DEMOCRACY 2 acctability

see main for previous; this includes generic responsiveness to the the ppl, sparked by ayn FANG

merri ok

SEE DOGE COUP FASCISM MUSK CHECKS 2 RULE OF LAW CONCEPT STATE OF EXCEPTION/ EMERGENCY XO IMPERIAL PREZ

SEE MARTIAL LAW INSURECTION POSSE COMMITATUS

SEE BANNON 6 11 25

see 2024 election

SEE SCOTUS DEGRADES IMMUNITY VOTER SUPPRESSION

see libel defam

SEE GERRY TEXAS 7 25 THREAT ARREST EXPEL

see lie power any means RETALIATION ENEMIES

see big lie Jan 6

SEE GOP STEAL ELECTIONS

see voter suppression

SEE FASCISM 5 , 6 VIOLENCE (DIGITAL) AUTHORITARIAN 71% OF WORLD

KIRK SHOOT 925 SUPPRESSION PRESS ACTIV DISSENT DEMS

SEE TRUMP / COUP JAN 6

SEE PSEUDO-POPULISM CTR-ELITE

SEE JDV THIEL MUSK BROLIARCHY LIBTARD SEASTEAD

see initiative/propOstion eg florida [// harder to amend state const?]

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an 10 26

Harvard expert: Trump is fully prepared to launch a brute-force coup

Matthew Rozsa October 01, 2026

President Donald Trump has made it very clear that, if it is within his power, he will steal the 2026 midterm elections rather than allow Democrats to win them. If he succeeds, America will cease to be a democracy — yet even if he fails, he has already made democracy in America into an "if" rather than a given.

That, at least, is the assessment of Dr. Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government at Harvard University. When he spoke with me for AlterNet, Levitsky made it clear that there is a non-zero chance of Trump successfully turning America into an effective dictatorship before the 2026 election cycle is over. The question is not whether he has the legal authority to declare martial law, send the military (and/or ICE and/or other forms of law enforcement) to seize ballots or to demand Republicans in Congress simply refuse to seat Democrats. From a strictly legal perspective, he cannot do any of those things.

The concern is that Trump also has what Levitsky described as "de facto" power — that is, the capacity to effectively implement these or other anti-democratic measures in defiance of the law. After all, Trump has already engaged in mass deportations, silenced media critics, levied tariffs, destroyed national monuments and slapped his name all over the place regardless of the legality behind those measures. Perhaps most notably, he attempted a coup after losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden and was able to regain power thanks to the complicity of right-wing media and the complacency of America's top legal and business institutions.

In that sense, as Levitsky pointed out, American democracy is already in a sense permanently weakened. We are no longer a consolidated democracy, or one in which democratic institutions consistently work even if there are other social injustices; we are an unconsolidated democracy, or a government in which it is never entirely certain whether basic democratic structures will remain in intact.

Trump trying to steal the midterms through brute force.

Rozsa: President Trump has repeatedly said, either directly or through various surrogates, that he is considering declaring a national emergency, implementing martial law, sending ICE or the military to the polls, and in other ways directly hindering the actual process of the election occurring. Does he have the power to do these things?

Levitsky: Well, it depends whether you're talking about de facto power or legal power, constitutional power. I'm not a constitutional expert, but most would agree that he does not have the formal power to do these things. The Constitution gives the federal executive almost no power over election administration. That is left to the states. So the kind of federal intervention that Trump is talking about is almost certainly unconstitutional.

The real issue, of course, is whether he has the de facto power to do it, whether he can pull it off. And first, I'd say from the outset, I have no doubt that Trump is willing to order some sort of a coup against democracy to try to overturn the elections. He has shown over and over again that he is not a democrat and is perfectly willing to engage in really old-school authoritarian tactics to overturn elections.

We don't know for sure whether he can get away with it. There are some troubling signs. One of them is that we're just completely unprepared for a sort of radical seizure of power in this way. The courts have been pretty good, not great, on Trump's efforts to sort of overstep his bounds on elections, but courts move slowly. And it's just not at all clear, if on election night Trump were to order the seizure of ballot boxes, declare some kind of an emergency, mobilize troops, that courts could move quickly enough to stop it. So at the very least, it would create a massive, massive crisis.

But ultimately, I don't think he's got the power to get away with it. Unfortunately, we're living in a world where the chances of it happening are well above zero. But looking at, one, Trump's public support and his political power, which is in pretty sharp decline: there's a lot of evidence that the most successful assaults on democracy are carried out by presidents with 70, 80, 85% support, whether it's Putin or Hugo Chávez or Fujimori or Bukele. All of these guys had 80% support. Trump's at 35, 36.

And secondly, if you look at the Trump administration's record in planning, orchestrating, carrying out major policy initiatives, from DOGE to the Liberation Day tariffs to the war in Iran, it's just utter, utter incompetence, lack of foresight, lack of coordination, lack of planning. Fraud is hard. Repression is hard. Destroying constitutional rule is hard. If I had to bet a dollar — glad I'm not — I don't think these guys have the capacity to do it.

Rozsa: When I talked with Justin Levitt from Loyola Law School, he was very doubtful that Trump could use law enforcement and/or the military in this way. I then interjected with a recent quote from attorney Peter Ticktin, who is one of Trump's advisers. When someone told Ticktin that there would be riots if Trump attempted a coup, Ticktin responded, quote, "Our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are." Levitt then replied that this was a fantasy. But my question is, do you think Ticktin has a point, logistically speaking?

Levitsky: What does "logistically speaking" mean?

Rozsa: That because their armed forces are a lot bigger than the forces that could be arrayed against them, they could ultimately carry out a coup.

Levitsky: Well, this is a little frustrating because, again, there is a non-zero chance that they could carry out a coup. The reason why I think it's a relatively low probability — and we're dealing with a lot of speculation here — is that they have to pull off two things to militarize in that way. One, they've got to get the military to go along with egregiously, openly anti-democratic behavior, which they might, but it's not certain that the military would go along. And secondly, repression is really hard, especially if you're talking about an unpopular government in a context where there isn't a perceived crisis. In the aftermath of something like 9/11, or if we were at war, or if there were a real subversive organization in the country — if Americans were really scared about something, or if they really liked Trump — they'd be more likely to tolerate repression.

This is a context that is very unfavorable for carrying out repression. Look at what the Trump administration tried to do in Minnesota. They made the streets of Minneapolis look like El Salvador in the 1980s for a while, and it blew up in their face politically. And so if they couldn't militarize Minneapolis in January 2026, I think chances are that an effort to do it at the national level would fail.

Rozsa: Certainly, I hope you're right, but here is my counter to what you're saying, and I want to emphasize I'm playing devil's advocate. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but this is the thought that keeps occurring to me. It's the information ecosystem in which a lot of Americans choose to live. To illustrate what I mean: after January 6th, I kept hearing over and over again, "That's it. Trump's political career is dead. He just attempted a coup." Even some right-wing media outlets were initially critical of him. But then the far-right outlets were backing his attempts to gaslight people about what happened, and soon even the more mainstream conservative outlets began to fall in line, either downplaying it or contributing to the gaslighting, so that by the time the 2024 election rolled around, an event that had once been considered disqualifying was no longer an impediment to him being reelected.

Using that same reality, what is to stop CNN, which is soon going to be taken over by a pro-Trump family, and Fox News and all of these conservative outlets from spinning their own version of events regarding Trump's coup attempt, and in so doing, reducing the backlash against it? Do you see what I'm saying?

Levitsky: Yeah, look, I take your point about January 6th and the elite reaction to January 6th. After the shock wore off, after two or three days, when Republican politicians kind of put their finger to the wind, the elite abdication that occurred after January 6th was shocking. I certainly didn't expect it, and it was really costly. The reason why we have Trump today, and the reason why we're facing this threat, is exactly the dynamic you just described: that elites just decided to look the other way.

Could that happen again? Well, the thing to watch, and what was really critical in the 2021–2024 period, which I agree with you was just really, really decisive, was the behavior of Republican elites. Almost all Republican elites got in lock[step]. A few of them wandered off the reservation for a couple of weeks, but they all came back. And the ones who didn't, like Liz Cheney, were purged from the party. The unified Republican message that January 6th was okay, was justified, was acceptable, that the election might have been unfair — it was the fact that it was a unified message coming from the Republican elite. That's what allowed that myth to persist and allowed Trump to remain politically viable.

So one of the keys, one of the things to look for, is how Republican leaders would respond to this coup. If there is unified or even majoritarian Republican politician support or acquiescence or even silence in the face of this coup, then we're in worse shape. If a number of leading Republicans speak up, we'll be in better shape. But even so, Trump has less support, even in his own coalition, than he had back in 2021. I think the evidence shows that the support is weaker. It's thinner. And you can throw in CNN if you want, but the right-wing media ecosystem is real, but it's a third of the country. It's a third of the country. And a third of the country may well mobilize or support a coup attempt. I think there's reason to think that much of that MAGA base would support it. But Fox News lying about the coup is not going to affect majority public opinion in the United States.

Rozsa: CNN, by the way, will also lie about it now that it's been purchased by the Ellisons. And I would say I'm not only concerned about Republicans —

Levitsky: CNN might lie about it. We don't know that.

Rozsa: I think they will. I think Ellison has made it very clear where he stands. But my —

Levitsky: Ellison wants to make a lot of money in the medium term. And with Trump this weak, that's a hell of a bet, to bet on a coup.

Rozsa: Well, the other point I wanted to make is it's not just Republicans who need to go along. Jacob Weisberg wrote a great book called Profiles in Cowardice about individuals who aren't part of that coalition, but for transactional reasons decided to participate. People like Jeff Bezos, people like the head of the law firm Paul, Weiss. That type of logic, which argues that only a sucker makes a sacrifice in the name of principle, that a smart person goes where the power is — that could also facilitate a coup. What do you think?

Levitsky: I think you're misreading the balance of power today. This is not December 2024. It's not January, February 2025. Trump is in a political [corner]. He's politically weakened. And I'm as dismayed at the behavior of Paul, Weiss and universities and Jeff Bezos as Jacob Weisberg is. But those guys are making a different calculation today. To jump on the Trump train as it's descending into chaos is a much, much [riskier bet]. It turned out to be a pretty stupid bet in early 2025. The law firms that cooperated, the universities that cooperated — they're not better off for having acquiesced to or appeased Trump than those that ultimately resisted. But as Weisberg lays out in his book, there was a logic to it.

And it's not a very pretty logic from the standpoint of someone who cares about democracy, but there was a logic to it. I don't think that logic exists anymore. I think it's utterly irrational for somebody who's thinking about making money in the next two years to support a coup led by somebody that's unpopular. It's super high-risk.

Trump trying to steal the midterms through legal chicanery.

Rozsa: Now I want to talk about another way that Trump could pull this off. Let us say, hypothetically, that he isn't able to overturn the results through physical force and all of his efforts at frivolous litigation fail. He could, through the bureaucracy, get Democrats who were elected ultimately rejected. And I'm thinking of two possible methods. The first is through bureaucrats that he's embedded in positions of election administration and certification who believe in the Big Lie. And the second is by convincing Speaker Johnson or Leader Thune to reject Democratic victories when they are handed over to Congress in 2027. What do you think of either of those possibilities?

Levitsky: In terms of the first one, there's been talk in my world of kind of packing local election administrations with election deniers, and to some extent that has happened. But I don't think it ever amounted to as much as the supporters hoped and people like me feared initially. And again, looking at this administration and its efforts — its war efforts, its tariff efforts, its DOGE efforts — it strains my imagination to think they could pull off some kind of extraordinary coordinated feat like this. The Johnson Congress option —

Rozsa: Or Thune.

Levitsky: Or Thune, yeah. I think that is more credible. First of all, it's entirely legal, it turns out. If Republican candidates scream fraud and Johnson can point to a, quote-unquote, contested election, it is actually in his power to decide who gets the seat. And looking at his behavior, I think he'd do it. And if the balance of Congress [hinges on] a handful of seats — three, four, five seats — I'm going to worry a lot about that. To the extent that the Democrats achieve some sort of a landslide, that becomes less likely, becomes more difficult. We have to be very thankful that Trump is so unpopular that the Republicans are tanking this badly in the election. If it were a very close election, I would be very worried about that outcome. I'm a little less worried because I don't think it's going to be two or three seats holding the balance. I think it's going to be much more than that.

Rozsa: Now, when I asked the same question of Professor Levitt, he said, and I'm quoting, "The key moment isn't anything that Mike Johnson has a part in. The key moment is who's put on the roll of potential House members when at noon the House dissolves as a body. At 12:01, there is no House. There is no Speaker Johnson. He's just a dude. The Clerk of the House is the person who controls the roll. The Clerk of the House has a non-discretionary, very clear statutory duty to recognize the potential members who show up with certificates of election from their states, the things that the state officials have certified." Do you agree with his analysis there?

Levitsky: I'm not enough of an expert on that to say. I have no opinions. I just don't know.

Rozsa: Well, I want to ask this. Do you think it would be possible, if it seemed like Speaker Johnson was considering playing along with Trump's coup attempt, that Democrats could perhaps convince a few anti-Trump Republicans in the House to hold an early election to replace Johnson as speaker with someone who won't go along with him?

Levitsky: Yeah, I think that's actually a relatively likely scenario. Again, and thank God, because Trump is so unpopular and because this sort of a coup would be so unpopular — there's uncertainty, but I think there's a pretty good chance that Democrats could find a handful of Republicans — it wouldn't take many — they need to vote Johnson out.

Rozsa: Of course, my concern is that they'll face so much pressure from the Republican media that they'll ultimately be cowards and just toe the party line.

Levitsky: It's certainly possible. But again, given the balance of public opinion and political strength right now — I mean, in part just given Trump's age and his physical condition — it's very hard to bet on Trumpism in the medium term right now. Much harder than it was even, you know, a year and two quarters ago.

Trump's long-term consequences for American democracy — regardless of the midterms.

Rozsa: I want to take a step back from these immediate questions and ask something much deeper. What does it say about the health of American democracy that these worst-case scenarios are even plausible? I've been following politics since I was a teenager in the late 1990s. I've been covering it professionally since the 2012 election. And in my lifetime, at least, there was never any serious threat to democratic institutions. Based on my research into American history, the closest analogy I can think of was the 1860 presidential election, which ultimately led to a civil war. But even then, it didn't seem like people were questioning that Lincoln had been legitimately elected. They simply didn't want him to win, because then he would limit the expansion of slavery. What does it say about the state of democracy right now that these things are even possible?

Levitsky: I'll put it in boring political science terms. It means that the United States, at best today, is an unconsolidated democracy. I've argued that the United States has actually slid into kind of mild competitive authoritarianism under Trump 2.0. I don't think the regime at present is fully democratic. But even for those who argue that Trump's abuses are not sufficient to say that we've lost our democracy, the U.S. has become what political scientists call an unconsolidated democracy.

My day job is as a Latin Americanist. I've studied political regimes in Latin America for years and years and years. And what I was brought up learning was that democracies in countries like Peru and Argentina were unconsolidated in the sense that there was always uncertainty that all the powerful actors would play by the rules of the game. There was never certainty that everybody was committed to democratic rules of the game.

The United States for years and years and years was held up as an example of a consolidated democracy, where everybody knew that everybody was committed to democratic rules of the game. You could take for granted that elections would be free and fair, that everyone would play by the rules, that the government would play by the rules. There would be uncertainty over the outcomes of elections, but there was never uncertainty around the procedure of the elections. And that is long gone — since the 2020 election, but certainly with all the discussion we've had around the election today. Even if one agrees with me that the likelihood of a coup is relatively low, there is a lot of uncertainty.

There's uncertainty about whether the election will be fair. There's uncertainty about whether the government will accept the results of the election, or that there'll be an effort to manipulate the outcome of the election after the election. That uncertainty is a classic sign of what we call an unconsolidated democracy, an unstable democracy. And that sets the United States apart from all other established democracies in Europe and in Canada, and makes it much more like some of the unstable democracies we see in Latin America and elsewhere.

Rozsa: Have there been any of those unstable democracies in Latin America that went back to being consolidated democracies?

Levitsky: Yeah. Very often, sadly, after they tip into a period of authoritarian rule. But yeah, Argentine democracy was considered an unconsolidated democracy in the 1980s. There were several coup attempts. Today, it's considered a consolidated democracy. Brazil may not be a great example, because they had a similar —

Rozsa: With Bolsonaro.

Levitsky: In 2022. Yeah. So maybe it's not fully consolidated. I think they handled it better than we did. But Argentina is a much more consolidated democracy than it was in the 1980s.

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AN 9 26

On Thursday, a former federal judge detailed what he deemed “the final battle for America’s democracy,” laying out President Donald Trump’s plan to seize power on January 3, 2027. This is according to attorney and former U.S. Circuit Judge Michael Luttig, who warns that “Trump and his MAGA Republicans might bury our democracy once and for all.”

“Trump instigated a war against America’s democracy on January 6, 2021,” asserts Luttig. “Today, almost six years later, Donald Trump and his Republican congressional allies are even more determined to prosecute the president’s war against American democracy to its catastrophic end than they were on January 6, 2021. That catastrophic end could well come on January 3, 2027, when Trump and his Republican congressional allies wage the final battle in Trump’s determined war to corrupt America’s democracy and deliver a lasting political victory over the Democrats for his MAGA Republican Party.”

Over the course of his second term, says Luttig, Trump has taken steps to “seize control of the midterms” to ensure that Republicans retain a majority in the 120th Congress. As Trump himself declared in February, “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting.’ ... The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” And the Republicans, notes Luttig, “have dutifully fallen in line … So unalterably subjugated to Trump is today’s Republican House that even a decisive victory for Democrats and a resounding repudiation of Trump and the MAGA Republicans at the polls in November will not guarantee that a Democratic majority-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress on January 3.”

The core of the plan involves a Republican plot to claim the election was rigged after they lose. According to Luttig, “This is how the crisis would unfold. The precursor of the crisis will come sometime before noon on January 3, when Speaker [Mike] Johnson (R-LA) removes current House Clerk Kevin McCumber and replaces him with a person loyal to Johnson and House Republicans who they know will refuse to list on the statutory roll of representatives-elect to the 120th Congress any Democrat-elect whom Johnson and the Republicans direct him or her not to list. Under Rule II, Clause 1 of the Rules of the House, the Speaker of the House has the unilateral power to remove the incumbent clerk, and then the power under Title 2 U.S.C. § 5501(a) to replace him temporarily with whomever he wishes until the House elects a successor.

McCumber is a Republican appointed by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He is widely respected for his integrity and faithful adherence to the Constitution and is reputed to be unwilling to carry out orders he considers to be unconstitutional.”

“The constitutional crisis will begin, warns Luttig, when “sometime before the 120th Congress has been gaveled into session, the loyal temporary clerk refuses to list Democrat representatives-elect on the clerk’s roll of representatives-elect that determines who may participate in organizing the new Congress.” Such action will be met with lawsuits arguing that the clerk must perform its mandated action, which will work their way through appeals. “The next moment of constitutional crisis will come if and when,” says Luttig, the court orders the elected Democratic representatives be seated and the clerk refuses. “Judicial review of the House’s decision not to seat Democratic representatives-elect in the 120th Congress would take weeks, if not months, during which time the United States would be in the throes of a paralyzing constitutional crisis.”

From there, the matter would end up before the Supreme Court, which would be forced to answer “perhaps the most fundamental question under the Constitution: Is the United States of America a democracy, in which ‘We the People’ elect our representatives to the Congress and to the presidency, or is it not?” Should the Court decide to side with Republican claims of fraud, Luttig concludes, “two hundred and fifty years into the greatest experiment in self-government in the history of the world, the Republican Party would finally meet the fate to which it has been destined since January 6, 2021, and cement its place in history as the most corrupt political party ever to emerge in the United States of America.”

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How Oligarchy Eroded US Democracy; Palestinian Doctor Clings To Life w/ Jeffrey Winters | MR Live

founders struct shut off rule by ppl: senate appt, filibuter, override high bar, 5 dudes scotus

Democracy Now!

https://www.democracynow.org › 2026 › 5 › 27 › the_blind_spot

"How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies": Northwestern Prof. Jeffrey ...

May 27, 2026We speak with political scientist Jeffrey Winters about his new book, The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies. Winters argues that democracy's failure to address wealth inequality ...

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NO LNX

When the wealthiest people on Earth finally get the world they’ve always wanted

Thom Hartmann May 24, 2026

The United States and the Republic of China (the official name for Taiwan) — one of the world’s most vibrant and functional democracies — have had a formal defense relationship since 1955. Last week, Donald Trump — who’s been withholding since last year two shipments totaling $25 billion worth of US military hardware Taiwan has purchased — said that relationship is now a “bargaining chip” to get what he, his oligarch friends, and his family want from China.

