“ s. Sure, the left talks about rhetoric, but it also fights for higher wages, civil liberties, healthcare, affirmative action, investment in education, workers' rights, and voting rights.”
I don’t think the person you are replying to would agree with you about affirmative actions being a good thing. Other than that, the left is super repressive of free speech which is the only civil right left to win , detrimental to wage growth and worker rights by supporting unlimited immigration, bad for education by siding with teachers unions, manipulative when it comes to voting to the point when half of the country does not believe in elections. The right simply does not exist in the institutional level at this point, all they can do is whine about excesses of the left
Free speech is the only civil right left to win? Fear not, then, when the state legislatures get around to the Equal Rights Amendment maybe they can spare a thought for ratifying the First Amendment. It has waited long enough.
The right does not exist in the institutional level? Has anyone told Mitch McConnell about this, or Justice Thomas?
The last "right-wing" move I have seen in recent history was Trump's nerfed-ban of critical race theories. I do not remember any culturally significant initiatives produced by McConnell or Justice Thomas or anyone else on the right. The only true "right-wing" issue they still talk about is abortions.
Heritage Foundation? Rand Corporation? Cato Institute? American Enterprise Institute? The institutional right is unimaginably huge and well-funded. Half of them even have "institute" in the name.
All the policy since they source most of the ideas and especially political strategies. Since the early 2000s they ("they" now extending beyond just the think tanks listed previously) directly control the media by sourcing/compiling news for all major sources, so they basically control all political opinion. After a brief respite from their influence on social media, they seem to now do a pretty good job of influencing the influencers there as well.
Heritage Foundation: starting with Reagan and encouraging the right's obsession with smaller government, was a large advocate for us going into and staying in Iraq, and was a major influence on Trump - at least 66 foundation employees worked in the administration and advised Trump who should be in his administration, including advocating for Mick Mulvaney when other Republicans were pushing against him. After his loss, they hired three of Trump's immigration team. They have also promoted the voter fraud claims about 2016 and 2020 elections, saying that it was "rampant", and also are heavy deniers of climate change, the Clean Energy act and Kyoto Agreement.
AEI has been a little less controversial, although they've also leaned heavily on politicians about climate change, and their biggest funders are/were the Koch brothers. Notably, they were one of the earliest predictors of the 2008 housing crisis, though their focus (while not entirely incorrect) was about the causing effects of government banking, rather than private sector greed.
The Cato Institute is another organization founded and funded by one of the Kochs. The Cato Institute has lobbied hard for the deconstruction, outsourcing and privatization of the USPS (to recent great success), NASA, TSA. They have lobbied for the abolishment of minimum wage and in the absence thereof have fervently pushed for not increasing it (which hasn't happened since 2007 - legislation-wise, though the last increase went into effect in early 2009). It opposes overtime regulation and of all things, child labor prohibition (thankfully this hasn't gained much traction). It is one of the biggest opponents of universal health care, and of campaign finance reform.
In 2006 it helped Republicans propose a Balanced Budget Veto Amendment. It also strongly criticized the tobacco settlements.
Interestingly enough, the Cato Institute also supported striking down state laws against homosexuality, and the Federal Marriage Act (which would have prohibited same-sex marriage).
The Heritage Foundation's solution to climate change (if it turns out to be real), is more fossil fuels: "How Fossil Fuels Will Help Us Confront Climate Change" [1].
That article describes how in Dubai they handle an average temperature of over 100 ℉ with no problems by having air conditioned homes, offices, cars, buses, trains, and shopping malls. It's abundant oil and a government that promotes economic freedom that allows this, it says.
It then ties it to dealing with climate change:
> The current average world temperature is about 58 degrees. The true believers in climate change are predicting global catastrophe if that temperature rises by a worst-case estimate of 7 degrees Fahrenheit. That would bring the world average temperature to about 65 degrees.
> Dubai, today, is doing quite well at an average temperature 35 degrees higher.
