People gather for the Women’s March in Washington U.S., January 21, 2017. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
- Women’s marches: More than one million protesters vow to resist President Trump – The Washington Post
- Do Political Protests Matter? Evidence From The Tea Party Movement.
“Policy making was also affected, as incumbents responded to large protests in their district by voting more conservatively in Congress. Our estimates suggest significant multiplier effects: an additional protester increased the number of Republican votes by a factor well above 1. Together our results show that protests can build political movements that ultimately affect policy making and that they do so by influencing political views rather than solely through the revelation of existing political preferences.” PDF link. - Pictures From Women’s Marches Around the World – The New York Times
- The photo at the top of this article is, I think, the best illustration of how the media covers protests I’ve ever seen.
- Protesters Face Increasing Criminalization in Trump Era | Informed Comment
- Donald Trump Mad That Women March Bigger Than Inauguration | The Mary Sue
- The Women’s March is massive. Here’s how organizers can give it staying power. – Vox
A lengthy interview with Becky Bond and Zack Exley. - Women’s March Guiding Vision and Definition of Principles (pdf file)
And in other news…
- A Mixtape For Survival and Resistance in the Trump Years | Literate Perversions
- Voter Suppression Works Too Well
Overview of recent GOP voter suppression efforts. - Stop boring on about babies – the gender pay gap isn’t about “choice”
- Whaa? Neo-Nazis shocked to discover that a popular Neo-Nazi podcaster has a Jewish wife :: We Hunted The Mammoth
For your schadenfreude needs. - North Carolina Republicans sue to preserve racial gerrymandering
- This is literally what happiness looks like.
- Open Letter: An Open Letter to the Stranger on Facebook Who Convinced Me Not to Be Transgender Anymore – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
- Stop boring on about babies – the gender pay gap isn’t about “choice”
- A key Obamacare advocate tells us how he’ll fight repeal in 2017 – Vox
- Did Inadequate Women’s Healthcare Destroy Star Wars’ Old Republic? | Motherboard
- Automated book-culling software drives librarians to create fake patrons to “check out” endangered titles / Boing Boing
- The Story Behind the Maternal Mortality Rate in Texas Is Even Sadder Than We Realize | The Nation
- Today in Obamacare: the one question Republican senators really don’t want to answer – Vox
- What You’re Really Doing By Dismissing US Feminism for ‘Real’ Issues – Everyday Feminism
Cartoon by Alli Kirkham. - Congress is feuding over a teen’s controversial painting that dramatizes events in Ferguson – Vox
I love this story. Yes, there are serious issues to discuss here, but at another level it cracks me up. - The Fantasy of Being Thin | Shapely Prose
- Democrats Should Run a Celebrity for President, Too | New Republic
- Rogue One: the CGI resurrection of Peter Cushing is thrilling – but is it right? | Film | The Guardian
- The movie that doesn’t exist and the Redditors who think it does
Hundreds of people have detailed memories of the movie “Shazaam,” starring Sinbad – a movie which never existed. - More Than 500,000 Adults Will Lose SNAP Benefits in 2016 as Waivers Expire | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Even someone diligently looking for work, and willing to accept any job, will have their food stamps cut off. Of course, Congress could easily fix that… but we all know Republicans in Congress won’t allow that. - This 90-Year-Old Lady Seduced and Killed Nazis as a Teenager – VICE
- The Ritual (translation of poem by Dmitry Bykov) – Medium
Sometimes I am reminded of how much people in other countries here about US celebrities and politics, and I feel deeply embarrassed for us. - The Real Story Of 2016 | FiveThirtyEight
538’s post-election analysis begins.
Fair enough. However, I note that these protests all took place in urban areas. What Representatives of those districts are not already voting the way that the protesters prefer?
Yup, Trump has wildly over-promised. So all we need to do is sit back and wait for his supporters to realize that they’ve been had, and the next election is ours–right?
Alas, no. Desperate people embrace wishful thinking. And the psychic cost of acknowledging their error–and thus, surrendering to their despair–is too great. As the ship sinks, they cling to it ever more tightly–unless…
The remedy does not lie merely in pointing to facts. The remedy lies in pointing to HOPE. Trump supporters don’t need lectures; they need a lifeboat. They–we–need something else to cling to.
As the weekend’s protests illustrated, the next presidential campaign is well under way. But we need a message that goes beyond “You Trump supporters are a bunch of gullible racists!”
It would probably be a bad idea. Celebrity is most helpful in the primaries. Once you’re the main candidate for one of two parties celebrity starts to take a back seat to what you say, do, etc. But more to the point, Trump’s perceived celebrity was related to his perceived business acumen, and it would be unwise to expand it to general status. Beyonce would get creamed.
If we ran a Trump equivalent, which is to say one with celebrity but also some other catch (perceived business success and rejection or elites worked for Trump more than his celebrity, esp. in the late game) then it could succeed against a Republican equivalent. Steve Jobs, for example, would have been a good match for Trump, and perhaps a good candidate in general, but might not have been able to beat someone like Romney.
And Trump would not have beaten most folks. A much better strategy would be if we could have nominated someone who who didn’t inspire extraordinary hatred from huge segments of the population. I don’t think Trump won the election as much as Hillary lost the election. After all, the country happily elected a young and relatively inexperienced black senator. Not everyone loved Obama when he first ran, but he had a strong message and few folks really hated him. And we kept him in office for eight years.
There were somewhere around 12,000 protesters in Cincinnati, which is represented by two Republicans who have, for the most part, voted in pretty much the exact opposite way that the protesters would prefer. There was also a smaller protest out in a more rural area somewhat nearby. And a lot of people drove for hours to get to their nearest protest, because they live in rural areas. Plus, there was this woman: http://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/01/20/longville-possible-solo-womens-march
Going just by the pictures on the NYT, which do not AFAIK cover all marches…
Jackson Hole, WY. Two Republican senators, one Republican representative.
Jackson, MS. Two Republican senators, straddles two districts with D and R representatives.
Philadelphia, PA. One R senator.
Greenville, SC. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
Atlanta, GA. 2 R sen.
Gulfport, MS. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
Denver, CO. 1 R sen.
Fairbanks, AK. 2 R sen, 1 R Rep.
Boise, ID. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
Nashville, TN. 2 R sen.
Columbia, SC. 2 R sen.
Park City, UT. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
Dallas, Texas, 2 R sen.
Sioux Falls, SD. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
Springfield, MO. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
Lincoln, NE. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
Savannah, GA. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
Cleveland, OH. 1 R sen.
Las Vegas, NV. 1 R sen.
