For the Record: Bad Numbers and Conspiracy Theories

Alphabet Bad Student. Hand-drawn grunge font by Arkady Kazantsev via dreamstime.

Wait until Charlie learns people die pic.twitter.com/lQdlIbnP4B

— jordan (@JordanUhl) July 11, 2018

Not only that. I don't know where young Charlie's getting his numbers from, but they're totally wrong: there were

• 224,603,562 US citizens of voting age in 2016 and
• 200,081,377 registered voters the same year

—24.6 million being a lot more than minus 3.5 million by most calculations. Just so you know.

I'm surprised there are that many registered, almost 89%. Let's get those people off their asses in November.


Another popular rightwing idiocy is the assertion that the special counsel investigation must not have any evidence against Trump, as demonstrated that the charges thus far filed against Paul Manafort have nothing to do with the Trump campaign (even though some of the charges for which Flynn, Papadopoulos, and Gates have already pleaded guilty—lying to investigators on their contacts with Russians in the context of the campaign and presidential transition—plainly do):

Manafort is charged only in cases where they don't need him to testify.

For example he is not charged with soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions in the June 9 2016 Trump Tower meeting, though we know he (and Donald Jr. and Jared Kushner) did it.

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) July 11, 2018

Manafort is deeply involved in the Putin-Trump conspiracy to elect Trump in return for sanctions relief, but Mueller won't reveal his understanding of the nature of Manafort's involvement until the whole case is ready. That's coming.

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) July 11, 2018

You didn't hear Laura Ingraham snorting "this has nothing to do with Gotti!" when the charges were filed against Sammy the Bull.

Gravano had, of course, more in common with thugs like Michael Cohen and Felix Sater than with the elegant Mr. Manafort, but it's the same principle. Cohen and Sater will be testifying too--and they haven't been charged at all (yet). They may get away scot free if they're smart.

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) July 11, 2018

Or the general insistence that the idea of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian state in 2016, continuing into the present, is a "conspiracy theory" like that of the conspiracy to sap our vital fluids by fluoridating the water supply, as opposed to a hypothesis supported by a good deal of hard-to-ignore evidence:

82 secret contacts between Trump campaign and Russian state agents, 15 blanket denials by the campaign, all false, and numerous personal denials, including some whose participants (Papadopoulos, Flynn, Gates, van der Zwaan) have already pleaded guilty.... https://t.co/wbOk7m7HYV

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) July 11, 2018

...you've got a precise quid and a clear quo, you've got a continuing methodology of secret contact (Trump's unsecured phone and openly held meetings with Putin where no other American, including translator or notetaker, is present, another coming up in a few days)...

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) July 11, 2018

...you've got increasingly clear evidence of a parallel conspiracy featuring many of the same actors (Farage, Assange, Cambridge Analytica) in UK against Brexit... https://t.co/sMCue6MB7o Some "theories" work with more evidence than others.

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) July 11, 2018

It's getting so tiresome, not helped by mainstream cluelessness like this from David J. Kramer in the Washington Post worrying that Putin might be about to "con" Trump in Helsinki, as if Trump were some innocent sap, too unguarded and trusting, who could be sneakily talked into the views HE'S BEEN OPENLY EXPRESSING FOR THREE YEARS. Thanks to Jonathan Chait, by the way, for one of the most forthright discussions of the evidence I've seen in the fora of politely received opinion. It's about time.