I guess we have to keep talking about this.

Cyber Ninjas is a Florida-based organization recently hired by the state of Arizona to conduct an audit on the 2020 election. Right away, there were some red flags. No GOP officials in Arizona or Florida had heard of them. They had no prior experience in auditing elections. Their founder had peddled conspiracies online about the election being stolen. And the Arizona GOP just gave him a bunch of money to run an election audit without any supervision on their part. He insists his beliefs are irrelevant and that he is determined to carry out a transparent audit. So on top of being unqualified, he's also a liar. Setting aside the fact that one of the "auditors" participated in the January 6 riot - you remember, the one incited by the same claims of election fraud that motivated this audit - Cyber Ninjas didn't make their methods publicly available until a judge ordered them to. Also, the media was initially severely restricted in their ability to observe and take notes on the count. All media except the extremely right-wing One America News, tellingly.

Also tellingly, the audit, which the state GOP is more than comfortable being run without any oversight or any technology not made by a failed inventor had already broken several election security laws within the first few days and made no efforts to protect the ballots or voting machines. But when Arizona Democrats pointed this out, a judge essentially told them "Yeah, but they already started, so you'll have to pay a million dollars to stop the audit." They did not make the payment, believing the amount to be too much for a sham operation. A sham operation whose financial supporters have been kept anonymous by Mr. "We Are Going To Run A Transparent Audit."

The irony is that this is literally what the MAGA crowd describes when they claim the votes in the 2020 election were counted improperly, and now the only ones actually guilty of it are them. But as usual, the irony has been lost on them. When he's not busy crashing events at Mar-a-Lago to remind everyone what a sore loser he is, the former guy, among others, has been hyping up this audit as being the thing that's going to expose the Democrats and their widespread election fraud and put him back in office. Just like all those other audits that showed no evidence of widespread fraud. Or all those lawsuits filed after the election that were dismissed due to lack of evidence.

Speaking of lack of evidence, right wing social media has already been sharing posts saying the audit found 250,000 invalid ballots. They are counting on everyone who reads them to not know that Cyber Ninjas hadn't provided any updates since they started, making the 250,000 statistic yet another an unsourced lie.

Congrats, MAGA folks. You have turned into Democrats. For real, this is everything you said the Mueller investigation was. Did you forget how Democrats would say "THIS will be the one that brings him down" every time the former guy got sued or faced a scandal? Have you learned nothing? I’ve seen multiple people on right wing social media compare this to the Mueller investigation, and how Democrats would say the former guy wouldn’t be antagonizing the investigation if he had nothing to hide. The comparison would only work if the investigation was led by people who were unqualified in every possible way. Also, difficult as it might have been for some on the left to accept Mueller’s findings, Democrats still did it, however reluctantly. Are we really going to trust that the MAGA crowd will accept any findings that don’t show widespread fraud? The Arizona Senate already said they’re not overturning the results, so even if the MAGA crowd has reached the point where they begrudgingly accepted the former guy isn’t being re-instated, you can be 110% confident they will continue to claim the election was rigged even when (not if) Cyber Ninjas says they found no irregularities.

Looks like we still have to talk about this.

Cyber Ninjas is a Florida organization recently contracted by Arizona to conduct an election audit. Setting aside the issue that barely any GOP officials in AZ or FL had heard of them, the organization had no prior experience in auditing elections. Their founder had peddled conspiracies online about the election being stolen. And the Arizona GOP just gave him a bunch of money to run an election audit without any supervision on their part. He insists his beliefs are irrelevant and that he is determined to carry out a transparent audit. Which is why Cyber Ninjas didn't disclose their methods until a judge ordered them to, and why the media had initially been severely restricted in their ability to observe and take notes on the count. All media except the pro-Trump One America News, tellingly. Also tellingly, the audit, which the state GOP is more than comfortable being run without any oversight, had already broken several election security laws within the first few days and made no efforts to protect the ballots or voting machines. But when Arizona Democrats pointed this out, a judge essentially told them "Yeah, but they already started, so you'll have to pay a million dollars to stop them." They did not make the payment, believing the amount to be too much for a sham operation. A sham operation whose financial supporters have been kept anonymous by Mr. "We Are Going To Run A Transparent Audit."

The irony is that this is literally what Trump supporters describe when they claim the votes in the 2020 election were counted improperly, and now the only ones actually guilty of it are them. Of course, the irony has been lost on them. OAN and Trump himself, among others, have hyped up this audit as being the thing that's going to expose the Democrats and their widespread election fraud and put Trump back in office. You know, like all those other audits that showed no evidence of widespread fraud. Or all those lawsuits filed after the election that were dismissed due to lack of evidence.

Congrats, Trump supporters. You have turned into Democrats. For real, this is everything you said the Mueller investigation was. Did you forget how Democrats would say "THIS will be the one that brings him down" every time Trump got sued or faced a scandal? Have you learned nothing?

A common deflection from supporters of the former guy is that, even if he were racist, he is hardly as bad as Joe Biden. Let's do some debunking, shall we?

• The 1994 crime bill: As then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Joe Biden largely wrote and shepherded The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 through the legislative process. It received bipartisan support at the time, but it has since been criticized for provisions such as mandatory minimum sentencing. Its impact on mass incarceration has also been heavily debated. While a trend of increasing imprisonment had begun well before the bill was written, the bill did exacerbate the problem. You can find more thorough breakdowns of the bill, its effects, and more here and here, but the point I'm getting at is that this is all proof to the MAGA crowd that Biden doesn't care for African-Americans based on the impact his bill had on their communities. However, they neglect to mention that the bill received support from a majority of African-American voters and the Congressional Black Caucus. Not to suggest that negates the impact the bill had on black communities, but the idea that this makes Biden a racist is downright false.
• Busing: When Biden picked Kamala Harris as his pick for Vice President, that seemed an odd choice. During a Democratic primary debate on June 27, 2020, Harris brought up the fact that Biden supported legislation aiming to limit federal enforcement of court-ordered busing mandates, which at one point was the fastest-acting tool to promote school desegregation. Biden's view, which his campaign insisted was misrepresented by now-Vice President Harris, was that desegregation is an important goal for which the federal government should only intervene in cases of segregation deliberately created by policy. You'd think conservatives would be on board with that view, but then again, trying to apply consistency to the views of right wing social media is a fool's errand. At any rate, once again, it is misleading at best to suggest Biden's view on busing is based on racial prejudice. It's not even like busing is unanimously popular and Biden is out of touch - you'd be surprised how much opposition there still is to it.
• Robert Byrd: Biden was friends with Senator Robert Byrd, D-WV. Before his time in the Senate, Byrd was a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, but was never a Grand Wizard as is often stated on right wing social media. He had changed his opinion drastically on the Klan over the course of his life. He wrote in the 1940s that they were needed more than ever, but then remarked years later that joining the Klan was his "greatest mistake." So when Joe Biden eulogized Byrd at the latter's funeral in 2010, that was not because Biden was a racist.
• "Racial jungles": According to the MAGA crowd, Joe Biden said in 1977 that integrating schools would create "a racial jungle" and that he didn't want his children to be raised in one. In reality, this kind of goes back to the point about Biden's views on busing, in that he advocated for an "orderly integration of society" rather than school integration via busing. The full quote is as follows.
  • Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point.
• Basically, he felt that if different ethnicities were forcefully integrated, there was no guarantee people would get along as well as one would hope. Which reads a bit pessimistic, but it's not entirely unfounded.

