It really should go without saying at this point, but nobody involved in this should ever be allowed to live this down.

They should forever be known as the people who tried to overturn an election simply because their candidate did not win. https://twitter.com/johnkruzel/status/1337135543373733889

"Yes, but Democrats tried to overturn the election in 2016 by impeaching him..."

As much as Republicans tried to paint impeachment as an attempt to "overturn the election," that's not what happened.

Trump was impeached because he's a fucking criminal who did criminal shit.

"Yes, but the Russia investigation!"

The Russia investigation was legitimate. Read @pbump's piece on why that comparison is BS because I'm not going to have this conversation again: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/08/false-comparison-russia-investigation-with-trumps-fraud-claims/

So far none of the people currently trying to overturn the election results can so much as clarify what the fuck they mean when they say there were "irregularities," let alone prove that there was massive fraud.

The whole thing about how on election night it seemed Trump was going to win, etc. etc. etc. isn't even accurate. They've managed to retcon something that only happened a month ago.

On election night, I went to bed thinking Biden was probably going to win.

In fairness, I went to bed that night at like 4am after Trump gave his nonsensical speech calling the election a fraud and saying he was going to take it to SCOTUS. https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-2020-election-night-speech-transcript

First Republicans said that they couldn't call Biden the president-elect because "the media doesn't decide elections" and votes were still being counted. OK, fine.

And then votes were done being counted (and the media calls turned out to be correct, as they usually are).

Then it shifted to specious claims of fraud that didn't make sense, had zero evidence, and basically amounted to them saying that because Trump didn't win, it MUST be wrong.

The pro-Trump world is a cult. It is a bubble. It is the safest of all safe spaces, detached from reality. They see Trump as Ben Garrison sees him.

No "liberal bubble" is as insular as the Trump bubble. They've completely cut themselves off from the fact-based world.

And for years, rather than just being honest with them, mainstream news organizations went out of their way to treat Trump's cultists as totally normal people who just have a different view of things rather than delusional bubble-dwellers.

We all had to deal with being force-fed Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany and Scottie Nell Hughes and Jason Miller and Steve Cortes (who all got paychecks from CNN, fyi) in the name of "understanding Trump." It didn't matter that these were all unhinged lunatics.

We had to hear the same exact story reported from every single diner across America. "In Trump country, they still support Trump." No shit, guys! That's some top-notch journalism! Wow.

And do you know what all of that did?

It legitimized their fantasy world. It told them that their magical thinking was in line with reality. Mainstream media coddled these people, catered to them, pandered to them.

That's not journalism. That's never been journalism.

Journalism should be simple: tell people what's happening in the world.

Easy, right? No, we don't need a panel that includes someone living in fantasy world to get equal time to say "Actually, false thing is true." You're not informing anyone by doing that, you're pandering.

Instead, we got four years of this nonsense pretending to be journalism

So, after indulging the anti-reality wing of American politics, we end up in a situation where they're just absolutely shocked to learn that they represent a tiny majority of the country.

This is on CNN. This is on MSNBC. This is on CBS. This is on ABC. This is on Fox News. This is on NPR. This is on the AP. This is on Reuters.

You've all played a role in making this latest attack on democracy possible. And you will do precisely zero reflecting on that.

After the last election, the people who should have lost their jobs all got promotions and book deals. The people who should have gotten promotions and book deals lost their jobs. That's American journalism, and that's how we arrived at this moment in history.

Six months from now, one of the Republicans who signed on to this latest attempt to overturn the election is going to sit across from Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, look him straight in the eye, and feign outrage about deficit spending being too high or some garbage.

And Chuck Todd will look back, nodding and furrowing his brow in that way he does when he's hearing someone's concern. He'll thank the congressman, he'll say "it's always a pleasure to have you here," and he'll act like everything is so very normal.

My whole life, I've been obsessed with the news. As a child, my parents used to tell me that I couldn't go downstairs until 6am because otherwise I'd be down there at 4:30 watching the first news broadcast of the day. We didn't have cable, so it was just local network stuff.

Half hour newscasts, repeated over and over for a couple hours, anchors swapping in and out. Then the Today show and Good Morning America would come on. I tended to watch Today because the ABC reception was always fuzzy.

But I've always just consumed a truly ridiculous amount of media. It's fascinated me. The way language can shape perception, the way perception can shape action, the way action shapes reality.

For more than a half century, Republicans have been working the refs, claiming there's "liberal bias" in mainstream media. Sure, most of the big media companies are run or owned by Republicans, but they were somehow biased... against... themselves?

The answer, in a futile attempt to calm the outraged, has always been to shift to the right. And so there's been this nonstop rightward lurch. After 2016, it was really intense. After this election, the same thing is happening.

That's how now, today, December 10, 2020, we find ourselves in a place where more than 100 Republican members of Congress feel empowered to call on the Supreme Court to discard the results of the election we just had: Because they know there will be zero negative consequences.

They'll still be treated as very. serious. people. in the world of politics. Or they'll be afforded a sort of deference because hey, people elected them, so who is the media to hold them to any sort of standard, right?

No consequences. Chuck Todd will nod and invite them back.

The tl;dr of all of this: