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Telling Republicans their votes havent counted for diddly-squat due to rampant fraud, then asking them to go cast a ballot, seems a bit counterintuitive for a get out the vote campaign.

And yet, among at least some Republicans, that has been the message during much of the 2022 primaries. In February, Republican candidate for secretary of state, Jim Marchant, told a crowd in Reno that their vote hasn't counted for decades.

You haven't elected anybody. The people that are in office have been selected. You haven't had a choice, Marchant said.

For someone whose political ambitions depend on supporters actually casting ballots, the comments represent a pretty strong cognitive dissonance. Your vote doesnt matter, now go vote for me is, after all, a helluva campaign slogan. And while Marchant is among the most extreme peddlers of such election conspiracy theories, the underlying assertion that 2020 was rigged is nonetheless a mainstreamed idea within Nevadas Republican Party.

Its therefore unsurprising to see that recent polls show confidence in the upcoming election isnt exactly soaring among Republicans.

However, judging by the relatively robust turnout during early voting in the primary, many of those voters are nonetheless still casting ballots. Apparently, even among true believers, there remains some sort of faith in the electoral process the chorus of candidates telling them otherwise notwithstanding.

Which makes one wonder if more moderate Republican voices giving lip service to such fraud conspiracies are doing so out of actual concern for election integrity. Its quite possible that the GOPs obligatory propagation of the fraud narrative is intentionally or not merely a mechanism to avoid reckoning with the actual reasons for their last loss at the ballot box.

After all, critical introspection isnt a trait thats particularly incentivized by supporters of political parties or ideological movements. Telling Trump supporters that electronic voting machines are part of some global communist scheme to take over the world simply carries fewer political risks than telling them their guy is as disliked as he is.

And its not just Trump supporters. Just as Republicans have reached for any explanation of 2020 that doesnt indict their partys recent standard bearer as unbearable, the most progressive wing of Californias Democratic Party is doing likewise in the wake of Chesa Boudins recall in San Francisco.

As Johnathan Chait recently argued, many of the affluent white activists who populate the progressive movement in California are seemingly incapable of grappling with the notion they might be out of touch with minority voters in heavily Democratic jurisdictions such as San Fran. And as a result, theyre rushing to cast blame wherever they can instead of reflecting on what might have gone wrong with their own politicking.

Obviously, theres a monumental difference between the finger pointing going on among progressives in ultra-liberal San Francisco and the Republican claims that our nations entire election process has been overtaken by a global communist cabal. However, both instances underscore the blinding self-assured resistance to internal criticism that exists in political echo chambers.

Deflecting blame is hardly a new thing in politics. Even before Trump poured fuel onto the fire with election conspiracy theories in 2020, political losers such as Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams had made headlines for their refusal to concede after being rejected by voters peddling their own versions of events that attempted to shield them from much of the blame.

And while such deflections have ranged from Clintons contrived petty grievances to Trumps injurious assaults against the integrity of our electoral system, the refusal to learn from let alone admit uncomfortable or inconvenient truths is regrettably commonplace among politicians.

The GOPs continued obsession over fraud allegations allegations that have even been debunked by members of their own party is certainly more damaging to our political environment than Hillary Clintons propensity to blame everything except her own dismal personality for a political loss. However, both instances are part of a worrisome trend where electoral post-mortems have been replaced with manufactured narratives designed to ostensibly exonerate those who are actually responsible.

Unfortunately, the political incentives of our modern era often encourage partisans to indulge such behavior. Emerging from the primary election next week, the GOP would do itself a favor to resist that temptation and transition its focus toward the things that actually matter to most Nevadans such as inflation, high gas prices or our states educational woes.

Most Nevadans are likely ready for the Republican Party to stop scapegoating the 2020 loss of a deeply unpopular and divisive presidential incumbent and they might even be willing to reward GOP politicians who, as Mitch McConnell (R-KY) suggested, stop rehashing the past.

At the very least, it would provide the party with a better get-out-the-vote message than telling would-be supporters their ballots arent going to matter.

Michael Schaus is a communications and branding consultant based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He is the former communications director for Nevada Policy Research Institute and has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary as a columnist, political humorist, and radio talk show host. Follow him at SchausCreative.com or on Twitter at @schausmichael.

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The 'voter fraud' narrative haunting the GOP The Nevada Independent - The Nevada Independent

The lead story on the CBS Sports website last Monday reported that five players on the Tampa Bay Rays chose to not wear a LGBT+ logo on their uniforms.

