#I’m going to steal the declaration of independence
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
gloomglimmer · 4 months ago
Text
𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐋  𝐓𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐔𝐑𝐄  .  .  .  (  𝐫𝐩  𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞  𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬  )         This  collection  features  lines  from  National  Treasure  (  the  movie  ),  perfect  for  sparking  dynamic  interactions.         Use  these  starters  to  inspire  scenes  across  a  variety  of  genres,  including  historical  mystery,  heist  adventures,  or  treasure  hunts.       Feel  free  to  adjust  to  help  craft  your  scene.*
“I’m  going  to  steal  the  Declaration  of  Independence.”
“The  secret  lies  with  [insert  name].”
“People  don’t  talk  that  way  anymore.”
“The  legend  says  the  treasure  was  buried  to  keep  it  from  the  British.”
“It’s  invisible  ink.  You  need  heat  to  see  it.”
“When  someone  can  find  that  out,  you’ll  want  them  to  have  the  right  answer.”
“We’re  more  like  treasure  protectors.”
“I  feel  like  I’m  doing  something  illegal…  and  it’s  awesome!”
“The  map  is  invisible,  and  I’m  sure  we  can  figure  it  out.”
“History  abhors  a  paradox.”
“For  a  treasure  hunter,  I  can’t  think  of  a  more  noble  cause  than  giving  history  back  to  the  people.”
“There’s  more  to  this  than  meets  the  eye.”
“The  clues  are  all  around  us,  hidden  in  plain  sight.”
“The  harder  the  puzzle,  the  bigger  the  reward.”
“It’s  not  just  a  treasure;  it’s  a  piece  of  history.”
“We  didn’t  find  the  treasure—it  found  us.”
“The  real  mystery  isn’t  what  we’ve  discovered;  it’s  what  we  haven’t  yet  uncovered.”
“They  left  us  a  puzzle,  and  we’re  the  ones  to  solve  it.”
53 notes · View notes
rainbow-femme · 1 year ago
Text
The inciting incidents of the two National Treasure movies are so funny
“I’m treasure hunting with this guy and to find the map he wants to steal the Declaration of Independence. I am against stealing the Declaration of Independence so I stopped working with him. To protect the Declaration of Independence I am going to steal the Declaration of Independence and then also use it to find the map and treasure, the thing he initially suggested and is also trying to do.”
“I want to find this treasure and I want this famous treasure finder to help me. To get him, the guy who loves finding treasure, to help me find treasure I am going to publicly insult him and his family so he is forced to prove me wrong by finding the treasure himself and I’ll just follow him. As opposed to telling him, the guy who loves finding treasure, that there is treasure to go and find.”
168 notes · View notes
promptcorner · 23 days ago
Text
Soooooo, I’ve been off the web and I’m suddenly seeing all this AI taking over AO3 happening.
Bots harassing people and another AI taking fics for databases�� like why???????? It’s fanfiction, it’s mostly ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia, Hyper-fixation ramblings, and pure emotion for something the writer loves. Why in the world would anyone do this? Why are people taking the long and hard work, blood sweat and tears, literal history from 13 year olds or older or younger???? Any age actually???? Why? Why are people being so scummy that real life scum wouldn’t want to grow in their general vicinity?
Like, what’s the goal? Just to steal? Steal the Declaration of Independence at this rate, heck take the Mona Lisa— oh wait, Chat Gbt didn’t give you the right information and now your in police custody. Shame, you’ll need Ocean’s 8 and 11 to pull you out. No wait, you’ll need Audrey Hepburn to steal a million dollars for bail.
Ya know, I remember a time where art theft and book plagiarism was an actual crime that took effort to pull off. The mapping, planning, the get away car, the fights, and the sneaking people had to do was a big ass job. Now it’s a, guess who’s stealing Jenny’s fanfiction this week! Featuring Musklords and The Mother Board as themselves! Now staring the Dulingo Bird, Your Mom! And AO3, all being played by Markiplier! Directed by Hayao Miyazaki— coming out on YOUR BIRTHDAY!!!
Idk what to do, but I’m getting sad and a bit pissed off.
Edit: Aaaaand I just realized that I spelled Chat GPT as GBT. Whatever, that site doesn’t deserve my respect, it’s called GBT now. Garbage Bin Tech.
Edit: Know that this is not a death treat. I understand that this post calls people that use AI as Criminals. In truth, that is harsh and untrue. The creators of those tools, aka, the CEOs and whoever are involved with the brains of those ideas are the real culprits. Those who buy in and use AI are varied with their goals. Some do use AI to scam and be scummy. But others are just kids who are trying to get by in school. Or, people want to use it for fun. I understand why people use it, I just don’t agree with it.
My parents look at AI like it’s a new technology— similar to the internet. They don’t use it, but they say it won’t be going anywhere and that we have to accept it. Truthfully and respectfully, not true: AI can’t do anything we already do. It’s not being used to help the public. It should be used to help people with disabilities so they can speak and whatnot— NOT STEAL ACTORS VOICES AND USE THEM IN MOVIES AND ADS THEY DIDN’T ENDORSE. It’s taken critical thinking away, killing the planet faster, and scamming hundreds if not thousands, and using other people’s hard work to make CEOs richer. This is a Teen Dystopia Novel, change my mind.
Instead of ignoring the problem and making AI solve it, why not go at the roots and pull them out like the ancients of old? There are many problems, but AI is only a bandaid the size of a pea that is slowly rotting with the gash in our skin. It won’t make the pain go away, and it definitely won’t get better.
If your a tutor, help kids with their homework. If your a teacher, say students get a better grade if they don’t use AI. And if your a parent, help your kid.
