Elections 2020 Quotes

Most of us knew in our bones that things with the world weren’t right, long before it became a crisis.

She’d worn anxiety like a thick robe for so long that it was hard for her to take it off.

Embedded in their psyche was the story of what had happened to the world, and the boys felt glorious to be on the other side of the madness

There is a great new work before us, which is to replace with true knowledge the ignorance that has destroyed human minds. We will construct unity in a world [which] has been brutally torn apart by false divisions of race, religion, gender, nationality, and age. We will heal with unconditional love those souls whose hearts have been disfigured by hatred and loneliness.

It had been more than a year since the Joker’s conquest of America and we were all still in shock and going through the stages of grief but now we needed to come together and set love and beauty and solidarity and friendship against the monstrous forces that faced us. Humanity was the only answer to the cartoon. I had no plan except love. I hoped another plan might emerge in time but for now there was only holding each other tightly and passing strength to each other, body to body, mouth to mouth, spirit to spirit, me to you.

Democrats care about what's fair and true. Republicans only care about winning, no matter how much they have to lie and cheat.

Like other aspiring autocrats, Donald Trump cannot succeed alone. He depends upon enablers and collaborators. Every American should understand what his enablers in Congress and in the leadership of the Republican Party were willing to do to help Trump seize power in the months after he lost the 2020 presidential election—and what they continue to do to this day.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Dumb people like Trump think they're super smart, because they are so spectacularly stupid, they don't even know how much stuff they don't know. They are so dumb, they don't even know that other people know a lot more about a topic than they do.

Trump only cares how the covid-19 pandemic affects him, his bank account, and his chances of getting re-elected.

Rousseau already observed that this form of government is more accurately an ‘elective aristocracy’ because in practice the people are not in power at all. Instead we’re allowed to decide who holds power over us. It’s also important to realise this model was originally designed to exclude society’s rank and file. Take the American Constitution: historians agree it ‘was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period’. It was never the American Founding Fathers’ intention for the general populace to play an active role in politics. Even now, though any citizen can run for public office, it’s tough to win an election without access to an aristocratic network of donors and lobbyists. It’s not surprising that American ‘democracy’ exhibits dynastic tendencies—think of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bushes. Time and again we hope for better leaders, but all too often those hopes are dashed. The reason, says Professor Keltner, is that power causes people to lose the kindness and modesty that got them elected, or they never possessed those sterling qualities in the first place. In a hierarchically organised society, the Machiavellis are one step ahead. They have the ultimate secret weapon to defeat their competition. They’re shameless.

If you believe things went terribly wrong in the 2020 election, well, you’re not crazy, and you’re not alone. But most of all, you’re not wrong.

You must be a Fox News viewer. Nobody else is dumb enough to believe Trump's lies.

They worried that widespread mail-in voting would lead to fraud. And they had good reason to worry. A 2005 bipartisan commission co-chaired by none other than Jimmy Carter found that absentee balloting was the largest source of potential fraud in American elections. Why should 2020 be any different? They worried that universal mail-in balloting would make ballots harder to track, as some states bombarded addresses with ballots for previous residents who had moved out but hadn’t been struck from the voter rolls. What would happen to all the excess ballots?

Republicans began to issue warnings about the new practices well before November 2020. They talked about how widespread changes in the manner the country conducts elections would create uncertainty, confusion, and delays.

What happened during the 2020 election must be investigated and discussed, not in spite of media and political opposition to an open inquiry, but because of that opposition. The American people deserve to know what happened. They deserve answers, even if those answers are inconvenient. They deserve to know the effect flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots had on their vote. They deserve to know how and why Big Tech and the corporate political media manipulated the news to support certain political narratives while censoring stories they now admit were true. They deserve to know why courts were allowed to unilaterally rewrite the rules in the middle of the contest, often without the consent of the legislative bodies charged with writing election laws.

The powers that be did whatever it took to prevent Trump from winning his re-election bid in 2020. They admitted as much in a victory lap masquerading as a news article in Time magazine that referred to the individuals and institutions behind the efforts to oust Trump as a “well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”16

One hour after the meeting broke up, my watch buzzed with a Trump tweet alert. “Peter Navarro releases 36-page report alleging election fraud. ‘More than sufficient’ to swing victory to Trump. A great report by Peter. Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Wild.

Summer #28: 2020 What are we talking about in 2020? Kobe Bryant, Covid-19, social distancing, Zoom, TikTok, Navarro cheerleading, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and… The presidential election. A country divided. Opinions on both sides. It’s everywhere: on the news, on the late-night shows, in the papers, online, online, online,

What I admire most about Republicans is that they never run out of lies.

As the political scientist Ian Bremmer wrote in the run-up to the U.S. elections of 2020, victims seek saviors, and there is never a shortage of volunteers.

Don’t build a watch; tell voters the time.

The current American political scenario is not about the Left vs. the Right; it is about the Left vs. common sense.

Yesterday's assault on the Capitol was an attack on multiracial American democracy, a fragile experiment younger than most US senators. (1/7/2021)

No matter whom the people elect, you always get JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs in charge. the shit going on is unbelievable. all to save massively overpriced assets.

Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power,” I concluded. “This is why I agreed to appear before you today.

Our first post-election call of 2020 was at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, November 6. Following our opening prayer, we moved into leadership reports, where Kevin, Republican Whip Steve Scalise, and I briefed the membership.

In the 2020 election, Trump received 74 million votes, more than any presidential candidate in history with the exception of Joe Biden, who won 81 million votes. Biden secured the Electoral College with 306 votes to Trump's 232.

one consequence of the fact that our popular historical understanding erases roughly 1870 to 1932 from public memory is that many Americans have a distinctly warped view of how resilient american democracy actually is (11/12/2020 on Twitter)

He had developed a deep disdain of Donald Trump, whom he considered a con man, but he wasn’t impressed by Joe Biden. “When he was vice president, I went to lunch with him in San Francisco where he droned on for an hour and was boring as hell, like one of those dolls where you pull the string and it just says the same mindless phrases over and over.” Nonetheless, he says he would have voted for Biden in 2020, but he decided that going to the polls in California, where he was then registered, was a waste of time because it was not a contested state.

