The line between fact and truth

 

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In history and politics, a claim counts as established fact when (1) it is supported by independent convergent, reliable, and publicly checkable evidence, (2) it survives reasonable attempts to refute it, (3) it fits the broader body of evidence better than competing or different claims; and (5) it may retain some uncertainty, but only to a point that does not rationally materially affect the accuracy of the claim.

The 2020 election

An example is the fact that the 2020 election was not stolen. Trump and MAGA demagoguery still consistently claim the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by several different means, e.g., rigged ballot count machines, massive voter fraud, pedophilic communist Democrats, etc. For competing explanations, the question is: Which explanation best predicts the total evidence, including the evidence one would expect but does not find?

In over 60 lawsuits and lies repeated hundreds of times, Trump and MAGA elites challenged the 2020 election result. All except one of those lawsuits failed to find evidence of significant election theft. Nothing found would have changed the outcome. The two biggest single instances of election stealing probably were (1) Trump trying to get Georgia to give him over 11,000 votes so he would win that state, and (2) Trump’s 1/6 coup attempt, which tried to negate the entire election and overthrow the government by force. Other than those major attempts at election theft, there was no evidence of major fraud or theft. Every attempt to find the theft failed. That included re-examination of paper records, inquiries by local and state election administration officials, recounts, audits, adversarial litigation in courts, and federal investigations.

Despite all the intense scrutiny, there were no major discrepancies found ballots, ballot counts, tabulation records, voter records, recounts, canvasses, audits, sworn testimony, or litigated evidence. Repeated review across all of those channels failed to find any major discrepancy, other than efforts by Trump and MAGA elites, e.g., the fake electors fiasco. That is not just a situation where we have not seen proof. It’s affirmative, cumulative evidence against the stolen election hypothesis. There just was no persuasive evidence.

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The boundary

Political matters do not become facts by majority vote, institutional prestige, or repeated assertion. They acquire fact standing when the evidence and procedures appropriate to the question converge. Despite that, the exact fact-truth boundary is pragmatic, not partisan or popular. One does not need to wait for absolute certainty, because then almost no historical, scientific, or political proposition would count as fact. And we cannot call something factual merely because an official, pundit, or expert announces it. Simply put, the standard is proportionate to the stakes and evidence. The higher the stakes, the more evidence and verifying is warranted.

For the 2020, the political truth to political fact threshold was crossed long ago. The outcome was certified, audited, recounted where requested or required, litigated, and independently investigated. Later repetition of allegations without new, credible, outcome-changing evidence does not restore the original uncertainty. This is a about continued rational, evidence-based belief, not questioning of the evidence due to some asserted epistemological, partisan or ideological belief detached from solid, verifiable evidence.

Source — Trump’s pants are on fire a lot — but usually he’s lying at least some

Q: Is it fact, truth or false that Trump’s public record supports describing him as a chronic liar, not simply a near-constant source of good faith mistakes.

Some info sources:

Transcript: President Trump’s Phone Call With Georgia Election Officials — The president pressured [Georgia’s] Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the results of the election in an hourlong phone conversation. Here is a transcript of the audio recording.

No Evidence Found that a Foreign Government Manipulated Any Election Results

Ballotpedia’s 2020 Election Help Desk: Tracking election disputes, lawsuits, and recounts

Vote Recounts and Election Contests in Battleground States

GPO J6 Report: Executive summary

MAGA’s strategy

He doesn't tell people he broke a lot of it and

has no intention of ever fixing it for us

The MAGA 3-step plan

An article, The GOP’s 3-Step Scam: Break the Country, Blame Others, Then Claim Only They Can Fix It, published by Common Dreams nicely states a major part of MAGA’s authoritarian-kleptocrat strategy. The title is self-explanatory. The article fleshes it out commenting that MAGA creates crises, makes working Americans suffer while (1) rewarding billionaires with more wealth and power, and (2) blaming Dems for their wreckage. Now, while they are in campaign mode they say that Trump and MAGA politicians are the only people who can fix the vast damage. Obviously, MAGA demagoguery conveniently ignores the fact that most of the damage, maybe ~97%, is caused by MAGA’s authoritarian and kleptocratic politics and policies.