> Obviously, Dubai is on the cutting edge of technology and prosperity as a result of its oil endowment and government policies that promote economic freedom and growth.
> Not every country has oil, but in a globalized market, cheap fossil fuels are available everywhere to spur rapid growth and technological change.
I agree with you that it's not strictly a "left" issue - and certainly the recent election in the US had the "right" bringing up voter fraud.
But it's important to remember the "left" raising flags about fraud in the 2016 election, and primary. Everything from harping on the legitimacy of a candidate that lost the popular vote, "not my president" protests, accusations of voting machine fraud, primary delegate issues, conflating gerrymandering with federal elections, etc...
In general, it seems whichever side loses is increasingly blaming "unfairness" to generate more outrage to de-legitimize winners of the election. ...rather than trying to appeal to more voters.
We're all losers in this situation because it is the voting system that keeps us from killing each other.
My only issue with this comment is that it seems to discount the idea of "unfairness" in our elections. Yes, in a federal election the districts don't matter. However, as we can see right now, the state legislatures that are elected via those districts can drastically change the landscape of a federal election within their state. The republican legislatures are moving en masse to "prevent fraud" in a way that seems to be directly aimed at making it more difficult to vote[1]. Appealing to more voters is hard when fewer people are able to vote.
If you believe only officially identified US citizens should vote, the left started attacking decades ago. Also, there was a strong 'Trump stole the vote' campaign 4 years ago, similar to the current narrative pushed by Trump supporters.
From the sounds of it, you think the beginning was 2020. There's a long history of implying the "other side's" win is questionable, across the globe and including the US.
Affirmative action biasedly lifts up minorities over others. It looks noble on the surface, but realistically creates more of the same problem.
When I applied to college, I (and all of my friends), knew that ticking any non-white ethnicity box on the application made you more likely to get accepted. I don't know that any of us did, but it was very well known that you could game the system this way.
It made acceptance into college less about your academic merit and more about your ethnicity (or ability to use ethnic bias to cheat the system) - aka, more racism.
Affirmative action is here for a reason. If there wasn't systemic racism in hiring, there would be no need for it.
What affirmative action is supposed to do is to ensure that your race isn't a determining factor in not getting hired for a job that you are qualified for.
The Rooney Rule in the NFL wouldn't need to be a thing if being a black coach in the NFL meant statistically you had a greater chance of getting fired or not being hired at all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule
What affirmative action is supposed to do is to ensure that your race isn't a determining factor in not getting hired for a job that you are qualified for.
No, that's wrong. If that were the goal, it would simply be made illegal to ask about race (or race-proxy) on college application forms.
Affirmative action is meant to artifically boost the number of college graduates from a selected set of underrepresented backgrounds. If it weren't the goal, this blind recruitment trial wouldn't have been immediately canceled: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
I'm talking about job applications here.. not all job applicants have college degrees. And your link is to an Australian gender study. We are talking about similar but different issues
> the left is... manipulative when it comes to voting to the point when half of the country does not believe in elections
I disagree with essentially everything you're saying, but how on Earth can you write that with a straight face? I mean, five seconds on Google gives me:
Many elected Republicans are still lying about the election results. How is that 'the left' being 'manipulative when it comes to voting'? Not to mention the slew of disenfranchisement policies being drawn up by Republicans at the moment.
> The right simply does not exist in the institutional level at this point, all they can do is whine about excesses of the left
No, because that didn’t happen. If you were following the news the claim actually made is what the intelligence agencies of multiple countries concluded: Russia spent a considerable amount of money _influencing_ the elections with fake news and social media and they supported targeted attacks on Democrats.
There were concerns over attempts to compromise election systems, which again were confirmed by subsequent investigations, but that was reported by the mainstream media in the context of the federal government warning states to be prepared and noting that most attacks had failed and there was no reason to believe the elections would not be reliable.
You're absolutely right, Russia very likely did spent time and money attempting to influence the 2016 election, very few would doubt that. What I have issue with is the erasure of the fact that media outlets and mainstream Democrats were absolutely and without a doubt pushing the narrative that Russia "stole" or "hacked" the election, which is very different from attempting to influence.
