a mystical möbius — curating facts, ideas, text, and media to create a contemplative space.
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Grievance Grift [GG]
GG (part 1) || (part 2) || (part 3) || (part 4) || (part 5) || (part 6) || (part 7) || (part 8)
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“Political technologies”[PT]
Please recall a key to DJT‘s political approach is exploiting grievance. Many things DJT said/did politically in his time as president often leveraged grievance/outrage.
DJT‘s political technologies [PT] embody grievance politics and operationalize his power—through ground level cult-followers who act-out as local political technologists.
A peek at the comments under most posts on Senator Roger Marshall’s TheFacebook page will provide plenty of evidence for that claim.
The ultimate grievance
So, in 2016 DJT began setting up the granddaddy of all grievances in presidential politics, e.g., the tale of a stolen election to rob MAGA voters of their democratic franchise.
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A rudimentary timeline
My aim is merely to relate the basic outline for the rollout of DJT‘s dangerous anti-democratic PT project that peaked on January 6, 2021. Well, we hope it has already ‘peaked.’
Basic bullet points:
- In 2016 DJT set the table for election fraud claims—in April of 2016, Roger Stone established “Stop The Steal.” [Important note: DJT appropriated and built on Stone’s creation during the 2020 post-election campaign, e.g., the January 6 Rally was called the “Stop The Steal/Save America” Rally].
So, DJT constructs a coping mechanism because he cannot admit loss. He does this upfront. Depending on who one listens to it’s either a psychological defect or a strong commitment to a strategy grounded in what both his dad, Fred Trump, and his lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn, taught him; e.g., never ever admit loss and never ever say you’re sorry.
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- By August of 2017 the people at Vox had already identified a huge practical problem:
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- November 3rd, 2020, Joe Biden won the election by over 7 million votes in the popular vote count [he won by 74 electoral college votes, 306 -232].
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- November 4, 2020, (very early a.m.) as video below demonstrates, DJT began the (post-election-day) claim of election fraud and a stolen election.
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- November 7, 2020, DJT‘s ‘stolen election’ PT blitzkrieg begins in earnest at the Four Seasons Landscaping presser.
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- November 7 thru January 5, DJT and all his spokespeople use every possible means to declare widespread voter fraud and a stolen election. They make these claims over and over and over to broadly install the disinformation.
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- January 6, 2021, insurrectionists violently storm the Capitol to overturn the election.
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- January 6, 2021, late that evening, while admitting there is no evidence for widespread election fraud, many Republican leaders argue that some Americans have serious doubts about election integrity and so that’s why they are voting against the certification of the election. Seriously.
So, the elected leaders say they are just voicing voter concerns. However, the real reason that some Americans are concerned is because DJT and his PT machine have been telling them over and over and over for many weeks that the election was rigged and stolen. The evidence of the effects of that had been experienced in the attack.
Hopeful signs?
- May 3, 2021, Liz Cheney, again, publicly repudiates DJT‘s stolen election lie, and encourages the Republican Party to move away from him. Instead, the party is moving away from her. Liz Cheney vows to keep fighting ‘Big Lie’
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- May 11, 2021, Jeff Flake writes, “In today’s Republican Party, there is no greater offense than honesty.”
“Honesty has become a grueling and heavy lift,” Robin Givhan writes.
- May 12, 2021, Liz Cheney offers remarks on the eve of the vote that removed her from her third place in line of Republican leadership:
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- Now, Republican state voting laws are being changed to further constrict voting based on the same fabricated concerns.
Political technologists are everywhere
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When I began looking into PT I kept running into something. At first I didn’t understand what it meant practically. (5 sec. clip):
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MAGA-Charlies are “a dime a dozen.” Here’s an example of the PT trickle-down effect and resulting ground level political technologist.
Under my comment asking Senator Roger Marshall to call for a commission to investigate everything that led up to the attack on the Capitol, Charlie _______ replies with a ‘whataboutism’ (a PT tool) that’s also a falsehood (so, a double PT). Snips:
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tl;dr
So, circular reasoning…
- DJT claimed widespread election fraud (2016 & 2020)—debunked
- DJT‘s “Big Lie” was his claim of a “stolen election” (2020)—debunked
- “Stolen election” claim is repeated over and over and over
- DJT called his cult-followers to “Stop The Steal/Save America” on January 6, 2021
- MAGA-cult mob attacks U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to disrupt/overturn 2020 presidential election
- Republican excuse for their votes to disenfranchise some voters: “voters fear election fraud”—never mind those fears were created by DJT‘s Big Lie
Next week: GG (part 10) Come and see.
[this post approx. 800 words (3 min. read)]
Your thoughts?
I never know what I’ve said till I hear the response. What did you hear me say?
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a mystical möbius 
Maybe I linked to this in the past and if so, sorry for being redundant. Our thinking is somewhat alike which is always comforting to know someone else arrived at a similar conclusion following independent research and analysis. This very short read is something I wrote in 2018 about a tactic Trump has used so effectively and which is a slightly different way to look at the Grievance Grift. The title is The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend. I believe this very basic human compulsion is how Trump gets away with insulting so many people. The emotion to hate a common enemy is much stronger than competing emotions of love, justice, fairness, etc for many people.
https://shastatour.medium.com/the-twisted-logic-of-the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend-6c7c8c6fc81d
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hey now, shastatour,
Thanks for writing and sharing! I really appreciate you reading along. I do remember reading your enemy of my enemy piece back there.
This “PT” political propaganda topic basically seems to trace back to just post-tsarist Russia.
I feel that one could probably write about this topic for a long time. I think I’m going to wrap it up in (part 10) tomorrow (5/23/21).
Paul Waldman wrote what I feel is a fair assessment this week in The Post. He said the current GOP is in three pieces: group 1, The Crazies; group 2, The Cowards and Cynics; and group 3, The Sane.
“1) The Crazies, who sincerely believe there is a far-reaching conspiracy that includes both elected representatives and election officials at every level, many of whom are Republicans, to steal every election through complex schemes of fraud and vote-rigging.
2) The Cynics and Cowards who pander to the Crazies, either out of fear for their careers (and in some cases their personal safety) or because they see in the Crazies a vehicle for their own ambitions or an army that could help them steal elections they don’t actually win.
3) The Sane, who are larger in number than you might think but are too ineffectual to pull the party back to reality.”
The open question is how voters in various states populate those groups.
We’ll see.
peace and peanut butter,
michael
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/20/what-would-it-take-drag-gop-back-reality
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