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This blog is about, again: Dealing with crises

April 6, 2021

This is something of a sequel to the post “What is this blog about?”

Multiple Crises

We are in the midst of several crises of ecological and social destruction, , mainly brought about by our processes of extraction and pollution. Focusing only on the climate crisis can be a distraction from, or a defense against, realising how deeply we are caught in these multiple crises.

The Eco-crises include:

Deforestation
Destruction of agricultural land, through mining, house building, over-use, erosion etc
Poisoning through pollution
Over-fishing
Ocean Acidification
Disruption of the Nitrogen and Phosphorus cycles
Pollution, and loss, of water supplies
Introduction of new chemicals and materials
Changes in weather patterns

There are also social crises:

of information,
of social and political fracture,
of wealth and power disparities, including poverty
of political corruption,
of insecurity of work and income for most people (what is often called ‘precarity’),
of psychological contentment (existential crises)
and so on.

All these various crises interact in complex ways. Loss of agricultural land, for example, will probably spur the fractures of wealth and power, increase poverty and increase insecurity.

Part of the aims of this blog is to identify the problems, the underlying causes of the problems, and the ways we might come to change our minds and actions so as to deal with those problems.

Complexity and wicked problems

Complexity [1], [2], [3] adds to the difficulties of solving the crises. However, complexity has to be part of our understanding of social problems.

The term ‘wicked problems’ is used for problems:

Which don’t have a standard precedent, or standard formula for action; or the precedents and formulas appear to dig us deeper into the problem.
With no universal formulation; every wicked problem appears to be unique.
The people involved are in conflict, with different opinions and different aims, and there does not seem to be a possible mutually pleasing or agreeable solution. So solutions are likely to be undermined by those participating in the process, or prove unstable in the long run.
There are many linked problems, factors, drivers and consequences. The problem branches out into the systems.
Knowledge of the situation is obviously, and perhaps dangerously, incomplete. Some important people may dispute we have any knowledge.
There is little certainty a solution can be found in the time available for solving.
The problems are likely to change over time.
Solutions can also change the nature of the problem, and create further problems.

Wicked problems are systemic problems within complex systems. They sound impossible to fix, and hence are psychologically disorienting.

However, I’d say it is very difficult to fix the system rather than impossible. But the longer we leave it to stop what we are doing to disrupt the system, then the harder it will get to ‘fix’ it – or to keep it livable for the kind of society we might like.

It is easy to forget that we have always lived in complex systems and, in general, humans survive quite well – it’s not as if ‘wickedness’ or complexity are new phenomena, just something we often don’t recognise in contemporary societies.

If we remember we live in complex systems with a degree of unpredictability and uncertainty, and need to modify actions as we go along (and observe what happens), rather than assume we know in advance, then this realisation can change the ways we act, and process the results of our acts.

Complexity implies learning as we go along, trial and error, and so on.

It can also be helpful to pay attention to other sources of information than just our standard orderings. Information is a real problem nowadays, partly because there is so much of it, and so much of it is evaluated by whether it fits in with the politics of our ‘information groups’ online or in the media, and sometimes information primarily relies on the techniques of magic.

Social breakdown?

We are currently not organised to solve complex problems of great magnitude, but this does not mean it is impossible.

People may note that many large scale societies seem disrupted by ‘tribalism’ I don’t like the term ‘tribalism’ because not all forms of organisation we call tribal, have the features people use the word ‘tribal’ to indicate, However, the UK was at one time incredibly split and diverse, with big breaks between people. Papua Niugini was likewise one of the most diverse and splintered countries ever, with more completely different languages than any other country in the world. Both those places are now reasonably together, PNG in a remarkably short time – even if there are still obviously problems. We can, and have reduced the problems of ‘tribalism’ in the past.

Consequently, I don’t think there is any inevitability in the idea that people cannot unify or recognise difference and be able to live with it.

We may need to look at more closely, is what kinds of patterns of social organisation promote ‘gentler competition,’ more cross-social empathy and a sense of unity and, on the other hand, what patterns promote faction. That has become a recurrent theme on this blog – observing the ways that contemporary political communication patterns depend on the creation of enemies and outgroups, to bond the ingroup together behind the rulers.

My suggestion is that the patterns of behaviour over the last 40 years have increased the factionalisation of the US, for example. Things can get better or worse. But if we think the world is hostile, and prominent people encourage this thinking, then we tend to retreat from being-together, into being against each other. If we think that different humans can get on pretty well in general, and there are fewer forces promoting separation, then we are more disposed to try and get on.

We have also had times in human history in which the difference between the top and the bottom of the wealth hierarchy was not that great in terms of poverty, we have had times in which living conditions improved for a lot of people, and we have had times of better social mobility than others. These kinds of conditions need to be investigated without dogma, and without trying to prove that our dominant groups are really the best ever, or that hierarchy is essential – hierarchy is common, but hierarchies can vary in depth and separation between levels.

I have this vague suspicion that if we had encountered eco-problems we face now, in the 50s or 60s of last century, we would have found it easy to do a better job of handling it. We had a better sense that we all were all in things together, that sometimes money was not the only thing – and we had a growing sense that the world was fragile, which was useful, if threatening to some people.

Conceptual steps

It is now not uncommon to recognise the issues around complex systems, once people become aware of them. It is not hard to gain an awareness of the dangers of ecological destruction. It is easy to gain some sense of the political confusion, and learn that this confusion is not necessary, if you are not afraid to take on established destructive powers and habits. There are lots of people working on these issues; they even get some coverage in some media. There is a lot of effort put into discrediting science, on behalf of profit, but we can still learn if we want to.

As implied above the first step is to recognise that we do live in a set of complex systems, and that we need an experimental politics that looks for unintended consequences, and is prepared to modify policies depending on results.

We then need to be able to live with some levels of uncertainty and skepticism towards our own understandings – which plenty of people do already. In this skepticism, it is useful to be aware of the difference between real skepticism and directed skepticism, in which you are only skeptical of the out-group’s ideas, and use this apparent skepticism to reinforce your own dogmas.

We need to be able to recognise the ecological crises are problems, and that we probably cannot survive without working ecologies, and that societies previously have seemed to collapse because of ecological crisis. Dealing with the problems cannot be postponed indefinitely.

We need to understand that everything operates in contexts, and that changing the context can change the whole system, or even the meaning that some events have for us.

We probably need to be able to perceive some things in terms of continua, or statistical difference, rather than as binary opposites – because it is more realistic, and allows greater communication.

We need to be able to recognise that people are hurting because of the social and eco-crises, and that we cannot afford to have that pain be commandeered by fascist-like movements who try and impose more dogmatic order on the world.

Talking to each other with as much respect and kindness as we can, is often a good start.

Practical steps

While we cannot solve the problems entirely by ourselves, and they can seem overwhelming, it is useful to make whatever start you can, by yourself if necessary.

I’ve seen books which have long lists of things people can do:

learn as much as you can,
cut your electricity usage and bills as much as you can,
turn the heating down, and wear warmer clothes if possible, when its cold.
buy food from local producers,
buy organic food when you can afford it,
eat a bit less meat,
sit with local plants, get to know your local environment,
be careful what weed killers, insecticides and fertilisers you might use,
don’t use bottled water unless you have to,
avoid buying plastic,
engage in recycling even if it does not work,
don’t use a car for short distance travel if you can walk,
contact your local representatives about ecological and climate problems,
sign online petitions (if you don’t sign them, they won’t count),
engage in, or help organise, street marches or blockades. Start with the easiest first,
talk to friends about the issues, but not aggressively,
write about heavily polluting local industries to the owners, managers and local politicians,
buy ecologically principled renewables if you can afford them, or get together to explore organising a community buy in, if you can’t,
if you have superannuation, try and make sure it is not invested in fossil fuels or other ecologically damaging industries,
if you do buy shares, buy them in beneficial businesses,
let politicians and business people know that climate change and preserving the environment are important to you.

I’m sure people can think of other things which could make a difference in their area – even showing your support for other people who are doing the work is good.

If you are retired or young, you get extra opportunities to practice these kinds of things, and to work out what to do.

All these actions may sound trivial, but they will help a little. The greater numbers of people who act, then the greater the effect, the more it becomes part of their habits and common sense, the more it becomes part of social common sense, and the more it carries political weight, and the further sensible action will go. Find the things you can do and do them. Even better if you can join do them with others, as that helps support your actions and widens them, but the main thing is to do them.

We are helped in this process of change because of two factors:

1) small events, especially small accumulating events, can have large effects in complex systems, and

2) people tend to emulate others; so if you set as good example as you can without forcing it on others, then people may pick up the ideas and actions themselves and these actions may spread – and that builds a movement, even if it is not organised.

If you identify as part of the ‘political right’ and you think climate change is a danger, then it could be even more important for you to set an example, as people are more likely to learn from those they identify with, or classify themselves with.

There will be opposition to your protests, but that is life….

Old regulation

One of the main things that obstructs renewables in Australia is regulation, and I’d guess that would be a factor in most places. Markets tend to be regulated to favour those who have historically won in those markets, and those regulations often make assumptions which are no longer accurate. When something new starts, it has to fight against the established regulations. There are few markets without regulation. If there are no regulations then there might be ingrained corruption.

Anyway, finding out the regulations, finding out where they stop change, and agitating to change them, or draw attention to how they work, can also be useful. Politicians, or people in the market, may not even be aware of the regulatory problems

Climate Generosity

I’m interested in the idea of climate generosity as opposed to climate justice [1], [2]. It seems to me that people living in the justice or fairness framework, often behave as if they should begin to act when it’s fair, and that other people should act first to show them it’s fair. People are always saying things like “why should we destroy our economy while they are still polluting?” and so on. Leaving aside whether action on climate change necessarily involves economic destruction, we can’t really afford to wait. So we may need to just be generous and act before others act. We might be being exploited by those others, but who cares if it encourages more people to act and we survive?

This is another reason to act, even if it seems pointless.

Generosity is quite normal human behaviour. We might give gifts to gain status, or gain advantage, but that is fine. It often feels good to be generous and helpful. How we act is up to us: we might try and gift solar panels to a community building, even better if we work with others. We might try to get our politicians to use our taxpayer funds to help gift solar panels to a village, rather than force a coal mine on them, we could try and raise money for this ourselves.

Again we might talk to people and find out what they want rather than we think they should want, and see if it’s possible to help them get it with minimal ecological damage. Gifting is fraught, but you can increase the beneficial nature of the gift, by finding out in advance whether people would like it, and whether they will accept it, and understand that no return is expected, except for them to use it and acknowledge it. There are all kinds of ways to proceed, and involve others. Most people can at least make a present of some of their time.

Generosity reputedly helps people to feel good, build relationships, creates meaning and allows action. It helps solve the existential crisis.

Environmental relating

Sitting with, and observing, your environment can be fundamental to relating to the world, and getting a sense of how it works and changes, how important it is to you, and how much a part of it you are. Almost everywhere that people live there is some sense of environment, some form of nature.

One of the problems with renewables at the moment, seems to be that the people installing them think primarily in terms of business and money, rather than in how renewables can be installed with relative harmony, help people relate to their environment, and be socially fair and appropriate. This is partly because of the success of neoliberal ideologies in shaping people’s common sense and sense of how the world works.

The number one bad?

One of the most dangerous things that has happened in the last 40 to 50 years is the triumph of ‘neoliberalism’. Hence I write about it a lot on this blog [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and so on.

Neoliberalism is the idea that only important social function is business. The only responsibility of business is to make profit. People are taught that business can do anything, and that what it wants to do, must be good, that wealthy people are inherently virtuous, and that the job of government is to support established business and protect them from any challenge at all. This is usually justified by a kind of naïve Marxist idea that the economy determines everything else, so a ‘free market’ must mean freedom. But the idea is nearly always used to structure the economy to support the established wealthy, who can buy policies, buy regulation, buy politicians and so on.

A standard neoliberal process is to strip away regulation of the corporate sector, particularly ecological regulation, and try and regulate ordinary people so they cannot stop corporate action. Common tools of neoliberal economic policy include taxpayer subsidies of corporations when they face trouble, selling off public goods and profit to the private sector, tax cuts for corporations and wealthy people, and cut backs in the helpfulness of social services and making social services punitive. The main idea is that the wealthy deserve even more privilege, and the poor deserve less.

As such, neoliberalism has helped lessen the sense of possibility, and collaboration, that I referred to above. I suspect that neoliberalism, and the power relations that go with it, have done more to slow our response to the problems we face than anything else. This is not to say that free markets are not useful tools, but they are not the only tools or always the best tools, and neoliberals tend to want to structure the world so that it helps markets, rather than structure the market to serve and preserve the world. Indeed many people will argue that the idea of structuring the market to serve the world and its ecologies is tyrannical. But the basis of all economies is ecology. If we don’t make sure the ecological system can regenerate all that we take from it in a reasonable time (even, or especially, in a bad year), then we are on a dangerous path. Neoliberalism seems inherently opposed to action to stop ecological destruction [1], [2].

One reason neoliberalism is harmful, is that its supporters cannot win elections if they tell people that their primary interest is transferring wealth upwards, increasing the power of corporations, rendering ordinary people powerless, and making ecologies expendable, so they have to lie, stir up culture wars, and build strong ingroups to have any chance of victory [1], [2]. Now, in the US, they appear to be trying to stop people from voting. Sadly, the end point will probably be something like fascism [3], [4], [5], [6].

Neoliberalism suggests that ordinary people have no ability to cooperate (and should not cooperate outside of their jobs), are largely competitive and selfish, poverty is a moral failing, and that money is the measure of all virtue.