That piece I posted, of which there are hundreds of similar ones easily perusable quotes:
"[Donald Trump] it turns out, is no more the duly elected president of the United States than I am the world’s most decorated ballerina."
Do you see the issue there? It was a mainstream opinion at the time to believe that despite misguided Americans legally voting him into power, the election was fraudulent and Donald Trump was not the legal president.
I truly believe if the Democrats had exercised more tact in their accusations 4 years prior, we wouldn't have seen the horrific events at the capital by domestic terrorists peddling essentially the same conspiracy theory which had been forced down their throats by centre-left media.
You’re going to claim authoritative representation of American mainstream opinion based on a blog post by a Canadian author who lives in Europe?
More importantly, you’re conflating two very different situations: saying that the Russians _interfered_ with the election is a factual position and random people who are not in power complaining about it or saying that the legitimately elected candidate doesn’t speak for them is very different than the current President baselessly claiming fraud and trying to use his office to get legitimate votes thrown out or request that fake ones be manufactured. Trying to equate the two is simply dishonest.
Here are a lot more representative articles that aren't from a Huffpost opinion piece by a "novelist and photographer"
Clinton says Comey's letter, Russian hackers cost her the election [0]
Russian hackers, Donald Trump, and the 2016 election, explained [1]
Russia and its influence on the presidential election [2]
The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S. [3]
CIA concludes Russia interfered to help Trump win election, say reports [4]
These are consistently and specifically about Russian hacking of Clinton's email servers and about their actions targeting voting infrastructure. They moderate, rather than amplify, any blunt or clickbait language like "Russia hacked the election." There were not widespread claims that the election was outright stolen, and certainly not from the leader of the party. Merely claims that without Russian influence, people would have cast their votes differently.
Remember that Clinton conceded the next day and said outright that "we must accept this result." [5]
There is no one to blame for the big lie that the right wing has swallowed and run with except for the leadership that has fed them those lies over and over and over for years.
There's a big difference between partisans doing that, and an actual president claiming the election is stolen for months, asking his supporters to march on the Capitol to deny the rights of voters to have their vote confirmed, calling state officials to ask them to "find votes", etc.
You said it, they brought all of that to courts, which means it was entirely supported by the full establishment of the party, not just a fringe part of it.
The fact you can't even see the major difference makes me think you are clearly looking at just one side.
I think that's an apples-to-oranges comparison (no pun intended).
It would be fairer to compare the Democrats' allegations about Russia to the Republicans' allegations about China, i.e. accusations that Biden is anywhere between a useful-idiot-for to an outright-puppet-of the CCP.
AFAIK the Democrat position has been that, for both elections, the voting/counting mechanisms have withstood targetted attacks by state actors, and in both cases gave overall tallies which correspond to the electorate's choices, within an acceptable margin of error (I'm stopping at the tallies, to avoid the separate debate regarding the electoral college versus the popular vote).
Some Democrats also allege foreign interference with the electorate's choices, through widespread misinformation and propaganda. As an extreme example, fewer people may have voted for Trump if Russian troll farms weren't claiming that Clinton harvests child organs (or whatever Q-adjacent bullshit was spreading around Facebook at the time). It's perfectly consistent to make that claim, whilst also claiming that those lie-induced Trump votes were subsequently collated and counted correctly towards the totals.
AFAIK the Republican-led investigation found the Democrats' position to be essentially correct, that there were targetted attacks on infrastructure, and misinformation/propaganda attacks nudging the electorate towards Trump. No evidence of collusion was found, i.e. that Trump was working for foreign adversaries, or foreign adversaries were working for Trump, or they were coordinating ahead of time. That would (of course) have been even worse, but the lack of (evidence of) such collusion doesn't make the idea of foreign adversaries weaponising US voters for their own ends any more palatable.
