Post deleted as dupe.
That’s what Republicans are afraid of, and have been actively working to either prevent or override. If all election “certifier” parties ignore the vote counts and declare the winner they like, it won’t matter what the popular vote is, whether by state or nationally. If one administrative person can decide who gets to be president, NO votes will count.
Are you married? Would you like to be?
If only @adaher could see us now.
It wouldn’t help you. I went through the same process to claim my Canadian citizenship, and when the paperwork arrived it had this big warning page on it basically saying “This is only for you, it does not provide for chain citizenship for your family, so don’t even think about it buster!”
Since I am married and have children, the usefulness of Canadian citizenship is pretty drastically reduced.
And I’m pretty sure that’s what would trigger the civil war. If 81 million people woke up Jan 7th to find out that their votes had been uncermonioulsy tossed in the garbage, and even 1% of them decided to go shoot a local Republican Official, that’s 810,000 murders in one day.
If the Crazy Wing of the Republican Party actually pulls this off, they’ll be like the proverbial dog who caught the car they’d been chasing - they’d have no idea what to do next.
And yet here we are with a Democratic president and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.
Dismissing the importance of voting, or being apathetic about it on the grounds that Republicans will find ways to overturn the outcome, is far more dangerous than any restrictive voting law or post-election shenanigans.
I think Dung Beetle is happily married, herself, and is inquiring for the sake of single U.S. citizens who might be willing to take up with such a miserable specimen as myself. And I must caution you, that though my papers had a similar disclaimer, it can be done. I have a neighbor where I live in Florida who married a U.S. citizen, with whom he spent several summers living in connubial bliss in his hometown of Toronto and who became a Canadian citizen this past winter.
I believe this to be extremely unlikely. Republicans will simply take office. There will be some dissent and protest, but the Republicans would suppress that too, the same way that they gassed Lafayette Square so that Trump could awkwardly hold a bible.
Yep, just trying to come up with a plan B, here…
That only worked because no one was shooting back at the cops. And no one was ready to shoot back at that time, because as bad as it was, it was still bad within the parameters we’ve seen for decades.
But invalidating an election is a whole new level. “They’re going to steal the election/declare themselves President for Life!” type things used to be sole province of the Clearly Insane People. But if this comes to pass, a whole lot of people are going to wake up and decide it’s time to do something about it.
And as I said, even if it’s only 1%, that’s a lot of people. Even 0.1% would still be quite a lot.
If they get control of the cops and the military, any individual citizen with guns is going to be irrelevant.
One brightside to getting troped in an authoritarian dictatorship is the chance of surviving long enough to see it establish a state monopoly on violence and start to disarm private citizens. An awful lot of gun fetishists and 2nd Amendment fans are going to be unhappy. 
I would predict that they aren’t going to disarm their own Brownshirts, not until they have consolidated power, anyway.
“If”. And that’s really the million dollar question - when a hundred thousand people come out to violently protest a real stolen election, what will the military do? I don’t think it’s a given that they will all violate their oaths to the Constitution, but I’m not ruling it our either.
It’s very likely that the majority of cops and military, especially at the lower levels, are themselves Trumpists and have an … imperfect … understanding of the Constitution and their obligations.
So it’s incumbent on their superiors to force them to choose sides? Or get fired?
And when they’re taking orders from the Trumpists? We have already seen examples of officers at high levels who don’t believe in liberal democracy. At some stage there will be a tipping point at which “right thinking” people are going to find themselves outnumbered by true believers and the go-alongs. There were plenty of German officers who didn’t believe in Nazism. That didn’t stop things in the end. Same thing happened in Japan. Those who tried to enforce the law eventually found themselves out of the loop.
In 2020, we lucked out that there were a few key officials in just enough right places to avoid catastrophe. Ever since then, the Republicans have worked hard to make those people and their kind unwelcome in the party, and in the states where they control the government, do their best to deprive officials at that level of their authority, or replace them with Trumpists, and make life hell enough for anyone else to quit.
The last couple of years have experienced a staggering flight of officials in voting (and public health) positions who don’t have the ability to continually fight the right-wing mob.
So, we got lucky in 2020. Maybe … we’ll get lucky another time? How many times are you going to rely on luck? There is a large minority of people who have demonstrated over and over that they have no regard for democratic principles. And that large minority is overrepresented in positions of authority. And they make steady gains on every front to increase that majority over time.
What makes you so skeptical that this can happen? It’s not like it hasn’t before. In the 1860s, the federal government empowered blacks and liberals throughout the South. By the 1880s, segregationists had re-established white supremacy throughout the region, using a variety of means, including violent insurrection–the government of Wilmington, North Carolina, was overthrown in a coup d’etat by white supremacists.
Just before the turn of the 20th century, white supremacist fascist regimes took over roughly half the country, without any civil war, and they maintained power for the next 60-70 years. Millions of Americans were disenfranchised, experienced systematic discrimination, and were subject to an entire “justice” system dedicated to maintaining their subjugation.
Events like the Tulsa race massacre and lynching happened on a regular basis to keep the white supremacist regime in place.
Most liberals–until late in the 1960s–took the incremental improvement track, until Lyndon Johnson was persuaded to use his lifetime of amassed political power to make sweeping changes.
What makes so many people confident in the “it can’t happen here” idea when what is happening now has happened before here and elsewhere?
Is it an aspect of American exceptionalism? Or run-of-the-mill denial?
In the end, the message I get from these kinds of threads is that my life, everything I work for and want, is completely pointless, since it’ll all be taken away in a couple of years. My work, my family, my money, everything, all pointless. The only rational thing to do is to force my family by whatever means necessary to pull the kids from school and either move en masse to Europe by hook or by crook (ending my retirement funds to pay for this will probably go at least a little way) or teach them how to shoot for the upcoming civil war. I don’t see any other rational option.
And I’m not at all mocking those who argue towards that. I think it’s a very real possibility, maybe the only possibility. That’s exactly the problem. It’s like that libertarian acquaintance I’ve talked about in other threads, who shut down an assumably profitable small business and uprooted himself to move across the country right before the election for fear of civil war. He had the courage of his convictions. I’m not sure I do, and I’m somewhat disturbed by that.
This is a quick read, and – IMHO – relevant to this thread.
It’s the author’s take on a Quinnipiac poll (12pp PDF) and highlights whether – using Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the context – Americans think the US is worth fighting for:
The breakdown by political leanings and age groups is, to me, unsurprising but interesting.
“Foreign and domestic.” It’s easy to forget.