"a conspiracy unfolding...." "...a well-funded cabal....

[kazoolaw]

"This is the inside story of the conspiracy...."

"...a well-funded cabal of powerful people...working together behind the scenes to...change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information."

tinyurl.com/1or24w01

[welch]

A great article in Time Magazine, detailing how Democrats and Republicans agreed to count every vote, to have an honest election.


The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election


A weird thing happened right after the Nov. 3 election: nothing.

The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. Right-wing militias were girding for battle. In a poll before Election Day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence.

Instead, an eerie quiet descended. As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action but crickets. When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on Nov. 7, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the U.S. to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump’s ouster.

A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”

In a way, Trump was right.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.

For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election. The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be “rigged.” His henchmen at the state level sought to block their use, while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious suits to make it more difficult to vote–an intensification of the GOP’s legacy of suppressive tactics. Before the election, Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count. And he spent the months following Nov. 3 trying to steal the election he’d lost–with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.

The democracy campaigners watched with alarm. “Every week, we felt like we were in a struggle to try to pull off this election without the country going through a real dangerous moment of unraveling,” says former GOP Representative Zach Wamp, a Trump supporter who helped coordinate a bipartisan election-protection council. “We can look back and say this thing went pretty well, but it was not at all clear in September and October that that was going to be the case.”

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.

A long article, so I won't quote it all.

Read the rest at:

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

[dneal]

I saw this a couple of days ago. The thing that amuses me is the writer's near perfect demonstration of Doublethink: The ability to have two completely contradictory beliefs in one's mind and believe both of them to be true.

A conspiracy took place, but people who think a conspiracy took place are conspiracy theorists...

[kazoolaw]

"Definition of cabal
1: the contrived schemes of a group of persons secretly united in a plot (as to overturn a government)
also : a group engaged in such schemes"

See also, "self-own"

[kazoolaw]

I saw this a couple of days ago. The thing that amuses me is the writer's near perfect demonstration of Doublethink: The ability to have two completely contradictory beliefs in one's mind and believe both of them to be true.

A conspiracy took place, but people who think a conspiracy took place are conspiracy theorists...

Making the conspiracy realists.

[TSherbs]

Ah yes, the boys of false equivalencies. Still at it, I see.

I, for one, am grateful that this group of influential persons aligned to protect the access to and votes of and counting a these hundreds of millions of Americans. When I retire, I am determined to give some time in my state to continue the same struggle for access and accurate counting. Truly, we must not take access to and counting of our votes for granted. This will, forever more, be the fight. For the entire month of November I blasted every lying or deluded yahoo I came across in every platform I participated in and every in-face discussion. I did burn out, but I did what I could say at the time. My friends told me not to bother, but that is exactly the attitude that yields the space to disinformation and nefarious trends.

Already, the forces of some conservative GOP influencers are attempting to restrict voting access by changing state voting laws. No surprise there! Here we go. The fight over suffrage and access continues. The first thing that will be attacked is mail-in voting. Look for false claims of fraud or the ginned up fear of fraud to be used in these arguments. It's coming! Look for, "We've never had to do it this way before." Look for, "American democracy is built upon the tradition of the polling place." Etc. Look for, "Foreign countries might hack us." It's all coming.

[welch]

Well, fellows, what evil do all you see in liberals and conservatives having agreed to do anything they could to reinforce an honest election even while the pandemic made it dangerous for older people, as well as for groups packing tightly together in polling places?

[TSherbs]

Working across the political divide on behalf of suffrage and access and stability is evil! It's the Deep State! It's a Never-Trump cabal! My fears and anxieties are all confirmed! 😋

[dneal]

This French-Canadian lawyer, who has an interest in the goings-on in the U.S., offers his opinion.

Objective person who sees through the bullshit, or delusional conspiracy theorist? Depends on what flavor of kool aid one drinks...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx6OfAdl-UU

[Chuck Naill]

How does someone become an
" objective person who sees through then BS"? Is it when they agree with your BS?

[kazoolaw]

Well, fellows, what evil do all you see in liberals and conservatives having agreed to do anything they could to reinforce an honest election even while the pandemic made it dangerous for older people, as well as for groups packing tightly together in polling places?

welch,

All this time I thought you lacked a sense of humor, then I had to chuckle at your joke that rigging, er, fortifying the election was to save older people from being packed together. Like being packed together at planned post-election riots: "...website had a map listing 400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop the coup they feared, the left was ready to flood the streets."

Seems appropriate on Super Bowl Sunday that the liberals tag line denying their conspiracy/cabal was made the centerpiece of a commercial:

tinyurl.com/79zlydm8

[kazoolaw]

How does someone become an
" objective person who sees through then BS"? Is it when they agree with your BS?

No, Chuck, it's when a person sees through the BS no matter who's shoveling.

[Chuck Naill]

How does someone become an
" objective person who sees through then BS"? Is it when they agree with your BS?

No, Chuck, it's when a person sees through the BS no matter who's shoveling.

Thank you. z:)

[Chuck Naill]

Well, fellows, what evil do all you see in liberals and conservatives having agreed to do anything they could to reinforce an honest election even while the pandemic made it dangerous for older people, as well as for groups packing tightly together in polling places?

welch,

All this time I thought you lacked a sense of humor, then I had to chuckle at your joke that rigging, er, fortifying the election was to save older people from being packed together. Like being packed together at planned post-election riots: "...website had a map listing 400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop the coup they feared, the left was ready to flood the streets."

Seems appropriate on Super Bowl Sunday that the liberals tag line denying their conspiracy/cabal was made the centerpiece of a commercial:

tinyurl.com/79zlydm8





Do not post while drunk.

[TSherbs]

How does someone become an
" objective person who sees through then BS"? Is it when they agree with your BS?