Oklahoma City, OK. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
Jacksonville, FL. 1 R sen.
Ketchikan, AK. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
Madison, WI. 1 R sen.
New Orleans, LA. 2 R sen.
Knoxville, TN. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
St Louis, MO. 1 R sen.
Wilmington, NC. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
Indianapolis, IN. 1 R sen.
Cheyenne, WY. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
Charlotte, NC. 2 R sen.
Lansing, MI. 1 R rep.
Memphis, TN. 2 R sen.
Athens, GA. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
St Joseph, MI. 1 R rep.
Colorado Springs, CO. 1 R sen, 1 R rep.
Midland, MI. 1 R rep.
Chattanooga, TN. 1 R sen, 1 R rep.
Flagstaff, AZ. 2 R sen.
Shreveport, LA. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
Pittsburgh, PA. 1 R sen.
Sitka, AK. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
Austin, TX. 2 R sen, reps are a little difficult because Austin appears to be covered by 4 reps, but 3 of those are R. (Hello, gerrymandering!)
Winchester, VA. 1 R rep.
Key West, FL. 1 R sen, 1 R rep.
Portland, ME. 1 R sen.
Omaha, NE. 2 R sen, 1 R rep.
Phoenix, AZ. 2 R sen.
Las Cruces, NM. 1 R rep.
Richland, WA. 1 R rep.
Perhaps do some research before making claims like that next time?
Are you claiming that Fairbanks, AK and Jackson Hole, WY are NOT thriving metropoli?
I think the “in other news” #3 (which is also #8) is very revealing: the arguments show that the issue is no longer “equal pay for equal work” but “equal pay regardless.”
This line is especially telling:
In other words, it is unfair that companies pay more to people who do more work for them.
Moreover, her argument as to why companies benefit from child-rearing work because it allows the non-primary-caregiver partner to stay at work ignores the fact that the parents may not work for the same company.
Harlequin @5:
O.K. But when I see citations of 250,000 in Chicago and 400,000 somewhere else, those are all to my knowledge major Democratic strongholds. In the smaller cities that you cite, what were the turnouts, especially compared to the numbers and proportions of voters who voted for Trump vs. Clinton in those districts? In other words, how much is the turnout of those marches in those cities going to impress/worry the Representatives and Senators there?
I can’t see the NYT article, as I am not a subscriber and am informed by the web site that I have already reached my limit for free articles this month.
Handicapping the 2018 mid-terms: the GOP is defending 8 seats, none of which are in states that Ms. Clinton won. The Democrats are defending 25 seats, 10 of which are in states that Pres. Trump won. Many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip, of course, and a lot can and will happen in the next 2 years. But the Dems will need to take 3 of those 8 GOP seats and defend all 25 of the ones they hold to get a Senate majority. That’s going to take a lot of work and some fortuitous failures on the GOP’s part. Trump won’t be able to keep all his promises, that’s for sure. How much will his supporters punish him for that?
Ron, “turnout of marches impresses/worries the Reps and Senators” is not the mechanism by which demonstrations lead to change, according to the study I linked.
In my more pessimistic moments, I don’t think this will matter much at all. The main thing Trump supporters wanted, as far as I can tell, is to give a middle finger to Washington, and to liberals. This is something that I saw actual Trump supporters say, again and again, during the campaign. Electing Trump succeeded in doing that. Everything else is secondary to them.
In fact, that Trump’s promises are often flagrantly impossible to deliver on is, I think, part of his appeal to Republicans. That contempt for facts and reality is part of the big middle finger Republicans wanted to give; an indifference to reality, to facts, to making sense, is one way of demonstrating contempt for those of us who care about reality, facts, and making sense.
RonF: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/118EvtCwT8zz5xVVFOWAFxnD8YRgqEykx0fTJXn4hIN0/edit#gid=0 – ah, somebody (FiveThirtyEight) already did all the work for me. That would’ve been easier than going through the slideshow (though I did enjoy the slideshow). The 100k+ marches are all in blue urban areas, but plenty of the 10k+ are not.
Yeah–it turns out that employers find lots of ways to discriminate against women even if they have to pay them the same as men (though, to be sure, paying men and women differently for the same or equivalent work still happens too). What a shame that employers don’t value their female employees the same as their male employees so we have to keep having this discussion, right?
And also, of course, some things about the way employment is structured and compensated in general also cause women to be paid less than men, but those problems require structural solutions, not changes on the part of individual employers.
I am surprised you don’t know this, but if you read the NYT in an “incognito window”; “private window;” “p-rn mode” or whatever term you prefer, you can read ten articles, close the browser and reopen, and start again.
“even if” should be replaced with “because.” When you are obliged to pay more for a product than you think it’s worth, you will try to buy as little of it as you can. Come on, Venezuela is still in the news, can we at least acknowledge that fixed over-pricing structures create incentives not to buy?
“Same or equivalent” is the weasel term of the current research. It allows the researchers to ignore what the employers believe to be important, and to substitute the researcher’s beliefs on what is important, all under the guise as judging people to be “equivalent.” But by this point, we should be able to look at the various socialist and communist outcomes and conclude that a centralized agency (or its researchers) is never going to do a very good job with individual determinations. Or at least the agency won’t do nearly as good a job as people themselves.
From a research perspective, all of the blog authors here are probably “equivalent.” So are all of the folks who post comments. But from a personal choice–imagine you are going to run an online site and choose who to hire, and pay–you may have strong preferences. Maybe you’ll pay RonF $1/page and you think I’m only worth $0.10/page. If you were forced to pay everyone the same you’d do your best not to hire me; if someone told you we were all “same or equivalent” you’d think it was silly.
Just because the researchers cannot identify the reason for a difference (or because the researchers don’t agree that the reason is a “good” one) does not mean much.
In my district, there’s been a whole lot more pressure on our representative since the election. At a coffee hour that he held (out in the suburbs, in the middle of a weekday), which used to get about 20-30 people, over 100 attended, and a bunch more met outside. I’ve seen a lot of organized action about the ACA. (And even organized action about smaller things. A local high school was graffitied with swastikas over the weekend. Both senators immediately put out the standard “This is horrible, and this should not happen, and I send out my thoughts to the students and parents and faculty and neighbors” statements. Our representative took several days to say anything, and that was only after a few hundred phone calls. I mean, it’s not something dire, but it shows that people are paying attention.)
Remember, not everyone marched where they live. People flew from all 50 states, from areas both urban and rural, to the DC march. The Portland march, which I attended, had people attend from all over the state, including the “red” areas. My friends at the Oakland march talked to people who were from “red” suburbs and more rural Central Valley areas; many of those folks may have chosen to attend the San Jose and SF marches as well.
