What’s Wrong with the World

Gaslighting? What gaslighting? We never insinuated, with the 1619 Project, that 1619 was the real racist founding of America. Perish the thought. Nevermind what we published (and then silently changed), nevermind we used imagery of 1776 marked out with 1619 written above it on a certain person's Twitter account. You're imaging things. And you're racist.

While we're talking about what might seem to be far-fetched theories, here (from this summer) is the CDC itself talking about "relocating" elderly people to "green zones" to isolate them from their families and from younger people. To protect them. No clear mention of how this will be accomplished and whether it will be forced, except for the following rather ominous quotation:

"While the shielding approach is not meant to be coercive, it may appear forced or be misunderstood in humanitarian settings."

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/global-covid-19/shielding-approach-humanitarian.html

Well, because it isn't really coercive if we force you to do it for your own good, ya know. (Our superior understanding of your own good being determinative, naturally.) Force isn't "coercive" when it's us wielding the force.

Besides, "may appear forced", but isn't REALLY forced. You just don't know how to correctly interpret the screams, sobbing, hands clenched on doorposts, etc. These are signs of people overjoyed at being sent to the gulag.

Tony, Tony, not wanting to be isolated from your family is a CLEAR sign of dementia, so of course we must honour what these people would "really" choose if they were rational by dragging them away in chains. To honour their actual choices as opposed to the ones I imagine they would make would be to enslave them to their dementia.

And you know, if they don't like living in our life-saving camps, well, we can always give them euthanasia to any who ask for it, or who we think would ask for it if they were free like us.

And I know what will be said about it: "This is being taken out of context, because the CDC was only talking about humanitarian situations like refugee camps and such."

Several problems with that:

1) So, you're a refugee family that has escaped from a tsunami and is now at the mercy of humanitarian workers in a refugee camp. Is it really so okay that they remove Grandma, who is already disoriented due to all that she's been through on top of her age, from the only familiar people she has left, to put her in a "green zone" in the refugee camp? Just because she's elderly? So even if this *were* implemented only in refugee camps set up for other disasters, it would still be inhumane.

2) The page and one of the papers they link also refers to low-income areas and urban slums as places to do this. So I guess if you're poor you're considered a legit target for this type of thing even if you're not in an independently set-up refugee camp.

3) Though more far-fetched, it isn't entirely beyond the realm of possibility (especially now when things are crazier than ever) that there could be humanitarian camps set up *for* housing people because of Covid, and presumably this sort of segregation would take place there rather than housing those people in family or household units as much as possible. There was a brief kerfuffle in the summer when Governor DeWine of Ohio was asking for money to set up FEMA disaster camps in his state to house people who "needed" to quarantine or isolate and allegedly didn't have adequate facilities for doing so in their own home. At the time he was asked quite a few questions by news personnel about how those decisions would be made, whether it would be voluntary or not, and the like, and he dodged them. As far as I know, those FEMA camps in Ohio were not set up and used but were merely an idea he was floating. Cynically, I suspect he was just thinking about ways to get federal money and wasn't really planning to be a scary totalitarian about it. But it was more than a little creepy nonetheless, especially since he apparently had no clearly Constitutional plan for deciding who had to go there.

he apparently had no clearly Constitutional plan for deciding who had to go there

The Constitution means exactly what he chooses it to mean, neither more nor less. The question is, who is to be master, that's all, said Humpty Dumpty.

These all fits and starts are basically early trial runs for future planning purposes.

Apropos of "the science."

https://fee.org/articles/lockdowns-not-linked-with-lower-covid-death-rates-new-study-finds

It seems that once people become deathly afraid of COVID, they become only capable of hearing "the science" that confirms or strengthens their fear, and deaf or forgetful of all of "the science" that tells them they need not worry--even when the fear-reducing science comes from the exact same source as the science that made them afraid. Hence the WHO calls for lockdowns and people want lockdowns, but when the WHO condemns lockdowns, that crowd still wants them.

