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Antifa and Black Block demonstrators in Washington, D.C. Credit: Alex Edelman / AFP/ Getty
Shortly before 10pm yesterday, I was wandering along the boarded up streets of Washington towards the White House. I passed people dancing in clouds of cannabis smoke, gogo music blasting from a truck organised by activists with ShutdownDC, then watched a woman with ‘I am a Vagina Voter’ on her sweatshirt putting up posters on the protective fence hastily erected around the White House. Already, it was plastered with furious messages directed at Donald Trump. In one rare glimmer of wit, a hole left for taking pictures of the famous building had been framed with signs reading ‘Loser’, although the unfurling Florida result was throwing up questions over such instant assumptions.
Earlier in the week, a professor of politics had reminded me that election nights in the United States were traditionally times to heal campaign wounds and celebrate their democracy. No longer. For the mood of America is angry and divided — and this was seen all too clearly outside that famous white building, as results flowed in from around the country. One woman with a piercing voice preached Christian messages, while a person inside a papier-mâché Donald Trump waved its tiny hands nearby. A bearded man with a bandana, carrying the US flag, explained to reporters why he was not wearing a mask, watched by a Black Lives Matter protester whose head was encased in a gas mask. Nearby an enterprising soul pursued his vision of the American dream with a makeshift stall selling BLM T-shirts.
After watching this vaudeville show for a while, I walked back to my hotel to catch up on the latest results, only to find bizarre scenes outside on a roundabout. It was almost 11pm, yet on the lit-up steps of a large church a film crew was recording an ecumenical religious service as a couple of homeless guys stood watching. “That’s so off-key,” said one observer after a young preacher in red and white robes starting singing. On the other side of the circle scores of young protesters were gathering. Most were clad in black balaclavas, while many carried gas masks and some wore helmets and body armour, or held shields. About 20 police on bicycles watched them warily as a helicopter hovered overhead, then I counted as 18 cop cars in a convoy pulled up on an adjacent street.
The demonstrators moved off towards the White House, led by a figure waving an anarchy flag. They chanted the sort of stuff I had heard ten days earlier in Portland, Oregon, mostly revolving around the concept that all cops are bastards but also dismissing Joe Biden as much as Trump, as they disavowed the need for police or a president. They angrily rounded on a man who seemed to be urging them to stay peaceful and things briefly became ugly, but then they marched on letting off their fireworks and shouting their slogans. The police watched but did not intervene. This is, after all, a country where citizens have the constitutional right to protest.
These late-night sorties in the capital are another indication of the fissures in this country, exposed so starkly in the tight election race. I saw this clearly in Portland, where there have been almost-nightly protests for months and the city centre has been boarded up since May; I saw it when travelling into the heart of Trumpland in West Virginia, where many see Biden as a prisoner of the Left. One country but two very different outlooks on life, a nation filled with partisans that think their political foes deserve prison and protesters that believe they have the right to take the law into their own hands.
Look at the polls and there are stark differences in perception between the two tribes on everything from the state of the economy to the fight against the pandemic. Now look at the new electoral map and you see this sharp delineation across the land: a vast chunk of Republican red across the middle fringed by Democrat blue states on the left and top right.
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SubscribeYou seem to have caught TDS very badly.
Elections have been in the Courts before – remember the “hanging chads”?
If any one has stoked up the dissent , it is the Democrats – they have spent 4 years denying the results of the last election.
When I see figures in Pennsylvania showing an increase of the amount of votes to count of about 750,00 after the election finished it concerns me. Where did they come from? Are they valid – or is the cut off day for voting flexible in democratic controlled areas?
I can image the President Trump might be more than concerned!
Perfect name for your comment.
Don’t know if it is a nom de plume or your real name, but couldn’t be bettered.
Opposition parties are required to dissent, that’s the nature of democracy. It’s when politicians begin making unsubstantiated claims of fraud that democracy suffers most. And for a president to do it? Well it’s a ploy of the ‘shithole’ nations the man so disparaged.
The man disparaged shithole nations because he didn’t expect America to emulate them. Some claims ARE substantiated through visual evidence and through numbers that defy all statistical odds. Other claims will be litigated.
I agree with you up to a point.
Unsubstantiated and baseless claims don’t help.
However, US politics and opinion is severely polarized right now but both sides have had a hand in that.
The Dems threw out all kinds of conspiracy theories that didn’t go anywhere.
