It boils down to this: You don’t stop MAGA violence by giving in, but the opposite. You stop it by fighting back and holding people accountable. Removing Trump from the ballot, as the law requires, is a first step. It sends a strong message to MAGA: This is what happens when you use violence to get your way. By not taking his name off the ballot, states are signaling that they will accede to violent threats. We should not be surprised if rewarding MAGA violence means we see more of it.
Yeuup
They’re going to be violent; it’s only a matter of when, how much, and for how long. Kicking the can down the road puts “when” further away by making “how much” and “for how long” much worse.
Right? Jan 6 was a taste.
i wish they would get violent and we would respond in kind with greater force. give me a reason to start shooting these stupid fucks. let’s get this over with ffs.
I get what you’re saying, though I would frame it differently.
Knowing that there will be fascist violence, sooner or later (and with the election in November, that’s the cutoff date), I may be put in a position of protecting myself and others. I need to be prepared to do that protecting.
Good point, though I would counter that there’s a lot of blustering about taking our country back but I haven’t seen many serious attempts or people capable of actually planning and executing such a thing, and I’ve had a good bit of contact with what y’all would consider to be American far right rebels.
For all I know, the far righties talking about their revolution is about as productive as the tankies talking about theirs. Nobody sees a future in this country where the workers seize the means of production and we actually eat the rich, right?
Well, it’s Lemmy, so in all honesty I’d say that there definitely are a lot of tankies here who are as delusional as the far right MAGA idiots. Blind adherence to ideology makes madmen of us all, just as does a cult of personality like Trump’s.
Enlighten us, what’s your ideology? The status quo ?
fear of backlash
negotiating with terrorists
corporate wants you to find the difference between these this picture and this picture
If the backlash is the scary imagine how frightening the presidency would be. Fucking cowards.
Pick your poison:
Backlash now from an angry mob
Full-swing shift into an oppressive authoritarian state once he’s elected
No insurrectionists in any elected office. Makes perfect sense one would wish to have this key point in one’s constitution, heck, even from the beginning. What about insurrectionists who were appointed by insurrectionist(s)? Seems pretty dubious. We need to either remove the insurrectionist appointees, or expand the SCOTUS to water down the insurrectionists in government. Putin must be chortling in his cocoa puffs.
I honestly believe taking Trump off would hurt Biden. I feel there’s a reasonable number who are looking at voting for him because he’s not Trump.
Awful lot of extra words for “terrorists”.
Because that’s exactly what they are threatening, doxing, death threat, shooting up clubs hell even tried to attack the FBi and of course the attempt to overthrow the government… Literally the most successful terrorist there ever was and we still won’t call it at face value for what the maga group is…
https://apnews.com/article/fbi-cincinnati-armed-man-b4701596a0eb9770e3b29e95328f5704
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/blame-abc-news-finds-17-cases-invoking-trump/story?id=58912889
The “backlash” will be that the people that take him off the ballot may end up being murdered. Or their family might be killed. Or both. Sure, maybe it’s the duty of the secretary of state in each state to remove him from the ballot. But would you be willing to do that if it was likely someone would try to murder you? And consider for a moment that it’s likely that a significant number of cops that you might expect would protect you probably sympathize with political violence in favor of Trump.
Those are the stakes for the people that need to remove him from the ballot.
Are you ready and willing to fight? Because you might have to.
EDIT: People seem to think that my comment about getting ready to fight is in support of Trump. It’s not. If you believe in this 250-year experiment in Democracy, you might have to be willing to fight–as in, with guns and bullets–to preserve it, and that means fighting against the Trump followers that want to end democracy for a totalitarian gov’t. It happened in Germany in the 20s and 30s; don’t think that it can’t happen here.
If I took an oath of office you bet your ass I’d be willing. That’s what it means to serve your country in office. If you aren’t willing to uphold your oath, resign.
I would hold no ill will to any person who resigned their position because they are unwilling but if you want to do the job, do it.
Would you though? Would you really? If you got a email of a photo of your family getting out of their car at Target or Walmart, would you really think, yeah, I’m willing to trade the life of my spouse and kids for this job? Would you be willing to do it that if you took it to the police and they just shrugged and said they didn’t see anything actionable? The fact that we haven’t heard of political figures being assassinated by Trump supporters yet doesn’t mean that it’s not going to happen; religious fanatics have blown up doctors offices and killed doctors to ‘save babies’, and Trump cultists literally believe he was chosen by their god to rule.