Another example from Canada: our Health Officer has allowed schools to operate with much less stringent guidelines than other institutions because of a study that showed that the coronavirus is not a threat to children at all, and that there is not a single documented case of a child spreading it to an adult. They also explicitly advise against children wearing masks, because, being children, they will trade them with friends, fiddle with them, touch their face constantly, and likely increase their chances of catching illnesses.

And yet our fearless and ostensibly science-enamoured teacher's union is now clamouring to make the masks mandatory for the kids! And again, it is not as though this is some kind of "right wing science"--it comes from the very same person who, when she says something is unsafe, they trust without question.

I wonder how much of that is driven by social media, search engines, news outlets' biases, etc.

Hence the WHO calls for lockdowns and people want lockdowns, but when the WHO condemns lockdowns, that crowd still wants them.

Facebook, Twitter, and Google as far as I can tell are pretty explicitly manipulating content in exactly this way. They are making it more difficult to find the story about the WHO condemning lockdowns. News outlets write headlines that are blatantly biased on these matters, etc. So people decide what is the science based on what they see in their social media newsfeeds, what they get push notifications about from news sources, what comes up in their search engines.

On Facebook recently I posted a study on masking that showed that it doesn't appear to protect the wearer--a large study in Denmark, hardly some kind of right-wing thing. (Link below.) Yes, it's much harder to make such an objective, large study that measures whether masks protect others if the wearer himself is infectious, but the CDC has right up until the present been pushing that masks protect the wearer.

Facebook sent me a notification that it looks like I posted something "false" on their platform. They then covered up the picture that came with the link with a "false information" filter, saying that it had been "checked by independent fact checkers" and urging viewers to click to "see why." It was still (as far as I know) possible for those who follow me to go to the link and read the actual story, but obviously this was an attempt to make sure they didn't believe it. So it's pretty blatant. There are specific individuals (e.g., the individuals who run Facebook!) whose views are dominating and who have *decided* to suppress any science that doesn't agree with their predetermined conclusions.

Here's the link to a news story on the study:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/do-masks-stop-the-spread-of-covid-19-

Here's the link on Facebook showing the "false information" filter:

https://www.facebook.com/lydia.mcgrew.5/posts/10164350894610640

P.S. Watch for your Health Officer to change her views on schoolchildren masking in 3...2...1 under pressure. (In our state, our governor requires all children from kindergarten up, if you can imagine, to wear masks all day in school, and requires children *over age 2*, I am not making this up, to wear masks on buses taking them to and from childcare.)

I suppose some headlines reporting that Danish study erred slightly when they presented inconclusive results as "no benefit" for mask-wearing; but good heavens, what an astonishingly narrow distinction on which FB hangs its claim of misleading or false information.

The way scientific "consensus" has been achieved, not by way of a lengthy aggregation of data, but rather by aggressive suppression of dissenting scientists, really has been chilling.

Even without the active suppression of dissent, an incalculable amount of lost public trust derives simply from the excess of confidence, combined with the superabundance of sanctimony, which has accompanied so many official pronouncements on the pandemic. Caution, patience, moderation, humility: how thoroughly these eminently "scientific" virtues have been thrown aside, precisely when they were so greatly wanting, speaks to the fundamental folly of the human scientific project.

Pretty much any study purporting to show that "masks work" could be subject to analysis and questions and potential problems raised from it, no less than for the Danish study. But Facebook would never do the same for those. The one-sidedness is absolutely obvious.

Here's something really eyebrow-raising and interesting:

https://archive.is/Dfq6H

Another example of bizarrely heavy-handed content censorship by corporate entities:

https://news.yahoo.com/alex-berenson-speaks-amazon-censors-015813560.html

And Johns Hopkins deleted the above study from their site because it was "being used to support false and dangerous inaccuracies about the impact of the pandemic." What exactly these "false and dangerous inaccuracies are is anyone's guess. But the scientific research was extremely interesting and non-partisan. That, I guess, is why it had to be deleted. It was off-narrative.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/11/27/johns-hopkins-study-saying-covid-19-has-relatively-no-effect-on-deaths-in-u-s-deleted-after-publication-n1178930

P.S. Watch for your Health Officer to change her views on schoolchildren masking in 3...2...1 under pressure.

