The WH Transition Thread --- all things Trump to Biden until Inauguration

[Steve of phpBB]

Even if Fox News shuttered tonight, the POTUS has an entire media communications apparatus at his disposal.

This is one of the reasons I think Navalny is wrong.

[P.D.X.]

Even if Fox News shuttered tonight, the POTUS has an entire media communications apparatus at his disposal.

It is enjoyable that he now needs the apparatus that he's shit on for 4 years.

[Rex]

There are some thorny issues if a platform the size of Twitter censors a candidate for public office, which Trump will soon declare himself to be of course. But as of right now it’s total bullshit. Trump is clearly under investigation for some white collar crimes, and I suspect for some blue collar crimes too.

[EnochRoot]

Fuck Trump, and fuck Twitter for the past four years of Trump. Trump's used Twitter to gaslight his followers for what, 10-12 years? His actions on Twitter to undermine Obama should've netted him a ban alone. Had Twitter done that, Trump never would've become president. That said, to the fact it took Trump inciting a riot, and gaslighting his followers that the election was stolen from him, for Twitter to say that's a bridge too far?

It's about fucking time the banned the world's most compromised person from their platform.

And Alexey Navalny? The whataboutism is strong in him.

[degenerasian]

[tennbengal]

[brian]

Typical centrist bullshit. Fuck Biden.

[EnochRoot]

Parler yanked from Apple App Store.

[sancarlos]

Oh, the schadenfreude is strong.

I tweeted this sentence as a reply on the balls-tases tweet and got 221 likes. Wow.

[DaveInSeattle]

Parler yanked from Apple App Store.

And off Amazon server...

[psunate77]

They cut Trump's campaign email..

[Rex]

Insecure apps for insecure people

[duff]

Typical centrist bullshit. Fuck Biden.

Bad enough we got Canadians questioning our government. Now we got to worry about the Mexicans!

[Steve of phpBB]

Typical centrist bullshit. Fuck Biden.

Bad enough we got Canadians questioning our government. Now we got to worry about the Mexicans!

Build the wall!

[DSafetyGuy]

After the 20th would be very good.

[tennbengal]

Well...the Wash Po article linked through this tweet shows how close a call it was in the Capitol...

[EnochRoot]

Well...the Wash Po article linked through this tweet shows how close a call it was in the Capitol...

I'm not crying! You're crying!

[Steve of phpBB]

This is great. Especially the Conan sword.

[The Sybian]

Dude, that is clearly a joke. Just because it has Trump's picture and says "WH Office of..." doesn't mean it's real.

This gotta be a trap??

Let’s hope.

[psunate77]

Dude, that is clearly a joke. Just because it has Trump's picture and says "WH Office of..." doesn't mean it's real.

This gotta be a trap??

Let’s hope.

It also could be someone affiliated with the FBI who made a Parler account.. The post already has a ton of people who have given their address and what they did at the Capitol.

Remember Police once got people with outstanding warrants by sending them a notice that won prizes and then when they arrived, they arrested them.

[tennbengal]

[tennbengal]

If you read the Post article I referenced last night, this was the critical sequence that bought the senate security the one minute they needed to clear the room

[EnochRoot]

Images like this need to be on full-blast.

[EdRomero]

But Rubio says we need to move on to unite the country

[Steve of phpBB]

Assuming that my Twitter feed is accurate and that is the murder of Sicknick, that photo should be shoved in the face of every Republican at every opportunity for a long fucking time.

[Shirley]

Images like this need to be on full-blast.

If you watch the video, it's about to get worse. Someone (backpack dude, maybe) pulls off his helmet. And then the long beard dude (beige jacket) starts beating him, likely in the head, with his American flag pole. It's disgusting.

[Steve of phpBB]

And apparently that's not the murder of Sicknick; just a different routine brutal assault of a police officer by the Blue Lives Matter crowd.

[Brontoburglar]

it's incredible to watch the endless lengths that the party of personal responsibility and free markets will go to claim that the free market is conspiring against them and that they bear no personal responsibility for their own actions

expected, of course. but still pretty ridiculous.

[EdRomero]

I hope Biden etc are tough and mean enough to expose and fight this, including purging all the military and police who are complicit. Christopher Miller should be getting a lot of attention, as should every allegation made against Trump for the last 5 years. At the very least, he green lit a mob with intentions of murdering politicians that wouldn't go along with him. If he's okay with that, he is okay with playing along with Putin. It's all so overwhelmingly anger/depression inducing.

[mister d]

To be clear, none of this was a good thing. But if you believe this violence was inevitable, the cops being their target was the best possible thing for this country to have a chance.

