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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3146 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 31, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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In the immediate aftermath of the January 6th riots, there was what appeared to be a coordinated campaign to get as many people as possible to use the word "insurrection" to describe it.

This never occurred to me at the time, but were Democrats playing the long game here, trying to build a consensus that Trump had engaged in insurrection and thus was disqualified to run again in 2024?

I'm not sure they aimed exactly at that at the start, but they certainly tried to paint Trump as criminally complicit - I mean, they impeached him for that (though failed to convict, as expected). But a near-term strategy has been to delegitimize and suppress any right-wing popular protest, and scare away any legit right-wing politicians from supporting any populist movements or anything at all that has to do with the electoral system. Which has been executed very successfully. Removing Trump from the ballots is the later addition to the strategy and reeks of desperation a bit, since they can't really prohibit the GOP from nominating Trump, and they can't meaningfully influence his electoral college numbers that way - he is not going to get deep blue states anyway. But they can make a platform for refusing to recognize the election result in the event he wins - in the words of one Peter Strzok, an insurance policy. I am sure it's not the only one that is being brewed up right now.

My best guess was that it wasn't on the radar; they just wanted to cast it negatively, and it turned out well for them. But what do I know.

Use of the specific word "insurrection," which is used in the 14th Amendment but had rarely been used in living memory to describe domestic riots, seems unlikely to have been a coincidence.

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