In January 6th, 2021, Donald Trump incited a riot on the US Capitol to try to overturn the US presidential election. Most people know that. But for those who missed it, I’d like to highlight the worst part. Prior to the riots, the Trump campaign deliberately tried to counterfeit the election results. The purpose of the riot was to demand that congress to accept the counterfeit.
In an obscure step of the US election process, each state submits a “certificate of ascertainment” that declares the final vote count and winner of the election. The Trump team submitted fraudulent certificates of ascertainment in seven states. Nobody was fooled by the fraudulent certificates, but the Trump team argued that Trump’s vice president Mike Pence had the power to accept the counterfeit certificates anyway. All they had to do was pressure Mike Pence to do so.
Therefore, the primary target of the January 6 riot was not democrats, but rather Mike Pence. Thus, the “Hang Mike Pence” chants from rioters.
Of the riot, we could maybe excuse it by blaming the rioters. But the attempts to counterfeit the election were premeditated by the Trump team. The certificates of ascertainment are created by representatives called “electors”, and the number of electors in each state is equal to the number of electoral collage votes. To create false certificates of ascertainment, they had people falsely pose as electors and hold sham meetings to create fraudulent documents. You can read about the cloak and dagger on Wikipedia. For example:
The Michigan fake electors met in the basement of the state Republican Party headquarters on December 14, 2020,[48] after Michigan Republican Party chair Laura Cox successfully opposed a plan to have the false electors hide overnight in the Michigan State Capitol.[49] They produced and signed multiple documents falsely stating they were the duly elected and qualified electors in the 2020 U.S. presidential election and containing electoral votes for Donald Trump.[48]
This is all a matter of public record at this point. The theory of the far right, is that Biden “stole” the election with voter fraud etc., and therefore a counter-conspiracy was necessary to correct the election results. But for the rest of us, it’s an unacceptable attempt to destroy democracy. Republicans can’t defend the indefensible, and they can’t openly deny the conspiracy theories of their far right base, so they mostly just avoid mentioning any of the details. They want you to believe that it was just a few people prancing into the Capitol Building, and not the treasonous actions of their party’s leader.
There are a lot of ongoing court cases regarding the situation, including charges against the fake electors in each state. Donald Trump himself was indicted by a federal grand jury in August 2023. The indictment has been supported by at least some Republicans, most notably former vice president Mike Pence:
Our country is more important than one man. Our constitution is more important than any one man’s career. On January 6th, Former President Trump demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution. I chose the Constitution and I always will,
I hate to hand it to Mike Pence but well said.
Kamala Harris 2024!
I’ve heard that people don’t just want to hear why Trump is terrible, they want to hear why Kamala Harris is great. Sure, Kamala’s great, love her. I defer to her election campaign to make the positive case. But it would be extremely difficult to be even half as great as Donald Trump is terrible.
There are lots of countries in the world with weak democracies. They hold elections, but nobody really believes the elections are legitimate, and they have “landslides” in favor of the ruling party. Trump has openly made attempts to turn us into one of those countries. He will try again. He is not fit for office.
Among folks who are disillusioned with the Democrats, or favor third parties, people talk about withholding their votes. I am enthusiastic about game theory, and so I must acknowledge that withholding votes is a legitimate strategy to gain leverage over the direction of Democrats. I just think… it’s not a good strategy. Politicians mostly ignore abstentions, because research suggests that those votes are not worth pursuing. Also, if democracy collapses, what does any of that matter?
Crush Donald Trump so that he can never run again; that will free up more time for us to bicker about the dems. Even if you’re in a “solid” state, make the Republican party fail so spectacularly that they cannot dispute it, so that they are forced to transform or disappear.
Personally, I will vote for Kamala Harris 2024. I have donated the maximum allowable contribution towards Kamala’s campaign (sending a check by mail rather than through ActBlue, to avoid the spam). I also vote against Republicans all the way down the ballot, in this election and every single election. I am not happy with every single Democrat in the local elections, but when a candidate is in the party of Trump it’s a massive red flag.