America was founded on the idea that democracy — a form of government that our Founders discovered functioning well among Native American societies, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living — was our north star, the core concept around which all our actions revolved.

We fought Great Britain to establish democracy, fought against the fascist Confederacy to preserve democracy here in America, and helped fight German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese fascists to preserve and restore democracy in Europe and Asia.

After winning each battle, we became a little more democratic, enfranchising women, formerly enslaved people, and even 18-year-olds. We welcomed the diverse people of the world, groaning under oppression and poverty, to share our democracy and the free enterprise system it enabled.

Most of the countries in today’s world, however, have little use for democracy. Certainly, Putin, Xi, and the Middle Eastern sheiks view it as a threat to their wealth and power. Most of the smaller countries across the world are dominated by wealthy families (oligarchy) or violent warlords (autocracy); during the decades I did international relief work, I spent time in many of them.

And yet we always fought for democracy, even though we started out imperfectly. We helped create the United Nations, a democratic institution. We fought and died for European and Asian democracy. We encouraged democracy around the world through foreign aid programs like USAID and through pro-democracy advocacy operations like the Voice of America.

Until Trump.

Today, we have a president who holds democracy and democratic nations in disdain. He openly ridicules our democratic allies while sucking up to and praising autocrats and oligarchs. He gutted USAID, killed Voice of America, and even tried to overthrow our own democracy — and will probably try again.

His racist, homophobic, and “poorly educated” followers agree with his disdain for democracy, openly embracing his despotic proclamations because he hates the same people they hate. Republican politicians who once defended American democracy cower before his threats of revenge when, like Senator Bill Cassidy, they don’t join him in embracing Putin and fail to nakedly cheer Trump’s violations of international law.

Foreign billionaires like the Fox “News” Murdochs and the Middle Eastern sheiks who’ve poured billions into Trump’s family are apparently happy to see our democracy under assault. About a hundred domestic billionaire families are enthusiastically willing to trade democracy and the free press it requires for tax cuts and deregulation.

So, what happens if they win?

What happens if America finally, fully abandons the alliances we’ve built up over 250 years and instead embraces this autocratic new world order of Putin, Xi, and the corrupt billionaires who run most of the world’s autocracies?

If we formally pull out of NATO or, simply, quietly continue the process of abandoning the alliance? If we leave Taiwan, Japan, Australia, and South Korea to the tender mercies of the Chinese Communist Party? If we continue our embrace of “America’s coolest dictator,” Bukele in El Salvador and Rodriguez in Venezuela, and let their authoritarianism continue to metastasize across our hemisphere?

If the GOP and its billionaire owners manage to muzzle all but a token remnant of our once-vibrant free press, if ICE becomes Trump’s and Vance’s personal Schutzstaffel and throws open their “detention centers” to the “liberal” Americans they’ve already designated as “domestic terrorists”? If they continue to follow Putin’s system of tightly regulating who’s eligible to vote (while corrupting Democrats like Fetterman) so Republicans never lose?

What happens if they win?

Then the wealthiest people on Earth finally get the world they’ve always wanted, from the days they opposed the American Revolution, to fighting against Lincoln, to “America First” billionaires trying to hire Smedley Butler to assassinate FDR, to now supporting Trump:

A world where democracy is weak.

Labor is powerless.

The press is controlled.

Religion is weaponized.

Elections are managed.

Fear keeps people obedient.

And billionaires rule without accountability.

That’s the oligarch’s endgame and has been for millennia. It’s why they bought off Sinema, Manchin, Golden, and Fetterman and are inserting themselves in elections across the nation. It’s why they’re buying our media. It’s why Republicans in Congress keep sending more and more of our taxpayer money to ICE while ignoring Trump’s multiple impeachable offenses from war crimes to emoluments violations to the open betrayal of our democratic allies.

Not “making America great.”

Not patriotism.

Not Christianity.

Not freedom.

Power.

Raw power for a small handful of morbidly rich men, enforced by propaganda, corruption, and violence, both committed by agents of the state (against Comey, James, Schiff et al, and soon to be directed against you and me) as well as J6 freelancers Trump is trying to pre-pay with $1.7 billion just in time for this fall’s election.

Roughly every 80 years, it seems, the battle to preserve democracy comes back around and confronts the generation then living. And here it is again.

The generations that defeated fascism in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1940s understood something simple but profound: democracy survives only if ordinary people are willing to defend it.

Now it’s our turn.

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AN 5 26

Ex-Bush official sounds alarm on Trump's 'open fire hydrant' of grift - Alternet.org

//

The New York Times Editorial Board, in a strongly worded editorial, says “there has never been an example of presidential corruption like this.”

The paper of record is accusing President Donald Trump not only of “presidential corruption,” but also of “political self-dealing,” and “destroying the pillars of American democracy to empower himself.”

At issue is what the Times calls the Trump Justice Department’s “$1.8 billion political slush fund.”

“Ostensibly set up to compensate those who the department claims have ‘suffered weaponization and lawfare,’ it will in fact reward loyalists willing to defy the law and commit violence on behalf of the president,” the editors charge.

They allege that the fund actually encompasses three of Trump’s “most alarming behaviors”: corruption, using the DOJ “as an enforcer to punish his perceived opponents and protect his friends and allies,” and attempting to rewrite history “about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.”

How is Trump destroying pillars of American democracy?

“He claims elections are legitimate only if he wins,” they write. “He uses federal law enforcement to investigate and prosecute his perceived enemies. He purges his party of officials who defy him. He describes members of the other party and civil society as traitors and enemies.” Trump “incentivizes his supporters to break the law on his behalf and rewards them when they do,” and he “directs his allies to change election rules to keep his party in power.”

The agreement to create the fund came after Trump dropped a highly-controversial $10 billion lawsuit which reports say IRS lawyers were intending to contest.

In exchange for dropping the lawsuit, Trump and his supporters would receive “government handouts,” the Times says.

Trump and his family would gain immunity from IRS audits, and his supporters who were allegedly victimized by government lawfare would receive payments.

Times editors note that the fund holds another purpose: encouraging “future lawlessness on Mr. Trump’s behalf.”

“It sends the message that he will use his power not only to shield people who break the law from accountability,” they say, “but also to shower benefits on them. Just as punishment is a deterrent, rewards are an incentive.”

The editors urge Americans to be “cleareyed” about what Trump is actually doing: “taking their money and showering it on criminals.”

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yikes

an 1 26

Doomsday preppers are often depicted as right-wingers. Some are libertarians, while others are Christian fundamentalists. And their reasons for predicting doom vary, ranging from fears of an economic collapse worse than the Great Depression to predictions of nuclear war.

But Dmitri Mehlhorn, according to The Atlantic's Michael Scherer, is a "doomsday philosopher" and a former Democratic strategist who fears a "political apocalypse" under President Donald Trump.

"Betting money puts the odds of constitutional collapse in the United States at about one in 25," Scherer explains in an article published on January 22. "Anyone can wager three or four cents on Polymarket, Kalshi, or PredictIt that will pay out $1 if Donald Trump wins a third term in the 2028 election — an impossibility, according to the plain text of the 22nd Amendment: 'No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.' Dmitri Mehlhorn, a former Democratic strategist, thinks that the chance of political apocalypse is about 20 times higher — and that Americans need to start preparing now."

Scherer adds, "He recently secured dual citizenship for his family on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and is obsessively thinking through how people should respond if Trump tries to maintain power with the threat of force. He styles himself a doomsday philosopher of this worst-case scenario."

In December 2025, according to Scherer, Mehlhorn visited Manhattan's Soho area to "play a war game of sorts" with "about 15 finance professionals, nonprofit leaders, technology executives, and former Democratic-campaign advisers."

In the game, Scherer reports, the people gathered in Soho faced a fictional scenario in which "President Buzz Windrip" and "his team must increase their own wealth and maintain power or secure legal amnesty through 2030."

Mehlhorn told Scherer that in the scenario, "You have a man who breaks the law, and that man is the strongman. Which bends, the man or the law? That's the question…. If the president has proven in his first term that he will ignore subpoenas and ignore congressional budget authorizations and pardon anybody who also does, then suddenly, there's no power. What are the remaining checks? Every check is gone."

Interviewed by Scherer, Mehlhorn voiced his fears about what could happen in the 2028 presidential election.

"Trump would announce his candidacy for president late, leading the Republican Party to easily nominate him," Scherer explains. "The Supreme Court then would either split on the question of whether this is legal or rule against Trump with no effect. (Vice President) JD Vance has repeatedly endorsed the idea of the president defying Supreme Court rulings. As the votes are being counted, Mehlhorn imagines, Trump and federal law enforcement would declare rampant fraud in urban centers and move to disqualify residents of those districts' votes. In January 2029, Vance would do what (former Vice President) Mike Pence did not do in 2021: use his power to throw the election to Trump."

Scherer continues, "If there is resistance, another pro-Trump mob — including many who have already been pardoned for the January 6, 2021, attack — could provide backup."

Mehlhorn told Scherer, "As president, who stops him? Who prevents that from happening? What person? What combination of people?"

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AN 126 ROBT R

At the same time agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol are swarming into Minnesota and other states and cities, Trump is planning bombing raids on other countries.

Domestically and internationally, he is putting America on a war footing.

ICE is reportedly investing $100 million on what it calls “wartime recruitment” of 10,000 new agents, in addition to the 20,000 already employed. Its recruitment is targeting gun and military enthusiasts, people who listen to right-wing radio, who have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear, live near military bases, and attend NASCAR races. It’s calling for recruits willing to perform their “sacred duty” and “defend the homeland” by repelling “foreign invaders.”

Meanwhile, Trump has announced that he’ll ask Congress for a $1.5 trillion defense budget for the next fiscal year — a 66 percent increase over the 2026 defense budget Congress just authorized.

There’s coming to be no difference between Trump’s foreign and domestic policies.

Both are based on the same eight maniacal ideas: (1) Might makes right. (2) Law is irrelevant. (3) America is at war with the world’s “radical left,” who are defined chiefly by their opposition to Trump. (4) Fear and force are better weapons in this war than hope and compromise. (5) The U.S. stock market is the best measure of Trump’s success. (6) Personal enrichment by Trump and other officials is justified in pursuit of victory. (7) So are lies, cover-ups, and the illegal use of force. (8) Trump is invincible and omnipotent.

These ideas are at such fundamental odds with the norms most of us share about what America is all about and how a president should think and behave that it’s difficult to accept that Trump believes them or that his White House thugs eagerly endorse them. But he does, and they do.

Rather than some “doctrine” or set of principles, they’re more like guttural discharges. Trump is not rational, and the people around him trying to give him a patina of rationality — his White House assistants and spokespeople — surely know it.

The media tries to confer on Trump a coherence that evaporates almost as soon as it’s stated. The New York Times’s breathless coverage of its recent Oval Office interview with Trump — describing his “many faces” — is a model of such a vapidity.

According to the Times, Trump “took unpredictable turns” during the interview. But instead of seeing this unpredictability as a symptom of Trump’s diminishing capacities and ever-shorter attention span, the Timesreported it as “a tactic he embraces as president, particularly on the world stage. If no one knows what you might do, they often do what you want them to do.”

Attempts to show inconsistencies or hypocrisies in Trump’s domestic or foreign policies are fruitless because they have no consistency or truthfulness to begin with.

Nor is it possible for the media to describe a “big picture” of America and the world under Trump because there is nothing to picture other than his malignant, impulsive, unbridled grandiosity all the way up and all the way down.

Trump has unleashed violence on America’s streets for much the same reason he has unleashed violence on Latin America and is planning to unleash it elsewhere: to display his own strength. His motive is to gain more power and, along the way, more wealth. (On Sunday, he even posted an image referring to himself as the “Acting President of Venezuela.”)

“Policy” implies thought. But under Trump, there is no domestic or foreign policy because it is all thoughtless. It is not even improvised. It is just Trump’s ego — as interpreted by the toadies around him (Miller, Vought, Vance, Kennedy, Rubio, Noem) trying to guess what his ego craves or detests, or fulfilling their own fanatical goals by manipulating it.

We must stop trying to make rational sense out of what Trump is doing. He is a ruthless dictator, plan and simple.

All analyses of what is happening — all reporting, all efforts to understand, all attempts at strategizing — are doomed. The only reality is that an increasingly dangerous and irrational sociopath is now exercising brutal and unconstrained power over America and, hence, the world.

Trump is putting America on a war footing because war is good for him as it is for all dictators. War confers emergency powers. It justifies ignoring the niceties of elections. It allows dictators to imprison and intimidate opponents and enemies. It enables them to create their own personal slush funds. It distracts the public from other things (remember Jeffrey Epstein?).

War gives dictators like Trump more power and more wealth. Period.

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an 11 25 tim snyder orig is not in const

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Mother Jones writers Pema Levy and Ari Berman say that President Donald Trump "owes his corrupt and abusive reign to one man" — Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

"Twenty years ago, John Roberts promised that as chief justice of the Supreme Court, he would be like an umpire, calling balls and strikes," they write.

"His promise charmed senators and the media, who believed that his predilection for executive power and long-held antipathy for civil rights could be moderated by this commitment to faithfully apply the law," they add.

But Roberts wasn't what he seemed, they say.

"The delusion was so powerful that for two decades, the media defaulted to portraying him as a moderate institutionalist, pointing to high-profile decisions — to uphold parts of the Affordable Care Act or striking down President Donald Trump’s attempt to ask about citizenship in the 2020 census — in which he broke from conservative orthodoxy," they write.

Roberts, they say, is the sole reason for Trump's authoritarian streak.

"Today, as the Roberts court rewrites the Constitution in the image of Trumpian autocracy, it’s become clear that Roberts’ promise to be a neutral umpire was a lie. We are watching a rigged game, and Roberts set it up," they write.

"The Roberts court has spent Trump’s second term not applying the law so much as clearing it out of his way," they add.

Among the lawless actions Roberts has allowed: "firing independent agency commissioners, using racial profiling in immigration sweeps, disappearing immigrants to authoritarian and war-torn nations, and defying Congress’ power of the purse," they note.

But Roberts' "acquiescence to an anti-democratic America" isn't new, noting he "has been embedding white-dominant authoritarianism into the country’s source code for two decades. It’s impossible to imagine today’s crisis without the Roberts court having first undermined the foundations of our democracy."

Ryan Doerfler, a Harvard Law professor who studies the judiciary’s role in a democratic system, says that "You really can trace, in so many ways, the moment we’re in to critical decisions surrounding our law of democracy."

And much of that began with Roberts, who, "over the last five decades, has taken aim at the law, beginning as a young lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department fighting its reauthorization, when he claimed it would 'lead to a quota system in all areas,'" the Mother Jones writers explain.

"In 2019, Roberts toppled another pillar of democratic governance — if you don’t like a politician, you can vote them out — by writing in Rucho v. Common Causethat federal judges could not even review claims of partisan gerrymandering, deeming them 'political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,'" they explain.

The writers also note that "Roberts didn’t just strip political power from ordinary people — he handed it to billionaires."

His decisive vote in 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC "lifted restrictions on political spending, while ludicrously insisting it would not 'lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.' Political spending by billionaires has since increased 160-fold," they note.

That decision is "a direct line between the ruling and Elon Musk buying Trump the White House with more than $290 million and being given free rein to fire his companies’ regulators in return," they add.

In his nearly five decades in law, Roberts, they write, "didn’t wait till he was on the Supreme Court to empower Republican presidents — he auditioned for the job by showing his willingness to break the rules and come through for his team."

And under Trump, "we are now operating under a Robertsian reimagining of the separation of powers, in which laws passed by Congress are mere suggestions for a monarchical president," they explain.

"Trump needed Roberts to win, and Trump’s victory came just in time for Roberts," they add. "His corrupt bargain has had an exorbitant cost, both for the nation and the court’s reputation."

The writers agree, saying, today's court under Roberts "will greenlight Trump’s corrupt, self-enriching behavior and unlawful power grabs. The majority will instinctively know that its fate is tied to the fate of Trump’s movement, and so it will protect it. The result will be a democracy in name only."

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aha = thom dei = democ

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no lnx

The true risk behind Trump's purges

Thom Hartmann November 14, 2025

The American media refuses to call them out, so I guess the job falls to me: you can cut the racism with a knife, it’s so thick. With the Trump administration, the Confederacy is actively rising again, using the Lost Cause mythology/lie as its basis.

Trump this past week, apparently just in time for Veterans Day, erased tributes to Black U.S. soldiers who died fighting fascism — removing displays and plaques honoring African American liberators in Europe and removing similar memorial content at home — not merely to rewrite history but to say that only white men’s stories matter.

First, he claimed that brown-skinned people from south of the border were “murderers and rapists,” openly promoting racist tropes and activating enthusiastic bigots all across America to his side.

He whipped up a white mob who attacked the Capitol building and beat Black Capitol Police officers, while he watched on TV with apparent glee. He then pardoned all of them.

He reinstalled the statue of notorious Klan member, traitor, and Confederate general Albert Pike, while removing references to the horrors of slavery or early American presidents’ slaveholding from national parks and other federal monuments.

Trump’s white supremacists removed references to Black and female soldiers’ sacrifices from the Arlington Memorial Cemetery website.

Meanwhile, “Whiskey” Pete Hegseth is sweeping out senior‐level military leaders — women and people of color disproportionately — for daring to exist in leadership, and has ended military recognition of Black and women’s history events.

Trump’s henchman Russell Vought is finishing DOGE’s purge of Civil Service protections and DEI programs, with Black men and women especially hit hard.

This isn’t mere bureaucratic housekeeping: it’s the return of a white-male-supremacist architecture taking root in the GOP and the administration with echoes of the old Confederacy and the masked Klan in modern uniforms and executive orders.

But the even larger issue here is not only the racism: it’s the systematic assault on democracy and diversity itself. This is not just about statues or plaques or websites. It’s about the rewriting of our national identity, the redefinition of who counts as American, and the hasty, one-presidential-term reconstruction of a two-tier democracy: one for white men and one for everyone else.

Democracy depends on memory. When we lose sight of who fought, bled, and sacrificed to make this country more just, we lose our understanding of what democracy is supposed to mean. By erasing Black liberators, women leaders, and the long, painful march toward equality, this administration is saying: Only one story matters: the white, male, Confederate one.

That’s not just historical revisionism; it’s political weaponry. It’s a way of teaching future generations that the only people who truly belong in the story of America are white men with power.

This is how authoritarianism takes root, not just through violence, but through erasure. When diversity and equality are scrubbed from public memory, when entire groups of Americans are made invisible, it becomes easier to justify their exclusion in the present.

And once exclusion is normalized, democracy itself begins to die.

This Confederate revival we’re witnessing is not nostalgia: it’s a blueprint. The Lost Cause myth was always about rewriting defeat as heroism, slavery as benevolence, and white dominance as divine order.

That same logic is now being reinstalled at the highest levels of government. It’s an ideology that says equality is a threat and diversity is an invasion. It recasts white resentment as patriotism and paints those demanding fairness as enemies of the state. It’s why Hegseth condemned DEI in front of his generals and admirals and Trump and Fox “News” constantly rail against it.

But democracy, real democracy, cannot coexist with white supremacy. The two are fundamentally opposed.

Democracy requires inclusion, the recognition that every person’s voice and dignity matter. Diversity is not a “side issue” or a “political correctness” distraction; it is — as Ronald Reagan pointed out (ironically) — the very mechanism that keeps democracy alive. Reagan famously said (and Trump now repudiates):

“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.

“While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow.

“Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.

“This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

A government that silences or excludes women, Black people, immigrants, and other marginalized voices is no longer democratic and no longer looking or striving toward the future. It is frozen, stale, hierarchical, authoritarian, and fragile.

When the Trump administration erases diversity from its institutions — by firing people of color, ending DEI programs, banning the celebration of women’s history or Black soldiers’ sacrifices — it is not just discriminating. It is redefining the nation’s soul.

It is saying: only white male Americans count. Only they deserve to be remembered. Only they deserve to hold power, control wealth, and lead.

That is a true danger.

It’s an attempt to create a pseudo-democracy that exists in name only, one that maintains the trappings of elections and laws but has hollowed out the moral core of equality beneath them that upholds and sustains our republican system.

If this continues unchecked, we won’t simply be facing a rollback of rights; we’ll be watching the slow, deliberate dismantling of this noble 249-year democratic experiment itself.

And so, we must fight, not just for memory, but for meaning. We must insist that our national story remain whole and honest. We must demand that the sacrifices of every American — Black, brown, white, female, queer, immigrant — are honored, taught, and celebrated.

Because democracy without diversity is tyranny in disguise.

All Americans of conscience and goodwill must demand an end to these purges of women and minorities in memorials, jobs, the military, and civil service.

We must demand that our politicians stand up to Trump and his white supremacist lickspittle’s while insisting on a return to our foundational promise: equality, equal opportunity, and recognition for every person who serves and sacrifices.

