You must not believe there was any assault, disruption of Congress, or any of the other charges. Most of the defendants pleaded guilty, btw, even the MAGA shaman (guy with the horns) and spiritual people never lie.

You asked what laws were broken in the coup I mentioned.

It’s clear that laws were broken on J6. What laws were broken in this coup you mention?

I'm not sure any laws were broken. The CIA, the FBI, the media, the DNC, have the lawful power to defraud the country, to investigate their political opponents, and to submit the entire world to their propaganda and conspiracy theories.

I do. I’m not making a case; I’m just sharing my beliefs.

Besides, you and I have litigated the evidence and reasoning already, and the consistent appeals to authority have remained entirely unconvincing throughout. One day I would like to hear your own conclusions rather than someone else’s. Let me know if it ever occurs.

She’s resorting to insults. But that’s OK. The evidence affords greater weight to my characterization than yours, and history will correct the record.

It was far worse. They tried to frame the democratically-elected president for treason and waged a years-long coup based on Clinton campaign conspiracy theories that reached the highest echelons of the intelligence community and the administrative state. The riot on J6 was just their Reichstag moment.

Objecting to certification was exactly what congressional democrats did in 2017.

i was an absolute moron.

Fair enough

Your snark doesn’t change the fact you removed most of his argument and filled it with your own assumptions. That’s the way propaganda works, and I was only hoping you wouldn’t allow yourself to be misinformed, and worse, to pass it off as unarguable fact. My apologies.

I've quoted them in full. You are out-right lying. The kind of lying I cannot do anything with but tell you you are lying. Because you can read. So you know you are lying.

Did you not say this? “Trump believes suspension of "all rules, regulations and articles... of the constitution" is justified.”

I've not. I literally quoted him. Directly. No interpolation whatsoever. You are lying. And you know you are lying.

Is this a full direct quote?

“Trump believes suspension of "all rules, regulations and articles... of the constitution" is justified.”

They don't. I quoted him, so I know they don't. You are lying. Told you you wouldn't have any fun.

You quoted him at a point of your choosing, filling in the rest with words of your own choosing. I can quote you again if you’d like.

His own words say this, directly, with absolutely no middle man. Bizarre that you're asking. I didn't need to do anything to 'get there'. It is what he said he believes.

His words explicitly and directly say something else than what you’ve consistently claimed it does, namely, “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”.

You said: “Trump believes suspension of "all rules, regulations and articles... of the constitution" is justified.”

So why make such sweeping alterations, and pretend he said one and not the other?

I have outlined, twice, how this is a purely logical and sensible conclusion to draw. If you don't see it, that's within you to fix.

So I’m just curious why you feel the need to pick and choose what parts of the quote you want and supply your own words to the rest? Logic and sense?

Of course he’s talking about election fraud. What I’m wondering is how you can get from this quote:

“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution“

To this assumption regarding his motives:

“Trump wants to suspend the constitution”.

Or his beliefs:

Trump believes suspension of "all rules, regulations and articles... of the constitution" is justified.

His clarification directly disputes both assumptions. His absence from any position of power directly disputes even the possibility. So how do you get from one to the other, if not by way of the propaganda of his opponents?

I’m just wondering how one gets from what is quoted to “Trump wants to suspend the constitution” or “Trump calls for the termination of the constitution”. What leads you to take that leap?

Your whole schtick is stoicism but I can only read rank emotion. At any rate, I apologize for sending you off into clown world.

Your problem is the contextomy.

P2 ought to be: Trump believes “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution“.

Upon any confusion, good faith demands you seek clarification, not assume motives and attribute to him words he never said.

Just follow your imagination. Works every time.

In praxis’ defense I left out the .amp out of the link.

Massive fraud allowing for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution is a far cry from Trump wanting to suspend the constitution. So thanks for the demonstration.

This is contextomy. It would be proper to quote in full instead of picking and choose which words you want to include and fill in the blanks with your own. It would be proper to include any clarifications. So there is no fact here.

They’re provable lies, I’m afraid, and on a level that makes newspeak look like child’s-play. But that’s the sort of discourse we’re forced to deal with here.

Well, no, all four are plainly true. Their implication is another thing. But I'd hazard a differing between us there too.

They’re not only plainly false, they’re obvious lies. And they follow the same pattern of propaganda, namely, “contextomy”.