No, Chuck, it's when a person sees through the BS no matter who's shoveling.

More false equivalency.

A co-ordinated effort to do good is not the same as a co-ordinated effort to do evil. The former is commendable; the latter is both execrable and often criminal.

Like I said, I look forward to doing more in the future to broaden access and accuracy to voting (that, I call "good").

[dneal]

How does someone become an
" objective person who sees through then BS"? Is it when they agree with your BS?

No, Chuck, it's when a person sees through the BS no matter who's shoveling.

More false equivalency.

A co-ordinated effort to do good is not the same as a co-ordinated effort to do evil. The former is commendable; the latter is both execrable and often criminal.

Like I said, I look forward to doing more in the future to broaden access and accuracy to voting (that, I call "good").


Pfff... another way of saying the ends justify the means.

Doing evil in the name of the good is not the good. Silencing opponents is not the good. Circumventing the constitution to win an election is not the good. Trump wasn't a threat to democracy or any of the other nonsense the left shouted. He was a threat to globalists and bureaucrats.

[dneal]

How does someone become an
" objective person who sees through then BS"? Is it when they agree with your BS?

The answer is contained in what you omitted.

Reading if fundamental.

[Chuck Naill]

How does someone become an
" objective person who sees through then BS"? Is it when they agree with your BS?

The answer is contained in what you omitted.

Reading if fundamental.

"if fundamental" LOL!! DA!! Perhaps writing is also fundamental.

[kazoolaw]

More false equivalency.


TS-
You must understand that no matter how often you keep repeating a new term you've found that is doesn't apply to everything.

[kazoolaw]

Well, fellows, what evil do all you see in liberals and conservatives having agreed to do anything they could to reinforce an honest election even while the pandemic made it dangerous for older people, as well as for groups packing tightly together in polling places?

welch,

All this time I thought you lacked a sense of humor, then I had to chuckle at your joke that rigging, er, fortifying the election was to save older people from being packed together. Like being packed together at planned post-election riots: "...website had a map listing 400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop the coup they feared, the left was ready to flood the streets."

Seems appropriate on Super Bowl Sunday that the liberals tag line denying their conspiracy/cabal was made the centerpiece of a commercial:

tinyurl.com/79zlydm8





Do not post while drunk.
C'mon Chuck, that was funny!

[kazoolaw]

How does someone become an
" objective person who sees through then BS"? Is it when they agree with your BS?

The answer is contained in what you omitted.

Reading if fundamental.

"if fundamental" LOL!! DA!! Perhaps writing is also fundamental.

Chuck, may I refer you to your post 10 above?

[TSherbs]

Trump wasn't a threat to democracy or any of the other nonsense the left shouted....

Tell that to the family of Brian Sicknick. I guess those who beat him to death and then entered the Capitol were showing a kind of respect for the outcome of the vote? You know, "Yay, electoral process! Yay certification!" And Trump, too!

You are getting weirder, dneal. Get off the internet. Get out of those dark places that the algorithms are serving up to you (or that you are hunting for). Seriously.

[TSherbs]

More false equivalency.


TS-
You must understand that no matter how often you keep repeating a new term you've found that is doesn't apply to everything.

If the shoe still fits....

[dneal]

How does someone become an
" objective person who sees through then BS"? Is it when they agree with your BS?

The answer is contained in what you omitted.

Reading if fundamental.

"if fundamental" LOL!! DA!! Perhaps writing is also fundamental.

Just checking to see if you’re reading.

Nice dodge though.

[dneal]

Trump wasn't a threat to democracy or any of the other nonsense the left shouted....

Tell that to the family of Brian Sicknick. I guess those who beat him to death and then entered the Capitol were showing a kind of respect for the outcome of the vote? You know, "Yay, electoral process! Yay certification!" And Trump, too!

You are getting weirder, dneal. Get off the internet. Get out of those dark places that the algorithms are serving up to you (or that you are hunting for). Seriously.

Nope, Trump isn't responsible for that nonsense either. Nice irrelevant appeal to emotion though.

I suppose when you suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, everyone who has a different point of view seems "weird".

Put down your kool aid.

[Ray-VIgo]

When it's your friends gathering, it's a party; when it's your opponents, a conspiracy.

[kazoolaw]

Ray-Vigo: happy to party with you.

[Pendragon]

Tell that to the family of Brian Sicknick. I guess those who beat him to death and then entered the Capitol were showing a kind of respect for the outcome of the vote? You know, "Yay, electoral process! Yay certification!" And Trump, too!
Donald Trump said to walk down to the Capitol and cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. Some 30,000 of them walked down to the Capitol and protested peacefully. Had the crowd actually been incited to riot, they would have overrun the entire building almost immediately.

John Sullivan, an alt left agitator, climbed in through a broken window in the Capitol wearing a gas mask and body armor. He then said "Let's burn this shit down" and also "We accomplished this shit. We did this together. Fuck yeah! We are all a part of this history".

Now who was inciting the crowd to riot? Hint: Their role models are the Red Guard.


You are getting weirder, dneal.
Pot-kettle-black.

[welch]

Donald Trump said to walk down to the Capitol and cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. Some 30,000 of them walked down to the Capitol and protested peacefully. Had the crowd actually been incited to riot, they would have overrun the entire building almost immediately.

John Sullivan, an alt left agitator, climbed in through a broken window in the Capitol wearing a gas mask and body armor. He then said "Let's burn this shit down" and also "We accomplished this shit. We did this together. Fuck yeah! We are all a part of this history".

Now who was inciting the crowd to riot? Hint: Their role models are the Red Guard.


You are getting weirder, dneal.
Pot-kettle-black.

Hint? This is insane. What do you know about the Red Guards, Pendragon?