They even warned of Russian influence in this election.
And then there’s the Hunter Biden story that was quickly dismissed and cancelled as fake news.
IMO. America is past the point of “Put up or shut up” and even if Biden is declared the winner the numbers don’t lie – Trump was not some temporary glitch in the system facilitated by a few busloads of disaffected deplorables.
The Dems have actively tried to use every trick or tactic they could think of to invalidate Trump’s 2016 win.
Now they have an opportunity to ease tensions and restore some of their own credibility by fully supporting an investigation into any allegations of voting irregularities or shenanigans.
The article started innocuous enough, seemingly focusing of the unfortunate divisions in US society. But nature took its course and the author could not resist the urge to say what was on his soul and lay the blame squarely on Trump, at which point the whole argumentation could be summed by ‘Orange Man Bad’. There were the heartbreaking references to Belarus and Hong Kong, presumably to show how people from flyover America voting for Trump and not for the ‘genial character Biden’ is the same as dictatorship. Then what is left was to decry once again the sheer affrontery of almost half the people wanting four more years of Trump presidency but masked as a genuine concern for the things that may come. Not a sliver of recognition of the reasons for this vote, not a mere attempt to explain why we are nearly seeing wat we saw in 2016. One is left to wonder if some commentators and ‘award-winning’ journalists have learned anything at all in those 4 years
‘…phoney accusations of fraud…’ Such as emerging evidence of more votes than registered voters, and statistically-improbably turnouts of 90%+ in some counties? That kind of ‘phoney’?
There is not a shred of evidence for what you are suggesting. This site really is populated by a farcical collection of conspiracy theorists. Your posts are barely a step removed from Qanon crazy.
Is there any way to remove the highly divisive figure of Nancy Pelosi from the office of speaker?
Genial Biden? LOL-this guy is a grifter and a sock puppet. You’re just another fool with the vapors because you take offence at the Presidents manner. TDS indeed.
I assumed it was a spellcheck error for “senile Biden”
Senile – but not like the Orange Arsehole
Very astute observation, you should write a book.
Well said, Stephen. Biden was showing one of the signs of dementia, extreme irritability at petty things, from at least early on in the presidential race. A young university student, not a reporter, asked him civilly during the New Hampshire primary about his poor showing in the Iowa caucus. In no time he was calling her a “lying, dog-faced pony soldier”. It only got worse after that. He is, I suspect, the only major party presidential candidate who has ever called the incumbent president he is running against a disease. If he does end up winning this election, I suspect his dementia will make his presidency the shortest in living memory.
“dementia will make his presidency the shortest in living memory.”
Made me chuckle – thanks
I watched, appalled, as Trump falsely claimed victory in states he has lost, made phoney accusations of fraud and pledged legal challenges to official state results.
You watched, yet refused to see. When large buckets of ballots mysteriously show up with 100% of the vote for Biden, that’s banana republic stuff. Not even one vote for Kanye among those? When poll watchers are physically barred from doing their jobs, is that somehow phony?
On both extremes sit unsavoury groups that proclaim the use of violence to achieve their goals in a country seeing surging gun sales.
and yet, only one of those extremes has participated in serial violence in cities across the country. It appears that one party to this “both” fantasy in your head is doing things wrong. And yes, a public that sees cops being told to stand down by mayors and other govt officials gets the message loud and clear – you are on your own.
Re the increase in votes for Biden, I presume you’ve heard the counter-argument that it was a correction to an earlier typo. Isn’t that a possible alternative explanation?
I have no idea where you get your information, but it clearly isn’t from state election boards. One case in Philly where an observer had to go to a second polling station before getting an apology. A judge’s ruling where observers of both parties were allowed to stand 6 ft. away instead of 25. No “large buckets” to speak of. No fraudulent activity proven, across the country, to the point that DT’s lawyers are not claiming fraud in their lawsuits. And the absurd assertion that (I presume leftist) violence is the only example found, ignoring the militia plot in Michigan as just one example. The idea that only one side of any ideological spectrum is somehow pure and non-violent is so obviously false it’s enough to undermine the credibility of your entire post, but your depiction of the facts of the election challenge is fraudulent itself.
I read and enjoyed the article. I live in Britain and have good NY friends – who are Democrats and I have family members living in San Francisco, so of course they are Democrats. Although they clearly are (my friends and family) – this doesn’t make me a partisan in your debates, I voted for Brexit – so in the eyes of most US Democrats and many left/liberals in the UK, that makes me a Trump supporter.
