Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2

[Rick Plant]

Donald Trump Falsely Claims Only One Person Died During Capitol Riots
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-january-6-capitol-riots-death-bill-oreilly-1660918

[Rick Plant]

Trump’s 2024 playbook is straight out of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’: Yale historian Timothy Snyder



NPR on Thursday aired an alarming report on "the clear and present danger of Trump's enduring 'Big Lie.'"

"When a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the goal was to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and install Donald Trump in a second term. Call it an insurrection or a coup attempt. It was fueled by what's known as the "Big Lie": the verifiably false assertion that Trump won. Joe Biden won 306 votes in the Electoral College, while Trump received 232. In the popular vote, Biden won by more than seven million votes," Melissa Block reported.

Law school professor and election law expert Rick Hasen offered NPR a dire warning.

"I've never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now, because of the metastasizing of the 'Big Lie,'" Hasen said. "This is not the kind of thing I expected to ever worry about in the United States. I kind of feel like a climate scientist from five years ago, or [an] expert on viruses a couple of years ago, sounding the alarm and just hoping that we're not too late already."

Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder noted Adolph Hitler used a similar strategy.

"Part of the character of the 'big lie' is that it turns the powerful person into the victim. And then that allows the powerful person to actually exact revenge, like it's a promise for the future," he explained. "The lie is so big that it reorders the world. And so part of telling the big lie is that you immediately say it's the other side that tells the big lie. Sadly, but it's just a matter of record, all of that is in Mein Kampf."

Listen:
https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-adolph-hitler-playbook/


The clear and present danger of Trump's enduring 'Big Lie



It's been nearly a year since the United States suffered an unprecedented attack on constitutional democracy.

When a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, the goal was to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and install Donald Trump to a second term.

Call it an insurrection or a coup attempt, it was fueled by what's known as the "Big Lie": the verifiably false assertion that Trump won. Joe Biden won 306 votes in the Electoral College, while Trump received 232. In the popular vote, Biden won by more than 7 million votes.

Many are warning that over the past year, that "big lie" of a stolen election has grown more entrenched and more dangerous.

"I've never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now, because of the metastasizing of the 'big lie,' " says election law expert Rick Hasen, co-director of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center at the University of California, Irvine.

"This is not the kind of thing I expected to ever worry about in the United States," Hasen says. "I kind of feel like a climate scientist from five years ago or [an] expert on viruses a couple of years ago, sounding the alarm and just hoping that we're not too late already."

A "big lie" with roots in history

In rallies across the country, Trump continues to hammer on the fiction that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

Speaking at a rally in Georgia in September, Trump trumpeted his familiar, baseless claim that the election was "corrupt" and "rigged."

"I have no doubt that we won, and we won big," Trump said. "The headlines claiming that Biden won are fake news — and a very big lie."

A couple of weeks later, he repeated the fiction at a rally in Iowa. "We didn't lose," he insisted to a crowd that rewarded him with chants of "Trump won!"

By inverting the narrative, attempting to slough off the "big lie" and pin it instead on his opponents, Trump exploited an age-old tactic, says Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder.

"Part of the character of the 'big lie' is that it turns the powerful person into the victim," he says. "And then that allows the powerful person to actually exact revenge, like it's a promise for the future."

Snyder, author of the books The Road to Unfreedom and On Tyranny, has spent years studying the ways tyrants skewer truth. Snyder points to Hitler's original definition of the "big lie" in his manifesto, Mein Kampf and the ways he used it to blame Jews for all of Germany's woes.

"The lie is so big that it reorders the world," Snyder says. "And so part of telling the big lie is that you immediately say it's the other side that tells the big lie. Sadly, but it's just a matter of record, all of that is in Mein Kampf."

A lie that's become embedded in public opinion
Over the past year, Trump's lie that election fraud cost him the White House has become firmly anchored in public opinion.

According to a CNN poll conducted this summer, fully 36% of Americans do not believe that President Biden legitimately won the election. Among Republicans, that number leaps to 78%.

In an NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll conducted in October, just 34% of Republicans say they trust that elections are fair, while 75% of Republicans say Trump has a legitimate claim that there were "real cases of fraud that changed the results." Just 2% of Democrats agreed with that statement.

What's more, says Timothy Snyder, "the 'big lie' is not just in people's minds. It's also now in the law books."

Snyder points to the raft of new laws passed in Republican-led states that restrict voting. Over the past year, at least 19 states have passed laws limiting ballot access.

In addition, Trump loyalists in battleground states are running for powerful offices that control elections. These are candidates who are endorsed by Trump, because they've embraced his lie that he won the 2020 election.

And some Republican-controlled state legislatures have moved to seize power over elections, opening a path where they could overrule voters and substitute their own slate of electors to choose the winner.

All of it, Snyder says, is a direct outcome of Trump's "big lie" and is deeply troubling for the future.

