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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

>Both the left and the right [...] call basic and decent democratic norms into question (free speech, elections).

I only see Republicans doing this, but I am not American so perhaps my perspective is not as acute as someone "on the inside". Can you link to instances of Democrats calling free speech and elections into question?

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Perhaps not Democrats per se, but the left (particularly the university left) has had a real problem with free speech over the last several years. Cancel culture, deplatforming, mobs trying to prevent speakers from appearing, getting people fired, and so on.

The left is not friends of free speech, at least not the current US left.

But the First Amendment to your constitution is about making laws that abridge the freedom of speech. It's about protecting the freedom of speech from the government, not about protecting the freedom of speech from other people who are free to protest your speaking event at their leisure.

Getting fired because of views you espouse is not a violation of your First Amendment rights.

There is a difference between freedom of speech as a cultural concept, and as a legal concept. When most people say "freedom of speech", I doubt they mean it in a specific, literal legal sense, but rather as a vague idea, a general principle. That idea may include corporations being allowed to fire people based on their political views. But when it becomes standard behaviour for people not to mention their political views publicly due to fear of losing their jobs, I doubt that is the kind of society that will have freedom of speech in culture or in working legal sense much longer. Nor do I think that people have such a society in mind when they imagine a "free society".

I suppose you missed the 3-year period where Trump was supposedly a Russian agent who stole the election?

That's just the tenor of American politics right now in general.

No one made that claim except right wing media. They said, and this was proven, there was collusion among members of his campaign to influence the election.

When the left complained that Trump became president while several million more people wanted his opponent to win, characterizing that as 'stealing the election' does not seem particularly unfair.

And given the oddly pervasive connections between Trump's family and Russia, I can't really fault people for thinking there might very well be a connection. An awful lot of smoke, there is.

Honestly, the _incredibly_ numerous sexual assault complaints against him should have disqualified him at the start, especially when combined with his publicly indecent behaviour.

If you allow for someone to be disqualified based on accusations which haven't been tried in court how are you going to prevent that from being weaponized? In fact, isn't that what they tried to do to Biden this election?

There were a set of rules. According to the rules, he won. That's not stealing the election, that's winning by the rules. That's like saying that one team "stole" a baseball game because they had fewer hits than the other team. Yeah, but they had more runs, and that's the rules of the game.

> There were a set of rules. According to the rules, he won

Correct. Which is why most of the grousing centered around the electoral college being archaic and undemocratic. Many people want to see the rules changed.

And I'm fine with that. That's the approach they should take.

Claiming "they stole the election" is not that.

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