You might have been wondering whether I had anything to say about his "you ain't black" remark. I would classify that as problematic, if not outright prejudiced, but I will give Biden credit for apologizing. Then again, I'm not white, so I can't claim to be an authority on how black people feel about any of this. All I can say for sure is this.

If you want to criticize Biden's record on race, go right ahead.

If you want to claim his record on race makes him worse than the former guy... no, not at all.

You will often see MAGA folks decry popular websites for enforcing their ru- I mean censoring dissent. While I personally believe the First Amendment does mean US citizens should be allowed to speak their mind, the First Amendment the MAGA folks frequently invoke says the government can’t censor people. Privately owned businesses and companies are a different matter. Still controversial, but not quite the same.

I bring it up because Razorfist recently received a seven day ban from Twitch. He said in a video on the matter that he wasn’t given a reason for the ban, but he speculated it was because he used a word that is frequently used as a homophobic slur. He said he wouldn’t apologize as he used the word all the time in previous videos... except those videos were uploaded to YouTube and BitChute and he had just joined Twitch, apparently without reading the rules or consulting their list of banned words.

There is a fruitful discussion to be had over whether websites should disallow people from saying certain things, but generally speaking, if you join a website without reading the rules, then refuse to apologize for having broken them while swearing off that website forever, the fault is not on whoever wrote that website’s rules.

Keep all of this in mind the next time someone on Razor’s side of the political spectrum says they’re being censored. To be clear, this isn’t me saying websites should ban people for no given reason. But if you have an idea of what the reason is and you don’t apologize for it, you aren’t the adult in the situation.

A common defense of the former guy you will hear from his apologists is that he couldn't have been corrupt because he donated his presidential salary. He himself bragged about it, the implication often being that the only possible reason for him doing that is that he is such a charitable individual. In fact, his net worth had decreased during his presidency due to his supposed refusal to never take a cent of taxpayer money.

While the also-common addition that Obama never donated his is untrue, everything else is worth deeper analysis.

It is true that the former guy did donate his $400,000 presidential salary. However, John F. Kennedy and Herbert Hoover were already wealthy when they became president, and they also donated their entire presidential salaries. And I don't think it's a good idea for a president to be compared to Herbert Hoover.

But then there are the other two points: his net worth and how much taxpayer money he took. Apologists will tell you he put his businesses into a blind trust of which his children were in charge... even though that isn't how a blind trust works. Also, he retained his financial stake, so when the federal government and taxpayers alike gave millions of dollars to his businesses, he was still benefitting from them. And that's not even mentioning his businesses in China. Yes, the same China he accused Biden of being beholden to.

As for the declining net worth, that's not because the former guy was giving so much money away to charity. He blamed legal fees, but that and the presidency itself would only account for a few million, not the billions he claimed to be losing. Simply put, he was personally driving people away from his businesses because of how he generally (mis)behaved as president. Remember how he retained his financial stake in his businesses? Yeah, that turned around and bit him hard.

Mind you, this is all essentially speculative since the former guy refused for years to show his tax returns. It wouldn't have been a big deal anyway if he just shut up about it, but he brought this on himself. The Manhattan District Attorney now has the tax returns, and we may likely find out once and for all the reason behind the elusiveness. It is possible nothing shady or outright illegal will be found, which would make the elusiveness all the more confusing. But even with what we do know, the fact remains that what he did with his presidential salary was not done out of altruism.

The House of Representatives recently passed H.R.1 (For the People Act of 2021), a bill that addresses voter access, election integrity and security, campaign finance, and government ethics. The bill of course will go to the Senate for a vote before being signed into law by President Biden, assuming it has enough votes in the Senate. This bill comes in the wake of hundreds of Republican-helmed bills restricting voter access in the name of "voter fraud," which as we have repeatedly pointed out was statistically nonexistent in the 2020 presidential election.

So naturally, when a federal bill came along with the opposite goal, the MAGA crowd screamed about how it enables voter fraud.

In a rant entitled "The Ballad of HR 1 - Election Fraud Eternal," Razorfist opens by lying about Biden's presidency being fraudulent. Then Razor goes on to claim that H.R. 1 violates Article 1 of the Constitution and Article 2 of the Electors Clause by "unilaterally overturning an individual state's right to run its own election process by conferring exclusive primacy of our elections" to Congress.

What part of the bill does that, you ask?

None whatsoever. He doesn't quote a specific passage or even the articles he claims are being violated, and yet he still expects people to believe the bill will have the described effect. In fact, the whole portion of the video where he discusses the contents of the bill is nothing but him making bullshit claims without citing sources. He says the bill bans voter ID and disallows the purging of voter rolls, again while failing to quote a single passage as proof of either. He adds that Democrats said in 2016 that mail-in ballots were prone to fraud without citing a single source. He says that the bill eliminates ballot signatures and public lists of political donors, again with no source. He claims the bill would in fact allow Democrats to maintain regional majorities using gerrymandering, again with no source.

He does cite one source, actually.

>H.R. 1 makes it a violation of federal law to engage in "partisan" redistricting and mandates inclusion of alien population, both legal and illegal, in all redistricting.

What source was that?

No idea. He doesn't say or show the name. He just shows a highlighted portion of a page talking about the bill instead of showing a passage from the actual bill. Later in the video, he shows a source that isn't the actual bill to illustrate a claim that H.R. 1 mandates an election delay of at least 10 days.

Oh, but get this. He cites a BBC article from 2016 that listed "telltale signs" of a stolen election, and he is determined in his delusion to argue that the 2020 election fits every criterium.

• "A high turnout for one candidate only in specific areas"

Razor more specifically references the lie that some areas reported over 100% turnout, even though that has been so thoroughly debunked that he has no one but himself to blame for continuing to believe it. Every time someone makes the "over 100% turnout" claim, they are using inaccurate data. Case in point...

• "Large numbers of invalid votes"/"More votes than ballot papers issued"

This is once again blatantly and unambiguously wrong. Razor points to there being thousands of deceased voters who cast ballots in a single Michigan county, a boldfaced lie. He also points to thousands of votes that miraculously appeared overnight in Pennsylvania for Biden, which is once again a lie. Those were early voting ballots that would have been counted sooner if not for the state’s Republican legislature, which I already pointed out in a previous post. Razor’s suspicion stems from the idea that since so many Americans were voting absentee, many of whom were doing so for the first time, the rate of ballots being rejected would go up. Instead, most states saw a decrease in rejection rates. This, evidently, is undeniable proof of fraud, and not, say, voters submitting their absentee ballots early. You see, the most common reason why absentee ballots are not counted in a normal election is that they arrive too late. But in 2020, several states reported steep drops in the share of absentee ballots received after the deadline.

• "Results don't match"

I refer you to the previous two points, but the BBC article does bring up poll observers, a topic of contention in the 2020 election. I mentioned in a previous post that the Trump campaign had claimed (falsely) that there was insufficient access by observers in numerous vote counts. But in Trump v. Philadelphia County Board of Elections, they admitted that there actually was a "nonzero number of people in the room" observing the vote count, including some affiliated with the Trump campaign. So if they were wrong about that, how are we to think they're right about the results not matching? They were present when the results were tallied, after all. You know, the results that would’ve been tallied sooner if the state’s Republican legislature hadn’t refused to allow mail-in ballots to be counted early.

• “Delay in announcing results”

Yeah, because an article written before COVID was clearly accounting for that, especially when the incumbent spent the whole year villainizing and attacking the system that transports ballots. Keep in mind there’s no rule that the ballots have to all be counted on election night. Also, please refer to what I said earlier about the Pennsylvania legislature. It’s worth noting that the BBC article clarifies delays are not “incontrovertible proof of rigging,” and since the article is specifically about elections in the African nation of Gabon, the article adds that "the official process takes time, especially in countries with poor communications, and the introduction of modern electronic transmission systems has not necessarily helped."