Hint? Did Jewish Space Lazars create all the votes that were counted to give President Biden the victory?

Hint? When liberals and conservatives work together to make an honest election it is not a cabal except to people trying to destroy American elections forever.

Hint? When the President of the United States demands that a state's secretary of state "recalculate" the vote-count to make him a winner, that President is trying to overthrow elections.

[welch]

In wake of Trump calls to state officials, Georgia prosecutors open criminal investigation into efforts to subvert election results


By
Amy Gardner
Feb. 10, 2021 at 11:09 a.m. EST

Add to list
An Atlanta-area prosecutor has opened a criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election result in Georgia in the wake of two calls then-President Donald Trump placed to state officials, urging them to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

In a letter Wednesday to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis did not mention Trump by name, but stated that her office is examining a raft of potential criminal charges related to “attempts to influence” the administration of the 2020 election in the state.

In early January, Trump pressured Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in the state during an hour-long phone call.

Trump also called the top elections investigator on Raffensperger’s staff shortly before Christmas, asking the person to “find the fraud” and become a “national hero.”

Willis wrote that her office will examine whether anyone illegally solicited election fraud, made false statements to state and local government officials, made threats or participated in a criminal conspiracy. Her letter was first reported by The New York Times.

She asked officials to preserve all records related to to the 2020 election. She said the matter is “of high priority” and will go before a grand jury as soon as March.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-wake-of-trump-calls-to-state-officials-georgia-prosecutors-open-criminal-investigation-into-efforts-to-subvert-election-results/2021/02/10/17709bd0-6bb3-11eb-9f80-3d7646ce1bc0_story.html

[dneal]

It's amusing to watch the posts change to match the narrative. Georgia couldn't have possibly been "stolen", because the Governor and SecState were Republicans.

Now, liberals and conservatives work together to "make an honest election".

It's a cabal, until it's pointed out that cabal has negative connotations; so now it's "not a cabal".

[welch]

Same story in the NY Times:


ATLANTA — Prosecutors in Fulton County have initiated a criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn Georgia’s election results, including a phone call he made to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Mr. Trump pressured him to “find” enough votes to help him reverse his loss.

On Wednesday, Fani Willis, the recently elected Democratic prosecutor in Fulton County, sent a letter to numerous officials in state government, including Mr. Raffensperger, requesting that they preserve documents related to “an investigation into attempts to influence the administration of the 2020 Georgia General Election.”

While the letter does not mention Mr. Trump by name, it is related to his intervention in Georgia’s election, according to a state official with knowledge of the matter. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.

“This investigation includes, but is not limited to, potential violations of Georgia law prohibiting the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration,” the letter states.

This investigation is by the newly-elected Fulton County prosecutor, a Democrat.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/us/politics/trump-georgia-investigation.html?fbclid=IwAR0ngHBW1HC8VgSgmSb2fH Pi3059borXELa60ERJjMaG7nm18iaklOiD1YU
Meanwhile, the Republican government of Georgia is opening an administrative investigation:


Georgia Officials Review Trump Phone Call as Scrutiny Intensifies
The office of Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has initiated a fact-finding inquiry into Donald Trump’s January phone call to Mr. Raffensperger pressuring him to “find” votes.

By Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim
Feb. 8, 2021
ATLANTA — The office of Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on Monday started an investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the state’s election results, including a phone call he made to Mr. Raffensperger in which Mr. Trump pressured him to “find” enough votes to reverse his loss.

Such inquiries are “fact-finding and administrative in nature,” the secretary’s office said, and are a routine step when complaints are received about electoral matters. Findings are typically brought before the Republican-controlled state board of elections, which decides whether to refer them for prosecution to the state attorney general or another agency.

The move comes as Fani Willis, the Democratic district attorney of Fulton County, which encompasses much of Atlanta, is weighing whether to begin a criminal inquiry of her own. A spokesman for Ms. Willis declined to comment on Monday.

The January call was one of several attempts Mr. Trump made to try to persuade top Republican officials in the state to uncover instances of voting fraud that might change the outcome, despite the insistence of voting officials that there was no widespread fraud to be found. He also called Gov. Brian Kemp in early December and pressured him to call a special legislative session to overturn his election loss. Later that month, Mr. Trump called a state investigator and pressed the official to “find the fraud,” according to those with knowledge of the call.

“The Secretary of State’s office investigates complaints it receives,” Walter Jones, a spokesman for the office, said in a statement on Monday. “The investigations are fact-finding and administrative in nature. Any further legal efforts will be left to the Attorney General.”

David Worley, the sole Democrat on the state elections board, said Monday that administrative inquiries by the secretary of state’s office could result in criminal charges.

“Any investigation of a statutory violation is a potential criminal investigation depending on the statute involved,” he said, adding that in the case of Mr. Trump, “The complaint that was received involved a criminal violation.”

Mr. Worley said that now that an inquiry had been started by the secretary of state’s office, he would not introduce a motion at Wednesday’s state board of election meeting, as he had originally planned to do, in an effort to refer the case to the Fulton County district attorney’s office.

Not long after the call to Mr. Raffensperger became public, several complaints were filed. One came from John F. Banzhaf III, a George Washington University law professor.

Former prosecutors said Mr. Trump’s calls might run afoul of at least three state laws. One is criminal solicitation to commit election fraud, which can be either a felony or a misdemeanor; as a felony, it is punishable by at least a year in prison. There is also a related conspiracy charge, which can be prosecuted either as a misdemeanor or a felony. A third law, a misdemeanor offense, bars “intentional interference” with another person’s “performance of election duties.”



https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/us/politics/trump-georgia-election-investigation.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

[kazoolaw]

When liberals and conservatives work together to make an honest election it is not a cabal except to people trying to destroy American elections forever.