Over the next few months, the Trump campaign challenged the election by demanding recounts—all of which confirmed that Biden had won. Trump or his surrogates filed and lost at least sixty-three lawsuits over the 2020 election, most of which were dismissed for lack of evidence.

The whole nature of how ppl respond to this coup would change if ppl, knew the full history of Reconstruction--and learned it as "white identity based mobs regularly overturned elections whenever a Black person or someone perceived as a Black ally was elected" (12/12/2020 on Twitter)

The term '20/20 vision' implies good if not perfect sight. May the advent of 2020 - a new year, a new decade - see a lifting of the fog which has recently blurred the edges of what can be described as 'acceptable political discourse', and in the process refocus voter attention on the clear need to demand from elected representatives, a display of basic decency and decorum in public life - both of which have been seriously lacking in the behaviour of some high profile politicians on both sides of the pond, on an eye-watering number of occasions. That indeed would be a sight for sore eyes.

People fear different things about death,” I tell her. “Pain. Not finishing something you’re working on. Leaving someone you love. There’s even real FOMO, fear of missing out, of the world going on and you not being here to see it.” “I can’t decide if missing the 2020 election is terrible timing,

so if you live in the United States, and you are reading this prior to November 2020, please do me a favor and (a) Register to vote, or check to make sure your registration is still valid, (b) Remember to vote on election day (or before if you take an early ballot) and (c) Try not to vote for anyone who is a whirling amoral vortex of chaos.

At least one pollster agrees with Trump. After the 2020 election, pollster Jim Lee of Susquehanna Polling & Research blasted the politicization of his industry and issued a statement noting that a slew of inaccurate polling results that almost universally overstated Biden’s support left pollsters “vulnerable to criticisms of contributing to voter suppression.

Back when I dressed nice and uh... had some money in pocket I'd meet girls, you know. And eventually you gotta Pop the question, right? Do you charge for sex or do you sleep with people you actually like? of course that didn't ALWAYS end well... and now it's 2020 and they give me TRUMP or BIDEN. oh you assholes. I guess Karma is a bitch. No thanks... I think I'm staying in.

Trump’s election obviously had a very personal meaning for me. I feel unsettled everyday by his words, his behavior, and his corrosive impact on democracy and the rule of law. Trump has had an impact as well on our collective psyche and our nervous systems; supporters and opponents alike. He has modeled, normalized, and appealed to our most primitive instincts: greed, anger, deceit, hatred, defensiveness, blame, and denial. Rather than evolving in office, Trump has devolved, dragging us backward with him. Among the majority of Americans who oppose him, he fuels fear and anxiety, outrage, and despair. Among his supporters, he sanctions rage and hatred. The fight or flight emotions he arouses in supporters and critics alike serve none of us well.

When Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, he attempted to overturn the results in order to seize power illegally and remain in office. When the violent mob he had mobilized laid siege to our Capitol, he watched the attack on television and refused for more than three hours to tell the rioters to leave. Donald Trump’s actions violated the law and the oath he swore to the Constitution.

Never in America’s history, though—however many sideburns Bowery barbers shaved or immigrants came ashore—had a losing presidential candidate argued that the whole nation had been swindled. When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860, his victory so outraged his opposition that an entire region of the country broke away. But in loss Stephen A. Douglas never claimed the election was “rigged.

Months after the 2020 presidential election, Time magazine published its triumphant story of how the election was won by “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”70

Sometimes after I talked through the facts of the 2020 election—including how the courts ruled and what the judges said—people I met with were willing to reconsider their embrace of Trump’s lies. Others remained defiant and angry. It can be tough to learn that you’ve been fooled, tricked by those you trusted. That you let yourself be deceived. The natural reaction is denial, and a refusal to listen to anything to the contrary.

The book was uncomfortably friendly to the powerful Democrat and confirmed that Ball had close ties to Democratic leaders. Of all people, she was in a position to know the story of what happened in 2020. In her piece, Ball told a cheerful story about a “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes,” the “result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.”72 She purported to tell “the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election.”73

Left unsaid was that Biden states received 88.4 percent of the funding and an average award of more than $3.5 million—3.34 times as large as the amount Trump states received. Four states that received funds switched from Trump states in 2016 to Biden states in 2020. Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania received $35,579,609—more than half of all funds. By contrast, Florida, a state that became more firmly Trump-supporting in 2020, received only $287,000 in CEIR funding.86

The next day, September 26, the House Intelligence Committee released the complaint to the public, and people could read for themselves the whistleblower’s concern that Trump was soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 election and that both Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr were implicated in the scheme. The complaint laid out how Trump tried to strong-arm Zelensky into smearing the Bidens and how White House officials had buried the tape of the call on a secret server.[

A Politico article in November 2020 claimed that Biden’s eventual win in Georgia was related to Democrats’ massive efforts to fight so-called “voter suppression tactics,” the left’s terminology for ensuring that election fraud is limited by removing ineligible voters from polling books, having voters submit identification, and limiting the participation of outside parties in the secret voting process.56 Democrats did invest in the project, spending tens of millions of dollars to challenge and change voter integrity laws.

Within days, Trump admitted that on July 25 he had called the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to enlist his help against former vice president Joe Biden, who was beating Trump in most polls going into the 2020 election season. Zelensky was desperate for the money Congress had approved to help his country fight Russian-backed separatists in the regions Russia had occupied after the 2014 invasion, but Trump indicated he would release the money only after Zelensky announced an investigation into the actions of Biden’s son Hunter during his time on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Trump continued, “Now, you can say that that’s OK and Hillary can say that that’s OK. But it’s not OK with me, because based on what she’s saying, and based on where she’s going, and where she’s been, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month on the final day. And that’s not acceptable.”34 As improbable as it had once seemed, by the 2020 State of the Union address Trump had proven himself to be a thoroughly pro-life president. He had taken swift and decisive action to limit access to abortion, preventing tax dollars from funding abortions overseas and allowing states to cut federal funds to Planned Parenthood.