Any conservative should be able to tell you:

a) that people are cooperative and competitive, and that for good social life we want a competition which builds cooperation amongst the population rather than destroys it,
b) people are selfish, but they are not only selfish, and
c) virtue has little to do with money.

So we have to move on from the idea that it should be forbidden to criticise markets in politics – or perhaps more precisely, the players in those markets and the way they play. Tax cuts for wealthy people are not the only economic policies which exist.

The problem of virtue – the prime dangers of renewables comes from companies not from renewables

We should never assume that because a project appears to be virtuous, and we support its virtue, it will not have harmful effects. Furthermore, our ideas about the project, and how it works, may be completely wrong.

This applies to everything. Recognising that a virtuous, useful project that we completely support can have harmful and unintended consequences is fundamental to an experimental politics, and to navigating complexity.

So far the main problem we have had with renewable energy, is that we are often (although not always) carrying out the transition through the normal ways that we have carried out business and development in the past. These ways of proceeding have traditionally harmed people, and harmed ecologies, partly I suspect because they have always put development, business and profit ahead of those people or ecologies. So we have to be careful.

For example, production of solar panels can involve ecological destruction through mining or pollution. The factories can have harmful working conditions – workers can be poisoned. Disposing of old, or broken, panels can create pollution. We face the usual consequences we might expect from attempts to increase profit, without any ecological or social concern.

Biofuels have in many places resulted in small farmers being pushed off their land, loss of casual farm work for people without land, breakdown of village relationships, deforestation (which goes against the point of the fuels), replacement of food crops with fuel crops pushing up the price of food and leaving people short of food. Biofuels have resulted in greater use of fertilisers which may harm the soils and rivers, they may consume vast quantities of water which can threaten local livelihoods, if rain is rare.

It’s pretty obvious that cultivating vast areas of monocrops takes fuel burning, and making and transporting the resulting fuels can take fuel burning. As well, it usually takes much longer to grow biofuels than to burn them, so it is not immediately obvious that, unless fossil fuel consumption is significantly curtailed by these processes, that it is actually helping at all.

Likewise, wind and solar farms can involve companies fraudulently stealing land from small farmers (people I research with have observed this in action), can involve secret agreements which split townships, unclear distribution of royalties, disruption of people’s sense of the land, agreements that do not involve local people or only involve some local people, fake community consultations, use of water which is in short supply to clean panels, destruction of jobs without replacement and so on. Sometimes it can even involve organised crime, or militia’s, intimidating opposition, forcing people to sell land, or provide ‘services’ for the non-local labour that has come in to install the renewables.

Even events like attempting to conserve forests can lead to traditional people who have lived pretty well with the forests for thousands of years, being thrown out of the forests and becoming homeless.

It should be clear to anyone, that an energy transition does not have to proceed like this, but this is how normal developments proceed at the moment. Mining is often surrounded by local protest and horrendous treatment of local residents, and even poisoning. Having a large chain supermarket arrive in your town, can destroy local business, and create unemployment amongst previous business owners. However, for some reason or other, many of the people who lead country wide protests against wind farms, do not see a problem with mining, even when destroying agricultural land completely, perhaps because they think mining is virtuous. However, it is not just renewables that cause problems, it is the system. So the system needs change, at whatever levels we can manage.

The point is we need to have more care about how we proceed, and more awareness of the problems in virtuous projects without feeling we have to abandon them. If people get dispossessed by renewable companies, behaving as companies often do, we need to stop this, as they may tend to react with hostility towards the transition in general, when the problem is company behaviour not transition.

This blog aims to explore some of these effects, and suggest possible remedies. We cannot afford for business to behave like this, so renewables companies must be regulated to engage with communities.

Perhaps this means that community based renewables are a better way to go? People working as a community are more likely to listen to each other, and to relate to the place they are working in – which does not automatically mean harmony of course. If this is true, then it again demonstrates the importance of working at a local level – even in cities.

The downside is that careful processes take longer and slow progress down, but we want a liveable world at the end of it.

Problems of Fantasy Tech

Finally, some imagined technologies like ‘clean coal,’ ‘carbon capture and storage,’ or geoengineering [1], [2], [3] often act as ways to reassure us we can continue on as we are doing, and suggest we can fix everything up with a future technological add on to the process. These technologies currently do not exist safely, or are not working at the rates we need. It is generally not sensible to imagine that a working technology must appear because we need it, or in the right amount of time to solve our problems. That is just fantasy. While we should research new technologies, we also have to act with the technologies we have now, as well as we can. Further delay, because of technological fantasy, just makes the situation worse.

Tags:complexity, Disinformation, disorder, neoliberalism, renewable energy, social action, social category theory
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Is climate change overblown by the left?

March 23, 2021

Given that the world is, on the whole, not anywhere near necessary targets, according to the latest UN NDC Synthesis Reports issued February 2021; then if “the left” are being overblown, they are not having much influence.

This is as you would expect. Most people in the developed world, don’t want to change their lifestyles – and given that most people in that world seem to be going downhill due to neoliberal privileging of business, transfer of wealth upwards, and nannying of the wealthy, why would they want to risk going even further backwards because of attempts to fix global warming? This is the usual reason given for working class anger in the US, and for ‘populism’ (assuming that word means anything). Furthermore lots of powerful people do not want to lose the wealth they have tied up in fossil fuels, and they don’t want to risk the possibility that new forms of energy could increase democracy or impoverish fossil fuel companies.

These wealthy and powerful people can buy politicians, can buy media, and can buy the idea that climate change, global warming, massive forest fires, massive flooding, ecological destruction, over-fishing, destruction of agricultural lands, deforestation, loss of animal life etc are not really a problem, or they occur all the time, and that imagined technological invention can save us, without any political or economic change. This seems well documented to me.

They have captured mainstream parties all over the world, with the possible exception of UK conservatives, who actually seem to be trying to reduce emissions – not that this gets reported much outside the UK (remember wealthy people own the media, or advertise in it). UK conservatives, do tend to have a real conservative streak because they believe in conserving things (which is pretty unusual in the Right nowadays), and they don’t always believe in encouraging business to destroy their country….

In the developing world many countries, believe that fossil fuels and ecological destruction are necessary for development, and that it is their turn to engage in destruction for the benefit of their people, and that developed world objections to this are a form of neo-colonial racism. They say something like “get your own world in order before complaining about us.” So, on the whole, many relatively powerful people in the developing world downplay the problems as well.

Again the point is, that if the left is overblowing global warming they are not having much of an impact, and one of the leading forces for emissions reduction is not remotely left wing.

The next implied question is “are the left exaggerating the dangers?” Personally I think it is unlikely that the majority are. Some will be of course, this is what happens. Most scientists and people who study the subject, seem to think that bad things, to very bad things, could happen. Strings of high ’unprecedented’ temperatures in the Antarctic are clearly not good. World wide highly intense and ’unprecedented’ forest fires are not good. Declines in fish population are not good. The apparent death of large expanses of coral reefs is not good. Places having streams of days over 40 degrees centigrade are not good. Strings of destructive storms are not good. And this is with only 1 degree increase. What we will have with another couple of degrees will probably be really bad.

One issue here is that because ecologies and climate are complex systems we cannot predict how bad things will get. We do know, that once you knock the systems out of their balance and equilibrium, they tend to oscillate wildly, which probably means increasing wild weather, but precisely what this will mean, we can’t tell until it happens. However, the chances of good things happening for most people seem remote. I guess, if you are wealthy enough, you can move to and buy somewhere safe and remote and perhaps you can buy the people to provide you with food etc….

I don’t think it is altogether sensible to wait to see what happens before acting, because there almost certainly will be a delay. If we act now, then things will continue to get worse for a number of years. The later we act then the greater the probability that the situation will get worse for longer after we stop. So we have to stop before it gets unendurable.

I personally think the idea that action on global warming or ecological destruction is not particularly left wing at all. Real conservatives should be concerned. Even if you think that global warming has nothing to do with humans, then you might want to think about how we should prepare to adapt to changing circumstances, and how we should lessen the effects. Climate and ecological action is about dealing with, and lessening, anticipated problems, which is pretty normal across the political spectrum.

After all, ordinary people do want forests, do not want to breath coal and oil pollution, don’t want a coal mine next to their house, don’t want flooding, don’t want the price of food to go up and face food shortages, don’t want climate refugees, don’t want (if they live in hot countries) to work outside in 38 degree centigrade (100 degrees F) or more temperatures and so on. However, the wealthy elites have successfully managed to label action on these issues as ‘left wing’, probably in an attempt to make those people who identify as conservative, right wing, or libertarian shy away from action, and not think about what would be a good solution. This helps those sponsoring people maintain their power.

Climate change and eco-destruction is real and does seem to be humanly generated, (which is absolutely obvious in terms of eco-destruction). If we do discuss what to do then the arguments about what we should do, are likely to be political – and this is good.

Personally I would rather have people on the right thinking about solutions, than attempting to sabotage solutions, or attempting to prop up a failed regime, and UK Conservatives show that this is possible…

Tags:climate change, Disinformation, neoliberalism, politics
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“There have been billions of years of climate change”

February 24, 2021

People quite often object to the idea of climate change, by saying that climate has always been changing. They triumphantly point out that there have been billions of years of climate change. Temperatures have been much higher than they are now and things still lived. Life will not end. Then they ask, why is it that alarmists neglect this fact?

The problem is that we ‘alarmists’ do not ignore this fact. Indeed if you believe we do, then you are probably not getting your information about alarmism from scientists. I know of no one interested in climate change who is not aware that there have been large numbers of different climates in Earth’s history and that many different kinds of creatures who have flourished or died out in these different climate regimes. No one expects life to die out completely in the current process of climate change, either.

What some people do say is that the Holocene period, which is the one in which humanity has been living, has been remarkably stable. During that stability, humans developed civilisations, which tend to fix us in place.

We currently seem to be facing a rapid period of climate change, ecological destruction and biodiversity loss; one measured in hundreds of years, not tens of thousands of years. This will almost certainly put massive stress on civilisations, the weather conditions will change, sea levels will change, water availability will change, food availability will change. As the change is rapid the chance is high that storms will increase. People will try to move from areas which no longer seem habitable to areas which do seem habitable. All of these factors will add further stress to civilisations.

So the big problem is not climate change in itself. One problem is whether it is likely that any of the current major civilisations will be able to cope with these stresses without significant social breakdown and population death. The other problem is whether any of them will do anything to significant lower the pressures, or the rate of change.

Countries are not all in a resilient place to begin with. Some civilisations may already be breaking down irrespective of climate change.

For example, many people in the US expect income and wealth inequality to grow and standards of living to continue to decline. By some accounts many of those people already suffer from unstable low incomes, food shortages, unaffordable medicine and rampant disease, and we have only just started moving into the additional problems of climate and eco-crisis. Given the US’s inability to keep its infrastructure repaired, protect its population from Covid-19 (now over half a million dead, and unknown numbers with ‘long covid’), look after people equally or rebuild after violent storms as in Puerto Rico [1], [2], or New Orleans (still), or prevent the energy consequences of a cold snap in Texas, then it seems improbable business and government will be able to cope with severe and added difficulties. They may, but it seems sensible to reduce the magnitude of the problem in advance, if that is at all possible.

Unfortunately, dealing with this change seems to threaten the power and wealth of some powerful groups of people, and they are doing their best to persuade people that it is not a problem. And they are doing this quite well. But for them its not a problem, they figure the ordinary folks will be the ones that suffer, and they can ride it out. They have wealth, they can buy violent protection, they can buy technology that will keep them safe. They may be even be correct, but do you want to sacrifice yourself, your friends and family to preserve these people’s power?

We can stick with helping the crisis to happen if we want, or we can ‘do the research’ overcome the misinformation being distributed, and try to think of solutions. If you really do think that people who are worried about climate change never consider that climate change has occurred in the past, then you might also want to think about why the people giving you your information about climate change alarmists are lying, and why.

Tags:climate change, Disinformation
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Paying for Links

January 28, 2021

The Australian Government is proposing legislation which means that google, and Facebook, and presumably anyone else will have to pay for ‘using’ media items.

The problem for me is that Google and Facebook, do not (as far as I know) take media items and put them on their websites without acknowledgement, or steal articles as the government and its media backers allege. They put up headlines, possibly a lead image, perhaps the first couple of lines of text and a link.

Providing a link to a news media item does not seem to be stealing the product; it is linking to it – it is in effect providing a free advertisement for the content.

If a person clicks on that link they get taken to the site (unless it is behind a paywall). This then gives the publisher the eyeballs. It gives the publisher the advertising revenue and so on. If its behind a paywall then it may indicate to the clicker that the news is worth paying for.

Every article I’ve ever clicked on, on Twitter, Facebook etc works like this. Yahoo news may work differently, but I’ve always assumed they do pay- perhaps they don’t – that should be solved.

News sites who don’t want to get these free adverts can easily incorporate a piece of code into their web pages, and google, for example, will not collect the information and report it in searches. That way they easily get rid of the sense that google is stealing their news.

Most of the items, I see on facebook, are put there by people who think the articles are interesting and useful, and they, again, are encouraging people to go and read the article on the article owner’s website. This also counts as very effective advertising. It means that people I like recommend something, and that tends to be the most trusted advert.

Likewise, I can see that many online news stories use twitter posts as ‘evidence’. These link to twitter etc, but there is generally no need to travel to twitter to read them. This could be considered to be theft, and perhaps news should stop doing it. But I still think its a primarily a link, and it tells people that twitter is important and is good to use.

If I personally link to something someone wrote, I don’t think I’m stealing their work, I’m acknowledging it, or giving them some advertising.

The real problem is that if google and facebook have to pay for every item they link to, then surely every article online should also have to pay for similar links, links to evidence etc, then the sites will shut down. I cannot afford it for one.