The first thought was why anyone thought five baseball players not wearing a political symbol could possibly be national news.

Apparently, the perceived significance came in a decision to not celebrate something (LGBT pride month) which some now expect everyone to celebrate; that having LGBT "pride," or at least publicly signaling that you do, is now something of a requirement, even for the vast majority of the population that isn't LGBT.

Lock-step conformity is now apparently expected when it comes to LGBT issues, in this case a perfunctory symbolism intended to announce to the world the holding of a certain enlightened attitude.

By choosing to not celebrate in the approved fashion, the five ball players therefore ran the risk of being perceived as hostile to the LGBT movement, even if they aren't.

Thus we are reminded that the purpose of virtue signaling in a woke age is not so much to convey what you really think but to acquire immunity from attack by removing suspicion that you might think the wrong (unapproved) things.

Expressing sentiments you don't really share becomes imperative, suppressing the ones you do often equally so. It's no longer enough to be accepting of members of the LGBT community in your daily life, you must also now apparently wear a symbol to prove it, or else.

In a remarkably short period of time we have moved from demands for tolerance and respect to demands for approval and now, finally, something resembling coerced celebration.

Within this context, it isn't just dissent that makes you a potential target but failure to give assent with sufficient gusto.

If "Heather Has Two Mommies" in school libraries was not too long ago considered objectionable, now it is those who object to it who are.

In the late and thoroughly unlamented Soviet Union, people protected themselves by hanging portraits of Marx and Lenin in their apartments, even if they despised everything about the communism that had made their lives so miserable. In America we pen essays expressing our commitment to "diversity, equity, and inclusion" when applying for college jobs and put LGBT symbols on our baseball jerseys in a similar effort to acquire acceptance and deflect suspicion, even if we roll our eyes when doing so.

Finally, the additional thought occurs that the LGBT movement has become increasingly strained and susceptible to failure as more initials get added; that the "T" might at some not too distant point come into conflict with the "L," "G," and "B."

The gay rights movement succeeded, and made America a better place in the process, because it borrowed the template of the earlier civil and women's rights movements, which were built on appeals to justice and equality and fairness and taught that discrimination on the basis of ascription (skin color and sex) was morally wrong.

Even if there were substantive differences between pigmentation on the one hand and sexual preference (and thus behavior based on preference) on the other, it was still persuasive enough to convince a majority of Americans that gay Americans should enjoy the same rights as other Americans, including the right to marry.

It is far from obvious, however, that everyone who supports gay marriage also supports the right of biological men pretending to be women to hang out in women's locker rooms and compete in sporting contests with biological women. Or that anyone who raises concerns on that latter count is a bigot merely for having done so.

Polls tell us that the same majorities that now support gay marriage also oppose the more extreme demands of the transgender movement, to the point where conflating it all under the same LGBT+ moniker could lead to a loss of support outside LGBT ranks and dissension within them.

Indeed, the hunch is that a large chunk of the American population finds the idea of celebrating guys who wear dresses to be even more bizarre than guys wearing dresses.

Americans, contrary to woke narratives, are generally tolerant people who believe in live and let live.

But we also believe in minding our own business first and foremost and are tired of being told that we are morally deficient if we don't enthusiastically celebrate the sexual preferences of other people.

One of the more amusing criticisms of the decision of Tampa Bay ballplayers to not wear the LGBT logos was that it was divisive and undermined team unity, as if the prior decision of a baseball team to express political sentiments that have nothing to do with baseball isn't going to cause division and that the problem lies not with those who made that decision but the few players who refused to fall into line.

It isn't hard to understand that if you don't want politics to divide your team, don't inject politics into it.

Some of us were writing columns supporting gay marriage long before Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden expeditiously came around to the idea and neither we, nor anyone else, need wear a logo to prove we're not bigots.

Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

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OPINION | BRADLEY GITZ: You will be proud - Arkansas Online

A timeline of key events before, during after after the 1972 passage of the landmark U.S. law known as Title IX:

1836: Georgia Female College is the first women's college to open in the U.S.

1917: Jeannette Rankin of Montana becomes the first woman elected to Congress.

1920: U.S. women gain the right to vote.

1936: A federal appeals court effectively says doctors can prescribe women birth control.

1947: The first Truman Commission report pushes for more equal access to higher education, including ending race and religious discrimination.

1953: Toni Stone becomes the first woman to regularly play professional baseball (Negro Leagues).

1954: U.S. Supreme Court rules "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" in landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision.