AI should get a big ass water mark with every generation, and get fined for not doing so. Like, a big ass fine.
26 notes · View notes
queer-spiro · 3 months ago
Text
So I’m thinking about the Lone Wander from Fallout 3 going up to Boston and meeting Hancock. Like Hancock has got to be a founding fathers history nerd with the whole John Hancock cosplay and Lone Wander comes rocking up with Abraham Lincoln‘s repeater and stories about stealing the Declaration of Independence. Hancock would lose his mind. He’d love that John Hancock wrote his name the biggest on the Declaration. 
26 notes · View notes
goddess-aelin · 9 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
Lovestruck
Day 2 of Rowaelin month- spies/heist AU
A follow up to Lovesick- highly recommend reading that one before this one. Otherwise you'll probably be lost
Masterlist
Word count: 1.9k
Warnings: stealing, small injury
“Aelin?” Rowan’s heart completely dropped to his stomach. Why was the woman he had seen just hours ago sitting on his fire escape, clad in black and laying next to a broken statue like she was on some sort of fucking art heist?
“Ro..I…Agh.” Aelin clutched her head, squeezing her eyes shut as if she was in pain. “Fuck.”
Rowan could only stare. 
“I swear this isn’t what it looks like.” Aelin’s turquoise eyes met his own. She shifted her hand behind her to sit up more sturdily but a hiss of pain escaped her lips instead.
  And at that moment, Rowan really couldn’t have cared whether she was in the middle of stealing the fucking Declaration of Independence, he couldn’t bear to see her in pain. “Fuck, Aelin. Come here.” He pushed his window up just far enough that he could reach out and pull her toward him. He picked her up with a gentleness that surprised even him given the circumstances, watching for any injuries or flinches of pain. Setting her down on the couch, he started to make his way to the kitchen but thought better of it and held his hand out to Aelin, instead. “Give me your glove.” 
“What?” 
He made a motion with his hand. “Give me your glove. Quickly.” Hesitantly, she did as she was asked, handing her black leather glove over to Rowan. Even though it was at least three sizes too small, Rowan shoved as much of his hand into the glove as he could and went once again to the window. Leaning out, he gently picked up the pieces of the broken statue, making sure that he got every little piece before closing the window.
As he turned back to Aelin, he could tell she was gobsmacked. 
“Why are you helping me?”
Rowan just sighed but didn’t answer her question. “How about we start with me wrapping that wrist and then you can tell me what you were doing on my fire escape at two in the morning with a suspiciously familiar statue.” 
While she didn’t necessarily look happy, Aelin nodded. “Deal.”
“Can you walk?” At his question, Aelin nodded, and got up to follow him to the kitchen.
She sat at one of the high-top stools at his kitchen island and he could feel her piercing gaze on his back as he rifled through the cabinets to find a wrap for her wrist. Returning to her once he found it, he grabbed her hand, inspecting for any cuts or scrapes. Finding none, he started pushing at her skin in different areas. She hissed as his fingers met the already-forming bruise.
“Luckily, I think it’s just a sprain. I’ll wrap it but if it feels any different tomorrow, you should go get an x-ray.” 
Aelin snorted. “This isn’t my first rodeo.” 
Rowan raised his eyebrows at that. But still he said nothing, trying and failing to gather his thoughts around this strange, beautiful, and mysterious woman. Gently, he began wrapping her wrist with the bandages.
“So you just keep a wrist wrap in your kitchen?”
“I’m a doctor, remember? I have medical supplies all over my apartment.” Aelin let out a huff of breath at that. “Are you going to tell me why I found you out there, looking as if you were falling from the heavens?”
Aelin sighed, gathering her thoughts. “I swear to you, it was not what you think. I wasn’t stealing the statue from the art gallery above.” Rowan met her gaze and raised an eyebrow. “Okay, maybe I was stealing the statue but I swear I had a good reason.” 
Aelin took a deep breath to steal herself. “I come from a long line of Terrasen royalty. Of course, we don’t have a monarchy anymore so I’m just a normal citizen, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about my family’s history. My great-great grandfather had a collection of artifacts that dated all the way back to King Brannon’s line. I’m sure you’ve heard of him.” Rowan nodded in affirmation. “Well that broken statue was one of the last known pieces from that time period. My great-great grandfather passed it down to my great grandfather, he to my grandfather, and then it should’ve passed onto my father. But this guy, Arobynn Hamel, took it instead”
“The Arobynn Hamel that owns the art gallery upstairs?”
Aelin nodded. “If we come from a long line of Terrasen royalty, then he comes from a long line of people who tried to steal the throne from us. So I guess he felt like he was entitled to this particular statue and when my grandfather died. Imagine our surprise when the will was read and our family heirloom was suddenly passed down to a guy no one could stand.”
"Sounds fishy.” 
“It was. There was no way that my grandfather would have given it to him. None. I grew up being a part of my grandfather’s life and I still remember his disdain for the man. Without my dad here to stop me anymore, I guess I just wanted to have a piece of our family history back.”
“So why did you feel like you needed to do this in the dead of night instead of fighting for it via legal routes?”
Aelin’s rueful smile slowly grew into a smirk. “Where would the fun be in that?”
Rowan couldn’t hold back his huff of laughter. This woman. She was going to be the death of him. Aelin’s face suddenly got serious. “Are you mad?”
Rowan furrowed his brows. “Mad? No.” He sighed. “Concerned? Yes, of course.”
Aelin swallowed loudly. “Are you going to turn me in?” 
Rowan really tried to make a good show of contemplating. But his strength when it came to this woman was nonexistent. He caved much sooner than he would’ve liked and feared he gave away much of his emotion in the process. “Of course not. If I turned you in, I wouldn’t get to go on another date with you and we can’t have that, can we?”