"All of those things set us up for a scenario where the candidate who loses by every measure, not just by the popular vote, but by the Electoral College, the candidate who loses by every measure will nevertheless be installed as president of the United States," Snyder says. "I think that is probably the most likely scenario in 2024 as things stand now."

That scenario needs to be confronted immediately, Snyder says: "It's right in front of our eyes. The most interesting and the most distressing thing about American news coverage right now is that we don't treat the end of democracy in America as the story. That is the story."

We delude ourselves, Snyder says, if we think we're immune from an anti-democratic turn. "We imagine that there's somehow this immovable American democratic background, which doesn't really exist," he says. "We can lose democracy just like anybody else can, just like most people have in the history of democracy. We can lose it, and we're losing it right now."

"The fierce urgency of now"

As of yet, the Democratic-led Congress has been unable to pass legislation to protect voting rights, a fact that Carol Anderson, professor of African-American Studies at Emory University, finds appalling.

She argues that passing voting rights laws would "short-circuit the damage that the 'big lie' is doing and will do."

Anderson sees "a Democratic Party that does not understand that American democracy is hanging by a thread, and does not grapple with the fierce urgency of now."

We have been, in her words, "baptized in American exceptionalism" — the naive belief that the demise of democracy can't happen here.

"Even after you have had the insurrection," Anderson says, "even after you have had these legislatures write these laws figuring out not only how to stop Black people, brown people, indigenous people from voting, but also how to lower the guardrails of democracy that prevented Trump from being able to overturn the results in these states; so even after seeing this, to not move and do what needs to be done to protect this nation?" Anderson sighs. "It's unconscionable."

For Anderson, author of the books White Rage and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, Trump's lie about the election sprouts from the same twisted roots as his birtherism lie, which is the conspiracy theory Trump peddled, falsely claiming that Barack Obama was born outside the U.S. and therefore ineligible to serve as president.

Linking both, she says, is a clear racist throughline.

"Foundational to that is the devaluation and the dismissing of American citizenship for Black people," Anderson says. "This is about, 'My nation is about the real Americans. And all of those folks aren't real Americans.' It is so vile. It is so racist. And it works. That's the thing, it works."

After all, Anderson says, if you repeat the lie enough times, it starts to sound like the truth.

A failed coup is practice for a successful one

In Congress, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has interviewed hundreds of witnesses to establish the truth of what happened that day.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., is one of just two Republicans on the committee. An outspoken Trump critic, he has announced he won't run for reelection.

Kinzinger compares conspiracy theories to a cancer eating away at the Republican Party, and feeding that cancer, he says, is the "big lie."

"The thing that's most concerning is that it has endured in the face of all evidence," he says. "And I've gotten to wonder if there is actually any evidence that would ever change certain people's minds."

Beyond his committee's mission of uncovering what happened on Jan. 6 itself, Kinzinger has broader questions.

"More importantly in my mind, what is the rot in the system that led up to Jan. 6? And where have we come since? And how do we stop anything like this from happening again?" he asks. " 'Cause even though Jan. 6 technically failed, there's a lot of areas where you can learn from, if your goal is to overthrow a legitimate election and potentially do it successfully next time."

And that is precisely the lesson from history, says Yale professor Timothy Snyder.

"It wasn't enough, but next time, it could well be enough. And the fact that it's been rehearsed makes me worry," he says. "This is what historians and political scientists who study coups d'etat say. They say a failed coup is practice for a successful one."

What we're potentially looking at, Snyder warns, is nothing less than the end of the democratic United States as we've come to know it.

"That's just the reality," he says. "And in order to prevent things from being frightening, you have to look right at them and say, 'OK, that's the monster. How can I disassemble it? How can I take it to pieces? How can I make sure that that story isn't our only story?' But it will be unless we tell it to ourselves straight."

We have to confront that reality, Snyder says, if we are to find the courage and conviction to do something about it.

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/23/1065277246/trump-big-lie-jan-6-election

[Rick Plant]

Manhattan District Attorney convenes new grand jury in Trump Organization probe, report says
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/04/trump-organization-probe-manhattan-da-convenes-2nd-grand-jury.html

[Rick Plant]

More lies and smears coming from Trump's criminal kid Eric which is all projection.

"I'm telling you, there's nowhere like the United States of America," said Trump. "Now, you do have a party that's hellbent on trying to kill our ways of life. They're trying to kill our traditions, they're trying to kill our history. They're trying to tear apart the fabric of this country. They stopped believing in God a long time ago. They stopped believing in family values a long time ago. And those are all things that, frankly, made America America and made America great."