What worries me most about the comment section is how vitriolic many of them are. I would like to see more evidence brought forward instead of just rage. Is it really true what was said below about all these extra votes in Pennsylvania? What’s that assertion based on? Can we hear about it please?
I am quite prepared to believe that there are some examples of voter fraud. It’s a democracy and there’s always some (at least a small) minority prepared to cheat, but I don’t think that adds up to enough to invalidate an election – unless it can be demonstrated that it took place on a widespread scale.
Your Mr Trump has driven your media and some of ours absolutely crazy and some of them, maybe many of them, have decided to “…fight fire with fire…” so they exaggerate, distort and bluster just as he does sometimes.
There is an expression “the wisdom of crowds”, there is even a good book with that title, but for it to be powerful enough to shape events, it requires those getting involved in these debates to show a little restraint.
By all means make arguments forcefully and powerfully but based on evidence rather than just assertion. I like my ideas to be challenged and like to learn from people with different views – which is why am reading this – but if the volume is turned too loud and the rage too overwhelming – it’s almost impossible to hear or learn from all the noise.
The article at the moment is far better than the commentary which follows it in this regard.
James, I voted in the leadership election for the Canadian Conservative Party in August. All voting was mail-in, and only votes received by election day would be counted. Pennsylvania law says about the same thing: only votes received by the time the polls close on election day count. The Democrats wanted an extension and unable to get the legislation changed, got the courts to overrule an elected legislature. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided that votes received up to three days after election day by 6 p.m., will still be counted if they were postmarked by the election day. The kicker is that even votes without a postmark received as late as tomorrow before 6 p.m. will be considered to have been mailed before the polls closed unless there is strong evidence (not sure what they have in mind) to the contrary. So votes after election day could, and quite likely will, be counted. This hardly exhausts Republican concerns but shows in itself how the process stinks. The Pennsylvania race is close and this judicial overreach may by itself be enough to make Biden president instead of Trump.
The greatest of all American presidents said in his inaugural address in 1861: “…[I]f the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal.” Rule by judges rather than the people, the fate Abraham Lincoln sought to avoid, seems to be where the US is at now, and it has been pushed in that direction by the Democrats, not the Republicans.
thank you – stuff to think about.
James
One thing that I noticed yesterday morning was that in Pennsylvania,
Trump was winning by 3/4 million votes with 2.75M left to count.
By the afternoon Trump was winning by 1/4M votes. The votes left to count has increased to 3 .25M.
So Biden increased his votes by 1/2M and the votes still to count increase by 1/2M.
That is a minimum increase in votes of 1,000,000 after the polls had closed.
Cause for concern – at the very least?
It’s not a ’cause for concern’. It is evidence of outright fraud. They had literally hundreds of thousands of freshly printed ballots in reserve, ready to count.
In Wisconsin, meanwhile, it seems that turnout was 90%! I don’t think so…
The reason these states are taking so long to count the votes is because they keep printing more votes to count.
But the fix is so massive, so egregious, that everyone can see it. And there are more and more videos and whistle blowers coming forward.
The republicans legally prevented those votes from being counted. Are you staggeringly ignorant of that well known fact or simply lying?
Counting votes that arrive after the polls close sounds odd. It isn’t allowed in the UK. However, there are numerous aspects of US election procedures that baffle me: for example, why haven’t we had 100% of the votes counted in any state? How can it take so long? Re Pennsylvania, Biden will get to the magic 270 without it if he wins Nevada. Assuming, of course, that no legal challenges change things.
Roll on direct Presidential elections, with no electoral college. Every vote will then count, and individual states won’t be able to do their own thing.
those question baffle a lot people, right along with how is it possible that multiple leads can suddenly evaporate overnight and how it is that changes always benefit one side.
The EC is not going away and with good reason. Without it, a candidate can win California and one or two other states, and take the whole thing. I’d rather not have govt by California.
Here we have Government by England, you just have to learn to suck it up I’m afraid…
First past the post avoids government by London however.
Except that your plan is not in alignment with how we were constituted. To begin with, the people are not even supposed to be electing the President to begin with. That right to elect the country’s top Administrative post was reserved for the top Administrators of each state, the Governors.