Welch,

Did you forget: It's the cabal which proudly identified itself as a cabal. I don't know why it did, but it did.
Called itself a conspiracy as well. Don't know why it did, but it did.
Read it in Time magazine.

You can't walk back from that now.

[welch]

When liberals and conservatives work together to make an honest election it is not a cabal except to people trying to destroy American elections forever.

Welch,

Did you forget: It's the cabal which proudly identified itself as a cabal. I don't know why it did, but it did.
Called itself a conspiracy as well. Don't know why it did, but it did.
Read it in Time magazine.

You can't walk back from that now.

What??? Did you even bother to read? Of course, maybe your problem is understanding what you've read, so I'll explain it. Trump spent months before the election pretending that the ONLY way he could lose re-election would be if it was stolen from him. Poor baby. So you think it was, somehow, evil that Democrats and Republicans worked to make an honest election happen. How?

OK, if you hate to read, watch the House Impeachment Managers make the case against Trump.

- "No violence".

- "It's too late for that. They don't listen without violence"

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/10/us/politics/live-trump-impeachment-trial.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

[welch]

Kazoolaw, here you are, from commentary about the impeachment trial:


Lisa LererHost, On Politics newsletter
Unreality is the key word, Sabrina. The internet and some right-wing outlets created a whole fake world of election fraud, deep state, and QAnon child abuse conspiracy theories and Trump seemed to both inhabit it and stoke it.

[fountainpenkid]

I saw this a couple of days ago. The thing that amuses me is the writer's near perfect demonstration of Doublethink: The ability to have two completely contradictory beliefs in one's mind and believe both of them to be true.

A conspiracy took place, but people who think a conspiracy took place are conspiracy theorists...

Not doublethink in the slightest, because they are two entirely different conspiracies*. They do not contradict each other. The Trump-supported one alleged a defrauding of the public by rigging a certain outcome, whereas this one was about empowering the public to decide the outcome for themselves. I can't believe I had to write that.

*The author was clearly distorting the use of "conspiracy"--which by definition is harmful--for dramatic effect. I also can't believe I had to write that.

[dneal]

I don't think you understand the definition of "conspire" or "conspiracy".

The author asserts that there was a conspiracy to defeat Trump. Trump supporters assert there was a conspiracy to defeat Trump. Same thing. The author thinks it was good and says it was an effort to "defend democracy" or whatever, and that changing election rules and laws outside the legislature - a clearly illegal act - is ok. Trump supporters know it was illegal and suspect it led to fraudulent mail-in ballot counts. The author thinks suppressing information and lying - like calling the Biden laptop "Russian disinformation" is morally ok. Liberals love to note how much Trump "lies". Hypocrisy, but to be expected.

I can continue, but I can't believe I have to explain it.

See also: Russell Conjugation. The entire Time piece (and your post) is an example of it.

[fountainpenkid]

Conspiracy to defeat Trump? That is such a willful misreading of the article. Vacating this thread too. To others--don't feed the bear with this shit.

[dneal]

Typical. Can't back up your argument, talk smack and run away...

[kazoolaw]

I saw this a couple of days ago. The thing that amuses me is the writer's near perfect demonstration of Doublethink: The ability to have two completely contradictory beliefs in one's mind and believe both of them to be true.

A conspiracy took place, but people who think a conspiracy took place are conspiracy theorists...

Not doublethink in the slightest, because they are two entirely different conspiracies*. They do not contradict each other. The Trump-supported one alleged a defrauding of the public by rigging a certain outcome, whereas this one was about empowering the public to decide the outcome for themselves. I can't believe I had to write that.

*The author was clearly distorting the use of "conspiracy"--which by definition is harmful--for dramatic effect. I also can't believe I had to write that.

Oops, the cabal takes credit for rigging the election.

Appreciate your concession that conspiracies are, by definition, harmful. And then you add cabal acting together to create a secret history.

I believe you wrote both things, and believe neither.

[kazoolaw]

When liberals and conservatives work together to make an honest election it is not a cabal except to people trying to destroy American elections forever.

Welch,

Did you forget: It's the cabal which proudly identified itself as a cabal. I don't know why it did, but it did.
Called itself a conspiracy as well. Don't know why it did, but it did.
Read it in Time magazine.

You can't walk back from that now.

What??? Did you even bother to read? Of course, maybe your problem is understanding what you've read, so I'll explain it. Trump spent months before the election pretending that the ONLY way he could lose re-election would be if it was stolen from him. Poor baby. So you think it was, somehow, evil that Democrats and Republicans worked to make an honest election happen. How?

OK, if you hate to read, watch the House Impeachment Managers make the case against Trump.

- "No violence".

- "It's too late for that. They don't listen without violence"

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/10/us/politics/live-trump-impeachment-trial.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

Welch, Welch-

Stay on task here. Your entire post is an effort to run away from what was written by your people about your people.

Remember this: "A great article in Time Magazine, detailing how Democrats and Republicans agreed to count every vote, to have an honest election." Who said that?
What did the great article say? "There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs."
"...even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information."

To what end? "They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it." Post 2. Who quoted that? Is there another "welch" on the board?

The article you describe as "great" isn't referring to Trump supporters as a conspiracy, a cabal, something that sounds like a paranoid fever dream. It's talking about your people, protesting that they weren't rigging the election but had to secretly conspire to "fortify" the election.

"Hoisted with your own petard" to coin a phrase.

[Pendragon]

Hint? This is insane. What do you know about the Red Guards, Pendragon?
They were a bunch of violent thugs who used culture and politics as convenient excuses for violence and destruction. Much like Antifa and the now co-opted BLM today, the antiwar protesters in the 1960s, or the Nazi brownshirts of my grandparents generation. In principle, all of them were motivated by idealism of some sort, but in fact the focus was always on recreational violence.


