Month: October 2020
How to Protect Oneself against the “Conspiracy Theorist in Chief”
- Wear a Mask
Wear a mask, please, and don’t go to any type of super spreader events like the ones the “Conspiracy Theorist in Chief” has recently been holding. Being mask-less, stupidly defiant, antagonistic and condescendingly inconsiderate of the health of others doesn’t really help in this fight against the pandemic. What the latter behavior will do, however, is cause the cases and the deaths to spike again.
- Vote by Mail
Please vote by mail if at all possible. Instances of voter fraud are less than 0.01%. Study after study held by Republicans, Democrats and independents, all come up with this same similar percentage of cases. And even if that percentage were higher, denying people their right to vote is not the way to properly address the issue. Only a despot would think that.
- Use Common Sense
Lastly, use common sense. It also wouldn’t hurt to consider obtaining your news from more than one source, cross-checking the facts, etc. And for Pete’s sake, don’t ever follow the advice of the “Conspiracy Theorist in Chief.” It could either kill you, like it did Herman Cain, or get you thrown into jail.
Conspiracy Theorist in Chief
He is the “Conspiracy Theorist in Chief.” From Birther Stories to Deep State delusions to dangerous hallucinations about Election Fraud to hordes of imaginary caravanning terrorists at the border to his support of QAnon’s insane theory about a secret cabal of leading Democrats involved in a nefarious network of human trafficking, he is the king of misinformation and other flights of dangerously un-American despotic fantasies. As confirmed by his doctors in the white suits, this makes him uniquely qualified to identify elephants, but, leaving him without much ability to identify anything ever having to do with the truth, especially when it comes to COVID-19 (“Did I tell you, Bob, how dangerous this disease was in February, much deadlier than the flu but I’m down playing it because, you know, I don’t want people to panic? Plus, I like calling things that are the truth a hoax”).
Detecting Fraud
Thirty one instances of suspected voter fraud out of one billion votes from 2000 – 2014. Something needs to be done about this according to fringe elements of the political spectrum. To them, that fraction of a percentage of probable voter fraud cases is way too high. For all you who are partial to statistical numbers: 0.0000031% of those votes are suspected of being fraudulent. The study was conducted by Loyola Law School Professor, Justin Levitt. Levitt is also the author of an earlier study on the same subject entitled, “The Truth about Voter Fraud.”
Similar studies confirm these results including one conducted by the Bush II administration. And the few cases that do exist may surprise you regarding who is committing these crimes. For example, a truly egregious, well publicized instance of voter fraud was committed in 2018 by Republicans in North Carolina. To increase the irony, it involved absentee voting. And then, just recently, the Republican Party in California somehow believes that they are exempt from State laws protecting registered voters against voter fraud when they decided to sponsor ballot boxes that are not owned or officially sanctioned by the State of California.
The California Republican Party is misleading voters into believing that the Republican operated drop boxes are official ballot boxes. The leaders of any other group of people involved in similar nefarious activity would be automatically hauled off to jail without a second thought since this action is typically regarded as a felony in California. Lastly, the President himself is encouraging his supporters to vote twice which is also a felony. It’s disturbing to think that a presumably respected long standing national Political Party would decide that turning to a life of crime is the only way it can win elections. It seems the ones making the most noise about voter fraud are the ones who are most often committing it.
Traditionally, the majority of absentee voters have been Republicans (including the President and the administration’s own Press Secretary—talk about Black Kettle complexes). So, if anything, voter fraud would have favored the Republicans not the Democrats if there were any merit to this erroneous claim. The assertion that there is rampant voter fraud being made by President Trump has no basis in fact. At 0.0000031%, voter fraud is virtually non-existent. The claim made by the President is itself fraudulent, dishonest and irresponsible.
Why would the President risk upsetting or alienating Republican voters and, really, all voters, by threatening to take their absentee voting rights away? Because Trump wants to give his Base something to rally behind and to hate. It’s what all demagogues do. It’s what all despicable people do who have no ethics, no morals to guide them and no integrity. If there’s nothing to hate, they’ll invent something to hate. It also sets the stage for Trump’s attempt to discredit the election results should he lose the election. This is something only a despot would do.
Even if voter fraud was rampant instead of the incredibly miniscule percentage of 0.0000031%, why would you throw the baby out with the bathwater? If you were truly concerned about election fraud, why not address the voter fraud in productive ways that improve the security of voting by mail? That way it would increase the confidence in the legitimacy of those votes. If you found the majority of voter fraud cases occurred at Polling Places, would that cause you to outlaw Polling Places? Such an action would be absurd and a deliberate attempt at destroying our right to self-rule.
We are in the middle of a pandemic that Trump initially labeled a hoax, a pandemic Trump failed to take seriously and then failed to do anything about for months. As a consequence, local governments were forced to take extreme measures absent any real leadership from the Federal government. It was a disease that Trump knew how deadly it was at the time he was calling it a hoax. This revelation caught on tape by Bob Woodward shows the dishonesty of a man who is willing to sacrifice the lives of the people of his own country in favor of what he deems to be his own favorable political fortunes. The destructive suggestion that voters should physically go to the polls to expose themselves to the very real chance that they could contract a deadly disease, a disease causing hundreds of thousands of deaths here in the United States, when there are more reasonable and safer ways of voting available to us is probably the single most irresponsible action a President has ever made in our lifetimes. This point especially resonates when you consider the President himself caught COVID-19 as a result of his own irresponsible recklessness.
For this reason and many other equally disturbing reasons, Trump is a dangerous threat to our democracy and to our country in general. Trump is especially dangerous when he advocates against our right to vote. No respectable American President dedicated to self-rule would ever advocate such a position.
Only a totalitarian leaning despot afraid of losing power would argue that your right to vote in the manner prescribed by the laws of your State should be taken away from you. If that’s not an offensive affront to our democracy, I do not know what is. A President who is against voting safely and securely should make you pause to reflect upon the stark possibility that we are truly a democracy in jeopardy. But it’s not in jeopardy because of voter fraud. It’s in jeopardy because of a different kind of fraud. And that fraud is the current occupant living in the White House.
References:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47323556
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL6ixYa1hUY
https://www.factcheck.org/2016/10/trumps-bogus-voter-fraud-claims/
https://www.politifact.com/article/2016/dec/17/fact-checking-claims-voter-fraud-2016/
https://www.lls.edu/faculty/facultylistl-r/justinlevitt/
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/The%20Truth%20About%20Voter%20Fraud.pdf
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/Fool+me+once%2c+shame+on+you%3b+fool+me+twice%2c+shame+on+me
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/truth-about-voter-fraud
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ca-gop-ballot-drop-boxes/
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/12/california-gop-says-it-owns-unofficial-ballot-drop-boxes.html
The Polarity Resistance 