The people were tasked with voting for the Congress, the Legislative branch. The House of Representatives which is a short term election the number of which a state has based on the population of that state. And the Senate in which each state gets 2 regardless of the population. All laws and bills are supposed to originate in the House and then have to be ratified in the Senate, then either signed or vetoed by the President. The Senate can then either accept that veto or over ride it with a 2/3 majority.
The 3rd leg of the stool is the Judiciary, the Supreme Court, the right to appoint the members of which is the sole right of then President in office when a position opens. His choice is vetted by the Senate and either confirmed or rejected. Their job is to decide whether laws are consistent with the Constitution.
The Governors are allowed to choose their electoral votes based on anything they want to, rolling dice, their wives nagging, or what ever.
Somewhere along the line the popular vote for president which began to be tallied by newspapers became the rage and as time passed, a Governor who wanted to be reelected would not cast his vote for a candidate that a majority of his citizens didn’t want.
Fast forward to modern times and the citizens have become convinced that it is THEIR right to elect the President.
The need for the electoral college seems evident to me. Without it only the big cities would have a say. There is nothing at all from keeping a state from apportioning its electoral delegates which would make the percentage of electoral votes proportionate to the percentage of the popular vote that each candidate receives. Yet, there are only 2 states that have chosen to do that.
The truth is that the Republicans would never win the presidency again without the electoral college which is of course why the Democrats are always for abolishing it…
The US is a Representational Republic and not a Democracy and we are not supposed to be a Democracy. Democracy is a fancy word for mob rule. we were set up to be a nation that operates under the rule of the laws of the Republic and not the opinions of the mob. Like someone said, Democracy is 7 wolves and a lamb taking a vote on what to do about lunch.
All the ballyhoo about Democracy being something positive to aim for is a Communist/Socialist construct designed to fool the simpletons into destroying our Government while feeling good about doing so.
Do you think it is a coincidence that there are so many totalitarian states whose names begin with “The Democratic Republic of…”?
Please forgive my complete ignorance on this, (takes deep breath), but is the system not at fault here then, is it fit for purpose?
As an outsider looking in it looks, dare I say it, completely bonkers.
If you want actually evidence of voter fraud, check out various Project Veritas videos from a couple of weeks ago. But that was small scale relative to what happened on Tuesday night.
Miraculously, when Trump was heading for victory, they found hundreds of thousands of votes from places where, apparently, NOBODY voted for Trump. (Or even Kanye). I’ve just seen a film of a woman saying that she saw ballots with NO NAME on them being counted. There was always going to be widespread mail-in voter Democrat voter fraud in this election, but even I am shocked at the scale of it.
Youre kind of people will believe any old shit if it suits your retarded mind …
I can’t understand the vitriol either. They’re mad when they win, they’re mad when they lose. What’s the difference?
So much of what I’ve seen during the Trump presidency is the sheer delight in upsetting snowflakes/libtards/elites and finding new names to call them.
The achievements of Trump as a president (whatever they may be) are definitely secondary. As long as he is winding up the left, his fanbase is happy. But not in a sunshine and roses kind of happy, more of a shouty, red-faced high-fiving happy.
I just don’t get it. Sure everyone likes to win and everyone wants their party to get the votes, but ultimately they all share the same country and all need to see it succeed. I get the impression that Trump supporters would be happy seeing everybody out of work, as long as the left got a good kicking.
There’s a level of dysfunctionality in politics now that I’ve never seen in my lifetime. Hopefully Trump’s exit steps the rancour down on both sides and we go back to when politics used to be boring.
“…I’ve never seen in my lifetime.” Are you old enough to vote? I was thinking-judging by your many posts, that you are a teen-age troll, watching life through the window of media.
I’m “a teen-age troll”? You mean someone who calls names, while hiding behind an anonymous profile, stephen f?
You should trot along over to 4chan. You’d fit right in.
This is late, but I apologize-I enjoy your posts and ripostes, and should not have said what I said to you…
Thank you. I probably do come across as a bit troll-y sometimes. It’s something I’m working on.
“I just don’t get it. Sure everyone likes to win and everyone wants their
party to get the votes, but ultimately they all share the same country
and all need to see it succeed. I get the impression that Trump
supporters would be happy seeing everybody out of work, as long as the
left got a good kicking.”
The problem is that The only definition of “succeeding” that the left is will ing to accept is defined as succeeding in running the country as the left sees fit to do.
Under Trump, more people in this country were working and for better wages than we have ever seen. Then came the Covid…but I guess you figure that is Trump’s fault to.