Aelin beamed. Slowly, as if he were a skittish deer, Aelin leaned in and rested her forehead against his. “Thank you, Rowan.” 
Tilting his head so that he could place a gentle kiss upon her lips, Rowan whispered “You’re welcome.”
The oven beeping broke them out of their little bubble that wholly encompassed them. It was at that moment that he could tell that Aelin finally smelled the melting chocolate and sugary goodness. 
Slowly, like a cat, her eyes met his, a small smirk playing on her lips. “Are those for me?”
Rowan shrugged, nonchalant. “Maybe.” 
Aelin softly swatted at him. “You’re a dork. But…” Her gaze was piercing as she pursed her lips, debating on her next statement. “But you’re my dork.”
Rowan could feel something in his chest alight at her statement. He was her dork. Given that he just found her on his fire escape after she stole a priceless heirloom, warning bells probably should have been going off in Rowan’s head. But all he could think was, “And you’re a thief. But…” He pecked her nose. “You’re my thief.”
A/N: Happy Day 2 of Rowaelin Month! I have some stuff planned though none of it written but I'm glad to have even gotten this piece out!
59 notes · View notes
dreaminginthedeepsouth · 8 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
deAdder
* * * *
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
October 2, 2024
Heather Cox Richardson
Oct 03, 2024
When moderator Margaret Brennan noted during last night’s vice presidential debate that Republican nominee J.D. Vance had, once again, lied about the legal status of migrants in Springfield, Ohio, Vance retorted: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!” As scholar of propaganda Pekka Kallioniemi noted, this was “[t]he epitome of post-truth politics.”
Vance lied throughout the debate and has lied throughout this campaign, and in that, he is following the MAGA Republicans and Trump, who has become entirely untethered from reality. Aaron Rupar, who watches Trump’s rallies, and Noah Berlatsky wrote in Public Notice that Trump’s growing mental incapacity was obvious yesterday, as in two rallies he made a “wide-ranging journey through conspiracy theories, hatred, and nonsense.” He “seems ever more adrift in his own fog of hate and ego,” Rupar and Berlatsky wrote, “He mixes up world leaders, confuses countries, garbles pronouns, loses track of his nonsense talking points.” 
Vance’s post-truth world did not dominate last night’s debate. A Politico/Focaldata snap poll afterward showed that while party voters overwhelmingly declared their party’s nominee the winner, 58% of Independents backed Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz. 
Before the debate, political consultant Stuart Stevens posted: “If you want to know what the campaigns think of their VP candidates debate, just watch how they schedule the candidates post-debate. After Cheney VP debates, Lieberman and Edwards basically disappeared, banished to tiny markets. If Trump world believes America wants more Vance, they can put him in big markets in big states. I’m doubting that will happen. I suspect that [the] Harris campaign gets Walz in front of more voters after debate. He wears well.” 
Today, Stevens noted that the campaign is ramping up Walz’s schedule, sending him through Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona and adding more media, including “two national TV interviews, a podcast and a late-night TV appearance,” and that Trump said he was “satisfied with Vance’s ‘fantastic’ performance.”
But Vance’s willingness to lie matters to Trump, and nowhere more than in his refusal to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Vance has repeatedly said he would have done what Vice President Mike Pence would not: go along with Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, urging the states to approve “alternative” slates of electors than the ones that accurately reflected the choice voters made at the polls. 
“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) responded, “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”
Vance’s stance was poorly timed. This afternoon, Judge Tanya Chutkan released the government’s motion for immunity determinations, special counsel Jack Smith’s legal filing laying out the government’s case against Trump for his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The filing pulls from previously unreleased interviews, calls, and messages to paint a damning picture of Trump’s behavior as he tried to steal the presidency. Names in it are redacted, but journalists have already figured them out. 
The filing is coming now because Trump and then the Supreme Court repeatedly delayed the case. After the Supreme Court decided that presidents are immune from prosecution for crimes committed as part of a president’s official acts, the court had to take on what constituted an official act. In today’s filing, Smith argued that where Trump “was acting ‘as office-seeker, not office-holder,’ no immunity attaches.” The government asks that “the Court determine that the defendant must stand trial for his private crimes as would any other citizen.” 
The facts of the case begin with a damning statement: “When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.” 
Fundamental to those crimes was disinformation. The entire plan for keeping Trump in office depended on Trump and his loyalists lying to the American people, convincing them of a completely false story that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen.  
That effort started long before the actual election when it became clear to the Trump team that he was unlikely to win. They knew, though, that since Democrats were more likely than Republicans to use mail-in ballots, there would be an initial period when his numbers were higher than Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s. 
In that case, Trump told advisor Roger Stone, his chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short, he would simply declare before all the ballots had been counted that he had won. In the meantime, he planted the idea that the election would be stolen from him, publicly saying, for example, that he would “have to see” whether he would accept the election results and saying that the only way he could lose would be if the election was rigged. 
On October 31, advisor Steve Bannon, whose specialty was disinformation, told a group of supporters that Trump was simply “going to declare victory. That doesn’t mean he’s the winner, he’s just going to say he’s the winner…that’s our strategy.” 
That’s exactly what Trump did. He claimed there had been fraud in the election and that he had won. Then, as states continued to count votes, Trump’s operatives tried to create chaos at the polling places. When the vote count in Detroit swung toward Biden, for example, operative Michael Roman told a colleague there to “give me options to file litigation… even if itbis [sic],” apparently meaning “even if it is BS.” Smith noted that “[w]hen a colleague suggested there was about to be unrest reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers Riot, a violent effort to stop the vote count in Florida after the 2000 presidential election”—a riot in which Roger Stone had participated—Roman responded: “Make them riot” and “Do it!!!”