Hint? Did Jewish Space Lazars create all the votes that were counted to give President Biden the victory?
Given Trump's great support for our Israeli friends, I doubt it. Jewish space lasers would be way cool if they did exist, however. Even cooler than a guy wearing buffalo horns and carrying a spear, and that is pretty hard to do.


Hint? When liberals and conservatives work together to make an honest election it is not a cabal except to people trying to destroy American elections forever.
Correction, when the liberal and conservative elite (i.e. the Republicrat royalty) work together to outflank the average Joe and Jane. Maybe the elections were honest, and maybe not. If they were, great effort must have been made to conceal it, or at least ensure doubt was cast on the process. Our election process is pretty dialed if there is a large gap between the winner and loser. If the two candidates are running neck and neck, the process is woefully lacking. Of course, a big part of the problem is the losing side's willingness to admit defeat. That goes for both the Democrats and Republicans. People no longer tolerate dissent from their personal views. It started with the 2016 election and continues today. Elections have almost become a mere formality, valid only if "my side wins". That is not a worldview that should be encouraged by iffy elections.

If Trump won the 2020 election, what do you think would have happened? It is not hard to realize the butt hurt left would have turned our city centers into giant bonfires and stormed the White House.


Hint? When the President of the United States demands that a state's secretary of state "recalculate" the vote-count to make him a winner, that President is trying to overthrow elections.
He was asking for an accurate vote count, one done in accordance with State and Federal laws. It was not entirely clear that that had happened. Notice that there was no question of the election results in Florida, where the results were available within an hour after the election. The rest of the states should adopt Florida's system.

[welch]

Kazoolaw, your description of the Time Magazine article does not match the article. It describes people working to protect the vote as Trump insisted that the only way he would not win by "a landslide" would be if a shadowy something stole his votes. We saw that county and state election officials, who are not famous and fancy politicians, did their jobs as always. They counted the votes and Trump lost badly in both the Electoral vote and the popular vote.

Further, Trump and his sycophants sued here there and everywhere, but lost again and again. On the merits of their weak cases. Sometimes the cases were insane and sometimes they could not present evidence because their supposed witnesses would not be sworn in to be cross-examined.

Meanwhile, Pendragon should, at least, look up the Red Guards, devoted followers of Chairman Mao.

[kazoolaw]

Kazoolaw, your description of the Time Magazine article does not match the article.

welch my friend,

It's not my description of the article, it's my quotation of the article. I certainly understand trying to distance yourself from the self-professed cabal and the conspiracy, both sounding like a paranoid fever dream. But you can't: it's who they admit they are.

I am sorry that the confession of conspiracy disheartened you so.

[welch]

Oh, Kazoo, have you read the article?

It says:


A weird thing happened right after the Nov. 3 election: nothing.

The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. Right-wing militias were girding for battle. In a poll before Election Day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence.

Instead, an eerie quiet descended. As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action but crickets. When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on Nov. 7, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the U.S. to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump’s ouster.

A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”

In a way, Trump was right.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

[kazoolaw]

Yes, but thought that the self-description as a "shadow effort" might have been too much for you.

[Pendragon]

Meanwhile, Pendragon should, at least, look up the Red Guards, devoted followers of Chairman Mao.
All champions of a Socialist utopia. We all saw how well that worked out, both during Mao's reign and in the Soviet Union. Why on earth should we try to repeat those failed experiments?

[welch]

Meanwhile, Pendragon should, at least, look up the Red Guards, devoted followers of Chairman Mao.
All champions of a Socialist utopia. We all saw how well that worked out, both during Mao's reign and in the Soviet Union. Why on earth should we try to repeat those failed experiments?

The Red Guards acted at the order of Chairman Mao to drive out people Mao and Chou En Lai had chosen as the next leadership group. Armed with the Little Red Books, selections from Chairman Mao made by Comrade Lin Piao, they criticized-in-a-physical-way people like Liu Shao Chi. By about 1972 or 1973, Mao and other members of his ruling group had had enough. They killed Lin Piao, stopped the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution", and went on about their business. There were were several versions of "socialist utopia" replacing each other from the mid-1950s onward...starting with "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom". Through all of it, the Chinese Communist Party ran things, as they still do.

[ralfstc]

Folks, I'm glad y'all are having fun. But serious question. Do you have any sense of how much all of this is making the US look deranged to the rest of the world?

Take care,

Ralf

[azkid]

Its about time the rest of the world saw what's behind the curtain.

[Chuck Naill]

I could make many analogies, but the fact that Americans are able and willing to discuss our problems is like a disfunctional family who doesn't tolerate a sexually abusive great grand father. With an old man, many turn a blind eye or dismiss the unthinkable as dementia. It is not. So, the US has been brewing this cup of coffee for decades and it finally popped the top off the purcolator.

This past election turnout, the number of Republicans deciding to become independants, the attackers on the capital learning they were duped by a con artist, and the soon to be revealed Trump finances, will help ensure our future is a democracy.

It is up to each of us to decide not to believe and repeat information that is not true. There are basic human rules that have endured like being kind, always tell the truth, and saying please and thank you. I had a HS football coach that liked to say "good guys finish last". I wish I could have responded that they may finish last, but their goodness remains.

[calamus]

When the President of the United States demands that a state's secretary of state "recalculate" the vote-count to make him a winner, that President is trying to overthrow elections.

That would be true only if there weren't significant irregularities that made the vote-count suspect. The mainstream media, owned by multinational interests that don't give a rat's posterior about the US, say there weren't any irregularities, but that doesn't necessarily make it so. Instead, they and their big tech buddies shut down everyone they can who doesn't agree with them. That is censorship, pure and simple.