I would really like to return to halcyon days of pre-2016, when I actually did a reasonably good job of focusing and turning in books on a schedule that would not make production people hate me and burn me in effigy, so if you live in the United States, and you are reading this prior to November 2020, please do me a favor and (a) Register to vote, or check to make sure your registration is still valid, (b) Remember to vote on election day (or before if you take an early ballot) and (c) Try not to vote for anyone who is a whirling amoral vortex of chaos. I would really really really appreciate it, and you would also probably get more books from me.

Those who stormed this Capitol and those who instigated and incited and those who called on them to do so” acted “not in service of America, but rather in service of one man” who “has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election…because he values power over principle, because he sees his own interests as more important than his country’s interests and America’s interests, and because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution,” Biden told the American people. He urged Americans not to succumb to autocracy, but to come together to defend our democracy, “to keep the promise of America alive,” and to protect what we stand for: “the right to vote, the right to govern ourselves, the right to determine our own destiny.”[

Biden’s presidency offered, to borrow a phrase from James Baldwin, “a means of buying time.” By removing the immediate threat of fascism, white nationalism, and extraordinary incompetence, the American people cleared a little bit of space to better fight the perennial threats of white supremacy, capitalism, and empire. Embracing such a sober analysis of president-elect Biden’s platform enables us to set aside any illusions about the current political moment. We recognize that the effects of Trump’s reign will not magically disappear in the wake of the 2020 election. We also understand that President Biden is incapable, and in some cases unwilling, to repair the damage wielded by the previous administration. With such reduced expectations, we have little reason to believe that the Biden presidency will properly attend to the systemic issues that preceded and, indeed, helped produce the Trump phenomenon. This analysis applies not only to domestic matters, but also to U.S. foreign policy.

The number of infections kept rising. By the end of March the US led the world in infections and deaths caused by the virus. What does Trump do? He refuses to wear a mask. He’s not going to look like a weakling. Testing? Overrated. It increases the number of infections. Why doesn’t the country have enough PPE and ventilators? Obama’s fault. The President is in charge, but if there’s any failure, it’s the fault of governors and mayors. He keeps repeating his mantra, “The situation is under control.” Pence’s team will whip the virus. Or was it Jared’s team? This virus isn’t as bad as the flu. America always wins. Doesn’t matter who or what the enemy is, we always triumph. We’re going to kill that little bug. Those people wearing masks are doing it to spite me, Donald J. Trump, the greatest President in history. “The situation is under control.” But the deaths keep mounting. It surpasses annual deaths from auto accidents, 34,000. It surpasses US deaths in the Vietnam War, 58,000. Next, it’s going to surpass total deaths of US soldiers in World War I, 116,500, and it’s not going to stop there.

Five years later, the legacy of Trump’s presidency and his promises can be addressed. There never was an infrastructure bill. Trump’s budgets consistently proposed cuts to the social programs he vowed not to touch. He did little to combat the opioid epidemic he promised to end, with deaths rising by the end of his tenure. The national debt Trump promised to erase has ballooned by almost $7.8 trillion. Trump’s failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with nothing remains the nadir of his public approval, surpassing even the days following his incitement of an armed attack on the Capitol building in an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss. Trump has the worst jobs record of any president since 1939, with more than three million lost. He is, in fact, the worst jobs president “god ever created,” despite inheriting an economy that had finally begun to boom in the later years of the Obama administration. The promises of better healthcare didn’t materialize, and the job and wage growth from the economy he inherited were crushed by the pandemic he refused to address. Those were not the promises Trump kept.

Trump is a complete package of the Founders’ greatest fears—delusions of royalty, appeals to the basest appetites of the polity, populism over small-r republicanism, and vulnerability to the blandishments of foreign powers who so obviously are welcome to corrupt him with gifts or flattery of his ravenous ego. To date, his actions have had the possible check of the 2020 election hanging over him, which has influenced him whether or not he admits it. Trump needs to win reelection to continue his nation-state level, god-tier grifting and to avoid prosecution. He thrives not on a competition of ideas but on the division of the country. Our parties and politics will follow him down, fighting a dirtier, more savage battle until we’ve forgotten what it means to share even the most common baseline with our fellow Americans. The cold civil war is warming by the day. He’s not the only centrifugal political force, but he’s the most powerful. This will only accelerate if he is reelected. There will be no end to his ambition and no check on his actions. He will conclude that he’s the winner who wins, and for him that will justify everything in his catalog of errors and terrors. We’ve learned there is no bottom with Trump, no level to which he won’t sink, no excess he won’t embrace.

Most presidents would instantly draw a sharp, clean line between campaign operations and the use of military force. This is the proverbial “wag the dog” scenario where a president in trouble seeks to bomb his way out of it by hitting a target overseas. With no adult supervision in the Pentagon—just who is the acting, provisional, temporary, staffing-agency, drop-in SECDEF this week?—no one should put it past Trump to escalate conflicts with China, Iran, or elsewhere when some part of his lizard brain tells him that some boom-boom will goose his polling numbers. Some of my former GOP colleagues will whisper, “How dare you accuse the American president of ever using the military for…” and then drop the subject, because no matter how deep they are in the Trump hole, they know who this man is and what he’ll do. Trump proves time and again that morals, laws, norms, traditions, rules, guidelines, recommendations, and tearful pleading from his staff mean nothing when he gets a power boner and decides he’s going to do something stupid. President Hold My Beer comes from the Modern Unitary Executive Power theory, where there are no limits, no laws, and no right and wrong. I’m not saying it’s a matter of if Trump will wag the dog in 2020. I’m saying that anyone who thinks he wouldn’t is a damn fool.