Yes. Those things seem to be clearly true.

They’re complete lies. These sorts of lies are just another reason people are abandoning the sinking ship that is establishment politics.

But the lies obviously work as we can watch in real time as people repeat them. At this point it’s just a question how well they work.

I don’t see any of that. I don’t know what to tell you.

What subscription?

I clicked on a link and read the article. Maybe you’re at your Fox News limit.

I was refuting the claim that Trump brought it all on himself, which is absurd because one can never bring charges on himself. Prosecutors bring charges. The prosecutor’s motivations along with the frivolousness and novelty of the charges reveal the political motives.

Nope.

House Jan. 6 Committee deleted more than 100 encrypted files days before GOP took majority: sources

Fox News Digital has learned that Loudermilk’s committee hired a digital forensics team to scrape hard drives to determine what information they were not given.

The forensics team, according to sources familiar with their search, determined that 117 files were both deleted and encrypted. Sources said those files were deleted on Jan. 1, 2023 – just days before Thompson’s team was required to transfer the data to the new committee.

Fox News Digital has learned the forensics team has recovered all 117 deleted and encrypted files. Now, Loudermilk is demanding answers and passwords to access the data.

I wonder what they’re trying to hide?

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-committee-jan-6-deleted-encrypted-117-files-was-required-share-house-gop-sources.amp

Stealing someone’s taxes and releasing it to a partisan press is a huge violation of privacy. Thankfully the charade dispelled a host of myths that were regnant at the time.

Removing their opponents from the ballot, indicting their opponents during an election, altering voting laws beneath the noses of the voter, flooding the country with illegals, criminalizing the ability to contest an election, for example.

It’s just not the case that he brought it on himself. Many of the people indicting him campaigned on doing so. They brought it on him, and not because they were searching for justice or any nonsense like that, but because he decided to run again. He’s being sued in civil cases for alleged crimes from the 90’s and 2000’s. It’s just a shame that the flimsiness, novelty, and unprecedented status of all their cases only attests to the grasping nature of their efforts, and finally how desperate they all are.

Observe the case of Charles Littlejohn, who was just convicted of stealing Trump’s taxes and leaking them to the press. Apparently he started his job for the sole purpose of stealing and leaking Trump’s taxes. I wonder who convinced him to do that? These kinds of people are not above violating the law, human rights, nor any notion of justice because they believe they are stopping some existential threat. They are trapped in a moral panic, like Pizzagate, but far more prevalent, far-reaching, and consequential. They are the existential threat. They are threatening democracy.

But to those of us who remain unconvinced, their schemes continue to read like the conspiracy theories of the same people who believed he was a Russian spy, or that a 3-hour riot was a violent insurrection and worse than Pearl Harbor. You can actually trace the word “insurrection” from Joe Biden all the way down, just as you can the Russian hoax from the Clinton campaign.

He had indicated earlier that he had already made up his mind, that it was only a question of when he’d announce. A month later they raid Mar-a-lago.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-2024-decision.html

I actually think Trump is running for POTUS again to get out of his legal troubles...

He announced his campaign months before the first indictment.

Sorry, but Trump was looking for illegal votes, which if found would have put him in the lead. He wasn’t telling the governor to fabricate votes or find hidden Trump votes. So Not only are they corrupt, but they’re misinforming you, persecuting innocent people, and making a mockery of the justice system while doing so.

You can witness fallacy at work. Guilt by association, fallacy of composition, and a whole host of social categorization biases leading to the typical stereotypes. If this is the quality of reason and criticism then it’s no wonder no one wants to hear it.

My guess is it is not born out of any knowledge or experience or insight, but passed along from one pliant head to the next in the form of moral enterprise. It’s why you can claim people dream of Trump leading them to a promised land, a kingdom in which they're the elite and not those other ones you see on TV all day, without being able to show an actual sample of this being the case. It’s difficult to tell if this is actually true or the result of a fevered imagination.

This is what a moral panic reads like. Observe the conspiracy theories, fortune-telling, and fear mongering, derived as they were from the reporting of a press trapped in the exact same hysteria. Here we have a consortium of unelected lawyers and activists ready to subvert the will of the people should it not go their way.