1960: Wilma Rudolph becomes the first American woman to win three gold medals in an Olympics. The star Black sprinter becomes a prominent advocate for civil rights.

1963: The Commission on the Status of Women, headed by Eleanor Roosevelt, finds widespread discrimination against women in the U.S. and urges federal courts that "the principle of equality become firmly established in constitutional doctrine." Congress passes the Equal Pay Act.

1964: The Civil Rights Act includes sex as one of the things that employers can't discriminate against. It also establishes the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Patsy Mink of Hawaii becomes the first woman of color elected to the U.S. House; she later co-authors Title IX, the Early Childhood Education Act and the Women's Educational Equality Act.

1965: The Elementary and Secondary Education Act gives federal funding to K-12 schools with low-income student populations. President Lyndon Johnson also signs the Higher Education Act of 1965 that gives college students access to loans, grants and other programs.

1966: The National Organization for Women is established, calling for women to have "full participation in the mainstream of American society ... in truly equal partnership with men."

1967: Aretha Franklin covers Otis Redding's 1965 hit, "Respect, " and it quickly becomes a feminist anthem.

1969: New York Democrat Shirley Chisholm becomes the first Black woman in Congress. She later becomes the first woman to seek nomination for president.

1971: The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) founded to govern collegiate women's athletics and administer national championships.

1972: Congress passes Title IX, which is signed into law by President Richard Nixon. Title IX states: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." Congress also passes the Equal Rights Amendment, but it never gets approval from the 38 states needed to become law.

1973: The Supreme Court issues its Roe v. Wade opinion establishing the right to an abortion. Billie Jean King beats Bobby Riggs in straight sets in the "The Battle of the Sexes" tennis exhibition match.

1974: The Women's Educational Equity Act provides grants and contracts to help with "nonsexist curricula," as well as to help institutions meet Title IX requirements.

1975: President Gerald Ford signs Title IX athletics regulations, which gives athletic departments up to three years to implement, after noting "it was the intent of Congress under any reason of interpretation to include athletics."

1976: NCAA challenges the legality of Title IX regarding athletics in a lawsuit that is dismissed two years later.

1977: Three female students at Yale, two graduates and a male faculty member become the first to sue over sexual harassment under Title IX (Alexander v. Yale). It would fail on appeal.

1979: Ann Meyers becomes the first woman to sign an NBA contract (Indiana Pacers, $500,000). She had been the first woman to receive a UCLA basketball scholarship.

1979: U.S. officials put into effect the important three-prong test for Title IX compliance when it comes to athletics.

1980: Title IX oversight is given to the Office of Civil Rights in the Education Department.

1981: Sandra Day O'Connor becomes the first woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

1982: Louisiana Tech beats Cheyney State for the first NCAA women's basketball title. Two months later, the AIAW folds, putting top women's collegiate sports fully under the NCAA umbrella. Cheryl Miller scores 105 points in a high school game to kick off one of the greatest careers in basketball history.

1984: Democrat Geraldine Ferraro becomes first woman to earn a vice presidential nomination from a major political party. The U.S. wins its first Olympic gold medal in women's basketball.

1987: Pat Summitt wins the first of her eight women's basketball national titles at Tennessee.

1988: Congress overrides President Ronald Reagan's veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987, making it mandatory that Title IX apply to any school that receives federal money.

1994: The Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act is passed. Under Title IX, schools with federal financial aid programs and athletics must provide annual information regarding gender equity, including roster sizes and certain budgets.

1995: Connecticut wins the first of its 11 national titles under coach Geno Auriemma.

1996: Female athletes win a lawsuit and force Brown to restore funding for women's gymnastics and volleyball after the saying the school violated Title IX when it turned both teams into donor-funded entities. The NBA clears the way for the Women's National Basketball Association to begin play the following year.

1999: Brandi Chastain's penalty kick gives the United States a win over China in the World Cup final, invigorating women's sports in the U.S.

2001: Ashley Martin becomes the first woman to play and score in an Division I football game as a placekicker for Jacksonville State.

2008: Danica Patrick wins the Japan 300 to become the first female victor in the top level of American open-wheel racing.

2014: Becky Hammon becomes the first full-time female assistant coach in NBA history.

2015: The United States' 5-2 win over Japan in the Women's World Cup final becomes the most viewed soccer game in the history of American television.

2016: Citing Title IX, the Obama administration says transgender students at public schools must be allowed to use the bathroom or locker room that matches their gender identity. Hillary Clinton becomes the first woman to win a major party nomination for president.

2017: Serena Williams wins her 23rd Grand Slam title, second-most of all time.