The Cincinnati march had a whole lot of people from Kentucky, or from the more rural areas of southern Ohio, some of whom drove several hours to get there. I saw people in the Facebook group coordinating carpools from over 100 miles away.
And even people who weren’t physically at any of the marches — my mom and a bunch of her friends, mostly women in their sixties who live in the suburbs, knit a whole lot of those pink hats. (And, despite what a bunch of people on Twitter seem to think, they were not paid for their work by George Soros.)
I think it is more accurate to say that a lot of people figured that he was promising big so that he could compromise better. The thought was that if he could not deliver on all of his promises, he would be far better than the alternatives even if he could only deliver on half or a quarter of them.
I also think it is rather condescending to say that Trump voters deliberately have contempt for facts and are against your side because they are angry that you believe in facts. Rather, I think that they believe that Washington has an agenda which says they don’t matter and that the media selectively portrays things in a way to push an agenda that is harmful to their interests. Therefore, they (a) hate the media, and (b) do not trust anything the media says.
As for the inaugural crowd size, a lot of Trump supporters do not care if Trump or his surrogates are lying about it, (a) because it is not a matter of consequence to them, and (b) they have no ulterior reasons to focus on it (i.e. they are not looking for anything that might take him down and so fixate on anything they could use – as one might argue happened with the Monica Lewinsky affair).
Then it’s a brilliant strategy to vote for the guy who has, for decades, consistently acted as if they don’t matter.
Donald J. Trump
O.J. Simpson
I’m registered in three. I’ve got a friend who’s registered in five. In most states, there isn’t any process for un-registering when you move. And, in at least one state, I followed the directions to un-register, but they’ve still got me listed as registered.
I’m kind of curious what voting totals would look like if people were required to vote where they were born, rather than where they currently live. I think that Greece does it that way. A whole lot of my friends when I lived in NYC and DC were people who were born in red states. (Which makes the whole “City people live in a bubble” thing kind of ridiculous, when so many of those “city people” grew up in and still have parents and siblings living in those rural areas that we supposedly know nothing about.)
Amp, @ 11:
I came home from Troop meeting on Nov. 8th at about 9:00 P.M. expecting to see a breathless female commentator/newsreader from CNN or MSNBC congratulating a beaming Hillary Clinton on her victory. Not so much, it seemed. I sat and watched until it became clear that a) Donald Trump had won and b) CNN didn’t want to admit it. I turned to my wife and said “This is a giant FUCK YOU to Hillary, the Dems and (indicating the screen full of media people talking to each other) them.” She said “Yup!”
Don’t forget that there was a significant number of Obama voters in crossover districts that ended up voting for Trump. “She’ll just be more of the same, we need something different” was a major reason for the turnaround for a lot of people who voted for him. And for the women I talked to, electing “the first female President” just didn’t have nearly the importance to them that electing “the first black President” had to a lot of Obama’s voters.
The contempt is for the media, and it translates into a disbelief that what they say are facts and represent reality.
So, did President Trump play the media on this?
Trump: I’m convinced that a lot of illegal aliens voted.
Media: Sounds like fake news, care to back that up and investigate it?
Trump: You’re on. Remember, you asked for this.
What do you think the odds are that a Federal investigation WON’T find voter fraud? I know that folks here have often held that there is little to none. I’ve held that it’s been in neither party’s interest to find any, especially from illegal aliens. Looks like we may find out who’s right.
Ron, Trump has claimed that millions of illegal voters voted for Clinton in the 2016 election.
I will bet you a thousand dollars, paid to the charity of the winner’s choice, that the investigation fails to prove that millions of people cast illegal votes. That’s how certain I am of the odds. Want to take that bet?
I’ve had arguments with two people in the past few days in which they pretty much refused to acknowledge the existence of knitting.
Nope. I don’t think there’s 3 or 5 million illegal aliens voting out there. But I’ll bet he finds some. And he’ll probably try to use it to justify Federal intervention in State and local election offices.
Meanwhile:
Madonna: I’ve been thinking about wanting to blow up the White House.
Me: I had no idea anyone at the White House was named “Up”.
By the way, Ron, Fox News didn’t call it for Trump until 2:40am. Was that also left-wing media bias?
CNN called it for Trump a little after 2:30am – which is to say, a few minutes before Fox did.
They were both reacting to the same thing – which is that enough of Pensylvania’s votes had been counted that it was statistically certain that Trump would win PA, which put him over the top in electoral votes. Arguably, calling the election before that point would have been irresponsible. (AP was the first to call the election, at about 1:30am, but none of the TV networks called it until about an hour later.)
The Obama voters who voted for Trump existed, but they weren’t the biggest factor:
Ron, as for “a disbelief that what they say are facts and represent reality,” after a certain point isn’t it fair to decide that these people are fools? Believing there were millions of illegal voters, like Trump does, is foolish. It’s not a matter of not trusting the media; it’s being completely wrong because you place ideology so far above evidence. The same for believing that human-caused climate change is a myth. The same for believing that Trump’s inauguration had “the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period.” The same for believing that human evolution is a myth.
These are not beliefs that reasonable people who have researched these issues can disagree on. It’s like arguing about if the ocean is wet.
I’m sort of despairing of ever arguing with conservatives again, because they seem so disinclined to accept reality at all.
Ron, the difference between “some” and “3 million” is not a minor distinction. I have no doubt that a responsible investigation will discover a handful of illegal votes cast, as past investigations have. But state-level investigations – including some run by Republicans – have simply failed to find evidence of a significant problem. Trump’s investigation, if it happens and if it’s honest, is overwhelmingly likely to find the same thing.
Trump will use the results – whatever they are – to justify voter suppression laws. That’s what Republicans do. At the highest levels, because they want to suppress Democratic (which is to say, mostly Black) voters. At the ordinary level, because Republicans uncritically believe whatever their leaders tell them, regardless of evidence.
Ron, you’ve said you don’t believe that there were 3-5 million illegal votes cast. (That makes you smarter than the leader of the free world!) How many seems like a plausible number to you?
Because maybe I’m missing something, but I simply don’t see how a significant number of undocumented immigrants could vote without the pattern being very visible. If a hundred thousand undocumented immigrants voted in California, for example, that would lead to either records of tens of thousands of dead people voting, or records of tens of thousands of people voting twice and somehow miraculously avoiding detection at the polls. (Remember the right-wing activist who got arrested for voting twice during this election?)
How can there be thousands of undocumented immigrants voting without it showing up as thousands of dead people or double-voters?