In short, choosing positions/policies/rhetoric that is useful to adversaries is not itself criminal; it could simply be naivety or coincidence. Yet knowing that a candidate's positions/policies/rhetoric is useful to adversaries would be pertinent information for voters.
You can look at the retraction itself [0] and it says nothing close to "it wasn't based in reality."
What it says is that Trump's actual words were that the state official would "find things that are gonna be unbelievable" and that "[w]hen the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised."
The specific words were a misquote, but there is no doubt from the call itself that Trump was pressuring state officials into supporting his big lie.
Trump did plenty of dumb stuff. It bothers me when people misquote him so bad they are practically lie about it because it makes people doubt all of the bad things he really did.
Did Trump do something improper by calling the Governor and pressuring them? Yea. Was it so bad as directly tell them to "find votes"? No.
I agree with you, but you have to recognize that one is just an escalation of the other. Both are terrible, even if Trump being worse. Trump would not have been possible if discourse had not already broken down.
We created a culture where this devolution of discourse was acceptable, and so fewer voters found Trump's rhetoric unacceptable - partially because they heard more and more extreme rhetoric coming from the other side - whether on social media, MSM, or even some far left wing political leaders.
Incidents like when the Bernie Sanders campaign worker SHOT a US GOP senator. ...the reporting on that was extremely asymmetric between GOP and Dem news media.
These sorts of escalations, and the MSM pandering to their base, creates a cycle of hyperbole and misinformation.
We really need to think about how we can get out of this mess and bring the rational majority back to a central forum of discourse.
The (Republican) Senate committee found that there were in fact extensive ties between Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign, and that Russia actively attacked state election infrastructure. And the (Republican) special counsel found that they actively propagandized over social media, and hacked into Democratic campaign and candidate emails, which ended up being the anti-Clinton story leading up to the election.
It's tired and disingenuous at this point to claim that "the left" made this up.
All of that is true! But as I posted above, I don't take any issue with the fact that there was Russian interference in the election, I take issue with mainstream Democrats and media companies jumping to the conclusion that this meant the election was fraudulent.
> Many elected Republicans are still lying about the election results.
So we have voter IDs and secure voting? Did you miss the part about lack of confidence in voting? If we don’t have voter IDs how is the right lying? Or are you just trying to reaffirm the narrative?
Because having voter IDs is not the only or even the main thing that the right — a very vocal minority of the right, by the way — had an issue with. There were a lot of conflated FUD about
The funny thing is that Trump’s own appointed people, including Krebs who we cite here a lot, but also Barr and others admitted that there was not nearly enough evidence of fraud to overturn any election result in any state.
And even funnier is how FOX and NewsMax debunked themselves and now chase the My Pillow CEO and others off their show for suggesting there was voting machine fraud — because they got cease and desist letters and warnings.
The irony for me was Texas suing the other states and then West floating a trial baloon to secede from the union (great form, West!) because they accused the other states of vote manipulation... this from a state that works hard to close HUNDREDS of poll places in Democratic areas ahead of the election to keep the state voting Republican, in blatant violation of the Voting Rights Act (neutered by the supreme court). And no one sues Texas in federal court for that.
For Republicans, mail-in ballots were the end-run around their extensive efforts to close polling places and require voting IDs and other ways to tip the balance in their party’s favor. If people can just vote from home then all that effort to drive an hour and stand in a long line will be unnecessary! So they aren’t being totally honest about their FUD being nonpartisan either.
I just want to be clear – I said it is a small, vocal minority on the right. Most of "the right" rejected the MAGA conspiracy theories and stopped supporting the FUD. As I have pointed out, even a lot of the mainstream right-wing media has started to "deplatform" people who continue speaking about this "problem". The Supreme court and other courts have thrown out 98% of all the cases, after applying rules of standing and evidence [1].
After all that money came in to campaign promising to "fight for every LEGAL vote to be counted", Giuliani never even applied to the supreme court. A lot of it seems to have been about taking in massive amounts of money (up to 1 billion dollars) from faithful Trump voters via the campaigns. Giuliani distanced himself from Sidney Powell who actually wanted to go to the supreme court, seemingly in order to not share the large sums of cash coming in from MAGA supporters.