The year 2020 will mark the end of the U.S. presidency and the executive branch of the government. Let’s just say the American public will finally be fed up by then and leave it at that. The legislative branch will essentially absorb the responsibilities of the executive branch, with a streamlined body of elected representatives, an equal number from each state, forming the new legislature, which will be known simply as the Senate. The “party” system of Democrats, Republicans, Independents, et al., will un-complicate itself into Liberals and Conservatives, who will debate and vote on each proposed bill and law in nationally televised sessions. Requirements for Senate candidates will be stringent and continuously monitored. For example, senators will be prohibited from having any past or present salaried position with any company that has ever had or might ever have a professional or contractual connection to federal, state, or local government, and each senator must submit to random drug and alcohol testing throughout his or her term. The long-term effects of this reorganized government and closely examined body of lawmakers will be a return of legislative accountability and public trust, and state governments will follow suit no later than 2024 by becoming smaller mirror images of the national Senate.

If we analyze white supremacy from the philosophical lens of Star Wars, then it is all the Sith Lords, the Empire, and the First Order commanded by the Dark Side of the Force. It wants to dominate and impose its will on all galaxies, even those far, far away. Let’s just call this insidious force THE WHITENESS. The Whiteness’s ability to inspire fear and anger is so strong that it corrupted many well-​intentioned people, including people of color, to vote for an incompetent vulgarian in 2016 and 2020. It deludes many liberal and “moderate” whites into believing that they are the “good” ones who are committed to social justice as they talk about white privilege but never actually give up any of it. Still, they’ll have these discussions about racial equality with their white friends in establishments with white patrons from white neighborhoods—​without including the rest of us. The Whiteness has always played for all the marbles. It’s not interested in diplomacy, a representative government, free and fair elections, equitable pay, and a delicious buffet of meals from a multitude of countries. It needs a border wall, a Muslim Ban, and affirmative action for wealthy white students at Yale University. It’s a system, a structure, a paradigm, an ideology whose ultimate goal is domination and submission by any means necessary.

Trump’s shortcomings stood out particularly during emergencies. I remember briefing the president in the Oval Office on the projected storm track of an Atlantic hurricane. At first, he seemed to grasp the devastating magnitude of the Category 4 superstorm, until he opened his mouth. “Is that the direction they always spin?” the president asked me. “I’m sorry sir,” I responded, “I don’t understand.” “Hurricanes. Do they always spin like that?” He made a swirl in the air with his finger. “Counterclockwise?” I asked. He nodded. “Yes, Mr. President. It’s called the Coriolis effect. It’s the same reason toilet water spins the other direction in the Southern Hemisphere.” “Incredible,” Trump replied, squinting his eyes to look at the foam board presentation. We needed him to urge residents to evacuate from the Carolinas, where it looked like the storm would make landfall, but the president mused about another potential response. “You know, I was watching TV, and they interviewed a guy in a parking lot,” Trump leaned back and recounted. “He was wearing a red hat, a MAGA hat, and he said he was going to ‘ride it out.’ Isn’t that something? That’s what Trump supporters do. They’re tough. They ride it out. I think that’s what I’ll tell them to do.” Sometimes his irreverence could be funny, even charming. That day it wasn’t. Worried looks filled the room. A clever communications aide piped up. “Mr. President, I wouldn’t take that chance. This is going to be a pretty bad storm, and you don’t want to lose supporters in the Carolinas before the 2020 election.” The president thought about it for a moment. “That’s such a good point. We should urge the evacuations.” You couldn’t write such a stupid scene in a movie, but it always got a little worse.

Stay involved in democracy. Fight for democracy. It can be messy and frustrating, believe me, I know. I understand why many Americans are frustrated by government and feel like it doesn’t make a difference. It’s not perfect, and not supposed to be. It’s only as good as we are, as what we choose to care about, as the people we elect. We’re never going to get 100 percent of what we want right away. But what if we got some of it right away, and protected it, and kept moving forward until we got the rest? That’s what voting is about. It’s not about making things perfect; it’s about making things better. It’s about putting us on track so that a generation from now, we can look back and say, “things got better starting now.” Voting is about using the power we have and pooling it together to get a government that’s more concerned, more responsive, more focused on the things that matter. This precious system of self-government is how we’ve come this far. It’s worth our time and effort. It’s worth protecting. I was heartened to see voter turnout leap this year over where it usually is. That’s great. Now imagine if we did that every time? Imagine if sixty or seventy percent of us, or even more, voted every time. We’d have a government that looks more representative, that’s full of life experience that’s more representative, that understands what people are going through and how we can work together to make people’s lives better. We’d have a government full of people who could corral a pandemic, who believe in science and have a plan to protect this planet for our kids; who care about working Americans and have a plan to help folks start getting ahead; who believe in racial equality and are willing to do the work to bring us closer an America where no matter what we look like, where we come from, who we love, or how much money we’ve got, we can make it if we try. That’s not science fiction. It’s possible! We just have to keep at it. Dec. 2020

