French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

What's crazy to me is seeing this happen at an individual level. In 2022, my conservative family members were reluctantly but firmly on board with the idea that Trump did the crimes: lied to the tax man, stole the classified documents, leaned on the Georgia secretary of state to "find me 11780 votes," and on Jan 6 set up fake electors and asked Pence to overturn the election. In each case, they gave a good fight, but as those who are familiar with these cases know, the evidence is overwhelming, almost comically so at points (the fake elector certifications are so poorly put together that they are tough not to laugh at, the recording of trump bragging about the classified documents and establishing intent belongs in a law school documentary).

By 2024 they were 100% in lock-step with the party line that all cases were fake news lawfare (but wouldn't engage with detailed argument, of course) and in 2025 they are gaslighting me about ever having had those arguments at all. The only thing keeping me sane is the correspondence that I kept proving that our conversations weren't a product of my own fevered imagination.

Man, that's a scary story. The Georgia thing especially is so easy to understand: just listen to the tape!

> stole the classified documents

A nitpick of mine is how Trump having the documents wasn’t the case against him. The case against Trump was an obstruction case because he lied and concealed the documents from authorities, going so far as shuffling them between properties, having his lawyers give false statements, and defying subpoenas.

This differentiates Trumps document case from everyone else’s (ie Bidens); the right loves to use this as an example of DOJ weaponization when they couldn’t be more different.

Yes! And when the FBI started closing in he asked his bodyguard to pull some of the documents and his IT guy to wipe the video evidence! The details are sooo much worse than the high level description can do justice.

Isn't it curious how your comment collects downvotes, despite just stating facts.

That, and Mike Pence went on Fox News and said:

> President Trump demanded that I use my authority as vice president presiding over the count of the Electoral College to essentially overturn the election by returning or literally rejecting votes.

Pretty much expected at this point. I'm much more worried about "Democrats are terrorists" and "terrorists don't have rights." Right now they're busy black-bagging immigrants, but I can see where this is headed.

>and in 2025 they are gaslighting me about ever having had those arguments at all

This part is especially fascinating because I have heard of, and even had, remarkably similar experiences. The only real thing is the perpetual now. It's not even that they aren't curious or aware of what they said previously, they even emphatically deny their own words.

I don't know if you remember when Ebola was a big news topic because there were two or three cases in the U.S., but I had a family member insisting it was "just the beginning" and was going to get worse. A year later he said there's "probably a lot of stuff happening that's not reported yet". Two years later he forgot he ever said it.

> It's not even that they aren't curious or aware of what they said previously, they even emphatically deny their own words.

Tribal alignment. If the tribe had moved on from Trump and he had lost the election, your relatives would still be grounded in these conversations and reality.

Trump is still the leader of their party and cultural movement, They have zero incentive to acknowledge the truth if it conflicts with these loyalties. If anything, such an action would be dangerous and risk their standing within their tribe, So the loyalty test then becomes denying what's clear and obvious to prove you are still a loyal member.

But his NY felony convictions were not about those cases but about paying off Stormy Daniels. That case I do think was lawfare; it was politically motivated and on similar facts would never have been brought against, as an example, Joe Biden.

It’s also a very dangerous precedent to bring criminal charges against the presumptive (and in hindsight, actual) winner of the at time forthcoming presidential election, even if some of the cases have merit. Regardless of the merit of the cases, it’s impossible for that scenario to not be at least partly politically motivated and to have the effect of trying to disenfranchise half the country.

I have relatives who’ve been concerned enough about the “[democratic candidate] will take your guns!” thing that they’ve made and displayed signs about it. For multiple election cycles.

That these same candidates, when elected, haven’t even attempted such a thing, even when they have an aligned Congress, doesn’t seem to register at all. They hear their lying talking heads say it again the next time, and believe it whole-heartedly. It’s so weird. You’d think at some point they’d start to wonder why it never happened.

Thanks for reminding me, he also broke campaign finance laws with the pornstar payoff.

No, if Joe Biden had the same facts against him the entire right wing -- including you -- would be eagerly prosecuting them and singing of the high-minded justice in doing so. Have you forgotten "lock her up!"?

"President is above the law" is a far more dangerous precedent to set, and "nominees are above the law" is out-of-this-word nuts.

I appreciate that you've been willing to do the work in this regard. A major part of the issue is people (lead, in part, by establishment Democrats) absolutely desperate to avoid rocking the boat - really a euphemism for "kicking the can on the social dislocation that's inevitably coming, and all the harder for it".

It's similar to the people who push against unionization for fear of being retaliated against, only to get capriciously laid off during the next cyclical downturn. Seek your justice now, as delay is a form of denial.

