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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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Publish all the evidence that made you absolutely positive.

If this evidence is less than absolute proof that more fraudulent votes were counted than the margin of your loss, your case is immediately dismissed and you are mocked/demonized for promulgating baseless claims of election fraud -- the other way at least there is some chance of having your day in court.

Who said anything about court? Your theory that judges are more likely to dismiss people who publish more evidence is an interesting one, but there is a reason why I said "publish", not "file". As I admitted, if the judges dismiss you then you still lose 2020, but if the voters don't then your team wins 2022 and 2024 and a lot of opportunities to prevent whatever fraud you detected from happening again. Maybe it takes time to go through evidence in the moment and make sure you're not hurting your credibility by putting credence in bad evidence too, but after three or four years have passed Vance shouldn't be dancing around when asked if Trump lost, he shouldn't be pointing to social media censorship (or whatever "big tech rigged the election" meant) as reasons why Trump morally won, he should be advertising "trumpwon2020.com" or whatever URL they picked to host all the evidence they have that Trump actually won.

if the voters don't

If...

Fair, but "at least there is some chance" applies here too. Wasn't that the point of Trump's "you won't have to vote anymore" speech a while back, that if you can convince enough voters to beat the "margin of fraud" then you can get into power to shrink that margin to 0?

Isn't it much better, then, to convince these voters by specifically explaining to them how the fraud is working and what needs to be done to stop it? If you have a plan that's more detailed than "just elect Trump" then even if you fail at the presidential level you can still get election reforms going at local levels.

Trump is a narcissistic dude, and is probably much more interested in being elected himself* than repairing the electoral system per se -- this absolutely is a character flaw, but it doesn't mean that he's faking the interest in fixing the fraud.

*I do think that he wants this because he truly believes he's able to improve America, which is an important distinction between most politicians who are guided by more of a lust for power

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that he was faking.

IMHO Trump's only clear advantage over most Republican candidates is that, despite his very loose relationship with honesty in general, he will occasionally turn on "I'm going to piss off everyone who disagrees with me" mode as a costly signal of sincerity. Kamala's trying to backpedal on her previous statements on things like policing and border security in very weasel-worded ways that are obviously intended to barely placate moderates while being easy to un-backpedal from later. Vance's "Trump would have won except for big tech" phrasing is a great way to say something technically true without either actually agreeing with Republicans who think it was vote fraud or openly disagreeing and pissing them off. But when Trump goes full on anti-illegal-immigration or 2020-was-fraud or whatever he doesn't use his charismatic-real-estate-negotiator language, he brings out scare-the-normies level language that he's clearly not going to back down from. He might be mistaken but he's not lying.

My point is just that relying on him alone to fix any problems is strictly inferior to relying on both him and on grassroots-level efforts too. Maybe some of the evidence that convinced him was spurious (the reason I'm not convinced is that I waded through enough of that) and he'll go after those red herrings and never get around to other real problems, so the only way to get real problems fixed is to publish the evidence. Maybe he won't get reelected because that's just not happening again, and fixing any vulnerabilities will have to be done by others, so the only way to point out what to fix is to publish the evidence. Maybe he would have been reelected if he made a strong case for voter fraud evidence, but he didn't, so there are people who would have voted for the anti-voter-fraud Trump but will vote against the weird-fake-electors-thing Trump. Maybe he will be reelected and will go after real problems but will be thwarted by federalism or another branch or the deep state or whatever and fixes will have to come in at the local level. There's just so many ways that Trump making a public case could make things better. It seems like the one big risk here for him is that putting everything out in the open might reveal that none of it is convincing, but that's also a situation where "good for Trump" vs "good for the country" diverge, and I'd be on the "good for the country" side in that case.