Even as Trump publicly claimed victory, his campaign staff told him his chances of prevailing were slim. To win, they told him, he must carry Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. When the campaign conceded its litigation in Arizona on November 13, it effectively admitted Trump had lost the election. As soon as his lawyers conceded in Arizona, Trump sidelined his campaign staff and turned to Giuliani and lawyers who would back the Big Lie. 
To overturn the election results, Trump and his loyalists turned to pressuring Republicans in the states he had lost, especially Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, as well as in states that used certain voting machines, to say the election had been fraudulent. When officials demanded proof of their claims, Trump and Giuliani threatened them, then accused them of betrayal and spread their names to angry supporters, who harassed them. Again and again, Republican officials told Trump his numbers were wrong and that he had lost the election. They begged him to stop spreading lies. 
As for the idea that voting machines had been compromised, Chris Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, publicly posted that claims of election fraud through voting machines “either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.” When Trump tried to get then–Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel to publicize a report that claimed machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had affected the vote, McDaniel declined, saying she had already discussed the report with Michigan’s speaker of the house, who had told her the report was “f*cking nuts.”  
By late November, neither the legal challenges nor the threats had worked. So in early December the conspirators decided to get the people who would have been the electors if Trump had won to sign certifications saying that they were the legitimate electors and were casting their electoral votes for Trump. The lawyer who came up with the plan, Ken Chesebro, admitted that “the votes aren’t legal” but thought Congress could use them to challenge the real votes. 
Many of the electors were wary of the plan, but Trump and his conspirators managed to get the slates of fake electors on December 14, the appointed day for real electors to meet. The plan was for Vice President Mike Pence, who as president of the Senate would preside over the counting of the electoral votes, to use the fake electors to say there were competing slates of electors and thus to “negotiate a solution to defeat Biden.” On December 19, Trump posted: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6. Be there, will be wild!”
But the plan hit a snag. Pence maintained he did not have the power to do any such thing. The more Pence refused, the more insistent Trump became. After another argument on January 1, 2021, Trump told Pence that “hundreds of thousands of people are going to hate your guts,” “people are gonna think you’re stupid,” and, finally, “You’re too honest.”
Trump, Bannon, and Trump’s lawyers all continued to pressure Pence, and Bannon normalized the plan on his podcast. Trump continued to talk publicly of fighting to make sure his opponents didn’t take the White House and continued to pressure Pence. On January 5—the day before the election certification proceeding—he talked to Bannon, and less than two hours later, on his podcast, Bannon told his listeners: “All Hell is going to break loose tomorrow” in Washington, D.C. 
Concerned at Trump’s escalating fury at Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short alerted Pence’s secret service detail. Then, after Trump spoke with Bannon and lawyer John Eastman, who had come up with the legal argument for Pence’s power to affect the count, he simply lied on social media that Pence agreed the vice president could change the election results, then posted: “Do it, Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!”
When Pence continued to refuse, on January 6, Trump told his supporters at the Ellipse that Pence had let him down and then continued to lie that the election had been stolen, assuring them they would “never take back our country with weakness.” Then he sent the crowd to obstruct the proceedings. 
Trump sat in the small dining room off the Oval Office watching the Fox News Channel and scrolling through Twitter as the crowd broke into the Capitol. At 2:24, Trump tweeted that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” A rioter read the tweet through a bullhorn for the crowd. A minute later, the Secret Service had to evacuate Pence to a secure location. When told of Pence’s danger, Trump answered: “So what?”
When Congress came back after the riot, Trump and Giuliani tried to delay further, calling senators and one representative to slow the process down. It didn’t work. On January 7, at 3:41 in the morning, Pence announced that Biden’s election had been certified. 
It was all a lie. 
One hundred and forty police officers assaulted, close to $3 million in damage, close to 1,200 people charged, more than 450 serving prison sentences, a poisonous political movement taking root, and voter suppression laws…all because Trump couldn’t bear to have lost an election. 
“Post-truth politics” has real-world repercussions.  
Last night, when a reporter in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, asked him if trusted the electoral process this time around, Trump answered: “I’ll let you know in about 33 days.”
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
12 notes · View notes
zoropookie · 8 months ago
Note
I’m putting a trademark on ur SMAUS so now their under my contract
😲 i wonder if this is how nicholas cage felt when he was going to steal the declaration of independence
8 notes · View notes
doueverwonder · 2 years ago
Text
Would Indiana Jones and Ben Gates get along?
my dad says no bc Ben is too obsessed with conspiracy and did do the opposite of what Indy would approve of (take something out of a museum >:\)
Gates: I’m going to steal the Declaration of Independence
Jones, turning in his grave: No you fucking won’t
18 notes · View notes
theeclipseknight · 2 years ago
Text
Meet: Eden Astra, The Eclipse
——
Tumblr media
——
Nicknames:
Ede, Edie, E, Starchild, Starseed.
Patron(s):
• Rah, God of the Sun
• Khonsu god of the Moon
Description:
While not fighting bad-guys or going on missions, The Eclipse is Eden Astra. An Adventurer, Book nerd, and Astrology and Astronomy buff, not to mention breaking every gender barrier they come across! With the help of The Moon Knight system, Eden is discovering their new abilities and what it means to be a hero.
Items:
• Satchel/backpack to carry things
• Astrology and Astronomy books
•Nonbinary pride Pin
•Various Compasses and maps
Fun Facts:
•Eden is Nonbinary and uses They/Them pronouns exclusively
•Met Steven while working at the museum book shop and learned about the rest of The Moon Knight system a bit later. Eventually, They became best friends, and after the night/morning Eden became The Eclipse, they’ve been inseparable.
