So-and-so never said such-and-such about this and that
I come across it constantly in comments and in blog posts on other sites: assertions that some politician, or every politician, in the Republican Party never spoke on a certain topic, never fought against a certain pernicious action of the left, never tried to do a certain thing. And yet very often when I’ve checked – usually a rather simple and quick search – I find it’s not the case and that the person has in fact done some form of that thing or spoken out on just that topic.
The internet has made it rather easy for us all to do such searches. And yet people don’t seem to be doing them much. I think it’s because we all have so much anger at what’s happening to our country that there’s an urge to strike out not just at the left – that’s easy – but at the supposed right who haven’t been able (or in some cases even willing) to stop it. I’ve noticed this as long as I’ve been blogging, which is nineteen years at this point (yikes).
Just to take one example, there’s this comment by “wendybar” I noticed today at Althouse’s. It was on a thread about the Draconian sentence handed down for J6 defendent and Proud Boy Enrique Barrio, who wasn’t even present at J6:
Quit f****** pretending anybody is “protecting democracy”.
Trump is, because he is right. These J6 prisoners are now martyrs for freedom. This is the biggest “issue” in the coming year…
DeSantis and the GOPe field…silent.
I would like to see every GOP candidate – and even some Democrats (a person can dream, right?) speak out against the persecution of the J6 defendants. I agree that many have been way too silent. But have they all been silent about the J6 sentences? No. It was simplicity itself to find coverage of this story from late May, when Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes had just been sentenced to 18 years in prison:
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Thursday he would prioritize pardoning “victims” of “political targeting,” potentially including the defendants involved with the January 6 attacks on the capitol, a move that could alter sentences like the 18 years handed to Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes Thursday. …
From the start of his presidency, he would be “aggressive about issuing pardons” to groups he believes have been politically targeted, such as pro-life demonstrators, he said.
While some cases may involve a true violation of the law, DeSantis said he believes there is an “uneven application of justice” in many incidents—he used the example of a Black Lives Matter protester not getting prosecuted the same as someone involved in January 6.
The article says that Vivek wrote in April that he’d pardon “all federal defendants prosecuted on political motives,” including the January 6 defendants. Also noted is the fact that Trump said back in 2022 he would “treat them fairly – And if it requires pardons we will give them pardons.”
I can’t find anything on the other candidates. That doesn’t mean they haven’t spoken on the subject, although I would be surprised if any of them have issued statements such as those of DeSantis or Ramaswamy. That’s because the rest of the candidates are either running on an anti-Trump platform or are part of the less conservative wing of the GOP.
J6 has generally been one of those third-rail issues – a lot of people on the right are afraid to touch it, because they think it labels them as being on the so-called “far right” and therefore anathema to middle America. I’m not sure it would actually have that effect, and what’s more, I think it’s of vital important to speak out against our incredibly twisted and partisan justice system of politically-motivated trials and especially the lengthy sentences.
NOTE: As I’ve said many times, I strongly believe Trump will get the nomination. The election itself is quite far away, and many events could happen prior to that time (including a change of candidate for the Democrats), but I also believe the GOP is likely to lose the general.
Could it be that many of these errors come from people who got rid of Google, and of some Commie browser? I ask because I’m one of them, but I’ve had to go back to Google for searching. I hate to say it, but it’s the best I’ve seen. My browser is Brave, but Brave search is pathetic.
Eeyore:
I don’t think many of them are doing searches at all – I would guess they are just assuming that because they are not aware of the statements of certain politicians, then that means they haven’t ever spoken on the topic. Or they’ve read somewhere – like in some other blog – that such people have never spoken on the subject, and they are repeating what they’re read, assuming it is correct.
As far as search engines go, I think DuckDuckGo is quite good.
because repetition, 10% of all j6ers, are floridian, half of them have been charged enrique tarrio, miami native, was virtually proscribed, 22 years, for texting some messages, thats about the size of it,
so much of this is criminal abuse of law enforcement, empowered by matthew graves, who could play the part of the sheriff of nottingham
I don’t think people search. There are lots of people on Twitter/X who just say things which others believe without checking.
Someone was having apoplexy that DeSantis “claimed to be a SEAL.” He didn’t. He had said that he had deployed alongside the SEALS. His exact quote was “I deployed to Iraq alongside U.S. Navy SEALs in places like Fallujah, Ramadi…”
Lee Also:
Most of the critiques of DeSantis are lies, and this has been going on – from left and elements of the right – for a long long time.
My conservative cousin keeps going on how no conservative will Tell It Like It Is and galvanize the nation like Jimmy Stewart in “Mr Smith Goes to Washington.”
Or something.
It seems to me that Republicans, even RINO-types, do say Good Stuff sometimes, but it doesn’t get the coverage and it doesn’t make a difference, but it did get said
Frankly I’m more of a bottom-up guy. Barring the miracles of Washington, Lincoln, plus a few more, I think change happens when some critical proportion of the population is ready for change, before the Man on the White Horse arrives.
Back in 2020, I was talking with someone who said they had not heard a particular politician say much. I do not remember now if it was Trump or the Texas Governor Abbot. At the time, I was keeping track of a lot of what was being said, and I knew that particular leader had been talking about the situation. The person saying that just was not really paying attention and maybe their limited news watching was not covering it.
Yes, people don’t do the searches they should. However, I think a lot this stems from the extreme frustration the base with the GOP and it’s willingness to actually fight back. As mentioned the other day, the GOP certainly doesn’t have the level of coordination that the left has, and sucks at communication. So people just get frustrated and lash out by claiming “They don’t do anything!”
Even today I saw an article where the headline was “Jim Jordan writes another letter!” The gist was that is all he does…writes letters and expects results. Frustration oozing.
I too have used DuckDuckGo as my search engine, but my experience has not been good. Even when I’m trying to find a conservative essay I know I have read on a certain topic, the top results are almost all left-oriented.
TinK:
That’s what happens to me with Google, but much less with DuckDuckGo.
yes he was the jag lawyer to the seals,
I don’t hold the near silence against him, but others might, because the law doesn’t seem to matter, 22 years that was the sentence huber matos, one of the rebel commanders got for insurrection against el comandante,
miguel cervantes:
So when someone speaks out- especially compared to the others – it’s “near silence”?
I think the frustration is mostly with the majority of Repubs who seem afraid to be associated with J6. I think the only two reps to visit them are Gaetz and MTG. I agree DeSantis has done well most of the time. A lot of the unhappiness with him is because of his need for big donors. I can’t recall what percentage is from small donors. ActBlue has mastered this problem by faking donors as James O’Keefe has demonstrated by going door to door to D donors and asking them how much they donated. The video is entertaining.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q-AmlxTfCQ
Sure, Republicans speak out. Take, for instance, Lindsey Graham. It seems he’s made many angry sternly worded speeches concerning Democrat perfidy. If there’s angry sternly worded speech to be made about the Dems, he’s you’re man.
Here is what Republicans in D.C. can do, Neo. Refuse to pass a budget resolution until all the J6 protestors are freed/pardoned. I DGAF what politicians say any longer. The words out of the mouth carry no more weight with me than their practical effect on anything else, which is nothing.
Republicans are bringing hot air to a machine gun fight.
There’s always another hill for Repubs to die on
Yancey Ward:
Considering that Republicans don’t have the MSM, the DOJ, the FBI, or DC courts in their favor or even neutral, but are targeted by them, I think Republicans are proceeding not that badly (at least, some). It’s only because they’ve been pushing to reveal it that the Biden corruption has now been exposed. I have read (and I wrote a post about it a couple of weeks ago) that they are planning reciprocal lawfare in some red states. However, unlike leftist judges and juries, conservative judges and juries are less likely to believe the law is an almost endlessly elastic thing that can be contorted and stretched in order to “get” one’s enemies.
Yancey Ward:
As far as the budget goes, I’ve discussed that many times either with you or with others, or with both. They would absolutely lose that battle. First of all, their margin in the House is so razor thin that unless it was virtually unanimous it wouldn’t hold. And there would always be enough defections that it wouldn’t work in the first place – you’d need a much larger group and a more uniformly conservative group for it to hold. Secondly, even if they held firm, the Democrats would never give in and they would successfully, with the help of the press, etc., blame the terrible Republicans for gumming up the works just to get a bunch of insurrectionists pardoned. Your suggestion is a losing game.
I think a much much better approach would be to try some sort of reciprocal lawfare.
they are burning the forest down, to the stumps, this is what mark elias has wrought,
The 24 hour news cycle means that if somebody said something weeks or months ago it gets overlooked. Much also depends on what you search for. The first result I get on “DeSantis and Stewart Rhodes” is DeSantis saying he’d look into pardoning him. It’s that story from late May of this year. But who remembers Stewart Rhodes now? If I search for “Ron DeSantis and January 6 defendants” I don’t find anything about pardoning in the top results. Throw in “pardoning” and I get more of those late May results. Search for “Ron DeSantis and Enrique Barrio” and I don’t get anything.