[Chuck Naill]

The vote count questioned?? Really? He didn’t win the popular vote in the last election!!

[dneal]

The vote count questioned?? Really? He didn’t win the popular vote in the last election!!

*sigh*

Such willful ignorance and/or disingenuousness.

[welch]

When the President of the United States demands that a state's secretary of state "recalculate" the vote-count to make him a winner, that President is trying to overthrow elections.

That would be true only if there weren't significant irregularities that made the vote-count suspect. The mainstream media, owned by multinational interests that don't give a rat's posterior about the US, say there weren't any irregularities, but that doesn't necessarily make it so. Instead, they and their big tech buddies shut down everyone they can who doesn't agree with them. That is censorship, pure and simple.

The state of Georgia says that it had a good election with an honest vote count. They recounted twice, or maybe three times. Do you have any basis for this, other than a bias against the Georgia Secretary of State, his election staff, and the people who ran elections in each county in Georgia?

When a US President insists that a state "recalculate" its vote to find enough votes for him to have won that state, after all the recounts, then he is trying to demolish the US election system.

In one of these threads, a few of us read through each of the Trump campaign's lawsuits in a half-dozen states. Including Georgia. There is the evidence you need to consider.

[Chuck Naill]

I am convinced, not that I will not stop trying, that if you tell some of these folks something they don't want to believe, they will not even consider. I used to thinki, twenty five years ago, that Rush Limbaugh was someone to consider. before it occured to me that he was not a doer, but a complainer. Any one can complain and it takes no talent. If I can change, so can they. We just have to be diligent.

[calamus]

I could change too, except I don't like Kool-Aid and I prefer to think for myself.

[Chuck Naill]

I could change too, except I don't like Kool-Aid and I prefer to think for myself.

Those are not mutually exclusve.

If thinking for yourself means you can think anything you want and think you're not drinking the "kool-aid", thats self deception. I am not being dismissive and I respect your decision to think whatever you decide to believe/think.

[Cyril]

Someone ask me during a conversation and she used the word " CONSPIRACY THEORY " AND ASKED ME DO YOU BELIEVE IN HOLOCAUST ?
I never counter respond by asking when did exactly Hitler died? and where was he when it happened ?
It is not rocket science to educate yourself.
Some people in Australia they are waking over the "Jade" or "Black Opel" with out knowing they are walking over worthless rubbles where as it is a million dollar mine to the treasure diggers.
It is simple as that and in our manipulative world they (Cabal- THE CONSPIRACIST ) use manipulative words and The word "CONSPIRACY THEORY" CAME TO THEIR VOCABULARY DURING 1960 THE killing of the JFK and they manipulate the whole assassination.
So it is very easy way of HYPNOTISING AND MANIPULATING THE CROWD BY USING THE VOCABULARY.
OF course I learn this from Mr DAVID ICKE , THE FAMOUS CONSPIRACY THEORIST.
So Nostradamus or Edgar Casey , Nicola Teslas Leonardo da Vinci are "conspiracy theorists" ?? It is a good question to look at on a walken prospective.
I think it is very silly to joins in a conversation on world politics or on religion on a forum like this and there are IMBECILES EVERYWHERE AND YOU MAY end up as a bad guy. I noticed it is here and we have that US culture war is spreading far in to wider horizon.
It seems no one understand what is the worth of the Freedom of speak we grew up. I apologise for any offensive sense of my few words on CONSPIRACY THEORIES. wish you all a good discussion.

[kazoolaw]

Tell that to the family of Brian Sicknick. I guess those who beat him to death and then entered the Capitol were showing a kind of respect for the outcome of the vote? You know, "Yay, electoral process! Yay certification!" And Trump, too!

You are getting weirder, dneal. Get off the internet. Get out of those dark places that the algorithms are serving up to you (or that you are hunting for). Seriously.

TS-
Don't think you've gotten anything right. You should be embarrassed by misusing Office Sicknick's death.
https://www.cbs17.com/news/national-news/capitol-police-officer-brian-sicknick-died-of-2-strokes-natural-causes-medical-examiner-says/

[kazoolaw]

Will the cabal take a bow?
https://nypost.com/2021/12/09/cabal-that-bragged-of-foisting-joe-biden-on-us-must-answer-for-his-presidency/

[Chuck Naill]

I was reminded today of what was said about King Saul, he was little in his own eyes. There is a danger in these kinds of personalities. Then I considered Jews asking for a king rather than judges.
https://www.redletterchristians.org/we-want-a-king-over-us-from-king-saul-to-donald-trump/

The prophets are speaking. Are you listening?

[kazoolaw]

Sorry, attempted deflection to blame DJT foe Old Joe's failure both misses, and concedes, the point.

[Chuck Naill]

You're choice, bro, but you conscience will remind you later.

[kazoolaw]

You're choice, bro, but you conscience will remind you later.

Thanks for agreeing you know you know, bro.

[Chuck Naill]

You're choice, bro, but you conscience will remind you later.

Thanks for agreeing you know you know, bro.

Times on my side, Cas

[kazoolaw]

Was a hit for The Rolling Stones, Chuck not so much.

[Chip]

The NY Post? Did you scrape off the cat litter to read it?

Meanwhile, here's a cool conspiracy theory:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/technology/birds-arent-real-gen-z-misinformation.html?referringSource=articleShare

A bit of fun in an increasingly grim and desperate world.

[kazoolaw]

The NY Post?

Not surprised you didn't recognize the law professor/author from Instapundit.com.

[Chuck Naill]

The NY Post? Did you scrape off the cat litter to read it?

