The OG and the Cult: A Sampling of Stupidity

Let’s assume you are a reasonably intelligent person, possessed with basic reasoning skills. Would you still believe Donald Trump won the last presidential election? 

If you do, you are in a cult. 

(Luckily for you, we are here to help.)

***

9/6/23: In the hunt for truth (or high ratings – which is definitely not the same), Fox News released the results of a study today, showing that other news channels are biased and horrible, and probably run by Jews and communists – who are often, inexplicably, according to QAnon dopes, the same people.

(Hint: Jewish people are not allies of communists, who hate all religion.)

 

The conservative Media Research Center – which, if you watch Fox News, you assume is led by god-fearing, patriotic Americans who are definitely not transgender or gay – has studied news coverage of former President Trump’s legal entanglements. From January 1 to August 31, MRC found that ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted 872 minutes to covering Trump, with 751 of those focused on his four indictments. Yet, MRC reveals, those commie-run news organizations almost NEVER mentioned that the people who indicted Trump (four times!!!!) were all…Democrats…or Democrat-appointed officers of the courts. 

“Yet even as these legal dramas dominate the political discourse, the networks have strained to present the prosecutors as non-partisan actors – even those who ran and won their offices as Democratic partisans,” MRC analyst Rich Noyes writes.  

Anyway, we will color this portion of the post blue, as in “blue states.” We will mark it as “truth” that everyone who thinks Trump broke the law secretly hopes to establish a Joe Biden dictatorship. The plan is to make sure that Lardo-from-Mar-a-Lago never sits in the White House again.

Of course, there’s “truth,” and there’s “selected evidence,” and there’s overwhelming evidence that will hold up in court.

(Fox News: Where members of the cult go to worship from home.)

The Orange God is not even a god.

 

Here, we switch to black text, with orange highlights, like Trump’s favorite makeup color. Let’s pretend you are really interested in the truth about the 2020 presidential election – but that you might be a member of the cult, which would mean that you are almost terminally ill-informed. For example, you may wallow in Fox News. You may lust after Sean Hannity, if you are a woman of a certain age, or Laura Ingraham if you are an elderly male viewer who sometimes uses a walker.

 Also: you fluff your MyPillow every night before bed. 

Consider just a few of the facts you must ignore – which we will number, as always, in this series of posts – should you choose to believe that Donald is being hunted by evil Democrats, who hate this great land.

(This is a part of a longer post, so numbering starts at #39.)

 

39. First, let’s remember that Fox News got hammered in court after helping spread the lie that Dominion Voting Machines helped rig the 2020 election. Cost of those lies, in a defamation suit: $787.5 million.

$787.5 million

(We could almost stop there if you cared about truth.)

40. Rudy Giuliani, who claimed Trump won the vote in Georgia in 2020, and defamed two low-level poll workers, and said they stole tens of thousands of votes, has lost a defamation suit by default.

(That means he was lying.)

 

41. President Trump also defamed the two poll workers, and they were the target of multiple death threats. 

(He was lying too.)

42. The defamed Georgia poll workers also won a defamation suit against right-wing One America News (OAN). 

43. Dr. Eric Coomer, who worked for Dominion Voting Systems, and faced his own barrage of death threats, after he was accused of helping Antifa rig the election, also won a defamation case against OAN. 

(Are we seeing a trend, Trump fans?)

44. Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp has said that Trump did not win the 2020 vote in his state. Kemp worked during the campaign to…help Donald get elected. 

45. Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan, also a Georgia official at the time, said Trump lost the state, and now calls Trump a threat to the rule of law. 

46. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who, like Duncan and Kemp, worked in support of Trump’s reelection, also said evidence showed: Biden won Georgia, by almost 12,000 votes. 

To believe Trump won Georgia, you have to believe that top state officials, who supported his reelection bid all lied about who won. 

(Does that make sense to you? If it does you are smack dab in the middle of a cult.)

47. Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official, warned that Trump’s attacks on poll workers were dangerous, and there had been an alarming rise in death threats aimed at election workers. Someone, he warned, was “going to get killed.” (Raffensperger and his family got plenty of threats.) 

48. Bjay Pak, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, a Trump appointee, said he could find no evidence that votes in meaningful numbers were stolen in Georgia. Pak was fired by President Trump. 

