2) and other witnesses wildly embellished their credibility, Joshua Merritt, aka "Spider" aka "Spyder" was listed as a military intelligence expert, while what is able to be verified is that he enlisted in the training program but failed to complete the entry level material.
The arguments have been made, the evidence has been examined, to say /no/ investigation has occurred is willfully misinformed at this point.
1)https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/politics/2020/12/04/evid...
2)https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/sidney-powell-...
I see no reason why all of them can’t be wrong (not necessarily intentionally lying).
It is curious that of all his public allegations against Dominion, he never asserted those in court. He is a lawyer and is aware of the consequences of asserting false accusations or frivolous suits in court. No doubt he will point to Sidney Powell and claim he was in good faith.
Most of the claims he made were pretty outlandish, and IMO he (especially as a lawyer) should now better. This is going to be interesting.
He publicly claimed that the Dominion machines "switched votes" even after the hand-count in Georgia confirmed that the machine count had indeed been accurate.
Proper investigations were conducted, and no serious issues found. The lawsuits were laughed out of court, even by Republican judges.
Its surely possible that all those "sworn affidavits" can be wrong in some way: AFAIK, they were either bogus, irrelevant, or from people who didn't understand what they were seeing because they hadn't bothered to familiarize themselves with the vote counting process before they became election observers.
The more pertinent question is: how could anyone still believe those lawsuits could have merit at this point? The sad answer is: disinformation works.
At least in terms of convincing "everyone" of anything, it's turtles all the way down.
This lawsuit will be an investigation of sorts. If they aren't baseless, dominion can't win.
Why not?
It's like when you hear a muffled audio recording but it's incomprehensible, and then you're told by a headline, "Can you believe Mr. X just said Y?". Then you listen again, and voila, you interpret the audio as Y. You've been primed to hear Y, so your brain hears it.
When you've been primed by all your anti-establishment media sources to see fraud, then you think back to that time 3 weeks ago when you thought you overheard two coworkers at the mail-sorting center talking about "post-dating the ballots". Well, maybe they didn't say "ballots" exactly... But it was "post-date the fourth", and surely they meant "November 4th", right? I mean election day was the 3rd, and they weren't trying to count late ballots, were they? But what else could they have meant? And they sure looked suspicious when I came over and interrupted them. I mean they didn't mention ballots again that whole conversation because I guess they were worried I would tell someone.
Reading through some of the affidavits and watching the interviews gives the impression that these are well-intentioned folks who just wanted to report something without understanding the context, and they've been primed for fraud. Unfortunately, they get picked up by politicians and media figures who have a clear pro vote-rigging agenda, and get made a martyr for the cause by plastering their face all over OANN, Project VERITAS, etc. It's depressing to watch.
Edit: For fun, here's a tweet demonstrating the audio-priming example you can try for yourself! https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1086436669413183488
I think what you say is true of most people, but it seems very clear that we have a group which doesn't behave like most people.
Are you asserting that some of the same people who filed affidavits also entered the capitol own jan 6th? Is there any evidence for this?
> I think what you say is true of most people, but it seems very clear that we have a group which doesn't behave like most people.
I think we as a society are moving past the whole "judge some people by the actions of some different people" thing.
For what it's worth I imagine many of them think they're telling the truth, or at least are honestly putting their name to something they've been told and believe. That also doesn't mean they're right though.
They could also just be wrong.
There's a reason why eye-witness testimony is one of the weakest forms of evidence there is.
Which is more damaging to US political institutions, having an illegitimate president or admitting that the election was stolen?
I'd wager an admission of election changing fraud would make it almost impossible to recover any trust in political institutions. What would be the next steps from admitting that the election was fraudulent?
Given the above, I'm not sure it matters. Of course that scenario is still possible, if evidence is produced. The institutional incentives align towards keeping the results as is. Proceeding from there, what can be done to restore trust?
*Disclaimer, please do not misread this as an assertion of evidence existing, not existing or the validity of it.
given the foregoing, are you sure you want people to trust the government?
Distrusting government would still make sense for me personally. It would be idyllic if people looked towards decentralization, localism and private solutions. Trust in their local institutions or community, while drastically reducing the purview of the federal government. That's just my personal preference. I'm not sure it is applicable in the widespread, pragmatic sense.
Some kind of political figure reaching across the aisle, recognizing the concerns of those who feel disenfranchised looks like the pragmatic solution that isn't happening. Instead I see actions and accusations that are predictably creating more division.
