Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "FRONTLINE PBS | Official"
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"This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only Trump and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process."
"It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump."
"Trump and his advisers have sought to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense; they have attempted to corrupt federal law-enforcement agencies to protect themselves and their cohorts, and they have exploited the nation’s darkest impulses in the pursuit of profit. But their ability to get away with this fraud is tied to cruelty."
"Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, blackVoters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them."
--Adam Serwer, The Atlantic December 2019
"All cruelty springs from weakness."
--Seneca
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A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia. Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties.
Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part.
Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics. “They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s.
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Yes, Biden won with only 16% of U.S. counties. And no, that's not mathematically impossible.
Along with fraud allegations that don't even have enough evidence to make it into a courtroom, much less win a single case, people who want the outcome of the election to be different keep sharing all kinds of statistics designed to make Biden's win look fishy.
The problem is that none of these purportedly suspicious numbers are actually suspicious at all.
Biden won 81,283,098 votes, or 51.3 percent of the votes cast. He is the first U.S. presidential candidate to have won more than 80 million votes. Trump won 74,222,958 votes, or 46.8 percent of the votes cast. That’s also more votes than any other presidential candidate has ever won, with the exception of Biden that is. 🤣
(Third-party candidates picked up 1.8 percent of the votes cast.)
More than 159 million Americans voted in 2020: 159,633,396 to be exact. That’s the largest total voter turnout in U.S. history and the first time more than 140 million people voted. Voter turnout in 2020 was the highest in 120 years when measured as a percentage of the voting-eligible population: 66.7 percent.
Let's start by looking at county counts. Right now there are lots of posts going around comparing the vote counts and counties won between Obama, Trump, and Biden, making it seem like it's just not possible for Biden to have won the popular vote with the number of counties he won.
Biden won 527 counties, not 477. That's still far fewer than what Trump won, but it doesn't matter.
According to the U.S. Census, more than half of U.S. residents live in just 143 counties (or 4.6% of total counties). Counties vary vastly in size and population, from fewer than 100 people, to more than 10 million per county. In fact, Los Angeles County alone has more people than 41 whole states, and more than the 11 least populous states combined, which have a total of 416 counties between them.
So yeah, Biden could have won even fewer counties than the 500+ he carried, and still have come out on top in the popular vote. Especially since urban areas tend to vote Democrat in higher numbers than Republican.
As far as the rally visuals of Trump’s rallies go? One word—pandemic. Biden never held big rallies because he didn't want crowds because...pandemic. This one's really not hard.
And regarding the higher vote totals, well, yes. The U.S. has grown by more than 27 million since Obama was elected in 2008 and there was record turnout of voters in this election to boot. In fact, there were so many more voters this year, Biden could have lost the popular vote and still had more votes than Obama got when he won. Because that's just how numbers work.🤣
Another interesting statistic: The counties that Biden carried account for 70% of the U.S. economy. According to the Wall Street Journal, the 84% of counties that Trump won accounts for just 30% of the U.S. GDP, while the 16% that Biden won make up 70% of it. Even when Trump won the election in 2016, the counties he won only accounted for 36% of the economy.
let's go ahead and nix another misnomer that's floating around. Does "Simple Math" show that Biden claimed millions more votes than there were eligible voters who voted in the election?
Umm, no.
That "2020 Election Turnout Rate" of 66.2% doesn't mean 66.2% of registered legal voters, it means 66.2% of eligible voters. Super appreciate that they gave the source, but if you actually look up that WaPo article, it very clearly says "As a share of the voting-eligible population," not "registered voters." All registered voters are eligible voters, but not all eligible voters are registered voters. The eligible voting population is approximately 239.2 million, so the math in this calculation falls apart right where the multiplication starts. If you replace the registered vote total with 239.2 million, you come out with the original 158.4 million votes that were certified.
But the funniest thing about this one is just...really? Do people really think that our multi-step, multi-check electoral processes wouldn't immediately catch 13 or 17 million illegitimate votes if they actually existed? Do people really think that this very basic counting epiphany more than a month after the election took place, and after it has been checked and verified, even makes sense?