Oh yes, don't get me wrong, the woman is far from reasonable. She has just recently issued a decree in which bars, restaurants, and gyms all remain open, but you can't have anyone over to your house (but "grandparents may still provide childcare"), and you can't have any religious gatherings, get this, of any size. Most ridiculously, AA meetings are still a-okay, and guess where most of those take place--in churches. So you can have an AA meeting in the basement of the cathedral, but you cannot have a Mass in the gigantic cathedral itself with a congregation of even five people.

So yeah, the woman is all over the place. The relaxed guidelines at schools is just a rare place in which she shows something like common sense.

(In our state, our governor requires all children from kindergarten up, if you can imagine, to wear masks all day in school, and requires children *over age 2*, I am not making this up, to wear masks on buses taking them to and from childcare.)

I can't tell if there's more stupidity or wickedness in that, there's so much of both.

And again, even if the coronavirus were literally the Black Death (which it is emphatically not, as the John Hopkins study clearly shows), it would still be a stupid idea to mask the kids. Anyone who has spent any time at all with children that age in real life knows that the mask will just be one other thing they get dirty, with the added bonus of all the dirt going in their mouths.

(Not that you can keep much out of their mouths anyway--my almost-two-year-old still reaches into his diaper to snack on his own poop occasionally).

The fact that Johns Hopkins would deep-six the research, without casting any doubt on its integrity as research, purely on the grounds of how it was "being used," must strike any fair-minded observer as quite chilling.

Among other things, this decision has made it more difficult for interested people to dig into the research itself. (One obvious problem with it is that the research only includes statistics through August.) In any case, according to CDC calculations right now, excess deaths since February 1st in the US range from 260,000 to 360,000, and even excluding Covid-19, they range from 36,000 to 120,000.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

We've heard a lot about comorbidities and underlying conditions over these past months. It's clear now that Covid-19 is not a serious threat to the young and healthy, aside from (a) the possibly (though not the likelihood) of being laid up in bed for 7-10 days feeling miserable, and (b) the inconveniences of a lengthy quarantine. That said, underlying conditions start to pile up with a great many people starting in their 40s and 50s. High-blood-pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, etc. I'd wager that almost any death of someone over 65 will include underlying conditions, often multiple ones. Of course, many of these are treatable for years, even decades, while maintaining a full and active life.

That's why these excess death estimates are important for evaluating the real toll of the virus.

Here's a lengthy thread from late September that goes into much more detail on this grim subject:

https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1309866982070722560

The fact that Johns Hopkins would deep-six the research, without casting any doubt on its integrity as research, purely on the grounds of how it was "being used," must strike any fair-minded observer as quite chilling.

Ex-act-ly. I can't believe anyone (hinthint some of my Facebook acquaintances) needs that spelled out. We could spin out all day the ways that could screw up science. And will.

A more reasonable pundit, business, and governing class who (being more reasonable) knew not to act like a bunch of partisan hacks, phobic madmen, economic idiots, or gibbering totalitarian tyrants might have been able to prevent at least to some extent the rise of wacky theories "on the right" by retaining a few shreds of public trust in the first place.

Sure, the "look what you made me do" defense. When are Republicans ever going to take responsibility for their own "wacky theories" and spouting falsehoods? Literally every encounter the Trump campaign has had with the legal system post-election has been ruinous for their claims of massive conspiracy made to the public. The reason why is because there are actual consequences for lying in court. That alone should cause reasonable people to suspect the obvious, which is that the Republicans are cynically promoting this charade but cannot back up any of their claims with proof.

Of course, needless to say, if voting fraud were alleged with anything close to similar plausibility on the other side of the political aisle (that is, by Republicans) it would be pursued with Javert-like ferocity.