A toxic blast from the past: Carl Rove rises again!

In addition to the MAGA 3-step scam, the war on democracy and truth also includes coddling of criminals via Trump’s pardons-for-profit grift, and MAGA’s demagogic appeals to kleptocrats, oligarchs, bigots, racists, and extremists. Speaking of welcoming extremists into the MAGA party, a San Antonio Current article, Karl Rove says Republican Party is being taken over by ‘Nazis’, conveys blunt criticisms from a surprising source.[1] Rove never seemed to be bothered by extremism, or sophisticated, reality-trashing demagoguery.

In an extremely rare moment of candor from a MAGA-aligned elite, Rove is quoted: “If [U.S. Sen.] John Cornyn were the nominee, this race would be over. But when you’ve got a guy [Ken Paxton] that has multiple girlfriends and $200,000 worth of improvements in his house from a corrupt business guy whom he does favors. Can you make this shit up? ….. I mean, really. Nick Fuentes goes to Dallas and meets with a bunch of Republican leaders. This guy is a Nazi. We’ve got all these people getting on their little podcasts and so forth, saying: ‘We’re just asking questions about the Jews.’”

Well, yeah, some of us could make up morally rotted stuff approximately this, especially after Trump’s treasonous 1/6 coup attempt and the 2024 elections putting the traitor-kleptocrat back in office. But opinions on this differ a lot.

Q: About how important is MAGA’s 3-step plan compared to everything else in the overall scheme of MAGA’s goal to empower and advance authoritarianism and kleptocracy, unimportant, moderately important, highly important, dominant, etc.?

Footnote:

1. One confused member of the public fretted: It’s really really confusing seeing this. I always thought Karl Rove was a Nazi so I am perplexed. I’m an older millennial. Back in the W era, all of us anywhere near the left, watched as this guy and his crew used the Iraq war to drive a wedge into society. If you weren’t for it, you were unamerican and filth. They finished what the southern strategy started – brought in racist backwoods idiots, religious zealots, etc. thinking they were easy votes and they could control them later. You can’t start using the “us vs them = good vs evil” messaging and be surprised when the new “us” start taking control. All the rest of us saw this shit coming in 2003-2004. It was so obvious. How did they not understand this would be the outcome?

Trump and MAGA aren’t “taking over” the GOP. MAGA is the natural end result of decades of GOP practices and policies. This includes the “us vs them” and “we are good; they are evil” as well as “never compromise” and many other aspects of standard Republican and radical extremism. Karl Rove is very much responsible for this.

Isn’t a little blast of history like this refreshing to help the mind maintain context and good feng-shui?

Some info sources:

ASYMMETRIC CONSTITUTIONAL HARDBALL — Since at least the mid-1990s, Republican office­holders have been more likely than their Democratic counterparts to push the constitutional envelope, straining unwritten norms of gov­ernance or disrupting established constitutional understandings. Both sides have done these things. But contrary to the apparent assumption of some legal scholars, they have not done so with the same frequency or intensity.

Administrative Sabotage — This Article offers an account of the “what, why, and how” of administrative sabotage that answers those questions. It contends that sabotage reflects a distinct mode of agency action that is more permanent, more destructive, and more democratically illegitimate than more-studied forms of maladministration. In contrast to an agency that shirks its statutory duties or drifts away from Congress’s policy goals, one engaged in sabotage aims deliberately to kill or nullify a program it administers. Agencies sabotage because presidents ask them to.