These numbers are all out there for everyone to calculate for themselves, but if people aren't calculating with the right variables, then they're going to come up with shady conclusions like these ones. And they'll accept it because it backs up their beliefs.
Misinformation is rampant and literally tearing at the fabric of our nation. It's up to all of us to battle it when we see it.
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For two years ending in 2013, the FBI had a court-approved warrant to eavesdrop on a sophisticated Russian organized crime money-laundering network that operated out of unit 63A in Trump Tower.
The FBI investigation led to a federal grand jury indictment and the arrest of more than 30 people, including one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. Known as the “Little Taiwanese,” he was the only target to slip away, and he remains a fugitive from American justice.
Tokhtakhounov's whereabouts remained unknown for seven months, even after Interpol issued a red notice for Tokhtakhounov. And then, in April 2013, this fugitive from American justice, appeared seated near Trump in the VIP section of Trump's Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.
“He is a major player,” said Mike Gaeta, the agent who led the 2013 FBI investigation of Tokhtakhounov and his alleged mafia money-laundering and gambling ring, in a 2014 interview with ABC News.
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DJT sat in the White House, and watched theVio.lence that unfolded on our nation's Capitol for at least two whole hours, without doing anything and without saying a word, other than to blast his own Vice President, who eventually had to flee for his life.
The truth of the matter is, if he had not filled his followers heads with lies for months, and if he had not held that rally, where he instructed his followers to march to the Capitol and fight like he// in order to "stop the steal" the insurrection never would have happened. Because without the use of vio.lence, how else were they going to stop the so called steal?
The election was over. The only thing that remained was for Pence to count and certify the electoral votes. So the only thing they could've been fighting for, was to bring a stop to the counting of the electoral votes, which would officially certify Biden as the next democratically elected president.
AndVio.lence was the only option they had left. DJT had already exhausted every other legal and illegal option. So on January 6th, theViolence card was the only card he had left, and he played it.
The insurrection was Trump's revenge against our democracy and our Constitution.
It was his way of getting back at everyone who didn't vote for him, and those who refused to violate our Constitution on his behalf. Watching his followers storm the Capitol while wearing his hat and waving flags emblazoned with his name, was the greatest day of his presidency. He had never felt more like the dictator he's always wanted to be than he did on that day. And he reveled in it.
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What Trump tried to do really was far worse than Watergate. As corrupt as Nixon was, he never incited a violent insurrection on our nation's Capitol in order to stay in power. John Dean warned us about Trump back in 2016.
John Dean served as White House counsel to Nixon from 1970 to 73. He was a key figure in the Watergate saga—participating in, and then helping to expose, the most iconic political scandal in modern U.S. history at the time. Back in 2016, Dean said that Trump could easily be the most corrupt presidents ever.
“The American presidency has never been at the whims of an authoritarian personality like Donald Trump,” Dean stated. “He is going to test our democracy as it has never been tested."
Dean stated that he is not only convinced that Trump will be worse than Nixon in virtually every way—he thinks he could possibly get away with it.
“I used to have one-on-one conversations with Nixon, where I’d see him checking his more authoritarian tendencies,” Dean recalled. “He’d say, ‘This is something I can’t say out loud...’ or, ‘That is something the president can’t do.’” To Dean, these moments suggested a functioning sense of shame in Nixon, something he was forced to wrestle with in his quest for power. Trump, by contrast, appears to Dean, to be unmolested by any such struggle." Dean went even further in his assessment, stating: “I don’t think Richard Nixon even comes close to the level of corruption we already know about Trump.”
100 years from now, kids in our schools will still be learning about the events that took place on January 6, 2021, the day our nation's Capitol came under attack from insurrectionists, the same way our kids are still taught today about the events that took place on December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor, and the events that took place on 9-11. These are dates that will forever live in infamy.
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What Trump tried to do really was far worse than Watergate. As corrupt as Nixon was, he never incited a violent insurrection on our nation's Capitol in order to stay in power. John Dean warned us about Trump back in 2016.
