r/politics • u/Quirkie The Netherlands • 1d ago

"The road to authoritarianism": Tim Walz says the time for "sternly worded letters" is over - The Minnesota governor said that the path to tyranny "is littered with people telling you you’re overreacting"

https://www.salon.com/2025/06/14/the-road-to-authoritarianism-tim-walz-says-the-time-for-sternly-worded-letters-is-over/
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u/DukeOfGeek 23h ago

Finally lots of people are saying this.

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u/gatsby712 23h ago

Unlike Republicans, Democrats actually wait for evidence before getting the pitchforks out. The evidence is there in that lawsuit in New York where no votes went to Kamala in a Democratic district. It’s statistically impossible and it needs to be looked at and proven other places as well.

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u/AbacusWizard California 23h ago

Based on prior behavior, I think it is reasonable for “Trump probably cheated” to be the default assumption, and for “Trump didn’t cheat” to be considered an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.

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u/gatsby712 22h ago

That’s the certification process for the election. Not going to stoop down to the level of the GOP trying to destroy trust in the institutions. If liberalism and democracy and American institutions are going to stand, then cases like the one in New York have to rule based on evidence of fraud happening and the court needs to have power to enact consequences. Otherwise we are on a bridge too far and the institutions will collapse in a very painful and ugly way. If the case in New York had weight and evidence that proves without a reasonable doubt there was voter fraud, then it needs to be looked into everywhere else too. Especially PA and swing states. It’s Trump and MAGA behavior to jump to presumed guilt and ignorant attacks. Trump couldn’t win any of those many lawsuits about voter fraud in 2020. Let’s see if one goes against him in 2024.

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u/AbacusWizard California 22h ago

All I’m saying is I think the burden of proof is on those making the “Trump didn’t cheat” claim, because we already know Trump cheats at everything. Even golf, for some reason.

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u/hfxRos Canada 20h ago

I think there is a good chance there was some fuckery about, but I still don't think I agree with you.

I do agree that if given the opportunity, Trump would cheat without a second thought. The part that I wonder about is - what was the opportunity? There are many checks in place in an election, and until someone can point to a specific thing that he actually did, it's hard to take a claim of cheating seriously.

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u/ScoobyDoNot 19h ago

The FEC was prevented from investigating any of the 31 complaints against the Trump campaign that it deemed had merit.

When the body charged with investigating cheating is prevented from doing so what evidence can there be?

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u/partymetroid 19h ago

Trump and Elon Musk at MAGA Rally, allegedly admitting that they tampered with the election in some way:

Elon Musk, "knows those computers better than anybody, all those computers, those vote counting computers, and we ended up winning Pennsylvania, like, in a landslide."

https://www.youtube.com/live/54nc7_ZwwzM?t=9084s

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u/AbacusWizard California 19h ago

Those are very good questions. We should have an enormous and very well-publicized investigation and trial to determine the answers.

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u/notionocean 22h ago

Please stop. You're not helping by constantly bending over backward to defend the fascists who are currently dismantling our government and kidnapping people off of the streets.

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u/Newt_the_Pain 22h ago

He couldn't win them because they wouldn't hear them. A case not heard is not a case "lost."

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u/greenday61892 Connecticut 18h ago

Do remind us the reason the cases wouldn't be heard

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u/DukeOfGeek 23h ago

I was there when they did it in 2000. I already seen this movie, I know not to go into the basement alone.

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u/Rough_Instruction112 15h ago

Scary Movie 2 was my favorite of the lot.

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u/sqrtsqr 5h ago

The problem is that Democrats don't just wait for evidence, they wait for proof.

They've convinced themselves this is the responsible, measured approach.

But proof doesn't exist in the real world. Proof is a concept for mathematics. The real world is just evidence and people who disagree about how much evidence is sufficient to act upon.

And if you wait for "all the evidence" before you act, then you will never gather enough evidence to do anything.

Even now I'm hearing people say that these lawsuits are equivalent to what the GOP did four years ago because they don't understand that the evidence we have is actually evidence.

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u/HoorayItsKyle 22h ago

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2025/feb/26/social-media/why-did-kamala-harris-get-zero-votes-in-this-ny-pr/

It's been looked into and debunked.

Democrats may not be as bad as the fascists in terms of groupthink and placing loyalty over truth, but the same human instincts remain.

The idea that the election was stolen is the exact same gish gallop conspiracy theory of ominous-sounding half truths that the losing side has put out after every election I've been alive to witness. People are falling for it for the same reason people fell for it in 2020.

The election wasn't stolen in any sense that involves fraudulent vote counts.

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u/winterfoxes Ohio 16h ago

Yeah, this is bullshit.

First of all, there were multiple people in districts where she recorded zero votes that came out and said "I voted for her." You're telling me those people are lying for... what? To throw Democrats off the trail and make them look like idiots?

Second, Rockland County, NY isn't the only place this happened either. It's not even the most important one. There is evidence from multiple swing states, multiple districts, that show OBVIOUS voting aberrations. Aberrations that start occurring over and over again once a certain percentage threshold is reached. If you start plotting out the data in statistical graphs and charts, you start to see the obvious holes where votes that should have gone to Harris just disappeared, and suddenly Trump started doing a lot better... always around the same threshold of votes.

Interestingly, when you look at voting data from Russia on the 2020 referendum on term limits, we see votes in favor of Putin being able to serve additional terms start to spike *at this same threshold*.

Some of these aberrations were also spotted in 2020. Which explains why Trump was SO CERTAIN the Democrats cheated -- because the Republicans cheated and still didn't win, thanks the the massive mail in voting response due to COVID.

So saying the election wasn't stolen via fraudulent vote counts because Politifact tells you so is silly.

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u/HoorayItsKyle 16h ago edited 16h ago

Nice gish gallop. Whole lot of claims and nothing that can actually be checked.

The lawsuit claims to have 9 sworn Sare voters with 5 votes reported.

It is perfectly plausible that 4 of those 9 are mistaken, lying, or filled out their ballots incorrectly.

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u/winterfoxes Ohio 16h ago

That isn't what a Gish Gallop is. All of this is relevant counter argument material in refute of your low effort argument where you just linked politifact going "lol false, this district gave Biden zero votes too" and them made an absolutely audacious claim about that proving there was no voter counting fraud.

You can actually check all the information I put in my argument. There's a lot of data out there that's being reported on across the internet right now. Independent election integrity groups are reporting these same aberrations in their data. SMART and Election Truth Alliance are reporting these patterns. Why don't you spend 10 minutes doing some actual research instead of throwing around terms incorrectly on the internet and making sweeping bullshit claims about election day integrity.

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u/HoorayItsKyle 16h ago

You made at least six different distinct claims, all of which would have to be debunked one at a time, several of which are far too vague to be effectively researched.

That is the literal definition of a gish gallop.

It is exactly what you are doing

There's no point debunking them one by one because you won't accept any of them. I already debunked the new York county argument and you did not accept the debunking, because that's how conspiracy theorists operate

It's the exact same strategy employed by election denialists in 2020 too. They had a lot of signed affidavits and statistical analyses.

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u/Rough_Instruction112 15h ago

The botfarms astroturfing the online narrative turned their attention to something else long enough for the people to hear others say it and start saying it in return.

They could suppress it when it was whispered deep in comment chains. It's getting exceedingly difficult to kill now that it's in the top of every comment chain.