60% of GOP voters think election was stolen; 50% think 1/6 riot was non-violent or done by leftists

[SAAuthCapitalist]

I remember when CNN was saying the BLM riots were actually done by white nationalists, Proud Boys, and Groypers.

And those riots were objectively far more violent than the Capitol thing.

[SAAuthCapitalist]

The January 6th riots involved Trump supporters beating a police officer to death with an American flag.  Along with many other acts of violence against cops and threats of violence against members of Congress, prevented only by the bravery of those same cops.

I don't want to hear anyone say they were non-violent.

There has been no evidence Sicknick died from injuries related to the riots though. This is from the FBI, not me.

[SAAuthCapitalist]

The January 6th riots involved Trump supporters beating a police officer to death with an American flag.  Along with many other acts of violence against cops and threats of violence against members of Congress, prevented only by the bravery of those same cops.

I don't want to hear anyone say they were non-violent.

There has been no evidence Sicknick died from injuries related to the riots though. This is from the FBI, not me.

Yes, a healthy man in his early forties who is involved with hey Violet physical confrontation including being struck in the head and complained of pain immediately afterwards inexplicably goes into a coma and dies soon afterward. Please report back Sherlock as you continue to unravel this mystery for us!

Note that the investigation is ongoing and the FBI still hasn’t charged anyone with his death.

Also, he was pepper sprayed, not struck in the head.

[SAAuthCapitalist]

Jan. 6 was largely a non-violent protest, that is a statement of fact

Pollsters asking people what they "believe" at a given moment (as opposed to more overt behavior, like voting intention) is designed to generate results like this.  Much to Atlas' surprise, most normal people do not spend their free time racking their brains about the causes and effects of events like 1/6.  Calling it a non-violent protest or the handiwork of left-wing agitators isn't really a statement of positive belief that an individual has arrived at after assessing some level of (dis)information, it's used only to signal which "team" the respondent plays for (and this is the inherent danger of NYT and WaPo continuing to give QAnon so much unearned attention; the more mainstream liberals turn it into a partisan bludgeon, the more defense of it will become a rallying cry for run-of-the-mill Republicans - it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.)

That sentence alone makes Republicans look far worse, petty, and downright stupid than anything I've ever typed about them. Congrats.

But Democrats do it too, as lfromnj pointed out above, over two-thirds of Democrats believe that Russia tampered with vote tallies to get Donald Trump elected in 2016* - a belief that is just as indisputably misaligned with the facts as believing the Jan. 6 riots were mostly the work of BLM or antifa

My axiom holds for both the left and right:  if media, in their all-consuming quest to garner clicks/views and drive narratives of division - amplify certain stories beyond what is reasonable (i.e., Russian interference, QAnon, etc.) then partisans will come to traffick in them regardless of their factual standing. 

*this is, FWIW, a lie that top Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi pushed just as brazenly as Trump did his claims of election interference after 2020

Did they? Did they consistently claim for months that Russia actually *changed vote tallies*?

Joe Biden is emphatically not the first modern U.S. president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy.  Hillary Clinton told CBS' 60 Minutes as late as 2019 that "[Trump] knows he's an illegitimate president."

And it goes back way further than that, John Lewis and 20 more House Democrats refused to attend Trump's inauguration in 2017 because, as Lewis said, "I don't see him as a legitimate president...I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected."

Jerry Nadler, who presided over one of the most costly and intrusive investigations into Trump's presidency, was allowed to do such after saying in 2017 that despite being "legally elected" Russian interference made "[Trump's] election illegitimate."

High-ranking and respected Democrats denying the legitimacy of our elections by participating in a Russian smear effort is open war on our democratic processes and institutions (it is all the more damning, even, that they were saying these things before the Mueller Report had been released.)  That this talk never went away is exactly why over two-thirds of Democrats believe baseless conspiracy theories about Donald Trump and the 2016 election.  Liberals boohooing now over the "delegitimization" of Biden have very select memories; they spent four years not only declaring Trump an illegitimate president, but they tried to remove him from office and abused their powers of investigation for political gain.   

Go off!