Mary Tyler Moore just died. :-(
I really never thought that “rogue park ranger” would be a phrase that I would have reason to use.
15% of Trump voters happily declare there are 5 lights!
In a survey in which people were shown a picture of the 2017 and 2009 inauguration crowds (unlabelled), 15% of Trump supporters declared that the 2009 photo showed a larger crowd. Only 3% of non-voters agreed.
Hm. Well, apparently Pres. Trump doesn’t need to run an investigation and come up with some damning results to get a pretext to interfere with State and local election boards. All he has to do is let one of President Obama’s executive orders stand – at least, that’s what the 50 state-level Secretaries of State seem to think.
Whether or not that’s actually happening is one thing – but if it were, what’s to stop it? Apparently California officials do not check one of the major death record sources and remove people on it from their voter rolls. Get a fake SS card or some other record like a drivers’ license, register to vote. It can be done and at least to a certain extent it IS being done. To what extent I dare not say.
My take on this being launched is that I welcome it. It’s been a controversy for a while with people on all sides of the issue – there’s a lot, there’s a little, there’s none, it favors one party or another, it’s being encouraged by public officials, blah, blah, blah. Let’s have it thoroughly investigated and find out the truth.
The voting rolls are a mess. I know several people who’ve been removed from the rolls in New York for no reason. Meanwhile, it seems like anyone who’s ever been registered to vote in New Jersey is still registered to vote in New Jersey, even if they haven’t voted there in over a decade. Having fifty different databases, which don’t cross-check each other at all, is always going to be a mess. I just posted on Facebook, asking my friends to check their registration in all the places they’ve lived, and just from among the people who are friends with me and decided to check in the past half hour, I’ve found four people who are registered in multiple states. (Plus seven who said that they checked, and they’re only registered in one.)
Meanwhile, Trump’s story of the “problems” with voting is that someone who’s not an American citizen was not allowed to vote, but some brown people were allowed to vote. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/us/politics/trump-bernhard-langer-voting-fraud.html?
Ron:
I attempted to find any record of any follow-up to that reporter’s investigation, but no luck so far, other than this report of a Board of Supervisors meeting. According to the BoS, 1200-2000 deceased voters are removed from their database every month.
That story doesn’t say how he determined that the people were the same people.
So did he check to make sure that these weren’t clerical errors; or different people with the same names; or different people having the same name and birthdate (not unlikely when there are tens of millions of voters); or people who voted by mail before dying? (It appears that the large majority of the “dead voters” he found only voted in one election).
This in not a trivial nit-pick. In the past, there have been several times when some news team or politician grandly announced having found hundreds of fake votes – but further investigation showed that the vast majority of the votes were clerical errors, same-name errors, or people who absentee voted before dying. (See pages 14 and 15 of this report for several examples.)
What evidence would convince you that there is not a significant amount of voter fraud going on?
Ruchama, thanks for that link. God, Trump is appalling.
And while we’re at it we can investigate evolution, global warming, the moon landing, faeries and the Holocaust.
Only a fool would bet on a literal interpretation of hyperbole. For example, when you said
I wouldn’t expect you to bet $1000 on it–or any substantial amount for that matter (I don’t have $1000 to lose, maybe you do.) You’re too smart to lose $1,000 if it was “more than a handful.” That’s what, 100 people?
“Significance” isn’t an objective term. People who feel strongly about bad shit view it as a significant issue even if it is small.
To use an example, there are “as many as” 5000 KKK members, as per the ADL. That’s a pretty small group.
I think that an national investigation would probably find evidence of more than 5,000 illegal votes cast in the 2016 election, which is to say “at least as many illegal votes nationally, as there are KKK members.”
That is way more than a handful, and “significant” to people who feel strongly about vote accuracy… but a very small percentage: 5,000/138,884,643 = 0.0036% of the ballots cast. (Of course, the KKK is an even smaller percentage of the population, more like 0.0016%. I still think they’re significant, though.)
What does “significant” mean to you?
Associated Press, “Trump dogged by insecurity over popular vote, media coverage”
Pope Leo X (1513), as quoted in by William Samuel Lilly’s The Claims of Christianity (1894) at 191.
Trump has repeated the claim, and his official spokesperson confirms that Trump meant it:
So no, not hyperbole.
Yeah. Nothing Trump says is hyperbole. If he says it he believes it. Literally.
OK. I should say… well, I have no interest in trying to defend or explain Trump so I can’t even think of a good “only a fool would” lede..
I do have quite a bit of interest in discussing the issue of vote fraud, though, since it’s going to be in the news and it is a newsworthy issue in its own right (whatever the results.)
You’ve seemed pretty consistent in your framing of vote fraud largely as a non-issue, or one which is which is so minimal as not to be worth discussing. Now that it looks like we might finally get some actual information I’m curious to know what you really mean. Would you consider answering the question about what you would find significant?
g&w,
Do you have a reason for your 5,000 illegal votes estimate? That seems wildly high based on anything credible I’ve ever seen. We have Kris Kobach’s crusade in Kansas to try to find illegal voting, and he managed to find 6 people to prosecute (for incidents over about a ten year period), which would work out to about 50 people a year nationally. There are doubtless people who get away with absentee ballot fraud (voting for family members, dead or alive), and there are a few people who do that and get caught (a very few). There are probably a few people who vote who are not citizens, but except for some absurdly huge number claims, the best estimate I can find is 50 people in a decade (call that 20 if they only vote in presidential elections). Florida tried to purge non-citizens from its electoral rolls in 2012. They ended up purging 85 people from the rolls, but its method had very high false positives. Extrapolating that out to the country would be 1000 non-citizens registered, but almost all known cases of non-citizens voting are the result of misunderstandings, so it is highly likely that most non-citizens who mistakenly register don’t vote (plus, Florida has a much higher non-citizen population than most states, so that simplistic extrapolation is an overestimate).
I’d be very surprised if there were more than 500 people voting illegally in the last presidential election.
What does significant mean? The only form of illegal voting that actually has a significant effect is the kind that changes election results. Smaller levels of illegal voting might be a sign that there are significant problems with the election system, or they might just be errors and petty crimes. 5000 illegal votes would be about 1 in 10,000 votes being illegal. That seems like it might be a sign that there are defects. It wouldn’t be enough to swing any elections.
But all of this is an irrelevant side track from the fact that the President of the United States is lying his ass off about illegal voting. Getting into the weeds of “okay, is he off by 4 orders of magnitude, or is he only off by 3 orders of magnitude” is deeply counter-productive. The President is signalling that (a) he’s an unhinged egomaniac, and (b) that he’d like to prevent millions of people from voting. Ignore that at all our perils.