I must have overlooked the riots over this chicanery.
https://www.gq.com/story/north-carolina-ninth-district-fraud

The Denmark mask study was about as weak as a study can be. Less than half the participants claimed to wear a mask consistently, most of the rest claimed they typically wore a mask. The Denmark study itself gives this note about its limitations: "Inconclusive results, missing data, variable adherence, patient-reported findings on home tests, no blinding, and no assessment of whether masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others." But fine, with all those limitations and a result that did show a slight decline in mask wearers becoming infected, let's just assume that they are ineffective.

~~Sure, the "look what you made me do" defense. When are Republicans ever going to take responsibility for their own "wacky theories" and spouting falsehoods?~~

I'm neither a Trump guy nor a Republican, but I find it very hard to take any of this seriously when it's patently obvious that the entire mainstream media-information complex was in the tank for the Dems, and has been for four years. This is not to say that DT won the election. But it does mean that that the supposedly "unbiased" messengers steered the thing a certain way. And it stands to reason that if they did that in the lead-up to the election, they're doing it now in the aftermath. This is I why I don't trust ANYONE to get this right. And I firmly believe that if Trump had won the Dems would be doing the exact same thing the GOP is now, with the added spectacle of the mainstream media offering their services pro bono, while the cities burned in the background.

The idea that it is impossible that there could have been any election fraud at all is about as ridiculous as the idea that Trump could not possibly have lost. A bit of sobering up is needed all around.

Objectively speaking, no massive conspiracy is needed to pull off election fraud--the system seems quite vulnerable to it at a lot of different levels, so all that's really needed is a few individuals willing to lie in service of a "greater cause," which the modern world has in spades (and yes, on the right too, if anyone needs to hear that).

I strongly suspect every election has had some fraud. It's really just a question of whether there was enough fraud to flip the election. It is at this point some on the Trump side seem to lose their sense; this is an "I hate you both" election for a lot of people, which can always go either way.

One thing I would suggest is caution about how MUCH cheating goes on. I think everyone realizes there is likely to be some (hopefully small) amount of election cheating in lots and lots of elections. I think they hope that it is always a small amount that might sway very tight local elections - the ones where the total vote is maybe 5,000, and the difference winds up at less than 100 votes. It might not be so limited.

My first awareness of election cheating was when I was a kid: my father was a Conservative Party leader, and he observed (and tried to put a stop to) election fraud in some local races. What he observed directly was Dems cheating. He also suspected some Republican cheating, but that's not what he saw. But what he saw gives me reason to say "be cautious about how much is going on". It's because what he saw was clearly systemic in nature. It wasn't a single-year conspiracy by a small cadre of people out to steal one single election, it was a long-standing custom, a process that many people merely ASSUMED to be in place and to be followed because that's the way they were trained and the way "it was always done". The individual acts of stuffing boxes (for one side) and "losing" boxes (hurting the other side) was done by individuals, but they didn't apparently need itemized instructions each time because they already knew to do it like that. It didn't need high-level coordination (i.e. conspiratorial meetings etc) because the training had already been in place for a long time.

Now, I have no way of knowing whether this condition was repeated elsewhere, but my hometown was in no way singled out as a den of political corruption - indeed, one would have considered it relatively clean and free of such nonsense, from the political commentary and general awareness. Surely if the rest of the country can make jokes about dead people voting in Chicago, Chicagoans themselves know their own national reputation. But if my hometown was considered relatively clean, then anywhere or even EVERYWHERE might have also been just as clean. I.E. just as dirty as was actually observed. I can't tell. I don't know. Do you?

Admittedly, that was decades ago, maybe things have changed. I submit that there is little reason to be strongly confident that things changed for the better. Sure, the election process has changed a bit, but in-person voting has remained remarkably similar in terms of the method of verifying whether this person is eligible to vote. And mail-in voting seems far easier to corrupt than in-person voting.