49. His replacement, Bobby Christine, also a Trump pick for the job, looked into claims of voter fraud in that state. Finally, he told a group of assistant attorneys gathered for a meeting, some by phone. “I said I believe, as many of the people around the table believed,” Christine told those on the call, “there’s just nothing to them.”

 

50. Doug Ducey, the Republican governor of Arizona in 2020, said votes were not stolen, and Biden did win the state. 

51. A recount, done by Cyber Ninjas, a pro-Trump organization, also showed that Biden won the Arizona count, and had a net gain of 360 votes. 

(Team Trump spent $6 million on that futile recount.)

 

52, Mark Brnovich, the Arizona attorney general (like everyone else on this list, a Republican of some shape or size) looked for evidence of significant fraud in 2020. He said he had hoped that Trump would win – but could find no evidence he did.

53. Rusty Bowers, Republican Speaker of the House, in Arizona, said he was asked by Rudy Giuliani and the president, himself, to violate his oath of office, and help overturn voting results. He said he could not – said he considered the U.S. Constitution a divinely ordained document. 

(One “patriotic” Trump fan showed up at Bowers’ home and threatened his neighbor with a gun.)

 

54. After Team Trump complained that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan were rigged, and the vote was off by 68%, Republican officials conducted a hand recount. Trump gained 12 votes, out of 15,949.

(Which I assume even the most doltish member of the cult can tell is not 68%.)

 

55. A recount paid for by the Trump team, in Dane and Milwaukee counties in Wisconsin showed Biden gaining 132 votes. 

56. Team Trump spent almost $3 million on the recount. 

(That’s just kind of funny!)

Yes. He gained votes in most recounts.

 

57. In Pennsylvania, Lycoming County, under sustained pressure from Trump-loving election-deniers, did a full hand recount of 59,000 votes. In a red county, where Trump garnered 69.8% of the in-person vote, Donald was found to have received seven (7) fewer votes than initially reported. Joe’s tally dropped fifteen (15). If we figure an error of +8 for Donald, that would be an error rate of .000013 per cent. 

58. Bill Barr, Donald Trump’s attorney general at the time of the 2020 election, told the president that his repeated claims of significant voter fraud were unsupported by evidence, and were, in plain language, “bullshit.” 

59. When Trump asked Barr to make the claim that the Department of Justice had found real fraud, Barr resigned. 

(Barr saved Trump’s nuts during the Mueller investigation. Now Trump claimed Barr was a RINO.)

 

60. White House Chief Counsel Pat Cipollone testified under oath, before a congressional committee, that he agreed with Mr. Barr, and that he had also told Trump he lost the 2020 election. 

(Fox News was careful in that story to refer to Cipollone as only a “White House lawyer.”) 

(Cipollone led Trump’s defense team during his second impeachment.)

 

61. Okay, I’m sorry, but you have to be willfully ignorant to miss that kind of point. If you do, your ass is in a cult. 

62. Eric Herschmann, another top White House lawyer, agreed with Cipollone. There was no proof of significant voter fraud. When Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani kept pushing the “Stolen Election” claims, he told congressional investigators later that he felt, “What they were proposing, I thought was nuts.”

63. Powell has since been sanctioned by a federal judge for filing “frivolous” claims of voter fraud in Michigan.

64-65. Matthew Morgan, former general counsel for the Trump 2020 campaign and Bill Stepien, who ran the entire operation, during the last 115 days before the election, told their boss he lost. Stepien finally resigned from his position, as the push to claim the election was stolen dragged on, saying, “I didn’t think that what was happening at that point was honest or professional.” 

Morgan testified, under oath, that he had tried to track down every serious claim of election fraud, but uncovered no proof. 

66-68. Members of the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council Executive Committee, including Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Assistant Director Bob Kolasky, U.S. Election Assistance Commission Chair Benjamin Hovland, Director Christopher Krebs of CISA, and heads of several bipartisan election organizations issued the following statement: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in  American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.” 

“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” they said. 

Hovland was a Trump appointee. Kolasky worked for Krebs. Krebs was a Trump appointee. On November 14, 2020, Hovland told CNN that while the president had made a number of “bold claims” of voter fraud, “we’ve seen zero evidence.” 

(Naturally, Trump fires Krebs.)

 

69. After Barr stepped down, rather than violate the Constitution, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen took control at DOJ. He informed the president that there was no evidence of significant voter fraud.

