monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign recalls one of the most disastrous political lies of the 20th century.
[...]
Don’t get me wrong: This is not about comparing Mr. Trump to Hitler, which would be absurd. But the Dolchstosslegende provides a warning. It’s tempting to dismiss Mr. Trump’s irrational claim that the election was “rigged” as a laughable last convulsion of his reign or a cynical bid to heighten the market value for the TV personality he might once again intend to become, especially as he appears to be giving up on his effort to overturn the election result.

But that would be a grave error. Instead, the campaign should be seen as what it is: an attempt to elevate “They stole it” to the level of legend, perhaps seeding for the future social polarization and division on a scale America has never seen.
[...]
Don’t get me wrong: This is not about comparing Mr. Trump to Hitler, which would be absurd. But the Dolchstosslegende provides a warning. It’s tempting to dismiss Mr. Trump’s irrational claim that the election was “rigged” as a laughable last convulsion of his reign or a cynical bid to heighten the market value for the TV personality he might once again intend to become, especially as he appears to be giving up on his effort to overturn the election result.

But that would be a grave error. Instead, the campaign should be seen as what it is: an attempt to elevate “They stole it” to the level of legend, perhaps seeding for the future social polarization and division on a scale America has never seen.

Germany’s first democracy fell. Without a basic consensus built on a shared reality, society split into groups of ardent, uncompromising partisans. And in an atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia, the notion that dissenters were threats to the nation steadily took hold.

Alarmingly, that seems to be exactly what is happening in the United States today. According to the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of Trump supporters believe that a Joe Biden presidency would do “lasting harm to the U.S.,” while 90 percent of Biden supporters think the reverse. And while the question of which news media to trust has long split America, now even the largely unmoderated Twitter is regarded as partisan. Since the election, millions of Trump supporters have installed the alternative social media app Parler. Filter bubbles are turning into filter networks.

In such a landscape of social fragmentation, Mr. Trump’s baseless accusations about electoral fraud could do serious harm. A staggering 88 percent of Trump voters believe that the election result is illegitimate, according to a YouGov poll. A myth of betrayal and injustice is well underway.

It took another war and decades of reappraisal for the Dolchstosslegende to be exposed as a disastrous, fatal fallacy. If it has any worth today, it is in the lessons it can teach other nations. First among them: Beware the beginnings.

Trump’s trashing of norms has been harmful but decentralization, turnout, transparency, the courts and the media played a key role

It is not clear yet whether US democracy “survived” the 2020 presidential election unscathed.

If Donald Trump’s playbook of seeking to undermine a legitimate election becomes standard Republican practice for future elections – refuse to concede, make false claims of fraud, fan the flames of conspiracy, sue everywhere and refuse to certify any win by the other side – then American democracy might already have sustained a fatal wound.

But Trump has not succeeded in stealing the 2020 election, despite his historic attempt to do so, in what analysts call the most dangerous frontal assault on US democracy since the civil war era. The two states upon which Trump’s plot most hinged, Pennsylvania and Michigan, certified their results in Joe Biden’s favor earlier this week. The presidential transition is at last under way.

But while the election exposed key areas where American democracy is failing, it also highlighted structural features that make national elections in the United States hard to steal, no matter how determined the would-be despot or how complicit his party colleagues.

Here is a select list of those features:

1 Decentralization
[... ... ...]

2 Turnout
[... ... ...]

3 Integrity and transparency
[... ... ...]

4 The courts
[... ... ...]

5 The media
[... ... ...]

The king of trump TV thinks you’re dumb enough to buy it

Quote:

Why not let this guy debunk the declaration of those experts that the voting system is safe and secure since the system has been well tested

They cannot produce a date on the last time they were tested. If you were informed you would know that.

Quote:

What operating system does this guy use to do his analysis? Windows?

I can see you know nothing about data analyses.

NPR
@NPR
· 19h
When the state of Kansas issued a mask mandate, 81 counties opted out. Researchers found that coronavirus infection rates rose sharply in the opt-out counties — while falling in areas that required masks.
https://trib.al/mcTCDp2

Realistically this has become an industry regardless of political persuasion. No reason to think this is restricted to just one party.

state Republicans including Reps. Seth Grove (R., York) and Dawn Keefer (R., York) have begun echoing Trump’s distrust of Dominion’s machines, despite the fact that Trump won in 12 of the 14 Pennsylvania counties that use the company’s devices.

The king of trump TV thinks you’re dumb enough to buy it

Chris Ruddy, the C.E.O. of Newsmax, has found a business opportunity in feeding
Trump supporters the fantasy that the president could still win the election...

Here's the catch: Where was he before the election? Was he asleep on the job as top dog to ensure the safety and security of the software? Should he be held accountable for his negligence of duty? Does he feel guilty now?

Why aren’t Purdue and Loeffler being prosecuted for insider trading?

From what little I have read regarding the run-off January election, democrats are making less about them(any of them) and more about who control's the senate and the freeze McConnell would put on any legislation going through, including stimulus or urgent legislation, or as is as important, the appointment of federal judges. At least I hope so, if it gets into personalities and accusations, it goes both ways and the main goal gets lost.

Some federal judges plan to retire when Trump exits. Will Biden be able to replace them?