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time to fly the flag upside down..death of democracy is upon

 
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real-human



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PostPosted: Thu Apr 28, 2022 1:52 pm    Post subject: time to fly the flag upside down..death of democracy is upon Reply with quote

time to fly the flag upside down... death of democracy is upon us

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/former-pence-legal-adviser-gop-poised-steal-future-elections-rcna26448?cid=eml_mra_20220428&user_email=e73377d3e40790eecbf6a99203e1476ea2a23c644c2045abd739b8f9e629a73b


Former Pence legal adviser: GOP poised to steal future elections


Quote:
On Jan. 6, 2021, just hours before the attack on the Capitol, then-Vice President Mike Pence issued a written statement explaining that he had no choice but to follow the law when certifying the election results. The Republican’s letter cited legal history, the Constitution, a former president, and a former Supreme Court justice.

But Pence also quoted someone else: former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig.

While much of the country is probably unfamiliar with Luttig, in conservative legal circles, he has few rivals. As Politico recently noted, the jurist has spent much of his adult life operating “at the top of the conservative legal world.”

Luttig has been an attorney in the Reagan White House, a clerk for Antonin Scalia, and one of the nation’s most prominent conservative judges, overseeing clerks with familiar names such as Ted Cruz and John Eastman. Not surprisingly, Luttig was considered for the U.S. Supreme Court.

And so, when Pence and his team needed legal guidance after the 2020 election, they sought the former judge’s advice. He told them to follow the law. They did.

A year later, Luttig has had an opportunity to reflect, not only on what happened after Donald Trump’s defeat, but what might also happen in upcoming elections. To put it mildly, the conservative appears concerned.

The New York Times, for example, reported last week on far-right efforts to decertify 2020 election results some Republicans still reject based on ridiculous conspiracy theories. The article quoted Luttig.

“At the moment, there is no other way to say it: This is the clearest and most present danger to our democracy,” he said. “Trump and his supporters in Congress and in the states are preparing now to lay the groundwork to overturn the election in 2024 were Trump, or his designee, to lose the vote for the presidency.”

This week, Luttig fleshed this out in even more detail, writing an op-ed for CNN that was published yesterday. The conservative made the case that the public may not fully appreciate the severity of the ongoing threat.

The Republicans’ mystifying claim to this day that Trump did, or would have, received more votes than Joe Biden in 2020 were it not for actual voting fraud, is but the shiny object that Republicans have tauntingly and disingenuously dangled before the American public for almost a year and a half now to distract attention from their far more ambitious objective.... Trump’s and the Republicans’ far more ambitious objective is to execute successfully in 2024 the very same plan they failed in executing in 2020 and to overturn the 2024 election if Trump or his anointed successor loses again in the next quadrennial contest.

The 2020 election, the op-ed added, “was a dry run for the next.”

Luttig went on to argue that a radicalized Supreme Court appears likely to endorse radical ideas about state legislatures rejecting election results, while Republicans try to elect Trump-endorsed candidates who will be “positioned to generate and transmit alternative electoral slates to Congress” at the state level, as pro-Trump Republicans in Congress welcome the opportunity to overturn results at the federal level.

After endorsing efforts to reform the Electoral Count Act, Luttig concludes, “As it stands today, Trump, or his anointed successor, and the Republicans are poised, in their word, to “steal” from Democrats the presidential election in 2024 that they falsely claim the Democrats stole from them in 2020. But there is a difference between the falsely claimed ‘stolen’ election of 2020 and what would be the stolen election of 2024. Unlike the Democrats’ theft claimed by Republicans, the Republicans’ theft would be in open defiance of the popular vote and thus the will of the American people: poetic, though tragic, irony for America’s democracy.”