Also, the idea that some “investigation” created by Trump to prove that there were millions of illegal voters would get at actual information is ridiculous.
I would consider 100k illegal in person voters significant. I’m willing to bet thousands of dollars that they won’t find 100k legitimate cases of illegal in person voting.
RonF:
g&w:
If you think this has not been investigated, that represents your ignorance of existing investigations, not a lack of existing investigations.
In addition to the link Amp posted above, there’s a nice summary from The LA Times a couple of days ago. And here’s some others (and some overlapping) from The Washington Post. (Those “one out of 30ish million” stats are unreliable–since they didn’t examine every single ballot cast, the denominator there is wrong, and that’s a floor rather than an estimate–but the rest of it is pretty comprehensive about the fact that this is a non-issue.)
There’s more accidental illegal votes cast (people voting in the wrong place, or felons who don’t realize their voting rights were permanently rescinded due to felony convictions, for example) than there is deliberate fraud, but it’s still negligible (in terms of being able to change election outcomes). That is not to say we should not try to stop it; but it’s not very high on my priority list when, say, Wisconsin disenfranchises tens or hundreds of thousands of voters through bad design and implementation of an unnecessary voter ID law.
g&w@15–sorry, I missed your comment earlier.
Okay. But in this context, we are talking about women getting systematically paid less than men. So we’re talking about the fact that lots of employers make judgments that their female employees are less capable than their male employees, on average. Which is, y’know, sexist.
Believe me, I do not need to be told that lots of people honestly think I’m less capable than the men who do work very similar to mine. The point of my comment #13 is not that this is inexplicable; it’s that it is bad.
Stepping back in to say hey, I meant ignorant as a description and not a pejorative but I don’t think it came across that way, so I apologize for the use of the term.
Anyway, here’s an interesting idea about unemployment statistics courtesy of the Alas blogroll.
This is an important point. Allowing an illegal vote to be cast is exactly as bad, from the standpoint of democracy, as preventing a legitimate voter who want to vote from doing so. Therefore any method of fighting voter fraud which prevents more real votes than it does false votes is not worth it.
Post by G&W removed for G&W to edit and resubmit.
G&W, I tried to send you an email, but the address you’re using for comments bounced back. Email me (barry.deutsch@gmail.com), please, so I can email something back to you. Thanks.
Done.
Mostly it was rhetorical. I chose it in order to make the KKK analogy: a very small group can attain significance in the eyes of the country even though it is tiny. It seemed like a decent number to run with, as described below.
Most of us will never meet, speak to, or otherwise interact with a KKK member (one out of 65,000 people is a KKK member) but I’ve been hearing about them my whole life. IMO that is a good analogy for illegal voting: It’s perceived as a big deal even though illegal votes are unlikely to affect most outcomes. Even if there were 5,000 votes, it’s very rare for a state-level vote to have a total margin of less than 5000, and that margin is almost unheard of for a national contest.
So I agree that there are not going to be “millions” of illegal presidential votes. From an economics perspective, you’d expect illegal voting to be most prevalent where it has the largest payoff. Otherwise the risks outweigh the benefits. It should be most common in town, district, or state races where the margin is smaller and the benefit is higher. It would also be expected to be more common where it is harder to catch.
Huh. I am deliberately trying not to be nuts here. So we are clearly using different priors about that the initial estimate should be. For example, if one were to start from the assumption that the rate is zero and demand proof before moving off of zero, it would produce a low rate–but I don’t think that’s sensible. I don’t do that for anything!
What are your priors on this, and how do you consider your priors for other things which are known to be bad and which you think probably exist? To use an example of “false accusation of theft,” would you rely on the conviction rate for false accusations of theft (a charge which I have literally never even heard of or seen in my career, and which I therefore assume is ridiculously low)? Or would you set priors based on your more generic experience that some people are sometimes liars, and/or assholes, so that there are probably a few people who will make accusations to get folks in trouble?
I would do the latter. If you asked “How many people make false accusations of theft?” I would assume it was somewhere in the range of 0.1%-1% based on those prior assumptions. To put that in perspective, roughly 1 out of every THREE people has a criminal record.
Same here. We have roughly 100 million voters; I figure it’s pretty likely that some of them will cheat. Push the “how many?” number down to 1,000 illegal voters, which still seems like way more than you are willing to accept, and we have reached a rate of 1 illegal voter per 100,000 votes cast.
But I can hardly think of ANY real rate that low, including “likelihood that someone is a radical anarchist.” And when I think of rates for generic document fraud–from lying about the car sales price to get a lower tax; to forging a check; to using someone else’s SS number and name to get a job… those rates are much higher.
So the fact that we haven’t caught folks so far doesn’t do much to change my perspective, for a simple and rational reason: we wouldn’t expect t catch many people at all. Our low rate of catching vote fraud would match both of our priors.
Vote fraud is a crime which is quite difficult to investigate, and is almost impossible to screen for in certain areas. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Hard examples:
Good example. Absentee votes for a family member would be literally impossible to catch, unless the other family member voted as well or reported you. How would anyone tell?
Similarly, if you forge an ID and vote using someone else’s identity, it is literally impossible to track unless the forgery is subsequently discovered. We don’t take fingerprints or biometrics; we therefore have no evidence at all to initially distinguish a “false ID, real person” vote from a valid vote–and in most spots they don’t Xerox the ID, so you can’t do it later. There are a lot of forged IDs in the country. There are even more real IDs which are used improperly
Most of the existing stuff involves going after people who can be identified by comparing computer databases, and following up with a personal investigation. But that’s not really saying much.
When you combine that difficulty with an expected rate which is so low, then catching folks becomes incredibly difficult to do. “We did an in-depth personalized investigation of 10,000 randomly selected votes and didn’t find a single illegal voter” is fully compatible with the claim “there were a few thousand illegal votes in the last election, out of the 100+ million votes cast.” “We did a computer screening of some databases and didn’t find anything which we could identify as wrong” is even more compatible.
I would not be surprised at all. Nor should you be. When you imagine something that people may do, with very unlikely consequences, the priors should be solidly far above that rate.
110,000,000 ballots / 500 = 1 out of every 220,000 voters. If you were right, that would make 1/220,000 one of the lowest crime rates ever. (If every killer in the U.S. killed one person on average, the rate of killers to the population at large–including kids!–would be almost an order of magnitude higher than the rate of illegal voters.) I didn’t realize you had such faith in humanity! ;)
That is obviously a valid perspective with solid reasoning behind it. I’d be much happier if folks who feel that way would be as up front about it as you are. Then we could have a better conversation.
