Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“In the abstract, Americans don’t want a dictator. But if it’s their preferred leader, many are willing to throw checks and balances out the window so favored policies can be jammed through.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/06/voters-yearning-for-a-dictator-is-a-danger-to-the-country/
“Understanding the full scope of Vance’s answer requires a quick recap of how Trump’s lawyers wanted January 6, 2021, to play out. The so-called Eastman memo outlined the necessary steps to prevent a transfer of power. It proposed that officials in a handful of states won narrowly by Joe Biden should submit alternative slates of electors and that then-Vice President Mike Pence should invoke his unilateral authority “without asking for permission—either from a vote of the joint session [of Congress] or from the [Supreme Court]”—to count only the Trump-supporting slates from those states.
If state legislators in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other disputed states failed to take the bait, there was a backup plan in which Pence would cite “all the evidence and the letters from state legislators calling into question the executive certifications” as grounds for refusing to count the votes from seven disputed states.
“At the end of the count, the tally would therefore be 232 for Trump, 222 for Biden,” Eastman wrote. “Because the 12th Amendment says ‘majority of electors appointed,’ having determined that no electors from the 7 states were appointed…TRUMP WINS.”
It’s unknown whether this would have worked. Certainly, it would have drawn an immediate lawsuit from the Biden campaign, but it’s unclear how the Supreme Court would have viewed its role in such a dispute.
Crucially, Pence refused to play his part in the scheme. For doing so, he’s become a pariah in Republican politics—though he deserves to be remembered for maintaining his courage in the face of both a literal and metaphorical partisan mob.
Vance indicated in the All-In interview that he would be willing to do the opposite. Asked twice whether he would refuse to certify the election, Vance fell back both times to his claim that he would have simply asked states to submit alternative slates of electors and allowed Congress to have a debate about what to do.
That’s a cowardly response that fails to give a clear answer, but there can be no doubt about the signal Vance is sending. He is effectively saying that he’d have followed the path outlined in the Eastman memo—a path that would allow the vice president to claim he was merely letting Congress debate the outcome, and then use the chaos and uncertainty created by that same debate to throw out the results from certain states in pursuit of a different outcome.”
…
“It’s also worth engaging with the underlying notion here: that the country or Congress needs to debate the results of the election. That is also nonsense.
The country did debate the 2020 election. For months. Votes were cast, results were tallied, and the Electoral College determined the winner. The final certification of the results is not the time or place for that debate to take place. Indeed, the Trump campaign took advantage of many other opportunities that are built into the system to challenge results in specific places, and none of those efforts found systemic fraud or other reasons to doubt the outcome.”
…
“What Eastman proposed (and what Vance is nodding along with) is a reversal of all that: a substitution of the vice president’s and Congress’ opinion for the will of the voters. That’s not constitutional, democratic, or even populist. It’s just authoritarian.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/10/vance-says-hed-have-gone-along-with-trumps-plot-to-block-certification-of-the-2020-election/
“Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González claims the regime forced him to sign a letter recognizing Nicolás Maduro as the winner of July’s disputed presidential election.
“Either I signed or I would face consequences,” González explained in a video posted to social media. “There were very tense hours of coercion, blackmail and pressure.” The letter, according to González, was a condition for his escape to Spain, where he arrived on Sunday after weeks in hiding.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/19/venezuela-opposition-leader-forced-to-sign-letter-backing-maduro/
Targeted & Silenced By The Chinese Government | DR HUEY LI | Bridges #19
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NviqOERTKdA
The phenomenon of an autocratic Russia threatening its neighbors predates NATO and predates the United States.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJSDdCPpbto
“security forces have been systematically stopping citizens to inspect their phones, including photos, social media profiles, and WhatsApp conversations. Detainees are often held based on content uncovered during these searches, such as images or conversations related to protests or anti-government expressions.
This shows Maduro’s willingness to crack down on dissent. It also shows the crucial role of technology in this fight for freedom. We use privacy messaging apps like Signal to communicate sensitive information. We rely on X and Nostr to share public information with the Venezuelan people. And we use bitcoin to overcome Maduro’s financial surveillance.
Regimes know this, which is why the Maduro government has been updating its surveillance system. They are doing this in cooperation with other autocratic regimes. For example, the Chinese company ZTE has been supplying Maduro with advanced surveillance technology, according to nongovernmental organizations.
This is also why Maduro banned X and Signal for 10 days across Venezuela, claiming his opponents were using these platforms to incite political unrest. This unprecedented measure in the Western hemisphere sets a dangerous precedent in the region. It also shows how regimes can restrict essential technologies, including their privacy tools and communication platforms.”
https://reason.com/2024/08/21/in-venezuela-digital-freedom-is-a-threat-to-dictators/
How Democracies Fail: A Conversation with Anne Applebaum (Episode #376)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1GROJPCPV4
Destiny Stumps Every Conservative Influencer In HEATED 1v10 Bloodsport Debate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51gcd9uUwGY
“In early 2021, Richer was an Arizona Republican official who regularly attended local party events. At the time, he was the newly elected county recorder of Maricopa County. The job was a new level of prominence — he was now the most important election supervisory official in the state’s largest county — but going to Arizona Republican events was routine: the kind of thing that Richer, like any state politician, had done hundreds of times before.