DeSantis has sound political reasons for not making his campaign about January 6, but for some people it matters if he let the whole summer go by without saying anything about pardons or much about the injustices. Of course, what people forget in reading the news is that whether or not a politician comments on a given topic depends on whether he or she is asked about it. The difference between a politician who ventures a comment on something and one who doesn’t may just be that one politician was asked and another wasn’t.
Search engines deliver years of stories together. If I want to find out about a stupid thing or a lie that Biden said recently, I may get stories from years ago, even if I specify a recent date. Search for a needle and you get a haystack. I notice a story from June about DeSantis not saying whether he would issue pardons to anyone at a time when Ramaswamy had said he would pardon, and a story from July about DeSantis telling Clay Travis that he would consider pardoning Trump if it would bring the country together. Depending on which story comes first and which catches one’s eye, people can come away from a web search with very different impressions. Notice, too, that the reporter who wrote that June story, may not have done any search to find out what DeSantis had said the month before.
Abraxas:
Because I do a LOT of searching, I can usually find what I’m looking for. But sometimes it’s not easy. One way to do it is to go to “tools” and do a search for a certain time (today, this past week, custom search, etc.).
However, this search was quite easy. On DuckDuckGo, I searched for, “desantis talks about j6 convictions.” That’s pretty generic. I immediately got quite few articles. I think I will write another post about this, because what I found is quite interesting.
In other words, don’t even try to do anything meaningful.
Yancey Ward:
No, that’s not it.
What is it? It’s “be smart about what you do.” It’s also, “don’t try to do what’s not possible.” The GOP has a four-vote majority in the House and does not control the Senate. In the House, do you really think they can get enough support for this fairly extreme measure with only a four-vote majority? And 20 of those Republicans in the House voted to impeach Trump, and 18 of those Republicans are in districts that voted for Biden. Not everyone in the GOP is conservative. You may not like that, but it’s the case. And if you ran conservatives in the districts that voted for Biden, the Democrats would probably be controlling the House right now.
Here’s the situation as it stands. Might be a stalemate for a while, but at some point they’ll have to pass some sort of compromise, I think.
I occasionally go to the Daily Mail UK website in search of an unbiased news report. I was reading a Daily Mail story yesterday on the sentencing of the Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio. I found the article through Google News; maybe that was the problem?
The author called the Proud Boys a “neo-fascist group,” parroting Antifa rhetoric. There were other notable inaccuracies in the story. Sad.
“Yancey Ward on September 6, 2023 at 8:12 pm said:
Here is what Republicans in D.C. can do, Neo. Refuse to pass a budget resolution until all the J6 protestors are freed/pardoned. I DGAF what politicians say any longer. The words out of the mouth carry no more weight with me than their practical effect on anything else, which is nothing.”
THIS^^^^
I agree with Yancey. It is time to fight…something the Republicans show us time after time that they are afraid to do and WON’T do, unlike the Progressives.
Newt Gingrich lost his mano a mano battle with Clinton and that was at least partially Gingrich’s fault. Budget battles are tough to win. Maybe the abortion issue will be less intense next year. It would help if GOP legislatures would pass some sensible compromise like a 15 weeks limit. Maybe with a bigger majority something could be accomplished.
They will lose because they aren’t doing a THING about this…
“The truth is, I could have been home,” said Tarrio. “I could have been home a long time ago. I could be in my warm ass bed right now, laughing at the world, without a problem…and all I had to do in order to do that WAS LIE ABOUT TRUMP. All I had to do was confirm a lie.”
“Everything they wanted me to say is fabricated,” said Tarrio. “It was a lie. I refused to sign their work of fiction. I want to be unequivocally clear- I have no connection to President Trump or anyone in his family whatsoever. The connection simply just does NOT exist and never did. They literally wanted me to lie.”
https://rumble.com/v3fk3a8-the-feds-asked-me-to-lie-about-president-trump-in-order-to-indict-him.html
Wendy Brown:
You appear to want a show. It that show is doomed to failure, or is not possible with the small majority the GOP presently holds, or will alienate all but the right flank of the party, you apparently don’t care as long as it’s a show.
I would be in favor of it also, if I thought it would actually accomplish anything other than turning most voters off.