I agree that 5,000 voters (100 evenly-distributed voters per state) would be relatively insignificant, though it would raise a public uproar. But I don’t agree that the proper goal is one of “would it sway the election?” Illegal votes can affect confidence in the system at a much lower rate, and that is worth protecting.
Actually, I think that the “did he lie about illegal voting?” thing is a side track to pretty much all the other important stuff. (I also distinguish between “lie” and “wrong;” I think he’s obviously wrong but may be crazy enough to actually believe it, in which case he’s not lying.) YMMV. I’d care about “is he saying wrong things” in a vacuum, but not when there is a lot of more important stuff which is eclipsed by this issue. Presidents lie about shit (and their spokesfolks do it even more), but this lie doesn’t concern me nearly as much as most of the rest, because there’s no major current effect.
…which we never knew before! Seriously, it’s not like this changed my impression of him, and I do NOT mean that I started with a good impression.
Which he is not currently doing; if he does, I’ll join you in addressing it. I am generally opposed to gaming of the vote system, though I grudgingly concede that it’s an old issue.
I think there’s a real trust issue, though, because it is unclear if the folks arguing for vote protection think it’s a bad thing if either legal aliens or illegal aliens get to vote. When folks take the position that voting should no longer be restricted to citizens (for example, this a BLM platform position) then it makes it seem like their claims of vote suppression may be more about vote expansion.
I think a Trump investigation would be a great thing. You can’t have a good conversation about balancing fraud and voting unless you have some consensus on fraud, or you’re missing half the information needed to balance.
(Actually, that’s not entirely true–if Dems all adopted your position and won, it could end the argument early. But I think that would be political suicide. Taking the stance “we don’t really care about illegal voting unless it affects the results” would be a huge mistake.)
If Trump owns the investigation, then he will own the results. And if there are very few illegal voters, as you think–let’s use my example of 5,000 as a number which is way over your top end–then it will be valuable information for the subsequent discussions and will weigh heavily against vote suppression. Barring millions of votes to prevent a few thousand illegal votes is improper.
Even if you think Trump’s investigation will be faulty or imperfect, it’s still probably a good thing. If the true number is 5,000 and he reports 5,000,000, I am confident that it will be possible to easily disassemble a screw-up of that magnitude.
Since people here often talk about the difference in self-reporting and conviction rate for other crimes (especially those like rape which are notoriously hard to prove), here is an interesting paper involving self-reports of on voting by non-citizens.
That’s three orders of magnitude above my estimate.
I have only just skimmed it. I have no idea on whether these numbers are correct. They seem quite high to me, though they are within the range of criminality for a lot of other crimes.
That said, the fact that this involves both self-reporting and at least minimal verification is interesting.
g&w,
People cheat because they get something for it. People commit voting and election fraud on a large scale because they get something for it. What on Earth would you or I get for buying a fake id and using it to register to vote and then voting using that fake id? Nothing. Why would you or I or anyone else risk arrest and imprisonment (and public humiliation) to commit a crime that has no benefit?
Also, people get caught absentee voting for other people because the people they absentee vote for go and vote in person (because they don’t know that they’ve absentee voted). A woman in Ohio went to jail for doing that. People get caught absentee voting for dead people because elections officials check. A woman in NC got caught for that (she was fulfilling a promise to her late husband to vote for Romney for him). In Oregon vote-by-mail, you have to be able to forge the other person’s signature well enough to avoid detection by human and computer checks (that are set to a pretty high false positive rate). Some Trump supporter believed as you do that you could use fake ID to register to vote and vote, but California checks ID numbers against the registry, so now he is facing charges. A fake ID would have to be a copy of an actual ID, not a standard fake ID, and there you run into the problem of voting as a real other person, where that other person may decide to vote.
About the paper that you found, people often use it to come up with a ridiculous estimate of voting by non-citizens, but do go read about the authors’ further analysis of that result. The non-citizen question that people use for that interpretation had a substantial mis-interpretation rate, based on answers to other questions. Taking into account the mis-interpretation errors, the authors found no survey respondents who consistently stated they were non-citizens who voted.
Voting is a heavily monitored activity, requiring documentation of identity and address, with extensive record keeping. Republicans have been campaigning hard on the idea of vote fraud for more than a decade, so I assume that when Republican governments are unable to identify more than a handful of cases of illegal voting (almost all of which are not vote fraud), that there are unlikely to be more than a hundred times as many undetected cases as there are detected cases.
Any investigation by the Trump administration into imaginary voting is likely to be trash designed to be vaguely credible and to be a vehicle for arguing for greater voting restrictions. I’d be fine with a neutral process for a large examination of the US voting system, but we’ve had those before. A Trump administration investigation into imaginary voting will no more lead to a consensus than a Heartland Institute report on climate change helps to establish a consensus on climate change. It will just provide partisan fodder for demands for vote suppression. They’ll look ridiculous to anyone who is willing to read through the details and the counter-arguments, but they’ll be a Presidential Report on the terrible threat illegal voting poses to our nation for anyone who wants to be able to point to such a thing.
As for your “wait and see” attitude to Trump, I’ll refer you to a recent political cartoon from Amp…
G&W:
Hold it to one long post a day please.
Trump’s threat to investigate voters is a threat to Democracy, says CAP.
A Brennan Center study from 2005 declared vote fraud more rare than death by lightning.
And then there’s the absentee ballot manipulation that happens when, for example, the county Republican Party sends people to the nursing home at the retirement community where my mother lives, to “help people fill out their ballots.” Which translates to “color in this one…. and this one….” She has personally witnessed this. I have tried to get her to file a report with the state Attorney General but she says there is no point because he’s a Republican as well. (That’s AG 42, who used to work for Dan Quayle. AG 43 is also a Republican, but he’s African-American and a theatre guy, so maybe he might prove more moderate??)
I am currently unemployed but will add $500 of my own money to Amp’s $1000 bet, if credible terms can ever be established.
That’s a quote from the Washington Post article that Harlequin linked to in #50. It’s referring to the Interstate Crosscheck program, but it is not a very accurate description. The program works with participating states uploading their voter registration lists (first name, last name, DOB) to a centralized list. Then a computer crosscheck is done and then each state decides what to do with the results. There are tons of matches. As this thread has made clear most (more than 99%) aren’t fraud but rather duplicate registrations left over after someone moved or simply two people with the same name and date of birth.
Many states simply use the list to purge the rolls (I.e., if their registration is older they mail a postcard saying it looks like you have moved and if there is no response either purge or designate the registration as inactive).
