I have no problem envisioning how the SCOTUS might endorse some EC spoiling effort out of, say, NC, throwing the election to the House, and if Dems protest, being met with an avalanche of "who's the election denialist now?!" You have to get ahead of that.

It would be unfair - "unfair" - if there wasn't effort to portray the Democrat as also having problems with telling the truth to balance out the need to occasionally mention that the candidates who relentlessly lie about both minor and major things aren't telling the truth.

I too worry a little bit about how diving too hard on "you must accept the process!" - particularly in political media - pins Democrats down if they decide that a legalistic coup attempt is procedurally legitimate. Dems should do more work than they have trying to preempt that.

This "you have to accept me stealing elections if you expect me to not illicitly insist you stole an election" logic is a close parallel to, "you cannot prosecute me for crimes if you criticize me for trying to imprison political opposition on pretextual charges."

No. I'm afraid we're going to have to put on our big kid pants and make sound judgments about what are legitimate outcomes of the electoral system and not and reject candidates who will refuse to accept valid results of democratic participation irrespective of what powerful people might assert.

The is a very high possibility that the rituals of democracy will be there, but the substance of them - the ability to translate will into power - will be gone, like voting for a state legislature race in WI in 2012. What will be maddening will be the cultural denial that this is what has happened.

I don't think a connection was even deliberately made between ethnic cleansing and housing policy until well after the fact in post hoc justifications that appeared *for* the Trump campaign rather than coming *from* them. But they took the whitewash as a gift and are now running with it.

Like, I don't believe the Russians intermingling with white supremacists on Stormfront were expecting Stormfront types to take over much of the direction of a major American party.

Russian trolls were in American radical groups' online forums well before 2016 just to stir up discontent, and that strategy paid off handsomely - probably more than they anticipated - when online radicalism gained more of a foothold on mainstream American politics.

If fairness, you have a specific online red-brown alliance directed at you personally with dozens, occasionally thousands of accounts (if not people) participating, and that probably can distort one's sense of how much it is going on aside from that.