Not disagreeing with the thrust of your whole post. But I will point out that 600 groups times 100 members is 60,000 RW anarchist fighter wannabes, not merely 6,000. It’s worse than we thought.
Here locally when we were in the [all-restaurants and “non-essential businesses” closed] phase there was a chalkboard set up just inside our local grocery store. It said “Help wanted! Get a job in an essential industry! See the customer service desk for an application.” Poignant and not in a good way.
It is criminal how our society is unable to see that paying businesses to stay closed while paying their workers to stay home was (and still is) the only way to square the circle of human and business damage.
Oh God, that one’s delicious. It’s even better than my self-invented theory that if Republicans write in Trump for both Senate races they will create joinder and Trump will become the new Senate majority leader.
I’ll just respond to this one since the answers are similar for all of them. My guess is the AG filed his suit knowing full well that it didn’t have a thought and prayer of succeeding. It was purely political theater to curry favor with Trump and/or the Trumpists. Most of the heat in all of this is just that: political theater. It’s like a wimp starting a bar fight but telling his buddies to hold him back so he looks tough.
Outside of Trump and his whacko lawyers like Powell all the Republicans know that none of this has a real chance. No republican (or conservative judge) has done anything that has actually reversed a single vote.
It’s political theatre that can ultimately have very, very bad results.
The “audience” for this theatre thinks it is real. They cannot discern reality from fiction. The “audience” are being encouraged to storm the stage and attack some of the actors.
Well, you make two math mistakes here, but they balance out. 600X100 = 60000, not 6000. But none of those groups has anything remotely like 100 hard core members who are actually willing to risk their lives, more like maybe 10 guys. So it’s 6000 afterall. There are 800000 police officers.
It should be delicious, it’s a disinformation campaign started on Reddit to troll the Parler folks. I just saw them post this link to the Lin Wood twitter reference yesterday, and they were VERY excited to see that he’d picked it up. I’m not going to link to the subreddit, but if you search Reddit, you’ll find it.
Someone else pointed that out. I’m pretty good at math, I must have meant 10 hardcore members. In any case, it’s not going to be 60,000 soldiers. Had not seen this in years, amazing that it was 60,000 on the nose
You guys had me thinking I was going crazy.
The 600 x 100 maths mistake was corrected back in post #1387, and the next couple posts (as well as the post containing the error) make the same point about these militias being no match for the military / police force. So epic deja vu.
And the latter point is still irrelevant IMO. No-one’s claiming that a few right wing mobs could defeat the police or military.
When DrDreth mentioned “hard core members” it brought to my mind The Warriors movie, great fun if you haven’t seen it but most people under 40 haven’t even heard of it. But in a weird way, it exemplifies the ideas of the militia groups. No one, not even they, believe they can defeat the US military right now. But they think they can start a rebellion that will gradually bring in new members. The Moonrunners (The Proud Boys) unite with the Van Courtland Rangers (The Boogaloo Boys) etc. The clip above doesn’t show the whole scene, but in it Cyrus says “We take over one borough at a time.” He of course forgets that while they have 60,000 hard core members and NYPD has 20,000 officers, there are many, many more outside of NYC.
At the end of the scene, Cyrus gets shot by a rival gang member and there is all out war. Gangs against gangs, not gangs against the NYPD. And The Warriors, the gang blamed for the killing of Cyrus althought they didn’t do it, finally make it back home to Brooklyn. I’ll say they represent a fair share of the American populace who, well hell I can’t think of a good example.
I think I have stretched this metaphor about as far as I can.
Your arguments still seem to boil down to “Until it reverses a single vote, none of this political theatre is harmful to the country.”
Perhaps I’m misinterpreting your message, though. I’m pretty sure I’m correct, though, in my assessment that your attitude toward political theater is that, in and of itself, is harmless.
I welcome correction, of course. But, if you provide correction, I’d be very grateful if you would explain why correction is needed.
I haven’t said the rhetoric isn’t harmful. I’ve said that Republicans aren’t really trying to overturn the election, at least extralegally. When a Republican makes a move that actually overturns a legal vote I’ll believe otherwise.
For example, there’s a lot of hand-wringing about what Pence will do on January 6. I don’t think he’ll do anything that will put the election results in doubt. There might be plenty of rhetoric. I wouldn’t doubt that Pence will bend protocol to allow some Republicans to attempt some maneuver that has no shot of succeeding. But in the end Biden will be confirmed.
