US Elections 2020

According to a recent poll 45% of Republican voters approve the storming of the Capitol, compared to 43% who disapprove. https://today.yougov.com/topics/poli...tol-trump-poll

This points to the problem mainstream Republicans have created for themselves by indulging or encouraging this nonsense. They know they have to distance themselves from the extremists because it turns off moderate voters, but they can't repudiate them completely because there are too many among their supporters. It's disingenuous to be shocked at something that is the foreseeable result of the direction the party has been taking for many years. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...ob-responsible

I recall that soon after the election some unnamed Republican was quoted as asking what the harm was in indulging Trump and letting him blow off steam for a few weeks. Did these people really expect that Trump would just move on and save them the risk of having to oppose him? Now they are on Trump's hate list anyway for refusing to follow him over the cliff and they face a choice between either a messy civil war or surrendering to the extremists.

It's scary. We saw how they were able to sell their lies with covid even with almost every scientist saying they were wrong. Elections by their nature can't be transparent to every individual because there are thousands of precincts and millions of votes and thousands of vote counters processing ballots. Overall states do have audits and recounts and ways of ensuring that if there are rare cases of fraud it won't be systematic. But it's a process with a lot at stake that will already lend itself to paranoia.

There is no way to convince Republicans who can't figure out how they think the voter fraud took place that there wasn't voter fraud. You rebut one lie another fills the void. You'd think that when they hear one lie and then see it rebutted they would learn that their sources of information are untrustworthy and they are being played for the idiots they consistently seem to be. Yet while they won't get angry at people who are cynically manipulating them there is at least one Republican reading this who thinks none of this would have happened if I didn't call them idiots or if people didn't liken them to Nazis for behaving like a bunch of stupid, craven Nazis.

Corporations are, either for selfish reasons or some sense of social responsibility, starting to back away from these dangerous fools. The overall picture still doesn't look good but I will allow myself the enjoyment of watching the hatemongers' shock as they find out that the FBI really will arrest them for insurrection.

I admit to not having read a lot of the thread, but the last few days have been shocking but I think things have been building for a long time, for me the most worrying thing is the loss of independent non partisan news, nowadays it seems everyone is giving there view/spin of news, you can find woke-left leaning-right leaning-alt right news with no problem at all.

And I’m not defending trump at all, but politicians from both sides are to blame here, and the main stream media and the fanatical sites that have appeared, all feeding the fire, mainly for the power, views/ clicks and the money those things bring, maybe Biden will bring things back to the middle ground, where I think the world needs to return to, but maybe I’m living in cloud cuckoo land lol.

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Originally Posted by sidney111

And I’m not defending trump at all, but politicians from both sides are to blame here, and the main stream media and the fanatical sites that have appeared,

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Neither side is perfect but only the Republicans have knowingly spread misinformation that caused people to riot and kill. Once they caused neo-nazis to storm our capitol the President called them Patriots and continued to propagate the lie that the election was stolen from him. He did not concede an election once he lost the vote, lost 60 plus lawsuits, and unsuccessfully tried to extort the secretary of state in Georgia. His lawsuits were so frivolous that his lawyers could not even allege fraud in court without perjuring themselves.

Biden is nowhere near the fringes. But if there aren't consequences for stoking insurrection then we will not return to normal.

The mainstream media is not biased because they aren't presenting the seditious point of view. You can't split the baby and say Trump has some points when everything he is saying is so made up that there isn't even internal consistency. One day he'll say ballots were shredded. The next he'll say machine parts were switched out. Another day he'll say dumpsters were filled with ballots. He'll say more people voted than were registered and it will quickly be pointed out that's not true and he'll move on. These are conspiracy theories that are self-proving; the fact that you argue against one only shows it's true etcetera etcetera.

The people dressed in animal skins, sometimes in camouflage, carrying zip ties, waving the flag of treason and occasionally clothed in shirts mocking Nazi death camps are not going to have their viewpoints reflected in news articles written by people with functioning brains.

