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Comment by vxNsr | Hacker News Reader

Lol. I have the other side telling me that this all misunderstood and then they’ll point you to the AOCs, Sanders talking about “make lists, lock them up”. They’ll say one side is only talking, but look at Portland, Seattle, DC, etc. there was actual violence. Then the other side will point to Kenosha, which the Trump side will point to as well as proof for them. And they’ll tack on Portland.

The truth is very much in the middle.

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One faction is actively doing everything they can to undermine our system of government, everyone else is not.

That is the divide.

Actually both sides fervently believe the other side is doing everything they can to undermine our system of government, and both sides have valid points.

Please do elaborate.

If you identify with the left:

Why was election integrity highly questionable in 2016 (Russia, etc.), but not in 2020 after 4 years of Trump? Did something change in those 4 years to make election integrity unquestionable? In fact, election integrity is so unquestionable in 2020 that all the big tech companies are banding together to censor anything that questions election integrity.

If you identify with the right:

If there is a massive conspiracy to change the outcome of the election, why are not more whistleblowers coming forward? How was it coordinated across states?

The truth is that questionable things probably did happen in the 2020 election. The left needs to acknowledge this. The truth is that there isn't enough evidence that these questionable things probably didn't change the outcome of the election. The right needs to acknowledge this. Both sides need to agree on how to improve the 2024 election.

I would love for you to provide citations and references for your claims that people questioned the validity of the 2016 election. Many claimed Russian interference, many claimed that James Comey put his thumb on the scale, many claimed that the media provided Trump with a great deal of free media and that the mainstream media were easily whipped up with anti-Clinton stories, many claimed that the sitting administration erred in not publicizing known associations between high-level Trump campaign operatives and Russian agents.

NO ONE claimed that the vote was illegitimate. NO ONE claimed that the ballot boxes had been stuffed. The 2016 vote was much closer than 2020 and still the party that lost accepted the result and even if they mumbled about 'not my President' there was no one claiming that the election was stolen.

Please stop with the bullshit both-sides claims, it is pathetic.

> even if they mumbled about 'not my President'

more like shouted it at the top of their lungs for 4 years straight

> I would love for you to provide citations and references for your claims that people questioned the validity of the 2016 election

> there was no one claiming that the election was stolen.

I mean, I lived the 2016 election I remember the response of my left leaning friends, and some of them absolutely believed the election was rigged. Some quick googling can dig up lots of articles from 2016:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/hillary-clinton-sugg...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2016/12/16/t...

https://www.lwv.org/newsroom/press-releases/2016-presidentia...

None of those articles contain claims that votes were changed (election fraud) or that voters voted repeatedly or illegally (voter fraud).

They do contain claims of voter suppression, which I'll note continue to be made by those on the left this year (and in 2018 and in pretty much every election, disenfranchisement is an ongoing concern on the left).

> provide citations and references for your claims that people questioned the validity of the 2016 election

A 2018 YouGov poll said that 66% of democrats polled believe the claim that Russia tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help the President.

> https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

Election integrity was not questionable in either 2016 or 2020. There were massive amounts of disinformation - both from foreign actors and from Trump - in both elections. But there was not significant fraud in either election.

The claim by the left about 2016 is that there was foreign influence (and potential illegal collusion) in the election. There are fringe elements who claim that there was direct modification of votes, but the mainstream accusations are and were limited to things like advertisement targeting, funding, and potentially sharing of information between foreign actors and campaigns etc.

The mainstream claim by the right in 2020 is that there was widespread voter or election fraud (e.g. people voting multiple times, or people's votes being changed or vote counters not counting votes for a candidate).

There's a reasonable amount of evidence to support the assertions in 2016, including official government sources. There's reasonable amounts of evidence to conclude that many of the same tactics in 2016 were tried in 2020, including official government statements, but may have been less effective (due to awareness by the government, and policy changes by companies like Facebook and Google), and a lack of things like the DNC hack to make a big splash.

There's was no evidence of widespread voter or election fraud in 2016 or in 2020.

"Disband the police" is such a pro-government slogan

The police are not part of a system of government. Removing the police would leave the US a democracy.

You removed the words "system of" which changes the phrase from a democratic to a nationalistic one. Blind support for the government isn't healthy for a democracy.

Do you find it helpful to misrepresent other people's arguments, or do you simply not understand their arguments in the first place?

"Defund the police" was the slogan. Admittedly, still a brain-dead choice of a name for what the movement actually wanted.

Defund AND/OR disband. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/06/09/the-moveme...

I think a large part of the issue is that people that lean slightly one way are getting lumped in with the extremes of that direction where they don't see themselves like that.

Someone that questions immigration laws isn't necessarily a white supremacist for example, but that narrative isn't as interesting (doesn't sell as much advertising) as the white supremacist one.

If you were to truly believe fraud and impropriety occurred in the election you could rephrase your comment like this.

One faction actively did everything they could to undermine an election through fraud and impropriety, everyone else didn’t.

That is the divide.

This is what gp is talking about, both sides believing they are righteously just while they consume media in their bubbles.

Except that the facts only support one side.

Oh, wow. You're right. Talking about "make lists, lock them up" is TOTALLY equivalent to "when the looting starts the shooting starts". Totally.

Do you have a reference to the make lists/lock them up?

I think this is what they’re referring to: https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1324807776510595078

I don’t know though, this was in a WhatsApp group, I remember seeing the conversation about something she said but idk if this was it

That sounds like take screenshots so we can call them out later, not make lists/lock them up.

I'll second this.

Neither side really instances the other side and many buy into the headline narrative that the other half aee basically all extremist nutjobs.

Third! This is such a weird moment in America history. In one side you have a rag-tag group of: classical conservatives, flyover working class white people,cuban-americans, evangelicals and in the other you have hollywood, the media, the tech companies, their employees, and the colleges. This is not a right/left split, not even a liberal/conservative split, this is a power split (on which the regular people are just cannon-fodder soldiers) between old money and new money.

Let's make some concrete claims then

On partisanship: "The extremist-related murders of 2019 [in the US] were overwhelmingly (90%) linked to right-wing extremists. All but one of the incidents had ties to right-wing extremism...Almost all of the 2019 extremist-related murders were committed by white supremacists"

On weapons: "In the past 10 years, 315 of the 435 people (72%) killed in the U.S. by domestic extremists were shot to death."

Source: ADL Report on Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2019 (https://www.adl.org/murder-and-extremism-2019)

> then they’ll point you to the AOCs, Sanders talking about “make lists, lock them up”

I don't see an equivalancy with "find problem people and lock them up", which inherently implies judicial process, and the other side, with Trump saying:

"After repeatedly being interrupted by protesters at a campaign rally in Miami, Trump warned he’ll “be a little more violent” next time when addressing protesters. “See the first group, I was nice. ‘Oh, take your time.’ The second group, I was pretty nice. The third group, I’ll be a little more violent. And the fourth group, I’ll say get the hell out of here!”"

"Trump told Fox News the next day, “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing. I have a lot of fans, and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy who was a troublemaker who was looking to make trouble.”"

"“If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Just knock the hell out of them. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. There won’t be so much of them because the courts agree with us,” he said."

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