In the first day of the fighting, America’s new president, Joe Biden, called me. We had known each other for close to forty years, from the time we both came to Washington, he as a young senator from Delaware and I as deputy chief of Israel’s embassy to the United States. Four days after the 2020 elections Biden was declared president-elect. In the twenty-four hours after that declaration I followed twenty other world leaders in offering my congratulations. This elicited the ire of President Trump, who to this day believes that I was the first to do so. Now in our phone call President Biden said that America stood by Israel’s right to defend itself. But in the coming days, as the fighting escalated and the press reported on mounting Palestinian casualties, he began to push for a cease-fire. “Bibi, I gotta tell you, I’m coming under a lot of pressure back here,” he said. “This is not Scoop Jackson’s Democratic Party,” referring to the strikingly pro-Israel senator whose long tenure ended in the 1980s. “I’m getting squeezed here to put an end to this as soon as possible.” I responded that I was getting squeezed by millions of Israelis in underground shelters who rightfully expected me to knock the daylight out of the terrorists. For this the IDF needed a few more days to complete the destruction of the Hamas terrorist infrastructure. Our intelligence could pick off more prime targets, especially since Hamas’s underground bunkers were no longer secure. Biden agreed but resumed the pressure to end the fighting the next day. As I did earlier with Obama during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, I asked and got from Biden during Operation Guardian of the Walls a commitment to fund the replenishing of Iron Dome interceptors, a defensive weapon system that enjoyed broad bipartisan support in the US Congress. Each phone conversation with the president brought the end of the fighting closer. I could buy a little more time, but it was clear that we would not have the seemingly unlimited time we had in 2014. Nor did we need it. Within a little over a week, the IDF’s main battle goals were achieved, but I had one more objective in mind. With some luck and a bit more intelligence work, we might be able to pick off Mohammed Deif, the Hamas terrorist chief who was responsible for the murder of hundreds of Israelis and who had managed to evade all our previous efforts to target him.

Months later, Time magazine would run its now infamous article bragging about how it had been done. Without irony or shame, the magazine reported that “[t]here was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” creating “an extraordinary shadow effort” by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” to oppose Trump.112 Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. For Trump, these groups represented a powerful Washington and Democratic establishment that saw an unremarkable career politician like Biden as merely a vessel for protecting their self-interests. Accordingly, when Trump was asked whom he blames for the rigging of the 2020 election, he quickly responded, “Least of all Biden.” Time would, of course, disingenuously frame this effort as an attempt to “oppose Trump’s assault on democracy,” even as Time reporter Molly Ball noted this shadow campaign “touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.” The funding enabled the country’s sudden rush to mail-in balloting, which Ball described as “a revolution in how people vote.”113 The funding from Democratic donors to public election administrators was revolutionary. The Democrats’ network of nonprofit activist groups embedded into the nation’s electoral structure through generous grants from Democratic donors. They helped accomplish the Democrats’ vote-by-mail strategy from the inside of the election process. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys were paying the National Football League’s referee staff and conducting all of their support operations. No one would feel confident in games won by the Cowboys in such a scenario. Ball also reported that this shadowy cabal “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” And yet, Time magazine made this characterization months after it was revealed that the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s corrupt deal-making with Chinese and other foreign officials—deals that alleged direct involvement from Joe Biden, resulting in the reporting’s being overtly censored by social media—was substantially true. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would eventually tell Congress that censoring the New York Post and locking it out of its Twitter account over the story was “a mistake.” And the Hunter Biden story was hardly the only egregious mistake, to say nothing of the media’s willful dishonesty, in the 2020 election. Republicans read the Time article with horror and as an admission of guilt. It confirmed many voters’ suspicions that the election wasn’t entirely fair. Trump knew the article helped his case, calling it “the only good article I’ve read in Time magazine in a long time—that was actually just a piece of the truth because it was much deeper than that.

As it turned out, Mary Jo White and other attorneys for the Sacklers and Purdue had been quietly negotiating with the Trump administration for months. Inside the DOJ, the line prosecutors who had assembled both the civil and the criminal cases started to experience tremendous pressure from the political leadership to wrap up their investigations of Purdue and the Sacklers prior to the 2020 presidential election in November. A decision had been made at high levels of the Trump administration that this matter would be resolved quickly and with a soft touch. Some of the career attorneys at Justice were deeply unhappy with this move, so much so that they wrote confidential memos registering their objections, to preserve a record of what they believed to be a miscarriage of justice. One morning two weeks before the election, Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy attorney general for the Trump administration, convened a press conference in which he announced a “global resolution” of the federal investigations into Purdue and the Sacklers. The company was pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and to violate the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, as well as to two counts of conspiracy to violate the federal Anti-kickback Statute, Rosen announced. No executives would face individual charges. In fact, no individual executives were mentioned at all: it was as if the corporation had acted autonomously, like a driverless car. (In depositions related to Purdue’s bankruptcy which were held after the DOJ settlement, two former CEOs, John Stewart and Mark Timney, both declined to answer questions, invoking their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves.) Rosen touted the total value of the federal penalties against Purdue as “more than $8 billion.” And, in keeping with what had by now become a standard pattern, the press obligingly repeated that number in the headlines. Of course, anyone who was paying attention knew that the total value of Purdue’s cash and assets was only around $1 billion, and nobody was suggesting that the Sacklers would be on the hook to pay Purdue’s fines. So the $8 billion figure was misleading, much as the $10–$12 billion estimate of the value of the Sacklers’ settlement proposal had been misleading—an artificial number without any real practical meaning, designed chiefly to be reproduced in headlines. As for the Sacklers, Rosen announced that they had agreed to pay $225 million to resolve a separate civil charge that they had violated the False Claims Act. According to the investigation, Richard, David, Jonathan, Kathe, and Mortimer had “knowingly caused the submission of false and fraudulent claims to federal health care benefit programs” for opioids that “were prescribed for uses that were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary.” But there would be no criminal charges. In fact, according to a deposition of David Sackler, the Department of Justice concluded its investigation without so much as interviewing any member of the family. The authorities were so deferential toward the Sacklers that nobody had even bothered to question them.

November 22nd, 1963, was the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination. It was also the last day that America had a Catholic President until the election of Joe Biden in 2020. The gap will officially end with his inauguration in January 2021.