Given Luttig’s prominence as a giant in conservative legal circles, a written piece like this one packs a serious punch

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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 29, 2022 12:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

We gonna take a giant leap forward in November to save democracy. Musk's free speech move is a big step in the right direction, as censorship clearly stifles it.
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real-human



Joined: 02 Jul 2011
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 29, 2022 2:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

isobars wrote:
We gonna take a giant leap forward in November to save democracy. Musk's free speech move is a big step in the right direction, as censorship clearly stifles it.


amplifying lies is not free speech it is dark money in the works. Ya the supreme idiots in Citizens United has ruled unlimited dark money from corporations is acceptable. Hence, we had UAE (oil country) give to Trumps top ME advisor 1.5 billion dollars to do what influence the election I claim. Again that was more than Hillary spent to have more votes than trump did in that election. and now another country (oil country) give Trumps stepson 2 billion dollars and his sec of was it finance 1.5 billion.

but already ruled you cannot yell fire in a movie theatre... hence you should not be able to support yelling lies all over the world/ lies to overthrow the government. Every court found no demonstrated evidence.

Ya we know right wingers love their liars and support demonstrable lies. Hence your pos in support of such lies.

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real-human



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PostPosted: Wed Sep 14, 2022 7:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/opinion/democracy-crisis-speech-trump.html


The Greatest Threat to Democracy Is a Feature of Democracy


Quote:
By Sean Illing and Zac Gershberg

Mr. Illing and Mr. Gershberg are the authors of “The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion.”

It’s been over a month since Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence was searched by the F.B.I. The response to that event from political actors across the ideological spectrum has been predictable — and an example, for better or worse, of what democracy looks like in action.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina recently warned of “riots in the streets” if Mr. Trump should face prosecution for mishandling classified information. Naturally, the former president glommed on to that and similar narratives and has amplified them on Truth Social, his Twitter-like social media platform.

Meanwhile, President Biden, in a speech warning that the Constitution, American values and the rule of law are under siege, said, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”

We may think that these clashes over the Mar-a-Lago search and over the state of our democracy are an aberration, a Trump thing. But they are actually the latest example — increased in intensity by the internet — of something that has been a permanent part of our politics, what we call the paradox of democracy.

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Far more than a bundle of laws, norms and institutions, democracy is an open culture of communication that affords people the right to think, speak and act and allows every possible means of persuasion. That makes every democratic society uniquely vulnerable to the consequences of communication. We may not like it, but something like Jan. 6 is always potentially in the offing.

We ought to avoid the naïveté of liberal fantasy, which imagines we can impose reliable guardrails against dangerous or deceptive speech. Indeed, there’s a whole genre of articles and books arguing that social media is destroying democracy. Because of changes to online platforms around a decade ago, wrote Jonathan Haidt recently, “People could spread rumors and half-truths more quickly, and they could more readily sort themselves into homogeneous tribes.”

But this is precisely what an unwieldy democratic culture looks like. Depending on the communications environment, a democracy can foster reliable, respectful norms, or it can devolve into outrageous propaganda, widespread cynicism and vitriolic partisanship.

And when communications devolve into propaganda and partisanship, a democracy can either end with breathtaking speed, as it did in Myanmar last year, when the military overthrew the democratically elected government, or descend more gradually into chaos and authoritarianism, as Russia did under Vladimir Putin.

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Nothing forbids voters in a democracy to support an authoritarian or vote itself out of existence (as the ancient Athenian assembly famously did). The history of democracy is full of demagogues exploiting the openness of democratic cultures to turn people against the very system on which their freedom depends. In France, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte leveraged a celebrity name to run for president on a campaign of restoring order in 1848, only to end the Second Republic with a self-coup to become emperor when his term was up.

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Our American democracy has lurched in cycles from dissatisfaction to crisis to progress. Citizens have the opportunity to speak out and decide for themselves, and events unfold across the country; it could be a referendum that preserves abortion access in Kansas or a primary defeat for Liz Cheney in Wyoming or a protest movement inspired by a video of the extrajudicial killing of a Black man in Minneapolis or a fanatic attacking an F.B.I. office in Cincinnati after engaging online message boards.

According to one poll, only 21 percent of Republicans think the investigations into Mr. Trump should continue. However they arrived at that opinion, that they hold it at all matters. It gives conservatives not just the political cover to subvert the rule of law but also the power to create their own alternative reality.