70. The Acting Deputy Attorney General, Richard Donoghue, backed Rosen up. Trump lost the election. 

71. Steve Engel, Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, whose job was to advise the president on what steps he could take that were legal, and what steps he might want to take that were not, told him he lost. 

72, Barr, Rosen, Donoghue, and Engel were all Trump appointees. Rosen had held three posts during his four years as part of the administration. Trump decided his next move – in the absence of real evidence of voter fraud – was to fire Rosen and make Jeffrey Clark, another DOJ official, acting attorney general.

73-81. Rosen, Donoghue, and Engel, along with the six other assistant attorneys general, said they would all resign, if Trump followed through with that plan. In fact, they told the president that Clark would be heading up a “graveyard.” There would be a “cascade” or resignations.

(Clark has since been indicted as a co-conspirator in the plot to steal Georgia’s electoral votes.) 

82. Meanwhile, Jenna Ellis, a loyal Trump lawyer, was repeatedly insisting that the 2020 election was stolen, spindled, and mutilated. She has since been censured in Colorado – and forced to admit to telling ten specific lies.

Or: election-denying whoppers. 

(You could probably censure Trump for telling 10,000 by now.) 

(Ellis has also been indicted in Georgia.

She now calls Trump “malignant,” and won’t vote for him in 2024.)

 

83. Clark, Giuliani, Ellis, Powell, Professor John Eastman, and a whole bunch of accomplices have been indicted by Democratic, and Democratic-appointed prosecutors, because there’s a pile of evidence that Trump and his feloniously inclined pals were plotting to steal the election themselves. 

(Scott Hall, one of 19 people charged, has taken a plea deal and admitted to five felonies.)

84. We now know that in October 2020, Steve Bannon, a right-wing voice for Donald J. Trump, told a group of Chinese immigrants that Trump had a plan to claim the election was stolen – three days before the election was held.

 

85. When Congress decided to investigate the events of January 6, 2021, and the lies leading up to the attack on Capitol Hill, assorted Trump allies refused to testify at all. A jury found Bannon guilty of contempt of Congress and he was sentenced to four months in jail. (He is still fighting that conviction – which helps explain why the indictments of Trump have taken so long and now fall so close to the next presidential election.)

86. White House economic advisor Peter Navarro similarly refused to comply with a subpoena, and his trial for contempt was held in September 2023. Neither side bothered with witnesses and a jury convicted Navarro in short order. Like Bannon, he has been dragging this matter out for more than two years.

(We can probably assume that Navarro hopes Trump will win re-election in 2024.

Then baby gets’ a pardon!)

 

87-92. The following Trump family members, advisors, and allies have agreed to “testify” in various cases, or before Congress – but have each invoked the Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves hundreds of times. In the civil case in New York, when the former president had a chance to testify in his defense, he invoked that right a whopping 440 times. Not to be outdone, his son Eric took the Fifth 500 times. Eastman, Giuliani, Clark, and Gen. Michael T. Flynn also decided they’d rather not lie under oath. So they each invoked the Fifth hundreds of times. 

93. Gen. Flynn dared not even answer the question: Did he believe in a peaceful transfer of power, from Trump to Biden, on January 20, 2021?

94. Flynn, and several other Trump loyalists, including Diamond and Silk, and the MyPillow guy, supported the idea of sending in troops and rerunning elections in key battleground states where Trump lost. 

(Even members of the cult might catch a whiff of danger here.)

 

The blogger could add more examples, but this post is only a quick summary of all kinds of similar news. 

Plus, he’s old, and he needs a nap.

 

FUN FACT: It should be clear to even the most obtuse Trump supporter that the Orange God can’t keep his yap shut. You may recall that he lost a defamation case involving E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of rape. The jury voted 9-0 (it was a civil case) and awarded her $5 million. 

They agreed that Trump had committed sexual assault. 

Trump started screaming about how rape and sexual assault weren’t the same, and defamed Ms. Carroll again. 

The judge in the first case has now ruled that Trump has defamed Carroll again, and the only issue to be decided in a new jury trial is how much the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief will have to pay this time around.

(Ha, ha, cult members…keep sending him your money so he can keep losing in court.) 

THIS POST IS CURRENT TO: SEPTEMBER 30, 2023.