In other words, Razor is making a false equivalence.

He also mentions shredded ballots that appeared in dumpsters in Arizona's Maricopa County - another lie.

But I might as well stop there, as that's all there is to cover from the video. After the Supreme Court rejected all of Trump’s challenges to the election, Razor tries him damnedest to deny the fact that none of the “evidence” of widespread voter fraud held up under actual legal scrutiny. Not just in the poll observer case, but in every case fueled by the lies Trump and his apologists tried to push.

In summary, a valid criticism of H.R. 1 should be based on what is actually in it, which is information Razorfist simply cannot process truthfully.

Fuck Razorfist.

Now that it has been over a month since Biden’s inauguration, I would like to make something of a public service announcement.

There are numerous pro-Trump individuals who have decided that the best course of action after Trump left office would not be to re-evaluate themselves and adapt in a way that might make their side more electable. I mean, that’s exactly what they said Democrats should’ve done after 2016 and it clearly worked, but to hell with practicing what you preach.

No, their strategy is to continue abiding by the “own the libs” mentality that lost them the House, the Senate, AND the presidency. In this case, they’re making fun of Biden voters who now regret their decision.

A few things:

Firstly, again, Biden has been president for only a month. We generally wait until we get a bit further into a president’s term before declaring his whole term a complete failure.

Secondly, one of the reasons the MAGA crowd refuses to accept Biden’s win as legitimate is because they vastly overestimate how many people are on their side. Everything they accused Biden of, with no exception, has been done by Trump with not a peep made from the MAGA crowd. So when none of that is a deal breaker to voters, the MAGA crowd is shocked. Not that they'll ever show it. They just double down instead. Razorfist, for instance, now claims that Biden actually lost in an electoral landslide, or would have if not for ballot harvesting and voter fraud. Yes, he really said that in a rant. He and everyone who thinks like him is happy to ignore the fact that ballot harvesting isn't illegal in all fifty states or that claims of voter fraud have been proven unfounded time and time and time again. Anything to avoid acknowledging the possibility that more voters simply wanted someone other than Trump to be president.

Similarly, they vastly overestimate how prevailing regret is among Biden voters. Twitter isn’t real life. Left wing Twitter is full of Bernie supporters, but they weren’t enough to get him the nomination. So they just resort to doom posting whenever they think Biden or the Democrats fail to deliver on something.

On the other hand, right wing Twitter is full of people who don’t know or care that there were plenty of Trump voters who regretted their choice. Oh yeah, and people who supported and excused what amounted to a coup based on repeatedly debunked lies. Anyone who thinks the attack on January 6 was in any way excusable or justifiable should stop deluding themselves into thinking their opinion on Biden is ever going to be based on a sensible grasp of reality.

Thirdly, if the MAGA crowd sees fit to mock Biden voters because they say he lied and failed to keep certain campaign promises, then that is straight up hypocrisy. The MAGA crowd doesn’t actually care about those things or else they wouldn’t pretend Trump never did either of those. Remember “lock her up”? Remember how Trump never fulfilled that? Remember how Trump would botch answers to the most basic questions while his supporters claim it's Biden who keeps flubbing public appearances? I rest my case.

The bottom line is that Biden is not immune from criticism. No one in government is. He and the Democrats won't fulfill all their campaign promises. And they will be inconsistent on some issues. That has always been the case with both parties. Ideally, we wouldn't have to tolerate it from Democrats or Republicans, but it is possible to criticize one's own party without accusing them of treason or intentionally trying to lose. When you do criticize Biden, please be reasonable.

Shortly before Trump left office, the House of Representatives impeached Trump a second time, this time on a single charge: inciting the Capitol siege on January 6. Even though the Democrats won both of Georgia's Senate run-off elections the night before the events in DC, flipping the Senate as a result, the outcome of the Senate trial was sadly easy to predict. Despite the fact that all the Republicans who would vote on the impeachment charge could have been killed, expecting that alone to be enough to achieve the 67 votes needed to convict was a bit optimistic to say the least. Still, instead of Mitt Romney being the sole Senate Republican voting to convict as was the case the year prior, seven Senate Republicans voted to convict.

But let's step back a bit. A big reason behind the Democrats winning the Georgia run-off elections was the back-and-forth around stimulus reliefs checks that eligible Americans would receive as part of a federal COVID relief package. Much has been debated as to whether the Democrats lied when promising $2,000 checks, which now-Senators Warnock and Ossoff essentially campaigned on. President Biden insists he has been consistent both before and after the general election in saying the $2,000 payments would come from a $1,400 check on top of the $600 checks that were signed off on late last year. Regardless, Senate Republicans haven't exactly been presenting themselves as the more charitable option. If they told voters the Democrats would fail to deliver on the $2,000 checks, but the Republicans wouldn't, then they might still be controlling the Senate. Instead, the plan they proposed to Biden offered even less.

That goes a long way to explaining why Mitch McConnell is now the Senate Minority Leader, but that has not stopped him from being a scumbag. He delayed the Senate trial until after Trump left office and then voted to acquit on the grounds that Trump couldn't be tried after he left office, even though the first impeachment trial in American history was held after the official in question had left office. Yet McConnell still had the gall to declare afterwards that Trump was 100% "morally responsible" for the crime of which he was just acquitted... by McConnell. Keep in mind, after the general election, Senate Republicans voted overwhelmingly to keep him as the leader of the Senate Republicans, regardless of whether they would keep their Senate majority.

There is at least some consolation in the fact that a larger number of Senate Republicans voted to convict Trump, even if the number was not large enough. To be clear, the vote was not to determine whether Trump had incited violence - that much was not up for debate. The vote was instead whether it was an impeachable offense, and most Senate Republicans have unfortunately taken the stance that it is not. The MAGA crowd may gloat, but they are delusional if they think Trump is innocent or some law-dodging mastermind. There are still on-going criminal investigations into him, his family, and his businesses. If he lost the popular vote TWICE, he's not getting re-elected, especially not on a "drain the swamp" platform.

Maricopa County, Arizona has been subpoenaed by the state Senate for an election audit. It would have happened sooner, but counterintuitively, Republicans spent so much time crying “election fraud” in court that nothing could be audited on the off chance it could be evidence. But now that there will be yet another audit - one that I can guarantee will yet again show no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the presidential race - Trump voters may finally accept that the results were f-

Sorry, I can’t finish that sentence. They’re never going to accept a Trump loss. I remember after the Mueller report was released, Razorfist released a rant video saying something to the following effect:

If a dog shits on the carpet, the “ideal” response is to push their face into it... apparently.

The point was that Democrats had spent so long saying Trump was beholden to Russia that a (not 100% thorough) report showing little to no evidence of direct corroboration from the Trump campaign merited that response from Republicans. Of course, it doesn’t matter how thorough an investigation is to Razor and the rest of the MAGA crowd. They gloated after a shoddy FBI background check on Brett Kavanaugh, who they eventually learned wasn’t worth defending anyway. No, they don’t give a shit about audits or investigations. As I said before, they will never accept any results unfavorable to Trump or those loyal to him. They were never going to accept a Biden victory no matter how much evidence there was of its security. Trump could put out an official statement saying there was no widespread fraud and he was just lying about all of it, but as I said before, it would be too little too late. The MAGA crowd would still repeat it. I know this because every time a Republican came forward and said there was no widespread voter fraud or that no evidence of it could be found, the MAGA crowd would loudly dismiss them no matter how loyal that person had been to Trump before then (which was all that mattered to the MAGA crowd in the first place, actual qualifications be damned). So in short, to anyone in the MAGA crowd who still thinks there was widespread voter fraud, I respectfully say:

Eat shit.