2020: New Title IX amendments take effect, largely regarding sexual harassment.

2021: Report rips NCAA for failing to uphold its commitment to gender equity by prioritizing its lucrative Division I men's basketball tournament "over everything else," including women's championship events.

2022: South Carolina's Dawn Staley becomes the first Black Division I basketball coach, male or female, to win more than one national championship. The U.S. women's national soccer team reaches a milestone agreement to be paid equally to the men's national team.

___

For more on Title IX's impact, read AP's full report: https://apnews.com/hub/title-ix Video timeline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdgNI6BZpw0

Original post:
Title IX timeline: 50 years of halting progress across U.S. - Star Tribune

John Eastman. Rudy Giuliani. Donald Trump himself.

These people all bear some responsibility for the events of January 6, 2021. But there is another contributing factoran institution, not a personwhose role is regularly overlooked, and that deserves a focus in the ongoing January 6 committee hearings: the Electoral College. The Electoral College isnt responsible for President Trumps efforts to remain in office despite his clear loss. But it was integral to Trumps strategy, and it has everything to do with how close he came to success.

Read: The secret to beating the Electoral College

Many Americans understand that the countrys anachronistic system of presidential selection, part constitutional and part statutory, can sometimes produce a winner who does not receive the most votes nationwide. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by approximately 3 million, but lost in the Electoral College 304227. Sixteen years earlier, Al Gore won 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush nationwide, but Bush prevailed in the Electoral College 271266 after the Supreme Court functionally awarded him Floridas electoral votes. And even without Trumps machinations, the 2020 election came dangerously close to producing yet again a president who did not win the national popular vote. Joe Biden won approximately 7 million more votes than Trump, and prevailed in the Electoral College 306232, but just 44,000 additional Trump votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin could have resulted in a 269269 tie in the Electoral College. If that had happened, the House, voting by state delegation, would almost certainly have anointed Trump president despite his second popular-vote loss.

But theres a problem with the Electoral College thats distinct from the fact that it sometimes selects a winner who does not receive the most votes nationwide, and from the way it creates a political process that overvalues the concerns of voters in an arbitrary subset of states, increasing polarization, dysfunction, and division. (I elaborate on these dynamics in a recent essay in the Michigan Law Review, as does Jesse Wegman in the book thats the subject of my essay, Let the People Pick the President.) The problem is this: The Electoral College today is dangerously susceptible to manipulation. Indeed, as 2020 showed, the complex process through which a candidate becomes president contains a number of postelection opportunities to contest or undermine the results of an electionand to do so for reasons purportedly having to do with law and legal process.

Consider the Trump campaigns many lawsuits designed to delay state certification beyond the safe harbor deadline created by the Electoral Count Act, after which a states slate of electors is no longer deemed conclusive in the event of a dispute. Or Trump supporters efforts to disrupt the statutorily required meetings at which each states electors actually cast their votes, and the attempts of ersatz Trump electors to lay the groundwork for later challenges to official state slates. Trump also personally pressured state election officials to change election results by finding enough additional votes that he would be entitled to all of the states electoral votes. Trump loyalists in the Department of Justice, and Trump supporters such as Ginni Thomas, sought to push state legislatures to take the radical step of throwing out state returns on the basis of spurious fraud claims and appointing Trump electors themselves. Trump and at least one of his attorneys sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes from a number of states in which Biden received more votes, pointing to the vice presidents central role in counting electoral votes in the last stage of the Electoral College process created by the Twelfth Amendment. When that failed, what became the January 6 attack on the Capitol was an effort to disrupt that final event in the Electoral College timeline.

Read: The Republican Electoral College contradiction

Put plainly, for a candidate determined to win at all costs, the Electoral College was central to a postelection strategy designed to convert loss into victory. Last nights opening hearings of the January 6 committee made clear that Trump and his advisers were well aware no good-faith legal basis existed to dispute the elections results. In a nationwide popular vote, a deficit of 7 million votes would have been impossible to challenge using ostensibly lawful means; the fact of the Electoral College meant that flipping a few close states, or coercing the vice president into throwing out those states votes, would have been enough to change the elections outcome.

It also seems likely that the very existence of the Electoral College made the public more susceptible to Trumps efforts to subvert democracyor at least lulled the public for a time into believing there was nothing wildly wrong with a process in which a defeated candidate exploited pressure points in an attempt to cling to power. Americans are, after all, acclimated to an undemocratic system of presidential selection; perhaps that primed the public to respond in muted ways to Trumps blatantly antidemocratic moves.