Since Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020, Republicans have embraced the “big lie” and tried to restructure state laws to control future elections. You could say this is a brazen attack on democracy itself, but it’s really a glimpse of democracy shorn of liberal restraints.

It would be much better, of course, if democratic politics yielded to the preferences of measurable public opinion and reflected the will of the people. It would be better still if we were guaranteed protection by our civic and legal institutions, binding the rule of law to society with accountability and fairness.

“Yet the truth is,” as the political communication scholar Zizi Papacharissi has written, “we have always lived in imperfect democracies, and we still do. Democracy is not static. It is not a given, it is not guaranteed, and it is not stable.”

Too many people assume that liberalism and democracy are one and the same. They believe that certain norms, like respect for minority rights and the rule of law, are wired into the political system when, in fact, they are just conventions that matter only to the extent that citizens care about them. If nothing else, the past six years are a reminder that democracy is a contest — and there are no inevitable outcomes or assurances that all sides will play by the rules.

The paradox at the heart of this debate — the idea that democracy contains the ingredients for its own destruction — tells us that free expression and its sometimes troubling consequences are a feature, not a bug. What sometimes changes are novel forms of media, which come along and clear democratic space for all manner of persuasion. Patterns of bias and distortion and propaganda accompany each evolution.

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Cinema and radio could furnish the artistic milieu of a vibrant culture in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, but Nazi concentration of such media in the 1930s under Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels also became the pathway to world war and genocide. While television could bring the public closer to its leaders, the logic of the medium also rewarded the gauzy artifice of political figures as different as John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Each time new forms of media emerged, people, inevitably, used them for different ends — to shore up a flourishing democratic society or to destroy it.

For more than a century, knowledge has been created and mediated by elite institutions, particularly by major national TV networks and newspapers, that anchored a discourse driven by norms. But the deluge of social media in the 21st century has collapsed that arrangement and has been used as a tool to undercut our democracy. That is inevitable.

To fortify liberal democracy, leaders will have to defend the rule of law, even if they risk political blowback from devoted Trumpists. The Jan. 6 committee hearings were not in vain: They have established a forensic record of a deliberate effort to undermine a peaceful transfer of power, and the proceedings may have made for good television, leaving more citizens informed about what actually happened. But it’s not enough. In the end, the only way to confront a seditious conspiracy is to prosecute the criminals and defeat the people who support them at the ballot box.

If that means indicting Mr. Trump if there is sufficient evidence for possessing classified documents at his beachside club and lying about it or barring him from political office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, so be it.

Democracy’s claim to superiority over other political systems is that it offers free expression and the opportunity to confront arbitrary power. Mr. Trump and his supporters are entitled to the former, using all the available means of persuasion at their disposal. They are not, however, welcome to permanent impunity.

The good news is that our system has shown itself to be resilient: Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election were repulsed on Jan. 6, 2021. That’s a victory for American democracy.

But like every democratic victory, it was provisional. As long as there is democracy, there will be demagogy. And the ability to check power remains just that: an opportunity.

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If our institutions won’t defend themselves, they perhaps deserve to fail. And if their defenders can’t persuade enough people to support them, they likely will.

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real-human



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PostPosted: Wed Aug 02, 2023 5:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/a-conservative-former-federal-judge-said-trump-has-cynically-chosen-to-inflict-this-embarrassing-spectacle-on-the-nation-following-his-indictment/ar-AA1eHvLo?ocid=winp2fptaskbar&cvid=bb1624c2310146c8a9a2f3f8a86e9893&ei=6

A conservative former federal judge said Trump 'has cynically chosen to inflict this embarrassing spectacle on the Nation' following his indictment


Quote:
A conservative former federal judge castigated former President Donald Trump after a federal grand jury indicted him for attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

Former Judge J. Michael Luttig, who was appointed by Republican President H.W. Bush, tweeted Wednesday that the indictment "is all the more tragic and regrettable because the former president has cynically chosen to inflict this embarrassing spectacle on the Nation -- and a spectacle it will be."



"Never again will the world be inspired by America's democracy in the way that it has been inspired since America's founding almost 250 years ago," Luttig added.

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