It is a political tradition to blame the previous party in charge for current negatives and rob them of the credit for the work they did that spring positives under their oppositions term in power. It’s the same result as taking credit for the enjoyable shade or fruits of a tree that the team you are against planted years ago, but blaming that other team for having planted the tree when you chop it down with lazy or improper accounting for physics and its fall damages property.
Joe Biden is not as talented. and his supporters are forced to make goofy stretches to attempt to blame Donald Trump for the Biden blunders happening in his first year in office. The highest profile disaster so far has been the Biden “cut and run” withdrawal from Afghanistan that handed over total control of the country to the supposedly evil-terrorist leaders we had been fighting for 20 years, left Americans stranded, left military dogs abandoned to die, and left billions worth of tanks and airstrike vehicles and guns and ammo for the new rulers to use against their people.
The typical stretch to blame Trump for all this has been that Trump is the one who set the 2021 withdrawal date from the country, “so there!”. This ignores the reality that Biden scrapped the Trump withdrawal date, all the negotiations and terms that went with it, and didn’t follow any of the Trump administrations guidelines for a tiered withdrawal plan that would have at least made an attempt to avert the obvious disasters mentioned above.
The newest theory from someone named Cheri Jacobus, a NeverTrump activist and Russiagate Hoax podcast producer is that Trump set a “booby trap” for Biden with that Afghanistan policy, that, er… Biden ignored and revamped and made his own and did not have to follow at all or in any of the ways that he did.
I've never seen a Twitter bio that fits more perfectly with an imbecilic tweet in my entire life.🇷🇺🇷🇺🇷🇺🇷🇺🇷🇺 pic.twitter.com/NqKxqiR2a3
In case you missed it: Jacobus lists Trump and Mike Pompeo as being “enemies of America” along with Vladimir Putin in her baseless accusation that Biden’s horrifically mismanaged Afghanistan withdrawal actions were somehow a Trump/Russia collusion “trap”. No argument or explanation for the wild conspiracy theory, of course; she just tosses it out there to keep gullible minds connecting bad Biden moves to etherial Trump/Russia puppetry.
Sure, lady…
But the purpose is highlighting this insanity is to remind how thorough the Russiagate hoax peddlers continue to attempt to use this excuse, years after the Trump/Russia Collision conspiracy theory was investigated and debunked.
Last year, weeks before election day, Jen Psaki and Politico columnist Natasha Betrand helped spread the total lie that Russia was somehow behind tricking Americans in some way about the incriminating details found on Joe Biden’s son’s laptop.
Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say https://t.co/zRdHxTxVsl
The laptop was later verified to indeed have been Hunter Biden’s and it was revealed that the whole time Democrats and supposed “former intel officials” were claiming that its contents were Russian disinfo, Federal prosecutors had in fact been secretly investigating Hunter Biden for exactly the crimes he is shown admitting to and talking about (particularly international money laundering) in the contents of the laptop. But by then it was too late: Joe Biden had won the election, Hunter Biden received no punishment or prosecution, and Jen Psaki was hired as the Biden White House Press Secretary.
Summary: Tens of thousands of Twitter users misunderstood reporting about Georgia’s Floyd County recount revealing “800 for Trump” when it was featured as a trend on the platform, and mercilessly mocked and bullied Trump supporters in a straw man fallacy over their own mistake. Twitter didn’t correct them.
Math is hard (*not sarcasm) – however…
I admit that I am comically bad at math, myself. But I also don’t mock others for being bad at math. Glass houses and all.
I was not one of the people dunking on Brian Williams and Mara Gay and MNBC’s producers for covering a tweet that claimed a massive mathematical falsehood, endorsing it as true, and no one down the line realizing the mistake they were making in misunderstanding the numbers in front of them. The tweet they all thought was so profound was a blue-check-mark saying “Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. The U.S. population is 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million and still have money left over.” -Which most people immediately laughed at but I admit that when I first read it, I was like “so what’s the error?” for a solid way-longer-than-I-should-have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWqJCeY8cD0
After a minute my brain caught up to realize that “500 million” isn’t “1 million, 500 times” the way the author and pundits thought – it’s one dollar 500 million times (about enough to give every American $1.53).
However… The issue so many people got wrong about Georgia’s recount isn’t just a misunderstanding of math at play like the pundits in that MSNBC flub. This time, nearly 100% of the tweets making the math mistake were using that mistaken perception to ridicule Trump and Trump supporters, often accusing both of the thing they were actually guilty of (also called Narcissistic Projection).