MAGA attacks elections with whopper lies

Markwayne Mullin, the MAGA thug in charge

of subverting the 2026 elections

By now, most reasonable people paying at least a little attention to politics are aware that Trump and MAGA elites are doing their very best to subvert, rig and suppress voting before the 2026 mid-term elections. The lying MAGA elites use to attack and undermine election integrity is off the charts. The whoppers are coming fast and furious.

In recent months, Trump and MAGA elites alleged they found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls of Nevada and three other states. Other Trump attacks on election included statements that voting machines are vulnerable to manipulation, but he provided no evidence to support that had happened. He also alleged that China obtained 220 million US voter files beginning in the run-up to the 2020 election, that too was not backed up by solid evidence that had happened or that any vote irregularities happened if it did happen.

Other reporting indicates that MAGA continues to make the broad claim that American elections are rife with noncitizen voters. But no evidence backs that up. In one incident, DHS said it found close to 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter list. But a DHS official acknowledged in the meeting with Nevada officials that number was the ceiling and each voter still had to be manually reviewed. Then, a day later, DHS provided a list of 185 ID numbers pertaining to voters the agency said it was confident were noncitizens. Nevada asked for more information on those 185 voters, and the data used to match them to noncitizens. DHS refused to provide the evidence. The agency did say it still had more than 14,000 Nevada voters that need additional review, and it also provided the state with a list of more than 6,000 voter IDs the agency said were higher confidence matches but had yet to be reviewed.

Well, it turns out that the number of noncitizen voters, 250,000, 16,000, 6,000, 185, 1 or whatever the number is in whatever states they were supposed to be illegally registered in has turned out to be 100% false. DHS is unable to confirm that there is even 1 noncitizen voter on the Nevada rolls. We went from an allegation of 250,000 illegally registered voters to zero.

That is the scale of lying that Trump’s MAGA administration is spewing on us in its focused attempt to subvert the upcoming elections.

Q1: Are Trump and his authoritarian MAGA elites in power a bunch of lying liars trying hard to wreck the upcoming elections, and if not why do they talk and act as if they were? What is the evidence that MAGA is acting in good faith?

Q2: Is it reasonable to believe that MAGA elites dealing with election and voter matters are (1) grossly incompetent, or (2) worse, authoritarian liars knowingly trying to subvert democracy and elections, because they can’t find even 1 noncitizen illegally registered to vote in at least 4 states?**

** Common sense says that there has to be at least a few noncitizens, e.g., maybe ~20-50, illegally registered to vote among the states that DHS claimed to have looked into. If nothing else, people do make honest mistakes.

Some other info sources:

State Board to Check Voter Rolls to Identify, Remove Non-U.S. Citizens

The hunt for noncitizen voters in Georgia yields few results

Unpacking Myths About Noncitizen Voting — How Heritage Foundation’s Own Data Still Proves It’s Not the Problem It’s Made Out to Be

Flaws in Government Tool to ID Noncitizen Voters — But the tool has wrongly flagged many as being noncitizens, and there’s no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting. The data-matching program employed in those states over the last year identified about 10,000 potential noncitizens on voter registration lists, out of about 49 million voter registrations checked, according to reporting by the New York Times citing federal officials. But upon further investigation, county officials found U.S. citizens were among those identified. In addition, election officials determined some noncitizens were inadvertently added by county officials to voter lists, and still others were noncitizens who mistakenly checked a box for voter registration even after acknowledging on the same forms that they were noncitizens. Experts and state audits refute the idea of widespread noncitizen voting.

MAGA’s legacy: A radicalized, authoritarian Supreme Court

Context

Even if MAGA loses control of the House and Senate in the 2026 elections, American democracy, rule of law and civil liberties can still wind up crushed to death and replaced by some form of a cruel, deeply corrupt dictatorship-oligarchy-bigoted Christian nationalist theocracy. Even if the Dems control congress, that institution will remain broken. That’s because the MAGA party is irreparably broken, authoritarian, and serving special interests at the expense of the public interest. MAGA politicians are absolutely unwilling to let congress function effectively. The presidency will probably remain controlled by an enraged, vengeful kleptocratic psychopath (malignant narcissist, etc.) until Jan. 2029.