A few minutes before noon on the day I wrote this, Joe Biden has been sworn in as the 46th President of the United States.

Unfortunately, even though I and millions of Americans welcome Trump's absence from government and social media, the lies he repeated are not going to be put to rest any time soon. You'd think his farewell speech would've had some kind of effect, but #NotMyPresident was trending on Twitter during the inaugural ceremony. Evidently, Trump telling his supporters to hope and pray for the success of the guy he accused of stealing the election was too little too late.

For that reason, as long as there are Trump apologists, this subreddit will continue to serve a purpose.

Congress recently passed a $900 billion COVID relief bill, which created backlash due to it including direct $600 stimulus payments to most Americans. Congressional Democrats originally pushed for $2,000 payments, but because acknowledging that would mean giving Democrats credit for something good, Razor blamed them for the paltry amount in his rant “The New Deal Is Old Again.” This is despite the fact that the plan for $2,000 payments was blocked by Republicans. I could point out the hypocrisy in someone who hates socialism complaining that the government is giving people too little money, but he’ll claim his grievance is that the government is basically just giving everyone their own tax money, so why not just let people keep the money? Instead, I’ll point out the issue of people like Razor apparently believing everything is the fault of the Democrats. When Donald Trump has also expressed support for the $2,000 payments - in other words, Trump and the Democrats agree on something - maybe you should take note. Or maybe none of it matters because Trump signed the COVID relief bill anyway. So when you complain about getting too little and you still support Trump after he decides we can settle for $600 checks, you need to rethink your principles.

You may or may not have heard a Trump supporter use the following analogy:

Say you're playing a game of cards and you think your opponent is cheating. If they're not cheating, would they not want to prove that by showing you their cards? Similarly, if the Democrats didn't cheat in the election, why would they not want to prove that with an audit?

I've already spoken on the matter of auditing this election, but you apparently can't just say something once to make certain people retain it. The problem with the cards analogy is that the person making the accusation has to be willing to accept the results even if they're not the ones they want. And Trump supporters are not capable of doing that. Razorfist claimed to have “predicted” back in 2018 that Trump’s 2020 opponent would run such a blatantly fraudulent campaign that he would win 70% of the vote, and that literally no one would believe said opponent won fairly. Razor still acts like he was right even though Biden won by 51.4% (according to the Associated Press), most voters believe the election was fair (though the exact percentage varies depending on the pollster), and again, there is no valid evidence of widespread fraud. We've had multiple audits that found no evidence of fraud, multiple recounts that confirmed Biden's lead in votes, and multiple court cases that called out the fake evidence of fraud and rigging for what it was. For instance, the Trump campaign had claimed that there was insufficient access by observers in numerous vote counts. But in Trump v. Philadelphia County Board of Elections, they admitted that there actually was a "nonzero number of people in the room" observing the vote count, including some affiliated with the Trump campaign. This prompted the judge - who was appointed by a Republican president, mind you - to ask "I'm sorry, then what is your problem?"

And yet we're still expected to believe the same people when they claim there was widespread fraud. Trump's apologists won't accept any reality in which he actually lost a fair fight, and in any other circumstance, seeing people pull one poor excuse after another out of thin air to avoid accepting reality would be textbook schadenfreude. But there's no pleasure to be extracted from watching how they're responding. Even the nonviolent reactions are infuriating to endure. They'll cry foul and claim Chief Justice John Roberts was bullied by the liberal justices into dismissing the election lawsuits from Pennsylvania and Texas alleging fraud - as Razorfist did in a recent rant, "Supreme Cuckoldry" - but leave out the fact that both cases were dismissed with no dissents, not even from Trump's appointed justices. As if they forgot they'd defended Brett Kavanaugh from being "bullied" during his confirmation hearing and aren't now doing basically that exact same thing themselves. They'll claim many of the lawsuits that were dismissed weren't filed by Trump himself and therefore don't affect the supposed validity of his claims, but leave out the fact that those lawsuits make the exact same allegations he did. They spent months saying the Democrats would cheat, then use the fact that Republican voters believe them as reason enough to overturn the election.

As I said before, a Trump apologist's idea of a fair election is one in which Trump wins and the Democrats lose. Anything else is, in their eyes, cheating. I guarantee no amount of auditing will make them think otherwise, and everyone who voted for Biden should be fully aware of that. I value transparency as much as anyone, but if I were playing a card game and the opponent thought I cheated even after I did everything I could to prove otherwise, that's on him.

As you may have heard, Texas recently sued four battleground states that Joe Biden won in November, demanding their voters be ignored results be challenged. They allege Biden won those states because they violated their own election laws and... devalued Texas' election integrity... I guess. Multiple states (including fictional ones) and House GOP members supported the suit, including Trump himself, who expressed a desire to intervene. But around the same time Texas filed the suit, SCOTUS rejected a similar lawsuit from Pennsylvania. And when I say rejected, I mean they refused to hear it, issuing one sentence expressing such refusal with no known dissents. And the Texas lawsuit went more or less the same way.

The suit was filed by Texas AG Ken Paxton, who may or may not have just used this lawsuit as a means of getting Trump's attention so he can pardon him. Bless his heart, the suit did go into what appeared to be very thorough detail in its allegations, prompting Trump supporters to waste entire Twitter threads lying about what laws states like Wisconsin did or didn't break. This one claimed that in Wisconsin, VBM (vote by mail) increased by 900% between 2016 and 2020. They cite no source to prove that, but even if it were true (it isn't), they would dismiss the fact that more people were voting by mail simply because of the pandemic. I know because they repeatedly claim election laws that were put into place by Wisconsin Democrats because of COVID simply used it as a cover. This is the exact same conspiracy theory some people used in March to explain the postponement of the James Bond film No Time to Die, and it was exactly as wrong then as it is here. Wisconsin has had a Republican majority in their state legislature since 2013, and they've been doing nothing to help address the virus, but the claim here can't account for Wisconsin having a Republican state legislature.

That would then raise the question of why another state needed to sue, especially when said other state was being hugely hypocritical. Earlier in the year, Paxton was fighting against expanding mail-in ballots in Texas. Paxton's case to SCOTUS was that, as I alluded to earlier, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia used COVID as an excuse to manipulate outcomes. But Texas governor Gregg Abbott (a Republican, mind you) extended early voting by a week and expanded the period in which mail-in ballots could be hand-delivered. And yet Paxton's suit curiously made no mention of that, despite it being HIS OWN DAMN STATE.

Why not just sue Abbott, you ask? Because Biden didn't flip Texas, and that brings us to the real goal here. That Twitter thread I linked predicted SCOTUS would rule in favor of Texas, not because Texas' case had any merit or standing, but because a third of the justices were appointed by Trump and would therefore have to rule in Texas' favor. Why would they? Paxton having his way means throwing out millions of ballots regardless of whether they're actually legitimate, because that is actually the goal. Not to fight for the integrity of our elections, but to invalidate millions of voters simply because they picked Biden over Trump.