Also, I am not "a dem". You assume too much.
And btw, many people on the right, including social conservatives and fiscal conservatives, are also very critical of the Republican leadership. Here is far more information about why[2].
Again, if you’re focusing on the lawsuits you’ve missed the point. Are you aware there is an extreme left bias online? Knowing that, and today’s extreme cancel culture can you explain why you’re not seeing more people talk about this? Even here on HN these posts have support, until dems downvote it beyond the upvotes. There’s that bias!
Meanwhile in actual face to face conversations people can’t stop talking about it. Some have given up out of desperation but pointing to lack of media culture and deplatforming does nothing but support the claims and issues i’m pointing out.
> Are you aware there is an extreme left bias online?
Evidence please.
I am aware that 'left bias' is a consistent lie perpetuated by right-wing media, which contradicts at least twenty years of research on the subject, e.g.
So you watch the votes and downvotes come in? Before the downvote parade I had near 10 upvotes, net result after dems, -20. Clearly this is a conspiracy.
> Meanwhile in actual face to face conversations people can’t stop talking about it.
So instead your sampling bias is correct? Where is your evidence?
We don't have voter ID checks at the actual polling place for casting your vote, but we have signature checks and comparisons of who purported to vote with who is actually registered to vote at that polling place, and there are checks and verification involved in getting to that point.
This is sufficient to catch any double voting or voting as someone else that occurs at sufficient scale to be above the normal error rate.
The allegations still being made about election fraud by some Republicans have nothing to do with people double voting or voting as someone else. They are that election workers slipped in extra pre-filled ballots, or that they ran Biden ballots through the tabulating machines multiple times, or that the machines were programmed to switch votes, or that there are statistical anomalies in the vote totals or counting that could only be there due to fraud.
Every one of these is based on one or more of the following kinds of things:
1. There is simply no way, they say, Trump could possible have gotten less votes than Biden. There must have been fraud. (Variation: Trump got more votes in 2020 than Obama got in 2008 or Clinton got in 2016, so how could he lose? Completely ignoring that voter turnout was a lot higher in 2020)
2. Someone seeing something and misunderstanding it. E.g., one of the prominent claims of running ballots through the tabulating machine multiple times was actually an election worker before the count started running a test ballot through multiple times.
That's part of the standard pre-election test and setup procedure that the manufacturer's instruction call for before each election. The person who saw it happening was a volunteer who had skipped the training session where they covered that.
3. Taking things out of context. E.g., surveillance video purporting to show extra ballots being sneaked in to a counting area overnight, where we see someone pull boxes out from under a table and remove a bunch of ballots and start counting them.
We do indeed see that. But if you obtain the whole video instead of that short clip, you see that those boxes contain the ballots that were being counted when it was time for the counters to take a break. They put the uncounted ballots in their standard ballot storage lock boxes, put the boxes under the table, took their break, came back, retrieved the ballots from the boxes, and resumed counting. All completely normal.
4. Ignoring the recounts. The machines alleged to have switched Trump votes leave a paper trail. The hand recounts from the places where this switching is alleged to have occurred match the machine count.
5. Misunderstanding statistics. E.g., claims that first digit distributions of candidate totals across districts or counties not following Benford's law is proof of fraud. The mistake here is that Benford's law only applies to certain kinds of samplings of certain kinds of distributions. The distribution of population and of votes across districts or counties in most areas is not the right kind for this.
6. Ignoring that in-person election day votes are counted in many areas before mail-in ballots are counted. (Indeed, in some Republican controlled states, they have passed laws preventing election officials from starting to count mail-in ballots until the polls close).
Combine this with COVID in many "rural red, urban blue" states, where in-person urban voting often means long crowded lines at polling places, and you had a much higher percentage of urban voters going to mail-in voting than is usual. On top of that, Democrats on average were more likely to take COVID seriously, further shifting mail-in votes to be more likely to be from Democrats.