And this is coming from a seditionist who's father tried to steal the election with an attempted coup and insurrection. A criminal con man that stoked hate, fear, racism, bigotry, Anti-Semitism, and covid lies to divide Americans destroying our country. The Trump Crime Family has no "family values" which is why this whole bogus statement is a joke. And this fraud had enough nerve to spout this garbage after everything this criminal regime has done. 

https://www.rawstory.com/eric-trump-2656111765/


Trump gave a big chunk of money to Candace Owens' foundation before she interviewed him
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-candace-owens-cash/

[Rick Plant]

January 6th committee seeks potentially damning Trump video made during 'hours of silence' during riot



The House Select Committee investigating the January 6th riots at the United States Capitol wants to know more about what former President Donald Trump was doing during what the Washington Post describes as "hours of silence" during the insurrection.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) tells the Post that the committee is particularly interested in what Trump did right before he publicly broke his silence, around 187 minutes into the riots, and put out a video asking his followers to go home.

Some sources have indicated that Trump and his associates had to do multiple takes of the video because the former president refused to say what needed to be said to get his supporters to disperse.

“It appears that he tried to do a taping several times, but he wouldn’t say the right thing,” Thompson explained to the Post.

Thompson also said that it needs more information about Trump's actions during the siege before it makes a decision on whether to make a criminal referral against him for potentially corruptly obstructing an official act of Congress.

"That dereliction of duty causes us real concern,” Thompson said. “And one of those concerns is that whether or not it was intentional, and whether or not that lack of attention for that longer period of time, would warrant a referral.”

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-capitol-riot-commitee-2656111806/

[Rick Plant]

Trump's 'garbled' Supreme Court filing is 'riddled with absurd claims': MSNBC legal analyst



Donald Trump's appeal to the Supreme Court seeking to keep White House Jan. 6 records secret reads as though it's written in "garbled Russian," according to former acting U.S. solicitor general Neal Katyal.

The former president's lawyers on Thursday asked the high court to overturn a unanimous decision from the D.C. appeals court rejecting his claims of executive privilege.

Katyal said he believes the Supreme Court is unlikely to take up the case, meaning the lower court's decision will stand, forcing Trump to turn over the documents.

"It's a really lousy filing, and that's putting it charitably,," Katyal said of Trump's appeal on Thursday night, adding that the Supreme Court typically receives 8,000 to 10,000 petitions each year, but only hears about 65 cases.

"The Supreme Court is really the big leagues," Katyal said. "You can't afford a false move when you're making a filing to the Supreme Court, but the document that Trump filed today is written frankly by lawyers who appear not ready for this kind of filing. It's riddled with loose language and absurd claims. It's kind of surprising to me that Trump couldn't get a Supreme Court lawyer to file this document for him. He is a former president and all that, but then it's not that surprising when you look at his actual claims."

Katyal added that the filing makes no new arguments, but does contain some fresh rhetoric alleging that Trump is "more than an ordinary citizen."

"The document pretends essentially that he's still president, which maybe these folks who filed this believe, but he's not the president, and the thing about living in a democracy is that once you're out of office, you're an ordinary person," Katyal said.

Noting that Trump's filing came on the last possible day for an appeal, Katyal said: "That delay tells you all you need to know about what this document that they filed today at the Supreme Court is about. It's just about trying to stall this thing out as long as they can."

Watch below:

[Rick Plant]

Faux "News" is fake news.

Fox News warned Biden would ruin Christmas — but doesn't want to give him credit for saving it



For months now, Fox News has circulated fear-mongering reports about the possibility of President Joe Biden ruining Christmas. But now the conservative network's talking heads appear to still be grasping at straws as the predictions of doom failed to materialize — and they refuse to give the president credit.

The Recount shared a supercut of Fox News clips predicting Christmas delivery nightmares and blaming Biden:

But reports have shown that deliveries are actually moving swiftly to their destinations this year, leading the administration to take a victory lap.

The Fox News panel discussion that aired on Thursday, December 23 struggled to cope with these facts and the network's past coverage. Jesse Watters suggested that the president doesn't deserve credit but acknowledged how the recent reports signal improvement.

"If people are getting gifts under the tree in time, that’s a good thing," Watters said. "If Biden deserves credit, I’ll give him credit. I don’t know if he deserves credit… but according to reports, things are a lot better than they were in November."

Despite saying he'd give Biden credit if he deserved it, Watters then speculated that other actors, such as consumers and ports, were responsible for fixing the problem.

Another panelist said, "It’s always interesting when a politician wants credit for doing their job."

One might plausibly argue that Biden himself and the White House didn't have much of a role in fixing the supply chain problems that people feared would thwart Christmas plans. But if that's correct, then it was arguably wrong to pre-emptively blame for potential issues that the president may indeed have little control over.

As the Fox News clip circulated on Twitter, users began weighing in and mocking the network for the apparent hypocrisies in their discussion.

Watch videos here:
https://www.rawstory.com/fox-news-christmas/

[Rick Plant]

'This r​eally is a serious case': CNN justice reporter explains the latest lawsuit against OAN and Rudy Giuliani
https://www.rawstory.com/oan-and-rudy-giuliani-lawsuit/

Michigan's GOP Senate majority leader has some bad news for Trump
https://www.rawstory.com/michigan-candidates-endorsed-by-trump/