The internet will die.

I guess Murdoch will be happy.

Endnote

There might be lots to complain about with google, such as it often does not appear to pay taxes on revenue generated in the country in which it sells the advertisements it carries. But that is a real objection. The Australian government does not seem to be interested in reality, just in stopping people from finding the news.

Tags:Disinformation
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The 12 steps of neoliberal problem solving

January 26, 2021

If there is a problem which disturbs the established corporate sector and their hangers on, then try and deal with that problem as follows:

1) First: deny there is a problem.

2) Scream, shout at and slur those who say there is a problem.

3) If 97% of those who work in the field (economists, scientists, medical practitioners, ecologists etc) say there is a problem, then insist that the 3% who don’t, be given equal time. Hell, give that 3%, 80% of the time.

4) Call for problem recognisers to be dismissed from positions of employment. Call for the removal of problem data from government websites.

5) Hinder any attempts to do anything useful about the problem.

6) Complain solving the problem involves socialism and tyranny.

7) If the problem is so obvious it needs to be solved, then get the solutions to the problem to involve tax-payer subsidy of established industries and tax cuts for the wealthy.

8) Insist any other solution to the problem involves insufferable limits on peoples’ personal liberty to make the problem worse. Resisting recognition of the problem is vital and radical.

9) Fail dismally.

10) Argue that the failure to solve the problem, shows the Governments are useless and should not attempt to solve any problems at all.

11) Argue that everything should have been left to the private sector that did not want to recognise the problem in the first place.

12) Keep on as if nothing had happened.

Tags:Disinformation, neoliberalism
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QAnon?

January 20, 2021

This is an attempt to explore Q, and to write about Q, somewhat in the manner of Q.

First off, I’m not an expert on QAnon, so there is no need to take this seriously.

What was the Conspiracy?

Q does seem to be pro-Trump. However, Q does not seem to have had either Trump, or the Trump re-election committee, behind them, because it seems that Trump had little idea of what Q was talking about until relatively close to the end, when he could have taken advantage of it all along. He did occasionally retweet Q memes, but the memes were ubiquitous in the sources that Trump might read or see, so that does not mean he knew much about it. This is what he said when asked:

Trump: Yeah. I know nothing about a QAnon…. I know you told me [about QAnon], but what do you tell me doesn’t necessarily make it fact. I hate to say that. I know nothing about it. I do know that they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard, but I know nothing about it….
I’ll tell you what I do know about, I know about Antifa and I know about the radical left and I know how violent they are and how vicious they are, and I know how they are burning down cities run by Democrats, not run by Republicans….
Savannah Guthrie: Just this week, you retweeted your 87 million followers a conspiracy theory that Joe Biden orchestrated to have SEAL Team Six, the Navy SEAL Team Six to kill — cover up the fake death of bin Laden. Now, why would you send a lie that to your followers? You retweeted it.
Trump: I know nothing about it. It was retweet. That was a — an opinion of somebody and that was a retweet. I put it out there. People can decide for themselves to take a position.
Interview: Savannah Guthrie Leads a Town Hall With Donald Trump in Miami – October 15, 2020. Fact base

Given Trump would seem to take advantage of anything popular which favoured him or attacked his ‘enemies’, there is no reason to think that he would refrain from using Q, if it was connected to him and he knew about it. Unless Trump was in deep cover; which means he would confirm nothing of Q, although him confirming nothing, does not confirm anything.

Trump’s display of ignorance could suggest that Q was trying to take advantage of Trump and his followers for some purpose. Is there reason to think this untrue? Q had more to gain than Trump did. They could influence Trump’s followers, while binding Trump to promises he could probably never carry out such as capturing and trying Hilary Clinton as she tried to escape, engineering mass suicides of his enemies, perhaps announcing that the Mueller Report had unearthed pedophilia in security agencies, get John McCain to resign, expose Pope Francis and so on. Trump was also expected to hold ‘the Storm’ and arrest hundreds (maybe thousands) of satanic pedophiles, which may well have proven difficult if he had tried to do it – which he does not seem to have done. Trump was even incapable of triumphing over coronavirus, which was supposedly not really that deadly. Did the prophecies fail, did Trump fail, or was he pushed by Q? Were the prophecies codes for something less palatable to Trump’s people? Who are the secret manipulators?

Was Q even designed to discredit Trump and his followers, by demanding the impossible, and then letting the followers see it all fail? Q could have been the deep state in action, only pretending to be against itself. Was Trump was doing this himself? If Q was Satanist running a false flag operation, then allowing 100,000s of innocent Americans to die, because no coherent action was taken, could count as a major success.

The background: ‘drops,’ and black magic

The idea was clever. Q is supposedly a person with a Department of Energy clearance for Top Secret information (why Department of Energy?). We don’t even know Q is a real person, or how many people post as Q. The people playing Q basically issued questions, random snippets of information, made predictions and let people construct their own fantasies (or do a lot of learning as they might put it), so they provided the data and fantasy to back Q’s assertions, and spin the Web Q started. This is one supposed Q drop from near the beginning:

Mockingbird
HRC detained, not arrested (yet).
Where is Huma? Follow Huma.
This has nothing to do w/ Russia (yet).
Why does Potus surround himself w/ generals?
What is military intelligence?
Why go around the 3 letter agencies?
What Supreme Court case allows for the use of MI v Congressional assembled and approved agencies?
Who has ultimate authority over our branches of military wo approval conditions unless 90+ in wartime conditions?
What is the military code?
Where is AW being held? Why?
POTUS will not go on tv to address nation.
POTUS must isolate himself to prevent negative optics.
POTUS knew removing criminal rogue elements as a first step was essential to free and pass legislation.
Who has access to everything classified?
Do you believe HRC, Soros, Obama etc have more power than Trump? Fantasy.
Whoever controls the office of the Presidecy controls this great land.
They never believed for a moment they (Democrats and Republicans) would lose control.
This is not a R v D battle.
Why did Soros donate all his money recently?
Why would he place all his funds in a RC?
Mockingbird 10.30.17
God bless fellow Patriots.
Qposts 29-Oct-2017

There is no ‘secret information’ here, just questions with no answers. It is all references to things people would already have heard of, if they watched Alex Jones or similar parts of the Right0Sphere – Huma, for example is a close associate of Hillary Clinton, who is supposed to have peeled faces off children in a Satanic ceremony – is there any evidence of this? It doesn’t matter as she is not being accused of anything; people are just being told to watch her.

Here is another drop. Note the repetitions between posts, which might build up truth (‘What I tell you three times is true’):

Some of us come here to drop crumbs, just crumbs.
POTUS is 100% insulated – any discussion suggesting he’s even a target is false.
POTUS will not be addressing nation on any of these issues as people begin to be indicted and must remain neutral for pure optical reasons. To suggest this is the plan is false and should be common sense.
Focus on Military Intellingence/ State Secrets and why might that be used vs any three letter agency
What SC decision opened the door for a sitting President to activate – what must be showed?
Why is POTUS surrounded by generals ^^
Again, there are a lot more good people than bad so have faith. This was a hostile takeover from an evil corrupt network of players (not just Democrats).
Don’t fool yourself into thinking Obama, Soros, Roth’s, Clinton’s etc have more power present day than POTUS.
Operation Mockingbird
Patriots are in control. Sit back and enjoy the show.
Qposts 30-Oct-2017

This primarily states that Trump will not say anything about what Q is saying, so overt confirmation is not to be expected. Is silence confirmation? Trump is also not a target, but a target of who? Perhaps that means he is a target of Q (because it is denied). Of course both these posts could be fake, but they show the style…. it seems like a textual Rorschach blot. We might wonder if, like Trump’s speeches, whether the ‘drops’ interrupt and disrupt ‘rational’ (Mind 1) thought processes and critical thinking? Why do they make so few connected propositions which can be challenged? Could they be acting as incantations, black magic, hypnotic effects, replacing rationality, with repeated phrases about how great we are, how persecuted we are, how we can overcome everything, how those who disagree with us are traitors? How better is life, if we just hand over our will and our trust to the black magician? To the Satanist who pretends to expose Satanists, but never does. Mind 2 finds the patterns which are hinted at within the hypnotic suggestions, and that becomes hypnotic truth…

Q as liar? Fantasy and community?

Q also claimed that sometimes they would issue false information deliberately, some say to misguide the real criminals. This admission protects everything Q says. False information could be said to not really come from Q, or was a deliberate deception for some reason. This meant that any vaguely clear statement which turned out to be so obviously wrong, that even Q followers could not believe it, was easy to explain away, or forget. If Q says straight out sometimes they lie – who knows what to trust? This is just like Trump. People no longer know what is intended to be true, what is just ignorance and what is deceit. How many times does Q have to lie, before it all seems untrue, more untrue than not, only accidentally true on occasions, or people bed down with a hypothetical truth that they will protect from challenge?

The end result is that whatever takes off amongst readers is what what they elaborate, what people need to hear to make sense of the world, and which gave them a sense of accomplishment – people issue youtube ‘news’ videos – “You are the news now,” “Do your own research,” “Have faith in you own research”. While this further engages the participants, it could lead to a situation where if a source disagrees with Q on anything it seems obviously false, and cannot be trusted. If you don’t hear anything that Q is talking about in the mainstream media, that is because that media is part of the conspiracy and is actively suppressing the information. If you do hear something that confirms, or makes sense of, Q it must be true. So QAnon the movement became, more or less, completely self-referential and self-reinforcing. What was true would be what other Q followers said was true. And some of them might think “disinformation is necessary,” and just lie for some higher purpose – whatever that was? Supporting Trump? Supporting the swamp Trump cultivated? Supporting the take down of Trump?

These processes of trust and distrust build community and closeness amongst those who hang out for more drops from Q or who attempt to make sense of Q. The community builds up the sense that something important is happening here concerning the future of the USA, and ‘we’ are participating. People accepted what they were told because others they respected did, while saying that was only something that happened to those outside their community. Sadly, what is to say we cannot be conditioned by any media/information, unless we are critical of it? As they say “where we go one, we go all” or “WWG1WGA,” which sounds a bit like the sheep they condemn others for being, but let’s assume that is not true, and it just indicates following where the ‘evidence’ takes them, as long as it does not invalidate Q.

Satanic pedophiles

Opposition to Q, further proves Q had something, because wouldn’t the Satanic pedophiles oppose Q in all possible ways? “Many in our govt worship Satan.” “These people worship Satan_ some openly show it.” Although Q mentions Satan relatively little, it seems to be elaborated by followers; its a meme they magnify.

Q promises action is being taken, even if we don’t see it:

The pedo networks are being dismantled.
The child abductions for satanic rituals (ie Haiti and other 3rd world countries) are paused (not terminated until players in custody).
QPosts 1 Nov-2017

It certainly attracts attention, and I’ve certainly met people who think Trump is warring against organised high level pedophiles, despite the fact the only publicised arrests have been of friends of his, who previously escaped because of friends of his.

The elite pedophilia thing is not impossible. Organisations like the Catholic Church have behaved as if they were run by pedophiles to protect pedophiles and other rapists, so we cannot assume that no other high level organisations would be run in the same way. We also know that hidden pedophile rings do exist online. Online, anyone can find anything if they search hard enough, and police do break some of them. This is reported in the mainstream media, easily.

The odd thing is that Donald Trump could be seen as the person fighting pedophile rapists. That is hard to believe. He is a person who reveled in sexual assault, even if it was largely imaginary. Many women allege he behaved ‘inappropriately’ towards them. He seems to be a serial adulterer and user of prostitutes. He not only at one time had largely unreported, but real, charges against him of raping a thirteen year old girl. These charges were dropped as he became president, because the woman involved received death threats. He was a friend of Epstein’s who knew about Epstein’s tastes and did nothing about it, not even break off friendship, for years. He also knew, and hired, various other people who favoured Epstein. He specifically shouted out to Maxwell, when she was arrested, to wish her well. He deliberately had a woman who was repeatedly raped as a child unnecessarily executed for murder. We might as logically expect him to run a pedophile ring as be against it. Perhaps Q provides cover for this? Do the research….

The ‘Secret of Media’, is hidden

Some of Q, is not unreasonable:

What happens when 90% of the media is controlled/owned by (6) corporations?
What happens when those same corporations are operated and controlled by a political ideology?
What happens when the news is no longer free from bias?
What happens when the news is no longer reliable and independent?
What happens when the news is no longer trustworthy?
What happens when the news simply becomes an extension/arm of a political party?
Fact becomes fiction?
Fiction becomes fact?
When does news become propaganda? [more]
Qposts 22-Nov-2019

‘Of course’, there is no analysis of the normal process of monopoly, oligopoly and control in capitalism. The post relies on the standard uninvestigated rightwing meme that the US media is ‘liberal’ or pro-Democrat, rather than pro-corporate, or biasedly pro-Republican and geared at benefitting its owners and advertisers. Q does not suggest Right wing media bias. News could equally become propaganda when it belongs to Murdoch, or other ideologically committed billionaires, who stack their media with propagandists who promote the idea that any news which disagrees with their position is both lies and politically motivated. Q suggests that bad news stories about Trump, no matter how well documented, show there is a conspiracy against Trump and against decent Americans, not that Trump might be bad. Q people have to stand outside the supposed group-think of those who think Trump is a problem, and join the group-think of denying that Trump is incompetent, corrupt, not clearing the swamp, etc. – no matter how clear Trump’s failings would seem if you investigated him with an open mind. By all means, “do your own research,” but don’t assume that only pro-Trump sources are genuine, lest you want to be mindwashed.