Result: in effect those states ended up counting Republican ballots first, then Democrat ballots. And so of course Trump was ahead in the evening, and then Biden got most of the later counted mail-in ballots, which mostly came from the large urban areas.
None of that has anything whatsoever to do with voter ID.
Well this is a first, a dem telling the republicans how they feel.
> This is sufficient to catch any double voting or voting as someone else that occurs at sufficient scale to be above the normal error rate.
Most of the country doesn’t believe this. Regardless of what you believe, being on the other side nobody on the right will believe you. You stand to benefit most from this.
> Well this is a first, a dem telling the republicans how they feel.
Could you please point out where the parent claims to be a Democrat? I don't see it anywhere in what they've said, or in the past few days of their comment history.
> Most of the country doesn’t believe this.
I'm not sure about "most", but it's certainly a significant fraction; presumably caused by Trump's refusal to admit defeat.
> Regardless of what you believe, being on the other side nobody on the right will believe you. You stand to benefit most from this.
What do you mean by "other side"? The Democrats? I would again ask where you got the idea that the parent is a Democrat; I don't see it in their posts.
I think you may be mixing up cause and effect. Your claim seems to be that people on the right will not believe what the parent poster says, because the parent poster is a Democrat. However, your response is evidence of the inverse: that people on the right will believe the parent poster is a Democrat, because of what the parent poster says.
This mistake is troubling, since it admits a circular argument: Democrats aren't believed, and those who aren't believed are Democrats. Like all circular arguments, this is self-consistent whilst being completely detached from reality (the content of any claims, evidence, etc. are irrelevant; that self-justifying loop will work for anything).
> Could you please point out where the parent claims to be a Democrat? I don't see it anywhere in what they've said, or in the past few days of their comment history.
Yes, reread their comment, apply context, it should be apparent.
> I'm not sure about "most", but it's certainly a significant fraction; presumably caused by Trump's refusal to admit defeat.
Why do you think Trump has anything to do with it? He doesn't. Really people couldn't care less about Trump. The system is flawed regardless.
> This mistake is troubling, since it admits a circular argument: Democrats aren't believed, and those who aren't believed are Democrats. Like all circular arguments, this is self-consistent whilst being completely detached from reality (the content of any claims, evidence, etc. are irrelevant; that self-justifying loop will work for anything).
Hmmm, yup we have a divide in this country, mostly caused by dems refusal to accept and admit the right are people with opinions, ideas and feelings as well. Right doesn't believe left, left doesn't believe right. So, divide we have!
> reread their comment, apply context, it should be apparent.
I did. It was not apparent; hence why I asked.
> Why do you think Trump has anything to do with it?
If we're still talking about "it" being a significant fraction of the US public being distrustful of the election process/results, then Trump's main relevance is the combination of:
- His holding of the most powerful office in the world for four years
- His direct attacks on the election process/results, e.g.
- The attacks on the election process/results by other Repulican politicians, either using Trump's example to seize or cling-to power, or to curry Trump's favour, or to avoid Trump's wrath (either direct, or indirect like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempts_to_overturn_the_2020_... ), e.g.
Notice this started before Trump was elected? The rest of your comment is trying to support your belief this is somehow about Trump, therefore ignored.
Both the left and the right engage in suppression of free speech in different ways.
I mean when McCarthyism, Hoover’s FBI and COINTELPRO were repressing leftists left and right, sabotaging political campaigns and careers, this was considered a national security issue.
I mean, until Bernie Sanders, no politician openly called themselves a socialist. This is recent.
Are there any open atheists in US politics? Just curious
I don’t think the person you are replying to would agree with you about affirmative actions being a good thing. Other than that, the left is super repressive of free speech which is the only civil right left to win , detrimental to wage growth and worker rights by supporting unlimited immigration, bad for education by siding with teachers unions, manipulative when it comes to voting to the point when half of the country does not believe in elections. The right simply does not exist in the institutional level at this point, all they can do is whine about excesses of the left