Commonplace political rhetoric about presidential elections suggests as much, framing elections more as complex logic games than crucial acts of self-governance. We discuss paths to 270; we contemplate the prospect of things like running up the score in Broward County.

It is tempting to dismiss the events of January 6 as largely about Donald Trump rather than our system more broadly. And certainly, any electoral system can be targeted by an autocrat determined to hang on to power. But the Electoral College both provided numerous points of entry and brought the country dangerously close to an actual successful coup.

A genuine bipartisan legislative effort is now under way to reform some of the aspects of the Electoral Count Act that Trump sought to exploit in 2020, as well as to address a number of other vulnerabilities of our electoral system. But at the moment, insufficient attention is being paid to the Electoral College itself. One of the goals of these hearings should be to communicate to the public just how dangerous an institution the Electoral College isand perhaps to galvanize a serious effort to change it.

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The Other Cause of January 6 - The Atlantic

For fans of The Lord of the Rings, a Palantir is a seeing stone, or crystal ball, that can be used to see events and communicate with other stones. For the followers of technology companies, Palantir is a US company that specialises in big data analytics. One of its co-founders is Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who was Facebooks first outside investor. This begs the question: why would a software company, which boasts the US and UK governments among its clients, need defending? The answer lies in the strange values of Big Tech, Silicon Valley and Western progressives (or rather American progressives, whom every other Western progressive seems to ape).

Palantir Technologies, to give the company its full name, stands out for several reasons. Tech companies tend to have meaningless names (Microsoft, for example), or names reflecting what they do: Netflix stands for internet films. The literary origin of Palantirs name makes it stand out. The company is run by Alex Karp. With a PhD in philosophy from Goethe University, Frankfurt, Karp is highly intelligent, but not your typical tech boss. In journalistic terms, Karp is outspoken. In other words, he tells you what he thinks and does not hide behind corporate PR.

One recent example is Karps comments on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Sunday Times reported him as saying the risk of nuclear war is higher than most people think. He also pointed out that the firm had problems with investors, as Palantir would not sell to US adversaries. He noted as a result Palantir had never entered the Russian market, so they have no business to close down there due to sanctions.

It is this clear embrace of Western values that points to the controversy among progressives. Whereas other Big Tech firms have shied away from working for the CIA and the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Palantir has embraced such work. It sees itself as the contrarian amongst technology firms and explicitly rejects progressive values.

The irony for Silicon Valley progressives is that they are obsessed with diversity of race, gender and nationality, but diversity of thought sends them into a meltdown. This hostility to anyone who varies from progressive groupthink led to protests outside Palantirs Palo Alto headquarters and may well have led to the companys decision to move its headquarters to Denver, Colorado.

The irony is that if it was not for defence spending, there would probably be no Silicon Valley. For Big Tech progressives, history seems to begin in the 1970s with the founding of Apple Computers. In the real world the area around San Francisco has been an area of research for the US Navy for at least the last hundred years. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the largest employer was Lockheed, famous for its US military jets. Palantir is completely in the historic mainstream by seeking to work for the US government. In an era when China has its own tech champions, in the form of Tencent and Alibaba, America needs companies like Palantir more than ever.

The controversy over Palantir is not just limited to the United States. When Palantir began working with the NHS in March 2020 to improve data collection related to the pandemic, the progressive response was predictable. There was a lawsuit from Open Democracy (which was later withdrawn), plus a No Palantir in our NHS campaign established by 50 self-proclaimed healthcare, anti-racist, human rights groups. What is Palantirs crime in their book? It was Peter Thiel, not Palantir, who gave $1 million to Donald Trumps campaign in 2016. Of course, they dont mention that Alex Karp actually voted for Hillary Clinton and gave money to Joe Bidens campaign.

When Huawei, founded in 1987 by a former Chinese Peoples Liberation Party officer, opened offices in the UK, no progressives said or did anything about it. When Russian firms were listing on the London Stock Exchange, there were no mass protests. The double standards at work dont need a Palantir programme to identify them.

So next time you read a hostile article in the New York Times or a news report on the BBC about Palantir, you might want to ask yourself: if these guys are so sinister, why were they not working for the Russian government or cosying up to the Chinese Communist Party, unlike so many other Western firms and Big Tech companies? I, for one, am thankful that there is one tech firm out there that proudly stands up for Western values. Long Live Palantir.

We are the only publication thats committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one thats needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.

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Palantir: breaking the big data mould - TheArticle