What happened in Georgia
In Georgia, a statewide recount of votes in the presidential election was started over the weekend and on Monday (November 16th) revealed that over 2,600 votes in Floyd County had not been counted.
The blame for how this happened lays in an unknowable area in between human error, human intent, and the error or intent in the system of Dominion tabulating machines (the same system Trump alleged was falsely tabulating votes against him)… Specifically – a human evidently failed to load a memory stick for the tabulations of an entire voting machine and this was only found out a week after the election and only because of the scrutiny happening from the required recount. So opinions will vary between human accident, human intent, and a flawed system by Dominion that allows such an error by a poll taker to occur.
At the time of this writing, the statewide recount is still going on, with the deadline for completion being before Thursday (11:59 p.m. Wednesday).
The Error…
Local source, Coosa Valley News, reported that of the 2,631 ballots, “that it appeared that between 1,600 and 1,900 were cast for President Trump.” – which means that the votes that would have been left uncounted had this scrutiny not happened, favored Trump nearly 2 to 1.
Democrats on Twitter misunderstood that math, thinking the report was the opposite: that the roughly 800 votes for Biden in that batch of nearly 2,000 were a measly 800 votes for Trump.
“800 for Trump”
So many people on Twitter were tweeting mocking-LOL posts that the recount Trump supporters wanted in the state of Georgia was actually yielding over a thousand new votes for Biden and only 800 for Trump that “800 for Trump” started trending. “Trending” pages are created by Twitter editors to highlight round-ups of tweets with words and phrases that are in current high volume.
Featuring this in the side panel like that led to even more people posting with the same misunderstanding of what “net votes” means and of course none of them checked the math on their confirmation bias causing the repetition of the math error to appear in tens of thousands of tweets and retweets.
The correct response, even with this misunderstanding, is to be glad that new votes were counted that otherwise would have – not just to pretend to like Democracy when all you really care about is your candidate of choice winning – but also because this doesn’t change your candidate of choice still being the winner (so far) so there is nothing in it for you to gloat on your political opposition. You could just take the high ground and be like “yay Democracy” and support every legal vote being counted, assured that you’re still getting your way.
Instead – thousands of Tweeters couldn’t help themselves in kicking the other side when they’re down and used their false perception as club to attack.
Twitter, which has been censoring and “correcting” with vague warnings, Donald J Trump’s official account (but not Biden’s) in the months leading up to the election and especially afterward any time he tweets anything about the election (literally anything – not just disputed claims) put no correction, alert, or attempt to curtail the misinformation about the election that was spreading through any of these tweets.
As an example, take this tweet of Trumps saying that the numbers of his votes are “up big”, which they were at the time (11:49pm, November 3rd), so that was disputed by no one. After midnight, however, vote counting in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin stopped – something I don’t think has ever been done in modern (say, post 19th century) American vote counting on election night – new gluts of votes came in, and the tides started to turn. Trump accurately said he was up in the count and raised attention to the fishy behavior and for that Twitter says “not so fast”:
Keep that standard in mind while looking through the trending page for this “800 for Trump” lie as none of them have corrections by Twitter A.I. or manual editors despite the content they’re gloating about with soppy-wet sarcasm is actually the opposite of what really happened:
https://twitter.com/TimOBrien/status/1328522859224965120 ^Tim O’Brien is an anti-Trump blue-check-mark columnist for Bloomberg and author of Trump Nation. The tweet above was screenshotted before being deleted and can be seen here:
Math and science aren’t strengths for Bloomberg journalists.
Well look what we found – 1,600 uncounted ballots for Biden and 800 for Trump. So @JasonMillerinDC is excited the Biden lead is GROWING? https://t.co/U4d8puya1G
Notice how many of these people touting math while failing the math of the claim. Hundreds of the tweets I looked through were ones like this where they are commenting on an accurate tweet (in this case, by Brendan Keefe) with their ignorance:
This one gets extra points for including the “let me get this straight” trope + “do they not know [the thing I myself am misunderstanding], or am I missing something?”
What's that you say? Trump's recount found 1800 more votes for Biden? and only "800 for Trump" — sounds like we get to celebrate Biden's victory in Georgia all over again! pic.twitter.com/URlOCpvnVx
I thought for sure this next one was a satire because they ask “since when did [thousands] become thousands?” In addition to the other falsehoods. Yikes.
Since when did 2600 become thousands?
Also only 800 for Trump
and
1800 for Biden, benefits Biden not Trump because NEWSFLASH: 1800 is more than 800. https://t.co/0nM5dRxKHl
This guy with almost 40 thousand followers self-own’s with the roast “Maga. Because learnin’ is hard.” in his tweet showing that learnin, for him, is in fact difficult.
