missed the 3-year period where Trump was supposedly a Russian agent who stole the election?
That's just the tenor of American politics right now in general.
No one made that claim except right wing media. They said, and this was proven, there was collusion among members of his campaign to influence the election.
When the left complained that Trump became president while several million more people wanted his opponent to win, characterizing that as 'stealing the election' does not seem particularly unfair.
And given the oddly pervasive connections between Trump's family and Russia, I can't really fault people for thinking there might very well be a connection. An awful lot of smoke, there is.
Honestly, the _incredibly_ numerous sexual assault complaints against him should have disqualified him at the start, especially when combined with his publicly indecent behaviour.
If you allow for someone to be disqualified based on accusations which haven't been tried in court how are you going to prevent that from being weaponized? In fact, isn't that what they tried to do to Biden this election?
There were a set of rules. According to the rules, he won. That's not stealing the election, that's winning by the rules. That's like saying that one team "stole" a baseball game because they had fewer hits than the other team. Yeah, but they had more runs, and that's the rules of the game.
> There were a set of rules. According to the rules, he won
Correct. Which is why most of the grousing centered around the electoral college being archaic and undemocratic. Many people want to see the rules changed.
And I'm fine with that. That's the approach they should take.
Claiming "they stole the election" is not that.
Perhaps not Democrats per se, but the left (particularly the university left) has had a real problem with free speech over the last several years. Cancel culture, deplatforming, mobs trying to prevent speakers from appearing, getting people fired, and so on.
The left is not friends of free speech, at least not the current US left.
But the First Amendment to your constitution is about making laws that abridge the freedom of speech. It's about protecting the freedom of speech from the government, not about protecting the freedom of speech from other people who are free to protest your speaking event at their leisure.
Getting fired because of views you espouse is not a violation of your First Amendment rights.
There is a difference between freedom of speech as a cultural concept, and as a legal concept. When most people say "freedom of speech", I doubt they mean it in a specific, literal legal sense, but rather as a vague idea, a general principle. That idea may include corporations being allowed to fire people based on their political views. But when it becomes standard behaviour for people not to mention their political views publicly due to fear of losing their jobs, I doubt that is the kind of society that will have freedom of speech in culture or in working legal sense much longer. Nor do I think that people have such a society in mind when they imagine a "free society".