You have a polite version of TDS my friend. Step away from the BBC and CNN. They are lying to you.
Economic upward momentum builds over years, not months. Trump picked up Obama’s rising boat and did manage not to sink it, though with his nationalistic trade policies it was probably a matter of time before he did. Covid saved him the bother. Is covid his fault? No. Did he give clear, guidance and leadership to his people in a time of crisis? No, he was terrible. Are BBC and CNN biased? Yes, but in a reasonably subtle way. As a determined centrist, I listen to Fox radio news a lot also. The slant there isn’t remotely subtle, it’s a sheer drop. Fox is full of shouting pundits railing against the libtards. It’s a pity that more on the right can’t understand that the two positions aren’t ‘balanced’.
Which gets back to the point of this thread.. Why is the Right always so dementedly angry?
Psychologists will tell you that anger is an expression of fear. Studies show that people can be manipulated into further right positions by making them more afraid. It seems to me that the explanation of Right rage is in there somewhere, but I don’t know what it is.
“Why is the Right always so dementedly angry?”
There’s very little comparison between US and UK politics at the moment – we’ve got a PM and Opposition leader who could conceivably be leaders of either party. But I think there is one very clear distinction. In the US the Right have decided that there is something innately evil about anyone they consider ‘liberal’ and/or those who vote Democrat.
As with the Republicans there have been good and bad Democrat administrations over the years, mostly it’s been a mixed bag.
The similarity with the UK is on the other side. Here there are groups on the Left who work themselves to a point of apoplexy when anyone mentions the Tories. Apparently the Tories are responsible for all society’s ills. Not only that, they are conspiring to make people poorer and more marginalised. Probably to kill them off. You could say it’s the Left in Britain which is ‘dementedly angry’.
Perhaps you missed the fact that it is the Leftists which appear to be angry in the US, if one might judge from their behavior. It is not dementedly angry rightists burning and looting the cities and physically attacking anyone who differs from themselves.
How do you people come up with the stuff without seeing the huge errors it it?
Obama’s rising boat?
A complete fabrication.
I was there and living through it. It’s going to be very difficult to convince me and about 150,000,000 other Americans who were there that Obama had the economy on the way up when we saw what he had with our own eyes.
I remember exactly when this ridiculous talking point came to be. there was no hint of this notion at all. Obama himself explained his failure by claiming that in today’s world there is no way that the US would ever see more than a 2% gain.
Then, out of nowhere Nancy Pelosi has a news conference where she referred to the Obama recovery. Within a day of that instant every talking head on CNN, MSNBC, The Big 3 networks and just about every Dem politician with any name recognition managed find a reason to call a presser or otherwise use the same terminology and they have repeated it ever since.
Typical Dem tactics. Make a talking point out of thin air, repeat it a Bazillion times, then behave as if their point was a long accepted fact.
Don’t be a dupe.
Well… the writer has clearly allied himself with the MSM who consider Trump a totalitarian dictator -so that’s an obvious distortion -whatever you think about Trump, he was democratically elected, and even if he lost this election he increased his vote by about 8 million -in a democracy mind, not in the manner Putin is repeatedly ‘elected’ nor the manner of the Chinese ‘elections’. So there is a demonstrable failure of restraint in a writer whose article you admire. You fail to acknowledge how the MSM narrative has wilfully sought to sow the seeds of division by railing in the most repetitive manner all conceivable charges of racism, sexism, anti-democracy etc… . The evidence for this was scant to say the least but the left didn’t care. It forcefully perpetuated the falsehoods and lies and worked hard to demoralise Americans and make them feel guilty about their nation -which, even if you find it hard to swallow, is still the greatest nation on this earth in the context of individual liberty and freedom. It is the nation that the vast majority of the globe would like to live in for this very reason. Outrage is a legitimate response to this onslaught -what has been perpetuated by the left media and politicians is nothing short of an outrage – and in spite of the vitriol you claim to see in the comments section here, it is Trump supporters who have shown the greatest restraint in the US -they were not the ones rioting in Portland, Kenosha, Washington, Seattle, LA etc.. etc… in almost every Democratic city and state -despite being slandered, slurred and harried at every turn. On election night shops and stores in Washington did not board their shops up because they were fearful of Trump supporters but because they feared the wrath of the left and in particular BLM -a hateful Marxist organisation which the Democrats have shamefully ridden on throughout their campaign -whipping up hatred and hysteria in the process.
