Bernie continues to espouse truth.
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Except for the “Trump is not stupid” part.
Stupid is a stupid does, and smart is just the ability to efficiently accomplish your objectives with the resources available to you.
I would argue that Trump is smart in that he has managed to, with limited intellectual, strategic, or character resources pull off one of the largest con jobs in American history.
He doesn't want to do good for America, he wants to do good for himself and has achieved heretofore not possible levels of graft and extortion and all of this without facing any real consequences himself.
He's not a good man, He's not an intelligent man, but he is a smart monster. He not an imbecile, he's not witless, but he is a stupid business man.
Trump proves that you can be stupid and smart at the same time because they can apply to different qualities of a person.
He is undeniably a bad American.
True. I’d qualify him as more manipulative than intelligent though, but I guess you can be smart at being manipulative. I’m not sure he’s even that because he’s just been afforded every opportunity in his life to take the most advantage of being manipulative so if he was not a millionaire by birth, I don’t think he would be anywhere near as good at it.
He's good at subconsciously transmitting divisive/extremist messages with such "genuine innocence/ignorance" (not sure about this word, but he seems to be genuinely unaware of when he is lying) that other susceptible people absorb subconsciously too. It does not go through the rational part of the brain, so this is not about being stupid, being stupid probably helps him be genuine when he makes the most blatant lies, unlike JD.
He was born rich, all the stuff he does is because he got started on third base and even then lost it all.
His saving grace was him being entertaining, not intelligent.
I will always cherish my time volunteering for him.
No warning necessary. This is guaranteed.
Trump will of course deny it.
He didn't even accept the vote totals when he won in 2016. I don't think there's any result where he doesn't attack faith in democracy.
Calling out bullshit before the bullshitter performs the bullshit might help people see the patterns of Trumps behaviour.
It's worse than just laying the groundwork to make a claim. Much worse. Republicans have been installing MAGA zealots in key positions getting ready to tie up the election until SCOTUS steps in and hands Trump the win as they did with Bush in 2000.
Rolling Stone identified at least 70 election officials around the country that are 2020 election deniers. In addition, 3 of the 5 member Georgia Board of Elections are election denying Trump supporters that are already changing rules to allow and support challenges this November. Trump called out all three by name at a rally there and one was even in the front row and briefly spoke at the rally.
Not only that, but pretty much every countermeasure you could take to stop them would be twisted by them as "evidence" that they were right in the first place.
It's like the 100,000 election "observers" (read: saboteurs) they're recruiting: the role of an election observer is to raise objections in case of problems. But if they're going to fraudulently raise objections to nonexistent problems, there's no counter to that. You can't just get another 100,000 election observers from the other party to try to stop them, because their role is also to raise objections. There's no such thing as an observer actively not-raising a not-objection. It's an asymmetric tactic in the MAGA fascists' favor.
Yes. It's going to get ugly. I'm hoping it's a huge blowout for Harris but even then, Trump's cult will deny reality and react violently.
The scariest part for me is SCOTUS helping Trump get away with it. I worry that there are too many Americans who are too comfortable/stupid/in denial to fully appreciate the long-term implications of what's happening, and that the thin veneer of legitimacy a corrupt SCOTUS could give a Trump coup would stop them from doing what would need to be done.
Of course he fucking is, he’s still denying the last one.
Why is it that blatantly lying about your political opponent and actively spreading clear disinformation that is easily reputable isn't penalized?
And I don't want like "cuz capitalism" zero effort responses, I'm wanting to know from an actual legal complexity standpoint what would go wrong if this was made illegal.
The fact it's so clearly provably as a false claim by countless directions, it should be an open and shut "you spread obvious disinformation" and at least a notable slap on the wrist should occur each time.
Why can a candidate just go and openly lie and say whatever without penalty, legally? Shouldn't this be under something like Libel, defamation, etc?
Shouldn't Kamala's crew be able to take Trump to court right now for defamation?
Their mob also does not believe trial by jury either now. they discredited the executive branch with trump, the legislative branch with the stunts in congress, the judicial branch with the supreme court, Cannon and his NY trial so now there is no taboo left to break to question an election without a massive potential for convolution. What Bernie is saying is not what people say is obvious.
What he is saying is prepare, trump-proof, harden and diversify your election integrity verification methods, because this time maga knows what it's doing.
What could go wrong when you have a law on the books like that is the people in power will enforce it based on their concept of truth, not yours. The libel laws are the way they are currently because lawmakers and courts have, so far, chosen to err on the side of encouraging speech. Letting anyone say anything they want about politicians is probably better than limiting political speech, because, in the wrong hands, limits on political speech can be very dangerous.
Then there’s the classic “you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater if there is no fire” example. Maybe that could apply to knowing purveyors of disinformation, but you’d have to prove that they know what they are saying is false, and they intend harm. That’s a very high burden of proof, but if you can prove both of those then there’s a case for fraud.
you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater if there is no fire
This SCOTUS case has been largely overturned. It's from Schenck v. United States, a case involving people distributing fliers to draft age men during WW1 encouraging them to resist the draft. The ruling was narrowed in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) to only allow free speech restrictions based on imminent harm, not just making the government a little uncomfortable.
The specific example of causing a stampede in a crowded theater could be criminalized as imminent harm. Speaking of that specific scenario, apparently it had come up because there had been multiple deadly stampedes in crowded theaters from false alarms. I wonder if now we would not have that. People have been trained from childhood to evacuate a building in an orderly fashion.
"The only shared reality that society is allowed to have is Trump's subjective interpretation of reality."
The crazy part is, that MAGAts want Trump to be the sole source of truth probably more than even Trump does.
One fair thing to do would be to let them to live with each other and eat each others' faces until they want to come back to a "realer" world.
He did last time too.
And people still deny it to this day.
He also denied the results in 2016 when he won because he didn't win by whatever margin he thought he deserved.
He likes to deny that he lost the popular vote.
gearing up? They never stopped rigging even while getting smacked down after the last election.
If Harris wins, there will be another, more successful contest, another coup attempt, they'll be calling for civil war.
It is his only choice now. He will lose the election, and all of the swing states will not certify it.
Is this not just taken for granted? It’s as certain as the sun rising tomorrow.
Nobody is surprised by it, and we can only hope the infrastructure is in place to properly defend against it when the time comes.
With Democrats in control of the Senate and White House during the transition, and such a narrow margin of Republican control in the House, I can't really see how denying the election results without court-admissible evidence ends with Trump in power. That said, it could still result in violence.
It will result in violence, that's going to cause problems. Also, weakening faith in our institutions, and voting processes is very problematic for the long term.
Violence kicks the issue to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court -- now packed with not only a fascist majority, but with no less than three of them having worked on Bush's side of Bush v. Gore! -- coronates Trump.
Nothing in that article suggests that the violence was what kicked it to the Supreme Court, and I don't think that's a sound assumption to make. If their plan is to replicate 2000, they're putting in a lot of work that will hinge on a very unlikely situation.
Oh we know, Bernie. He's been framing (and gradually amplifying) that narrative for months now.
Duh
We already knew this months ago.