But at one event, the crowd heckled and harassed him. When he tried to leave, they dragged him back in, yanking on his arms and shoulders, to berate him about the allegedly stolen 2020 election. He started to worry: Would his own people, fellow Republican Party members, seriously hurt him?
There was a clear reason for the madness. Many of the Republican faithful had recently decided that Maricopa County had been the epicenter of “the steal,” Joe Biden’s theft of Arizona from Donald Trump — and the entire presidential election with it. This wasn’t true, obviously. Richer tried to tell them it wasn’t true, hoping his long track record in the state Republican party would give him some credibility.
It did not. What happened instead reveals a pattern that is quietly reshaping American politics: Across the board and around the country, data reveals that threats against public officials have risen to unprecedented numbers — to the point where 83 percent of Americans are now concerned about risks of political violence in their country. The threats are coming from across the political spectrum, but the most important ones in this regard emanate from the MAGA faithful.
Trump’s most fanatical followers have created a situation where challenging him carries not only political risks but also personal ones. Elected officials who dare defy the former president face serious threats to their well-being and to that of their families — raising the cost of taking an already difficult stand.”
…
“It’s been well over two years since Richer attended the kinds of Arizona GOP grassroots events where he was once welcome. Today, the institutional Arizona Republican party is dominated by politicians who have embraced Trump’s lies about the election — people like Kari Lake, Blake Masters, and Mark Finchem. The harassment and threats from the MAGA faithful was one weapon in the extremist takeover’s arsenal, working to push voices of sanity out of key party events — breaking even determined ones like Richer.
In Arizona, the Trumpist threat of violence worked. And it worked for reasons that should worry all of us at the beginning of an election year that could decide the fate of American democracy.”
…
“In 2016, the Capitol Police recorded fewer than 900 threats against members of Congress. In 2017, that figure more than quadrupled, per data provided by the Capitol Police.
The numbers continued to increase in every year of the Trump presidency, peaking at 9,700 in 2021. In 2022, the first full year of Biden’s term, the numbers went down to a still-high 7,500. The 2023 data has not yet been released, but a spike in threats against legislators during the House Republican speaker fight and Israel-Hamas conflict suggests an increase over the 2022 numbers is plausible.
Members of Congress are taking these threats seriously. In September, three journalists at the Washington Post reviewed FEC filings to assess how much candidates for the House and Senate were spending on security. They found an overall increase of 500 percent between 2020 and 2022.”
https://www.vox.com/23899688/2024-election-republican-primary-death-threats-trump
“On April 22, 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill dissolving the Reedy Creek Improvement District, ending perhaps the most successful experiment in private governance in U.S. history. The bill ended an arrangement that turned a swamp on the edges of Orlando into the home of Walt Disney World, one of the busiest tourist destinations on Earth. The governor’s victory is not yet final—while the district was formally dissolved earlier this year, Disney attorneys quickly outfoxed DeSantis, delegating many of the district’s powers back to the company. The company is now suing to reverse the change altogether.”
…
“DeSantis’ attempt to dissolve the district is a blatant effort to bully a private company because he disapproved of its constitutionally protected speech. At best, it reveals DeSantis as a culture warrior rather than a small-government conservative. At worst, it exposes DeSantis as a politician willing to toss out the rule of law and free markets to score cheap political points, in the lead-up to a Republican presidential primary in which he’s struggling to meet expectations.”
…
“Looking back over the past half-century, it’s safe to say that the Reedy Creek Improvement District has been a remarkably successful experiment in private governance. If Disney World isn’t technically a city, it may as well be. On a typical day, the district hosts 160,000 visitors and 77,000 employees, which would put it among the top 100 U.S. cities, well above Walt’s vision of 20,000 EPCOT residents. Approximately 32,000 hotel rooms house tens of thousands of temporary—and nonvoting—residents each night.
The district had been a laboratory for public services, running instructive experiments in everything from mosquito abatement to green energy—though it never built that nuclear power plant. The district’s boutique EPCOT Building Code, a nod to Walt’s original ambitions for the project, optimizes safety and innovation better than the typical U.S. building code does. The district is still, for the most part, ringed by a carefully managed greenbelt, and the Disney World monorail is the ninth-busiest rapid transit system in the country.”
…
“Even well beyond its official boundaries, it’s nearly impossible to ignore the transformative impact of the Reedy Creek Improvement District. Orlando has been among the fastest-growing cities in the U.S. every decade since 1970, and its metropolitan population has quadrupled from approximately 344,000 to 1.5 million residents. Today, Orlando—and Florida as a whole—is synonymous with tourism, an economic powerhouse that holds the undisputed title of “theme park capital of the world.””
…
“Far from being a failure, the Reedy Creek Improvement District has been a runaway economic development success, matched only by the free market economic zones that created Singapore and Hong Kong or turned China from a nation of peasant farmers into an industrialized nation in a single generation. The worst that can be said about it is that Florida didn’t create even more such districts, offering a level playing field to competitors such as Universal Studios. With new cities and charter cities once again in vogue, we should be discussing the district as a model rather than pondering its apparent death.”
https://reason.com/2023/12/16/desantis-vs-disney-floridas-fight-over-private-governance/