The biggest challenge now for the Democrats will be to make good on the lies they have proliferated for the past four years. They have purported to be holier than everyone, more virtuous and saintly than all others. They promise an egalitarian utopia which is self evidently impossible to achieve -and they have failed to even get close to it every time they have held power -irrespective of the colour of the individual in power. Theirs is not the American dream, but the Democratic delusional utopia -a sop to the masses -the disappointment and disillusion they will now reap will likely lead to a terrible demise in their fortunes -but my concern is how they will deal with this -the radical left always looks to scapegoating in this sort of circumstance and we are going to see a lot of show trials and purges as they look for scapegoats to excuse their inevitable failure.
I want to add -having scanned the comments here, that in fact there is very little vitriol. It makes me think that after all the firestorming from the Democrats this kind of response is what we can all expect -the ‘can’t we just all get along now’ which is exactly what the gaslighting abuser tells the victim when he has experienced triumph that comes with a tiniest sense of remorse.
That’s odd, I’ve had to endure four years of trench warfare from Remainers after the 2016 Brexit vote. Seems to be more about getting the right answer than any democratic principles, it seems to me.
Suddenly democracy is in vogue again now the left won finally – funny that.
‘Back in my hotel room, I watched, appalled, as Trump falsely claimed victory in states he has lost..’
We are seeing more and more evidence of massive mail-in voter fraud in those states. Mail-in voter fraud was always going to be widespread, but not even I had imagined they would deploy it on such a vast scale. But the scale is so large, and so blatant, that perhaps they won’t get away with it.
For evidence of mail-in voter fraud from a couple of week ago, check out various Project Veritas videos.
It’s truly amazing how casually folks like the author dismiss what is happening before their eyes.
Substitute “appalling” for amazing…
Try re-reading this article with the possibly that there actually IS something fishy going on with all those mail-in ballots. As in, if Biden had had a clear lead, and then suddenly a boatload of 100% Trump votes popped up out of nowhere.
Would you just shrug and say “oh well, better luck in 4 years, old chap!” and merrily go about your day? Or perhaps you too would demand the matter investigated further before conceding?
Well, Mr Mitchell Berrell, you downvoted my comment. Does that mean you would indeed have shrugged it off if the shoe had been on the other foot and Biden was suddenly nudged out of a significant lead?
The only people dumb enough to think that Biden miracously won without massive voter fraud are the same people who were dumb enough to think that Russians stole the election in 2016.
Biden could barely muster 100 people at a rally so we’re expected to believe he got 70 million votes? It’s ludicrous.
The mere fact that there is such a massive disparity in the proportions of mail-in votes cast for Biden and Trump (shades of Peterborough) should be a concern to even the dullest TDS’er.
Trump had won at 3am so they pulled the vote in 5 states and set about manufacturing enough fake votes to steal the election.
The only people dumb enough to think that Biden miracously won without massive voter fraud are the same people who were dumb enough to think that Russians stole the election in 2016.
They are consistent, though, not that consistency is always a good thing.
Whatever you say. Alternatively, it could be that Trump had spent some time telling his supporters not to send mail-in votes, while the Democrats encouraged theirs to do that.
Shhh. Occam’s Razor is not the preferred logical method for deranged conspiracy theorists like Alex.
Hardly ‘deranged’ unless America en masse, is ignorant of mathematics, i.e. Probability Theory.
In probability theory and statistics, a probability distribution is the mathematical function that gives the probabilities of occurrence of different possible outcomes for an experiment. It is a mathematical description of a random phenomenon in terms of its sample space and the probabilities of events.
Ergo, the ‘events’, listed above, which describe the magical appearance of millions of votes, at different stations, but all, without exception voting Biden, appear to confound or dispute a reliable mathematical theory which has served generations.
There’s a single problem with your use of probability theory, and that is that you still do not provide a shred of evidence that the results rejected it. The source of the votes was not random. Quite simple. Votes came in from areas with a high proportion of democrat voters. Look at any map which visualises the spatial distribution of votes and you will see that it does not conform to a random selection of the population.
For someone who quotes mathematics to make a point, you have an embarrassingly poor understanding of its basic principles.
Late millennials/zoomers with no jobs, living on trust funds”or some other source of unearned privilege”are by majority the only people with the ability to roam the streets for days on end waiting to burn and break things.
