“I want to specifically apologize to my colleagues at KMJ and all who serve in the media. After 50 years in broadcasting, I understand that my choice of words matters and I made a mistake that won’t happen again. I humbly ask for your forgiveness.” Ray Appleton.
NO. No forgiveness for these acts. There was a plot to. take over. Congress, kill the Vice President, kill all those who were against Trump’s lying claims of voter fraud, and deliver the election to Trump.
His son called for insurrection, his Lawyer, within an hour of the assault, called for combat. Trump himself called for the mob to attack Congress..
And if anyone thinks he wasn’t secretly coaching the sedition you are as much a liar as the rest of them.
If you have to lie to prove your point there is something really wrong with that.
Trump set this up and executed it. He still is encouraging this.
Look there was no fraud, there have been more checks and double checks of the the outcome of the Presidential election that breaks records.
Over 50 lawsuits were dismissed for lack of evidence.
And STILL MAGA blindness reigns and says sedition would be ok..
Many people who supported Nixon versus Kennedy in 1960 claimed voter fraud in a few precincts of Chicago (never proved) but they did not pursue their concerns and Kennedy was elected.
We are a huge nation and our election system is not perfect. But it is. way more accurate than it was in 1960 for sure. Every study of our system shows that.
We do need reform however..
- Abolish the Electoral College…go to a popular vote for President and Vice President. The Electoral College has holes in it all over the place. Can you imagine if Trump was in the same place as Hillary Clinton or Al Gore were, losing the electoral college vote but winning he popular vote by millions of votes? Can you imagine what Trump would be doing now? He would have called for violence in 2016 for sure.
But we democrats held our breath and went along..and we had a minority elected President, Trump, and his legitimacy was constantly in question. Trump started lying about the size of the inauguration crowd creating a false narrative attacking the media for publishing he really lost by almost 3 million votes. Trump lost the 2016 election by almost 3 million votes…
He lost the 2020 election by 7 million votes! And still the electoral college votes was relatively “close”.
That is simply wrong.
I would imagine not many Republicans are reading this…but how would you feel if you were cheated by the electoral college out of being elected President…We would have had riots in 2016 that probably would still be going on.
The time it took to unravel the Florida count in 2000, is credited with partially allowing the 9–11 attacks, the attackers used the paralysis of the government to execute their venomous plans.
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss is as bad. Trump, to counter the claims that he really LOST the election with the popular vote, was constantly attacking, constantly trying to prove with lies that he really won the popular vote. He even today claims he won in a landslide?
That lie his supporters repeat over and over again.
The only way to make what is a shaky credibility of that argument is to LIE. Almost 3 million votes don’t lie (that is what Clinton beat Trump by).
The electoral college has many gaps in it to de-legitimize and damage the body politic.
In 1876 Rutherford B. Hayes won the election by bartering behind closed doors and getting enough electoral votes from the Democrats. (the south’s party, had lost the Civil War)and part of the bargain was to withdraw the Army from the occupied south AND eliminate the Reconstruction effort that was enfranchising the African Americans in the south AND north to vote. Hayes made a deal with the devil to do that, essentially allowing Jim Crowe to develop over the next 100 years that led to the segregation reality of the south and north for over 100 years.
Only those of us who study government, know this. It was suppressed by white people to hide the decisions that in fact encouraged a renewal of a new slavery in the south that still strains our democratic institutions.
Why wasn’t this publicized? It was, but people were so tired of war that they acquiesced to the false narrative that carpetbaggers and fraud was part of the occupation of the south.
It wasn’t. It was doing the right thing after over 200 years of chattel slavery.
This is the same thing, and the damned electoral college gave Hayes the opening to sell out ex-slaves and disenfranchise them.
So Ray Appleton cannot apologize just like R. B. Hayes can’t apologize. He represents the same thing, selling out minorities to enhance white supremacy.
Trump lied, Republicans. lied, Ted Cruz lied, Holly lied, the entire Republic Party has been lying for years!
The election of 2020 was legitimate. The election of 2016 and 2000 were legitimate, and losers of those elections did the right thing and conceded.
Trump still has not conceded!
2. Change the Senate to one man one vote. Pick a higher representative number per Senator, elect the upper house like we do for state’s legislatures by SCOTUS order: an assembly that represent few people per assembly person and a Senate that represents more per Senator. Cut the Senator length of service per election to four not six!
3. Reform the Supreme Court..Again select the justices by election and 10 year terms with only one re-election allowed per each Justice. Arrangements like this exist in EVERY state, state supreme courts are elected not appointed. A minority party can easily run the country….just look at what happened with civil rights, the south, because they kept electing Democrats until 1972 then switched to Republicans, both parties essentially changed political positions on racism. Today a Senator from Kentucky, a relatively small state compared to where all the people are, runs the country.
That is wrong and undemocratic!
We have a crisis in democracy because we have failed to change key Constitutional language that was initially put in the Constitution to support slavery. The electoral college was invented to keep the south in the union period!
We have a crisis of legitimacy because we are living by the sell out that RB. Hayes made in 1876.
These errors the founders made were not errors, they were part of a compromise with slave states to perpetuate the most brutal slave system in human history; AFTER the emancipation!
And as far as Appleton is concerned he should be in jail…we need to upgrade our sedition laws to not allow “free speech” that advocates rebellion or sedition. In fact we do have such laws they just aren’t enacted that much.
You do not have the right to yell fire in a crowded theater.
He clearly did. sedition and deserves prison not the right to apologize!
If we do not act on this we are doomed to lose our democracy period..The ticking time bomb is still ticking.