As a society we need to reflect on the events to date and realize that it is critical that a vision for the transformation of how we deliver public services is the top issue to be debated in all elections. This vision is needed at all levels of gov't. - Tom Golway

Black folks, it's ok to celebrate an end to the Trump Presidency while questioning the future of our nation. It's ok to celebrate Kamala Harris and still denounce white supremacy. It's ok to celebrate the work we contributed to this election while understanding that the fight is not over. It's ok to have a celebratory moment despite scattered emotions. We've always given ourselves permission to express hope & joy even during dark times.

By 2006, they had created an international exemplar of interconnectedness. Estonian software engineers had not only created Skype; they were helping to build a new society, where the only rituals requiring you to show up in person and present a document were marriage, divorce, and buying property. Everything else was online—government, banking, finance, insurance, communications, broadcast and print media, the balloting for elections. Wi-Fi was strong, ever present, and free. People began to call their homeland e-Estonia. They had created the first country whose political and social architectures were framed by an internet infrastructure—and perhaps the most technologically sophisticated nation on earth. In April 2007, the authorities in Tallinn decided to move the Bronze Soldier from its pedestal to a military cemetery. Estonian patriots found it offensive, Russian nationalists came to Estonia to rally around it, and the statue became a flash point of confrontation. Russia’s foreign affairs minister, Sergey Lavrov, called the decision disgusting; he warned of serious consequences for Estonia. An angry mob of Russians ran riot in the capital. In Moscow, young thugs laid siege to the Estonian embassy and forced it to shut down. And then Putin waged political warfare in a way that made Estonia’s strength its weakness.

The Ukrainian people would soon find out how ironclad these assurances were. The corrupt Viktor Yanukovych had returned to power in the last election, thanks to the efforts of the equally crooked political consultant Paul Manafort, whose office manager in Kyiv, Konstantin Kilimnik, had deep ties to Russian intelligence. Their paymasters included tycoons enmeshed with both organized crime and the Kremlin. Manafort collected many millions in fees from Yanukovych, laundering them in offshore accounts, and attracting the attention of the FBI, which began wiretapping him in a foreign intelligence investigation. Manafort also cut business deals with the country’s richest and most odious oligarchs, including Dmytro Firtash, a Putin crony and a prominent associate of Russian organized crime indicted on federal corruption charges in Chicago in October 2013.

RT had paid him $45,000 for his appearance. His colleagues had warned him that taking Kremlin gold would fatally compromise him, and they also thought that he didn’t care. (Flynn’s twenty-seven-day stint as Trump’s White House national security adviser ended after he lied to the FBI about his conversations with the Russians.) Stein said her campaign paid for her trip to Moscow, but RT paid her back. It ran more than one hundred stories on its American channel supporting her bid for the White House, amplifying her positions—“a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war”—which reliably corresponded with the party line of the Internet Research Agency. “She’s a Russian asset—I mean, totally,” Clinton said three years after the election, an intriguing and incendiary charge.

Probably it was the ways in which Bush expanded American military and intelligence alliances with dictators in nations such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Maybe it was when, in the first free and fair parliamentary election ever held by the Palestinian people, the militant Hamas party won and the United States refused to recognize the results. Surely it was the way the war in Iraq was going; the crusade to inject democracy into the Islamic world at gunpoint had gone haywire. His resplendent rhetoric aside, a truer expression of the way Bush saw the world came in the recounting of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who had been the top American commander in Iraq. As the war descended into chaos in the spring of 2004, the general wrote, Bush had shouted: “Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them!

Nations that had spent a thousand years under tyrants did not transform into free republics overnight because the United States wished them to do so. Elections alone did not a democracy make; they could bring strongmen to power and keep them there. Democracy, as it developed, could not be easily exported; it was not a commodity like soybeans or sneakers but an ideal that lived in the mind.

You can't cherry-pick the truth.

I sat in front of the TV hour after hour watching the news about how Trump was fucking up the government’s response to the spreading corona virus infection. Why didn’t he invoke the federal government’s power under the Defense Production Act as soon as the virus hit Washington State? All the experts knew how fast-spreading and dangerous this corona virus could be? Instead, he ignores the CDC’s advice and downplays the risk to the nation’s health. Not until mid April, when it’s way too late, does Trump finally use some of the government’s power under the DPA, and even then it’s a half-assed measure. Not enough testing, not enough ventilators, not enough PPE, not enough swabs. The number of infections kept rising. By the end of March the US led the world in infections and deaths caused by the virus. What does Trump do? He refuses to wear a mask. He’s not going to look like a weakling. Testing? Overrated. It increases the number of infections. Why doesn’t the country have enough PPE and ventilators? Obama’s fault. The President is in charge, but if there’s any failure, it’s the fault of governors and mayors. He keeps repeating his mantra, “The situation is under control.” Pence’s team will whip the virus. Or was it Jared’s team? This virus isn’t as bad as the flu. America always wins. Doesn’t matter who or what the enemy is, we always triumph. We’re going to kill that little bug. Those people wearing masks are doing it to spite me, Donald J. Trump, the greatest President in history. “The situation is under control.” But the deaths keep mounting. It surpasses annual deaths from auto accidents, 34,000. It surpasses US deaths in the Vietnam War, 58,000. Next, it’s going to surpass total deaths of US soldiers in World War I, 116,500, and it’s not going to stop there. What the fuck!? This is the United States of America! We’re supposed to have the best healthcare in the world, the best of everything. We’re Number One! Yeah, Trump made America great again. He said with him as President America would win so much we’d get tired of winning. Right on, man! We are Number One – in corona virus infections and deaths! After spending all day switching back and forth among the cable news networks on TV, I’d turn off the television and get on my laptop and rant on Twitter about what an idiot the President was. That was my life during the lockdown. From "Anarchist, Republican... Assassin

The 2020 USA election will give clear insight into how prevalent racism is in America.