Just remember the lamestream media could not be bothered to report the charges of Trump raping adolescents or many of his war actions, before thinking it is inherently anti-Trump.

If Trump was a Satanist, we might ask, does Trump enjoy other people’s deaths? Is this why he had people executed on his way out? Is this why he pretended Covid would not kill many Americans, even now when over 400,000 Americans (current figures, likely to get bigger) have died? Is this why he ignored Covid after the election, to pay people back for not voting him in? Is this why he allows companies more freedom to pollute and poison people? Is this why Trump media also pretends the virus is not real? It is sacrificing its watchers to some ‘higher cause’?

Did Trump pardon those who entered the Capitol Building for him, or did he pardon politicians who were convicted for defrauding people for money, or convicted of tax or financial fraud, people who committed war crimes, or high level people who were convicted for illegal acts protecting him? Is this defending the swamp and casting aside the principled? What does your media say?

Q is dead, but Q is not dead

That Q was, at best, largely fake, should be relatively clear to everyone by now. The Storm never happened. There never were any mass arrests carried out by Trump, even at the last minute. There never was any outside evidence of the plots that Q generated awareness of. There were no trials. Three years of promises with nothing to show, except winding up support for Trump. But who knows, perhaps Q can be saved by pretending the failure of the prophecies was a necessary step towards later success, that so many good people could not have been sold a line so it must be true, or that people misread the drops (not hard) and that Q did not bother to let anyone know…. In which case Q is at best unreliable, and we still are not certain Q was other than a complete fake.

Acknowledged failure does not mean Q will not start up again, or that people who are dedicated will not keep it going, but it needs a new rationale. And that may take a while to get going…. So don’t give up on it yet, only 4 years till the next attempt (at best).

Because QAnon was so widespread in the ‘Right0sphere’, the domain of dedicated Right wing theory and propaganda, people who frequent that zone are almost certainly influenced by Q memes and Q provoked fantasy, even if they have never knowingly directly engaged with the Q community, and even if they thought Q was loopy. They share some things in common to begin with, so increasing that sharing may not be hard. In that case, is the spread of Qdom limited by the presence of Q, any more? It may have its own self-generating base, and so will probably continue, even if it drops in popularity, and it may well resurface later on, when all the disproving factors have been forgotten.

Q and real politics

Part of Q’s success involves what I have called ‘shadow politics’. That is the ability to displace evil on to outgroups, or the ‘other side’ in a binary political system. Because the other side is not us, and we are good, they become the repository of all our suppressed, or unacknowledged desires. Through this thoroughly human process, we are able to truly identify the evil and fight it. Fighting that evil, and hopefully expelling it, bonds us together in community, while also making the separation between the groups sharper and more intense.

As it is harder to talk across groups, it becomes easier to believe they are deluded and evil. Because this separation is so involved in fantasy, there is no limit to what can seem to be true, in terms of their evil and our good. You can see this in action with people condemning those others involved in QAnon, almost as much as you can see it in the QAnon movement itself.

Politics and economics also tend to become caught in fantasies and projections which are collective and cultural, and indeed even make collective culture. It might even be the case that effective politics is about the creation of effective fantasies – which can then obstruct people from attending to the reality they are dealing with, and lead to destruction – because they seem so true, and they are so easy to communicate. One important thing in research is to attempt to prove you are right, the other is to explore how much you can be wrong. This is difficult when fantasies are involved, and is almost never encouraged by leaders, whose power often depends on you accepting their truth.

What Q does indicate, and what should be taken seriously, is the shear amount of alienation in the US population, and how deeply uninvolved, or frightened, at least 30% or so of potential voters feel about political process. How they feel the ruling elites do not listen to them, the intellectual elites despise them, and the media is untruthful – and, sadly, there is real point to that feeling. This is significant. For many people, it feels as if the current world is being run by evil geniuses (or evil morons), who have no morals at all.

We can assert that the ideologies of capitalism have let people down, because those ideologies have no capacity to explain what is happening to people, or give consolation. People have little hope – nothing indicates that doing what they are supposed to do (like ‘work hard’) actually works for them. They are losing money and life chances. Life is going downhill, for them and their children. It shows they feel they are the victims of forces they cannot control – and this is probably correct. It may also show they feel that God has abandoned them, or needs a lot of placating to be on their side.

QAnon also shows people’s own heroism, they were prepared to stand up for change, if they thought that change was true. They were prepared to separate from families and community for this truth. That it may not have been true, does not diminish that heroism, or their determination to find things out and take the consequences.

Do Q’s satanic pedophiles exist, at any really important level, any more than the Pizzagate ring existed? Probably not. However, it is important symbolically, as it again could represent the idea that people experience themselves as being at the mercy of predators in their daily lives, which could well be true – they are all subject to the forces of predatory capitalism, and a system which sacrifices normal people for taxcuts for the wealthy, fossil fuels, run down housing, and subsidies for the hyper-wealthy.

If this alienation from politics and from social life, is not taken seriously by people in politics (and religion) and they do not work to fix it, but continue to work to take advantage of it, or dismiss it, then the US will continue to head for tyranny, persecution of innocents and collapse. Everything may well unwind. If steps are not taken, the future could be every bit as horrific as Q suggests.

Tags:depth psychology, Disinformation
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Zogopolitics

January 15, 2021

Let’s just pretend that the media was nearly all owned and controlled by one slightly divided faction – lets call them zogopolites.

Zogopolites only report news and opinion which they like. There might be a little difference between the Sydney Zogopolite and the Australian Zogopolite, but not that much. The one on the far up pretends it is sensible and centre and that the other media is far down, but they both ignore the down who don’t have any media at all, expect the papers they publish in their back sheds.

If the down have policies, ideas and information, you won’t get to hear it, but you might be told that all you hear outside the Australian Zogopolite is filthy downism, and you may get some vague distorted idea of how evil the down are.

The zogopolites distort and lie about ‘opinion’ and science they do not like, or which might cause followers to think about whether the zogopolitism was actually survivable. The media calling itself centerist, spends a lot of money hiring people who scream and shout a lot, because the point is that people should be angry and contemptuous of the down – that way they won’t listen to them, in the unlikely event they were ever to hear any.

Zogopolites all protest strongly if anyone on the up gets ‘censored’ – even if that person has access to other news media, or even their own news media – but it completely ignores censorship of the down. So people might even think zogopolitism was “fair and balanced”. What you don’t hear won’t bother you and you won’t notice it, and they more or less never report on the Down except abusively or falsely , so it seems normal. They may even deny that zogopolites exist, their ideology is commonsense after all. You must be deluded to disagree.

The up think that you should have to hear them and nothing else.

If we were living in this world we might think we have non-zogopolite media on youtube or something, but somehow most of it runs with the same kind of line; we must ascend! we must ascend! descent is bad!!!! We might flatter ourselves that we do research, when all we do is look for stuff that confirms our feelings, which have been cultivated by zogopolites – remember the shouting and lies?

Given that zogopolite media will largely not report the truth, or let other opinion in, and it is close to impossible to set up competing media, what should people in this world do?

Should they just say that is the way it is, and we will believe zogopolite reality because its there, and it owns and controls the media? or is there some other solution?

Tags:Disinformation
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Stochastic Terrorism

January 10, 2021

I generally don’t like memes, and I’ve no idea where this originates, but its a useful idea.

The Idea

The earliest account I’ve seen, and some of the wording in the meme comes from this source is an anonymous article in the Daily Kos from January 2011: Stochastic Terrorism: Triggering the shooters.

The person who actually plants the bomb or assassinates the public official is not the stochastic terrorist, they are the “missile” set in motion by the stochastic terrorist. The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media as their means of setting those “missiles” in motion.
While [the ‘terrorist’] action may have been statistically predictable… the specific person and the specific act are not predictable (yet).

We can think of this as complexity in motion. Just as we know climate change will produce storms that will destroy something valuable and important, we don’t quite know what. Its a dangerous weapon, in that it could bite the person who uses it, but I guess the media is used to direct the actor to hit someone who the stochastic terrorist does not like and has (along with other people) been denouncing.

The Problem

The stochastic terrorist then has plausible deniability: “Oh, it was just a lone nut, nobody could have predicted he would do that, and I’m not responsible for what people in my audience do.”

The expectable ‘missile’ gets arrested or killed, and the stochastic terrorist keeps their position, and possibly gets to tut-tut about how violent their opposition are, and thus encourage more missiles.

The author explains that because the missile could be a ‘lone wolf,’ they are extremely hard to pick up in advance. There is almost no trail and nothing to draw attention to them: “They are law enforcement’s and intel’s worst nightmare.” They are people who are unstable, and just need a small nudge to start planning something that will make an impact and give them notoriety. This is almost a normal part of everyday life in capitalism.

Anyone who is familiar with marketing and advertising knows how this works, and advertisers often target their messages to people who are “ready to buy” and just need a little persuading.

Perpetrators seem inherently excusable. There is no direct link between them and the result, AND there are so many of them doing this, it becomes hard to assign any individual responsibility.

Bias as entertainment?

Many politicians and political commentators know they are not trying to convince the people on other sides. They are just trying to get their own people worked up, in a lather, vote for the right people, and keep tuned to the show (purely commercial truth distortion). But sometimes this is going to result in a missile, even if they are not being deliberate about this. Listening to the rhetoric, as when Alan Jones talked of someone killing Julia Gillard, it is hard to think they are entirely innocent – for them to be entirely innocent they would have to be entirely ignorant about people and what they are doing, which seems unlikely – but it is possible…

Some people will take talk about Democrats taking away their guns, putting Republicans in concentration camps, wanting to destroy America, injecting them with micro-chips, having health care death panels, taking away their jobs and giving them to blacks, engaging in a coup, inventing Covid and fixing the election as being true, and act appropriately. The more this kind of fantasy is repeated from show to show, and politician to politician, the more likely people are to believe it. The more it is fantasy, the less it needs anything to do with reality, the more profound and hidden it can seem, and the more it is likely to mesh with someone’s prior beliefs.

While Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, and O’Reilly (or Alan Jones, Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin etc.) don’t (or didn’t) do non-verbal violence themselves, they give an unstable someone else all the ‘alternative facts’ and conceptual violence, they need to suffer fear, gain a grudge and take action. They reinforce each other’s effect, as if people hear similar things from others they classify as similar to themselves (“Republican”) then what they hear tends to be taken as true.

Even if Trump does not know what he is doing, he picks the technique up from the media he watches.

The Advantage

Stochastic terrorists also have a great advantage. They don’t have to be reasonable, logical or coherent in their arguments. They don’t have to care about the truth, or accuracy, of what they say. They don’t have to even attempt to specify what is known and what is supposition. They can pretend they are comedy or satire and they can pretend they are 100% true at the same time. They can say whatever they like as long as it’s passionate and resonates with their audience and keeps that audience listening. They can change their mind in nothing flat, as long as the target remains the same. They can be ambiguous and say that what you think they said is not what they said.

For example:

Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick –if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day, if — if — Hillary gets to put her judges in.
Speech: Donald Trump in Wilmington, NC – August 9, 2016

Many people took this false statement (Clinton did not want to abolish the Second Amendment, ‘essentially’ or otherwise) as an invitation for gun lovers to kill her or ‘her judges’ in advance of her getting “to put her judges in.” But a person from the campaign said:

It’s called the power of unification – 2^nd Amendment people have amazing spirit and are tremendously unified, which gives them great political power.
Trump Campaign Statement on Dishonest Media

Note the press release title. Always say the others are lying, they have to be evil, that is part of the strategy.

More recently Trump has cast serious aspersions on electoral office workers, Democrat scrutineers and fellow Republicans who would not go along with his attempt to fix the election vote. He has denounced them furiously. Some of them seem to have been stalked and received death threats. This was to be expected. So far no one has died or been seriously assaulted (as far as I know), but it is possible. The big problem is whether this will scare off those who consider that they should be making sure the election is safe and legal, and only encourage those who are sure their job is to make sure their side wins. In any case Trump would deny he was encouraging terror.

This procedure becomes almost impossible to argue with, and the impossibility of arguing against the stochastic terrorist, then shows their followers how true the arguments are. And if you care about ‘free speech’ how could you stop them, whether they know what they are doing or not?

Right Wing Terror?

The foaming at the mouth, abusive, anger raising news commentary originated with the Right and still comes primarily from the Right, so we could expect that this would increase Right wing violence.

American ABC wrote in May 2020 that:

a nationwide review conducted by ABC News has identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault…..
in at least 12 cases perpetrators hailed Trump in the midst or immediate aftermath of physically assaulting innocent victims. In another 18 cases, perpetrators cheered or defended Trump while taunting or threatening others. And in another 10 cases, Trump and his rhetoric were cited in court to explain a defendant’s violent or threatening behavior….
the vast majority of the cases – 41 of the 54 – reflect someone echoing presidential rhetoric, not protesting it.
Levine, ‘No Blame?’ ABC News finds 54 cases invoking ‘Trump’ in connection with violence, threats, alleged assaults. ABCNews, 30 May 2020

This number of cases may be trivial. But Christopher Wray, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), reinforces the general impression, by saying:

The greatest threat we face in the homeland is that posed by lone actors radicalized online who look to attack soft targets with easily accessible weapons. We see this lone actor threat manifested both within domestic violent extremists (DVEs) and homegrown violent extremists (HVEs), two distinct sets of individuals that generally self-radicalize and mobilize to violence on their own. DVEs are individuals who commit violent criminal acts in furtherance of ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as racial bias and anti-government sentiment. HVEs are individuals who have been radicalized primarily in the United States, and who are inspired by, but not receiving individualized direction from, foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs)….
the underlying drivers for domestic violent extremism—such as perceptions of government or law enforcement overreach, sociopolitical conditions, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, and reactions to legislative actions—remain constant.
the FBI is most concerned about lone offender attacks, primarily shootings, as they have served as the dominant lethal mode for domestic violent extremist attacks. More deaths were caused by DVEs than international terrorists in recent years.
Worldwide Threats to the Homeland, FBI.gov 24 September 2020 [emphasis added]

The UN claims “a 320 per cent rise in attacks conducted by individuals affiliated with [right wing] movements and ideologies over the past five years” (emphasis added).