[Steve of phpBB]

To be clear, none of this was a good thing. But if you believe this violence was inevitable, the cops being their target was the best possible thing for this country to have a chance.

Yep.

How long do you think it will be before the Fox News Cinematic Universe starts their character assassination of Sicknick? I'm surprised it hasn't started already.

[tennbengal]

He was a trump voter so they will have to work at it...

Also, you all should read this piece (or get cheddar to paste it):

[Steve of phpBB]

For further description, that's an essay by Timothy Snyder, one of the preeminent historians and scholars of authoritarian tyranny in Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century (including the Holocaust).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_D._Snyder

[Rex]

Besides being reprehensible, the idea of turning the page here is not going to work. This is the most videotaped and photographed terror attack in history. We’ll be reliving it for a very long time. Just wait for the books and the movies to come out. I also think we’re not even close to knowing everything there is to know about how this happened. Imagine if “Bush did 911” was real and had merit—that’s this.

[EnochRoot]

Damn that was a sobering read.

[MaxWebster]

that article went beyond scaring the shit out of me - which was probably where i was last night - into "i don't know if I have a shred of hope"

my kids already want to leave the country (again!) after they're done w college and i won't be discouraging them.

[tennbengal]

Yeah. He really didn't sugarcoat it. Just plain spoken truths.

[EnochRoot]

Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place.

I have a friend who is buying up property on Mallorca in the Balearic Islands of Spain. When we go visit, I’d like to think I want to return home, but yeah, it’s more and more doubtful every day.

[tennbengal]

For further description, that's an essay by Timothy Snyder, one of the preeminent historians and scholars of authoritarian tyranny in Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century (including the Holocaust).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_D._Snyder

Thanks Steve.

[tennbengal]

These passages...

Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth. His use of the term “fake news” echoed the Nazi smear Lügenpresse (“lying press”); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as “enemies of the people.” Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when the conventional press had taken a beating; the financial crisis of 2008 did to American newspapers what the Great Depression did to German ones. The Nazis thought that they could use radio to replace the old pluralism of the newspaper; Trump tried to do the same with Twitter.

Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself.

Some of his lies were, admittedly, medium-size: that he was a successful businessman; that Russia did not support him in 2016; that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Such medium-size lies were the standard fare of aspiring authoritarians in the 21st century. In Poland the right-wing party built a martyrdom cult around assigning blame to political rivals for an airplane crash that killed the nation’s president. Hungary’s Viktor Orban blames a vanishingly small number of Muslim refugees for his country’s problems. But such claims were not quite big lies; they stretched but did not rend what Hannah Arendt called “the fabric of factuality.”

One historical big lie discussed by Arendt is Joseph Stalin’s explanation of starvation in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33. The state had collectivized agriculture, then applied a series of punitive measures to Ukraine that ensured millions would die. Yet the official line was that the starving were provocateurs, agents of Western powers who hated socialism so much they were killing themselves. A still grander fiction, in Arendt’s account, is Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the First World War. Intriguingly, Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.

In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.”

The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved. To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and of experts but also of local, state and federal government institutions, from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security and all the way to the Supreme Court. It brings with it, of necessity, a conspiracy theory: Imagine all the people who must have been in on such a plot and all the people who would have had to work on the cover-up.

Trump’s electoral fiction floats free of verifiable reality. It is defended not so much by facts as by claims that someone else has made some claims. The sensibility is that something must be wrong because I feel it to be wrong, and I know others feel the same way. When political leaders such as Ted Cruz or Jim Jordan spoke like this, what they meant was: You believe my lies, which compels me to repeat them. Social media provides an infinity of apparent evidence for any conviction, especially one seemingly held by a president.

On the surface, a conspiracy theory makes its victim look strong: It sees Trump as resisting the Democrats, the Republicans, the Deep State, the pedophiles, the Satanists. More profoundly, however, it inverts the position of the strong and the weak. Trump’s focus on alleged “irregularities” and “contested states” comes down to cities where Black people live and vote. At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people.

It’s not just that electoral fraud by African-Americans against Donald Trump never happened. It is that it is the very opposite of what happened, in 2020 and in every American election. As always, Black people waited longer than others to vote and were more likely to have their votes challenged. They were more likely to be suffering or dying from Covid-19, and less likely to be able to take time away from work. The historical protection of their right to vote has been removed by the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, and states have rushed to pass measures of a kind that historically reduce voting by the poor and communities of color.

The claim that Trump was denied a win by fraud is a big lie not just because it mauls logic, misdescribes the present and demands belief in a conspiracy. It is a big lie, fundamentally, because it reverses the moral field of American politics and the basic structure of American history.