Because if we don’t stop them now, the erasures become the new normal and our children will wake up in a country that no longer remembers it ever stood for freedom at all.

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Far-right podcaster and former top presidential advisor Steve Bannon told a crowd of aspiring conservative staffers on Capitol Hill this week that the job of Republicans between now and the midterm election next year is to seize complete control of government institutions and turn as many of President Donald Trump’s executive orders as possible into law as a way to avoid politic defeat in the coming years and, ultimately, keep MAGA loyalists from being tried and sent to jail.

“I’ll tell you right, as God as my witness, if we lose the midterms and we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison,” Bannon told the crowd Wednesday at an awards event hosted by the Conservative Partnership Academy. This group offers training and certifications to aspiring right-wing ideologues working in politics and government.

Bannon, who has already served time in prison for refusing to submit to a congressional subpoena related to his role as a top aide to Trump during his first term, included himself among those who might be targeted if Republicans lost power.

In his remarks, Bannon said Tuesday’s election results in New York City, Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere—where Democrats swept the GOP—should be seen as a warning to Trump’s MAGA base, but called for an intensification of the agenda, not a retreat.

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“They’re not gonna stop,” Bannon said of Democrats and progressives aligned against Trump’s authoritarian push and Republican economic policies that have focused on lavishing ever-larger tax cuts for corporations and the rich while gutting government programs, including cuts to Medicaid, food assistance for the poor, devastating environmental policies, and dismantling of healthcare subsidies leading to a surge in monthly premiums for millions of families.

Trump’s opponents, warned Bannon, are “getting more and more and more radical, and we have to counter that.”

His advice to Republicans in power and the right-wing movement that supports them is to counter “with more intense action” and more “urgency” before it’s too late. “We’re burning daylight,” Bannon said. “We have to codify what Trump has done by executive order.”

In what seemed like a reference to Trump’s recent talk of going “nuclear” on the filibuster in the US Senate and other efforts, Bannon said, “We have to get beyond these structural barriers” in Washington, DC, that he believes are hindering the president from consolidating his power even further.

Speaking about discussions behind the scenes, Bannon said he has been in touch with Republicans in the Senate who he says are asking him to go through for them what he means and that in the coming days people may be surprised by who “in the conservative movement” are coming around to his thinking, mentioning “institutionalists” like Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, as those he’s been speaking with.

“These are what I would call heavy-hitters on the limited-government constitutionalists, in our movement,” Bannon said of other unnamed individuals, “and they’re about to come out in the next couple of days and make this argument because I said, ‘Look, we have to understand that if we don’t this to the maximum—the maximalist strategy—now, with a sense of urgency, and in doing this, seize the institutions... if we don’t do this now, we’re going to lose this chance forever, because you’re never going to have another Trump.”

In an interview with Politico following Tuesday’s elections, Bannon said the win by democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to become New York City’s next mayor “should be a wakeup call” to Trump’s right-wing nationalist movement. “These are very serious people,” Bannon said of Mamdani and others who support his affordability agenda that focuses on the needs of working people, “and they need to be addressed seriously.”

As such, Bannon called for the Justice Department, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security to target Mamdani specifically by going after his US citizenship and calling for him to be deported. Mamdani is a naturalized US citizen who came to the United States with his parents when he was seven years old.

As the video clip of Bannon’s remarks about jail time if the Republicans lose in the upcoming elections made the rounds online Thursday, reactions were predictable along partisan lines.

“Steve Bannon motivating Democratic voters,” said Aviel Roshwald, a Georgetown University professor of history with a focus on nationalist movements.

Bannon’s call for “seizing the institutions” has been a mainstay on his popular War Room podcast for months, but critics warn that his open embrace of the demand should not make it any less shocking or worrisome.

“He’s preparing his audience to see violence and institutional takeover as ‘necessary.’ And he’s counting on Democrats and independents being too divided or too polite to call it what it is,” warned Christopher Webb, a left-leaning political writer on his Substack page last month.

Bannon and his allies, continued Webb, “do not give a damn about the law, the Constitution, or democracy. They only care about control. And if we keep treating their words as ‘just talk,’ it will be too late when it stops being talk.”

He concluded: “This isn’t going to end well.”

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U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) tells the New Republic that “we have all three key ingredients of a strongman state: a rubber-stamp Congress acceding to the president’s desires; a Supreme Court enhancing the president’s powers; and a power-hungry president … disregarding the laws and the checks and balances of our Constitution.”

In this environment, President Donald Trump is using 10 rules out of the “authoritarian playbook” to collapse U.S. democracy.

“The first rule … is to fire the government’s referees,” said Merkley, which Trump began when he fired 17 inspectors general and members of federal oversight commissions and regulatory boards without cause. The second rule is then to “pack your government with loyalists."

“The Senate is supposed to block confirmation of unqualified individuals,” but Merkley said that’s where that “rubber stamp” in the Republican majority comes in handy.

A third rule is to grab the power over the funding of programs from Congress so a single man can decide which programs to fund and at what level. Once you’ve grabbed the funding levers you can pursue the “fourth rule in the authoritarian playbook” by going after centers of power.

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“Trump is doing exactly that when he withholds research grants from universities or security clearances from law firms unless they restructure to his will,” Merkley said.

The fifth rule involves an autocrat pushing his influence over the press, which Trump is doing with “lawsuits and his power over broadcast licenses and corporate mergers to pressure newspapers and networks over the content of their reports and broadcasts, and even which late-night comedians they employ.” Merkley said Trump’s already destroyed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and defunded PBS, NPR, and even Voice of America, which was created specifically to counter disinformation from authoritarian regimes around the world.

Rule No. 6 is to disregard due process. “Democracies don’t have secret police,” said Merkley. “But now, unidentified masked federal agents are arresting people off the street … terrorizing communities, zip-tying children, and disappearing people overseas without a fair trial.”

Rule No. 7 — attack and diminish dissent by weaponizing the Department of Justice — is hot on the heels of that with Trump publicly naming enemies and pushing the DOJ to pursue them: James Comey, Letitia James, Adam Schiff, John Bolton.

Soon comes Rule No 8, which involves the “use the military to suppress domestic dissent.”

“Trump is activating Title 10 of the U.S. Code, section 12406, to federalize the National Guard and send them into American cities,” said Merkley. “… A district judge ruled against Trump’s effort to federalize and deploy Oregon National Guard members in Portland … but Trump may yet succeed, because some judges … are arguing that the courts should defer to the president’s discretion.”

“A ninth rule is to use the power of the government to spread propaganda,” said Merkley, which Trump is already doing with “banners with the president’s face hanging off federal buildings; video announcements at airports featuring Homeland Security Secretary Noem blaming Democrats for the government shutdown; federal websites spreading the president’s political messages,” all in violation of the Hatch Act and other rules.

A tenth rule in the authoritarian playbook — and the most dangerous rule of all, said Merkley — is to rig future elections. Trump is already trying to consolidate states’ voter registration files into a national database to make them easier to manipulate in the next election, and he’s gerrymandering states’ congressional districts to increase Republican power in the House of Representatives, possibly with the blessing of the Supreme Court in upcoming months.

It will take “strong citizen resistance” in the autocrat’s first year to derail his effort. After that, the struggle gets considerably harder, if not impossible.

“Let’s ring the alarm bells loud and clear and pass the election test in November 2026 with flying colors,” Merkley said.

Read the full New Republic report at this link.

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NO LNX

Trump has successfully mounted a coup thanks to one man

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) hands President Donald Trump a gavel after Trump signed his signature bill of tax breaks and spending cuts, ahead of the Fourth of July celebrations, at the White House in Washington, Friday, July 4, 2025. Alex Brandon/Pool via REUTERS

:{Thom HartmannOctober 27, 2025

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“No political truth is of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty: The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

—James Madison, Federalist 47

“All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body. The concentrating of these in the same hands, is precisely the definition of despotic government. An ELECTIVE DESPOTISM was not the government we fought for; but one ... in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.” (emphasis Jefferson’s)

— Thomas Jefferson, commentary on Federalist 48

Speaker Mike Johnson, presumably on the orders of Donald Trump, has unconstitutionally shut down the House of Representatives for over a month. The result is that Trump can now do pretty much whatever he wants without restraint.

He’s effectively King of America, at least for the moment. No limits, no constraints, no oversight. It’s the coup that finally worked.

If there is any one principle the Founders of this nation agreed on, it was that the first and primary function of Congress is to prevent a president from seizing king-like powers. It’s repeated over and over throughout their writings and carved into the Constitution itself.

That historical reality notwithstanding, “King” Donald has decided, all by himself, to demolish a large chunk of The People’s White House and replace it with a replica of Vladimir Putin’s Winter Palace’s Grand Throne Room so he can entertain billionaires with large, high-dollar fundraisers at the taxpayers’ expense without having to travel all the way to Mar-a-Largo.

He didn’t bother to get permission from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, nor did he submit plans for what people are now calling the “Epstein Ballroom” to the National Capital Planning Commission as any other historic building in D.C. would do. Loopholes in the law apparently allowed him to do this, however, because previous generations of lawmakers never imagined a president would be so insane as to one day demolish parts of the White House without consulting Congress or the people, so they saw no need to forbid it.

Which leaves only Congress as the single agency that could have thwarted Trump’s imperial plans. As any Constitutional scholar will tell you — as would Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson or Father of the Constitution James Madison — that’s at the foundation of their job.

Congress is supposed to have oversight over the president, to constrain him with laws, budgets, and hearings, and keep his behavior within the law. Like they did when Richard Nixon was bugging the Democratic National Committee, or when Bill Clinton tried covering up his affair, or George W. Bush engaged in illegal torture after lying us into two wars.

They should be demanding answers about Trump’s lawless “murders” (quoting Colombia’s president) of people in the Caribbean, his imposing tariffs in violation of Article I of the Constitution, or his ICE agency’s brutality and illegal warantless arrests.

But to do that — even to have prevented his unilateral tearing down part of the White House — the House of Representatives would have to convene oversight hearings and create such a public uproar that Trump would back down, and there’s a real possibility that could have happened, particularly as Republicans like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Rep. Thomas Massey (R-KY) are starting to stand up to Trump.

The only problem is that Congress is on vacation. Apparently because Trump ordered it: we all know that if he wanted the House open, it would be open today.

Johnson has shut down the House by sending everybody home and then dragging out the recess. The growing concern is that he’s doing this at Trump’s demand in order to eliminate congressional oversight and thus enhance his now-near-dictatorial power.

Johnson has kept the chamber in indefinite recess during a government shutdown — the first Speaker in history to do so — while refusing to hold even pro forma sessions, seat a duly elected member (Adelita Grijalva, of Arizona), or allow continuing resolutions to reach the floor.

This is against the law — the supreme law — of the land. There is no joint resolution with the Senate allowing for a recess longer than three days, nor has the Senate passed such a standalone resolution. Article I, §5, cl.4 of the Constitution reads:

“Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.”

Congress didn’t even suspend its functioning for weeks like this during the Civil War or WWII; it’s literally never happened before.

So why would Johnson take this unprecedented step? What’s the emergency that’s greater than the War of 1812, WWI, 9/11, or any other crisis?

One possible answer is that it’s all about increasing Trump’s power as potentate, so he can do whatever he wants — like demolishing part of the White House — with no criticism or examination, no hearings or testimony, no experts or historians, from the House of Representatives.

By halting committee work, freezing discharge petitions through this naked (and unconstitutional) calendar manipulation, and withholding any date for Congress to reconvene, Johnson — obviously fulfilling Trump’s demand — has placed the entire legislative branch into a political form of suspended animation.

Why does Trump want this? Why does he care about the House of Representatives enough to put Mike Johnson in this difficult, illegal situation? This threat to Johnson’s legacy as Speaker?

The House, which only “exists” as a functional body when formally in session (normal or pro forma), has been rendered incapable of introducing bills, issuing subpoenas, or performing any oversight whatsoever of the executive branch, from Trump to Stephen Miller to Russell Vought, Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, or anybody else.

And even if the Senate were to step in and “legalize” Johnson’s recess, his dragging it out this long or longer would still have the same impact on weakening what’s left of our democracy and handing more and more uncountable power to Trump.

What Johnson has pulled off is a “procedural” coup: he (with Trump) now controls whether Congress exists at all. His keeping the House in recess concentrates extraordinary power in the Speaker’s office and, by extension, in Trump, whose directives Johnson slavishly follows.

With the calendar erased and committees paralyzed, transparency and accountability over the executive and judicial branches has disappeared; the public can’t track missed votes, can’t demand action, and federal agencies like Vought’s CBO and Noem’s ICE can operate entirely unchecked.

Border Czar Tom Homan suddenly has no oversight. Whatsoever. Ditto for Bondi, Noem, FCC Chair Brendan Carr, Patel, Miller, etc.

They can do whatever they damn well please, particularly since they appear to believe they’ll get pardoned if they get caught breaking the law.

Furthermore, the longer this paralysis continues, the more it normalizes an unbalanced government in which the president acts without legislative restraint.

If this continues, or Johnson falls into a pattern of repeatedly recessing Congress whenever Trump requires him to, Trump might as well declare himself king.

Without the House, even the Senate can’t act in a meaningful way; the Constitution requires that all legislation involving money — including any laws or resolutions that may tie Trump’s hands (since virtually all actions must be paid for) — must originate in the House. (Article 7, Clause 1: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives…”)

Without ever proclaiming it out loud, Mike Johnson has accomplished what open insurrection never could: the methodical, bureaucratic nullification of Congress itself, eliminating its ability to perform oversight over Trump.

All without even a peep or notice from the mainstream press, who are instead fixated on the government shutdown, seemingly thinking it’s the same thing as, or part of, the House recess.

If Johnson doesn’t back down, or if he does temporarily but this becomes a regular thing, our republic will have been really and truly turned into a kingdom — complete with a massive new throne room — before our very eyes.

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AN 10 25

White House advisers are now seriously weighing whether President Donald Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act — an obscure law from the early 1800s that permits the use of active-duty military troops within U.S. borders for law enforcement duties, NBC News reported Wednesday.

These talks coincide with Trump’s push to send National Guard units to several major cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland; under the pretext of fighting crime and protecting federal immigration agents from protesters.

One senior administration, who was not named, told the outlet that no decision to invoke the law is imminent. But, should the president do so, it would mark a major escalation.

Currently, the National Guard is used only in limited support roles — because under current law, active-duty troops generally cannot carry out tasks like searches or arrests.

The Insurrection Act, however, would allow such operations.

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Trump has already encountered legal pushback.

In Oregon, a federal judge blocked his efforts to send Guard units from other states to Portland. Facing that hurdle, Trump publicly indicated he would use the Insurrection Act “if it was necessary.” As he put it, “If people were being killed, and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that.” He added that, at present, “it hasn’t been needed.”

Meanwhile, the report led to criticism of the Trump administration online.

John Padora, a Democratic candidate for Congress, wrote on the social platform X: "America is no longer a healthy democracy — it’s a semi-functional autocracy unraveling in real time. Trump is deploying red state National Guards into blue cities, calling them 'war zones,' threatening governors, and openly talking about invoking the Insurrection Act if they dare defy him. He’s manufacturing crisis to justify authoritarian power — and possibly suspend the 2026 elections. This isn’t leadership. It’s deliberate chaos."

Anthony Kreis, a Constitutional law professor, wrote on X: "In an ordinary time, this would be an impeachable offense."

Journalist Bastian Brauns reacted to the news and wrote: "That would have far-reaching consequences…"

Derek Martin, a nonprofit leader, wrote: "While American families worry their health insurance premiums are about to explode, the President is focused on putting troops in your neighborhood to try and look like a tough guy."

"5 alarm fire, folks," wrote journalist Wajahat Ali on Bluesky.

"Military officers are morally and legally obligated to disobey any order that would violate the Constitution," author Everett Parrott posted to Bluesky. "Every general will be held accountable for their actions when this nightmare is over."

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AN 9 25

History’s path is never linear. But its turns can be very sharp.

It is rare to be able to identify the moment when we can say “this is the point at which everything changed”.

So have we reached the point where we can say the United States is in a constitutional crisis? Has American democracy failed? Has the US descended into authoritarianism?

If the answers to those questions weren’t clear already, they are now.

Yes. It is happening. Right now.

Not because of one incident, but a series of moments and choices, events within familiar historical structures, that are pushing the US over the edge.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the choices made by the administration in its aftermath, is one such moment. It was immediately clear the Trump administration would use Kirk’s murder as a pretext for accelerating its authoritarian project, weaponising it to destroy opponents, both real and imagined.

In a video address from the Oval Office, Trump blamed the “radical left” and promised a crackdown on “organizations” that “contributed” to the crime. His vice president, JD Vance,, effectively making it a tool of state-sponsored media. VID]

On that show, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller promised “we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks”.

In the MAGA-verse, terms such as “radical left”, “networks” and “organisations” are code for any form of opposition or dissent – including the Democratic Party and traditional media. It is worth noting here that “radical left” is now shifting to terms as broad as “left-leaning”, progressive or, even more subversive, liberal.

The Trump administration is promising to go after the fundraising architecture of its opposition, broadly defined. And it will. It is already using the agencies of the federal government – including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service – to threaten, punish and obliterate those who oppose it.

And the moments keep coming. On Wednesday, Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, appeared on another far-right podcast. Carr – a Project 2025 contributor – suggested that broadcasters running the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show were risking “the possibility of fines or licensed revocation from the FCC” due to Kimmel’s comments about Kirk’s death.

That night, ABC announced that Kimmel’s show would be suspended indefinitely.

Kimmel’s moment follows Stephen Colbert’s. It follows another moment earlier in the week, when Trump berated senior Australian Broadcasting Commission journalist John Lyons, aggressively telling him he was “hurting” Australia and that he would tell the Australian prime minster as much. The ABC has since been barred from Trump’s UK press conference, ostensibly for “logistical reasons”.

In the firehose of these moments, it can be difficult to see them in context. But they are all connected – part of a deliberate, carefully planned program to destroy anyone or anything that opposes or even questions Republican orthodoxy as defined by Trump.

The Kirk moment, the Kimmel moment, and all the rest, must be understood in that broader framework. This week, too, the Trump administration announced it was deploying the National Guard into Memphis, Tennessee. It will likely also send the National Guard into Chicago, as it has long been threatening. It has already despatched the National Guard into Los Angeles and Washington DC.

Trump and his cronies are openly musing about other “Democrat cities”. The point is to sow fear and suppress dissent. It is working.

This month, in the aftermath of a meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, Trump promised to end mail-in voting. The Trump-aligned Supreme Court is poised to gut a key provision of the Voting Rights Act intended to prevent racial discrimination. The mid-term elections are still over a year away.

Incredibly, we are only eight months into the second Trump administration. But the moments will keep coming, and the speed at which they arrive will likely accelerate.

Taken together, they paint a very grim picture for the future of US democracy, constrained though it already is. The widespread, coordinated suppression of dissent – and the extended chilling effect that suppression has – are ripping apart the fabric of American political life.

It is here. It is happening. History is being made before our eyes.

This is a monumental change. For the United States. For the world.

Emma Shortis, Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, *RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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AN 9 25

In an article for Democracy Docket published Tuesday, election attorney Marc Elias argued that President Donald Trump has begun using the machinery of the federal government to target his political opponents, and that these actions threaten democratic norms.

"Trump is quickly changing the nature of politics from adversarial contests to weaponized governance. A president using the power of the state to punish critics — or to condition basic government services on political fealty — is not merely rough politics. It is aimed at crushing dissent and free and fair elections," he wrote.

Elias noted that as soon as Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 election, he warned that the administration would use its various tools — political appointees, career officials, government contracts, IRS audits and criminal investigations — to harass those who opposed him. He added that what he predicted has begun to happen.

READ MORE:'Increasingly senile wackjob': Expert says Trump too broken to destroy democracy on his own

According to Elias, there have been threats and intimidation of elected officials, journalists, institutions and media outlets. He also argued that universities, law firms, nonprofits and the media are being offered ways to gain favor or risk punishment, observing that prosecutors and federal agencies are bending toward political ends rather than functioning as neutral arbiters.

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Elias reported that White House officials are discussing measures such as revoking tax‑exempt status for nonprofits, deploying anticorruption statutes, using federal agencies to target groups seen as hostile, and issuing executive orders that undermine voting rights.

Elias framed these steps as explicit efforts to suppress dissent and weaken opposition rather than merely an aggressive political strategy.

Elias claimed Trump’s broader goal is to prevent the political opposition, particularly progressive and Democratic groups, from gathering strength ahead of midterm elections. He pointed to efforts such as redrawing electoral maps, undermining voting rights through executive orders, planning to go after progressive groups and their donors, and using fabricated stories to divide opposition.

READ MORE: British historian explains why he was 'shaken every day' during US visit

He warned that democracy is already showing strain: guardrails are weakening, rule of law is fraying, the fabric of democracy is being torn. But he said the worst is yet to come: targeting of donors, organizations, opposition leaders, with lies intended to make each seem uniquely bad, to divide supporters.