The University of Maryland Global Terrorism Database states that in the US between 2015 and 2019, anti-government types killed 64 people, anti-semites killed 17 people, incels killed 13 people, neo-nazis 12 people, white supremacists 64 people, and jihadis 84 people (p.6). [Glen Beck and his ilk can perhaps be excused the jihadis, but the principle remains, no matter who does it. ]

the vast majority of terrorist attacks in the United States in 2019 were non-lethal (84%, excluding perpetrator deaths), and these attacks were also motivated by diverse ideological influences, including antifascist, anti-government, anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-white, left-wing, pro-choice, and white supremacist/nationalist extremism
Global Terrorism Database p.3.

The Centre for Strategic Studies says:

Between 1994 and 2020, there were 893 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States. Overall, right-wing terrorists perpetrated the majority—57 percent—of all attacks and plots during this period, compared to 25 percent committed by left-wing terrorists, 15 percent by religious terrorists, 3 percent by ethnonationalists, and 0.7 percent by terrorists with other motives.
right-wing terrorism not only accounts for the majority of incidents but has also grown in quantity over the past six years.
The Escalating Terrorism Problem in the United States, CSS, 17 June 2020

I would suspect that ethnonationalists tend to be of the right, just as the neo-nazis and white supremacists tend to support Trump, so that is 60% of all attacks.

For those who need to be told these things, I am not saying right wing terrorism and assault is the only form terrorism, assault, or riot. That would be stupid. This is about the ways the terror can be ‘organised’ through apparently random events, and that can apply everywhere. I merely assert that it is likely to be more common on the right, at the moment.

To be even clearer. The 316 deaths from ‘terrorism’ between 2015 to 2019, is far less than other deaths. For example its less than 10% of the official deaths from Covid-19 in 2020. In 2017 alone US police shot and killed 987 people (a relatively bad year). In 2019, 793 workers aged 65 years and older died due to an occupational injury, obviously far more workers died because of injury at work in total – the death rate is about 3.5 occupational injury deaths per 100,000 employed workers. Given there are about 130.6 million full time workers in the US in 2019, then that is a large number of deaths from work.

It is far more sensible to be terrified of US police and US employers than of terrorists.

There is no Conclusion

Obviously it is easy to accuse people of working up terrorism stochasically. In a zone of free speech it is hard to ban speech or writing on the grounds it may induce harm (even if it almost certainly will), although conspiracy laws and incitement laws exist. My guess is that it will also be impossible to curtail this kind of ‘news’ and incitement as it is now standard – especially in Mr. Murdoch’s empire. We also cannot expect people to dismiss hysteria and lies as showing that these opinion hosts and politicians have no good ideas or no valid arguments. Indeed it is likely that because this way of emoting is successful, and generates the hatred which justifies its use, it will spread even further.

It is likely more people will die, and more people will believe comforting lies (“we couldn’t have really lost!”) and discussion between groups will continue to lessen and break down. As I’ve said before, there is a case that this politics of abuse and culture war started as a deliberate neoliberal strategy to protect a Right wing politics of further entrenching wealth and the power of wealth, but it now perhaps has consequences which were not originally intended.

If people become terrorised that they might be killed or beaten up for expressing a view, or a researched finding because others will hate them, then society will die, because the information about the world that we use to steer it as best we can, will no longer be accurate, and we will flounder before our problems.

This already seems to be the case – see ecological destruction.

The author of the Daily Kos article quotes an article which says:

“It’s not fair to blame Beck for violence committed by people who watch his show.”

and responds:

I say it damn well is fair to blame them when it happens again and again and predictably again.
Once is a tragedy, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action.

Tags:Disinformation
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The Trump Putsch 01

January 9, 2021

There are many things that can be said about yesterdays ‘insurrection’ at the US Capitol building. These are some of them.

Rough Timeline: Firstly the protestors started knocking the fences down at about 1:00 p.m. At about 1.20 Trump arrives back at the White House – some say his security detail said they could not protect him at the protest. He watches the riot on live TV. 1:34 pm Mayor Bowser of Washington, DC requests assistance from Secretary of Army. About 1.40 demonstrators break into the House. The Senate and House chambers were evacuated at 2:30 p.m, about the same time the Washington Mayor orders a 6pm Curfew. At about 3.40pm the National Guard arrives (?). Crowds start dispersing around 5 pm. About 8 pm, Capitol police declared the building secure. At 8.15 pm the House starts working again.

1) “Trump Media”

Parts of the Trump media and media groupings (One America Network, Parler, 4 chan, Q-Anon, Brietbart, Newsmax), after supporting Trump’s fake claims of election fraud, and calls for insurrection, are now saying things like “we all know Republicans don’t riot, consequently the rioters were not Republicans and the whole thing was a false flag operation”. The rioters were busloads of Antifa.

There is no evidence of antifa involvement and, even if there was, it does not give us new evidence about who was calling for the events, and who was cheering the events on. This includes those who are now claiming they had nothing to do with it, which appears to include those Republican members of Congress who were trying to overturn the election results, while depending on the election results for their own seats.

This is simple cowardice. Childlike cowardice. They could say, “I made a mistake and don’t like the results of that mistake,” or they could stand with the people they encouraged. But these people decide to hide their encouragement of violence behind blaming their opposition, or saying they suddenly came to understand what Trump was like.

By trying to blame others they at least show they recognise there is a problem they don’t want to be associated with. Interestingly even the leader of the Proud Boys supposedly announced ahead of the march:

“We will not be wearing our traditional Black and Yellow. We will be incognito and we will spread across downtown DC in smaller teams,… And who knows….we might dress in all BLACK for the occasion [like Antifa],” Mr. Tarrio posted on the social media service Parler. “The night calls for a BLACK tie event.”
Proud Boys leader says members will be ‘incognito’ for next pro-Trump protest in D.C. Washington Times, 29 December 2020

We can presume they wanted to hide and not be held responsible, although Tarrio later apparently said or wrote: “Proud Of My Boys and my country….”Don’t ****ing leave.”

Those who need to know, know they were involved.

2) Trump himself

From the wandering speech made directly before the riots, it is not clear what Trump wants, except to complain that he could not have lost because of statistics and fake claims, and that Mike Pence could fix it up by decree. [See endnote].

During the riots. Trump tweeted [Times on these tweets are from storage and not local times, the one immediately below is apparently from 2.24 pm during the riots.]:

More or less immediately after the Riots, Trump tweeted:

[And in case the tweet copy gets deleted:

These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!
twitter Jan 6 – see also Fox News and Forbes

So Trump defended his supporters for a while. Trump later claimed that violence was not what he wanted and that we should seek peace together.

My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power.
This moment calls for healing and reconciliation…..
We must revitalize the sacred bonds of love and loyalty that bind us together as one national family.
Donald Trump Concedes Election, Condemns Rioters Video Speech Transcript January 7. Rev 7 January

Trump has never seemed to want peace before, other than the peace of everyone submitting to himself. It is however, reasonably possible to suggest that he did not think his speech would be followed by the events which followed it; that, for him, the march on the Capitol was purely a game for him. However it is equally possible he deliberately tried to engineer deniability, and he will keep feeding and inciting rage, while pretending not to.

Personally I think he is stabbing his supporters in the back because he does not want to loose the benefits and salary of an ex-President if he should be suspended or impeached, but who knows? Anyway, the point again is he could say, “I made a mistake and I’ve changed my mind”, or he could stand by his supporters and what he has been encouraging them to do since the last election or earlier, or even say he was surprised at how people reacted, but no, its all their fault. I suspect he will soon be telling us it was all the Democrats’ fault. For Trump, it seems like it is always someone else’s fault.

For those who wonder if the President would throw his supporters, workers and creditors under the bus, for personal advantage, just look at his career. This is what he has done his entire life. This and continuous falsehood, are his distinguishing marks, even for people in politics and business.

He has also refused to attend the inauguration. This is one way of making peace… but attending would show that he might put his own resentments on one side, and thus encourage his followers to do so as well – but that would not give him any political advantage, he needs to keep hatred going to have any chance of influence or another shot at the Presidency.

While so far it is rumour and third hand reports, so this paragraph will possibly be changed, there is some evidence to say that:

Trump watched the riot on live TV (was there live TV coverage?)
He did tweet about Mike Pence’s failure to steal the election for him
He ignored calls from Republicans trapped in the House
He only tweeted against the riots when it was clear they had not achieved any of their aims, beyond occupation.

If so, then we may assume that Trump did seek violence to change the election result and intimidate people in the House.

Mitch McConnell is reported as saying, after he helped acquit Trump,:

There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day… The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president… He did not do his job. He didn’t take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed and order restored… No. Instead, according to public reports, he watched television happily — happily — as the chaos unfolded… Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in serious danger.
Sprunt After Voting To Acquit, McConnell Torches Trump As Responsible For Riot. NPR 13 Feb 2021

What Trump does not appear to have done is even more significant. He did nothing to help organise a response. He did nothing to calm the situation down. He appears to have made no protest against what was happening while it was happening – and this is especially notable if he was watching on live TV.

It does not seem unreasonable to see Trump’s first public comments on Jan 12, as directed towards his riotous supporters as they defend the wall with Mexico, which seems to be a defense against illegal immigrants and emphasises the race issue. “We completed the wall,” he says which does not seem to be true, and he more or less admits is not true in the next line “They may want to expand it. We have the expansion underway.” But then:

We’re stopping a lot of illegal immigration. Our numbers have been very good. There does seem to be a surge now because people are coming up. So caravans are starting to form because they think there’s going to be a lot in it for them, if they’re able to get through, but we’re able to stop it
Donald Trump’s First Comments Since Capitol Riots: Says He Wants “No Violence”, Rev.com 12 January 2021

Then he implies the violence is against him, and that impeachment could lead to violence:

we want no violence, never violence. We want absolutely no violence. And on the impeachment, it’s really a continuation of the greatest witch hunt in the history of politics. It’s ridiculous. It’s absolutely ridiculous. This impeachment is causing tremendous anger as you’re doing it. And it’s really a terrible thing that they’re doing. For Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to continue on this path, I think it’s causing tremendous danger to our country and it’s causing tremendous anger. I want no violence.
Donald Trump’s First Comments Since Capitol Riots: Says He Wants “No Violence”, Rev.com 12 January 2021

And the riot had nothing to do with him, all the fault of other people:

if you look at what other people have said, politicians at a high level, about the riots during the summer, the horrible riots in Portland and Seattle and various other places. That was a real problem, what they said, but they’ve analyzed my speech and my words and my final paragraph, my final sentence. And everybody to the T thought it was totally appropriate.
Donald Trump’s First Comments Since Capitol Riots: Says He Wants “No Violence”, Rev.com 12 January 2021

His later speech was almost entirely about keeping illegal aliens out, and could be seen as a shout out to the ‘mob’. So he will almost certainly continue.

3) The Really Thin Blue Line

The Capitol was badly defended. There were hardly any police, and the national guard was not called in until way too late – apparently a guy Trump appointed to the job refused to let them be called in. In Washington DC the mayor does not command the National Guard, the President does. The guard eventually arrived because Republican and Democrat members of the house arranged it? (This is all very complicated, but see this timeline, which may or may not be accurate. The then chief of the Capitol Police, Steven Sund, “says he requested assistance six times ahead of and during the attack on the Capitol. Each of those requests was denied or delayed”). Trump tried to take credit for their arrival, but this does not seem to be accurate.

Many people ([1], [2], [3], [4] more could be given) have compared the thin lines of police with the heavy lines of police who faced Black Lives Matter protestors. and who seemed relaxed about using heavy violence to control and clear BLM protestors even if it was just for Presidential photo-ops. The police for the Trump protest seem to have been vastly outnumbered and under armed – I’ve seen videos of a few US police trying to hold back protestors with waist high portable fences, fists (!?) and no back-up. They had no hope against these white rioters.

I also read that 60 police where hospitalised with injuries and one police officer more or less definitely received deadly injuries from a thrown fire extinguisher. Video suggests one policeman was pulled down some stairs and beaten and kicked. One of the people beating him was using a flag pole with a US flag on it, and the crowd shouted “USA, USA”. Comments by Police Chief Contee also suggest rioters used pepper spray on the police. The police were not initially using tear gas and some had no gas masks. Pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails were also apparently found near the building outside the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee [5], [6].

This is where supporting people who claim to support the police, while they are suppressing others, gets you.

4) Police Complicity?

Some people say the police let the rioters in, and posed with rioters for selfies. This could be a cunning way of both getting photo ID of the perps, and/or avoiding being beaten up. There are pictures of police (or security guards) quietly standing by as occupiers walk past them. Perhaps some police where more gentle than people on the Left might expect them to be from their experience, and got out of the way, but this is not the same as deliberately letting people in.

If there was an inside job, it probably came from those people who ignored weeks of noise and warnings [7], [8], [9] and put in a thin blue line and blocked the National Guard. If you want to blame anyone, then blame the Trump Administration. They made the appointments and preparations. This obvert lack could also seem like pre-meditation.

5) Security Chaos

The failure of the police meant the Capitol was defended by security officers who had been trained to shoot terrorists and assassins. It is no wonder one person was shot, and amazing that more were not killed. Three of the four protestors who died are currently said to have died of medical complications. One was possibly crushed to death in the crowd.