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Originally Posted by sidney111

I admit to not having read a lot of the thread, but the last few days have been shocking but I think things have been building for a long time, for me the most worrying thing is the loss of independent non partisan news, nowadays it seems everyone is giving there view/spin of news, you can find woke-left leaning-right leaning-alt right news with no problem at all.

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You seem to be including the mainstream media in your criticism, so I'm wondering how you would define independent non-partisan media. The internet has obviously led to a proliferation of sources (including more extreme ones), but I don't think the mainstream media are more partisan than they have been in the past. The main thing that has changed is that we have a President who has done things that were unthinkable previously. When the President engages in consistent lying, hate-mongering and abuse of power do you think the media should refrain from criticising him in the interests of being non-partisan? I think they may have actually helped Trump in 2016 because they were trying so hard to appear non-partisan (eg the attention given to Hillary's emails).

I'm also wondering what are the left-wing equivalents of Fox News, OAN, Breitbart, Infowars, etc, which are mostly propaganda channels that promote lies and conspiracy theories?

The easiest way to see the difference between the two parties is to compare their reactions to the 2016 and 2020 elections. Sure lots of Democrats were unhappy about the result and many blamed interference by Russia. However, Russian interference was a finding by the intelligence agencies, not an allegation concocted by Democrats. Democrats accepted the outcome of the vote - they did not launch legal challenges, pressure electoral officials or vote against accepting the certified results. They cooperated in an orderly transition. There were some big protests but they were fairly peaceful - nobody attempted to storm the Capitol to stop the President being confirmed.

Yes I do include the mainstream media (not saying there as fanatical) who have been on a slow descent since the fair and balanced reporting law was removed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine.

from the replies, it seems this moment will change nothing, and we will still be on the race to the extremes, for me that’s a shame, but being old and not living in the USA , won’t affect me a lot.

This is a article that says some of what I mean, way better than I can https://www.nj.com/opinion/2021/01/i...l-opinion.html

I also remember right after Donald Trump was elected, there were several news shows on how this happened, and on a lot of them they mentioned a book/paper (can’t remember the correct term for it) written by a respected female professor, who had travelled around the “rust belt” and other areas asking regular people their opinions over a period of months, I can recall the democrats saying this should be looked at on how the divide can be addressed.

Quite funny or sad that that intention,sentiment, will lasted about a week, you have to wonder if that professor thought why have I bothered.

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Originally Posted by sidney111

Yes I do include the mainstream media (not saying there as fanatical) who have been on a slow descent since the fair and balanced reporting law was removed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine.

from the replies, it seems this moment will change nothing, and we will still be on the race to the extremes, for me that’s a shame, but being old and not living in the USA , won’t affect me a lot.

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Saying that insurrection is bad and it is the fault of those who promoted it with conspiracy theories is not enabling it. It's not extremism. You say you don't support Donald Trump but you must actually sympathize with his position if you think this is a both sides issue. He promoted conspiracy theories that had no basis in fact and were made entirely in bad faith because he could not tolerate losing an election.

You can say it doesn't affect you but you're the one who entered the debate without being willing to defend your opinion.

How do you think the insurrection at the capitol building should have been covered? What could Democrats have done to prevent Republicans from making completely false charges of voter fraud and trying to hang Mike Pence?

Just as a side note about the fairness doctrine: The fairness doctrine was revoked by a Republican appointee at the FCC. It's not clear whether it could have applied to cable news anyway without violating our first amendment.

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Originally Posted by sidney111

I admit to not having read a lot of the thread, but the last few days have been shocking but I think things have been building for a long time, for me the most worrying thing is the loss of independent non partisan news, nowadays it seems everyone is giving there view/spin of news, you can find woke-left leaning-right leaning-alt right news with no problem at all.

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I think I have an idea on what you're trying to say and think its better illustrated in this point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oSf-kKv8hU