•Has a GIANT CRUSH, and I mean MASSIVE, on Steven
•afraid of Bugs
•Ironically, they drive a Black Volkswagen Beetle
•Adores birds of Prey. Falcons, Eagles, Owls, Hawks, etc.
Catchphrases:
‘It’s because I’m a Capricorn.’
‘That’s homophobic. We should kill that guy.’
‘Can we go steal the declaration of independence? PLEASE?’
‘The stars-‘
3 notes · View notes
drlombriz · 5 months ago
Text
if i’m not halfway down a giant snake’s throat in the next fortnight i’m going to steal the declaration of independence
If i dont [experience pathologically concerning sex act] within the next [arbitrary time period] im going to [federal agency watchphrase]
52K notes · View notes
yourreddancer · 8 months ago
Text
Heather Cox Richardson 10.2.24
When moderator Margaret Brennan noted during last night’s vice presidential debate that Republican nominee J.D. Vance had, once again, lied about the legal status of migrants in Springfield, Ohio, Vance retorted: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!” As scholar of propaganda Pekka Kallioniemi noted, this was “[t]he epitome of post-truth politics.”
Vance lied throughout the debate and has lied throughout this campaign, and in that, he is following the MAGA Republicans and Trump, who has become entirely untethered from reality.
Aaron Rupar, who watches Trump’s rallies, and Noah Berlatsky wrote in Public Notice that Trump’s growing mental incapacity was obvious yesterday, as in two rallies he made a “wide-ranging journey through conspiracy theories, hatred, and nonsense.” He “seems ever more adrift in his own fog of hate and ego,” Rupar and Berlatsky wrote, “He mixes up world leaders, confuses countries, garbles pronouns, loses track of his nonsense talking points.” 
Vance’s post-truth world did not dominate last night’s debate. A Politico/Focaldata snap poll afterward showed that while party voters overwhelmingly declared their party’s nominee the winner, 58% of Independents backed Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz. 
Before the debate, political consultant Stuart Stevens posted: “If you want to know what the campaigns think of their VP candidates debate, just watch how they schedule the candidates post-debate. After Cheney VP debates, Lieberman and Edwards basically disappeared, banished to tiny markets. If Trump world believes America wants more Vance, they can put him in big markets in big states. I’m doubting that will happen. I suspect that [the] Harris campaign gets Walz in front of more voters after debate. He wears well.” 
Today, Stevens noted that the campaign is ramping up Walz’s schedule, sending him through Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona and adding more media, including “two national TV interviews, a podcast and a late-night TV appearance,” and that Trump said he was “satisfied with Vance’s ‘fantastic’ performance.”
But Vance’s willingness to lie matters to Trump, and nowhere more than in his refusal to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Vance has repeatedly said he would have done what Vice President Mike Pence would not: go along with Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, urging the states to approve “alternative” slates of electors than the ones that accurately reflected the choice voters made at the polls. 
“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) responded, “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”
Vance’s stance was poorly timed. This afternoon, Judge Tanya Chutkan released the government’s motion for immunity determinations, special counsel Jack Smith’s legal filing laying out the government’s case against Trump for his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The filing pulls from previously unreleased interviews, calls, and messages to paint a damning picture of Trump’s behavior as he tried to steal the presidency. Names in it are redacted, but journalists have already figured them out. 
The filing is coming now because Trump and then the Supreme Court repeatedly delayed the case. After the Supreme Court decided that presidents are immune from prosecution for crimes committed as part of a president’s official acts, the court had to take on what constituted an official act. In today’s filing, Smith argued that where Trump “was acting ‘as office-seeker, not office-holder,’ no immunity attaches.” The government asks that “the Court determine that the defendant must stand trial for his private crimes as would any other citizen.” 
The facts of the case begin with a damning statement: “When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.” 
Fundamental to those crimes was disinformation. The entire plan for keeping Trump in office depended on Trump and his loyalists lying to the American people, convincing them of a completely false story that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen.  
That effort started long before the actual election when it became clear to the Trump team that he was unlikely to win. They knew, though, that since Democrats were more likely than Republicans to use mail-in ballots, there would be an initial period when his numbers were higher than Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s. 
In that case, Trump told advisor Roger Stone, his chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short, he would simply declare before all the ballots had been counted that he had won. In the meantime, he planted the idea that the election would be stolen from him, publicly saying, for example, that he would “have to see” whether he would accept the election results and saying that the only way he could lose would be if the election was rigged. 
On October 31, advisor Steve Bannon, whose specialty was disinformation, told a group of supporters that Trump was simply “going to declare victory. That doesn’t mean he’s the winner, he’s just going to say he’s the winner…that’s our strategy.” 
That’s exactly what Trump did. He claimed there had been fraud in the election and that he had won. Then, as states continued to count votes, Trump’s operatives tried to create chaos at the polling places. When the vote count in Detroit swung toward Biden, for example, operative Michael Roman told a colleague there to “give me options to file litigation… even if itbis [sic],” apparently meaning “even if it is BS.” Smith noted that “[w]hen a colleague suggested there was about to be unrest reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers Riot, a violent effort to stop the vote count in Florida after the 2000 presidential election”—a riot in which Roger Stone had participated—Roman responded: “Make them riot” and “Do it!!!”
Even as Trump publicly claimed victory, his campaign staff told him his chances of prevailing were slim. To win, they told him, he must carry Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. When the campaign conceded its litigation in Arizona on November 13, it effectively admitted Trump had lost the election. As soon as his lawyers conceded in Arizona, Trump sidelined his campaign staff and turned to Giuliani and lawyers who would back the Big Lie. 