Meanwhile, here's a cool conspiracy theory:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/technology/birds-arent-real-gen-z-misinformation.html?referringSource=articleShare

A bit of fun in an increasingly grim and desperate world.


Kaz is one of our beloved drive by trolls...LOL!!

[kazoolaw]

The NY Post? Did you scrape off the cat litter to read it?

Meanwhile, here's a cool conspiracy theory:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/technology/birds-arent-real-gen-z-misinformation.html?referringSource=articleShare

A bit of fun in an increasingly grim and desperate world.


Kaz is one of our beloved drive by trolls...LOL!!

Sorry Charlie: aimed at me, quoted and Chip.

[Chuck Naill]

:boink:

[kazoolaw]

"Forgive the profanity, but you have got to be s–tting us.

First, the New York Times decides more than a year later that Hunter Biden’s business woes are worthy of a story. Then, deep in the piece, in passing, it notes that Hunter’s laptop is legitimate.

“People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity,” the Times writes. “Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”

Authenticated!!! You don’t say. You mean, when a newspaper actually does reporting on a topic and doesn’t just try to whitewash coverage for Joe Biden, it discovers it’s actually true?"
https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/the-times-finally-admits-hunter-bidens-laptop-is-real/
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hunter-bidens-emails-are-genuine-the-new-york-times-admits-ccf76cjc2

Wait, a conspiracy of silence?

[Chuck Naill]

The NYT was not silent.

[Chip]

Compared to Trump's foul spawn, Hunter is a feckin' angel.

https://i.imgur.com/tywOJwD.jpg

[Chuck Naill]

Someone else read The Path to Unfreedom. Then we can once and for all dispense of Russia Trump.

[dneal]

Compared to Trump's foul spawn, Hunter is a feckin' angel.

https://i.imgur.com/tywOJwD.jpg

Which one is the crack-smoking, stripper-impregnating-abandoning-child support paying one? Which one is the one that threw a pistol in a trashcan the Secret Service policed up? Buying that pistol is a felony when you have clearly lied on your ATF 4473 - question 21e.

Liberals want gun control, right? That's a violation of 18 USC 921 (Gun Control Act). 10 years in prison and/or up to $250k fine. But I digress.

Which one is in that NYT article about the Burisma and China scandals - 10% to the "Big Guy" - with all the evidence in plain sight and now documented by the beloved New York Times?

Which one took millions from a Russian oligarch's wife?

Now, which one brokered what - four - middle east peace deals?

Wanna call them all sleezy New York bankers and real estate assholes - fine. But don't pretend we're talking anything like a Vice President getting his son to funnel money from (at best) competitor countries that happen to also benefit geopolitically for resulting Admin decisions. That's the prime example of the huckster Trump gets accused of being - and "your" guy is literally doing it in plain sight.

At some point we just have to be honest.

[Chip]

Is this whataboutism at a fever pitch?

The guy in the middle— your fearless leader— committed several rapes and screwed porn stars while his wife was pregnant. Not to mention stealing money with fraud schemes, cheating on his taxes, and lying his arse off.

No wonder Republicans love him.

[kazoolaw]

Chip 'n' Chuck-
Deflecting demons.
Chuck pretends to forget how long it took The NY Times to admit it really was Hunter's laptop, claiming the very idea was part of a Russian plot.
Chip ignores the the point as well, and raises a smokescreen Worthy of WW II.
Here's a hint of what the NYT didn't want you to even think about:
https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/22/8-joe-biden-scandals-inside-hunter-bidens-macbook-that-corporate-media-just-admitted-is-legit/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=8-joe-biden-scandals-inside-hunter-bidens-macbook-that-corporate-media-just-admitted-is-legit&utm_term=2022-03-22

[Chuck Naill]

Mr. Kazoolaw, from December 9, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/us/politics/hunter-biden-tax-investigation.html

[Chuck Naill]

Is this whataboutism at a fever pitch?

The guy in the middle— your fearless leader— committed several rapes and screwed porn stars while his wife was pregnant. Not to mention stealing money with fraud schemes, cheating on his taxes, and lying his arse off.

No wonder Republicans love him.

Oh my, he did more than that. You have to wonder how this guy fooled so many.

"Trump was furious. He said Monnin had “loser’s remorse,” and said that if you “looked at her and compared her to the other people who were in the top 15, you would understand why she was not in the top 15.” His consigliere Michael Cohen called into TMZ Live and said that Monnin had 24 hours to retract her statement or that she could “bet [her] a** that [Miss Universe] will sue . . . seeking massive damages.” Consigliere Cohen was good to his word. Trump obtained a $5 million defamation award against Monnin in an uncontested arbitration proceeding, which was upheld by a federal judge.

A 2013 investigation by Jezebel found that a pageant recruiter in Trump’s Miss USA franchise allegedly demanded a blow job in exchange for magazine work that would allow a contestant to pay the $895 contest entrance fee.

Trump had acquired the Miss Universe franchise in 1996. He reportedly paid tens of millions of dollars (the exact figure was not disclosed) to buy it from ITT Corp., beating out beat two television networks and several South American media moguls. (The deal also included Miss USA and Miss Teen USA.) Trump ran Miss Universe as a 50-50 partnership with TV networks, first with CBS, and, after 2002, with NBC.

On the surface, it looked like a good business. It cost $20 million to bring the 2013 Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. Emin Agalarov whose family owns the arena that hosted the pageant broke down the costs for Russian Forbes. A third of that $20 million went to secure rights. Another third: organizational costs. And the final third goes to the production and broadcast costs. (Another report said overseas rights to Miss Universe were selling for $6 million in 2003.)