"The idea of an explicit government crackdown on thought and speech would have been unthinkable in the past. A president doing so as part of an election strategy would have been so extraordinary at any other time in our nation’s history it would have led to calls for impeachment," Elias wrore.

He added: "It’s as close to Orwellian as we’ve come. The 'Thought Police' is no longer a fictional warning, but our new, stark reality."

Elias called on those who defend democracy to treat attacks on any Democratic campaign, group or organization as attacks against all, to refuse division among progressive actors, and to stand together in defense of free and fair elections. He argued that preserving elections is the greatest vulnerability of the administration’s efforts to consolidate power, and that these must be protected at all costs or democracy itself may fail.

"Donald Trump’s attack on free and fair elections has only just begun. It is not only his biggest target, but also his greatest vulnerability. We must protect them at all costs. If we succeed, we will likely survive this dark period with democracy weakened but intact. If we fail, we may not have a democracy to come home to," he warned.

READ MORE:Trump’s AG scrambles to do 'damage control' after conservatives rage against free speech threat

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hnn 825

A Republic, if They Can Force It

In public schools around the country, conservatives are succeeding in their long effort to replace the word “democracy” with “constitutional republic.”

Timothy Messer-Kruse

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AN 8 25

The ironic term "Good Germans" is used to describe Germans who, during the 1930s and 1940s, didn't actively support Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime but looked the other way and downplayed or ignored the atrocities that were taking place. Often, "Good Germans" would argue that sure, Hitler is brash, but his opponents are overreacting to his inflammatory speeches.

Salon's Chauncey DeVega, in an article published on July 18, fears that in 2025, too many "Good Americans" — not unlike the "Good Germans" of the 1930s and 1940s — are downplaying the most disturbing parts of Donald Trump's second presidency.

"I have studied accounts from people who lived through authoritarian and fascist regimes in places like Chile, Argentina and Germany," DeVega warns. "One of the common threads is how citizens compromised their ethics and, in the end, were stained in ways both large and small. For some, this took the form of actively working with the regime against their family, friends and neighbors. They raised high the banner of patriotism! Law and order! The Dear Leader is always right! Other denizens chose denial and willful ignorance, turning inward to a fantasyland where, somehow, everything was normal, even when it was not."

READ MORE: 'People are going to be shocked': Backlash predicted for GOP as disaster looms

DeVega continues, "Those 'Good Germans.' How could they ever do such things? We 'Good Americans' will, in all probability, not be much different."

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Americans, DeVega laments, "are being intentionally spun out of control by Trump and the larger right-wing anti-democracy movement."

"These last few weeks have seen Trump's reign as a wannabe king and aspiring dictator made even more secure by a series of decisions by the right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court, who have neutered the ability of the federal courts to slow down the (Trump) Administration's assaults on the rule of law and democracy," DeVega observes. "In violation of decades — and centuries — of norms and precedents, Trump has expanded the use of the military and federalized National Guard as part of his mass deportation campaign. He is also claiming the right to nullify and generally ignore any law he does not agree with."

DeVega adds, "According to a recent whistleblower report, Justice Department official Emil Bove, who Trump has nominated for a federal judgeship, suggested telling courts that ruled against the (Trump) Administration 'f——— you' and then 'ignor(ing) their orders.' This is part of a much larger pattern where Trump, his staffers and other mouthpieces have argued he does not have to obey the Constitution and its protections for civil and human rights. The president and his agents are becoming even louder with their threats to arrest and imprison members of the Democratic Party for 'crimes.'"

READ MORE:'Worse by the day': Analyst reveals how Trump is rapidly losing backing of far-right media

Despite the massive No Kings Day protests of June 14, DeVega observes, the Trump Administration's "attempts to end multiracial pluralistic democracy" are "accelerating with little effective resistance from civil society or the mass public."

"To ignore these dimensions of our current national emergency is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the existential danger we are facing," DeVega explains. "To wit: Public opinion polls, focus groups and other data consistently show that the vertigo we are experiencing during this Age of Trump is getting worse…. Ultimately, Americans are quickly running out of time to stop our democracy and society from spinning out of control. However the Age of Trump may end, I fear it will show that too many Americans, along with their 'responsible' mainstream leaders and other elites, did not pay close attention when the flight crew told them about the escape doors and flotation devices."

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an 7 25

Although Donald Trump vehemently denied knowing anything about Project 2025 during the 2024 presidential race, far-right Christian nationalist Russell Vought — a major architect of the Project 2025 agenda — now heads the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Project 2025 called for federal government employees to be fired in huge numbers and replaced with an army of MAGA loyalists, and Vought has been pushing Project 2025's recommendations at OMB.

On Thursday morning, June 17, Vought attended a Christian Science Monitor breakfast — where, according to Politico's Katherine Tully-McManus, he openly expressed his disdain for bipartisanship.

Vought told reporters, "The appropriations process has to be less bipartisan…. There is no voter in the country that went to the polls and said, 'I'm voting for a bipartisan appropriations process.' That may be the view of something that appropriators want to maintain."

READ MORE: 'Didn’t you vote to pass this?' GOP rep stumps CNN host after blasting bill he voted for

The previous day, the U.S. Senate passed a rescissions package that includes major cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) as well as to foreign aid. And Vought is hoping that more cuts will be forthcoming.

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Vought told reporters, "We are willing to send up additional rescissions. I think if this continues to pass, we're likely to send up another rescissions package that would come soon, and we'll be working on that to try to get that across the finish line. We're not there yet."

Politico's Nicholas Wu posted Tully-McManus' reporting on X, formerly Twitter. And Vought's comments against bipartisanship are generating a lot of discussion on the social media platform.

X user Roger Dodger posted, "That is one of the more obscene things I have heard. Just terrible."

READ MORE:'Who in the world would be stupid enough to believe that?' Morning Joe torches Trump

Another X user, Catherine H., sarcastically wrote, "Yeah, because why would you want a unified country?"

X user Scott Plante commented, "Not how democracies work, Russ."

Another X user, Biscuit Salad, wrote, "He is old, and any pretense that the two term president with a decade-long death grip on his party isn't 'the establishment' gets more hilarious every day."

7 25

pass 9b recission 2 gop defect? ! PBS

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This jaw-dropping truth about the Supreme Court will make you furious

Thom Hartmann July 18, 2025

Earlier this month, Louise and I vacationed across several different cities and rural areas in Norway, the country from which my grandfather emigrated to the United States in 1917. The place was immaculate, modern, and, astonishingly, seemed entirely free of homelessness. Official stats say around 3,000 people lack housing across the entire country. That’s about the number you’ll see sleeping on sidewalks in a single Los Angeles neighborhood.

Depending on the city, it looked like half or more of the cars on the road were electric. Norway has mandated that, starting this coming January, all new cars sold in that nation must be zero-emission. Charging stations are everywhere. Already, 89 percent of all new cars sold there last year were fully electric.

But the real eye-opener wasn’t the electric cars or tidy sidewalks; it was the democracy. Norway is a functioning democratic republic, but not in the American sense where billionaires run the show to their own benefit.

It’s a country that practices democratic socialism, a term that causes conniptions among Fox “News” anchors and libertarian think tanks but simply means this: The people vote for leaders who actually implement policies the majority wants.

Sadly, that’s not the case here pretty much at all, at least since the Reagan Revolution. Back here in the United States, six billionaire-corrupted Supreme Court justices just told us that democracy doesn’t matter anymore. That the desires of millions of Americans can be rendered meaningless, especially if billionaires and their puppets want it that way.

Yesterday, this Trump-packed Supreme Court quietly — in an unsigned ruling on their badly-abused so-called “shadow docket” with no public debate and no explanation — handed down one of the most destructive rulings in modern history.

In a 6–3 decision, the justices green-lit Trump’s plan to gut the Department of Education, firing 1,400 people, freezing $6.8 billion in funding, and throwing the constitutional guarantee of equal access to education under the proverbial bus. It also flies in the face of the constitutional requirement that the president “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” by spending money Congress appropriates and keeping open agencies Congress created.

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent was scathing, calling the ruling “indefensible” and warning it would “cripple the federal government’s ability to ensure civil rights are enforced in education.”

The highest court in our land just sided with a twice-impeached, sexual-assaulting, insurrection-inciting president to dismantle the very agency responsible for making sure children with disabilities get accommodations. That Black and Brown, Jewish and Muslim students aren’t systematically discriminated against. That poor children in poor neighborhoods can still get a good education. That people with massive student debt can get some small breaks. That schools have at least some federal oversight.

Compare that to Norway.

While American billionaires are buying legislators and court decisions to keep their taxes low, their subsidies for the fossil fuel industry flowing, and to crush unions, Norwegians are investing in their people.

Nobody in Norway ever goes bankrupt from medical bills. College and trade schools are free. Unions are everywhere, wages are high, and stiff taxes on the morbidly rich ensure that public services like education and healthcare are publicly funded rather than run by greedy corporations and billionaire CEOs.

How do they do it? Why is it so different there compared to here?

Because in Norway, and across most of Europe, democracy is real. Citizens are automatically registered to vote. Elections are free of voter suppression, and dark money is illegal. Politicians are answerable to the people, not to fossil fuel barons or Wall Street banksters.

And so, people can vote for legislators who can actually give them what they want:

Universal healthcare

Free higher education

Robust public transit

Workers’ rights and living wages

Climate action, not climate denial

Meanwhile, in America, six corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court have become an unelected, billionaire-funded wrecking crew that’s gleefully tearing down every public institution that threatens plutocratic rule.

This disparity, this tragedy, is no accident here in our country.

As I’ve written about for years and most recently detailed in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, it began in the modern era with Lewis Powell’s 1971 Memo, a blueprint for corporate America to seize the courts, media, education, and politics. Nixon rewarded Powell by putting him on the Supreme Court the following year, and the rest is tragic history.

From Buckley v. Valeo to Citizens United, this court and its billionaire benefactors have redefined bribery as “free speech” and legalized the wholesale purchase of politicians. And, of course, Supreme Court justices.

This week’s shadow docket ruling is just the latest in that decades-long march toward oligarchy and, now, dictatorship.

The irony? The majority of Americans want a Norway-style system.

66% support Medicare for All

58% support free college and student debt cancellation

64% support taxing the ultra-rich more heavily

60% of workers say they’d join a union if they could

So why don’t we have it?

Because six corrupt Republican Supreme Court justices, and the corrupt rightwing billionaires who bought them and support their lavish lifestyles, won’t let us.

They’ve legalized voter suppression, gutted campaign finance laws, blessed gerrymandering, and are now attacking public education, the very foundation of a functioning democracy.

The lesson of Norway isn’t that the people there are somehow better. It’s that they’ve built institutions that respect the will of the majority and block the power of the morbidly rich. And when their democratic institutions are under threat, they act.

In America, we must do the same.

End lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court and put in term limits.

Ban dark money in politics.

Rebuild public education, not dismantle it.

Tax the morbidly rich.

Expand and protect voting rights.

This isn’t a left-right issue; it’s a democracy-versus-oligarchy issue. And this week’s Supreme Court ruling should be a five-alarm fire.

If we want a country that looks more like Norway and less like the feudal state Trump and his bought-off justices envision, we’ve got to fight for it.

The billionaires may have the Supreme Court, the White House, and Congress, at least for now. But we still have the numbers.

And in a democracy, that still means something, if we make it mean something.

NOW READ: MAGA is mad about more than a broken promise

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AN 6 25

Salon Senior writer Chauncey Devega warns the authoritarian tide is “rising very quickly in America,” with President Donald Trump threatening to use his "big beautiful bill" as a weapon or revenge against his enemies, namely the Democratic Party.

During a recent trip to Capitol Hill to whip up support for his “big beautiful” budget bill, the president admitted to reporters that “We're going to make a couple of tweaks….I mean, we don't want to benefit Democrat governors.”

“… We want to help all the states, but we have governors that are from the Democrat [sic] party, let's say New York, Illinois, big ones, and let's say Gavin 'Newscum,' who's done a horrible job in California. We want to benefit Republicans. They are the ones that are going to make America great again….The Democrats are destroying our country," Trump said.

READ MORE: 'Can't you just shoot them?' Inside Trump's threat to deal with 'radical left thugs' in America

Devega points out presidents didn’t do this before Trump because a two-party system is essential to democracy. But last week Trump escalated threats to terminate federal funding from the state of California, forgetting that “Democrat-led blue states contribute more money to the federal government in terms of tax dollars and other resources than Republican-led red parts of the country,” as Devega explains.

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When Governor Gavin Newsom responded by suggesting California could retaliate by cutting off tax payments from the state to the federal government, Trump’s administration went ballistic. United States Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent warned Newsom that he would be guilty of “criminal tax evasion” over such a move.

But this escalation is just the beginning for our “first elected autocrat and aspiring dictator,” Devega says. In addition to series of “Truth Social propaganda platform” posts where Devega says :{Trump shared conspiracy theories and menacing images of retaliation against judges who stymied his immigration policies, the administration is also harassing Democratic members of Congress with arrest.}:

Department of Homeland Security police recently handcuffed an aide to U.S. Rep. Representative Jerry Nadler, (D-N.Y.), which makes the second time in less than a month the Trump administration has used law enforcement to directly target Congress. And for the second time in less than a month, Congress doesn’t have the desire or ability to defend itself.

READ MORE: 'I didn’t vote for this': Pro-Trump Appalachians are 'living on the edge'

Atlantic columnist David Graham writes: “The Constitution’s checks and balances are premised on each branch wantingto protect its powers. What happens if that’s not the case?”

Republicans are largely unwilling to stand up to Trump, Graham argues, while Democrats are incapable of exerting formal or informal political power.

With Trump announcing he was federalizing the California National Guard—against the wishes of Gov. Newsom—after ICE raids over the weekend, the authoritarian tide is rising, Devega warns. But the American people and their leaders “had numerous opportunities to ‘drown-proof’ their democracy at the ballot box.”

They also had ample time to deal with the problem through the rule of law and by addressing the deep societal problems that birthed Trumpism, MAGA, authoritarian populism and the larger antidemocracy movement. Instead, he says they put “a man who announced he would be a ‘dictator on day one’ back” in the White House.

READ MORE:How this horrid show ends

Read the full Salon report at this link.

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5 25 Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed law last week that makes it tougher for citizens to get constitutional amendments on the ballot.

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MMA

Newsmax host says US elections are “a huge liability. It weakens our country in a lot of ways because we're always thinking about the next election”

Rob Schmitt: “XI Jinping doesn't have to worry about elections. That's a huge benefit. Trump talks about that a lot. He's jealous of that.”

Written by Media Matters Staff

:{Published 04/09/25

Video

Citation

From the April 8, 2025, edition of Newsmax's Rob Schmitt Tonight

ROB SCHMITT: Two billion a day, he says. Two billion a day in tariff revenue. That's about 700 billion a year. More than 700 billion a year. Just to give you a reference, that's a third of what our government brings in from all income taxes, everything we all pay in income taxes — that would be about a third of that number. That's quick to get to those kind of numbers. And by the way, that number, 700 billion is going to increase sharply at midnight because China has a lot of that. Likely forcing China with its very weak economy to the table to cut a deal that will benefit our country, our workers, to some unknown extent. Based on our tremendous deficit, which you can see here behind me, just how much more China sends us than they accept from us, China's retaliatory tariffs just don't hit as hard as they need them to. That's the problem when there's this huge disparity. China exports far more to us than they import from us. The White House has the winning hand in many different ways here.

China's only upside is, of course, political. XI Jinping doesn't have to worry about elections. That's a huge benefit. Trump talks about that a lot. He's jealous of that because imagine what you could do if you could not have to worry about every two years, you got to get everybody reelected. I mean, that's a huge liability. It weakens our country in a lot of ways because we're always thinking about the next election. It's hard to ever do the right thing like they're doing right now. This is why most politicians never do the right thing. They just always think about the next election. But for the next year, Trump and Republicans don't really need to worry about this election either. And again, China's situation is pretty bad. And if they pull this off, if the White House pulls this off and these deals all do come together and they get China and have some kind of a win with China, and our market goes soaring again and our industrial base improves in a way that Americans can feel over the next couple years, look out.

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an 3 25

One of the purposes of “flooding the zone,” as the Trump regime is trying to do — shocking and awing us with its blitzkrieg of bonkers orders — is to make it almost impossible to sort out what we should be incredibly freaked out about from what we should merely freak out about.

I’m incredibly freaked out about the regime grabbing people from their homes who are legally in the United States, with permanent status — not just visas permitting them to work or study here but green cards —and then whisking them away to prison because they’ve engaged in constitutionally protected speech that the regime doesn’t like.

You think I’m exaggerating? This is exactly what happened to Mahmoud Khalil on Saturday night. Khalil, who graduated from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December, has a green card. His wife, who is eight months pregnant, is an American citizen.

Immigration agents appeared at his apartment building and told him he was being detained. He now appears to be in a detention facility in Louisiana.

Khalil did nothing illegal. He has not been charged with a crime. He expressed his political point of view — peacefully, non-violently, non-threateningly. That’s supposed to be permitted — dare I say even encouraged? — in a democracy.

So why is he in jail?

Khalil was one of the leaders of last year’s peaceful pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump conceded Khalil was snatched up and sent off because of his politics. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” wrote Trump. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”

Where, may I ask, are the “First Amendment absolutists” such as Trump First Buddy Elon Trump when it comes to protecting speech that the Trump regime finds objectionable?

Where are all the Republicans who for years have accused liberals of “cancelling” their views?

Where are the conservatives who have claimed for even longer they only want to conserve traditional American values?

Nearly 13 million people in the United States hold green cards. Tens of thousands more are here temporarily as foreign students and professors. Apparently all are now in danger of being arrested if they speak their minds.

If this assault on civil liberties stands, Trump could just as well arrest and expel permanent residents who voice support for, say, transgender people or DEI or “woke” or Ukraine, or anything else the regime finds “anti-American” and offensive.

If it stands, what’s to stop the Trump regime from arresting American citizens who support any cause the regime doesn’t like — such as, say, replacing Republicans in Congress in 2026 and putting a Democrat in the White House in 2028?

Does anyone remember Senator Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts? I do. They weren’t pretty. Careers were ruined; reputations, destroyed. They remain a stain on American democracy.

American democracy. That’s what’s at stake. The Trump regime is out to trash it. The regime doesn’t believe in the First or any other amendments. It doesn’t believe in the Constitution.

Let’s commit to ending Republican control of Congress in 2026 and sending this regime packing in 2028 — if there’s still a democracy that enables us to do so.

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AN 3 125

As Americans face the reality of President Donald Trump's second term and the mass firings, takeover of federal agencies by billionaire mogul Elon Musk, and looming trade war that have come with it, the direct democracy advocacy group Fairness Project warned of a "major attack" on voters' rights taking place at the state level across the country.

While many in the U.S. have been focused on the actions of the Trump administration, said the group in a Thursday statement, legislators in over 15 states have introduced more than 100 bills to stop citizen-led initiatives from being placed on ballots in upcoming elections—and to stop them from becoming law even if a majority of voters support the measures.

"We're sounding the alarm: Direct democracy is being threatened right under our noses," said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project. "Ballot measures have been a lifeline to working people in red and purple states, allowing them to make change even when politicians fail to represent their interests. Legislators are trying to systematically take that power away."

The Fairness Project has supported dozens of successful ballot measure campaigns to expand healthcare access, raise minimum wages, and win paid time off policies for roughly 18 million people across the country.

The group was the biggest funder of abortion rights ballot measures in the last election cycle, working to ensure campaigners in Missouri and Arizona collected enough signatures to get questions about expanding abortion rights on ballots. Both ballot initiatives were approved by voters in November.

The Fairness Project was also involved in a 2023 campaign to stop a Republican-backed measure in Ohio that would have required a 60% supermajority to pass any future constitutional amendments.

In six of the states currently pushing attacks on ballot measures—Oklahoma, Arizona, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Idaho—Republicans are making similar attempts to raise the threshold for passing ballot measures from a simple majority to 60%.

If they succeed in passing the proposals, said the Fairness Project, the GOP will be "effectively enacting minority rule."

Lawmakers are also advancing bills that would apply onerous signature requirements to the ballot measure process.

In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' proposed changes to ballot initiative laws include requiring individual voters to complete a petition in person at an election office or by mail in order to express support for a measure, instead of allowing sponsors to pay workers to collect signatures in public.

"They want to kill the process," Angelo Paparella, president of a group that has run several petition drives in the state, toldAxioslast month.

The Arkansas state Senate this month passed several bills regulating how citizen-led initiatives make it onto ballots, including one requiring canvassers to request a photo ID from signers; one requiring potential signers to read the ballot title of a petition or have it read aloud to them; and one requiring canvassers to file an affidavit certifying they complied with state law when collecting signatures.

