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Previous Guy's down to his last demand: majoritarian victimhood defenses as a logical fallacy [1]

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Date: 2022-08-30

The back to the future of a delusion. Like places where fun goes to die, or ‘peace on earth’ the parallel universe keeps some fantasies and grievances alive.

The 2020 election is over and the winner declared. The loser decided to commit fraud and his party fomented election interference. There even was a riot. He wants it to happen again because that’s the last tantrum you have left to throw. All they have left are empty violence threats that will manifest themselves regionally but likely never again like J6 unless previous guy can co-opt an army corps.

x Trump calls for him to be declared the winner of the 2020 election and be reinstalled as president, or for there to be an immediate do-over of the presidential election. pic.twitter.com/2jE643rpB1 — Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) August 29, 2022

“Trump has still not said a word of explanation as to why he took the documents, why he did not return them all, and what he was doing with them for over 18 months.” @ AWeissmann_

x New sealed entry on the Trump Mar-a-Lago special master docket just dropped pic.twitter.com/FpM20h61Jr — Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) August 30, 2022

x The sealed entry is likely the more detailed property receipt that Trump had requested. The DOJ response will not be sealed. — Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) August 30, 2022

Here’s the point: When the starting position is that any and all law enforcement activity related to Trump is inherently illegitimate — that this activity by definition cannot have been justified by reasonable suspicions of wrongdoing — then everything works backward from there.

We’ve already seen this over and over again.

When federal agents searched Trump’s resort operating partly on information shared by confidential witnesses around Trump, this happened because evidence they’d collected convinced a judge (Reinhart) of probable cause. But Trump supporters labeled this the stuff of totalitarian secret police forces.

When the warrant was released, it documented specific suspected crimes (violation of the Espionage Act and other statutes involving handling of government information). The search inventory showed that highly sensitive documents had been recovered. But Trump and his supporters demanded release of the affidavit, even as his lawyers avoided official action toward that end.

Meanwhile, despite public release of the warrant, Trump’s propagandists intensified their claims that the FBI had declared war on Trump supporters. They were undaunted by intensifying threats of violence against law enforcement.

Now, if the affidavit is released with heavy redactions, the conspiracy theories will intensify. And the end point isn’t hard to predict. For Trump and his supporters, the price of social peace will essentially be a grant of absolute impunity to Trump on multiple fronts.

This at a time when Trump still faces potential indictment for possible crimes related to efforts to steal the 2020 election, incitement of a violent assault on the government and possession of highly classified national security documents. Meanwhile, Trump is gearing up another potential effort to overturn our political order.

The release of the affidavit is unlikely to appease Trump and his supporters in the least. He is all but certain to do all he can to ensure that it only escalates their rage. www.washingtonpost.com/... x No yeah this guy's definitely on his way out. pic.twitter.com/vOUWZ11cJv — Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) August 20, 2022

x The President has power. Biden using the word "semi-fascism" to discuss Trump and MAGA movement is forcing America to grapple with the reality of this extremist force. Media outlets are going to twist themselves in a pretzel to avoid confronting it. — Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) August 30, 2022

x I would like to add Jan 6th is remembered for the attack on the Capitol building, but many forget that 147 Republican lawmakers objected to the election results after the attack. Now imagine what these people will do if they regain control of the House and Senate. https://t.co/ecpGLTKh1Z — Christopher Bouzy (@cbouzy) August 13, 2022

Beyond logical fallacy, this argument falls apart if subject to an analysis of the way white privilege operates in a settler-colonial context. In Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's work "Decolonization is not a metaphor", they argue claims to indigeneity can act as a settler move to innocence that resolves the guilt of the colonizer.

philosophy.stackexchange.com/...

All Trump has is revisionist history, much like the missing history of a surviving DeLorean car company.

Monterey, California (CNN) If you've seen the new DeLorean Alpha5 electric car, you might be disappointed that it doesn't look much at all like the famous DeLorean DMC-12 from the "Back to the Future" movies. Really, other than the gullwing doors, there's not much that clearly ties the cars together.

But the Alpha5, which made its public debut recently, does resemble some DeLoreans you might not remember because none of them were ever actually made.

It's one thing to buy the DeLorean name, put it on some new vehicle and declare it an "official DeLorean." But the DeLorean DMC-12 was an icon of modern design. Its successor should not just bear the DeLorean name, it should look like a DeLorean, too.

But after 40 years, what should a DeLorean look like? Surely it should at least somewhat resemble the DMC-12 that starred in the movies, but the car company went bankrupt before the first film even debuted. So the company's designs didn't evolve over the following decades the way those of other car brands did. Ironically, the "Back to the Future" car remained firmly stuck in the past. To imagine what today's DeLorean would look like, the company's new designers had to fill in a nearly 40-year gap.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/30/2119434/-Previous-Guy-s-down-to-his-last-demand-majoritarian-victimhood-defenses-as-a-logical-fallacy

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