To overturn the election results, Trump and his loyalists turned to pressuring Republicans in the states he had lost, especially Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, as well as in states that used certain voting machines, to say the election had been fraudulent.
When officials demanded proof of their claims, Trump and Giuliani threatened them, then accused them of betrayal and spread their names to angry supporters, who harassed them. Again and again, Republican officials told Trump his numbers were wrong and that he had lost the election. They begged him to stop spreading lies. 
As for the idea that voting machines had been compromised, Chris Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, publicly posted that claims of election fraud through voting machines “either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.” When Trump tried to get then–Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel to publicize a report that claimed machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had affected the vote, McDaniel declined, saying she had already discussed the report with Michigan’s speaker of the house, who had told her the report was “f*cking nuts.”  
By late November, neither the legal challenges nor the threats had worked. So in early December the conspirators decided to get the people who would have been the electors if Trump had won to sign certifications saying that they were the legitimate electors and were casting their electoral votes for Trump. The lawyer who came up with the plan, Ken Chesebro, admitted that “the votes aren’t legal” but thought Congress could use them to challenge the real votes. 
Many of the electors were wary of the plan, but Trump and his conspirators managed to get the slates of fake electors on December 14, the appointed day for real electors to meet. The plan was for Vice President Mike Pence, who as president of the Senate would preside over the counting of the electoral votes, to use the fake electors to say there were competing slates of electors and thus to “negotiate a solution to defeat Biden.” On December 19, Trump posted: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6. Be there, will be wild!”
But the plan hit a snag. Pence maintained he did not have the power to do any such thing. The more Pence refused, the more insistent Trump became. After another argument on January 1, 2021, Trump told Pence that “hundreds of thousands of people are going to hate your guts,” “people are gonna think you’re stupid,” and, finally, “You’re too honest.”
Trump, Bannon, and Trump’s lawyers all continued to pressure Pence, and Bannon normalized the plan on his podcast. Trump continued to talk publicly of fighting to make sure his opponents didn’t take the White House and continued to pressure Pence. On January 5—the day before the election certification proceeding—he talked to Bannon, and less than two hours later, on his podcast, Bannon told his listeners: “All Hell is going to break loose tomorrow” in Washington, D.C. 
Concerned at Trump’s escalating fury at Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short alerted Pence’s secret service detail. Then, after Trump spoke with Bannon and lawyer John Eastman, who had come up with the legal argument for Pence’s power to affect the count, he simply lied on social media that Pence agreed the vice president could change the election results, then posted: “Do it, Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!”
When Pence continued to refuse, on January 6, Trump told his supporters at the Ellipse that Pence had let him down and then continued to lie that the election had been stolen, assuring them they would “never take back our country with weakness.” Then he sent the crowd to obstruct the proceedings. 
Trump sat in the small dining room off the Oval Office watching the Fox News Channel and scrolling through Twitter as the crowd broke into the Capitol. At 2:24, Trump tweeted that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” A rioter read the tweet through a bullhorn for the crowd. A minute later, the Secret Service had to evacuate Pence to a secure location. When told of Pence’s danger, Trump answered: “So what?”0
When Congress came back after the riot, Trump and Giuliani tried to delay further, calling senators and one representative to slow the process down. It didn’t work. On January 7, at 3:41 in the morning, Pence announced that Biden’s election had been certified. 
It was all a lie. 
One hundred and forty police officers assaulted, close to $3 million in damage, close to 1,200 people charged, more than 450 serving prison sentences, a poisonous political movement taking root, and voter suppression laws…all because Trump couldn’t bear to have lost an election. 
“Post-truth politics” has real-world repercussions.  
Last night, when a reporter in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, asked him if trusted the electoral process this time around, Trump answered: “I’ll let you know in about 33 days.”
0 notes
misfitwashere · 8 months ago
Text
October 2, 2024 
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
OCT 3
When moderator Margaret Brennan noted during last night’s vice presidential debate that Republican nominee J.D. Vance had, once again, lied about the legal status of migrants in Springfield, Ohio, Vance retorted: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!” As scholar of propaganda Pekka Kallioniemi noted, this was “[t]he epitome of post-truth politics.”
Vance lied throughout the debate and has lied throughout this campaign, and in that, he is following the MAGA Republicans and Trump, who has become entirely untethered from reality. Aaron Rupar, who watches Trump’s rallies, and Noah Berlatsky wrote in Public Notice that Trump’s growing mental incapacity was obvious yesterday, as in two rallies he made a “wide-ranging journey through conspiracy theories, hatred, and nonsense.” He “seems ever more adrift in his own fog of hate and ego,” Rupar and Berlatsky wrote, “He mixes up world leaders, confuses countries, garbles pronouns, loses track of his nonsense talking points.” 
Vance’s post-truth world did not dominate last night’s debate. A Politico/Focaldata snap poll afterward showed that while party voters overwhelmingly declared their party’s nominee the winner, 58% of Independents backed Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz. 
Before the debate, political consultant Stuart Stevens posted: “If you want to know what the campaigns think of their VP candidates debate, just watch how they schedule the candidates post-debate. After Cheney VP debates, Lieberman and Edwards basically disappeared, banished to tiny markets. If Trump world believes America wants more Vance, they can put him in big markets in big states. I’m doubting that will happen. I suspect that [the] Harris campaign gets Walz in front of more voters after debate. He wears well.” 
Today, Stevens noted that the campaign is ramping up Walz’s schedule, sending him through Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona and adding more media, including “two national TV interviews, a podcast and a late-night TV appearance,” and that Trump said he was “satisfied with Vance’s ‘fantastic’ performance.”