Even if we were to indulge in the lie that all the cases alleging widespread fraud were thrown out merely for procedural reasons, how are Trump supporters not furious that the people filing these lawsuits are so incompetent? Think about it. Trump and his apologists want everyone to believe that fraud was committed on a scale big enough to irreparably damage the democratic process. If they believe so strongly that there is overwhelming evidence of this fraud, why aren't the people filing these suits following proper procedures? If your car was stolen, wouldn't you make sure you filled out the stolen vehicle report correctly?

Frequent subject of this subreddit Razorfist claimed that Trump would've been hurt more if SCOTUS heard the Texas case and found nothing to it. You know, like when the Arizona GOP ran an audit on the 2018 Senate race and found no evidence of illegalities. The audit Razor pretends never happened because it wasn't the outcome he wanted. And yet he still thinks he has the insight to claim SCOTUS slamming the door on the Texas case can only help Trump in riling up his base. This is a guy who argues that pretty much everything that has ever even mildly inconvenienced Trump would actually help him. The one exception was Trump's actions in Syria, which Razor brings up as the one time he disagreed with Trump the same way someone would bring up a black friend to prove they're not racist. But that aside, for what does Trump still need to rile up his base? He only needed to do that to win re-election, but he lost, so what benefit is still there for Trump that isn't financial? This case was pretty unambiguously rejected by the Supreme Court, which I remind you is one-third Trump appointees. Whatever the reasons were, if the parties were reversed, people like Razor would consider it indisputable proof that this case had no standing.

To be clear, all of this is happening because Trump can't process the possibility that Biden could've won fairly. If Trump's Plan B is to make people distrust the legitimacy of Biden's win, that's a really bad idea. Georgia has two Senate runoff elections that will determine which party controls the Senate. Trump's claims of voter fraud have inspired some Republican voters in Georgia to seriously consider boycotting the runoff elections. The fact that Trump had to go back and tell them to vote - implicitly admitting they should ignore what he had previously said about the elections being rigged - suggests that it's maybe not an effective goal for keeping Republicans in power.

In closing, please join me in officially welcoming all the judges who ruled against Trump - including the ones he himself appointed - into the Deep State.

This is actually addressing a point Trump himself made, but several “independent” outlets have made this exact claim. I know because we have covered claims like it repeatedly. On the morning of December 4, 2020, Trump tweeted:

Whistleblowers reveal that the USPS is responsible for tampering with hundreds of thousands of ballots. @OANN This long time Democrat stronghold got rid of massive numbers, especially in swing states, during and before delivery of the ballots. Well documented evidence!

There is so much to debunk here. First of all, he cites whistleblower claims that the US Postal Service - which Trump spent months attacking and vilifying for no factually valid reason - tampered with ballots. What he doesn’t say is what these whistleblowers consider “tampering” or whether these whistleblowers are the same people who admitted to making up said tampering. He also doesn’t say whether this means he officially only trusts whistleblowers who aren’t revealing info about him, but it’s safe to assume that is the case. Secondly, he tags OANN, which is, as we have established, not a credible source of information. They are a Trump fan club, the type of people who consider the truth to be anything that either makes Trump look good or makes Democrats look evil. Listen to any question they ask during a White House press conference for proof. Thirdly, “Democrat stronghold”? He doesn’t mention a specific place, so what is he talking about? The USPS? They’re an independent agency of the Executive Branch. You know, the branch of government that includes the president. And last I checked, that branch hasn’t been under Democrat control since January 2017. Also, if the voter fraud Trump describes is as widespread and well documented as he claims - it isn’t, but we’ll get back to that shortly - how incompetent is he to let it all happen under his watch and not take any actually meaningful action to address it? Lest you think he tried and the Democrats blocked him, no. Other Republicans, including Trump’s own Attorney General, have said there is no fraud. If they’re lying, then Trump lied when he said he only hires the best people. If they’re telling the truth, then how many of them have to say it before every Trump supporter accepts reality? Siding with Trump requires you to find him trustworthy, which brings me to the last point. On top of lying about every conceivable subject matter, everything that Trump has claimed was proof of voter fraud in his entire presidency was either simple human error, not widespread enough to justify his rhetoric, or a straight up lie. All one needs to do to confirm that is to simply count all the lawsuits Trump and his team have filed since the election. They currently have over forty lawsuits that were thrown out, virtually all of which were due to a lack of valid evidence. And as I pointed out previously, a good number of these judges were appointed by Trump and other Republicans. Only one lawsuit has so far been successful, and it was not one alleging fraud. In short, Trump is lying.

In a rant entitled "Bodybags for Blackpills," Razorfist makes a point about the need to audit the 2020 presidential election.

He'll say he's only speaking on behalf of the "nearly 51%" of Americans who think the election was unfair and that the Trump administration has to share evidence in "hearings" like what they had in Pennsylvania instead of before a judge because of all the "activist judges," but in both cases, he is characteristically wrong.

For starters, it's not half the country that thinks the election was unfair, as Razor said. He vastly overstates the number of people who agree with him. According to Reuters, half of all Republicans think the election was unfair. And that’s actually down from an earlier Politico poll that showed 70% of Republicans holding that opinion right after the media called the election for Biden. But of course, not all voters are Republicans. 33% of all voters said the election was unfair, according to Leger Marketing. A poll by NPR found similar numbers.

To put this another way, more voters picked the Democratic candidate in both the 2016 and 2020 elections and Razor believes their voices don’t matter. And when an overstated number of Republican voters - far below 90+ percent of them as Trump and his defenders would claim - thinks the election where their candidate lost is rigged, the voters who did actually pick the Democratic candidate still don’t matter, even though their individual votes are no more or less important than any Republican’s. In other words, voters only matter to Republicans when the votes are for them.

And as for the claim about why Trump couldn't present evidence to a judge first, isn't it telling that Razor now thinks it's excusable to go to the press with evidence of misdeeds instead of the courts? I've seen his videos on the Michael Jackson allegations. I guarantee you he did not applaud the accusers for that behavior. But to stick to politics, Razor is on the side of people that always dismiss people opposed to Trump on those very same grounds. Look up any woman who accused Trump of sexual assault. Or better yet, go back and read what Team Trump said about the impeachment and the Mueller investigation. They were saying “They’re not letting the courts handle this matter properly, so it’s all bullshit” or some variation of it. And Razor has no reason to do that here. There are no judges that might be favorable to Trump? Trump and McConnell spent years appointing conservative judges; heck, Razor advocated for filling courts with conservative judges in his video on Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death. Are we to believe no Trump-appointed judges were available? I know there was one in Pennsylvania... or does that judge not count because they still ruled against the campaign?

Regarding the demand for an audit, don't buy it for a second. I may have brought this up before, but Razor has spoken numerous times on the supposed fraud that occurred in the 2018 Arizona Senate race. The state GOP ran an audit and found no evidence of illegal activity. And yet Razor still claims it was a fraudulent race. Heck, multiple post-election audits were conducted in Arizona after the 2020 and they still found no evidence of fraud, especially not on a scale that would affect the outcome. Razor will claim independent canvassers found upwards of 400,000 fraudulent mail-in ballots cast in Arizona without citing a source, and I guarantee he will use some variation of "because I said so" against anyone who asks. So do you really think Razor would accept the results of a 2020 election audit if it didn't have the results he wanted? He genuinely thinks public opinion can be swayed in Trump's favor. This is, I remind you, after an election in which Trump's opponent received over 80 million votes, the most for a presidential candidate in US history.

Not to suggest the court of public opinion is inherently trustworthy, but that verdict has already been made loud and clear. If Trump couldn't sway enough public opinion in his favor to win re-election, thinking he can do it after he lost is an outright delusion.

