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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29444 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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So the first thing I think the skeptic does is to ignore basically all the fluff about the former purpose. If you just read pretty much all the "Defendant falsely claimed" statements as "Defendant believed" (though perhaps was just wrong on the facts, once they all come to light), then nearly 90% of this indictment simply disappears. It's certainly not a crime to just be wrong on the facts or to have a situation where some people are saying one thing and others are saying another result in you believing the wrong thing, even if your belief is heavily influenced by personal political motivations (i.e., you really want to believe that there was something nefarious).

This is the rub for me, on almost all of this. If the people involved actually believed the election was stolen nothing outside of the Jan 6 event is criminal. If you believe that your state committed vote fraud, then you certainly would send a protest slate of electors, especially if the only avenue remaining is that the electors are disputed. If you believed that the election had been stolen from you, you absolutely would seek redress in the courts. You absolutely would be screaming from the housetops. And if you believed that the government was stealing the presidency from your tribe, you’d absolutely go to the Capitol to protest.

To me, the mob doesn’t matter much, because getting a mob of angry people to do something stupid is easy. Maybe a cop shoves a protester, maybe someone simply suggested the riots, maybe somebody threw a rock. But if you have a crowd of angry people that feel that their country has stolen political power from them, especially in the numbers present, a riot of some sort was going to happen. People riot after winning the cup in major sporting events. It takes nothing more than high emotions and some precipitating event.

I think the best way to tease this apart is to ask the counter factual of if the election had been stolen and people knew it, how would their behavior be any different than what we actually saw. And I just don’t see anything where I can put my fingers down and say “if they thought the election was stolen, why did they do this”. Everything seems pretty consistent with the idea that Trump and his inner circle absolutely believed in the stolen election. Being mistaken isn’t a crime.

Being mistaken isn’t a crime.

Depends on the crime. Some laws operate on strict liability - I drove through a red light honestly believing that it was green, but I still broke the law by doing so. And yes, this does mean that you can commit crimes entirely by accident.

Some laws operate on a "reckless disregard for the truth" standard. That is, you have some responsibility to ensure that the beliefs you are acting on are in fact true. So if you are mistaken, that can be a crime if it the truth of the situation was knowable to you and you chose not to look. This typically applies in defamation law - you can't just say any crazy lie and say "but your honour I really believed he was a pedo" and get away with it.

Being mistaken often is not a crime. But it's not true as a blanket statement.

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