But Vance’s willingness to lie matters to Trump, and nowhere more than in his refusal to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Vance has repeatedly said he would have done what Vice President Mike Pence would not: go along with Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, urging the states to approve “alternative” slates of electors than the ones that accurately reflected the choice voters made at the polls. 
“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) responded, “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”
Vance’s stance was poorly timed. This afternoon, Judge Tanya Chutkan released the government’s motion for immunity determinations, special counsel Jack Smith’s legal filing laying out the government’s case against Trump for his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The filing pulls from previously unreleased interviews, calls, and messages to paint a damning picture of Trump’s behavior as he tried to steal the presidency. Names in it are redacted, but journalists have already figured them out. 
The filing is coming now because Trump and then the Supreme Court repeatedly delayed the case. After the Supreme Court decided that presidents are immune from prosecution for crimes committed as part of a president’s official acts, the court had to take on what constituted an official act. In today’s filing, Smith argued that where Trump “was acting ‘as office-seeker, not office-holder,’ no immunity attaches.” The government asks that “the Court determine that the defendant must stand trial for his private crimes as would any other citizen.” 
The facts of the case begin with a damning statement: “When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.” 
Fundamental to those crimes was disinformation. The entire plan for keeping Trump in office depended on Trump and his loyalists lying to the American people, convincing them of a completely false story that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen.  
That effort started long before the actual election when it became clear to the Trump team that he was unlikely to win. They knew, though, that since Democrats were more likely than Republicans to use mail-in ballots, there would be an initial period when his numbers were higher than Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s. 
In that case, Trump told advisor Roger Stone, his chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short, he would simply declare before all the ballots had been counted that he had won. In the meantime, he planted the idea that the election would be stolen from him, publicly saying, for example, that he would “have to see” whether he would accept the election results and saying that the only way he could lose would be if the election was rigged. 
On October 31, advisor Steve Bannon, whose specialty was disinformation, told a group of supporters that Trump was simply “going to declare victory. That doesn’t mean he’s the winner, he’s just going to say he’s the winner…that’s our strategy.” 
That’s exactly what Trump did. He claimed there had been fraud in the election and that he had won. Then, as states continued to count votes, Trump’s operatives tried to create chaos at the polling places. When the vote count in Detroit swung toward Biden, for example, operative Michael Roman told a colleague there to “give me options to file litigation… even if itbis [sic],” apparently meaning “even if it is BS.” Smith noted that “[w]hen a colleague suggested there was about to be unrest reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers Riot, a violent effort to stop the vote count in Florida after the 2000 presidential election”—a riot in which Roger Stone had participated—Roman responded: “Make them riot” and “Do it!!!”
Even as Trump publicly claimed victory, his campaign staff told him his chances of prevailing were slim. To win, they told him, he must carry Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. When the campaign conceded its litigation in Arizona on November 13, it effectively admitted Trump had lost the election. As soon as his lawyers conceded in Arizona, Trump sidelined his campaign staff and turned to Giuliani and lawyers who would back the Big Lie. 
To overturn the election results, Trump and his loyalists turned to pressuring Republicans in the states he had lost, especially Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, as well as in states that used certain voting machines, to say the election had been fraudulent. When officials demanded proof of their claims, Trump and Giuliani threatened them, then accused them of betrayal and spread their names to angry supporters, who harassed them. Again and again, Republican officials told Trump his numbers were wrong and that he had lost the election. They begged him to stop spreading lies. 
As for the idea that voting machines had been compromised, Chris Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, publicly posted that claims of election fraud through voting machines “either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.” When Trump tried to get then–Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel to publicize a report that claimed machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had affected the vote, McDaniel declined, saying she had already discussed the report with Michigan’s speaker of the house, who had told her the report was “f*cking nuts.”  
By late November, neither the legal challenges nor the threats had worked. So in early December the conspirators decided to get the people who would have been the electors if Trump had won to sign certifications saying that they were the legitimate electors and were casting their electoral votes for Trump. The lawyer who came up with the plan, Ken Chesebro, admitted that “the votes aren’t legal” but thought Congress could use them to challenge the real votes. 
Many of the electors were wary of the plan, but Trump and his conspirators managed to get the slates of fake electors on December 14, the appointed day for real electors to meet. The plan was for Vice President Mike Pence, who as president of the Senate would preside over the counting of the electoral votes, to use the fake electors to say there were competing slates of electors and thus to “negotiate a solution to defeat Biden.” On December 19, Trump posted: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6. Be there, will be wild!”
But the plan hit a snag. Pence maintained he did not have the power to do any such thing. The more Pence refused, the more insistent Trump became. After another argument on January 1, 2021, Trump told Pence that “hundreds of thousands of people are going to hate your guts,” “people are gonna think you’re stupid,” and, finally, “You’re too honest.”
Trump, Bannon, and Trump’s lawyers all continued to pressure Pence, and Bannon normalized the plan on his podcast. Trump continued to talk publicly of fighting to make sure his opponents didn’t take the White House and continued to pressure Pence. On January 5—the day before the election certification proceeding—he talked to Bannon, and less than two hours later, on his podcast, Bannon told his listeners: “All Hell is going to break loose tomorrow” in Washington, D.C. 
Concerned at Trump’s escalating fury at Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short alerted Pence’s secret service detail. Then, after Trump spoke with Bannon and lawyer John Eastman, who had come up with the legal argument for Pence’s power to affect the count, he simply lied on social media that Pence agreed the vice president could change the election results, then posted: “Do it, Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!”