The security at the Capitol was surprisingly low key. It appears to advertise that if any real and moderately competent terrorist organisation had wanted to, they could have invaded and shot up Capitol Hill without problem.

6) Lack of Revolutionary Aims

The rioters seemed to have no idea what to do when they achieved their aims. Some people have said they were going to burn the electoral college votes, but they failed to do that, and there is no evidence that was an aim shared by the majority of people – any more there is evidence the pipe bombs were the work of many people. While burning the votes might have been a great piece of symbolism, it would achieve nothing. There was no attempt to seize centres of power, to control the airwaves or barricade themselves in, or even bring automatic weapons into the building.

Most of the rioters seemed happy enough to frolic around, break into offices, steal souvenirs and pose for photos. This was not a crowd of organised revolutionaries. I’m not sure they can be called terrorists either, despite the Federal Code of Regulation definition that terrorism is:

the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof and furtherance of political or social objectives
As quoted by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser Press Conference Day After Capitol Riot Transcript January 7

Discontents is probably better. If it were not for the injured cops this might have been disorderly ‘fun’.

On the other hand, some people wore neo-nazi symbols and apparently called for the execution of Mike Pence (who knows how seriously) for not obeying Trump’s call to neutralise the result. People have alleged there were plans to capture Nancy Pelosi, but the evidence seems conjectural at this moment. However, Neo-Nazis reportedly boasted they were there, and the Proud Boys reputedly sent out a message saying:

For several hours, our collective strength had politicians in Washington in absolute terror. The treacherous pawns (cops) were also terrified…
The system would have you believe that you are alone. That’s why they want to ban all ‘radicals’ from social media. They want you to feel alone. But the truth is that you are not alone. We are everywhere.
Things will get difficult soon but don’t lose heart. We are growing and our unity will terrify the evil elites running this nation.
Proud Boys Boast About Politicians ‘in Absolute Terror’ During Capitol Raid. Newsweek, 7 January.

So some people had ambitions, perhaps after the event. The FBI says ‘Antifa’ does not seem to have had much if any presence. Earlier reports claiming this was not the case have since been discredited.

So let us be clear about this. Mainstream people on the Right are blaming a group for the riots, who almost certainly were not there, while ignoring right wing extremists who certainly were there, who are claiming responsibility for the occupation and the violence, and who are promising more of the same.

And these same people want unity and no prosecution of Trump for anything? Some of them because they fear what might come next. This again is cowardice, and indicates the possible take over of the Republican party by fascists.

7) Spread

The event was not confined to the Capitol in Washington. There were similar, generally peaceful, if less successful, protests across the country: in Arizona (which involved breaking glass and a guillotine), Colarado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and probably elsewhere. It is notable that many people were also protesting against coronavirus lockdowns and did not wear masks. So we can see this movement as a spreader event. Perhaps deliberately to generate more chaos for the new Administration to deal with, but more probably to do with disbelief.

With the Internet it is not necessary for there to be an organising body, but apparently the main event was organised by “Women for America First” and it allegedly involved people from the Presiden’ts 2020 campaign. When asked the Trump Campaign apparently said

We did not organize, operate or finance this event. No campaign staff was involved in the organization or operation of this event. If any former employees or independent contractors for the campaign worked on this event, they did not do so at the direction of the Trump campaign.
Trump allies helped plan, promote rally that led to Capitol attack. ABC NEWS (America) 9 January

As you would expect, they avertised the event to their followers, through twitter and facebook. For example:

and

Women for America First announced:

We are saddened and disappointed at the violence that erupted on Capitol Hill, instigated by a handful of bad actors, that transpired after the rally
Trump allies helped plan, promote rally that led to Capitol attack. ABC NEWS (America) 9 January and “Statement on Violence at the Capitol”

And did the expected blame shifting, it’s got nothing to do with them and everything to do with people they don’t like:

Unfortunately, for months the left and the mainstream media told the American people that violence was an acceptable political tool. They were wrong. It is not.
Trump allies helped plan, promote rally that led to Capitol attack. ABC NEWS (America) 9 January and “Statement on Violence at the Capitol“

Apparently, no one ever listens to the right wing media…

The Women for America First website with the statement on it seems to have disappeared. Other people involved in the event appear to have included: “Stop the Steal,” “Wild Protest.com” “Turning Point Action,” “Rule of Law Defence Fund,” “Tea Party Patriots,” Eighty Percent Coalition”, not to mention “Proud Boys”, “Three Percenters” and the like – who do seem to have some familiarity with threatening violence.

Some allege that some of the misinformation and promotion of violence came from ‘big oil’ and those who promote climate denial [10], [11] which, if correct, shows how terrified they are of even the minor climate efforts Biden has promised to make. It is true, that Trump would have kept subsidies and profits up for a while longer if he ‘won,’ and fossil fuel companies have never shown much concern over democracy.

Fear is also part of the spread of misinformation. One Republican Representative is reported as saying:

“One of the saddest things is I had colleagues who, when it came time to recognize reality and vote to certify Arizona and Pennsylvania in the Electoral College, they knew in their heart of hearts that they should’ve voted to certify, but some had legitimate concerns about the safety of their families. They felt that that vote would put their families in danger,”
Amash’s Successor Peter Meijer: Trump’s Deceptions Are ‘Rankly Unfit. Reason 8 January 2021

If true, this is fascism in action again, and not being denounced.

8) Fantasy

The following report may not be accurate, but while some protestors were disappointed in Trump, and his failure to produce evidence for the “storm” that many people on the Right had been expecting and inciting for so long (when the deep state Satanist pedophiles would be arrested and charged), some of the rioters or riot supporters claim that Trump’s apparent backdown is a deep fake video, or perhaps:

“He has a plan here President Trump would not back down that easily… We need to stand strong, keep watch and pray. Something big is coming and Gid [God] is going to see it through.”
“Trump did not concede. He used language to buy a little extra time because the senators and congressmen who support him are being threatened with dirty bombs and their families’ lives by the Deep State and/or communist Chinese … I have it on good grounds that Trump will be moving with the military And regarding the transition to a new administration, means Trump with a new VP Pence is obviously a traitor and is ‘fired’”
Donald Trump fans cry betrayal as he rebukes Capitol violence. The Guardian, 8 January 2021

If the Storm has not happened by now, we can assume it will never happen, and would never happen.

9) It is not Necessarily ended

Some have compared this event to the Munich Beer Hall putsch of 1923. Hitler’s failed attempt to take over Bavaria. From that event we learn that Hitler was no brave war hero, but he came back some years later and produced a lot of death. The point of the comparison is just to remind us that failure does not always mean that a movement is ended. Ten years from now, maybe Trump or someone like him will succeed in inspiring people who feel displaced and take over the government.

If politicians get the message that these people (like most people) cannot be controlled and selling one’s soul (for power) to a proto-fascist is not a good deal, then something has to change. The problems faced by real people trying to live in neoliberal America have to be taken seriously and people have to feel that government is something they can participate in without needing force. Neoliberalism has to go, because this is where it leads.

However, Republican leaders are generally not condemning either the rioter’s or their party’s association with neo-fascism and white supremacy, never mind putting the wealthy first. Hence we can assume they are happy to go along with things as they are. This increases the likelihood of that party being taken over by those forces and being used by those forces, just as QAnon appears to have tried to use Trump for its purposes, through the cultivation of fantasy and resonance.

The information mess of information society, is another problem. Propaganda is effective, and can easily promote these kind of events and this kind of resentment. Fascism is easy, not impossible because of some national spirit. It can happen anywhere. We somehow need to establish a truth which can be shared amongst all, but fascist propagandists seek a truth that splits and makes the acceptors superior. Or perhaps we need to establish a more general, non-directed skepticism. I don’t know a solution, but an approach is needed.

10) Election Inquiry?

Personally I would go for an independent open and public inquiry into the Election process. It would include all the alleged events that Trump mentions. This would allow them to be refuted in public. It would also include: investigation into Gerrymandering; voter suppression; refusals to have enough pre-poll booths; attempts to crush mail-in voting through sabotaging the post office or any other way; intimidation or attempted bribery of electoral officials and workers; the apparently deliberate delays in voting in certain areas; explanations about the way voting trends can change; and so on. It perhaps should investigate the rules around the electoral college or the consequences of its abandonment. It perhaps should recommend a public holiday to make voting possible for many people. It would have the power to charge the ex-President, and anyone else with offenses before a court, if they should be demonstrated. It should also consider making Washington DC, and Puerto Rico into States for electoral purposes. If people say this should not happen because Republicans would never win without restricting the vote, then let them think about their commitment to democracy or lack of useful policies.

Endnote: Trump Administration Speeches

Trump’s big speech before the riot, starts as it goes on.

This was not a close election. I say sometimes jokingly, but there’s no joke about it, I’ve been in two elections. I won them both and the second one, I won much bigger than the first. Almost 75 million people voted for our campaign, the most of any incumbent president by far in the history of our country, 12 million more people than four years ago. I was told by the real pollsters, we do have real pollsters. They know that we were going to do well, and we were going to win. What I was told, if I went from 63 million, which we had four years ago to 66 million, there was no chance of losing. Well, we didn’t go to 66. We went to 75 million and they say we lost. We didn’t lose.
By the way, does anybody believe that Joe had 80 million votes? Does anybody believe that? He had 80 million computer votes. It’s a disgrace. There’s never been anything like that. You could take third world countries. Just take a look, take third world countries. Their elections are more honest than what we’ve been going through in this country. It’s a disgrace. It’s a disgrace. Even when you look at last night, they’re all running around like chickens with their heads cut off with boxes. Nobody knows what the hell is going on. There’s never been anything like this. We will not let them silence your voices. We’re not going to let it happen. Not going to let it happen….
if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. All he has to do. This is from the number one or certainly one of the top constitutional lawyers in our country. He has the absolute right to do it. We’re supposed to protect our country, support our country, support our constitution, and protect our constitution. States want to revote. The States got defrauded. They were given false information. They voted on it. Now they want to recertify. They want it back. All Vice-President Pence has to do is send it back to the States to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people.
Donald Trump Speech “Save America” Rally Transcript January 6. Rev 6 January

Despite being full of falsehood, denunciation of the election result, and self praise (he “had to beat Oprah, [who] used to be a friend of mine”), the speech does not seems to be a direct incitement to riot. There is little to no evidence for his impeachment on those grounds here [although see this analysis, which I think its a bit strained]. Indeed Trump said:

I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard….
we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… [ellipsis in original to indicate change of track] The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.
So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Donald Trump Speech “Save America” Rally Transcript January 6. Rev 6 January

He did not walk with them, although it is not clear why. Perhaps he wanted to be elsewhere if violence broke out – it would be safer for him. The only overtly but vague instruction for riot he gave was:

I said, “Something’s wrong here. Something’s really wrong. Can’t have happened.” And we fight. We fight like Hell and if you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.
Donald Trump Speech “Save America” Rally Transcript January 6. Rev 6 January

This could easily be defended as a figure of speech. The violence, seems to have been plotted beforehand, and not at the speech. Trump may have been simply a focus for other people to make that move – perhaps this is something he wanted to take advantage of, but not be directly involved in.

During the riot he tries to steer both sides, those of the rioters and those who were not impressed by the riots:

I know your pain. I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side, but you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great [pause] people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt. It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a time like this where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us, from me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home and go home at peace.
Trump Video Telling Protesters at Capitol Building to Go Home: Transcript. Rev 6 January and Facebook

This is a line made clear by his press secretary Kayleigh McEnany as well.

What we saw yesterday, was a group of violent rioters, undermining the legitimate First Amendment rights of the many thousands who came to peacefully have their voices heard in our nation’s Capitol. Those who violently besieged our Capitol, are the opposite of everything this administration stands for.
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Press Briefing on Capitol Riot Transcript

This massive backdown, implies either cowardice or that he was being used by other more competent people for their own purposes, to start something off, or to be a figurehead. QAnon seems to be that kind of movement, as the President seemed to make little use of it, or have little familiarity with its arguments and misinformation, even when it would have been useful for him. This probably means ‘Q’ not only does not have many ties with the President, but probably not with the Republican Party itself. This again makes impeachment hard.

Tags:Disinformation, politics
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Trump and the campaign against Democracy

January 3, 2021

Trump does not have to do anything other than convince most of his followers that the election was stolen, and that he and they are victims of a vast and clearly powerful conspiracy. He was preparing for this before the election [footnote1], and claimed victory after the election, without any particular evidence that I know of – that is, he made an over-optimistic or deliberately false claim, not a mistaken claim [footnote2]. We might well assert that Donald Trump can never admit to losing or failing, he will pretend he was successful or he will blame others for cheating. This seems to be a long established characteristic.

However, his claims are working. A small Reuters Ipsos poll taken on Nov. 13-17 found only 29% of Republican voters said that Biden had rightfully won and 68% of Republicans said they were concerned that the election was “rigged.” A poll from Vox and Data for Progress taken on 16 November stated:

73 percent of likely Republican voters say that the allegations of voter fraud have made them question Joe Biden’s victory, a statement that 44 percent of all likely voters agreed with as well. Similarly, 75 percent of likely Republican voters said they believed voter fraud took place during the election that benefitted Biden, something that 43 percent of likely voters overall also stated.
Vox poll: 73 percent of Republican voters are questioning Biden’s victory

A poll taken in early December, by Quinnipiac University found that Republicans “say 70 – 23 percent that they think Biden’s victory is not legitimate… 38 percent [of all registered voters] say they believe there was widespread fraud.” Rather oddly “Republicans say 77 – 19 percent they believe there was widespread voter fraud,” so there are presumably Republicans who think that there was widespread Republican fraud.