"This is their playbook: When cowardly politicians know they can't win with voters on the issues, they try to change the rules of the game," Hall said Thursday.

Earlier this week, Mississippi voters once again lost out on the chance to place measures on statewide ballots, which was permitted in the state until the state Supreme Court struck down the ballot initiative process in 2021.

Lawmakers allowed a proposal to partially restore the process to die ahead of a legislative deadline.

"This means voters still have no direct way to propose new state laws, to change state laws, or to change the Constitution," reported Taylor Vance of Mississippi Today.

Hall said the Fairness Project will continue fighting attacks on representative direct democracy nationwide.

"Voters are paying attention to this widespread attack on their constitutional rights, and they're fighting back," said Hall. "Americans deserve leaders who respect our democracy."

---

2 25 all but gave up on checks and balance advise and consent max 3 mcconn murkowski and --- collins rolled on bondi?

// doge coup

an 2 25

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has been making unprecedented moves to slash federal spending with the blessing of President Donald Trump. As the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (which is not yet an official federal agency authorized by Congress), Musk is exploring major cuts to the Department of Education and plans to shut down USAID — the agency responsible for foreign aid. His team has also been granted access to the Treasury Department’s payments system. But unlike much of the country, some Senate Republicans couldn’t be bothered, NOTUS reported on Tuesday.

One major source of distress among experts is that Musk is rejecting appropriations laws passed by Congress -- in other words, taking authority over funding. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said these actions are indeed unconstitutional, but he is not concerned, saying: “Nobody should bellyache about that."

“That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense,” Tillis said. But “it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.”

READ MORE:These 'relatively traditional' Trump Cabinet picks are actually 'spineless cowards': analysis

Other Republicans are glad that Musk is looking at cutting costs.

“He’s doing exactly what he should be doing,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said Monday. “He’s going through every agency and looking at how to make sure the money’s spent right.” And while Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution gives that job to Congress, Scott argued: “It doesn’t look like Congress is doing their job."

“The actions that have been taken with USAID are long overdue,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) said. “The agency is out of control.”

Unlike Tillis, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said Musk has not violated the Constitution.

“Mr. Musk is acting under the authority of the president of the United States,” he said. “It’s perfectly legal, perfectly constitutional. And the issue, anyway, is not process. The issue is substance. Did they find wasteful spending, or not?”

READ MORE:'Unchecked power': Trump himself ordered firings of prosecutors working criminal cases against him

Still, some Republicans are concerned. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the top Republican on the Appropriations Committee, said she was “very concerned about Mr. Musk or any of his assistants going into federal agencies and demanding personal information on employees.” She said that his actions have not met “the requirements of the law.” BUT THEN VOTED FOR PAM BONDI?

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) joined Republicans in defending Musk. “He’s working with the president, and they’re making recommendations in some cases on agencies,” he told NOTUS. “But the whole program here is that we’re spending way more money than what we’re bringing in.”

He added: “The president has the authority to operate the executive branch of government. So.”

READ MORE:'Call somebody who cares': GOP senator slammed over response to 'friends who are upset' FOGHORN

Click here to read NOTUS' report in full.

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an 1 25

desantis fla

"He wants legislators to pass measures on illegal immigration to support Trump's executive orders and mass deportation plans, and to enact sweeping changes that could make ballot initiatives more difficult to pass,"

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an 125

Journalist/author Katherine Stewart is known for her in-depth reporting on the Religious Right, which she has been highly critical of over the years. The titles of her books — among them, "The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children" and "The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism" — underscore her view that far-right white evangelicals and Christian nationalists pose a major threat to religious freedom in the United States.

In her book, "Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy" — which has a February 18 release date on Amazon — Stewart warns that an alliance between Christian nationalists and billionaire oligarchs is pushing "an end to pluralistic democracy."

The Guardian's Adam Gabbatt examines the book in an article published on January 19.

READ MORE:Trump’s second term could face the 'same disastrous end' as Grover Cleveland’s: presidential historian

Stewart, according to Gabbatt, warns, "Money is a huge part of the story, meaning that huge concentrations of wealth have destabilized the political system. Second, lies, or conscious disinformation, is a huge feature of this movement. And third, God, because the most important ideological framework for the largest part of this movement is Christian nationalism."

Gabbatt notes that although "billionaire oligarchs" and Christian nationalists "may not seem to have much in common," the "aim" of their "unholy alliance" is "the same: bringing an end to democracy in the U.S. as we know it."

According to Stewart, "The best label I can find for the phenomenon — and I do not pretend it is a fully satisfactory label — is 'reactionary nihilism.' It is reactionary in the sense that it expresses itself as mortal opposition to a perceived catastrophic change in the political order; it is nihilistic because its deepest premise is that the actual world is devoid of value, impervious to reason, and governable only through brutal acts of will."

Stewart adds, "It stands for a kind of unraveling of the American political mind — a madness that now afflicts one side of nearly every political debate."

Gabbatt points out, however, that Stewart, in her book, "insists the situation is not hopeless."

READ MORE:Biden preemptively pardons members of January 6 panel and other Trump targets

Stewart argues, "There's no feature as of yet in the American political system that would ensure that the MAGA movement is going to rule indefinitely. And frankly, I take heart from the fact that those of us who believe in democracy and its core principles probably represent a majority and not a minority of the population. I continue to believe more Americans support a democratic political system over some sort of cronyistic, kleptocratic and theocratic system that has authoritarian features."

---

AHA democracy is slow, fascism is fast; biden quickly moved to fix supply chain in covid, re-booted chips mfgr, kamala did deal to slow central am immigration = systemic, but voters blamed biden for inflation tho best in world, thot unemployment was record HIGH?!; trump prevented no carrier AC factory from moving, and his foxcomm plant never built; infra week literally a joke, vs biden infro act bipartisan rebuilt bridge hit by ship in record time; gop mitch showed up to cut ribbons on bills they voted against; only notice pothole, not roads;

AN 12 24

During the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump relentlessly attacked President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on the economy — blaming both of them for post-pandemic inflation in the United States. And the message resonated with enough voters for Trump to pull off a narrow victory over Harris.

According to the Cook Political Report, Trump defeated Harris by roughly 1.5 or 1.6 percent in the popular vote and picked up 312 electoral votes compared to 226 for the vice president.

A victory of 1.5 or 1.6 percent is hardly a "landslide," as Trump's allies have been claiming. But it's a victory nonetheless, and Trump will be sworn in for a nonconsecutive second term on January 20, 2025.

READ MORE:**Trump’s tariffs on Mexico could devastate border region: TX economists**

Some of Biden's supporters have argued that history will be kind to the outgoing president — not unlike the kind words for the late President George H.W. Bush after he lost the 1992 election to President Bill Clinton. And history, they argue, will remember Biden's job-creation record and the low unemployment of his presidency.

In October, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), U.S. unemployment was 4.1 percent.

In a December 2 post on X, formerly Twitter, Alex Armlovich — a senior housing analyst for the Niskanen Center — praised Biden's record on creating manufacturing jobs. And he made his point by tweeting a chart from Joey Politano, who publishes a financial newsletter.

Armlovich tweeted, "This rise in US manufacturing construction spend via @JosephPolitano is absolutely mindblowing. So many CHIPS & IRA-fueled factories are about to start opening in January you're not gonna believe it."

READ MORE:[Bombshell report details 'dangerous' new allegations against Trump Cabinet nominee

In a separate tweet, Armlovich laments that Trump, in 2025, will get the credit for Biden's economic achievements.

Armlovich predicts, "Trump's name will be on every IIJA, CHIPS, & IRA ribbon cut b/c key Dem factions thought NEPA red tape was more important than permitting reform to finish projects in <4 yrs FDR didn't respond to the 1930s by saying 'Mussolini is too fast we need NEPA.' He just started building."

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no lnx

alternet

America is at a crossroads

Thom Hartmann November 18, 2024

Oligarchy is a form of government where the richest people in a country have captured its political system (or even filled it with themselves) and use that control to direct much of the government’s efforts to increasing their own wealth and power.

We’ll soon again have a billionaire president — helped to power by the richest billionaire on the planet — with his election campaign funded in large part by at least $2 billion in direct, reported donations from roughly 150 billionaire families.

It appears that the other roughly 350 billionaires who openly funded Trump in 2020 chose, this time, to instead donate to “dark money” SuperPACs created by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court with Citizens United that don’t list their donors or, in many cases, even report their expenditures. With an estimated $15 billion spent on this 2024 election, their expenditures probably dwarf the ones we know about (and collectively they carpet-bombed Americans in often-deceptive political advertising).

And none of that covers the additional billions in “free media” Trump got from FOX “News,” rightwing hate radio, and Musk apparently altering the Xitter algorithm to favor messages friendly to himself and/or Trump while suppressing anti-Trump or pro-Harris posts.

This is extraordinarily bad for average Americans: With billionaires calling the shots in the upcoming Trump administration we can expect more pollution, fewer consumer protections, a war on unions, a frozen $7.25 federal minimum wage, bigger subsidies and grants to billionaires’ companies (from the fossil fuel industry to defense and SpaceX), lower taxes on the morbidly rich, and cuts to social services and entitlement programs.

But far more concerning is the simple reality that oligarchies are merely transitional forms of government, as I mentioned on Ali Velshi’s show Sunday morning and wrote in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

Ever since Ronald Reagan embraced neoliberalism (free trade, gut unions, low taxes on the morbidly rich) the top .01% have pillaged the American working class, essentially stealing over $50 trillion over the past 43 years and using that money to buy megayachts, penis-shaped rockets, European chateaus, private jets, and to fill their money bins.

So far, Republicans have been able to largely distract Americans from this naked theft by tossing out red herrings; blaming the ills of America on immigrants, big-city Black people, teachers, and the queer community. But there’s a limit to how long you can gaslight people; eventually working-class Americans figure out what’s going on and who’s behind their falling behind previous generations.

When that happens, oligarchies begin to tremble, something that’s been gradually happening for several decades. People protest, what’s left of union movements stand up, and progressive political parties begin to get a significant toehold on the national debate. The success of Bernie Sanders in his presidential efforts is an example of the leading edge of this dissatisfaction and dawning realization by average citizens of an early indicator that we were approaching this cusp.

Once protest against the oligarchs buying politicians and manipulating government reaches a critical mass, the oligarchy is faced with a terrible but necessary choice.

They can allow democracy to proceed and end up being voted out of power (as happened in Brazil when Bolsonaro was thrown out), sometimes even facing jail themselves (as happened here in 2020, although Merrick Garland dragged his feet for two long years).

Or the kleptocratic government can clamp down on their opposition, labeling protestors and democracy-advocating politicians as terrorists and “the enemy within,” using the power of the state (guns and jails) to suppress popular pro-democracy movements.

This latter path was the one Vladimir Putin chose as Russia moved from democracy to oligarchy and then to outright dictatorship. Speak up and go directly to jail, if you’re not killed outright like Alexi Navalny was. It’s also the path Viktor Orbán, the man many Republicans claim is their role model, has taken in Hungary.

And, if the rhetoric coming from Trump and his acolytes is translated into action starting in January, that is the path America will soon take.

Numerous Americans have been warning about this ever since Trump’s first term in office (and some, including me, for decades before).

Reagan began the destruction of the middle class (which has gone from two-thirds of us in 1981 when he came into office to 43% of us having that wealth today), Bush and Cheney used 9/11 to expand presidential authority, six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court granted king-like powers to Trump, and now the wannabee Mussolini is echoing traditional fascist rhetoric about women, minorities, the press, and his political opposition.

Soon, millions of Americans will be confronted with a choice. Will they, like “good Germans,” Russians, Chinese, and Hungarians did, abandon politics and go back to sports, music, and keeping their heads down? Or will they — like millions in Brazil, Chile, and Ukraine — stand up, protest, join the Democratic Party (while it’s still legal) and form a real resistance to an oligarchy that appears bent on morphing itself into America’s first raw tyranny?

In particular, it appears we’re approaching a time when Democratic state governors will need our support in their efforts to resist Trump’s fascist impulses. And, as our mainstream media continues to act like Trump is merely business-as-usual, help sustain independent media that engages in radical truth telling (there are many on Substack: check out my recommendations).

And it’s not too late for America to return to democracy; the next election of great import will be in two years and we all need to prepare.

Those who have faced the violence of state oppression have told us about the importance of times like this.

Elie Wiesel said, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented,” and Martin Luther King Jr. told us, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

We still have the power to make the choice to resist, awaken others, and organize. Seize it, before it’s gone.

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an 11 24

During the 2024 presidential race, radio host Charlamagne tha God predicted that if Vice President Kamala Harris defeated GOP nominee Donald Trump, the "corrupt" U.S. Supreme Court would go along with one of Trump's legal challenges and hand the election to Trump even though he had lost it.

But President-elect Trump enjoyed a decisive victory over Harris on Election Night 2024, and Harris subsequently gave her concession speech. Trump not only picked up at least 295 electoral votes — according to the vote count, he appears to have won the popular vote as well.

During his second term, Trump is likely to push the U.S. Supreme Court — which has a 6-3 GOP-appointed supermajority — even more to the right.

:{READ MORE:'Listen here, sweetheart': Possible Trump AG pick threatens NY’s Letitia James with 'prison'

In a scathing article published on November 8, Mother Jones' Pema Levy argues that the Roberts Court has repeatedly run interference for Trump — and helped his campaign more than once.

"Why Americans chose a demagogue to helm their democracy may be partially explained by the fact that, in many ways, the United States isn't a democracy any longer — and in many ways, that's thanks to the Roberts Court," Levy argues. "Our system was never perfect; on a basic level, the U.S. only became a democracy in 1965 when it finally gave all Black people the right to vote. But for nearly two decades, Roberts and his colleagues have done immense damage to the underpinnings of the democracy Americans painstakingly built."

Levy adds, "They have reallocated political power from ordinary citizens to billionaires, worsened congressional paralysis, and transformed many elections into meaningless exercises."

The cases that Levy discusses include, among others, Biden v. Nebraska and Trump v. the United States.

READ MORE:Path forward' to Democrats winning may come sooner than you think: analysis

Levy notes that in Biden v. Nebraska, the High Court "blocked (President Joe) Biden's loan forgiveness plan." But she is even more critical of the Trump v. the United States ruling.

"After Trump lost the 2020 election," Levy explains, "he attempted to stay in office by plotting to overturn the will of the voters, culminating in a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. In the summer of 2023, special counsel Jack Smith brought charges against him for his role in the scheme. A trial was scheduled for March 2024, during the Republican primaries. But the Supreme Court was there to help Trump…. Then, on July 1, John Roberts released a stunning opinion."

Levy continues, "He bought Trump's argument — hook, line, and sinker. Former Presidents are now immune from criminal prosecution for anything deemed an official act. Even evidence of a crime is inadmissible if it involved official acts. The Court, with Roberts in the lead, had not only removed a serious impediment to Trump's reelection efforts — but ensured that should Trump return to the White House, he would do so with more power than any president ever before."

READ MORE:How Garland’s 'truly historic legal missteps' let Trump dodge accountability

*Pema Levy's full article for Mother Jones is available at this link.

thiel maga mini-me's // bannon ~ fed gov't

blake masters, pa mastriano

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biden scotus reforms

“Disdains democracy': Chief justice’s role in Trump immunity sparks outrage from legal experts](https://www.alternet.org/scotus-trump/) an 7 24

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an 10 24

robt r

We’ve learned from a forthcoming book by journalist Bob Woodward that in 2020, while he was president, Trump secretly shipped Covid-19 testing equipment to Russian president Vladimir Putin for his own personal use at a time when Americans could not get it.

The author of The Art of the Dealdid not demand in return that Putin forego attacking Ukraine or release Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed, two Americans being held by Russia at the time and later released under the Biden administration.

The Trump campaign denies this story, but on Wednesday the Kremlin confirmed it.

Woodward also reported that Trump and Putin have had “as many as seven” personal conversations since Trump left office in 2021.

Let’s be clear about the implications of all this: If Trump wins the election, he’ll likely do whatever Putin wants, including allowing Putin to take much, if not all, of Ukraine.

Trump has repeatedly avoided criticizing Putin, even going so far as to praise him as a “genius” and “very savvy” for his unprovoked invasion. At the same time, Trump has been critical of the Biden administration’s aid to Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s invasion.

During the presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris last month, vid] Trump he wanted to see Ukraine win the war against Russia.

Earlier this year, Trump suggested he’d encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” if a NATO ally wasn’t paying their fair share to the alliance.

I used to believe seven things about the 21st century that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s presidency and current neck-and-neck race with Kamala Harris have shown me to be false. I assumed:

1. Nationalism is disappearing. I was wrong.

I expected globalization would blur borders, create economic interdependence among nations and regions, and extend a modern consumer and artistic culture worldwide.

But both Putin and Trump have exploited xenophobic nationalism to build their power. (Putin’s aggression has also ignited an inspiring patriotism in Ukraine.)

1. Nations can no longer control what their citizens know. I was wrong.

I assumed that emerging digital technologies, including the internet, would make it impossible to control worldwide flows of information and knowledge. Tyrants could no longer keep their people in the dark or hoodwink them with propaganda.

But Trump and Putin have filled the media with lies. Putin has also cut off Russian citizens from the truth about what’s occurring in Ukraine. Putin filled American social media with lies in favor of Trump and against his opponent in the 2016 election and apparently is doing so again.

1. Advanced nations will no longer war over geographic territory. I was only partly right.

I thought that in the “new economy,” land was becoming less valuable than technological knowhow and innovation. Competition among nations would therefore be over the development of cutting-edge inventions.

I was only partly right. While skills and innovation are critical, land still provides access to critical raw materials and buffers against potential foreign aggressors.

1. Major nuclear powers will never risk war against each other because of the certainty of “mutually assured destruction.” I was wrong.

I bought the conventional wisdom that nuclear war was unthinkable.

I fear I was wrong. Putin is now resorting to dangerous nuclear brinksmanship in Ukraine.

1. Civilization will never again be held hostage by crazy isolated “strongmen” with the power to wreak havoc. Wrong.

I assumed this was a phenomenon of the 20th century and that 21st century governments, even totalitarian ones, would constrain tyrants.

Trump and Putin have convinced me I was mistaken.

1. Advances in warfare, such as cyber-warfare and precision weapons, will minimize civilian casualties. I was wrong.

I was persuaded by specialists in defense strategy that it no longer made sense for sophisticated powers to target civilians.

Utterly wrong. Civilian casualties in Ukraine are huge. Meanwhile, since October 7, 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu has created a bloodbath in Gaza as well — another arena where xenophobia and a “strongman” unconstrained by democratic norms have wrought havoc.

1. Democracy is inevitable. I was wrong about this, too.

I formed this belief in the late 1990s, after the Soviet Union had imploded and China was still poor. It seemed to me that totalitarian regimes didn’t stand a chance in the new technologically driven, globalized world. Sure, petty dictatorships would remain in some retrograde regions of the world. But modernity came with democracy, and democracy with modernity.

Both Trump and Putin have shown how wrong I was on this, too.

Meanwhile, Ukrainians have demonstrated that Trump’s and Putin’s efforts to turn back the clock on the 21st century can be addressed only with a democracy powerful enough to counteract autocrats like them.

They have also displayed with inspiring clarity that democracy cannot be taken for granted. Democracy is not a spectator sport. It’s notwhat governments do. Democracy is what people do.

The resistance to Putin in Ukraine should remind us that democracy survives only if people are willing to sacrifice for it.

Some sacrifices are smaller than others. You may have to stand in line for hours to vote, as did tens of thousands of Black people in America’s 2020 and 2022 elections. You may have to march and protest and even risk your life so others may vote, as did iconic civil rights leaders like the late John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr.

You may have to knock on hundreds of doors to get out the vote. Or organize thousands to make your voices heard. And stand up against the powerful who don’t want your voices heard.

You may have to fight a war to protect democracy from those who would destroy it.

The people of Ukraine have also reminded us that democracy is the single most important legacy we have been bequeathed by previous generations who strengthened it and risked their lives to preserve it. It will be the most significant legacy we leave to future generations — unless we allow it to be destroyed.

Putin and Trump have convinced me I was wrong about how far we had come in the 21st century. Technology, globalization, and modern systems of governance haven’t altered the ways of tyranny.

In a few weeks, we will see how much the people of the United States value democracy — for ourselves, for Ukrainians, and for others around the world.

an 1024

kns

Republican strategist's attempt to minimize former President Donald Trump's threat of "enemies within" spurred a swift fact check and heated debate on CNN Monday morning.

Conservative commentator Shermichael Singleton was checked by CNN anchor Jim Acosta as he tried to claim Trump's threat to sic the military on political enemies was limited only to those who live in the U.S. without citizenship status.

"I think he's talking about immigration," Singleton said. "And when you look at—"

The video player is currently playing an ad.