A land acknowledgement or territorial acknowledgement is a formal statement, often spoken at the beginning of a public event, that it is taking place on land originally inhabited by or belonging to indigenous people. In Canada, land acknowledgements became popular after the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (which argued that the country's Indian residential school system had amounted to cultural genocide) and the election of liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau that same year.[2] By 2019, they were a regular practice at events including National Hockey League games, ballet performances and parliament meetings. Critics of land acknowledgements have described them as excesses of political correctness or expressed concerns that they amount to empty gestures that avoid actually addressing the issues of indigenous communities. Ensuring the factual accuracy of acknowledgments can be difficult due to problems like conflicting land claims or unrecorded land exchanges between indigenous groups. In the United States, the practice of land acknowledgements has been described as "catching on" as of 2020.

The greatest lesson was this: “What they do to us we cannot do to them,” said Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of Estonia from 2006 to 2016. “Liberal democracies with a free press and free and fair elections are at an asymmetric disadvantage.… The tools of their democratic and free speech can be used against them.

Larry Diamond, a prominent American political sociologist, wrote in January 2015. “There is a growing sense, both domestically and internationally, that democracy in the United States has not been functioning effectively.” Voter turnouts were sinking. The cost of election campaigns was crushing. The role of dark money in politics was surging. Public trust in government was fading. Comity, courtesy, the consideration that the other person might have a point, were dying. Conspiracy theories were trending. Talking heads were shouting. Everyone was arguing with everybody

The IRA’s Black front was by many measures its biggest. “No single group of Americans was targeted by IRA information operatives more than African-Americans,” the Senate Intelligence Committee found in 2019. “By far, race and related issues were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the country.” The IRA’s messages to the black community sometimes lobbied for Stein, but far more often argued for boycotting the election entirely. The voter suppression drive aimed at dozens of cities, especially communities where the killings of black citizens by white police officers created flash points for the Black Lives Matter movement. The Black front made an overwhelming effort to keep African Americans away from the ballot boxes with messages like “Our Votes Don’t Matter,” “Don’t Vote for Hillary Clinton,” and “Don’t Vote at All.” Its “Woke Blacks” Instagram account argued that “a particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils.

Meanwhile, the GloboCap propaganda has reached some new post-Orwellian level. After four long years of “RUSSIA HACKED THE ELECTION!” ... now, suddenly, “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ELECTION FRAUD IN THE USA!” That’s right, once again, millions of liberals, like that scene in 1984 where the Party switches official enemies right in the middle of the Hate-Week speech, have been ordered to radically revise their “reality,” and hysterically deny the existence of the very thing they have been hysterically alleging for four solid years ... and they are actually doing it!

If the altered demographic profile of the two parties in the 2016 election—almost perfectly replicated in the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections—is signaling America’s newest political realignment, it would be the first since the Nixon-Reagan elections of 1968 to 1980, roughly forty to fifty years earlier. By Walter Dean Burnham’s count (as we saw in Chapter 4), that would suggest America is now moving into its seventh party system.

If they order you to take a fucking vaccine, you will not ask what is in the vaccine, or start whining about the “potential side effects.” You will shut up and take the fucking vaccine. If they tell you to put a mask on your kid, you will put a fucking mask on your fucking kid.10 You will not go digging up Danish studies11 proving the pointlessness of putting masks on kids.12 If they tell you the Russians rigged the election, then the Russians rigged the fucking election. And, if four years later they turn around and tell you that rigging an election is impossible, then rigging an election is fucking impossible. It isn’t an invitation to debate. It is a GloboCap-verified fact-checked fact. You will stand (or kneel) in your designated, color-coded, social-distancing box and repeat this verified fact-checked fact, over and over, like a fucking parrot, or they will discover some new mutant variant of virus and put you back in fucking “lockdown.” They will do this until you get your mind right, or you can live the rest of your life on Zoom, or tweeting content that no one but the Internet censors will ever see into the digital void in your fucking pajamas.

He appeared to think that if he just said things over and over, he could will them into reality--and persuade his followers to believe them

Bannon pounds relentlessly at what he calls the Big Steal—the claim that Biden stole the 2020 election—while the Democrats call that the Big Lie. And it is a big lie, a dangerous one. But is it the Big Lie? Bigger, say, than trickle-down economics? Bigger than “tax cuts create jobs”? Bigger than infinite growth on a finite planet? Bigger than Thatcher’s double whammy of “There is no alternative” and “There is no such thing as society”? Bigger, for that matter, than Manifest Destiny, Terra Nullius, and the Doctrine of Discovery—the lies that form the basis of the United States, Canada, Australia, and every other settler colonial state? If we can stand to look at the Shadow Lands even for a moment, it becomes clear that we are ensnared in a web of life-annihilating lies and that whatever the Mirror World is on about this week is neither the biggest lie nor the one with the highest stakes. It’s entirely possible that Bannon and Wolf’s war on reality is just what happens when so many of the big lies that built the modern world visibly crumble. As the house collapses, some people choose to take flight into full-blown fantasy, sure—but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us who were also born and raised in that house are guardians of the truth.

The riots had led to more than 840 arrests, multiple deaths and injuries, investigations, and massive ongoing litigation, and had clearly been instigated by the perception that the 2020 election had been fraudulent.

The fact that as of this writing a significant percentage of the population refuses to accept the results of the November 2020 election, and a meaningful number of those with leadership roles in the Republican Party are encouraging them not to, is evidence that something is seriously amiss.

The 2020 election was the turning point for America’s epistemological crisis: the moment when the growing divide between people who believed in the old shared reality—based on reported facts and traditional authorities and institutions—and the people who believed in the new, alternative shared reality—the one concocted by Trump and the right-wing media ecosystem based on conspiracy theories, disinformation, wild conjecture, and flat-out falsehoods—became finally irreconcilable.