Yeah. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the mediocre. Because mediocre is the best you’re going to get right now, and I know that sucks, but abstention is not the way to change things. People abstained in 2016 and in return, the GOP got a Supreme Court supermajority for possibly a whole generation (but at least a decade), leading to the erosion of all kinds of rights (rights for minorities, abortion rights), and the most recent travesty stating that the president is, by default, above the law when performing anything that could be remotely seen as their job, and that courts must defer to this ruling, which requires an unclear standard of proof to actually find them guilty of anything. Voting is not enough (obviously)…but it’s still important.
Unless you’re an accelerationist. And if you are, I’ll tell you to piss off, because accelerationism is the worst form of privilege imaginable, as it effectively disregards the lives that will be destroyed in the name of eventual progress (new systems of governance, new kinds of economies, etc.). Those people are by and large those with little or no power in today’s world, the ones who can’t insulate themselves from the fascism that is theorized to lead to the upending of the entire world order. And just because society collapses does not mean that it will come back better. It could be worse. It could not come back at all. We can’t rely on naive pipe dreams to ensure our species’ survival into the future, and it is immensely unethical to risk it all (and to to sacrifice so many lives) in the name of an imagined utopia.
I’ve been kinda following Harris since she was the San Francisco DA, after reading her book “Smart on Crime”. She was my preferred candidate in 2020, and I started to feel some hope after Biden stepped down, endorsed her, and rather unusually, most of the Democratic party seemed to coalesce around her.
I’m also liking the ‘weird” strategy lately, and think she’s been giving pretty good speeches/showings lately, that are almost a direct opposition to orange asshole’s rallies. She seems gracious, names and thanks notable people in the crowd, and otherwise seems to make a note of other’s contributions and efforts. And she talks about Roe/Dobbs, project 2025, and liberty, which I think is probably a pretty strong attack angle. And brings up the successes/achievements of the Biden/Harris administration, and where she plans to focus her administration’s efforts.
I think she’s a pretty solid candidate, and her background as a DA and AG make her well prepared for an adversarial/confrontational situation, like campaigning against the former president.
I’m just saddened to see so many left-leaning folk unquestionably repeating/forwarding/reposting the old bullshit from 2020, much of which has been debunked, and strikes me as a targeted character assassination attempt (maybe by Russia, or another state actor?). I’ve got a pretty leftist acquaintance, who more than once has said “Kamala the cop”, and repeated the (debunked) claim that she personally argued to keep people in California jails to fight fires.
Yeah, she’s not perfect, and she’s not even that far left/progressive, but she is more so than a lot of the viable candidates out there, (and here’s where I tend to loose a lot of people…) but a president can only do so much by themselves… They can break things bad if they are hostile to democracy and the country (as the previous one did…), but they can only make as many progressive changes as Congress enables them. This idea seems to be very hard to convey to people, but also fits well with the “bus stop” analogy of incremental politics – this candidate may not be my ideal, but the are going in the direction I want to go, and even if they don’t go as far as I want, they are the most likely to get me closer to that goal.
I’m also frustrated by the repeated abuse of the recall elections more local to me (us?). 🙁
I would add here, because it doesn’t get said enough: call your elected officials’ offices. If you aren’t voting and you aren’t telling them what issues you care about, you will be ignored.
If you call your senator’s/representative’s office just twice per year, that likely puts you in the top 0.1% most politically relevant of their constituents, because they know you’re paying attention and their job depends on people like you. Do it, even if you think they won’t care what you have to say.
It helps to have an understanding of what they can actually do to support the issues you care about. Mostly they can vote for/against legislation (more relevant when one party controls both House and Senate) and influence federal funding programs (happens every year). There are advocacy toolkits for every kind of political issue online.
Calling or writing an email are easy to do. Even better is to set up a Zoom call, or an in-person meeting if you are near their office.
Well said!
Like I keep saying: You gotta put the tourniquet on, so the patient doesn’t bleed out, before you deal with the broken arm.
Yessssssssssss
Also I’ll put this link here, to the Vote From Abroad site https://www.votefromabroad.org/ I’m encouraging everybody, if you know any Americans living abroad, to send this link to them. Every state has different rules about how to register and how to send in your vote, and this site walks you through it.
I’ve been trying to promote the phrase “Vote in ’24, so that your vote will count in ’28.”