And then, there’s our MAGAfied USSC (US Supreme Court). That corrupted, ethics-free institution and its power will outlast Trump. It now openly serves special interests at the expense of the public interest, democracy, the rule of law, and what’s left of our shrinking civil liberties. What can we reasonably expect? Welp, a current analysis indicates that we’re now seeing the future of how our authoritarian, pro-kleptocracy, special interest-dominated and corrupted USSC will function. Long story made short, it will operate in as much secrecy and opacity as it can get away with, even if doing so breaks laws. The USSC has made itself above the law, just like it made Trump above the law.

The USSC’s shadow docket

A ProPublica article (and YouTube video), The Supreme Court Changed. What Now?, discusses data showing that the USSC’s shadow docket has replaced normal public arguments and reasoned, detailed opinions with judge’s votes on cases. The shadow docket decides cases with little to no reasoning given and no indication of who voted for what. Most shadow docket decisions are about time-sensitive or procedural matters that are not troubling for democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties. That is no a matter of concern.

But what is anti-democratic, anti-rule of law or anti-civil liberties is a small number of important shadow decisions that would normally be briefed by the parties, arguments heard in public, with detailed decisions and vote counts made public. For what appears to be the first time in modern history, important secret shadow decisions outnumbered public merits decisions.

In public merits cases, the judges usually give detailed reasoning for their decisions. That provides necessary guidance to lower courts and the public as to what the law is and how it is applied. It also tells the public how individual judges voted. That secrecy shields judges’ identities from corrupt votes that give benefits to special interests, usually while either (1) taking benefits from the public interest, or (2) causing damage to democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties, which also generally benefits affected special interests.

A few shadow decisions have been favorable to the public interest democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties. Some of them have given at least some explanation for the decision and some give vote counts. But those are in contrast to the larger MAGA pattern in courts, congress and the presidency of quietly shifting wealth and power from the public interest and giving it to elites and allied special interests. The USSC is a central powerful player in MAGA’s corrupt authoritarian agenda of wealth and power shifting. Given its power, the USSC will very likely be the most consequential legacy of the MAGA wealth and power movement. That legacy will not be on our side. It will be in opposition to us.

Q1: Do you believe that the current USSC is mostly supportive of, or mostly opposed to (1) service to the public interest before service to special interests with wealth, or (2) democracy, the rule of law and/or civil liberties?

Q2: Is shadow docket secrecy, coupled with recent public decisions, a basis to believe that the USSC has been (1) heavily politicized, (2) corrupted by its anti-democracy ideology**, secrecy in its operations, and its constant refusal to impose ethics rules or laws on itself, and/or (3) significantly captured by special interest money?

** The MAGA judges vehemently deny they are anti-democracy. They say they are fiercely pro-democracy and pro-rule of law. Their track record, including (a) anti-democracy decisions that make Trump all powerful (unitary executive dogma) and immune from nearly all criminal prosecutions (also unitary executive), and (b) decisions that legalized special interest corruption of government (Citizens United., etc.). Opinions on this point are bitterly divided.

Some info sources:

Supreme Court ‘Shadow’ Docket Is Now Bigger Than The Real, ‘Transparent’ One

Favorable views of Supreme Court remain near historic low

Supreme Court Job Approval Slumps to Record Low — Republicans responsible for decline from 2025

Supreme Court Shadow Docket Tracker — Challenges to Trump Administration Actions — The Trump administration has prevailed in the vast majority of its requests for emergency action, as the data below shows. These rulings have allowed administration policies to move forward after lower courts had found that the administration’s actions were likely illegal. ….. The lack of reasoning in most shadow docket rulings also leaves lower courts with little guidance about how to address similar issues in other cases.

The Supreme Court “Shadow Docket” Explained