Fears grow that Trump will use the military in ‘dictatorial ways’ if he returns to the White House

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-military-fears-rcna129159

“We are preparing for litigation and preparing to use every tool in the toolbox that our democracy provides to provide the American people an ability to fight back,” said Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward. “We believe this is an existential moment for American democracy and it’s incumbent on everybody to do their part.”

“There are an array of horrors that could result from Donald Trump’s unrestricted use of the Insurrection Act,” Blumenthal said in an interview. “A malignantly motivated president could use it in a vast variety of dictatorial ways unless at some point the military itself resisted what they deemed to be an unlawful order. But that places a very heavy burden on the military.”

“He’s a clear and present danger to our democracy,” said William Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine and defense secretary in the Clinton administration who is not involved in the loose-knit network. “His support is solid. And I don’t think people understand what living in a dictatorship would mean.”

In an interview, Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said of Trump: “He’s going to be one creative motherf----- when it comes to trying to figure out how to abuse it [power]. Whatever your guess is, open up your imagination a little more.”

“The military is hundreds of thousands of people strong, and ultimately Trump will find people to follow his legal orders no matter what,” said a former senior official who served in the Trump administration, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk freely.

“The Insurrection Act is a legal order, and if he orders it there will be military officers, especially younger men and women, who will follow that legal order,” the former official added.

“A second Trump term would be day after day of constitutional crisis — the Justice Department one day, the Pentagon the next and Homeland Security the next,” Bolton said in an interview. “It would be unremitting.”

“Like any good dictator, he’s going to try to use the military to basically perform his will,” said Leon Panetta, former defense secretary and CIA director in the Obama administration.

“We’re about 30 seconds away from the Armageddon clock when it comes to democracy,” said Cohen, the former Republican senator and defense secretary. “I think that’s how close we’re coming to it when you have a presidential candidate who can be indicted on 91 counts, who can be [found liable for] sexual aggression, who we have seen lies pathologically, who has flouted every rule in the book.”

Shadowy cabals of special interest groups are already forming. The rhetoric and activity is all grooming for election interference, cheating, a coup, or worse. They’ll destroy “our democracy” in order to save it.

I don’t see how you can conclude from my quote that I was speaking about that particular statement alone. Clearly I wrote, and thankfully you quoted—something of a rarity around here—“of course, as is evidenced by the transcript, he’s looking for fraudulent ballots, the ones that were shredded, and so on.” Not as evidenced by the statement, but by the transcript.

I’d love to see you dispute that. But I know you’ve swallowed whole something else.

You seem to think wrong. I was speaking about election crimes, not election management.

Election crimes become federal cases when:

• The ballot includes one or more federal candidates
• The crime involves an election official abusing his duties
• The crime pertains to fraudulent voter registration
• Voters are not U.S. citizens

Given that he was the victim of the biggest scam in American history, the Russia hoax, of course he had a personal interest in the following election, as did many of his constituents, millions and millions of them in fact. Might they try to steal it a second time? Either way, they got away with it, installed their puppet, a complete husk of a human being who in his half-century of living off the tax-payer’s dollar has never created a damn a thing in his life. At least with this election it’s all out there for anyone to see. The only fun part is to watch how hard you deny it and follow along.

Here’s a better quote because we don’t want to accidentally spread a little misinformation.

So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.

And of course, as is evidenced by the transcript, he’s looking for fraudulent ballots, the ones that were shredded, and so on. That’s entirely within his purview because he is expected to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed”. So I don’t know why his opponents took that silly line for their propaganda.

It would have been a better angle to go after him for what he did do wrong, which was to offer the Secretary of State the opportunity to absolve anyone of criminal guilt by saying it might have been all a mistake, and that he just wanted to find enough fraud in order to win. That could be construed as criminal.

Yes, one thing the Conservative Incorporated likes to forget that Reagan implemented harsh and targeted gun control, especially in California, where he did it to arguably stop the Black Panther party from policing their own communities. The racist beginnings of American gun control are well-enough known, but it’s surprising to see it implemented in almost the same fashion today, not so much on racial terms, but to defend the established order.

Fascism is undoubtedly conservative, as is gun control. But i would argue that the "American left", if there was such a group, is as conservative as the right when it comes to its culture and institutions. Liberalism and freedom and individual rights are are nothing but rhetorical play-things for all of them.