Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Matthew Sheffield started his first conservative website in 2000, dedicating it to criticizing the former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who Mr. Sheffield believed was a partisan liberal and not critical enough of President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Mr. Sheffield then went on to help create NewsBusters, another right-leaning website that criticized the mainstream media for liberal bias. Later, he became the founding online managing editor of the Washington Examiner, another popular outlet for conservative views.

“I basically built the infrastructure for a lot of conservative online people and personally taught a lot of them what they know,” he said.

But Mr. Sheffield, who is 42 and lives in the Los Angeles area, grew disillusioned in recent years. He said facts were treated as an acceptable casualty in the broader political war. “The end justifies the means,” said Mr. Sheffield, who hosts a politics and technology podcast called Theory of Change and is writing a memoir about growing up in a strict Mormon family. He now blames right-wing media for undermining faith in American democracy by spreading unsubstantiated claims by President Trump and others that the election was rigged. Through websites and platforms like Facebook and YouTube, Mr. Sheffield said, right-wing media has created an environment in which a large portion of the population believes in a “different reality.”

In a recent interview, edited for length and clarity, Mr. Sheffield discussed how it got to this point.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday that he has come under increasing pressure in recent days from fellow Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), to question the validity of legally cast absentee ballots in an effort to reverse President Trump’s narrow loss in the state.

In a wide-ranging interview about the 2020 election, Raffensperger expressed exasperation with a string of baseless allegations coming from Trump and his allies about the integrity of the Georgia results, including claims that Dominion Voting Systems, the Colorado-based manufacturer of Georgia’s voting machines, is a “leftist” company with ties to Venezuela that engineered thousands of Trump votes not to be counted.

The atmosphere has grown so contentious, Raffensperger said, that both he and his wife, Tricia, have received death threats in recent days, including a text to him that read, “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it.”

The normally mild-mannered Raffensperger saved his harshest language for U.S. Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), who is leading the president’s effort to prove fraud in Georgia and whom Raffensperger called a “liar” and a “charlatan.”

Collins has questioned Raffensperger’s handling of the vote and accused him of capitulating to Democrats by not backing allegations of voter fraud more strongly.

Raffensperger has said that every accusation of fraud will be thoroughly investigated, but that there is currently no credible evidence that fraud occurred on a broad enough scale to affect the outcome of the election.

The recount, Raffensperger said in the interview Monday, will “affirm” the results of the initial count. He said the hand-counted audit that began last week will also prove the accuracy of the Dominion machines; some counties have already reported that their hand recounts exactly match the machine tallies previously reported.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]