Well I don’t know, in 2017 a professor asked us if democracy was in crisis and I thought “its never been healthier”. For the first time I can remember, people were actually trying to hold the President accountable for something. Now it is true that most of that was driven by the fact that they didn’t like who the President happened to be at the time, so maybe we can get that to work in our favor again.
> More specifically, it would be nice if establishment media and political figures didn't respond to this distrust with castigation.
Well on the one hand I agree with that, but on the other hand this is the result of some complicated interactions (no matter how you view the facts on the ground). If their distrust is actually motivated and harmful then I’m sure its not an act for those establishment types to castigate it. On the other hand such activity is sure to increase distrust. So we’re stuck again.
> Distrusting government would still make sense for me personally. It would be idyllic if people looked towards decentralization, localism and private solutions. Trust in their local institutions or community, while drastically reducing the purview of the federal government. That's just my personal preference. I'm not sure it is applicable in the widespread, pragmatic sense.
I agree generally
> Some kind of political figure reaching across the aisle, recognizing the concerns of those who feel disenfranchised looks like the pragmatic solution that isn't happening. Instead I see actions and accusations that are predictably creating more division.
I agree
Biden, his cabinet, and tons of both Dem and Republican senators and other officials were arrested. Proof of their vast crimes was shown. They were court martialed and found guilty.
However, it was decided this was too much for the American people to accept. Overturning the election and showing the crimes of these politicians could lead to Civil War.
So an agreement was reached: Biden and other deep state elements wI'll be allowed to move freely and serve their terms. President Trump would "concede" and leave office. But this is all for appearances.
Behind the scenes, Donald J. Trump is still President. This plan, known as SHADOWPREZ, was seen as a last resort. But it worked.
Anything that happens in the next 4 years is actually President Trumps doing.
What steps can practically be taken to restore trust for the average person, who might not be as cynical as myself?
Nixon killed any real trust in the 70s generation that raised the 90s kids, and Bush v. Gore, the war in Iraq, and Obama era drone strikes on US citizens without trial have killed any real trust in the 90s kids who raised the current generation. The current adult generation is having that killed by what is going on right now.
There's been three generations of general distrust (if not outright cynical belief that the government is _always_ lying), and that's not going to come back any time soon. I'm not sure there is anything that you can do beyond radical transparency and time.
We're at this intermediate stage because the previous solution was to just give all the power to a bunch of people, likely the ones that killed more people.
Using elections instead of military power is an improvement over middle age, but you still have a bunch of people with a lot of power.
There's absolutely zero trust possible.
Maybe after western social democracies wreck the economy for the umpteenth time, people will try to remove power from governments until they disappear.
If either side is genuine about their beliefs, a first step is probably enforcing single-issue bills in Congress.
“Christianity” isn’t a unifying philosophy; even more recently than 50 years ago, the most dedicated evangelical/fundamentalist Protestant Christians were campaigning against the single largest Christian denomination in the country (Catholicism) as vigorously as against non-Christians, and many of our key religious freedom rulings were a result of Christian or Christian-adjacent groups (Jehovah’s Witnesses figure particularly prominently here) resisting impositions by more dominant Christian groups. Kennedy got much the same kind of attacks for being an (actual) Catholic as were directed at Obama for being (supposedly) a Muslim.
And if the short history in America were not enough, look at the troubled history of Christian-Christian relations in Europe and the Near East.
The problem I think is that you are starting from the assumption that America had a uniting mythos that only recently fell apart, rather than America having had deep, vicious internal divides throughout its entire history that were sometimes temporary subordinated to even stronger shared opposition to external forces.
> It wasn't always this vicious, or this pervasive in its viciousness, in my lifetime.
In our & our parents lifetimes, we had the "even stronger shared opposition to external forces" of Cold War opposition to the Soviet Union to keep these divisions in check.
America's divides have been terribly vicious in the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Kansas, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War), and some of the current things that divide us even have their roots in that era.
And even then, the Civil Rights and Anti-War and other internal conflicts of the 1950s-1970s weren't insignificant.
https://www.citizensvoice.com/news/crime-emergencies/forty-f...
https://www.phillyvoice.com/voter-fraud-pennsylvania-trump-e...
https://www.dailylocal.com/news/chester-county-man-facing-tr...
Which makes sense, when you hear from your news sources that the other party is committing massive fraud, that gives some people an excuse to do so too.
If anything it’s surprising that Pennsylvania only caught 3 Trump supporters trying to do it (see links in ancestor comment).