The fact remains that the President gathered tens of thousands of people and, with a torrent of lies, weaponized them into an attack on the United States. Just because it failed doesn't make it any less grave of a crime.
The other thing I want to mention (in demonstrating the two standards) is that the dem leadership cheered on protests in the summer with battle like language which turned into far larger and more consequential riots that somehow we dont talk about anymore. Many lost their livelihoods and some their lives. These went on for months, not 6 hours. Those riots by the way were encouraged by dem leadership but somehow have not been penalized on twitter or even critiqued. The unlevel playing field that essentially a cartel is laying out which we see time and time again is what people are getting fed up with and I can sympathize.
mullingitover - You might be correct that the claims were hyperbole. But I don't see a difference between the two sides in falsely justifying a protest that turned into a riot. For instance, the police brutality is not acceptable (and the imagery was terrible), but it was also mostly an astroturf and amplification of reality before an election to rally voters when you actually look at the FBI statistics of racial deaths in the hands of police. Both sides encouraged protests with battle like language. They both turned into destructive riots. One side was penalized.
He's not completely stupid, at least in the short term. I'll give him that.
The fact is, however, that he made breathtaking, wholly unfounded claims of a vast conspiracy that if you believed them would lead you to believe that a revolution was in order and completely appropriate. Then he turned them loose on the Capitol.
Another side told people that their country was being stolen from them and only they could stop it before telling them to go to the capital.
It's easy for the winning side to trot out a bunch of people that support their position (and if you try suggesting R's are on the same side as Trump supporters, then you're more divorced from reality than I feared). Trump supporters don't care. They want specific concerns addressed.
And frankly, they should be. Every election in a bona fide democracy should be characterized by the winning side steel manning the losing side's objections and addressing them one-by-one until the fraction of the population continuing to object is minuscule enough to ignore.
That didn't happen. Instead objectors got people they didn't trust trotted out before them declaring "There's NO evidence of election fraud" (demonstrably false, there's evidence of election fraud in every election), stonewalling, and running out the clock.
They should have steel-manned and addressed in a very public and forthcoming, unspun manner the more compelling arguments presented. Matt Braynard's [1] work, for example, should have been litigated to hell and back.
Undergoing these challenges is critical to maintaining democracy, but the left was hell-bent on painting a narrative that pursuing election transparency in 2020 (not 2016, mind you; they had quite a different take then when they were mucking with the electoral college themselves [2]) was somehow antidemocratic because all questions had been settled by the people only they were permitted to declare trustworthy.
So what we have now is a huge fraction of the population that feel the election has been stolen:
"Sixty-one percent (61%) of Republicans say it’s Very Likely the Democrats stole the election, but just as many Democrats (61%) say it’s Not At All Likely. Among unaffiliateds, 29% feel it’s a stolen election; 45% do not." [3]
I don't have much of a dog in this fight. I'm about as pure a libertarian/ancap as you can find. I leaned slightly Trump because I despise war, but I would have been just as happy with Biden and a republican senate. I'm telling you with open eyes (the same eyes I use to attempt to discredit the Q and Lin Wood madness on the right) that you have bought into a false narrative sold to you by the leftist media. You are nowhere in the vicinity of "woke". You are stuck in a bubble that decries other bubbles and you don't even realize it. Worse, it's the most powerful bubble that is causing the most damage to society. It is YOUR bubble that is causing the most damage to democracy in this country.
[1] https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/matt_braynards_...
[2] https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/12/17/how-democrats-attempt...
[3] https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/ele...
All these things already happened and it was proven over and over that there was no substantial proof of widespread fraud. If your fellow citizens cannot discern the difference between social media and reality then this does not create an obligation for the opposing side that scales upwards towards infinity with their level of insanity.
Its deeply ironic that before the election around 2/3 of republicans believed our elections were free and fair and now instead of concluding that their objections are grounded in bad faith you believe that the democrats didn't do enough to prove to their opponents that they didn't cheat. You have reversed the burden of proof and I reject your assertion. The burden of proof always lies with he would would assert a crime has been done not upon the accused to prove a negative. The alternative is utter nonsense.
Incidentally if we look at an actual source
https://morningconsult.com/form/tracking-voter-trust-in-elec...
10% of democrats believe we didn't have a fair election, 44% of independents, and a whopping 78% of republicans. On the overall ~2/3 of Americans trust our election was free and fair. The 1/3 will more or less be convinced by nothing as their feelings aren't based on reality.
These people will by and large just have to go through the next 4-16 years of Democratic control thinking the Democrats, the women, and the minorities are stealing their country.
Ask yourself, who led these people to believe this.
It is a stupid conspiracy, the gap in the popular vote is overwhelming and Trump was only ever going to get in on electoral college technicalities. But this meme that Trump is the first one to launch serious claims at the electoral system is misinformation. This is a direct mimic of the Democrat response to 2016.
I recall some arguments in Congress, but to call it a 'direct mimic' is complete nonsense. The election was conceded immediately by the Clinton campaign as soon as it was called by the networks.
Now, what we can claim is that historical injustices have led to increased ratios of police interaction by different populations. That’s true. However, per interaction, the police are not more likely to be fatal to one group vs another. That’s a misrepresentation.
See: Simpson’s Paradox.
Given this it should behoove media and leaders to institute root changes that improve the “interaction” frequency.
For the same given percentage, they could all be people who were genuine threats, or all people reaching for their wallets in their own garage.
The metric is not measuring what matters.
I cannot fathom why you keep saying this. Please present some evidence.