"No, no, no," interrupted Acosta. "He was talking about what he called radical left people in this country. Americans. Political opponents."

Singleton shrugged off what Acosta described as a "dangerous" threat — arguing Republicans cared more about policy than rhetoric — and in doing so outraged Democratic strategist Julia Roginsky.

"Let me just say something right now," Roginsky said. "This is not Donald Trump saying crazy stuff...he's done this before."

Roginsky argued Trump meant what he said at a Coachella rally over the weekend that he'd bully Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) into supporting his border control policies by threatening to withhold "fire money....for all the forest fires."

She pointed to recent reports from two former staffers who said Trump tried to block wildfire relief from reaching California in 2018 until he was shown voter data proving supporters lived there and raised a crucial concern.

"There were people around him [during his first term] to stop the worst impulses...they're not going to be there this time around," she said. "He's basically letting the voters know that, you know, this is what you're voting for."

When Acosta asked if Democrats needed to do more to call out Trump's authoritarian rhetoric, Roginsky replied with an incredulous shake of the head and a figurative finger pointed at his industry.

"The media has not done enough to call this out," Roginsky snapped back. "Here you have a fascist — and General Milley is right because all of the markers of a fascist exist in Donald Trump — and yet our news media has not done enough, by any stretch of the imagination, to call this out."

As proof, Roginsky pointed to intense media scrutiny of President Joe Biden's age and Gov. Tim Walz' (D-MN) location during the Tiananmen Square protests 35 years ago.

Singleton, given a chance to respond, interestingly did not slap back with a defense of his political party — but of colleagues in the media he argued could not be blamed for focusing more important issues than Trump's rhetoric.

"We have covered it," he said. "i just think there are far more consequential issues that impact people's day-to-day lives."

"With all do respect," Roginsky replied, "Take a look at the ratio. This is an existential problem."

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an 4 24

rural white voters have, in many cases, far more political power than suburban or urban voters, and they’re using that outsized power to push our nation toward disaster. While they’re only 20 percent of the country, for example, because of gerrymandering they control fully 42 percent of seats in the House of Representatives.

The authors of new book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy point out that rural whites are measurably more bigoted and xenophobic than suburban or urban voters, 13 points more likely to hate on queer people, 15 points more likely to support Trump’s Muslim ban.

They’re also far more likely to agree that setting democracy aside for a strongman like Trump or another Putin wannabee will “fix the mess and drain the swamp.” And fully 74% of the members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 election represented rural districts.

The majority of rural white voters disagree with the statement (or have no opinion) that “diversity makes America stronger.” And while only 22 percent of city dwellers believe Trump won the 2020 election and Biden and Democrats “stole” it, a mind-boggling 47 percent of rural whites are certain Biden is illegitimately occupying the White House.

READ:Revealed: What government officials privately shared about Trump not disclosing finances

The astonishing paradox, though, is how Republican politicians regularly crap on their own voters in rural America. Instead of offering help or solutions to rural problems, the GOP and conservative media instead feed them a steady diet of xenophobic and racist fear and hate.

And they eat it up! The racist buffoons among them are one and a half times more likely to be QAnon followers than people who live in cities or suburbs.

Democrats created — and Republicans opposed — virtually all the programs that are keeping rural America from sinking even farther into poverty and despair. Social Security, unemployment insurance, SS Disability, Medicare, Medicaid, over 60 farm subsidy programs that funnel billions in taxpayer dollars into rural communities, food stamps, the Women and Infant Children (WIC) program, anti-addiction programs, etc.

The only real accomplishment of the Trump presidency was passing a massive $2 trillion dollar tax cut for the morbidly rich that had virtually no effect on rural voters. Nonetheless, 71 percent of rural voters cast a ballot for Trump in 2020.

There are still 11 mostly rural states where hospitals are closing and people are dying younger than necessary because Republicans in those states have refused to expand Medicaid.

Republicans in Congress fought against legislation to expand rural broadband access. They constantly try to cut or gut rural health and nutrition programs, and fought against expanding Obamacare in a way that would help rural people.

gerry SUPERMAJORITY

Most of the Red State Republican politicians in America know their seats will never be in danger, so they take millions from special interest groups to write loopholes into the tax code, vote for larger fossil fuel subsidies, and vote against efforts to lower prescription drug prices or do anything about global warming.

They get rich while the people who put them into office struggle to get by. Ted Cruz escapes to Cancun with the $600,000+ in cash he just got for his podcast, laughing at Texas voters all the way. JD Vance, a multimillionaire Wall Street guy, lives in an elite townhouse and travels by first class while people in Ohio watch Republican politicians gut their public schools and try to outlaw abortion and birth control.

Republican members of Congress representing rural states went all the way to the Supreme Court to successfully block President Biden’s first attempt at reducing student debt while rural students carry 60% more student debt than urban students by age 25.

One of the most chilling quotes from the book is about how rural voters are willing to both abandon democracy and embrace a violent rightwing coup:

“[R]ural Americans are more likely to believe that ‘it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government.’ Indeed, more than one out of four rural residents agree that Trump should be returned to office by force if necessary.”

White rural voters are more likely than any other demographic group — Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans — to be willing to overturn our democracy, and the people who represent them are in the majority of legislators who voted to overturn the 2020 election the day after the January 6th attack on our capitol.

If, say, Black people held that view, rightwing media would be trumpeting it every day from coast to coast. But because it’s rural white people, the so-called “heartland Americans,” it gets largely ignored by American media.

After all, most mainstream outlets treat rural people as if they’re an exotic species who must be listened to: going to rural diners to interview people is so common it’s become a cliché. In the past month I’ve seen dozens of such interviews played on MSNBC and CNN, but not once have I seen those same reporters go into a city and ask why people are voting for Biden.

The Biden administration has done more for rural America than any president since Lyndon Johnson rolled out Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. Biden’s American Rescue Plan provided specific tax breaks and credits targeted at rural poverty, subsidized mortgage payments, and provided rent assistance to tens of thousands of rural residents:

— Rural Americans are nine times more likely to lack access to affordable child care, so Biden’s program allocated $39 billion for subsidies for child care providers, with the money disproportionately going to rural communities. There was also $350 billion specifically allocated for small towns in rural areas to help them run basic government functions and upgrade their infrastructure. He even put up $198 million in funding for rural colleges and universities.

— Biden and Democrats delivered a 15% increase in SNAP (food stamp) benefits that have a huge impact in rural areas, reaching “2.9 million people in rural areas, including 800,000 children, reducing rural poverty by 11 percent and rural child poverty by 20 percent.” Biden’s USDA, over Republican objections, also put a billion dollars into rural food banks.

— Biden and Democrats “invested a historic $3 billion in the Department of Commerce’s (DOC) Economic Development Administration (EDA) to build local [rural] economies that are resilient to future economic shocks, including a $300 million Coal Communities Commitment.”

— Biden and Democrats — over GOP objections — expanded hunting and fishing opportunities on 2.1 million acres of public lands, the largest such expansion in U.S. history, and provided $1.5 billion in annual funding for wildlife and habitat conservation efforts. Another $2 billion went “for funding communities in the Rural Partners Network to spur job creation and build infrastructure.”

— They put $5 billion in “investments to help rural areas update infrastructure, boost high-speed internet access, and aid agricultural producers and small businesses in implementing climate-focused practices” and “$1.7 billion in funding to assist farmers, ranchers and foresters in adopting techniques to adapt to the changing climate, such as cover crops, nutrient management, and carbon storage.”

And that’s just the beginning: for a full list of the ways the Biden administration, over the objection of Republicans in Congress, has helped rural people click here.

Not one single Republican in either the House or the Senate voted for any of the things listed above: in fact, almost all voted against these helps to rural America.

Instead of concerning themselves with the well-being of rural people, they’re trying to block clean air standards that prevent rural communities from being poisoned, block clean water standards in rivers that supply water to rural communities, cut taxes on billionaires, and increase subsidies to the fossil fuel and banking industries.

All while taking huge campaign contributions, private jet rides, taxpayer funded junkets overseas, and the promise of million-dollar-a-year jobs when they leave Congress if only they vote the right way.

Because Republican politicians are more interested in feathering their own nests than helping out the people they were elected to represent, rural Red states are massively subsidized by urban Blue states just to keep their heads above water. As the Associated Press recently reported:

“Mississippi received $2.13 for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington in 2015, according to the Rockefeller study. West Virginia received $2.07, Kentucky got $1.90 and South Carolina got $1.71.

“Meanwhile, New Jersey received 74 cents in federal spending for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington. New York received 81 cents, Connecticut received 82 cents and Massachusetts received 83 cents.”

It’s undeniably true (and documented with each hotlink below) that Republican-controlled “Red” states, almost across the board, have higher rates of:

— Spousal abuse

— [Obesity — Smoking](https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/11/10/1994653/-Decades-of-Republican-Mismanagement-Have-Left-Red-States-Mired-in-the-Past-at-the-Bottom)

— Teen pregnancy

— Sexually transmitted diseases

— Abortion (at least before Dobbs; now it would be “forced births”)

— Bankruptcies and poverty

— Homicide and suicide

— Infant mortality

— Maternal mortality

— Forcible rape — Robbery and aggravated assault

— Dropouts from high school

— Divorce

— Contaminated air and water

— Opiate addiction and deaths

— Unskilled workers

— Parasitic infections

— Income and wealth inequality

— Covid deaths and unvaccinated people

— Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”)

— People on welfare

— Child poverty — Homelessness

— Spousal murder

— Unemployment

— Deaths from auto accidents

— People living on disability

— Gun deaths

So, why do Red state voters tolerate being conned and ripped off by their own elected representatives? Are they just stupid?

One theory is that “they hate the same people we hate.” And, indeed, for a significant and measurable cohort of rural white voters, racial fear and hatred is a primary motivating factor in their embrace of the GOP, although that’s only, according to this new book, about 20% of rural people.

Others vote Republican because the party has been so effective at branding itself with county fairs, NASCAR, country music, and the overall rural lifestyle including a faux paean to rugged individuality and independence.

Having over 1500 radio stations daily broadcasting a rightwing Republican message to literally every nook and cranny of rural America is another large factor. As is the dominance of Australian billionaire Lachlan Murdoch’s Fox “News.”

Will rural voters ever wake up to how badly they’re being screwed now and have been screwed by Republicans ever since Reagan started the whole neoliberal austerity and free trade movement that shipped over 60,000 factories and 20 million jobs overseas?

Or is the GOP’s cynical manipulation of religion, gender, and race enough to keep them voting to hurt themselves and further enrich Republican fat-cats?

So far, all indications seem like that’s the case and will stay that way for at least the next election cycle.

While the media struggles with trying to “understand” the rural white voter every election cycle, instead they should be running stories on how the very real problems and crises of rural America are daily made worse by Republicans in Congress and at the helm of their Red States.

How to break through?

Democrats need to get smart and start using the “negative partisanship” strategies Rachel Bitecofer recommends in her new book Hit 'Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game. They can do this by pointing out, with ad buys and media appearances, just how bad Red state Republicans politicians have been for rural people and their communities.

And they need to do it soon. As the authors of White Rural Rage point out:

“By 2040, 70% of Americans will reside in the 15 most populous states and choose 30 of the 100 US senators. Concentrated in smaller and more rural states, the remaining 30% of the population will elect 70 senators. No matter how distorted these population ratios become, each state is guaranteed its two senators — past, present, and forever.”

Our mainstream media have made it clear, for over 40 years, that they won’t expose the damage Republicans are doing to rural areas because their TV programs will fail if Republican politicians boycott them.

So, the job falls to us and the Democrats. Can we do it? I believe so; we just need to get started.

NOW READ:GOP Senators back away from MTG's 'ridiculous' speaker threat

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Trump complains it was 'ridiculous' he had to 'follow the laws' and leave office - Alternet.org

Dick Cheney blasts 'coward' Donald Trump in campaign ad for daughter Liz - Alternet.org

'Lying about the evidence in all caps': Liz Cheney shoots down Trump’s biggest Jan. 6 lies - Alternet.org

Liz Cheney sounds alarm on Trump: 'Cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution' - Alternet.org

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*Democracy Awakening - Notes on the State of America](

https://www.c-span.org/video/?531037-1/democracy-awakening-notes-state-america)*

Historian Heather Cox Richardson talked about past and present challenges to American democracy and her outlook on its future. Politics and Prose Bookstore and Sidwell Friends School in… book tv 2023

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11 23 an guk

right-wing election deniers are seeing consequences of their efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election by facing a slew of defamation lawsuits, The Guardian reports.}:

Per the report, "Defamation law has traditionally been sparingly used in the US, given the very high bar that plaintiffs have to meet. Under the 1964 supreme court ruling New York Times Co v Sullivan, they have to be able to show 'actual malice' on behalf of the accused.

Rachel Goodman, an attorney with non-partisan advocacy organization Protect Democracy, told The Guardian, said the group's legal action is about "accountability as a way of ensuring that our democracy can get back on track."

Currently, according to the report, Protect Democracy has five ongoing defamation suits "against individuals and outlets who propagated election denial, including ex-President Donald Trump lawyer and former New York mayor Giuliani, the Gateway Pundit and the beleaguered undercover video outfit Project Veritas," as well as conspiracy theorist Dinesh D'Souza, and failed Arizona GOP candidate Kari Lake.

The Guardian notes election denier and My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell also faces defamation suits from voting machine technology firms Dominion and Smartmatic.

Per the report, "The lawsuits are designed in part as a strategy of deterrence," as "those pressing the libel suits hope that anyone contemplating a renewed assault on next year's presidential election, in which Trump is once again likely to be the Republican candidate, will look at the potentially devastating costs and think twice."

Giuliani's trial — Protect Democracy's first in its series of defamation suits — is set to take place in federal court in Washington, DC on December 11.

"This is lawfare," Lindell told the Guardian. "Lawfare hasn't been used in our country since the late 1700s, and that's what they are doing."

READ MORE:Lawyers are ditching top Trump allies for not paying their bills: report

The right-wing conspiracy theorist argued, "I have a first amendment right. These defamation cases are damaging free speech – people are afraid to speak out, to come forward with anything."

Goodman emphasized in her interview that "the first amendment does not provide blanket protection for mendacity," saying, "It does not protect those who knowingly spread lies that destroy reputations and lives."

The lawyer added, "We aim to demonstrate that there is no immunity for spreading intentional and reckless lies. Ensuring accountability for intentional defamation is a crucial part of deterring election subversion from happening again in 2024."

:{*:{The Guardian's full report is here (subscription required).}:

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in a time of historic distrust in government, the United States Postal Service has accomplished something extraordinary: it remains a universally beloved federal agency. Second only to the Parks Service in public favorability (a jaw-dropping 77% approval rating, per Gallup), USPS is arguably also the most frequently-interacted-with component of the federal government: packages and letters are delivered to Americans’ mailboxes six days per week. But these warm feelings – already under threat by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s continued destructive leadership – could quickly chill if the Postal Board of Governors has its way.

At least four times per year, the Board (the governing body that votes on DeJoy’s agenda and has the sole power to fire him) holds an open session meeting, its sole formal contact with the public. In recent years, these meetings have concluded with a well-attended public comment period, where in-person and virtual attendees have excoriated DeJoy for embracing a privatization-friendly agenda. Just this year alone, public commenters at Board meetings have decried the mail slow downs and price hikes, demanded changes to DeJoy’s gas-guzzling and union-busting fleet plan, raised serious concerns about transparency of DeJoy’s facility consolidation plans, and pushed DeJoy to expand community services offered at the post office.

The future of the people’s most treasured public institution depends on public participation and feedback

But when the Postal Board of Governors met this week for their final open session of the year, there was one major difference from its previous quarterly meetings: virtual and remote public comments were, without explanation, banned. This abrupt new barrier to public accessibility led the number of public commenters – which in recent meetings has been a double-digit tally – to drop to 4. The decline in attendance was also likely compounded by an unexplained shift in the meeting time: whereas past meetings have been held at 4:00pm ET, Tuesday’s session was held at noon – the middle of the workday.

The Board’s decision to not allow virtual comments at the November 14th meeting follows another alarming recent attempt to suppress public input. At the August 2023 meeting, each public commenter was allotted only 25 seconds to speak, in sharp contrast to the typical 3 minute time limit. And past meetings were not beacons of accountability, either. The Postal Governors never responded to any comments raised by the public, and the comment period itself was always excluded from the official publicly available USPS recording of the formal session.

But next year, the Postal Board’s accountability problem will get even worse. During Tuesday’s meeting, Postal Board Deputy Secretary Lucy Trout explained, starting next year, the Postal Board will only hear public comments once per year in November. In other words, though the next three Postal Board meetings (February, May, and August 2024) are ostensibly “public sessions,” members of the public will have no opportunity to inform the Postal Board about their concerns until a year from now.

And it’s not as if postal workers, customers, and public advocates don’t have anything pressing to alert the Board about. On the contrary, DeJoy has continued to advance a destructive agenda that includes:

• Five successive postage rate increases, which have risked driving away business and failed to improve USPS financial standing, despite DeJoy’s promises.
• A 10-year stealth privatization plan that is being advanced with zero opportunities for public input and would increase delivery times, slash 50,000 jobs through attrition, and cut operations at more than 200 post offices and sorting facilities, which could devastate rural and Indigenous communities.
• A next-gen postal fleet contract with Oshkosh Defense that is nearly 40% gas-guzzler and 100% built with non-union scab labor. UAW workers from Oshkosh have regularly attended postal board meetings (including Tuesday’s) to call for an investigation into the company’s union avoidance scheme and for the Board to rebid a new, union-built contract.
• Failure to protect USPS staff from a dangerous summer heatwave that killed one postal worker, even after members of Congress urged improvements to the USPS heat safety protection plan and letter carriers alleged their managers were routinely falsifying safety documents.
• Refusal to support alternative revenue sources that could strengthen USPS, such as postal banking, grocery delivery, or electric vehicle charging stations.

President Biden has utterly failed to hold DeJoy to account for any of this, instead inviting him to White House stamp ceremonies and staying silent as the Postmaster General laughably reinvents himself as a “Biden ally” to credulous reporters. This is particularly egregious given the President’s power to nominate members of the Postal Board of Governors:

• Biden has inexplicably failed to name replacements for two Trump-appointed Governors – including DeJoy-supporting Democrat Lee Moak – whose terms expired last December. This has allowed Moak and his Republican colleague William Zollars to stay on the board for nearly a full year (their holdover terms will expire on December 8, 2023) and continue occupying seats that Biden has been statutorily allowed to fill.
  • The Save The Post Office coalition has endorsed former Congresswoman Brenda Lawrence and postal expert Sarah Anderson – two strong critics of DeJoy’s leadership with decades of actual postal experience and policy expertise – for these positions. Biden has yet to indicate he will nominate anyone to these vacancies.

• Though Biden has already nominated five of the Board’s nine governors (on paper, enough to fire DeJoy), at least two of his picks have been DeJoy backers: Democratic ex-GSA head Dan Tangherlini (who approved Trump’s lease of D.C.’s Old Post Office Building) and Republican Derek Kan (a former Mitch McConnell/Elaine Chao advisor). As I’ve written before, Biden’s choice to nominate Tangherlini and Kan (instead of two anti-Dejoy reformers) squandered a key opportunity to finally give the Board a pro-reform, anti-DeJoy majority.

The Postal Board’s restrictions on public comment are unacceptable. They must reverse course by allowing both in-person AND virtual public comments at ALL open sessions next year, and take further steps to improve accountability by responding to public comments and posting recorded comment sessions to the USPS website. Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration must publicly call out this shameful barrier to transparent government and fast-track filling the Moak and Zollars Postal Board seats with anti-DeJoy, pro-accountability reformers.

The future of the people’s most treasured public institution depends on public participation and feedback–that’s how public service works.

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Rick Santorum complains that "very sexy things like abortion and marijuana" were on the ballot in Ohio: "Pure democracies are not the way to run a country" | Media Matters for America

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ohio super maj and all const officers? recently passed law no election in aug, then 180 to jam thru prop to derail 700k sigs fall election.

2nd big midwest abortion loss after kansas

no lnx

Ohio’s GOP secretary of state brutally mocked after his amendment goes down in flames

Brad Reedand Raw Story August 09, 2023

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose put a lot of political capital on backing "Issue 1," a ballot initiative that would have raised the threshold for future ballot initiatives to succeed from 50 percent to 60 percent.

Voters in Ohio subsequently rejected the measure by 14 points -- but that didn't stop LaRose from issuing a defiant statement blaming out-of-state spending for the loss.

"We were dramatically outspent by dark money billionaires from California to New York, and the giant 'for sale' sign still hangs on Ohio's constitution," he complained. "Ohioans will see the devastating impact of this vote soon enough."

Many critics were quick to mock LaRose for his statement, including Rachel Petri, the campaign manager for Sen. Sherrod Brown, who wrote on Twitter that "you can't spell 'a loser' without 'LaRose.'"