Asked and answered, it’s not going to change because you rephrased the question.
If I took an oath of office you bet your ass I’d be willing. That’s what it means to serve your country in office. If you aren’t willing to uphold your oath, resign.
I would hold no ill will to any person who resigned their position because they are unwilling but if you want to do the job, do it.
Bluntly, I don’t believe you.
It wasn’t all that long ago that people got lynched in the part of the country I live in. A candidate running against MTG–she’s the next district over from me–had so many death threats and close calls that his wife divorced him and he ended up having to move out of the state to save his own life. Maybe you would be dumb and principled and do the right thing though; if so, you’d probable end up dead, esp. in a lot of the states that have really deep red pockets. Then the next person who takes the job, well, they’re probably be a lot less interested in being right and dead, and more interested in being able to go home at night.
Bluntly, I don’t believe you.
Good thing I’m not Tinker Bell and don’t need your belief to have strength in my convictions.
Cowards often like to believe others are just as cowardly as them, it helps rationalize their world view.
To sin by silence, when we should protest, Makes cowards out of men.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
This is why Mexican politicians kowtow to the cartels.
I thought America was better than this.
We had four years of a populist far-right president that brought out the very worst in his cultists. The only reason we were (past tense) better than this was because we believed we were.
So let’s say we let him run to avoid a violent backlash.
What happens if he loses? We let him overturn the election to avoid another violent backlash?
All we’re doing is proving to the fascists that we will kowtow to them if they are angry and violent enough. If we want to remain a free-ish country we’re going to have to piss them off at some point by doing the right thing, and we’ll need to deal with the fallout.
I don’t think it’s entirely about “fear of backlash”. I think the real fear people are expressing is the fear of the election appearing rigged, Ahmadinejad-style. If the Republicans nominate Trump, and he goes unconsidered with “unknown numbers” of write-in votes in enough states to affect the election, he would obviously argue that he actually won on votes and might even be convincing to non-Republicans.
When the Colorado Supreme Court decided against Trump, it was a split decision by an all-Democrat panel that questioned what “due process” should be on the matter. There’s so many ways that this can be spun nationally or internationally by the modern equivalent of the way the South created sympathy through propaganda after the Civil War that survives today. Hundreds of millions of people throughout the world will likely question the legitimacy of the president or US elections after this matter no matter who wins or how chips fall.
BUT, there’s also no right answer, and none of the above reasons are sufficient to just put Trump back on the ballot and hope. It should never have gotten to this. Someone that is publicly believed by a significant percent of America to not be eligible should not have party support in the first place. And if it did, Congress should have stepped in before now.
Ultimately, the Republicans are again objectively hurting America for their own agenda.
If Republicans want a candidate on the ballot, they can nominate someone who didn’t start an insurrection. They have no shortage of choices for other candidates. If anything, that’s why the rulings should be laid out right now before the Republican Iowa Caucus.
In a vacuum, I could see the point of the world not seeing the US President as being democratically elected. In practice, this is only going to be an issue for countries that have their own problems with fascist political parties, and I’m not inclined to care.
This is an opinion piece from someone who thinks they know better than the entirety of the US judicial body. You can skip this one.
What Judicial body? Every currently standing ruling regarding the merits of Trump’s eligibility to be president under the 14th amendment have found that he is not eligible (although all are still in limbo pending the inevitable SCOTUS appeal). There is a colorable technical argument to be made that he is not excluded, but most of the legal community is not convinced by them.
The legal arguments about his eligibility to appear on the primary ballot are more nuanced, but seem kind of silly if he ultimately is inneligable to hold the office.
The states that have ruled that Trump can remain on the primary ballot all did so on some sort of procedural ground. Typically of the form “state law does not require a candidate to be elligable to hold office to appear on a primary ballot”. In fairness to those states’ lawmakers, what sort of braindead political party would try nominating someone who was inneligable to hold office?
It’s going to get fucky, because no presidential candidate is actually on a citizen’s ballot. We don’t vote for the named candidate; we vote for a panel of unnamed electors pledged (but not obligated) to support the named candidate.
We need to be talking about “faithless electors” and the “National Popular Vote Interstate Compact”, as the conditions are ripe for these to play a major role in the next election.
