There’s no shortage of nincompoops buying into the legitimacy of the Biden presidency and the bullshit narrative about “an insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol building on January 6th. I’m sure they’re quite content in their ignorance — they refuse to even consider the evidence available regarding the lack of ballot integrity in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Texas, and elsewhere, and they continue to pretend the January 6th debacle was a real threat to our democracy, rather than a largely peaceful group of wide-eyed goofballs who were mostly waved through the barricades by the Capitol Police.

One of the best summaries I’ve read about the attitudes of those who feel disenfranchised by the 2020 election is this series of tweets by the of the MartyrMade podcast, Darryl Cooper. His tweets are also discussed here by Tyler O’Neil. It is Cooper’s “general theory” on the perspective of “Boomer tier” Trump supporters, as he calls them. Last year’s fraudulent election was only the culmination of events going back to the investigation of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. The whole thread is interesting, but you must get past a little “soft cover” at the start that might have been intended to distract the speech police at Twitter. I’ll try to summarize here:

• The intelligence community spied on the Trump campaign in 2016, and that’s a major transgression! The DNC was involved too, actually paying for fabricated evidence. James Comey falsely denied any knowledge of that fact. John Brennan and Adam Schiff also lied shamelessly in this affair.
• By the time Trump supporters realized all the noise was fake, they naively expected justice to be served. But no, and so their faith in certain institutions was shaken.
• The gaslighting continued, and the whole thing consumed energy and had a chilling effect on participation in the Trump Administration. This was an active kind of subversion crossing “all institutional boundaries”.
• The participation of the press was the poison icing on the cake. The press is now viewed by much of the country as a propaganda arm of “The Regime”.
• Many aren’t sure whether the election was fixed, but if it was, they know they’d be lied to about it. 

• Voting procedures in many jurisdictions were changed using COVID as a pretext. 
• The press smoke-screened the Biden, Inc. scandals, including evidence of pay-for-play and incredibly lurid information on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Instead, the press played-up gossip about Trump. 
• Trump people rightly felt betrayed by the very institutions they’ve always trusted, but they voted in record numbers, and we’re not convinced all were counted.
• “But when the four critical swing states went dark at midnight, they knew.”
• Conspiracy theories abounded, but media and tech shut down discussion of real anomalies. Had the election gone Trump’s way, they would have cried foul! 
• The courts were handcuffed by fear of political violence and retribution.

I agree with substantially all of Cooper’s thread. Our experience since Donald Trump became an active politician has been disillusioning in several respects: it has shown how flimsy our constitutional rights and our republic are when the wrong actors come to dominate certain institutions. It also shows how malleable are the “facts” that we are asked to accept by these actors. We are seemingly helpless to defend the rule of law, the Constitution, and social norms when an intransigent minority decides it can simply ignore them. This is how tyranny is borne.

Election integrity is not an outlandish objective. Neither is demanding fair treatment of diverse viewpoints from social media, Big Tech, and educational institutions. And neither is it outlandish to demand safe communities and adequate police protection; that our borders be enforced; that our public health officials speak honestly about risks; and that we should never, under any circumstances, be judged, punished, or rewarded based on the color of our skin. These are just a few of the things we must demand, and never take “no” for an answer.

This post also appears at The American Reveille (or will soon).