So the Post summary is wrong in many respects. The participating states didn’t have 84 million votes but 84 million records. More to the point, the only State that put the resources into investigating duplicate votes was Kansas. The 14 cases of fraud were between 2008 and 2010. But the program was much more limited in 2008 with fewer states participating.
Bottom line, Kansas found 11 duplicate votes in the 2010 elections. They had about 835,000 votes for Senate that year. So about 1 fraudulent vote in 76,000. Some big States like California, New York, and Texas don’t participate. But most of Kansas’ neighbors do. I think it’s a fair conclusion that 1 in 50,000 votes in that election would have been discovered to be a duplicate if all States had shared their data.
If that same ratio held in 2016 nationwide there would have been over 2700 duplicate voters. I think a lot of the reporting of past investigations is similar. It can be a little sloppy in setting the denominator and lead the reader to conclude that there are probably only dozens of fraudulent votes each year, when in fact it’s probably a few thousand.
Way upthread, Amp asked:
I’m not sure that’s directed at me, because while I think there is more fraud than many on this thread seem to believe, I’m not really sure it’s a significant amount. Still, one of the other links in the Post article said that there were 3000 voters turned away from the polls for not having the proper ID in Wisconsin. If I had the resources I would randomly select 300 of these cases and ascertain: 1) is this a real person, who 2) lives in the State, and 3) in fact was the same person who went to the polls and got turned away.
And I’ll refer you to “Trump Targets Muslims, Refugees In New Executive Order Issued On Holocaust Remembrance Day”
fibi,
Your description of Kobach finding 11 (or 18) cases of double voting just in 2008 doesn’t match any other description I can find. Could you point to something that supports your description?
The Crosscheck program has significant problems. This Rolling Stone article does a good job of explaining them.
Charles – It was the 2010 election, not the 2008. Here is the presentation Kansas gave to the National Association of State Election Directors on the Interstate Crosscheck.
AndiF – Rolling Stone article addresses the main use of the crossovers data which is to purge rolls (without ascertaining whether there were double votes). Typically a voter gets a post card and if they don’t respond their registration is either deleted or inactivated. It may well be that more legitimate voters are removed because they didn’t go through their mail carefully than actual duplicate registrations where the voter had the intent of double voting are purged (the largest group is inadvertent duplicate registrations). I wasn’t addressing whether this aggressive purging was a good idea. But it doesn’t change the fact that Kansas found 1 duplicate vote for every 76,000 votes when they were only able to crossovers against about 40% of all registrations nationally.
Charles – sorry about that. Here is the link.
Fibi: The Rolling Stone article suggests (at least to me) that any results claimed by Kobach need independent validation of the source for determining that these were in fact duplicate votes.
g&w–What Charles said. There have already been investigations into voter fraud that found very, very few illegal votes cast; Republicans still tout them as showing voter fraud to be a major problem. If your worst case scenario came true and an investigation finds 5,000 illegal votes, Republicans and Trump will use that as evidence that we need voter ID laws. If the investigations finds 50 illegal votes, Republicans and Trump will use that as evidence that we need voter ID laws. The notion that they will stop pushing voter ID laws if no significant voter fraud is found is profoundly naive. It requires a belief that they will consider facts and evidence that don’t match their preconceived notions and goals.
Fibi, that link redirects to https://platform.gsa.gov/ for me.
Charles – here is a link to an html version (it’s actually the link the Post provided). A little googling and you can turn up the PowerPoint but apparently I can’t link to that from my tablet…
Thanks.
Who Is Registered to Vote in Two States? Some in Trump’s Inner Circle – The New York Times
The GOP wants you to die so the super rich can save 2.2% on income over $250k
From a an article about preventing drug addiction in Iceland:
News story on a shooting at a mosque in Quebec City by a Marine Le Pen fan–one thing that struck me was that there were originally 2 suspects, but one was released after police determined that he was just a witness. The suspect-turned-witness, Mohamed Belkhadir, saw a cop and thought it was the shooter because of the cop’s gun, so he ran, and when the cops saw Belkhadir running from them, they thought Belkhadir was the shooter. Things could have turned out badly if Belkhadir had been armed and decided to play hero (or if the cops had been too quick to shoot).
I’m pretty much a centrist on gun control, but it seems like a lot of strongly anti-gun-control people underestimate A) how many irresponsible gun owners are out there B) how even the responsible gun owners will sometimes make mistakes.
Shazaam and the Mandela effect:
I remember the movie as Shazaam (I didn’t watch Shazaam/Kazaam) and the Berenstain Bears as the Berenstein Bears. I was trying to remember if “Shazaam” had Sinbad or Shaquille O’Neal or some other celebrity-but-not-highbrow-actor, black American man, maybe a name with an “S”. I assume that the reason is the same for both “Shazaam/Kazaam” and Berenstein/Berenstain–my brain is “correcting” the spelling because Shazaam is more commonly used in magic-y dialog in pop culture, and names ending in “ein” are more common than “ain”. (And with a name like Sinbad, you can kind of see where the genie association could happen, and I seem to remember Sinbad usually wearing an earring, and Shaq is wearing an earring in the poster…)
I definitely remembered it as Berenstain, because it bothered me that it wasn’t -stein like the names that I knew. Plus, it was always pronounced with a long A sound when anyone read those books to me, not with a long I or long E like -stein names usually are.
NYT: The Peculiar Populism of Donald Trump—
[Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris write,] “[W]hen people grow up taking survival for granted it makes them more open to new ideas and more tolerant of outgroups.”
In effect, postwar prosperity in America and in Western Europe allowed many voters to shift their political priorities from bread-and-butter issues to less materialistic concerns, “bringing greater emphasis on freedom of expression, environmental protection, gender equality, and tolerance of gays, handicapped people and foreigners.”
Not everyone experienced this new found economic security, however, and the number of those left behind has grown steadily. Those who do not experience the benefits of prosperity, Inglehart and Norris write, can see “others” — “an influx of foreigners,” for example, as the culprit causing their predicament:
According to the two authors,
I remember it as Berenstain. But I have an advantage there because they trapped me in their home for an hour one Halloween. I think they were trying to be nice and evangelize us for our own good, but it came across as extremely creepy. But, unlike James Michener, at least they answered the door on Halloween.
Jake Squid, don’t feel obliged, but FYI I want to know absolutely everything about that story…
Actually, both of those stories. Michener?
The left demonstrates its commitment to free speech on the campus that led the Free Speech Movement. Numerous people on the left seem to think this is a good idea. Sarah Silverman wants to fight what she claims is fascism by proposing a military takeover of the Federal government, which IIRC is actual fascism.