And the different mores of the parties has changed. When I grew up, Dems were largely just as patriotic as Republicans, and at least in rhetoric they were just as vociferous about it. Not true any more. Many Dems would never use the term "patriotic" of themselves, and seem to go out of their way to avoid it coming up. Sure, out in the hustings on the campaign trail, politicians may call themselves patriotic, but they never use the term except when political advantage can be had by it. Except to sneer at it. While I have no doubt that there are cheaters in the Republican party (and in other parties), I do think that the Dems have managed to undermine one of what should be - and in other times would have been - a (at least partially) effective deterrent to massive, systemic cheating: that the participants would feel dirty in doing it, and (some) would balk at it. I don't think of Republicans (or those of other parties) as being better persons overall, but they don't have to be better persons all told to not have THIS particular character flaw as a common attribute.

Tony and Cameron,
I did not intend to suggest there was no voter fraud at all. Only that by the nature of the court cases and the drastic remedies sought the Trump campaign must prove widespread fraud which was enough to flip the election.

Taken on their own terms most of the theories being alleged by the campaign or its supporters don't make much sense. In Pennsylvania the Dominion machines tabulated more Trump votes in every county they were used in, but in Georgia they supposedly switched the Trump votes to Biden. Especially fatal for that conspiracy is that a hand count of all the Georgia ballots confirmed the machine count. Another allegation about widespread voter fraud and/or ballot stuffing is that New Mexico and Minnesota voters who collectively elected Biden also voted in new Republican House members and in New Hampshire they flipped the entire state legislature to the GOP. Are we supposed to believe the fraud was somehow limited to only the presidential race? The most devious claims are the ones that use misleading statistics to create the impression of nefarious activity during the count. The critical context is that the Trump campaign loudly discouraged mail-in ballots and Democrats promoted it, and that those most anxious about the pandemic (and hence most likely to use mail-in ballots) skewed by a 9 to 1 margin in favor of Biden.

Nice Marmot,
If the President of the US decides to call the majority of your profession the Enemy of the People, leading to death threats and other vile behavior, I trust you will fawn over that wannabe tyrant.

Step2: Sorry, but I do not understand your comment.

I'm not going to enter into discussions of the incidence and severity of various modalities of electoral fraud, except to note that it is radically implausible, given everything that is known about the parties, and especially the historical expertise of the Democrats in employing the very forms of fraud that are alleged of the 2020 election, that no significant fraud occurred. let alone that no fraud whatsoever occurred - and I have heard libs making the latter claim.

As for what the ordinary, apolitical masses believe, well, the elites have only themselves to blame if the common folk believe things at variance with what the elites deem to be the orthodoxy - political, religious, scientific, and so forth. The elites of both government and capitalism, of both left and right, have sold so many illusions - nay, lies - to the people, especially over the past 40-50 years, that they have long since forfeited any right, not only to the deference of the masses in matters where the elites claim some expertise (but I have a degree from Yale! or Look at my data regression on climate change, from which I deduce that the solution is to make you poorer!), but to being listened to at all. The fish rots from the head.

Specifically, I have no patience for liberal and Democratic lectures on faith in the integrity of the electoral system, a vast, duct-taped series of crooked kludges, if ever there was one, not after the past twenty years of liberal theorizing about stolen elections: Katherine Harris in Florida, 2000; Diebold Delivers in Ohio, 2004; Russian collusion and interference/memes/hacking in 2016. I'm not even saying that there was no evidence for the allegations made in 2000 and 2004, although everything alleged of 2016 was utterly cynical, meretricious, and fraudulent, only that the libs and Dems are not entitled to indulge their own conspiracy theorizing, in the absence of dispositive proof, and then deny the same privilege to the right. It is amusing, to the point of rolling on the floor, gasping for breath hilarity, to watch Greg Palast, who for well nigh twenty years, has insisted upon the theft of Florida in 2000, and Ohio in 2004, and countless other Republican electoral conspiracies in between and since, bend credulity to the point of rupture by insisting that the 2020 election was clean. Please. Do I know that the frauds perpetrated in 2020 were of sufficient magnitude to have altered the outcomes of several state elections? No. What I do know is that, if the irregularities observed in 2020, and attested by legions of affidavits, occurred in some foreign country whose government the US opposed, the State Department would be baying about fraud and calling for fresh balloting, and the entirety of the NGO industrial complex would be set in motion to engineer a regime change.