For Facebook, Jin wrote, cleaning up the messes it made meant that it needed to pay particular attention to its recommendation systems and features that encouraged bad behavior or were disproportionately prone to abuse. To avoid a disaster in the 2020 elections, he wrote, the company would either have to cut back on the features that amplified social problems or get better at plucking out the bad stuff. Facebook preferred the latter approach, Jin noted, but it was technically much harder to pull off. Besides, cleaning up Facebook and Instagram by targeting misbehavior raised inevitable concerns about censorship. No matter how much money Facebook spent on the effort, it still risked losing control of its platforms.

According to the results of a Public Religion Research Institute poll released in November 2021, among Republicans who say they believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, almost four in ten say that “true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save our country.

And boy do we feel threatened. By politics? Sure. More than half of Americans felt at least somewhat anxious about “the impact of politics on my daily life” in 2018, and a month before the 2020 election, nine out of ten registered voters, from both parties, thought a win by the other side would do “lasting harm” to our country.

The 2020 election was the most secure election in our nation's history. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar or grossly misinformed.

This, effectively, constituted a soft coupd’état.

There was no reason why the hearings over the 7 contested states could not have proceeded normally and the states could not have thus had their constitutionally mandated time allotted to publicly present and debate the causes of their respective election contestation. Instead, the process was cancelled and those who sought their constitutional guarantees to present their grievances were silenced and accused of crimes.

Thirdly, state and federal judges, including the Supreme Court, refused to hear the over fifty cases that were filed claiming evidence of voter and ballot fraud. All of these cases, except one, were dismissed on technicalities which meant that the evidence was not heard in its proper venue, a courtroom, where it might have been vetted either way.

The Supreme Court refused to hear the case of Texas vs Pennsylvania, a case in which Texas claimed that by unlawfully passing election laws, without the opportunity for the people of Pennsylvania to express their will through their legislative representatives, Pennsylvania had compromised the integrity of the voters of Texas by interfering in the election.

As an American, I acknowledge that this book is a reflection on the era associated with former president Donald Trump—especially with the shocking events after the November 2020 election, when avowed Christians, acting for explicitly Christian reasons, were at the forefront of those who sought to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as the 46th US president. Their dangerous attitudes were seen most strongly in those who violently breached the US capitol building on January 6, 2021.

It is a documented fact that the January 6th, 2021, US Capitol insurrection and the preliminary efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election contained a sizable conservative Christian presence, and had the acquiescence, ‘prayerful support,’ and fondest hopes of many Christians. This reveals the double-edged power of despair over the loss of a close election by their guy/their side, and a demonized reading of the Democratic Party that has swept through many conservative Christians. It was a counterrevolutionary effort to win this battle once and for all. It also reveals a substantial fringe of reactionary Christians slipping free of the constraints of our democratic system and the rule of law.

Donald Trump fired Chris Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security. Appointed by Trump himself, Krebs had spent two years working to harden America’s election systems from outside interference. In the aftermath of the election, Krebs repeatedly countered Trump’s false stolen-election claims. On November 12, Krebs had issued a joint statement with other state and federal election officials explaining that “the 2020 election was the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.

More thunder out of China, in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, came in early 2020. Although epidemiologists (not to mention biological weapons experts) will be studying this catastrophe long into the future; the mark of China’s authoritarian government and social-control systems is all over it. There is little doubt that China delayed, withheld, fabricated, and distorted information about the origin, timing, spread, and extent of the disease;28 suppressed dissent from physicians and others;29 hindered outside efforts by the World Health Organization and others to get accurate information; and engaged in active disinformation campaigns, actually trying to argue that the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease itself (COVID-19) did not originate in China.30 Ironically, some of the worst effects of China’s cover-up were visited on its closest allies. Iran, for example, looked to be one of the worst-hit countries, with satellite photos showing the excavation of burial pits for the expected victims of COVID-19.31 With 2020 being a presidential election year, it was inevitable that Trump’s performance in this global health emergency would become a campaign issue, which it did almost immediately. And there was plenty to criticize, starting with the Administration’s early, relentless assertion that the disease was “contained” and would have little or no economic effect. Larry Kudlow, Chairman of the National Economic Council, said, on February 25, “We have contained this. I won’t say [it’s] airtight, but it’s pretty close to airtight.”32 Market reactions to these kinds of assertions were decidedly negative, which may finally have woken the White House up to the seriousness of the problem.

Thirteen giant companies are leading contractors with US Customs and Borders Protection (CPB), including Elbit, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing. These firms are all weapons manufacturers, and for them it mattered little if their clients were the US military in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the Israeli government in its occupation.60 Between 2006 and 2018, CBP, the US Coast Guard, and ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) released more than 344,000 contracts for immigration services worth US$80.5 billion. The first drones tested and used by CBP over the US–Mexico border in 2004 were made by Elbit.61 This Israeli company liked the Trump administration and donated to his re-election campaign in the 2020 presidential election.

it is clear that Republicans are 10 to 15 years behind the Democrats’ advanced strategies and tactics on how to win an election. That was the case in 2018, 2020, and 2022. We saw it play out yet again in elections across select states in 2023. Despite the terrible economy, widespread cultural backlash to “woke” policies, a literal invasion of illegal migrants at our southern border, a disastrous and humiliating defeat and withdrawal of the U.S. military forces from Afghanistan, two massive foreign conflicts, runaway inflation, and the bottomless pit of national debt, Election Day 2023 was a wipeout for Republicans and a big win for Democrats.

What kind of legislative bodies did the Great Compromise create? After the 2020 census, California, the largest state, with nearly 40 million residents, sent 52 members to the House. The 590,000 residents of Wyoming, by contrast, rate only a single representative, yet Wyoming and California both elect two senators. This lopsided equation gives states with small populations a big advantage in the Senate. The 10 states containing half the people in the United States are represented by 239 of the 435 members to the House, but only 20 senators. The forty states with the other half of the population have eighty senators.

Allegations that find favor in the public sphere of gossip and innuendo cannot be a substitute for earnest pleadings and procedure in federal court. They most certainly cannot be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.” Another said, “[C]alling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.” A