Yeah, Milo seems to be an a$$hole. Yeah, he’s probably getting more mileage out of the protests than he is out of his actual speeches. So what? Protesting him is fine. Violence and celebrating violence is not. Anybody actually participating in violence should be arrested and tried. Any such person who is a student at Berkeley should be expelled, permanently. Berkeley should invite Milo back and do whatever it takes to ensure his security and those of the people who wish to hear him and make sure he can both start and finish his speech.
UC Berkeley condemns violent Milo Yiannopoulos protests And I gotta ask: do we know for a fact that the people in masks were indeed from the left? Or that they were indeed anarchists? I know the question makes me sound like one, but I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I am perfectly willing to believe, and would not be surprised to learn, that the people who got violent were from the left, or were anarchists. I just want to know if we know that for a fact above and beyond the results of their actions.
Richard Jeffrey Newman,
I actually think that’s a pretty good point – the masked protesters could have been operatives sent from Trump or Bannon or Breitbart.
I assume that mostly right-wing idiots disrupt progressive talks, but I have occasionally seen a few (justified) left-wing disruptions like in Toronto.
What is puzzling is that there are probably a few radical left-wing people at Berkley (I just read a book on the SLA and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst!), so I’m wondering how the scattered, “real” progressive people might fit in with the right-wing phonies. Any insight? I really respect your opinion as a professor!
I saw this linked as supporting the idea of the more violent protesters being genuine: https://twitter.com/lasophus/status/827082151770341380 but I have no idea how to judge is veracity. I also saw something about only multinational companies getting their windows smashed, not local businesses, but again couldn’t verify. (I think it might have been from a tweet thread Amp linked?)
And the violence continues at UC Berkeley.
Ron, I do think that incident – a couple of masked thugs attacking someone wearing a Trump hat – is bad.
I also thought it was bad when a Milo fan shot a protester at the University of Seattle. (The man claimed he shot the unarmed protestor in self-defense.)
I also thought it was bad when a Trump fan in Quebec shot up a mosque, murdering six people and injuring more.
And yet neither shooting seems to be getting nearly as much attention as what happened in Berkeley.
Here’s the University spokesman’s complete statement. While he couldn’t help but do a little virtue signaling at the end, it’s pretty reasonable.
I would like to see another statement by U.C. Berkeley, to consist of the following:
“Mr. Yiannopoulos will be speaking at U. C. Berkeley on [date] at [place]. Violent activity to shut down speech is a hallmark of fascism that cannot be permitted in any country calling itself free and recalls the actions of Nazis in Germany prior to World War II. It negates the very reason that universities exist and that gives them any right to call upon public support. Therefore, violent actions will not be tolerated. Anyone attempting to perpetrate such will be stopped and arrested using any means necessary and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. U.C. Berkeley commits to ensuring that sufficient resources will be on hand to execute this policy, even if that takes asking the Governor to send out the California National Guard.”
The only way that U. C. Berkeley, De Paul and any other university that Milo Yiannopolous attempted to speak at and was either prevented from doing so or interrupted from doing so once started can show that they are truly committed to free speech is to invite him back and ensure that no matter what he is able to speak. Any measure less than that and their commitment to free speech is a lie.
“By any means necessary” is a terrible idea. It implies that, for example, shooting protestors (as one Milo fan has already done) would be acceptable if done by police in order to make sure Milo can speak.
Have there been any celebrities voicing their support of the violence in Quebec like there has of the violence in Berkeley?
Ebit,
I have no answer. My question was an honest one and I haven’t yet heard or read anything that answers it clearly one way or the other.
I thought David Schraub’s take on the protests at Berkeley was interesting, and a way of thinking about things I hadn’t come across before.
Desipis – nope. However, there was a celebrity publicly calling for violence against left-wing protestors. And Republicans elected that celebrity President.
That depends on under what circumstances you think that shooting would be a necessary means. If people start shooting to stop him from speaking, then the government agencies involved would be justified in shooting back. I’m pretty much a First Amendment absolutist.
The Federal government was not instituted to provide social services. It was not instituted to fund universities where some group, whether chosen from or by the faculty or self-appointed in the streets, gets to decide who gets to say what. This country was founded on the philosophy that the justification for having a government is that their duty is to protect our rights. That’s what it’s for. If it doesn’t do that, we need a different government. At least, that’s what a bunch of damn radicals said, and put their lives on the line to back it up as opposed to asking for “safe spaces” when someone said something different.
.
You do know that the First Amendment is about restricting the power of the Federal Government and not about imposing an obligation on it to intervene in disputes between private parties, right?
Hey, Desipis, this isn’t a celebrity; but it an Republican party official (local, not national) calling for protestors to be shot.
U.P. Republican suggests ‘another Kent State’ as solution to protesters | MLive.com
Ridiculously, he later claimed that the comments were just “badly worded,” as if the problem with saying “Time for another Kent State perhaps. One bullet stops a lot of thuggery” is the word choice rather than the underlying meaning.
But Sarah Silverman said something stupid, so I guess that means liberals are worse.
The left are having a really tough time, there’s lots of support for violence on the one hand and crazy denialist conspiracy theories on the other.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/02/03/stunning-fake-news-cnn-promotes-conspiracy-theory-that-milo-organized-berkeley-protests-against-himself
For the record there are lots of anarchist websites openly saying it was them, they’re not trying to hide anything.
https://crimethinc.com/2017/02/03/its-not-your-speech-milo-understanding-the-uc-berkeley-protests
Here’s some journalism:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/us/anarchists-respond-to-trumps-inauguration-by-any-means-necessary.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/02/facism-alt-right-activists-trump-milo-yiannopoulos
I think the problem is there used to be two groups.
(1) The campus social justice progressives, who were basically part of the Establishment with an Obama White House talking to other parts of the Establishment in academia. Non violent, but very culturally influential.
(2) Anarchists who hated the state and were busy at the G8 and Davos. Violent, but culturally very marginalised.
With Trump in the WH they are now basically on the same side. So you’re getting Punch a Nazi advocacy from people who are very liberal about who counts as a Nazi, and people who are actually willing to do it and have experience of violent protest.
At least, that’s what a bunch of damn radicals said, and put their lives on the line to back it up as opposed to asking for “safe spaces” when someone said something different.
After a Yiannopoulos supporter shot into a crowd, arguably anyone showing up at a Yiannopoulos protest is potentially putting their life on the line.
Anyone showing up at a protest knows that the protest will not be a “safe space”, regardless of whether or not they want such spaces elsewhere.