Nah, libs, sorry. Irrespective of the merits of any of the cases, you don't get to conduct yourselves as you have for the past 20 years, and especially over the past 4, mewling and - with regard to the demented Russiagate conspiracy theory - lying about your adversaries, and then turn round and insist on the purity and integrity of American elections. The rhetorical and political translation of these tendentious briefs is, "When we win, we win; but when we lose, it's only because we were robbed", which essentially means, "Heads we win, tails, you lose." Nah, sorry. Russiagate was a straight-up lie, orders of magnitude more damaging to the nation than anything Trump has done, or is doing now to contest the outcome of the election. I'm no longer listening.

Step2, I have yet to see news reports indicating Trump's attorneys have sustained any of their claims. On that ground, I have not accorded Trump's claims my support or belief - he hasn't substantiated them, so they are just claims.

That said:

In Pennsylvania the Dominion machines tabulated more Trump votes in every county they were used in, but in Georgia they supposedly switched the Trump votes to Biden.

I don't think that necessarily follows: what prevents there being different people involved in the two states in how the machines are used? The claim is that the machines are open to being abused.

Another allegation about widespread voter fraud and/or ballot stuffing is that New Mexico and Minnesota voters who collectively elected Biden also voted in new Republican House members and in New Hampshire they flipped the entire state legislature to the GOP.

So far as I have heard, one of the standard cheating technique is to fill out bogus ballots ONLY for the race you are seeking to change, not for all races, as it takes too long to fill in the whole ballot for all the bogus ballots. Thus what you mention would not be odd, if the total number of votes for the presidential race significantly exceeded the total number of votes for the other seats, in the same precincts. Do we have that info?

At this point I don't expect Trump to succeed in establishing his claims. I do hope that the country can and will move to transparent and verifiable methods of voting and tallying regardless of the outcome for this election. I believe such methods are theoretically possible.

Jeff aka Maximos,
"When we win, we win; but when we lose, it's only because we were robbed"

I suppose you could instead go with Trump's claim that when he won in 2016 he was robbed by millions of illegal votes, yet with all the vast resources of the federal government he sadly failed to find or prosecute any of them. The very stable genius is always the victim of fraud, never the instigator.

Russiagate was a straight-up lie, orders of magnitude more damaging to the nation than anything Trump has done, or is doing now to contest the outcome of the election.

Trump's more vocal sycophants are calling for invoking the Insurrection Act over a peaceful election and also for military tribunals for anyone, Republican or Democrat, involved in certifying the election results. The newly pardoned Gen. Flynn is only mildly less unhinged, calling for "limited" martial law and a new election under military supervision. So Jeff's statement is hopefully just extremely misinformed instead of being delusional.

Tony,
Understand that Trump's lawyers are basically circus clowns. Rudy ended up having to make comical changes like a press briefing at Four Seasons Landscaping, across from the crematorium and next door to the adult bookstore, reportedly because one of his witnesses (who doesn't even live in that state) is a convicted sex offender and isn't allowed to be within a half mile of a school. That is the degree of scam and incompetence going on with this group.

Misinformed? No, just observant. Martial law is not going to be imposed over whatever election irregularities occurred, but the damage to the nation caused by unelected bureaucrats asserting a right to override the elected branches on policy, and fabricating a ludicrous conspiracy theory to camouflage the assertion of this extraconstitutional claim, is, alas, all too real.

As for Trump’s claims in 2016, they were merely staples of right wing discourse, as much as voter suppression is a staple of left wing discourse, and both probably deserve to be treated with the same seriousness.

I drop in here from time time to time to see what intelligent conservatives have to say. I must confess this is the first time I've been really shocked.