John Dean served as White House counsel to Nixon from 1970 to 73. He was a key figure in the Watergate saga—participating in, and then helping to expose, the most iconic political scandal in modern U.S. history at the time. Back in 2016, Dean said that Trump could easily be the most corrupt presidents ever.
“The American presidency has never been at the whims of an authoritarian personality like Donald Trump,” Dean stated. “He is going to test our democracy as it has never been tested."
Dean stated that he is not only convinced that Trump will be worse than Nixon in virtually every way—he thinks he could possibly get away with it.
“I used to have one-on-one conversations with Nixon, where I’d see him checking his more authoritarian tendencies,” Dean recalled. “He’d say, ‘This is something I can’t say out loud...’ or, ‘That is something the president can’t do.’” To Dean, these moments suggested a functioning sense of shame in Nixon, something he was forced to wrestle with in his quest for power. Trump, by contrast, appears to Dean, to be unmolested by any such struggle." Dean went even further in his assessment, stating: “I don’t think Richard Nixon even comes close to the level of corruption we already know about Trump.”
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What Trump tried to do really was far worse than Watergate. As corrupt as Nixon was, he never incited a violent insurrection on our nation's Capitol in order to stay in power. John Dean warned us about Trump back in 2016.
John Dean served as White House counsel to Nixon from 1970 to 73. He was a key figure in the Watergate saga—participating in, and then helping to expose, the most iconic political scandal in modern U.S. history at the time. Back in 2016, Dean said that Trump could easily be the most corrupt presidents ever.
“The American presidency has never been at the whims of an authoritarian personality like Donald Trump,” Dean stated. “He is going to test our democracy as it has never been tested."
Dean stated that he is not only convinced that Trump will be worse than Nixon in virtually every way—he thinks he could possibly get away with it.
“I used to have one-on-one conversations with Nixon, where I’d see him checking his more authoritarian tendencies,” Dean recalled. “He’d say, ‘This is something I can’t say out loud...’ or, ‘That is something the president can’t do.’” To Dean, these moments suggested a functioning sense of shame in Nixon, something he was forced to wrestle with in his quest for power. Trump, by contrast, appears to Dean, to be unmolested by any such struggle." Dean went even further in his assessment, stating: “I don’t think Richard Nixon even comes close to the level of corruption we already know about Trump.”
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@Provocateurofendtimes
The irony in this is palpable. Those people stormed the Capitol because they were tricked into believing that they were being oppressed, and their freedoms were being taken away from them, which was all a total lie. Now they're in a jail cell, and their freedom has been taken away from them, but for real this time. 🤣😅
This is what happens to people who end up in cults. It never ends well. A cult environment like "Q" and Trumpism discourages critical thinking, making it hard to voice doubts, when everyone around you is displaying dogmatic faith and obedience to their leader. A process of indoctrination is in use that can be seen as coercive persuasion, or thought reform, commonly called "brainwashing". The resulting internal conflict, known as cognitive dissonance, keeps them trapped, as each compromise makes it more painful to admit that you've been deceived.
So tell me, what rights have been taken away from you?
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The FBI obtained secret wiretaps collected by Spanish police of conversations involving Alexander Torshin, a deputy governor of Russia’s Central Bank who has forged close ties with the NRA, that led to a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. during the gun lobby’s annual convention in Louisville, in 2016.
José Grinda, who has spearheaded investigations into Spanish organized crime, said the FBI requested and were provided transcripts of wiretapped conversations between Torshin and Alexander Romanov, a convicted Russian money launderer. On the wiretaps, Romanov refers to Torshin as “El Padrino,” the godfather.
“Just a few months ago, the wiretaps of these telephone conversations were given to the FBI,” Grinda said in response to a question from Yahoo News during a talk he gave at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. Asked if he was concerned about Torshin’s meetings with Donald Trump Jr. and other American political figures, Grinda replied: “Mr. Trump’s son should be concerned.” 😲 😲 😲
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