When Pence continued to refuse, on January 6, Trump told his supporters at the Ellipse that Pence had let him down and then continued to lie that the election had been stolen, assuring them they would “never take back our country with weakness.” Then he sent the crowd to obstruct the proceedings. 
Trump sat in the small dining room off the Oval Office watching the Fox News Channel and scrolling through Twitter as the crowd broke into the Capitol. At 2:24, Trump tweeted that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” A rioter read the tweet through a bullhorn for the crowd. A minute later, the Secret Service had to evacuate Pence to a secure location. When told of Pence’s danger, Trump answered: “So what?”
When Congress came back after the riot, Trump and Giuliani tried to delay further, calling senators and one representative to slow the process down. It didn’t work. On January 7, at 3:41 in the morning, Pence announced that Biden’s election had been certified. 
It was all a lie. 
One hundred and forty police officers assaulted, close to $3 million in damage, close to 1,200 people charged, more than 450 serving prison sentences, a poisonous political movement taking root, and voter suppression laws…all because Trump couldn’t bear to have lost an election. 
“Post-truth politics” has real-world repercussions.  
Last night, when a reporter in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, asked him if trusted the electoral process this time around, Trump answered: “I’ll let you know in about 33 days.”
1 note · View note
taldoreipixtorsys · 1 month ago
Text
I’m going to steal the Mona Lisa
I’m going to repaint the Sistine Chapel
I will steal the Declaration of Independence
Oh [celebrity/character] we’re really in it now
funny phrases to use when something goes wrong instead of jokingly saying "i'm going to kms":
i'm going to kill god
i'm going to delete my blog
i'm going to explode
i'm going to blow up this entire website
i'm going to become the joker
this is going to be my villain origin story
i'm being so brave about it
fuck it we ball
god had to nerf me because i was too powerful
i'm too pretty for this
all according to plan
feel free to add on
209K notes · View notes
headknight-oh · 9 months ago
Text
Thinking bout the time I was mid coitus and woke myself out of my orgasmic haze to quit the movie we were watching.
The movie was National Treasure.
The line was not “we’re going to steal the Declaration of Independence”
I’m just a little freak who knows the dialogue to the national treasure movies
1 note · View note
ramrodd · 11 months ago
Video
youtube
BREAKING: Democracy Wins in Wisconsin, Alabama and Utah 
 COMMENTARY:
The important lesson woke Biden/Harris voters need to learn from the Conservative focus on voter suppression is how obsessive that focus is as it connects to how the butterfly ballot was created to steal elections for Republican candidates by confusing geriatric voters with ballots specifically designed to confuse people my age. ‘Any thing out of the ordinary is stressful for me. Leaving my room is stressful for me, Everything is a triathlon and I don’t want to fuck with it. But, I also know its good for me, so I gird my loins and go by bus to do things. It’s a bullshit attitude, but I feel I’ve earned the privilege of avoiding hassles .
And voting can be a hassle in the booth, DC has a great voting through put system, The have early voting, their ballots are complex but not complicated and the graphics are clean and enlarged for everybody, As an Eisenhower Republican, that’s the way universal franchise is supposed to work for the processes of the US Constitution to be able to constantly improve the personal standard of living, globally, I’m a process theology guru and I thrust process. the DC voting process, for me in Adams Morgan, is excellent, I voted in person where I live now in each election since 1982. But thinking about everything connected to getting into the booth is stressful and performance issues rise in the booth, And this was going on in Broward County before the Republican clerk of the vote introduced the butterfly ballot and the percentage of spoiled ballots caught the eye of activists like Roger Stone and Newt Gingrich and the fact that the system didn’t care about spoiled ballots, generally, and the expectation that seniors were more likely to produce spoiled ballots from performance anxiety, Hence, the butterfly ballot, Does any actually believe all those Holocaust survivors voted for Pat Buchanan. They had heard his shit before and it was not even a no-brainer for them, it was a Hell, NO! Brainer for them, Yet, Pat Buchanan won Broward County and Bush/Cheney took us into Iraq. For all intents and pruposes, the butterfly ballot was a Project 2025 operation, The RNC has been staffed by the same lawyers who enforced the steal until the Fascist SCOTUS majority ratified the stolen vote. It is essential to connect Trump with Project 2025 and William F. Buckley’s “Negro Problem” rebuttal to James Baldwin’s BLM proposal. And essential to connect Biden to Camelot and BLM, James Baldwin is talking Critical Race Theory and Biden has always been about as BLM as a white person can be from the Boomer generation, And BLM is totally DEI and DEI is the social contract of the Declaration of Independence. BLM/DEI is the reason to keep Biden/Harris. That’s what passing the Torch of Camelot from us Boomers to Gen Z looks like constitutionally, That’s what Biden is selling/ KD Harris is no Harry Truman, Nixon was probably the most prepared person to be POTUS when Eisenhower had his heart attack in 1955, Eisenhower wer re-elected in 1956 and Nixon got four more years experience in a staff that circulated aroung the man who ran D-Day, KD Harris has been part of Biden’s Build Back Better capital budget since before January 6, Everybody in NATO is pleased that John Bolton is not longer an influential voice in the actual operations of American national security, Biden’s biggest burden, internationally, is that he inherited Hillary Clinton’s Russian narrative, which is a Bush/Cheney legacy and congruent with Bill Kristol/Robert Kagan/John Bolton Project for the New American Century, which is the foreign policy element of Project 2025 and justifies the Free Market hegemony of the war crime of the Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Just Cause. Project 2025 is all about the Conservative legacy of stealing elections and, in particular, stealing this election by election fraud or January 6 violence all over America.
0 notes
meetmyothersouls · 1 year ago
Note
I wanted you to know
I’m going to steal the Declaration of Independence
….kal?
0 notes