So in the GA recount, trupmworld is celebrating 800 for trump, but ignoring the other 1,800 votes found for Biden.
^his bio identifies him as “Author of Goodnight Loon: Poems & Parodies to Survive Trump, and Goodnight Loon II”… Dozens of comments joined in his ridicule with various versions of the GOP being bad at math – again – while being the ones making the ridiculous math error.
The sarcastic struggles to understand their own mistakes continue:
Many were probably misled by this popular Leftist account with almost a million followers, whom I have caught fudging facts at least 4 other times this year:
The irony of saying “you can’t make this shit up” – literally about shit that the speaker of the phrase made up:
So the MAGA folks where calling fraud whent hey found 2600 uncounted ballots in Floyd County, GA… And 1800 are for Biden and 800 for Trump… You just can't make this shit up … https://t.co/7iMpstuyEI
Will these people delete their mistakes? So far none of the above have corrected or retracted in follow up tweets as new people keep Liking and retweeting the falsehoods in their original posts.
I predict a lot of checkmark Dems will be deleting their 800 for Trump tweets tomorrow, because math.
Sadly – I saw at least a dozen tweet replies being even MORE snarky and sarcastically dismissive even after the corrections were made because they just didn’t want to believe it, didn’t want to look it up, and just stuck with the original narrative. Basically all of them went along this tone and line of logic:
2,600 ballots extra in the recount. It’s math not opinions. I’ll help you 800 (Trump) ballots + 1,800 (biden) ballots = 2,600 ballots.
tax season must be hard for you, if you need more math Help, I have a 1st grader, Fundraising for 2024 blue candidates in Arkansas
^That one is the best representation of all of these as it wraps up every trop into one reply:
over confidence of something they’re dead wrong about,
attacks someones capability in sentences riddled with typos and grammar mistakes,
brags about how they are actively recruiting people to be as ignorant as themselves
“ur so stoopid but I’ll explain it to you, you poor dumb thing: [total falsehoods]. Get it now, looser? Lol I win. Nobody’s smart but me!”
“It’s math not opinions”…
How / Why this happened…
The information in these tweets are technically “lies” since the content is untrue and easily verifiably so, but I doubt even one of these people are “lying” (saying something *knowing* it is untrue). Rather, this confusion stemmed from Democrats reading that “Trump could gain nearly 800 net votes” and, since none of them have ever run a business, simply didn’t know what “net” means. That ignorance combined with confidence and a fighting attitude to stick it to the Trumpkins resulted in the mass misinformation train of people bathing in their own errors and feeling like super winners about it.
If the “net 800” thing makes sense to you then skip this paragraph. If you’re still absorbing those words the way I did with the MSNBC flub because math is hard (again: not being sarcastic), then just remember that economically, “net” means the total of something after its deficits. Think of the word “net” like a physical net that you carry something in and that something being what you get to take home. As in – if our lemonade stand pays $24 for ingredients and earns $25 in sales then we sold $25 worth of product – but the “net income” (profit) for that round is only $1 (income minus expenses, which here is 25-24). This is important because Democrats want to tax and regulate businesses while not understanding – and making no effort to understand – businesses they want to tax and regulate. Many of you here no doubt thought my lemonade business example of just $1 profit ($25 in sales minus $24 in expenses) was silly because its either unrealistic that even a small business would make such a small profit margin, and/or even if they did then “oh well” because they shouldn’t be in business if they can’t earn enough to pay half of that dollar in taxes to the government (which didn’t help buy, make, or sell anything but still gets paid) plus a government forced hourly minimum wage to anyone the lemonade biz hires. My example, however, uses the average profit margin of the restaurant business, which is 3-5% (4 percent of $25 is $1).
And that’s what makes this important to spotlight. Not that people got a thing wrong or even that they were jerks about it – but that a billion dollar mass media corporation is actively censoring opinions by the President that they don’t like while not only giving safe haven to verifiable falsehoods but actually featuring them as a highlight for people to go check out.
Something to be aware of.
——————————-
Update: The following tweets originally included in this post were deleted by their [presumably embarrassed] authors so I replaced them with others above but saved the list of shame for posterity since despite being so nasty about it, NONE of them corrected their mistake in follow up tweets (correct me if I missed anyone who did) after having misled the thousands who read it – they just quietly deleted the lie and moved on.
^(the last two was a pair of those who doubled down on the falsehood when corrected by multiple people before ultimately realizing their critics were right and deleted it all)
