Prof. Adrian Vermeule and Republican election denialism

November 30, 2022 1:23 PM

What, if anything, has conservative Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule said about the J6 insurrection and/or Republican election denialism since 2021?

I've recently been reminded of a since-deleted tweet by Vermeule, screenshotted in this tweet:

If Biden wins there will not be a right-wing version of #Resistance. Since 1789 the right side of the Assembly believes, deep down, that its losses are entirely legitimate, whereas the left believes, deep down, that its own losses are a betrayal of the consitutional order.

As you'll note, the original tweet was from Aug. 2, 2020 and the screenshot tweet is from Jan 2, 2021. Unfortunately, Vermeule's Twitter account is currently deleted and I haven't had any great success with checking the Wayback Machine for snapshots of his profile page nor with searching through mentions on Twitter.

I'm not really expecting someone like Vermeule has changed his mind on this topic but I'm very curious to see if he's ever had to reconcile this past statement with, well, everything that's been happening since.

posted by mhum to Grab Bag (5 answers total)

The full thread is here. After the statement quoted above, he wrote, "I’ll leave this as the test of whether I’m correct: if Biden is elected, and if there are right-wing protests that reach or exceed this level of violence, I was wrong," and he links to the 2016 article Anti-Trump protests, some violent, erupt for 3rd night nationwide.

The answer is self-evident. Whether he has subsequently acknowledged his error, I don't know.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 2:04 PM on November 30, 2022

Response by poster: > Mr.Know-it-some: "The full thread is here."

Lol, I hadn't seen the rest of the thread before, thanks for that. But this makes me even more interested in what was going on on his Twitter feed, say, around 4pm Eastern Time on Jan. 6, 2021.
posted by mhum at 2:25 PM on November 30, 2022

Best answer: Not only did he not say he was wrong, he was loudly in favor of and invested in the promotion of election stealing conspiracy theories.

So uh, he argued that the GOP's losses were a betrayal of the consitutional order. Citation 1 Citation 2
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:46 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Students put together a petition in response to his spreading of lies about the election in January 2021. You can read some coverage here and see the full petition here. The appendix includes screenshots of many of the November 2020 tweets and likes.
posted by earth by april at 2:55 PM on November 30, 2022

Response by poster: Heh, I figured this would be how it turned out. Thanks everyone!
posted by mhum at 9:50 AM on December 1, 2022