What credible allegations of voter fraud are there? Trump's campaign has raised over 200 million dollars post election and hasn't been able to find any. His lawyers have not even *alleged* fraud in any of their recent lawsuits. (They were arguing the controversial claim that every change to voting procedures had to be approved by a state legislature like any other bill.) Trump's very own news channel has not found any evidence of fraud. Staunch conservative judges have determined the fraud-alleging lawsuits to be meritless. What you guys seem to be saying is that Democrats are slimy, so they must've cheated. Or something, I can't tell what. I understand if no one wants to engage, but I'm honestly bamboozled.

A couple other things:

"When we win, we win; but when we lose, it's only because we were robbed" Isn't that what Republicans are screaming from the rooftops right now? They are contesting none of the downballot elections they won (those are apparently perfectly legit, as if the cheaters didn't care to give the Senate to the Dems, or state races relevant to redistricting to the state Dems), just the big election they lost!

On voter suppression: for people on the left, voter suppression is not keeping voters away with a gun or barbed wire. It involves policies that make it harder to vote for no good reason. That Republicans engage in voter suppression is not a fantasy, it's their stated public policy. (I think the recent election turnout showed that it is bad policy, strategically speaking, so maybe they will change their tune.)

I also have no idea how Russiagate (where even Republicans admitted the Russians tried to interfere in US elections) is supposed to be worse than more than half of a political party *advocating overturning the results of an election to install their guy as president* but I'm guessing that's a normative issue we'll never see eye to eye on.

Actually, what Trump hasn't been able to show are credible charges of *enough* fraud to swing the election. That's a very different matter. As for specific instances, there are credible claims galore. A Democrat official was just arrested for some of them here in my own state of Michigan.

I'm a little surprised that you didn't notice how restrained I was. I'm explicitly not claiming that the election was "stolen." In fact, I doubt that it was, though a sober analysis indicates that it was closer than it appeared. Even a site that has consistently decried any kind of "overturning" or unconstitutional action and has been solidly against Trump's lawsuits (namely, National Review) has said that.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/biden-won-wisconsin-but-it-was-even-closer-than-reported/

https://www.lawofficer.com/michigan-state-police-arrest-democratic-official-six-felony-charges-election-fraud/

If there are credible claims galore, why can't anyone produce them? The article you posted is from 2018.

To be sure, the Democracy in the Park thing in WI might have been contrary to state law. The Wisconsin Supreme Court held that laches barred the claims (they ruled this way partly because the petitioners' proposed remedy was so absurd -- had the relief requested been more reasonable, the Court might have heard the case). NR puts it tendentiously when they said the Court "excused any illegality." They excused no such thing, because they did not reach the merits. But even if DIP *were* contrary to state law, it was not *blatantly* illegal. I've read the ruling several times.

But *this* isn't the kind of fraud everyone is talking about, and that about which I was asking for credible evidence. Elections are complicated things to run, especially in a pandemic. I have no doubt various officials will make mistakes. Technically, this is fraud (no liberal I know would deny it, though you can always find idiots saying dumb things from any political persuasion), and it has doubtlessly occurred in 2020, 2018, 2016, 2014, etc. etc. But, again, it is not the kind of fraud that Trump and the Republicans are going on and on about. The *entire* discourse around fraud in Trump Twitter world -- as well as many state Republican parties (AZ for instance) -- is about "late night ballot dumps," thousands of dead voters voting, and other fantasies that were being promulgated months before the election without any evidence! This is not idle rhetoric, and is being used to subvert a democratic vote. When that is the case, the kind of fraud that is going to be denied is the latter kind, because that's the kind of fraud that's taking up all the space. If the Republicans had acted like grownups, there would be room for conversation here.

I wasn't talking about gazillions of votes like that. Frankly, I think I've made that amply clear. I think the whistleblower in the post office is a good example of a credible claim, and his bullying by the feds was pretty slimy. But it may have affected only a few votes. Still, it should be prosecuted if his supervisor really did what he alleged. That was, as I recall, what I had in mind when I wrote the o.p. And the smooshing of that story didn't have a good look and was likely to encourage even more whackadoodle theories that *aren't* true. Is that rational? No. Is it human? Yep.