Atlantic editor Ronald Brownstein, meanwhile, noted that LaRose's defiant statement didn't even mention the role that protecting abortion rights played in the amendment's defeat, which he said reflected Republicans' "uncertainty on how to handle abortion backlash."

Shannon Freshour, a Democrat who is running for Congress in Rep. Jim Jordan's (R-OH) district, celebrated the win and argued LaRose got exactly what he deserved.

"It's best to fight on the side of history, of democracy, of the people," she wrote. "Thankfully Ohio understands that."

Former Democratic Ohio candidate Paul Filippelli, meanwhile, mocked LaRose's suggestion that keeping the old ballot initiative process would put Ohio's state constitution at risk.

"Frank LaRose hates the Ohio Constitution and thinks it has a "for sale" sign on it because it... allows voters to make decisions about how our state is governed," he wrote.

And Tristan Rader, a progressive city councilman from Lakewood, Ohio, gave LaRose a sarcastic "thank you" for blowing his election.

"Thank you for your incompetent leadership on all the worst issues," he wrote. "Keep it up!"

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

GOP tries to keep abortion rights off ballot after major losses: 'Can’t win, so they cheat' ›

'Corrupt': OH Secretary of State admits proposal would avert abortion rights after denying for months ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose launches GOP Senate bid ›

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OMG evil crypto

https://www.alternet.org/gop-megadonor-citizen-ballot-initiatives/

https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/23/foundation-government-accountability-democracy

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no lnx

This GOP megadonor is funding efforts to 'derail citizen-led ballot initiatives': report

Alex HendersonJune 23, 2023

Over the years, Illinois-based shipping magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein have been major donors to the Republican Party. And these days, they have a preference for far-right MAGA candidates, including 2022 Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano (who lost by double digits to Democratic now-Gov. Josh Shapiro).

In 2023, The Guardian reports, Richard Uihlein has been a major funder of a Florida-based group known as theFoundation for Government Accountability (FGA) — who are trying to make it more difficult to get initiatives on ballots.

The Guardian's Brendan Fischer, in an article published June 23, reports, "These efforts are designed to derail citizen-led ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights, raise the minimum wage or expand Medicaid. In effect, FGA and its allies seek to give 41 percent of the voting population an effective veto over the wishes of the other 59 percent."

READ MORE: 'A stark illustration of our broken campaign finance system': Here's how rich mega-doners hacked US politics

Fischer notes that in "at least four states," FGA has "lobbied or testified in favor of changing ballot initiative rules to enshrine minority rule."

He then explains, "The latest fight is in Ohio, where Republican lawmakers last month passed a measure requiring future constitutional amendments to receive at least 60 percent support from voters — rather than a simple majority — and that would make it harder for proposed amendments to make it on to the ballot. Ohioans will now vote in August on whether to approve the higher thresholds…. FGA's tactics in Ohio echo those used previously — and unsuccessfully — in Arkansas and South Dakota."

In 2021, Fischer reports, FGA "issued a legal memo arguing for the constitutionality of a 60 percent requirement for enacting ballot initiatives, and a report decrying how voters in red states like Missouri, Oklahoma and Nebraska had approved Medicaid expansion through the ballot initiative process."

READ MORE: Appeals court dismisses GOP megadonor’s lawsuit against Beto O’Rourke: report

The Guardian's full report is available at this link.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Meet the billionaire Trump donor pushing for recall of Wisconsin’s governor over stay-at-home order after claiming 'the media is overblowing COVID-19' ›

GOP billionaire donor who funded Clarence Thomas’ lavish lifestyle also donated heavily to Sinema, Manchin ›

'You sort of just gasp': Clarence Thomas’ billionaire GOP donor hoards Hitler artifacts ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

How Richard Uihlein became one of the GOP's biggest megadonors ... ›

The Most Powerful Conservative Couple You've Never Heard Of ... ›

How the Uline Box Empire Has Fueled Election Denial — ProPublica ›

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no lnx

Florida group primarily funded by an Illinois billionaire is driving the recent attacks on direct democracy in states such as Ohio, Missouri, South Dakota and Arkansas.

The Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based group affiliated with the alliance of conservative thinktanks called the State Policy Network, has played a key role in recent efforts to raise the threshold for passing citizen ballot initiatives from a simple majority to a supermajority, and to make it harder to place measures on the ballot in the first place.

These efforts are designed to derail citizen-led ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights, raise the minimum wage or expand Medicaid. In effect, FGA and its allies seek to give 41% of the voting population an effective veto over the wishes of the other 59%.

In at least four states, FGA and its lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project, have lobbied or testified in favor of changing ballot initiative rules to enshrine minority rule, and in some cases have financed ballot committees advocating for those changes. FGA has also issued reports, legal memos, op-eds and polling that advocate for gutting direct democracy.

The latest fight is in Ohio, where Republican lawmakers last month passed a measure requiring future constitutional amendments to receive at least 60% support from voters – rather than a simple majority – and that would make it harder for proposed amendments to make it on to the ballot. Ohioans will now vote in August on whether to approve the higher thresholds.

The controversial plan is designed to derail an abortion rights initiative expected to be on the ballot in November.

Deuel Ross, center, plaintiff’s counsel in Allen v Milligan, speaks with members of the press after oral arguments outside the supreme court on 4 October 2022.]

‘Historic and significant’: key lawyer’s verdict on Alabama supreme court ruling

Read more

When Ohio Republicans first proposed the supermajority requirement last year, a representative of FGA’s lobbying arm was the only person who testified in favor. FGA’s lobbying arm again testified in support of the proposal earlier this year, in hearings before the House and Senate. FGA argued that the proposal was necessary to“make it more difficult for out of state billionaires and dark money groups” to change Ohio law.

As the measure moved through Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature, the Illinois billionaire Dick Uihlein gave $1.1m to the newly created “Save Our Constitution PAC”, which ran ads pressuring state lawmakers to support the measure; Uihlein is expected to contribute more as the August vote approaches.

A foundation controlled by Uihlein is also the largest known source of FGA’s funding, giving $17.6m since 2014. Uihlein has also been one of the key funders of election denial. Among other things, Uihlein has poured tens of millions into his “Restoration of America” network that promotes ludicrous election conspiracy theories and which created a controversial database that published voters’ personal information online in the name of uncovering election fraud. In the 2022 cycle, Dick Uihlein and his wife, Liz, were also top donors to election-denying candidates like the Pennsylvania gubernatorial hopeful Doug Mastriano and Nevada secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant.

FGA itself began to focus on “election integrity” in 2021, and boasted that it “achieved more than 70 election integrity policy wins across 19 states” last year.

FGA has also been promoting a supermajority requirement in Ohio and other states since at least 2021.

That year, FGA issued a legal memo arguing for the constitutionality of a 60% requirement for enacting ballot initiatives, and a report decrying how voters in red states like Missouri, Oklahoma and Nebraska had approved Medicaid expansion through the ballot initiative process. FGA and its lobbying arm also began testifying in support of state efforts to make it harder to enact ballot measures, andits in-house polling firm released Ohio polling showing voter support for a 60% threshold and for placing other restrictions on the initiative process.

FGA’s tactics in Ohio echo those used previously – and unsuccessfully – in Arkansas and South Dakota.

In Arkansas last year, FGA’s lobbying arm produced a fact sheet, an op-ed and social media posts advocating for Issue 2, which would have raised the ballot initiative threshold to 60%. As the billionaire-backed dark money group warned of “shady groups funded by billionaires you’ve never heard of” pushing ballot measures in Arkansas, it also gave $65,000 to the ballot committee advocating for the supermajority requirement. Arkansas voters defeated the measure by 19 percentage points.

In South Dakota, a representative of FGA’s lobbying arm testified in February 2021 in support of HJR 5003, which would require 60% approval for constitutional amendments. The legislation passed and was placed on the June 2022 ballot, with a goal of thwarting a Medicaid expansion initiative slated for the November 2022 ballot. FGA’s lobbying arm then gave $50,000 to the ballot committee advocating for the supermajority requirement – but voters rejected the measure by 35 points. Later that year, South Dakota voters approved Medicaid expansion.

FGA has also pressed Missouri lawmakers to create new hurdles for the initiative process.In 2021, FGA’s lobbying arm released polling claiming to show public support for “initiative integrity”, then sent a letter to Missouri legislative leadership arguing for a supermajority requirement and other changes to the initiative process. “Without reform,” the letter warned, “[o]ut-of-state billionaires will continue to pump millions of dollars to [promote] destructive, leftist policies like Medicaid expansion.” The group testified in support of Missouri HJR 22 that year, which would have created new requirements for putting measures on the ballot.

FGA’s lobbying arm would go on to testify in support offour different Missouri proposals to erect barriers to the ballot initiative process in 2022, and four more similar proposals this year. The Missouri house passed a measure to raise the initiative threshold, but it unexpectedly failed in the state senate.

This article was produced in partnership with Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project. Brendan Fischer is deputy executive director with Documented

LNX...

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YIKES SEE RED STATES 2 BILLS ON DARK MONEY, VOTER SUPPRESSION, PROPOSITION EG

https://readsludge.com**/2021/02/**25/red-state-assault-on-ballot-measures-threatens-direct-democracy/

sludge

in addition to an expansive push this year to restrict voting access, conservative lawmakers in at least 24 states want to make it more difficult for citizens to put initiatives on the ballot,according to a count from the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), a progressive nonprofit organization that supports ballot measure campaigns.

Voters across the country approved 39 citizen-initiated measures in 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic posed unique challenges for initiative proponents, particularly regarding signature collection for measures to qualify for the ballot. In several states, lawmakers sought court opinions on electronic signature gathering, delaying or halting initiative efforts ahead of the general election.

The increased use of citizen initiatives to enact popular policies including codifying voting rights and ballot access, expanding Medicaid, decriminalizing or legalizing marijuana, and increasing the minimum wage has state lawmakers—primarily in Republican-controlled legislatures—working to prevent their constituents from voting on policies many elected officials oppose.

“Since 2016, we’ve seen a direct ramp-up of strategy, and a number of bills introduced to create barriers to accessing the ballot measure process or to increase restrictions,” Corrine Rivera Fowler, policy and legal advocacy director for BISC, told Sludge.

This year, lawmakers in Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Mississippi, and several other states have introduced or are considering proposals to tighten statewide ballot measure laws. Most of the states where these bills have been proposed have legislatures controlled by Republicans.

The citizen initiative is a direct democracy reform born out of the Progressive Era in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to counter government corruption, corporate monopolies, and concentrated power. Populist movements in the Midwestern and Western states that had coalesced around farmer and worker rights led the charge to give the people this check on their government in the early 1900s.

South Dakota was the first state to enact the process, followed by Utah, Oregon and Illinois. In recent years, lawmakers in some of these same Midwestern and Western states have worked to expand barriers to the citizen initiative process using a variety of tactics including increasing signature collection requirements, restricting time allotted to collect signatures, enacting single-subject rules that leave measures open to court interpretation, and increasing the voter approval threshold from a simple majority to a minimum of 60 percent.

Over the last decade, conservative politicians have escalated their efforts to limit citizen participation in the democratic process, largely in response to constituents approving policies that lawmakers refuse to consider.

This year, state representatives in Arkansas, Arizona, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota introduced legislation that would raise the threshold for approval of ballot measures to three-fifths (60 percent), while Florida legislators hope to raise the bar to a 66 percent supermajority. Mississippi lawmakers have proposed a single-subject rule, and Republicans in Idaho, Utah and Virginia introduced other restrictive measures.

Idaho Lawmakers Respond with Restrictive Rules

Voters in Idaho approved a citizen-initiated ballot measure to expand Medicaid in 2018 with 62 percent of the vote. In every legislative session since, the Gem State’s most conservative lawmakers have proposed changes to the process, introducing more than a dozen legislative items since 2019.

Idaho already has one of the most restrictive ballot measure laws—in the more than 100 years since Idahoans gained the right to propose initiatives and referendums, only 37 measures made it to the ballot. Fewer have passed.

Following conservative education reform bills passed in 2011 by the Republican-controlled legislature, signed into law by Republican Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter and supported by Republican state schools Superintendent Tom Luna, teachers unions organized a successful effort to reject those laws via three citizen initiatives in 2012.

In 2013, GOP lawmakers wasted little time enacting legislation governing signature collection. Idaho’s current law reflects those changes, mandating petitioners gather signatures from 6 percent of qualified voters in 18 of the state’s 35 legislative districts.

On the heels of voters approving the Medicaid expansion initiative in 2018, Republican representatives again responded by further regulating the process with restrictions  including reducing time allotted for signature gathering, increasing the percentage of signatures needed in each district, and nearly doubling the total number of districts in which signatures would be required. That legislation, passed by the state GOP-led House and Senate, would have all but killed the citizen initiatives in the state were it not for Reclaim Idaho, a grassroots, volunteer-led organization behind the Medicaid expansion ballot measure. The group successfully launched a bipartisan campaign calling on Gov. Brad Little, a Republican, to veto the bill.

Professing his support for the restrictive reforms, Little “reluctantly vetoed” the legislation, citing potential legal action were he to approve it while issuing a transphobic statement warning of “the liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.”

This year, Idaho Senator Steve Vick, a Republican who has tweeted or retweeted election conspiracy theories, Covid-19 disinformation, and an invitation to supporters to “join me and 1,000,000 others” on the social media app Parler, a favorite of the GOP’s far-right, proposed new regulations for the state’s citizen initiative process. The State Affairs committee last week recommended passage, despite an outpouring of public testimony mostly against the restrictions.

“Let’s be clear: This bill is an attempt to make future grassroots initiatives virtually impossible,” Luke Mayville, co-founder of Reclaim Idaho, wrote in an op-ed published in newspapers around the state. Anticipating legislative approval of the measure despite public opposition, as was the case with the 2019 bill, Reclaim Idaho has once again launched a public awareness campaign urging Gov. Little to veto the bill.

Senator Vick’s proposal would amend the signature requirement from 6 percent of the qualified electors in 18 of the state’s 35 districts to 6 percent of electors in all 35 districts without increasing the timeframe for signature gathering. Additionally, SB 1110 has an emergency clause that would make the changes effective immediately, meaning it would directly impact initiative efforts for any upcoming elections.

“The bill is an unconstitutional restriction on the right of the people to control their government,” former Idaho attorney general and former state Supreme Court Justice Jim Jones, a Republican, wrote, following the committee’s approval of the bill. “After all, Article One of the Idaho Constitution solemnly proclaims that, ‘all political power is inherent in the people.’ It states that the people, ‘have the right to alter, reform or abolish’ the State government ‘whenever they may deem it necessary.’ How can the people possibly exercise that awesome power if they have to go through a power-hungry Legislature in every instance?”

Proponents of the measure—including the Idaho Farm Bureau, which advocated for the restrictive 2019 bill and against Medicaid expansion in 2018—argue rural voters are disenfranchised by the current process. But as Mayville pointed out, “Idaho’s Medicaid expansion initiative received signatures from all 44 counties. In fact, the entire campaign began in rural Bonner County and was bolstered by passionate teams of volunteers in rural communities across the state. The initiative received a majority of the vote in 35 of Idaho’s 44 counties, including dozens of rural counties.”

Mayville calls the current movement to restrict the initiative process a “red state assault” on direct democracy. Noting that conservative groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—to which Senator Vick and at least 14 other acting Idaho state lawmakers have ties—have long pushed for more restrictive initiative laws, Mayville said what unites lawmakers against direct democracy is a variety of issues, not necessarily a party ideology.

“When you look at it nationally… there are all kinds of motives,” Mayville told Sludge. Whether it be citizens organizing initiatives and voting to expand Medicaid, legalize cannabis, or enact a $15 minimum wage, “there is something of a unifying trend. When you look at ALEC and you look at all these organizations, the ballot initiative is scary for them because it threatens to undermine their legitimacy.”

Editorial boards from at least two of the state’s major news outlets have come out in opposition of Senator Vick’s bill, acknowledging the anticipatory nature of the proposed restrictions.

“At least part of the motivation behind this bill is the fear that Idahoans might vote to legalize medical or recreational marijuana by ballot initiative,” the Post Register’s editorial board wrote.

Idaho Senator C. Scott Grow, a Republican, introduced a resolution in January that would effectively preempt both the state legislature and citizens from legalizing via ballot measure adult-use recreational cannabis or any other drug not already legal in the state and approved by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA). Not surprisingly, Senator Grow introduced the 2019 bill that would have drastically increased barriers to the initiative process in the Gem State. Senator Grow’s anti-drug measure passed the Republican-controlled Senate this month. Pending House approval, the resolution will appear before voters in 2022 per Idaho law.

“It is understandable that lawmakers don’t want the legalization of marijuana,” the Post Register’s editorial board wrote. “But it is intolerable for them to declare that the people should have no choice in the matter.

“And thinking these restrictions would prevent legalization from landing on the ballot someday is foolish. Marijuana is now a large, profitable national industry,” the board continued. “The marijuana industry can afford to pay an army of signature gatherers to spread out over Clark County and gather the required 6 percent. These restrictions will primarily target grassroots, poorly funded campaigns—the exact sort of campaigns which the ballot initiative is meant to support.”

Citizens, Advocates Fight to Protect Direct Democracy

“This really comes from a place where the ballot measure is a tool for our liberation,” Rivera Fowler said.“Initiatives are the people’s tool to create immediate and impactful change in their own lives, especially when their own leaders are refusing to act on these policies.”

In recent history, ballot measures were used to counter civil rights laws, Rivera Fowler said.

“If you look back at the history of ballot measures, before 2012, there was about a 20-year period of conservative ballot measures and attacks to the progressive community, attacks to labor unions and worker rights, attacks to civil rights, LGBTQ rights, marriage equality, gender equality, racial equality, and taxes were all under attack,” she said.

But around 2010, progressive advocates began using the citizen initiative process to enact popular legislation lawmakers resisted.

“What we really like is that we’re seeing voters across all party lines and demographics voting for good policy at the ballot,” Rivera Fowler continued. “It’s not a partisan issue. It’s about making their lives better.”

Voters in Missouri approved Medicaid expansion in 2020, making the state the sixth to greenlight closing the “Medicaid gap” via citizen initiative. Between 1996 and 2020, state voters approved 25 of 27 ballot measures to increase minimum wage. As of 2020, 19 of the 35 states and Washington, D.C. that have legalized medical marijuana did so via ballot initiative.

“It’s clear to us that voters support good policy,” Rivera Fowler said. “We need to continue to protect ballot integrity, protect the ballot measure process by blocking bad legislation, and work to continue to run strong, bold progressive policy through ballot measures.”

Toward that end, Reclaim Idaho intends to pursue an education funding initiative similar to the one halted by the United States Supreme Court at the request of Gov. Little in 2020. Representatives in some states without initiative laws are looking to enact them as well. State legislatures in Hawaii, Kansas, New Jersey, South Carolina, Rhode Island and New York are considering granting their citizens the right to place measures before voters.

“It goes directly against democracy to diminish our power,” Rivera Fowler said. “And lawmakers are only showing their own colors by attempting to make the process harder to access. They’re really doing themselves a disservice because voters will respond.”

Idaho Senator Steve Vick did not respond to a request for comment regarding his proposed legislation.

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beyond suppression

bill allows gop guy to negate only biggest cty = dem; 2nd bill any cty?

https://www.alternet.org/republicans-texas-sweeping-power-grab/

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lil bit fashy? an raw 3 23

Texas-based gathering of the right-wing legal group the Federalist Society saw members pushing "radical new theories" about election laws — and possibly secession from the United States, reported POLITICO on Friday.

The Federalist Society -- which is best known for training an army of conservative lawyers for jobs on the federal bench, where they have undermined everything from abortion rights to labor laws to the basic ability of the civil service to pass rules -- was long a champion of "judicial restraint," as it was founded in an era when the judiciary was far more liberal than it is today.

Now, wrote, Ian Ward, their gathering for the National Student Symposium in Austin — an event that brought out Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to give a speech, the tables have turned — and it's "alarmingly clear" that attendees are more interested in using judicial power to overrule liberal democracy itself.

"'Democracy is what philosophers call an ‘essentially contested concept,’' said Daniel Lowenstein, a professor of law emeritus at UCLA and an expert in election law, during a panel on Friday evening. 'Differences that seem on their surface to concern the meaning of the word ‘democracy’,' he added, are actually struggles to advance particular and controversial political ideas,'" said the report. "What democracy does not mean, Lowenstein argued, was 'plebiscitary democracy,' or simple rule by democratic majorities. Citing the Federalist Papers — the namesake of the Federalist Society — Lowenstein suggested that governance based on simple mathematical majorities would enable 'tyrannical domination of the minority by the majority.'"