Well, them and the people getting paid by one of George Soro’s many puppet NGO’s. This is what Soros does. He stirs up revolution and chaos and them buys and sells vast amounts of gold to profit from the chaos. The US isn’t his first victim nor will it be his last.
What about those with poor education, no jobs and no prospects, let down by a broken system? I’d say they’ve got time on their hands
It’s ironic to me that these middle class rioters shouting “no borders, no wall, no USA at all”, will”if they get their way and establish this bizarre new one-world society”instantly be roughly in the top 0.1% its wealthiest.
Even the poorest in America are still in the top 1% of the world and nearly as rich as India’s richest.
We were just at historic lows in unemployment mere months ago before being gut-punched by a virus that brought with it partisan, over-aggressive, economically destructive lockdowns that showed ineffectiveness as early as April. Yet states continued to mandate, despite being decried by the UN for their disruptive effects on supply chains, and contributing to a looming “hunger pandemic” that could easily kill more than the virus itself. But hey, gotta get those jabs on the orange man, so let’s keep our boot on the neck of the US economy so we can blame him.
But in your view, these rioters are “victims of a broken system”, and are justified to burn everything down, as if they are living in a dictatorship, in huts, dying of starvation, and are fighting for their lives.
No, they will drive their 2020 Nissan Kicks back to their 1200 sq ft climate-controlled, plumbed, wired, furnished, multi-room apartments (or hotel rooms funded by undisclosed sources) and order postmates from the their mini personal supercomputers, and scroll through Netflix deciding on which 5 of over 30,000 hours of available entertainment they’ll binge on tonight, then turn on the tap and fill up a cup to drink, something 30% of the world still can’t do.
I wonder what it’s like to live in Sudan and have 1/75th of the per-capita purchasing power of an American, dream of becoming a citizen here, and then see us burning our country down because we’re angry that really rich people… um…. exist.
“Pretty much all US citizens desire to end all the hate and patch up their differences”? The exact opposite would seem to be the overriding issue causing the whole break-down, surely?
I think that’s true -I can’t see any desire for people to patch up their differences -the MSM is showing some signs of paranoid guilt about the hatred they have been whipping up but only in the sense it is beginning to dawn on them the trouble they have set in store for themselves in now trying to ‘unify’.
Interesting what you say about the MSM’s paranoid guilt – I haven’t been paying enough attention but will look out for it. Not sure how genuine old Joe is about “unifying” but it’s certainly a wise ploy. However I’m not sure how much luck Jo’s corporate Dems and Neocons are going to have when they try and unify with the neo-marxist/woke element that the MSM, Dems etc have cynically allowed to become mainstream in order to get some progressive/regressive votes.
This looks like it might be a pretty good result. We lose the absurd, divisive narcissist, but retain a Republican senate to suppress the equally absurd and divisive manifestations of Democratic wokery
I kind of agree, but I really think that this outcome would be more of a benefit to the Marxists. they will not be able to do all the insane things that they want to do, and so will be able convince their Metro Marxist core that they were roadblocked by the republicans, and at the same time argue to the traditional Democrats that they are not in bed with the crazy revolutionaries.
I wonder if it would be better for the long term if they took the whole ball of wax and went nuts with their deranged platform, thus exposing to one and all just how insane their ideology is?
I’d have had more sympathy for the author’s position if he’d referred just once in his piece to the overwhelming media bias against Trump (as in burying the latest about the Biden family’s doings with China and Ukraine) throughout his presidency and the grotesque machinations of the Democrats in Congress promoting trumped up (sorry) myths about Russian collusion and perpetual attempts to impeach him
I think the reason everyone is so vexed with politics currently, and may be many other important matters as well, is because there is virtually no information that has not already been pre-washed or filtered by someone else’s own opinions, biases or agenda. This leaves the vast majority of us who have reasonably good in-built models of the world in our heads with a sense of unease, or general disquiet that something is wrong or at least sounding ‘a little off key’.
We can all viscerally feel the underlying facts and information fighting to be comprehended underneath the narratives that have been imposed over the top. But there is just so much information blasting around nowadays with the modern media platforms each piece carrying with it a little seductive payload of narrative. So much information in fact that as non-experts we have to start distilling it to try make it manageable and find the actionable essence of it for incorporation into our busy lives.
Is it any wonder that the simple wrapping narrative starts to take over as a mental shortcut or pigeon hole to save us having to process and remember and balance and judge all those complicated and contradictory facts.