Whatever the case, a large majority of Republicans appear to think that Biden did not really win legitimately.

So, because of these claims, assuming he gets into the White House, Joe Biden will not be accepted by a large portion of the US population, no matter if he won the popular vote by 7 million votes or not (over c.81,281,000 to c.74,224,000).

Consequently, Trump’s side of politics can refuse all co-operation and bog the nation down in do-nothingness, while the US is raddled with uncontrollable pandemics, poverty and so on. The only allowed solution to which is more Trump, and more neoliberal Republicanism.

To achieve his aim, Trump does not need evidence that holds up in court. He only requires a few out of context videos, a few non tested testimonies, a heap of rumour, and the assertion that things were weird, and that he could not loose, and for his supporters not to hear the refutations of Trump’s assertions – which will happen due to the ways right wing media works.

This is probably why his lawyers have not presented evidence to the courts that was not easily dismissed as hearsay. All he needs is the allegation of there being evidence repeatedly backed up by people and media on his side. This allegation will be joined to the allegation that everyone who disagrees with the evidence he has alleged to be true and meaningful, is either naïve, brainwashed or part of the conspiracy. These assertions will be repeated over and over.

Then his followers are trapped. They have to agree, or they face exile, rage and mockery – and they think it could possibly be true, as after all so many people are asserting there is irrefutable evidence…. And no one who asserts otherwise can be trusted.

His followers are the victims, of a failed society, and they experience that every day, why should they have faith in its institutions?

Trump attempted to change certifications and called those people in his party who were responsible for certifications in order to change their minds. Lindsay Graham reputedly rang the Georgia Secretary of State, to have votes thrown out. Trump appears to have sought to have large numbers of votes thrown out with little to no evidence presented, other than the fact that he did not think he could lose. [For more see Footnote 3].

The assumption seems to be that if there was any cheating, it had to be Democrat cheating, but it is at least conceptually possible that the reason why Biden did not win by as much as expected is that there was Republican cheating. We know that Republicans tried to prevent people from voting in advance, or by mail, and that was probably to scare off those who believed Covid was a problem, who seem to be primarily Democrat. So there is form here. Trump quote figures for fake votes without any apparent sources, or with ambiguous videos so, if there were fake votes then they could be for anyone. Furthermore, if the votes for the Senate and the House were accurate, which Republicans seem to expect, these are made at the same time, so why were they not faked?

One high level Trump supporter called for a military take over, another said of Chris Krebs, who declared the election secure, “that guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot.” The same person also remarked of those Republicans who said the election was fair: “the governors in these states are a bunch of losers, along with their secretaries of state. I’ve never seen such wimps wearing an R [being Republican]…. You know, they’re going to have to be dealt with politically. It’s the only way you deal with these people.” Other people received death threats and slurs, apparently from Trump followers, with little objection from Republican representatives.

Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, said dozens of armed protesters gathered in a threatening manner outside her home on Saturday evening chanting “bogus” claims about electoral fraud.
Armed pro-Trump protesters gather outside Michigan elections chief’s home. The Guardian, 8 December 2020

The idea seems to be to intimidate and bribe. If so, this is fascism in action. This is the real cancel culture.

People on the Democrat side tend to believe in things like the rule of law, playing fair, and not lying all the time, so consequently they don’t even see that democracy is crumbling, despite the refutations of Trump by ‘experts’, people who were present where there was supposedly cheating, courts, and so on. This is also despite the number of votes Trump requested be nullified.

Refutations mean nothing, as Trump knows. To Trump’s followers the refutations, and their consistency, only prove the depth of the conspiracy against them. The 60 or so failed court cases, again demonstrate the size, ruthlessness and power of the opposition against him, not the fact that only one of the cases was any good.

By his followers’ lights, Democrats who can engineer all this failure for the super-businessman, must be evil. Evil stops at nothing, so evil cannot be believed, and evil must be crushed forever. Trump will not give in. He will take revenge on all who have stopped him being declared winner as was his right. His followers will agree and cheer.

So people on his side in the next election, will probably only step in to scrutinize results if they already know Republicans should win, and any Democrat victories are the result of fraud. They know the cost of ‘being truthful’ and going against Republican declarations of fraud. So not only will Republicans intensify their demonstrated opposition to any possible non-Republican votes, but they will try and fix the counts, to get at the real truth of America.

And when the next Republican gets in, he will not have to listen to Democrats at all because people on his side know that Democrats fixed an election and are evil. Democrats can slowly be rounded up because they are evil and corrupt, and many people will have no sympathy for them. And it won’t take much of that before most Democrats decide the results of this election probably were faked and they should go along with it. The media will go along to keep going along, and nobody will report the threats and so they will not exist.

Only a few people will even notice that democracy has gone, because it all will be done in defense of democracy.

*********************

[Footnote 1] A brief history of Trump and allegations of electoral fraud

After the election of Obama. Trump tweeted:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!
Twitter Nov 7, 2012

A deleted tweet said:

He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!
Donald Trump Freaks Out on Twitter After Obama Wins Election, Mashable 7 November 2012

and

The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one!
as above

Actually Obama seems to have won the popular vote by about 5 million votes. However, it is clear that loosing the popular vote but wining in the electoral college is no longer a problem in 2016.

In 2016, he lost the Iowa primary to Ted Cruz and wrote:

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump
Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!
Twitter 12: 47 am Feb 4, 2016

and

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump
Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.
Twitter 1: 28 am Feb 4 2016

Even later he tweeted:

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump
I will be interviewed on @foxandfriends at 9:00 A.M. I will be talking about the rigged and boss controlled Republican primaries!
Twitter 10:00 PM · Apr 16, 2016

In the 2016 presidential election against Hillary Clinton, he tweeted.

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
This election is being rigged by the media pushing false and unsubstantiated charges, and outright lies, in order to elect Crooked Hillary!
Twitter Oct 15, 2016

A section of a debate with Hilary Clinton went like this:

Donald Trump: She shouldn’t be allowed to run. She’s guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run. And just in that respect, I say it’s rigged. Because she should never-… she should never have been allowed to run for the presidency based on what she did with emails and so many other things.
Chris Wallace: (01:04:31)
But sir, there is a tradition in this country. In fact, one of the prides of this country is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard for what a campaign is that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying that you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and that the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?
Donald Trump: (01:04:57)
What I am saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense.
Hillary Clinton: (01:05:01)
Well, Chris, let me respond to that because that’s horrifying. Every time Donald thinks things are not going in his direction, he claims whatever it is is rigged against him. The FBI conducted a year long investigation into my emails. They concluded there was no case. He said the FBI was rigged. He lost the Iowa caucus. He lost the Wisconsin primary. He said the Republican primary was rigged against him. Then Trump University gets sued for fraud and racketeering, he claims the court system and the federal judge is rigged against him. There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmy’s were rigged against him.
Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton 3rd Presidential Debate Transcript 2016

Some days later he commented:

I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supporters and to all of the people of the United States that I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election, if I win,
Donald Trump: ‘I will totally accept’ election results ‘if I win’ 20 October 2016 – emphasis added.

Possibly a joke?, But its only fakery if he looses, yet he became one of the few Presidents to claim his victory was in a faked election

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
Twitter Nov 28, 2016

He continued his claims of fraud into 2017

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump
Look forward to seeing final results of VoteStand. Gregg Phillips and crew say at least 3,000,000 votes were illegal. We must do better!
Twitter Jan 28, 2017

The UK based Independent commented:

VoteStand is an amateur app that allows people to send in their own reports of voter fraud. The app has been downloaded just a few thousand times and is barely used…. The VoteStand Twitter account has only 614 followers.
Even if the app detected genuine instances of voter fraud, so few people use it that it would be impossible for three million infractions to have taken place [and been reported].
Votestand: Donald Trump relies on unknown app to back up claims of voter fraud. The Independent, 27 January 2017

His administration even threatened to investigate the supposed fraud, and Trump reportedly alleged again that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 election. No evidence was presented.

Let us be clear, if President Trump wanted to set up a commission to ensure US elections were secure, well-regulated, and reflected the will of the people, he had plenty of opportunity to do so. Republicans controlled the Senate and the House for his first two years so, even if Democrats had objected (which is unlikely, if the commission was not phrased as a witch hunt), a commission could easily have been set up to consider all the available evidence, and to find ways of better securing the results. He did not do this.

A reasonable conclusion from his comments, is that he only wants to challenge the voting system when votes don’t go his way.

He began this 2020 election pointing out a problem with mail-in voting….

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans. @foxandfriends
Twitter 10:20 PM · Apr 8, 2020 Emphasis added.

For what it is worth, one mid year survey estimated that:

“More than one-third of Americans intend to vote by mail in the November presidential election”….
Among them, 48% of voters who plan to vote for Democratic presumptive nominee Joe Biden said they are likely to vote by mail, according to the survey. That’s more than twice the 23% of voters backing President Donald Trump who said they are likely to vote by mail.
Biden voters twice as likely than Trump supporters to vote by mail in November, survey finds, USAToday 18 August 2020

So we can agree with the President that mail in ballots were going to be bad for Republicans. We could also suspect that if the mail in votes were counted after the polling day results, then there would be a significant swing in Biden’s direction, late in the counting. Some votes might be post-marked before the election and delivered after the election, especially given the apparent run down of the post-office.

As I understand it, in the USA, mailed ballots are safe for several reasons

They are signed by the voter.
The signature on the ballot is matched to one on file.
They are individually barcoded to keep track of the votes and voters, and check what forms are used.
All this information is stored and put on the electoral role, to catch people who vote by mail and then in person.
The US military use mailed ballots.

Most research appears to show mail-in votes are safe [2]. The Right wing Heritage Foundation reported only 1,308 proven instances of voter fraud since the 1990s. Only a subset of these votes were mail-in.

However, governments do sometimes send out multiple application forms, and sometimes people seem to think this is the actual voting form.

in California, the governor sent, I hear or sending millions of ballots all over the state. Millions to anybody. To anybody. People that aren’t citizens, illegals, anybody that walks in California is going to get a ballot. We’re not going to destroy this country by allowing things like that to happen. We’re not destroying our country. This has more to do with fairness and honesty and really our country itself because when that starts happening, you don’t have a fare. You have a rigged system. You have a rigged system and that’s what would happen.
We’re not going to let it happen because you’re subverting our process and you’re making our country a joke and the Democrats are doing it because in theory, it’s good for them. Although last week we two big races. We won in Wisconsin and one in California. California, 25. We won a tremendous race in California.
Transcript: Donald Trump Remarks on Protecting Seniors with Diabetes May 26, 2020

I think we’re going to have a lot of people show up. I’m very worried about mail-in voting because I think it’s subject to tremendous fraud and being rigged. Do you see that Paterson, New Jersey, where I believe it was 20% of the vote was fraudulent? It was all sorts of things happened. I understand a mailman was recently indicted someplace for playing games with the mail-in ballots….
You’ll have tremendous fraud if you do these mail-in ballots. Now, absentee ballots are okay, because absentee ballots, you have to get applications. You have to go through a process. If I’m here, and I vote in Florida, you get an absentee ballot. But you have to go through a process. Absentee ballots are great, but mail-in voting, where a governor mails millions of ballots to people all over the state. California, millions and millions of ballots, as an [inaudible 00:56:15]… and then they come back, they don’t come back. Who got them? Did you forget to send them to a Republican area or a Democrat area, I guess you could say? But if you take a look at all of the unbelievable fraud that’s been involved with mail-in voting over the last even short period of a while, but look at Paterson, New Jersey. It was a massive error and a massive miscalculation and there was incredible fraud. Look at the city council, what’s happened to it. This is one place, but you have many places and they’re all over. Yes, please?
Donald Trump Rose Garden Press Conference Transcript July 14, 2020

The Patterson New Jersey case is interesting, but it does not seem to be really about voter fraud, it is about procedural violations. Voters are supposed to either submit or mail in their votes themselves. They can authorise another person to do this, but such people are limited to delivering 3 votes. What seems to have happened is that some people took on far more than three votes from voters. They did not appear to fake them, and they were caught. The judge commented the vote was “rife with mail in vote procedural violations.” [3], [4] The case concerns an election for a city council ward, which is probably a little less protected than a Presidential Election.