Assumptions, assumptions...

I am not right wing, have never voted for Trump or chanted "lock her up", and no, I believe in principles and not party loyalty and would have felt the same had it been Biden.

I was also against Clinton's impeachment for the same reason. Stormy Daniels and Monica Lewinsky were both private sexual matters, and to try to use ancillary technical crimes (obstruction; campaign finance) to remove your political opponent is a bad precedent and it's bad when both parties do it.

Your reply itself also proves my point. You say that the right wing would have prosecuted Biden on the same facts, not that the same left wing New York DA would have. Justice shouldn't be left wing and right wing.

They have lost all ability to remember the past.

Big head political pundits literally go on Fox News and blame a Democrat President for Epstein's death, and you have to tell them "Uh, no, Trump was president then, and it was his administration in control" and they have this insane double take look like they can't possibly remember that.

Blaming Obama for the Hurricane Katrina response wasn't a fluke.

My father is a general contractor and viscerally experienced Trump's first term stupidity tripling his material costs. He still voted for him again, as "good for the economy", or "the democrats have gone too far". He blames democrats for the regional grocery chain hiring gay people as managers, which is funny, because they hire those people because they are the right kind of MBA types. He literally can't recognize the problem when it's in his very face.

My father has never been outwardly sexist and always demonstrated respect for strong women and their ability to participate in normal society. He still was convinced by right wing media that he should be afraid of women in the cockpit.

The soybean farmers were fucked by Trump's first term, and he gave them over $10 billion dollars. They all voted for him again, and it happened the exact same way.

Like, at this point, how do you convince people who change their memory of reality to fit their ideology?

I’m going to go find these recordings now. But do you, or anyone else, have a preferred location for this type of data?

For example reddit is consistently an echo chamber in the reverse direction. Another example is any clips selected by cable news are doubted by republicans for intentional malicious framing. Which is fair enough since I’ve seen plenty of intentionally obtuse takes of things said which are already unacceptable.

They would do it if they had the political capital, and further they will tell you as much.

Why would I not believe candidates who have spent their political life advocating the banning of the most popular rifle in America? When someone shows you what they are, believe them.

If Democrats want people to stop reacting that way, they need to commit to leaving law-abiding gun owners alone, not say "well it'll be fine, believe us" yet continue to campaign for bans and pass idiotic restrictions that do little to control crime.

If impartial non-partisan justice were your concern, you would spend your time focusing on the most egregious violations (Aileen Canon, the Supreme Court, etc) rather than grabbing the conversation by the horns and aggressively steering it towards an alleyway where you hoped to force a draw.

Your choices betray your priorities and they are not what you claim.

I do think there would be some utility to isolating and elevating this particular issue. It seems to be pretty uniform as a phenomenon. Conspiracy theorists can't remember the past.

I also think there's a kind of fascinating meta question about how the nature of conspiracy theorizing itself response to challenges. I think fact checking is a perfectly legitimate institutional response to it and in a healthy culture it would be appreciated and valued and utilized and would play a role. But the conspiracy ecosystem writ large has had to think of a systematic response to the phenomenon of fact checking and like evolve its way out of vulnerability to it.

One is to dismiss correction for any number of reasons, another is to kind of cultivate a mindset and attitude of frenzied emotional subject shifting that kind of exists and sustains itself in a way that's detached from the habit of factual investigation. But I also think there are such things as like experimenting with principled philosophical stances like relativism or disputing baseline concepts like burden of proof or especially fascinating in the flat Earth corner of the internet are philosophical positions about the relativity of knowledge and extreme subjective and skeptical orientations towards the world and the possibility of data and knowledge.

So even though I actually personally believe in the importance and significance of isolating out and emphasizing specific clear and short criticisms such as conspiracy theorists can't remember the past. I do think they have processes to metabolize and respond to those criticisms and I'm fascinated to learn to what extent they might try to articulate a principle in defense of not remembering the past. Because surely some will give it the college try.

The biggest trick HN ever pulled was convincing people that this place was somehow uniquely resistant to systemic vote gamification.

> political capital

Could you explain this a bit more?

It would take a combination of accumulated goodwill, unity, a significant legislative majority to overcome the filibuster, and a perceived mandate from the people (particularly in certain swing states) to survive the blowback that would follow pushing gun control on the level of another AR-15 ban through — plus a lack of other competing legislative priorities (e.g. health care reform) that could suffer as a result of the gun control push.

This lack of overwhelming political firepower and clear focus on guns and guns alone is why they haven't acted, not any kind of goodwill or sudden appreciation for the Constitution. They haven't banned common firearms yet because they can't, not because they don't want to.