As a result of this mental summarising we tend to find ourselves with strong opinions on subjects, that if we truely examine them closely we don’t actually know much or anything at all about. Unfortunately when these empty views are challenged they cannot be coherently defended or debated as they don’t contain any understanding as it was all summarised out earlier on, or possibly was never present in the first place. Once we find ourselves in this trap the only defences left to us are incoherence, anger and violence towards whoever is challenging our world view.
Whether people like it or not, Trump brought out, into full light, the workings of a deeply entrenched political ruling class. If voters thought that just voting Trump out, and electing a “Not-Trump”, straight from the swamp, old, establishment career politician will make things “goody-goody” again they are in for an incredible surprise. The violent faction of the Left was given basically “Carte-Blanche” to destroy things by politicians opposed to Trump. Now, that genie is out of the bottle, having tasted the feeling that they can get away with it. Just have in mind these immortal words: “Then they came for me”and there was no one left to speak for me.”
This present state of things was predicted, and explained how it would happen, FULLY, back in 1983 by Yuri Bezmenov, an ex-KGB agent. If anyone is interested in what he said back then, here’s the interview:
https://youtu.be/pzeHpf3OYQ…
Well, I wanted Trump to win ( mainly because of his resistance to political correctness ), but I am also appalled at the fact that he seems to be lying about fraud. Democracy relies on the loser accepting that he’s lost. He appears to be undermining that democratic spirit. Yes, of course make sure all the votes are legitimate, but count all the legitimate votes.
As someone said about the Iran-Iraq war, it’s a shame they can’t both lose.
You’re probably right, but what did the Dems expect? Spending all of Trump’s term in Trump Derangement Syndrome and trying to paint him as “Russian asset”. If only they’d been able to prove they were above Trump (not hard to do) we would all have much more sympathy for them now.
A well-written thoughtful piece, warning about the dangers to democracy when the agenda is seized by the populists of either side. You can reliably expect the commentators here to hate it.(Orange-man-good or TDS, I think it’s called)
“we have a shameless egotist in the White House, stirring up dissent in a volatile climate as he seeks to cling on to power.”
“Biden is a genial character”
Two quotes from the article above.
It may be a well written piece, but it obviously not a balanced article.
Does ‘balance’ mean lying about one to make him appear as bad as the other? Both statements are true. Is there any doubt, even on the right, that Trump is a massive egotist? Seriously? And Biden, from what I read, seems to be well-liked in Washington on both sides. “Genial” isn’t exactly the greatest compliment for a would-be president. It makes me think of Chauncey Gardiner.
Both statements are not true. I have seen plenty of evidence to suggest that Biden is anything but genial, except when putting on an act.
Just go back and watch some of the Senate speeches etc in which he refers to black men as super predators. Or the way in which he boasted to the press of having arranged for the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor who was instigating Burisma, on whose board his son was sitting.
Not a nice guy, not a nice guy at all.
You need to go fact-check that Super-predator comment. It’s not true. Biden never said it. The conversation doesn’t work if you deliberately throw falsehoods into the mix, and/or can’t be bothered to check what others tell you.
But Kamala Harris -who we all know is just lovely, lovely because she is of most importance a ‘POC’ and a woman to boot (so without the allowance of even a scintilla of doubt she must be all good) -well, she told me that Biden was both a sexual predator and a racist? Do you want to go fact check that one?
And I’m sure I heard lovely Joe say to a black man that he wasn’t black if he didn’t vote Democrat, and also that ‘Blacks’, unlike ‘Latinos’ were a sort of monoculture. I ‘fact checked’ these myself and apparently my ears did not deceive me! So I don’t think he is that much of a nice guy -more like someone playing the part of a nice guy who can’t hold a consistent politically correct line -as in fact no one can.
Why is everyone surprised by how divided the US is? It’s a country acting like a teenager at war with itself, and pouting because it’s no longer relevant to anything.
Until you need us…again…
The Americans only got involved in WW2 because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Before that you were happy to sell to both sides.
A lot of us would be happy at becoming even less relevant in your eyes. Pay for your own defense, for starters. We’ll trade with you if you’re producing something useful, but it would be nice to no longer squander taxpayer money on people who hate us.
Well said. I’m a European and I agree with you. And given the nature of the people that run Europe, and the stupidity of the European population, there is no good reason to step in and save us a fourth time. The first four being: WWI, WWII, Marshall Plan, Cold War.
We already pay for our own defence, and good, we don’t want your imperialism here.