It's kind of bizarre that one can be a committed conservative who has never voted for Trump in one's life and someone is sure to come along and misunderstand what one is saying. I think it's a sign of what's wrong with our current political discourse.

Good catch on the 2018 election fraud. The arrest was recent. (One does wonder if this same election official was involved in the 2020 election.) Nonetheless, I actually do think there appear to be various specific claims of fraud that have sufficient credibility that they should be investigated, as I said in the previous comment. If someone insists on interpreting this as an endorsement of the vast claims made by the Trump campaign, despite my repeated disclaimers, there's nothing I can do.

Lydia, I honestly appreciate you responding. I fully understand you aren't endorsing the crazier claims made by Trump et al, and I haven't misinterpreted you on this point. Our disagreement is about a) the probability of there being "numerous" credible allegations of fraud in the malicious sense (a complicated dispute that I'm sure neither of us have time for), and b) the legitimacy of the (non-OAN/Newsmax) media paying little or no attention to those claims in favor of taking the air out of the crazy conspiracy theories aimed at overturning a democratic election. And some of my pushback was aimed at comments subsequent to your post. No one in this thread seems the slightest bit interested in this last issue, or apportioning responsibility where it belongs, which is with Trump and his allies bleating on for months about nonexistent voter fraud. (How many Trump voters heard about alleged fraud from Trump? All of them. This primes them for interpreting the postal worker case in a certain way.) As for (a) I better understand the scope of your claim. I still think it's easily used in a motte and bailey type way, and hence deserves to be shoved under the rug in the present circumstances. Had the Republicans been more responsible, it might not have merited such treatment.

Just fyi, from reading the blog, I know many of you are not Trump fans. If this were a Trumpist site, I wouldn't have bothered posting.

Lydia, I honestly appreciate you responding. I fully understand you aren't endorsing the crazier claims made by Trump et al, and I haven't misinterpreted you on this point. Our disagreement is about a) the probability of there being "numerous" credible allegations of fraud in the malicious sense (a complicated dispute that I'm sure neither of us have time for), and b) the legitimacy of the (non-OAN/Newsmax) media paying little or no attention to those claims in favor of taking the air out of the crazy conspiracy theories aimed at overturning a democratic election. And some of my pushback was aimed at comments subsequent to your post. No one in this thread seems the slightest bit interested in this last issue, or apportioning responsibility where it belongs, which is with Trump and his allies bleating on for months about nonexistent voter fraud. (How many Trump voters heard about alleged fraud from Trump? All of them. This primes them for interpreting the postal worker case in a certain way.) As for (a) I better understand the scope of your claim. I still think it's easily used in a motte and bailey type way, and hence deserves to be shoved under the rug in the present circumstances. Had the Republicans been more responsible, it might not have merited such treatment.

Just fyi, from reading the blog, I know many of you are not Trump fans. If this were a Trumpist site, I wouldn't have bothered posting.

I think National Review is mostly hitting the right note of actually advocating investigating fraud for its own sake but not getting on-board with the sweeping theories. After all, as I think I said in the o.p. (I literally haven't read it recently), it *is* a federal crime. And for a reason. It's a bit like counterfeiting. Suppose someone were a counterfeiter of $500 bills, very good at it, but didn't make enough of them to seriously diminish the value of the currency. (How could he, given how many dollars are already in circulation?) It would still be a crime. That's why (I swear, I'm not doing this just to save face) the police are prosecuting vote fraud from 2018, even though it's now moot. So...we definitely shouldn't sweep that under the rug. And the appearance of doing so only encourages greater craziness. So I tend to have an opposite idea of what encourages craziness, but in any event, the news media is supposed to report. We have too much going on already where the media are deliberately quashing genuinely interesting and important stories because they don't like the probable political effects of reporting them. That's not a good trend.