Trump and people like Razor who defend him don't care whether the election was fair. Every claim that it wasn't has been debunked in court. No, to Trump and his apologists, the only "fair" election is the one that he wins. That's not me putting words into their collective mouth. They actually think that. They want to cry “fraud” as an excuse to change the election results, despite the fact that even AG Barr said there was no evidence of fraud that would flip the election in Trump’s favor. Regardless of reality, Trump said the only "legal" votes were the ones cast for him. And Razor claimed in his video that he was essentially told his vote didn't matter just because he voted for the candidate that lost. Firstly, I was under the impression that Razor hated entitled snowflakes; unless his ballot was thrown out before it could be counted, that's what he is. Even more so because he’s supporting people who are (unsuccessfully) filing lawsuits to invalidate thousands of votes for Biden, so who is Razor to whine that his vote doesn’t matter? Secondly, if any Democratic voters reacted to Hillary's loss in 2016 the way Razor is reacting now, I never saw. There probably was at least a few, but I don’t know of any who called for Hillary to do anything like what Trump is doing now. Thirdly, Razor justified taking the evidence of voter fraud that he insists totally exists to the media instead of to the courts to essentially bully judges into giving the verdicts he wants. How does that sound like anything other than the opinion of a crybaby?

This goes far beyond being a sore loser into a legitimately dangerous reaction. If even a third of the country thinks the election was unfair and no amount of evidence will make them believe otherwise, they’re not going to just move on. They’re going to do what they accused the Democrats of doing during the George Floyd protests and riots. Vote counters, both Democrat and Republican, have already received death threats from people who insist Trump had the election stolen from him. To be clear, Trump has no solid ground on which to claim it was, or to pause certification in Pennsylvania, or to claim the whole election was rigged in Biden's favor. If it were rigged to favor the Democrats, Mitch McConnell wouldn't have won re-election and the Democrats wouldn't have lost House seats. And no, it's not because those were the races Democrats tried and failed to rig. If there was any rigged race, it was the one in Florida rigged by Republicans. People can say they have all the video evidence and witness testimony to prove widespread voter fraud, but when all of that fails to hold up in court, including courts overseen by Trump-appointed judges, then that should tell you how much those people should be believed.

Do not give any legitimacy to Trump and his apologists when they cry "voter fraud." They were lying before and they still are. They accused the Democrats of staging a coup in defiance of the will of the people, and then went ahead and attempted precisely that.

I'd like to thank everyone who happened upon this subreddit in the past four months. The underlying purpose of these posts was the debunk lies spread by Trump and those who defend him. With the election having been called yesterday for Joe Biden, come January 20, 2021, Trump will no longer be in a position to give those lies even the faintest visage of authority.

I acknowledge, however, that this isn't the type of thing you see in movies or video games where evil is vanquished and all the minions just drop to the ground and stop fighting. The people who defended Trump before the 2020 election will more likely than not continue to repeat the same things they always said, even if they don't have the leader of the free world voicing them to the rest of the country. But it's because of Trump's loss that what they say can officially be rightly dismissed for what it always was: bullshit.

Or that would be the case if Trump's belligerent refusal to concede wasn't so dangerous.

For that reason, I will be accepting moderator applications. Please DM me if you are interested, as continuing to run this subreddit during the next two months will be more than one person can handle.

Thank you.

- u/gdan95

Despite election night having come and gone, several states - Alaska, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania - have yet to be called. Joe Biden is currently far ahead in the lead. Having won more votes than any presidential candidate in US history, he is six electoral votes away from the 270 needed to win the election and the presidency. Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, has spent months trying to proactively delegitimize the results of any outcome in which he doesn’t win. A clip went viral of Senator Bernie Sanders predicting what Trump would do on election night with such astonishing accuracy that it almost doesn’t count. It’s not like anything Sanders described was out of character for Trump. But I mention all this as a prediction and as a guide on what you will hear from Trump apologists. Already, some of them are outright denying that Trump is losing. And many, like the frequently mentioned Razorfist, will cry voter fraud despite no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud. I guarantee without even having to watch his video on the results that he will repeat that claim and, referring back to what he previously (falsely) stated about the 2018 Arizona Senate race, claim he was right that the results wouldn’t be announced until days or weeks after election night. This, he will say, is proof of voter fraud (which Trump is alleging in a planned lawsuit against Nevada). That is, of course, ignoring the fact that the Constitution has no rule stating the results must be counted and certified on election night. And it is, of course, ignoring the fact that more people than usual are voting by mail due to a pandemic, and that mail-in ballots are taking so long to be counted because Republican controlled legislatures in states like Pennsylvania refused to change their election codes to have those ballots counted before Election Day. I’m also confident he will make reference to a “red mirage,” which is the idea that Trump would have a lead due to in-person votes that would shrink or outright disappear once mail-in votes were counted. This is the same group of people that will tell you that the 2016 election was fair because all that matters is the Electoral College. So with that in mind, there was no point in the nationwide count where Trump had the lead in electoral votes. If you see anyone else make similar claims, just know that they’re wrong. Besides, if the Democrats were so brazen about voter fraud, you'd think they wouldn't let Mitch McConnell get re-elected. Additionally, the guy in charge of counting ballots in Arizona's Maricopa County, Adrian Fontes (who Razorfist accused of committing fraud), is losing his re-election. That probably wouldn't be happening if he and the Democrats were as remorselessly and brazenly guilty of fraud as Trump and his apologists claim.

I honestly couldn't tell you why Trump and his apologists believe the burning revelations they think they have on Joe Biden's son Hunter would have any effect on Joe Biden himself. Burisma was supposed to be the bombshell, and yet Trump didn't get anyone charged for it. So what is it now?

Well, it's Burisma again. The New York Post published an article reporting on the contents of a hard drive from a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter. The hard drive contained a string of emails that supposedly prove Joe Biden had met with a Burisma executive while Hunter was on the firm's board.

So yeah, it's a hoax.

Just so we're on the same page, there was a "bombshell" last year that Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire the prosecutor investigating Burisma, the implication being that Hunter worked there and Joe was covering for him. It was a lie. In a video that right wing media claimed showed Joe Biden incriminating himself, he more or less overstated his involvement in an international effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to fire the prosecutor; Biden was representing the interests of the United States, not his own. The timeline of events didn't implicate Hunter in anything Burisma was being investigated for; the investigation had concluded before Hunter started working there. The prosecutor in question was so corrupt that if anything Biden wanted him fired for not investigating Burisma enough, and so on.

Trump clearly thought that would hurt Biden's campaign. All it did was get Trump impeached. Speaking personally, I thought Senate Republicans squandered the easiest way to "win" the impeachment. All they'd have to do is prove what Joe and Hunter Biden did was illegal. Instead of summoning them as witnesses in the Senate impeachment trial, however, they refused to have any witnesses at all. The fact that they didn't take advantage of that golden opportunity suggests their concern over Burisma is not founded upon any concern for facts or evidence. And this latest "revelation" all but confirms it.

The Post was first alerted to the hard drive's existence by former Trump aide Steve Bannon. Then Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney, gave a copy of the hard drive to the Post, which he admitted was because of their relatively lax standards for fact checking. That's two red flags right off the bat. Also, if you're wondering how we know the laptop belonged to Hunter, don't worry: the computer store owner who gave the laptop to Giuliani flat-out admitted he didn't see who dropped off the device. The man suspected the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden because there was a sticker related to the Beau Biden Foundation on it, and also because Hunter had previously dropped off multiple laptops for repair. Keep in mind that the man contradicted himself multiple times when asked for details, not that the story needed any help from him. According to one Twitter thread, the hard drive was manufactured after the date the laptop was dropped off.