Very little of that money, however, was distributed to the general partners of Miss Universe. We know this because Trump had assigned his half of his interest in Miss Universe (25 percent of the company) to his publicly-traded corporation, Trump Entertainment Resorts, Inc. In 2002, the year Fedorova won in Puerto Rico, Trump Entertainment collected a mere $700,000 for it quarter share of the pageant. In 2003 and 2004, Trump Entertainment earned nothing from Miss Universe.

Where was all the money going?

Even if the business was a stinker, there was one attraction for Trump. It allowed him to indulge his Porky’s-style adolescent fantasy of seeing beautiful women naked when they were in no position to refuse.

“I’ll go backstage and everyone’s getting dressed, and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it,” Trump told Howard Stern in 2005.

Listen for yourself:"


"Asked whether he had ever slept with a contestant, Trump declined to say. “It could be a conflict of interest. … But, you know, it’s the kind of thing you worry about later, you tend to think about the conflict a little bit later on.”

Trump sold Miss Universe in 2015 to the talent agency WME | IMG for $28 million. The value of the franchise had been damaged by Trump’s description of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, which led NBC and Univision to drop coverage of Miss USA."

https://sethhettena.com/2017/11/27/trump-and-the-russian-beauty-queen/

[kazoolaw]

Mr. Kazoolaw, from December 9, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/us/politics/hunter-biden-tax-investigation.html

Can't see it behind the paywall: does the Times acknowledge that the laptop is Hunter's?

[Chuck Naill]

Mr. Kazoolaw, from December 9, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/us/politics/hunter-biden-tax-investigation.html

Can't see it behind the paywall: does the Times acknowledge that the laptop is Hunter's?


“ A computer repair shop owner in Wilmington, Del., named John Paul Mac Isaac has said Hunter Biden left a damaged Apple computer at his store in April 2019 and asked him to recover any data. Mr. Isaac said that Mr. Biden filled out a work order and identified himself as Hunter Biden, and that he came to his shop twice but never returned to retrieve the computer or an external hard drive on which its contents had been stored.”

[kazoolaw]

So you chose your excerpt because no where did the NYT admit it was really HB's computer.

[Chuck Naill]

No, I just did a simple search with HB and NYT with a early date.

[kazoolaw]

Search forr when NYT admitted it is really HB's.

[dneal]

*sigh*

Here's the March 2022 NYT Article (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-tax-bill-investigation.html).


People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.

This is the same laptop and the same files the liberal media was writing off as "Russian disinformation" in October 2020 - right before the election. The same thing "50 intelligence experts" (Clapper, Brennan and the other nitwits) chimed in on. Oh, the NYT quietly deleted their claim the laptop was unsubstantiated (https://news.yahoo.com/york-times-quietly-deletes-claim-021800355.html), by the way.

You have to be deep in the liberal echo chamber or willfully ignorant to not know this story and how it is unfolding as I type this. Anyone but an elitist would have been prosecuted for a number of crimes from the ATF violation to the sitting Vice President (now current President) getting his son a job on the board of an oil company in Ukraine - and funneling a portion of that money to "the big guy" (the sitting President!).

Dear god, this is the shit the Democrats accused Trump of, tried to impeach him twice for and we still see chimpscreamed about here.

I'm no fan of Trump, but 3 years of a special counsel to investigate "Russia collusion"; years of the New York AG suing for basically open access to all of his business records with no probable cause; and Democrats haven't turned up one shred of evidence anywhere near as plain and concrete as this laptop. Rather the opposite, and Durham has convicted one FBI attorney for perjuring himself on FISA warrant applications - lying to the court by falsifying documents (emails - plain and obvious evidence). Now he is indicting the general counsel of Hillary's 2016 campaign for lying to the FBI and seeding the whole "Russia/Trump" thing in the first place.

Oh, the political theater of another impeachment is far from something I want to suffer again, but this is an actual "High Crime" in plain view. Honestly, I wouldn't want to see Biden impeached because of who succeeds him. The Republicans are likely to have sweeping victories this fall. Probably not enough in the Senate to gain a supermajority, but I'm ok with 2 years of gridlock in the Federal Government.

Let's not forget the "influencing the election" angle. 20% of Biden voters polled said they would not have voted for him if they knew (i.e.: if the media and big tech hadn't suppressed the story).

[Chip]

How was the "abandoned" laptop acquired and the files examined? Federal subpoena? Seizure by investigators? Or was it it stolen?

Then there's Ashley Biden's diary, that was stolen by Project Veritas, followed up by fraudulent phone contacts to verify it.

There's nothing so low or dishonest the RWW vigilantes won't give it a try.

[dneal]

The FBI has been in possession of the laptop since 2019. All those questions have answers. What you should be asking is why hadn't the outlets you peruse already told you about it? and why did they say it wasn't true - until a few days ago.

Hunter admitted to the tax liability, and just paid that. That's the new development than can't be written off as Russian propaganda. The IRS says "hey, where'd this money come from? You owe some taxes..." That's why it's back in the news, and the NYT fessing up about it is fodder for the right to chimp scream about.

[kazoolaw]

How was the "abandoned" laptop acquired and the files examined? Federal subpoena? Seizure by investigators? Or was it it stolen?




"In October 2020, The Post exclusively reported on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop that he ditched at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019."
https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/hunter-bidens-infamous-laptop-confirmed-in-new-york-times-report/

[Chip]

So at least he paid the taxes.

That's more than you can say for Trump.

[dneal]

The FEC just fined Hillary’s campaign and the DNC for paying for the Steele dossier.

Who was that guy who fed Steele his information? Igor Danchenko? Sounds Russian.
What investigation was the Steele dossier the foundation for?

The NYT should be publishing the story in a couple of years…

[kazoolaw]

So at least he paid the taxes.

That's more than you can say for Trump.


Typical: when information contradicts the party line it's ignored, and a flurry of deflection appears.