Now it’s very bad what’s going on with mail-in ballots. Okay? As differentiated from absentee ballots where you have to go and you go through a process because you can’t be there for some reason, but the mail-in ballots is going to be, they’re going to be rigged. They’re going to be a terrible situation. And you have to be careful in Georgia, but you have to be careful everywhere where they’re doing it.
And there’s been tremendous corruption, tremendous corruption on mail-in ballots. So absentee ballot, great, mail-in ballot, absolutely no good. It makes no sense. A governor sends out millions of ballots all over the place. They don’t know where they’re going. They’re going to wherever. I have a friend who got one for his daughter, another one for his daughter, and then a second one for the first daughter. They didn’t know what to do with them. I had another friend, a really wonderful guy who lost his son seven years ago, Robert, his son, Robert, and his son was sent a mail-in ballot. He called me, he said, “What do I do? I just got a mail-in ballot for Robert? Robert died seven years ago.” So it’s a terrible situation if they decide to use it.
Donald Trump Atlanta Speech Transcript on Rebuilding Infrastructure July 15 2020

Again we have the problem of whether he was sent a mail-in ballot, or sent an application form for a mail in ballot. In interview with Chris Wallace, Trump was asked:

But can you give a direct answer, you will accept the election?
Donald Trump: I have to see. Look, I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say [inaudible 00:38:24 ‘or not‘???], and I didn’t last time either.
Donald Trump Chris Wallace Interview Transcript July 19 2020

In New Jersey, 20% of the ballots were defective, fraudulent, 20%. And that’s because they did a good job. Okay? So this is just a way they’re trying to steal the election and everybody knows that. Because the only way they’re going to win is by a rigged election. I really believe that. I saw the crowd outside. For every sign we had for Trump Pence, every single sign.
Donald Trump Speech Transcript August 20, 2020: In Joe Biden’s Hometown

This argument is that because he has crowds he will win….

the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged, remember that. It’s the only way we’re going to lose this election… So we have to be very careful. Look, we have more than this election, that’s a big statement. The only way they’re going to win is that way.
Donald Trump Speech Transcript Wisconsin August 17 2020

******

Footnote 2: Trump on the 2020 Election

I’d like to provide the American people with an update on our efforts to protect the integrity of our very important 2020 election. If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late, we’re looking to them very strongly, but a lot of votes came in late….
I’ve already decisively won many critical states, including massive victories in Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, to name just a few. We won these and many other victories despite historic election interference from big media, big money, and big tech. As everybody saw, we won by historic numbers, and the pollsters got it knowingly wrong. They got it knowingly wrong. We had polls that were so ridiculous and everybody knew it at the time.
There was no blue wave that they predicted. They thought there was going to be a big blue wave. That was false. That was done for suppression reasons…..
our opponents major donors were Wall Street bankers and special interests. Our major donors were police officers, farmers, everyday citizens. Yet for the first time ever, we lost zero races in the House….
I’ve been talking about mail-in voting for a long time. It’s really destroyed our system. It’s a corrupt system and it makes people corrupt, even if they aren’t by nature, but they become corrupt. It’s too easy. They want to find out how many votes they need, and then they seem to be able to find them. They wait and wait, and then they find them, and you see that on Election Night….
We were ahead in vote in North Carolina by a lot, a tremendous number of votes, and we’re still ahead by a lot, but not as many because they’re finding ballots all of a sudden. “Oh, we have some mail-in ballots.” It’s amazing how those mail-in ballots are so one-sided too….
Likewise in Georgia, I won by a lot, a lot, with a lead of over getting close to 300,000 votes on Election Night in Georgia. And by the way, got whittled down and now it’s getting to be to a point where I’ll go from winning by a lot to perhaps being even down a little bit…. The election apparatus in Georgia is run by Democrats….
Despite years of claiming to care about the election security, they refuse to include any requirement to verify signatures, identities, or even determined whether they’re eligible or ineligible to vote….
The officials overseeing the counting in Pennsylvania and other key states are all part of a corrupt Democrat machine that you’ve written about. And for a long time, you’ve been writing about the corrupt Democrat machine.
Donald Trump White House Press Conference as Election Counts Continue Transcript November 5

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
I WON THE ELECTION!
Twitter Nov 16, 2020

*******************

Footnote 3: Trump tries to fix the election

This will get more documentation over time, but these two cases bring out the point.

Judge Brann remarked of Trump’s Pennsylvania case:

In this action, the Trump Campaign and the Individual Plaintiffs (collectively, the “Plaintiffs”) seek to discard millions of votes legally cast by Pennsylvanians from all corners – from Greene County to Pike County, and everywhere in between. In other words, Plaintiffs ask this Court to disenfranchise almost seven million voters. This Court has been unable to find any case in which a plaintiff has sought such a drastic remedy in the contest of an election, in terms of the sheer volume of votes asked to be invalidated. One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens.
That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state.
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE MIDDLE DISTRICT OF PENNSYLVANIA…. No. 4:20-CV-02078

A taped Phone call from January 2nd exists in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to find more votes, as:

I won this election by hundreds of thousands of votes. There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes. I’m just going by small numbers, when you add them up, they’re many times the 11,000. But I won that state by hundreds of thousands of votes….
Donald Trump Georgia Phone call Transcript. Rev 4 January 2021

Trump reiterated this argument a few times – he must have won because he felt it, and people said he should have won….

We won very substantially in Georgia. You even see it by rally size, frankly. We’d be getting 25-30,000 people a rally, and the competition would get less than 100 people. And it never made sense…..
I mean, you know, and I didn’t lose the state, Brad. People have been saying that it was the highest vote ever. There was no way. A lot of the political people said that there’s no way they beat me. And they beat me. They beat me in the . . . As you know, every single state, we won every state [hardly because if they had, they would not need to be ringing the people in Georgia]….
I mean, we have many, many times the number of votes necessary to win this State and we won the State and we won it very substantially and easily and we’re getting… We have… Much of this is they’re certified, far more certified than we need. But we’re getting additional numbers certified too. [Again only if you believe him in the first place is this assertion correct]….
Brad, is we have other people coming in now from Alabama and from South Carolina and from other states, and they’re saying it’s impossible for you to have lost Georgia. We won. You know in Alabama, we set a record, got the highest vote ever. In Georgia, we set a record with a massive amount of votes. And they say it’s not possible to have lost Georgia. And I can tell you by our rallies, I can tell you by the rally I’m having on Monday night, the place they already have lines of people standing out front waiting. It’s just not possible to have lost Georgia, it’s not possible. [So what? He knows already how many people turn up at a Rally?]
I won this election by hundreds of thousands of votes. There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes. I’m just going by small numbers, when you add them up, they’re many times the 11,000. But I won that state by hundreds of thousands of votes.
Donald Trump Georgia Phone call Transcript. Rev 4 January 2021

Trump even made this bizarre claim for his evidence:

President Trump: (30:39)
What about the ballots, the shredding of the ballots, have they been shredding ballots?
Ryan Germany: (30:44)
The only investigation that we have into that, they have not been shredding any ballots. There was an issue in Cobb County where they were doing normal office shredding, getting rid of old stuff, and we investigated that. But this stuff from past elections.
Trump : It doesn’t pass the smell test because we hear they’re shredding thousands and thousands of ballots, and now what they’re saying, “Oh, we’re just cleaning up the office.” You know.
Raffensperger : Mr. President, the problem you have with social media, they — people can say anything.
Trump : Oh this isn’t social media. This is Trump media. It’s not social media. It’s really not; it’s not social media. I don’t care about social media. I couldn’t care less. Social media is Big Tech. Big Tech is on your side, you know. I don’t even know why you have a side because you should want to have an accurate election. And you’re a Republican. [Ah media which agree with Trump are both reliable and not Big Tech]
Donald Trump Georgia Phone call Transcript. Rev 4 January 2021

Trump abused Raffensperger and pleaded with him.

The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry, and there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.
Donald Trump Georgia Phone call Transcript. Rev 4 January 2021

“So what are we going to do here folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break…. You would be respected, really respected, if this can be straightened out before the [Georgia runnoffs] election….”
When Trump claimed that over 5,000 ballots were cast in the state by dead people, Raffensperger responded: “The actual number was two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted. So that’s wrong..”
Donald Trump Georgia Phone call Transcript. Rev 4 January 2021 and Trump’s phone call to Brad Raffensperger: six key points. The Guardian 4 January 2021

Trump also claimed:

And the minimum, there were 18,000 ballots, but they used them three times. So that’s, you know, a lot of votes. And they were all to Biden, by the way. That’s the other thing we didn’t say….
Every single ballot that she did through the machines at early, early in the morning went to Biden. Did you know that, Ryan?
Germany : That’s not accurate, Mr. President.
Trump : Huh. What is accurate?
Germany : The numbers that we are showing are accurate….
Trump : No, they were 100 percent for Biden. 100 percent. There wasn’t a Trump vote in the whole group. Why don’t you want to find this, Ryan? What’s wrong with you? [How would he know they were 100% for Biden?]
Donald Trump Georgia Phone call Transcript. Rev 4 January 2021

Earlier the multiple counting came up

Trump: Brad, why did they put the votes in three times? You know, they put ’em in three times.
Raffensperger: Mr. President, they did not put that. We did an audit of that, and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times….
Germany: We had our — this is Ryan Germany. We had our law enforcement officers talk to everyone who was, who was there after that event came to light. GBI was with them as well as FBI agents….
Trump: Well, there’s no way they could — then they’re incompetent. They’re either dishonest or incompetent, okay?
Donald Trump Georgia Phone call Transcript. Rev 4 January 2021

People were supposed to have voted from outside Georgia or returned in suspicious circumstances.

Mitchell: The number who have registered out of state after they moved from Georgia. And so they had a date when they moved from Georgia, they registered to vote out of state, and then it’s like 4,500, I don’t have that number right in front of me.
Trump: And then they came back in, and they voted.
Germany : We’ve been going through each of those as well, and those numbers that we got, that Ms. Mitchell was just saying, they’re not accurate. Every one we’ve been through are people that lived in Georgia, moved to a different state, but then moved back to Georgia legitimately.
Trump: How may people do that? They moved out, and then they said, “Ah, to hell with it, I’ll move back.” You know, it doesn’t sound like a very normal . . . you mean, they moved out, and what, they missed it so much that they wanted to move back in? It’s crazy. [I guess that is an insult to Georgia].
Germany: They moved back in years ago. This was not like something just before the election. So there’s something about that data that, it’s just not accurate.
Donald Trump Georgia Phone call Transcript. Rev 4 January 2021

And so it goes on:

Trump: Do you think it’s possible that they shredded ballots in Fulton County? Because that’s what the rumor is. And also that Dominion took out machines. That Dominion is really moving fast to get rid of their, uh, machinery.
Germany : This is Ryan Germany. No, Dominion has not moved any machinery out of Fulton County.
Trump : But have they moved the inner parts of the machines and replaced them with other parts?
Germany : No.
Trump : Are you sure, Ryan?
Germany : I’m sure. I’m sure, Mr. President.
Donald Trump Georgia Phone call Transcript. Rev 4 January 2021

You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,…. You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk. But they are shredding ballots, in my opinion, based on what I’ve heard. And they are removing machinery, and they’re moving it as fast as they can, both of which are criminal finds…. So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state,
Donald Trump Georgia Phone call Transcript. Rev 4 January 2021

As USA Today said:

Georgia officials tallied votes for the presidential election three times in the state, including in an audit required by state law and a recount requested by the president. Each count determined that President-elect Joe Biden won the state, the first Democrat to do so since 1992…
On Dec. 5, Trump urged Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to demand the state legislature act to overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia. Kemp refused and has been subjected to a steady barrage of Trump attacks in the weeks since….
Neal Katyal, who was acting solicitor general during the Barack Obama administration, said the Trump call to Raffensperger “demonstrates an impeachable, perhaps criminal, offense. It is a behind the scenes look at how Trump carries out the presidency, abusing his power for his gain.”
Brown, Trump pushes Georgia secretary of state to ‘find’ votes during phone call, Washington Post reports, USAToday 3 January 2021

Trump’s response was.

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump
I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia. He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the “ballots under table” scam, ballot destruction, out of state “voters”, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!
Twitter 12:57 AM · Jan 4, 2021

If Trump really believes he has iron clad evidence, then why does he just not present it to a court? The phone call sounds like Trump has a complete incapacity to believe he could lose, or that he could be refused the opportunity to change things without proof. It sounds like a fishing expedition for access to materials to pronounce them fake. It veers from expecting the officials could just change things because its not that many votes they have to ‘find’ or disallow to give him victory, to odd threats and name calling. It even seems he was incapable of recognising the opportunities he had been given by the people in Georgia to establish his case, perhaps because he cannot.

It may need to be said, that even if Trump did win Georgia, he would not win the election. Therefore, we can presume, he is engaging in similar tactics elsewhere, but it has not leaked to the media. Georgia is probably more open as he is trying to get people out to vote in the runoffs by telling them that unless they vote in huge numbers, they will lose.

In a speech a few days later in Georgia he reportedly said:

Your governor, your secretary of state are petrified of Stacey Abrams,” he said, referring to a Democratic voting rights activist who lost to Kemp in 2018. “What’s all that about? They’re say they’re Republicans. I really don’t think they can be.”
The president added ominously: “I’m going to be back here in a year-and-a-half and I’m going to be campaigning against your governor and your crazy secretary of state.”
‘Fight like hell’: grievance and denialism rule at Trump Georgia rally. The Guardian, 5 January 2021

This is perhaps the end point of the ‘Republicans in Name Only’ (RINO) campaign. You are only a real Republican if you support Trump no matter what, and will commit any crime requested to gain the Party victory. Loyalty and obedience to ideology is required, otherwise you will be attacked or dismissed.

If a Democrat had behaved like this, then it would probably be clear to Republicans, that this was an effort to corrupt the election and generate fake votes.

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Posts Tagged ‘Disinformation’

Multiple Crises

Complexity and wicked problems

Social breakdown?

Conceptual steps

Practical steps

Old regulation

Climate Generosity

Environmental relating

The number one bad?

The problem of virtue – the prime dangers of renewables comes from companies not from renewables

Problems of Fantasy Tech

What was the Conspiracy?

The background: ‘drops,’ and black magic

Q as liar? Fantasy and community?

Satanic pedophiles

The ‘Secret of Media’, is hidden

Q is dead, but Q is not dead

Q and real politics

The Idea

The Problem

Bias as entertainment?

The Advantage

Right Wing Terror?

There is no Conclusion

1) “Trump Media”

2) Trump himself

3) The Really Thin Blue Line

4) Police Complicity?

5) Security Chaos

6) Lack of Revolutionary Aims

7) Spread

8) Fantasy

9) It is not Necessarily ended

10) Election Inquiry?

Endnote: Trump Administration Speeches

[Footnote 1] A brief history of Trump and allegations of electoral fraud

Footnote 2: Trump on the 2020 Election

Footnote 3: Trump tries to fix the election

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