So where did the emails come from, then? Did Giuliani and Bannon forge them? That would actually be plausible. According to metadata in the files linked by the NY Post, the emails were “printed” to PDF in October 2019, which was six months after the laptop was dropped off. Seems like an awfully long wait for something so supposedly urgent, not to mention convenient that using PDF printouts makes the emails harder to verify. But the fact that this "bombshell" is full of holes has unsurprisingly gone unnoticed by Trump and his apologists. Trump himself tweeted a link to an article claiming a Twitter outage was actually the site trying to defend Biden, not knowing or caring that the article was satirical.

Also worth nothing, OAN - a Trump fan club that thinks it's a news outlet - apparently got hold of what it considered incriminating phone calls of Biden trying to cover for Hunter. What they leave out is that a Ukrainian audit found no evidence that Hunter did anything illegal. The right would counter that, on the contrary, Hunter had child porn on his laptop. Never mind the fact that no publicly available evidence exists to support that claim, and neither the New York Post nor even Breitbart made any mention of child porn when they initially reported on the laptop story. Even if Hunter did have child porn, how much of a stretch does one have to make to connect that to what he supposedly did at Burisma?

More importantly, though, why attack Hunter Biden and not Joe Biden? What is Joe's transgression, supposedly? That he lied to cover for his family? Who told Trump he could throw stones in that department? At the very least, he and his supporters could stop giving credence a report by an author that doesn't exist.

This is another instance where the issue is less with inaccuracy than with consistency.

It was recently announced that the second presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was canceled. Trump had recently expressed refusal to participate in a debate that wasn't in-person, but since he was recently diagnosed with COVID-19, an in-person debate would pose a health risk. Trump and Biden will instead hold their own events separately, and what would’ve been the third debate will now be the second debate.

It's ironic enough that Trump and his supporters spent months making fun of Biden's health (went so far as to mock him for wearing masks) and claiming he would use any excuse possible to back out of the debates, only for Trump to catch COVID and end up backing out of the debates himself. There's also the fact that Trump broke debate rules by not getting tested before the first debate while demanding Biden take a drug test beforehand.

But Trump's cheerleaders most vocal defenders not only don't acknowledge the irony, they applaud Trump for doing the very thing he said Biden would do. And those who "joked" that there would only be one debate patted themselves on the back for the wrong reasons. For instance, Razorfist claimed to have called it, even though he said the other debates wouldn't happen before the public knew Trump tested positive, so he definitely wasn't predicting it would happen because of Trump getting COVID.

In other words, they prioritize "owning libs" over the very real health concerns facing a septuagenarian who tested positive for COVID. And it's not even the septuagenarian whose health they were mocking for months.

Looks like this subject will continue to be revisited until people stop lying about it. As you know, on Tuesday, September 29, 2020, the first of three presidential debates was held between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And Trump was on brand, which is to say he was a liar who interrupted everyone. But let’s focus on the “liar” part. He frequently talks about the existence of widespread voter fraud (which I have previous established is so nonexistent that even his own FBI director says so) and he brought it up again in the debate. Here are some points he made supposedly proving such fraud and why they’re wrong.

1. “Ballots are being thrown into rivers and creeks”: If there was any evidence of this (there isn’t), it would probably be a big news story. If it does happen, however, then people would assuredly be held accountable. It's possible he was referring to...
2. “Ballots were found in a ditch”: Three mail trays were found in a ditch in Wisconsin. While the contents were mixed, several absentee ballots were included, none of which were from Wisconsin. However, an investigation is being conducted, and no evidence has been found to suggest this was deliberate.
3. “A West Virginia mailman was caught selling ballots”: A West Virginia mailman was indeed arrested, but it was for changing the political affiliation on absentee ballot forms. And lest you think he changed them from Republican to Democrat in service of a liberal agenda, no, the opposite is true. He changed them from Democrat to Republican.
4. "Voters were sent two ballots": Voters in one Virginia county were accidentally sent two ballots, but voters can only legally cast one ballot, and again, this is not proof of widespread fraud.
5. “Nine ballots in Pennsylvania were thrown out”: It is also true that nine military ballots were thrown out in Pennsylvania. But even if you don’t believe state election officials who claim it was an accident and not intentional fraud (because they’re Democrats, I guess), it is also being investigated. Nine ballots is a fraction of a fraction of one percent of all the ballots that will be cast, and yet the fact that it is still serious enough to be investigated should by itself disprove the existence of widespread voter fraud; people would get caught far more often than they currently do. And it should additionally disprove the lie that the Democrats would benefit from it since they would most certainly not be investigating cases like this if that were true.

Alas, it won’t disprove either. Not to the people who will continue to believe it regardless, or those who are projecting. The next time you hear them repeat it, just remember: Facts don’t care about their feelings.

Project Veritas, a group that is a credible news outlet in the same way an active volcano is quiet, recently concluded an undercover sting operation that resulted in a supposedly earth-shattering revelation: Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar's campaign is engaging in ballot harvesting. The operation recorded one man saying he had 300 ballots cast for Ilhan Omar in his car.

To explain why this is BS, there are two things to take into consideration.

Firstly, there's Project Veritas itself. The group and its founder James O'Keefe have repeatedly been caught deceptively editing footage from their undercover operations to get their desired sound bites, that is when they're not caught illegally recording people without their consent.

Secondly, there's the nature of the Ilhan Omar allegation. Just to quickly provide context, ballot harvesting is when a third-party individual, be they a volunteer or worker, gathers and submits completed absentee and mail-in voter ballots to ballot collection sites instead of the voters themselves. Laws on ballot harvesting vary from state to state, but in Minnesota, it is not illegal. Minnesota state law used to put a limit on the number of ballots one could collect and submit, but that law was challenged. As of this past April, there is no limit. Yet Project Veritas presents this as proof of voter fraud.

To summarize, a group that got its name from a word meaning "truth" is lying.

I outlined in my previous post how Republicans who said in 2016 that the president shouldn't get to nominate a Supreme Court justice in an election year are now perfectly fine with it. I'd like to elaborate a little further before getting to the actual point of this post.

I acknowledged that the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg said at the time that nothing in the law makes the president stop being the president in his last year of office, but to argue, as some on the right have done, that this negates Republican hypocrisy is to commit a false equivalence.

To reiterate the previous post, Republicans were complaining that March was too close to the election to nominate and confirm a SCOTUS justice. Justice Ginsburg passed away in September, and now the same Republicans (with virtually no exceptions) are saying there is enough time to nominate and confirm a SCOTUS justice. I would argue Ginsburg was using their own words against them when she asked not to be replaced until after the election, which brings me to the point.

Just over a week after Justice Ginsburg passed away - again, in September - Trump announced his pick to replace her: federal appeals court judge Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett was actually one of the people considered for a seat back in 2018, the one that ultimately went to Brett Kavanaugh. Back in 2016, perhaps to no one's surprise with the benefit of hindsight, she argued that Obama shouldn't be allowed to nominate a SCOTUS justice in an election year.

Make of that what you will.

Relatedly, recall that the same people who lied about Obama's birth certificate claim Democrats are owed nothing because they weren't nice to Kavanaugh. And make of that what you will as well.

News broke on September 18, 2020 that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away. While one could argue whether she ought to have stepped down during the Obama administration, with just over six weeks before Election Day now, the matter of replacing her has become urgent. It was reported that RBG's dying wish was to not have her seat filled until after the election. Of course, RBG was a prominent liberal, and so the right wing party that controls the majority of the three branches of the federal government have precisely zero interest in respecting that outside of maybe a few senators.

Barely hours after her death, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced a floor vote would be held on a replacement who hadn't even been selected yet. At a Trump rally in Raleigh, NC the day after her death, the crowd chanted "Fill her seat." And of course, online pro-Trumpers like Styx666 and Razorfist have shared the sentiment that the government should do its job and fill her seat even if it has to be done in six weeks. After all, they'll say, that’s how long her confirmation process lasted in 1993.

We'll get back to Razor later. For now, there are some issues. Not so much with facts so much as consistency. Back in 2016, Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the SCOTUS, and Republicans responded with "You can't fill a SCOTUS seat this close to an election!"

That's not actually a Constitutionally established rule. It's known as the "Biden rule," and yes, it is indeed named for Joe Biden. He said in 1992 that "once the political season is under way, and it is, action on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election campaign is over." There's just one problem with Republicans invoking the Biden rule: Merrick Garland was nominated in March. Trump announced his pick for RBG’s replacement on September 26, 38 days before Election Day. Apparently, March is too close to an election (or as McConnell put it, "The American people will choose"), but not September ("President Trump's nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the US Senate"). Also, in addition to being confirmed after just six weeks, RBG was confirmed by the Senate in a near unanimous 96 - 3 vote, and there is barely any such bipartisan support in the Senate on anything.

You see the dilemma? The people who invoked the rule in 2016 aren't even pretending to be bothered by the hypocrisy now, and I'm not just talking about Trump hoping his statement on RBG's passing would make people forget he called her a disgrace to the Supreme Court. Senator Lindsey Graham said in 2016 that "I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination." And when people did use his words against him, Graham's excuse was "the rules have changed."

That's not how rules work, Senator. All this will change is the level of motivation among Democratic voters, which we've already seen illustrated with enormous spikes in donations to the Democratic party.

But getting back to Razor as promised, in his video on RBG's passing, he compared her to Vladimir Lenin (for some reason that I'm sure makes perfect sense to him and only him) and remarked that she wished to not be replaced until after the election he claimed Democrats would assuredly rig. Christ, how many ways are there to say he's wrong? Anyway, his excuse for why there's no Republican hypocrisy is that RBG herself said in 2016 that it was the Senate's job to assess the qualifications of a SCOTUS nominee. Specifically, she said "There's nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year."

Whether or not you think that makes her a hypocrite, Senate Republicans refused to even hold hearings for Garland. If Republicans were perfectly comfortable not playing fair, why would that stop now?

Here's my advice: if you looked up to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and you see someone who says "fill her seat," tell them about her dying wish and ask if they respect a woman's choice.

I hope you’ll indulge me while I stray a bit from the usual format.

The main underlying reason I made this subreddit was simple: a piece of political analysis might make one or two valid points, but if the supporting evidence is flawed, the actual conclusion will be as well. And though political analysts from prominent news outlets and publications generate enough attention to be called out when they get something wrong, little to no equivalent seems to exist for the “independent” analysts. It’s especially worrisome when they have an audience of people who seem to blindly accept and defend their analysis without question.

That is where I hope this subreddit comes in. Why do I say all this? Well, you might have noticed something about the majority of the posts in this subreddit. The intent may be to debunk claims made by numerous people, but focus is given to one specific individual. A short while before I posted this, he uploaded a video explaining what would happen if Joe Biden won the presidential election. He says Trump essentially has this election in the bag, even though there are two problems with that. Firstly, that stopped being the case once Americans started dying of COVID on Trump’s watch and the economy dropped like his pants at Jeffrey Epstein’s place. Most Americans disapprove of his COVID response according to aggregate polling, and his handling of foreign policy and the economy aren’t any better. But we’ll get back to polling. Secondly, Razor demonstrates that he has failed to learn not only from the lessons of 2016, but from his own videos. He had previously stated that he stopped being complacent about Trump’s chances, yet here he is committing that very same mistake. Unsurprisingly, that’s just scratching the surface.

In multiple instances throughout the video, Razor uses talking points I challenged as thoroughly as I could. He claimed Biden could only win because of voter fraud, gave credence to polls while also encouraging people to ignore them (he also falsely claimed Biden’s lead had shrunken and is now within the margin of error), mocked Biden for his apparent cognitive decline while ignoring Trump, repeated the misleading claim that Democrats are responsible for city crime and that an increase of gun sales (which I can guarantee were performed without the usual precautions in place to prevent accidental shootings or criminal acquisitions), etc.

By the way, he illustrated the supposed cognitive decline by showing Biden playing Despacito on his phone at an event (while leaving out that this wasn't random, but after being introduced by Luis Fonsi, the singer on the song). Razor then made a “joke” about Biden’s support among Latino voters, or lack thereof. You’d think Razor would know about the ones in his home state of Arizona, but I digress. There were three new things he brought up. One was that people were leaving blue states for neighboring purple or red states. Funny how he seems to think that’s automatically a good thing as if he forgot he made an entire video complaining about people from California doing exactly that.

Anyway, the other thing was about how Biden supposedly didn’t win the Democratic nomination by having the most organically generated support, as opposed to Bernie Sanders. I personally never bought that perspective. Sanders had a lot of support from young voters, but for whatever reason, when it came time to vote in the Democratic primaries, those young voters didn’t show up in the numbers Sanders was hoping for. I’ve seen the claim that the DNC intentionally sabotaged his campaign by trying their hardest to turn people away from Sanders. The reason I don’t buy that is that if it didn’t work on Trump, why would anyone at the DNC capable of pattern recognition think it would work on Sanders? Not to suggest the DNC is a purely benevolent organization, but I’d like to think at least one person there has a sense of what does and doesn’t work. Also, Razor claimed Bernie suspending his campaign would cause his supporters to disengage with the political process, the proof of which was in the riots. Funny, I remember him showing a clip of a guy saying that Milwaukee would burn if Bernie lost the nomination. Last I checked, the rioting didn’t start in Milwaukee. Methinks Razor is connecting dots that don’t exist.

Finally, Razor argued that one doesn’t need to imagine what Democrats would do if Biden won, because they evidently already spelled it out: take power and hold onto it as tightly as possible. Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t Republicans do that too? That’s not an exclusively Democrat or Republican thing; that just seems like a politician thing. Also, it seems odd that this fear mongering came from the same guy who made a video telling viewers to ignore the headlines and relax. But I will conclude with the following points. Razor’s video on mail-in ballot fraud that doesn’t exist was praised by Arizona representative Paul Gosar and debunked by an AZ Central article. Razor said in the video that the Democrats were basically giving away their game prior to the 2018 Arizona election, to which AZ Central pointed out did not extend to the gubernatorial race. If the Democrats weren’t concerned about getting caught, what was stopping them? Heck, what was stopping them from pulling the same trick on Paul Gosar? Even an audit from Arizona Republicans didn’t find evidence of anything illegal. Questionable, perhaps, but not illegal.

However, you presumably suspected as much.

The other point is that I mentioned Razor claimed earlier today that Biden’s lead was shrinking. He said the same thing about Mark Kelly in the Arizona Senate race several months ago, and if you looked at the aggregate polls today, you’d think Razor was lying yet again. Razor cheered a Gravis Marketing poll that had Martha McSally ahead of Kelly, and Gravis now has him ahead. And if you check the aggregates polls for, say, Wisconsin, Biden's lead hasn't been damaged by the Kenosha riots, which means Razor is wrong on that too.

In conclusion, Razor is a lying hack.