This rhetoric, explicitly rejecting the idea of the U.S. as a democracy, has grown more common in GOP circles, even being pushed by some Republican senators — and it obscures the fact that the U.S. electoral system is in fact the reverse, with the Senate's structure in particular letting a small minority dominate the majority.

Some attendees didn't stop at rejecting democracy, but rejected the idea of the United States as a country.

"Later on in the same panel, Joel Alicea, a law professor at the Catholic University of America, diagnosed the apparent threats facing American democracy today — political violence, abuses of governmental power, and attempted election subversion, to name a few — as symptoms of a deeper malaise," and threw in a jab at transgender rights, saying, “At this point in our society, we can’t even agree whether somebody is a man or a woman.” "Alicea advised the attendees to embrace conversion rather than coercion, but in the question-and-answer session after the panel, an audience member proposed a third option: a full-scale national divorce, of the sort recently proposed by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia."

In recent years, President Joe Biden has responded to the new flood of Federalist Society affiliated judges former President Donald Trump installed — who recently defeated a proposed ethics rule limiting their affiliation with the group while on the bench — by appointing another wave of more civil-rights oriented jurists in record numbers at a record pace.

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jan 6 bolosonaro //

https://www.alternet.org/american-insurrectionists-crossed-rubicon-history/

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an 11 22

This recent New York Times headline offers a perfect prospective epitaph for America's ailing democracy and its potential imminent demise: "Voters See Democracy in Peril, but Saving It Isn't a Priority."

The details are grim. Voters "overwhelmingly believe American democracy is under threat, but seem remarkably apathetic about that danger," with relatively few calling it "the nation's most pressing problem," according to a new poll conducted for the Times by Siena College. More than one-third of independent voters in the poll "said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election," because economic concerns were more urgent. While 71 percent of voters agreed that "democracy was at risk," only 7 percent said that was the country's most important problem.

The Times' analysis conformed to a depressing current of conventional wisdom, concluding that "for many Americans, this year's midterm elections will be largely defined by rising inflation and other economic woes," reflecting a deeply rooted "cynicism" about government. This particular portrait reinforces what political scientists and other experts have long known about voting and other political behavior in this country.

Most Americans are relatively unsophisticated in their understanding of politics and public policy, and tend to be disengaged on issues beyond the few that appear to be of immediate concern to them, their families or their communities, barring a national emergency or crisis that demands collective attention. But even that kind of increased salience does not necessarily translate into an accurate or factual understanding of the policies in question. For example, the COVID pandemic certainly became a major national issue, but also fueled widespread disinformation about vaccines and public health measures. The 2020 election transfixed the nation for weeks, but Donald Trump's Big Lie narrative about that election has not faded away.

There are exceptions. Because of their experience navigating the color line, the contradictions of American democracy and the country's long history of white supremacy and racism, Black Americans, as a group, often tend to be more sophisticated than white Americans in terms of political decision-making.

Most Americans are not ideological, meaning that they do not possess a coherent and consistent worldview that drives voting and other political behavior. In the aggregate, the American people tend to take their cues from trusted elites about how they should think about politics and what they should do about it. Partisanship and voting are proxies for other social identities, not independent of them.

It is often said that the American people are increasingly polarized on politics. That's true enough, but it fundamentally reflects how the political elites, opinion leaders, and a small percentage of highly politically engaged individuals drive mass behavior.

As the New York Times/Siena College poll and accompanying analysis reinforces, immediate financial concerns and judgments about the economy (aka "pocketbook issues") appear to influence political behavior for many Americans. But even this commonplace observation is more complicated than it appears. "The economy," as a political decision tool, is fraught with pitfalls and inconsistencies. In the aggregate, it may not even matter nearly as much in determining political decision-making as many experts and other observers have long assumed. Political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels make this intervention in their book "Democracy for Realists":

[I]t is by no means obvious that voters can ascertain how incumbents have performed simply by assessing changes in their own welfare. If jobs have been lost in a recession, something is wrong, but is that the president's fault? If it is not, then voting on the basis of good or bad economic conditions may be no more efficacious than killing the pharaoh when the Nile fails to flood or voting against Woodrow Wilson when sharks attack the Jersey shore…. Or, as Theodore Roosevelt put it while he coped with the Panic of 1907, "When the average man loses his money he is simply like a wounded snake and strikes right or left at anything, innocent or the reverse, that presents itself as conspicuous in his mind."

An even more fundamental problem is that voters may have great difficulty accurately assessing changes in their welfare — even with respect to national economic conditions, which are highly salient and carefully monitored by professional economists in and out of government.

Many Americans do not think systematically about politics, society or the economy and are not likely to make connections between an apparently abstract concept like "democracy" and the specific issues they care about. But it's also true that political elites, media commentators and other opinion leaders who claim to believe in democracy have failed to explain to a broad public audience how and why democracy has a substantive impact on the average person's daily life.

There is an even more cynical explanation: As a group, America's elites do not particularly want a well-informed and highly engaged public. Such a public might pose an effective challenge to the outsized power of those elites, and by doing so expose how far they have imposed their narrow set of interests on public policy. Here is Chris Hedges,in a recent essay republished at Salon:

The step from dysfunctional democracy to full-blown fascism was, and will again be, a small one. The hatred for the ruling class, embodied by the establishment Republican and Democratic parties, which have merged into one ruling party, is nearly universal. The public, battling inflation that is at a 40-year high and cost the average U.S. household an additional $717 a month in July alone, will increasingly see any political figure or political party willing to attack the traditional ruling elites as an ally. The more crude, irrational or vulgar the attack, the more the disenfranchised rejoice. These sentiments are true here and in Europe, where energy costs are expected to rise by as much as 80 percent this winter and an inflation rate of 10 percent is eating away at incomes.

The reconfiguration of society under neoliberalism to exclusively benefit the billionaire class, the slashing and privatization of public services, including schools, hospitals and utilities, along with deindustrialization, the profligate pouring of state funds and resources into the war industry, at the expense of the nation's infrastructure and social services, and the building of the world's largest prison system and militarization of police, have predictable results.

At the heart of the problem is a loss of faith in traditional forms of government and democratic solutions.

In a recent interview with me for Salon, social psychologist Shawn Rosenberg offered similar observations, saying that "the Achilles heel of democracy is that the people, meaning the citizenry, do not understand the larger political and governmental systemand its values," and are therefore "susceptible to a populist message." He mainly attributes this toAmerica's dysfunctional educational system, which has "failed to educate the public to understand complex questions of society and politics":

It's not that large parts of the American public are inherently evil or bad. It's just that when they look around at the world, they don't understand what's going on. They don't understand why it's so hard to solve some of these problems we're facing, why it's so hard to govern and why they're supposed to respect people who they believe are obviously wrong. ... Right-wing populism offers simple answers and simple solutions and simple characterizations of what the world is like. Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and other such Republican leaders are offering that vision and those answers.

Meanwhile, members of the media and political classes often make the error of generalizing from their own experience and knowledge to the public as a whole, leading to a whole range of incorrect assumptions, misguided conclusions and overall misunderstandings. Thus we get the perpetual of real or feigned shock and surprise from pundits, commentators and mainstream political leaders when faced with the Republican Party's fascist campaign against American democracy. Political scientist Jonathan Renshon addressed this in an interview with Politico last June:

Absolutely nothing is stopping elites from using the same public opinion data that academics or the public has access to, and yet we still see compelling evidence that elites misread public opinion, either because of stereotypes they hold about the public, over-weighting their own preferences, or unequal exposure to particular constituencies or special interests. As we saw in the 2020 presidential election campaign, it's also not unusual for politicians to discount or dismiss public opinion polls when they don't like the results. In a larger sense, this is not surprising: There are many domains in which access to more or more accurate information doesn't necessarily reduce the tendency for bias to creep into our judgments.

In total, the recent New York Times poll just offers further evidence that the American people may claim to be concerned about "democracy," but are fundamentally unclear as to the cause of the crisis and have no idea what to do about it. It's actually worse than that, in that many Americans don't even pretend to care about democracy and are more concerned about lower prices for gas and groceries — and have no problem trading away their rights and freedoms for the promise of ending inflation.

In a similarly dark vein, a new CBS News poll finds that 63 percent of likely Democratic voters believe that a functioning democracy is more important than a strong economy, but that those numbers are more than reversed among Republicans, 70 percent of whom rank a "strong economy" (whatever that means) above a functioning democracy.

It's not hyperbolic or metaphorical to describe those numbers as a textbook example of how democracy gradually, and then more swiftly, rots away and succumbs to fascism. The naive faith that "it can't happen here" is severely misplaced: It's happening here right now.

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yikes see also indep legis BS

an 10 22 me

a new analysis is highlighting the possibility of a disturbing outcome for the upcoming midterm elections. According to Newsweek, it is projected that election deniers could win approximately 189 races across the country.

"A previous investigation by The Washington Post found there are 291 Republicans 'election deniers' who have 'denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election' standing across the United States," the news outlet reported. "This constitutes more than half the total number of GOP candidates who are running for office."

"Out of the 291 Republican 'election deniers,' counting both Congressional and state races, it concluded that 171 are 'favored' to win, with another 48 running in 'close races.'"

READ MORE: Election deniers failed to hand Wisconsin to Trump — but paved the way for future GOP success

The news outlet's analysis goes on to project that "of the 48 in tight contests, 18 are more likely than not to win." The latest findings have led to heightened concerns about the possible door midterm elections could reopen for former President Donald Trump.

Reed Galen, the co-founder of The Lincoln Project, offered his opinion of what election-denier victories could mean for the former president.

Galen said, "Election deniers will destroy confidence in our democratic institutions because they don't care about the truth and are uninterested in governing."

"Their only purpose is to obtain power so they can reinstate Donald Trump as President in 2024 regardless of the outcome of the vote. If they take office, they will throw the idea of free and fair elections out the window to get the results they want."

READ MORE: Why Ron DeSantis is stumping for election deniers in key swing states: report

Gummer Ramer, who is affiliated with the Defend Democracy Together campaign, echoed similar sentiments. "Across the country, at all levels of government, election-denying candidates easily made their way through the primary," he said. "This is an indictment of the modern-day GOP."

"To win a Republican primary, you have to lie and promote conspiracy theories about the 2020 election," Ramer continued. "This constant sowing of distrust in election results is absolutely terrible for our democracy."

READ MORE: Election deniers and defenders poised for next voting war battle

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yikes

[[https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/05/ginni-and-clarence-thomas-steal-2024-election-coup.html

dahlia &

no lnx many

Clarence and Ginni Thomas Are Telling Us Exactly How the 2024 Coup Will Go Down

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK AND MARK JOSEPH STERN

MAY 23, 2022...

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an raw 10 22

A new survey shows Republicans are more likely than any other political group to reject the results of a losing election, and a veteran pollster expressed alarm at those findings.

The new poll conducted by Yahoo News and YouGov found just 43 percent of Republicans say political candidates who got fewer votes should concede their loss, compared to 74 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of independents, and Republican pollster Frank Luntz told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" those results were chilling.

"Scary as hell," Luntz said. "I'm here at the Conservative Party Conference [in the United Kingdom], trying to say to them, be very careful what you wish for, be very careful of what kind of campaign you hold because you could end up like the U.S."

"When you lose faith and trust in elections itself, you've lost your democracy," he added, "and we are so close to the edge. I'm sitting in a room with students from Radley College and have to teach them, I have to explain to them this isn't the way democracy is supposed to work, that you have winners and losers, you accept the loss and then you move on. We are so poisoned, we are so toxic, and I don't want what's going on in the U.S. to happen here in the U.K. That would be a real tragedy."

Watch video below or at this link.

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https://newrepublic.com/article/165984/10-people-destroying-democracy

Anne Nelson/April 18, 2022

10 People You’ve Never Heard of Who Are Destroying Democracy

They’re sowing disruption and disinformation, and they have their eyes on 2024.

Democracy in Peril

    [Will the Democrats Fight to Save Democracy?

    10 People You’ve Never Heard of Who Are Destroying Democracy

    The Six States That Could Determine Whether Republicans Steal the 2024 Election

    View All ]

In recent years, America’s democracy has faced countless challenges. Some seemed to materialize out of thin air, but many have been the fruit of secretive networks such as the 40-year-old Council for National Policy. Here are 10 individuals who have sown the seeds of disruption and disinformation—and who are setting their sights on the 2024 presidential election.

Larry Arnn

President, Hillsdale College

For decades, Michigan-based Hillsdale has served as an academic partner for the religious right. The college has had a close relationship to the Council for National Policy, the secretive Christian right umbrella organization that directs so much right-wing activism, through Arnn and his predecessor, George Roche III (who left in a cloud of scandal). Hillsdale’s major donors have constituted a who’s who of the radical right, including the Koch network and leading figures from the CNP. Arnn has expanded Hillsdale’s role as a platform for the CNP’s network of megadonors, fundamentalist activists, and media outlets, providing their policy prescriptions with a thin veneer of academic respectability. The college enrolls around 1,500 students, but its leaves an outsize footprint in political messaging. Its highly politicized publication Imprimis is sent to more than six million recipients. Hillsdale operates the Kirby Center in Washington, D.C., where it has groomed young conservatives at the Capitol Hill Staff Training School, run by the Leadership Institute (see Morton Blackwell, below). Hillsdale is also playing a role in the current disruption of public education, which has been used for political leverage in Virginia and beyond. In 2020, Donald Trump appointed Arnn chair of the 1776 Commission, to promote a “patriotic” rebuttal to the 1619 Project’s racially inclusive approach to U.S. history. Hillsdale has led an ongoing campaign to politicize public schools, promoting anti–critical race theory campaigns and assisting in the launch of “affiliate” charter schools in 11 states.

Joe Seales

CEO, Right Side Broadcasting Network

RSBN serves as the equivalent of a Trump-specific C-SPAN that has carried nearly every Trump speech, rally, and town hall since July 2015, as well as full coverage of the pro-Trump Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). It also broadcasts a show called The Right View, with Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump. On January 6, it livestreamed Trump’s speech inciting the march on the Capitol, and it gave live coverage to the Florida “Freedom Rally to Show Support for President Trump and January 6th Political Prisoners” a year later. In July 2021, RSBN was temporarily suspended by YouTube, but the network looked to its own app and the new pro-Trump platform Rumble to continue to carry Trump’s rallies. The radical right has been assiduously constructing a parallel media system in recent decades. RSBN, Rumble, and Trump’s new Truth Social platform complement other media initiatives, ranging from traditional fundamentalist broadcasters like American Family Radio to social sites like Gettr and Parler, in the ongoing construction of an alternate political reality for millions of followers. In March 2022, after the height of the Ottawa truckers’ protests, RSBN promoted a truckers’ convoy roundtable hosted by Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and it has offered ongoing amplification of Trump’s false election fraud claims. We can be sure that whatever Trump fabricates for future news cycles, RSBN will be repeating it.

Introductory offer: 50% off fearless reporting.

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Neil Patel

Co-founder and publisher of The Daily Caller

The Caller website was launched in 2010 by Patel and Tucker Carlson, his college roommate, with a $3 million investment from Patel’s fellow CNP member Foster Friess. (Carlson served as editor in chief until 2016 and left the publication in 2019, when Patel bought him out.) The site claims more than 20 million monthly readers, and the Daily Caller News Foundation licenses its content free of charge to almost 300 outlets. Patel has used the site as a platform for voices of the radical right, including Jason Kessler, the white supremacist who organized the Charlottesville rally, as well as climate denial and disinformation, such as a falsified “nude” photo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The site favors members of the CNP, including Supreme Court spouse Ginni Thomas (a Caller “special correspondent”) and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. The Daily Caller has recently launched a Facebook video platform called American Voices, with three million followers, that partners with media platforms of the religious right. It also boosts Carlson’s Fox News broadcasts. The Caller’s YouTube channel features additional Carlson content, comedy and sports programming, as well as regular attacks on Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, and CNN. It has given ample space to Trump’s false claims of election fraud, and positive coverage of voter suppression legislation.

Jenny Beth Martin

Co-founder and CEO, Tea Party Patriots

Martin launched the Tea Party Patriots in March 2009 in collaboration with Amy Kremer and Mark Meckler, with funding from FreedomWorks, a “grassroots service center” founded with Koch backing. The Tea Party Patriots spent the Obama administration organizing various “spontaneous” anti-government, anti-tax rallies. Martin, Meckler, and Kremer also joined the CNP; by 2020, Martin had risen to the executive committee and Meckler to the status of Gold Circle member. Martin’s Tea Party Patriots became the meeting ground for the secular Koch brothers and the Christian nationalist CNP. She became the go-to woman for organizing campaigns, including political canvassing and public protests. Martin was a key point person for the CNP in Trump’s reelection campaign. In April 2020, she organized “100 Business Executives” in support of Trump, along with fellow CNP members Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks and Lisa Nelson of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Trump acknowledged Martin by name in his speech before the CNP on the eve of the 2020 GOP convention. On November 4, 2020, Martin announced that her organization was going to hold “Protect the Vote” rallies in swing states. On December 30, she tweeted that she would be speaking at the January 6 Stop the Steal rally: “We must demand Congress to challenge the Electoral College votes and fight for President Trump!” (Martin was present at the rally, but didn’t end up speaking.) Most recently, Martin has spoken out in support of the Canadian truckers’ protest. “We are all truckers now,” she told The Hill in February.

Simone Gold

Founder, America’s Frontline Doctors

Gold was an emergency physician in Los Angeles who was tapped by the CNP leadership to serve as a point person for a massive Covid disinformation campaign. The plan was advanced on a conference call in May 2020, while the pandemic was first raging, and after Trump held his increasingly erratic press conferences that included CNP president William Walton and Trump aide Mercedes Schlapp. The goal was to use physicians to persuade the public that the economy could be opened up in time to benefit the Trump campaign. Gold began a series of appearances on media platforms run by CNP members, disparaging the idea that Covid was a “huge medical crisis,” pushing the false hydroxychloroquine “cure,” and attacking Anthony Fauci.

On July 27, 2020, Jenny Beth Martin introduced Gold and a dozen colleagues standing before the U.S. Supreme Court building, repeating a litany of falsehoods about the virus. Their statements, livestreamed by Breitbart News, quickly went viral, and the video was enthusiastically retweeted by Donald Trump. On January 6, Gold joined the mob that breached the Capitol. She was recorded in the Rotunda denouncing the Covid vaccine as “an experimental biological agent deceptively named a vaccine.” She was charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct (she pleaded guilty in March and will be sentenced in June). Over 2021, she appeared in a series of “Health and Freedom Conferences” across the country, sharing the bill with Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindell. In 2020, she set up a profitable online prescription service for bogus Covid “cures.”

Morton Blackwell

Founder and president, the Leadership Institute

Blackwell, Paul Weyrich, and Richard Viguerie were young Goldwater activists when they joined forces in the 1960s. Together, they helped to create a constellation of conservative groups, including the CNP umbrella organization and its partner CPAC. Blackwell took on the task of training future generations of right-wing political candidates and activists. His Leadership Institute, launched in 1979, claims that it has trained more than 200,000 people over its history, many of them in county- and state-level sessions in battleground districts. The courses include fundraising, speechwriting, social media, and candidate development. Graduates of the institute include Mike Pence, Representative Jim Jordan, and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe. The institute’s training is ongoing, especially in contested states. In 2021, the GOP, noting that it needed to net only five congressional districts to take the House, targeted 47 districts, five of them in Texas. That year, the Leadership Institute blanketed Texas, scheduling around 40 training workshops between March and November 2021—many months before the midterm elections. The national Democrats, in contrast, have tended to enter the state campaign arenas a few months or even weeks before the elections, offering minimal training on the ground, limited digital campaign tools, and poorly coordinated data. The institute’s menu of courses reflects the right’s current initiatives, including School Board Campaign Training and a School Board Activist Workshop.

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Cleta Mitchell

Attorney}:

Mitchell is a longtime member of the CNP board of governors. More recently, she appeared on panels at 2020 CNP meetings speaking on “Election Integrity: Securing the Ballot Box” and “Election Integrity: Action Steps.” Mitchell also serves on the board of directors of the Bradley Foundation, run by fellow CNP board member Richard Graber. Following Biden’s victory, Mitchell tweeted that the Georgia recount was “A FAKE!!!” She traveled to Georgia as a volunteer legal adviser for Trump’s campaign and helped to file a December 2020 lawsuit challenging the returns. According to The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow Jr., “On December 30, Mitchell wrote to [then–White House chief of staff] Mark Meadows and offered to send some 1,800 pages of documents purporting to support claims of election fraud.” On January 2, Mitchell took part in Trump’s infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, of whom Trump famously demanded, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” The call was leaked, and when Mitchell’s role was disclosed, she was obliged to resign from her position at the Foley & Lardner law firm. But Mitchell continues her work through her strategy sessions at the CNP, her board membership at the Bradley Foundation, her Apple podcast Who’s Counting?, and her November 2021 appointment to the Board of Advisors of the federal Election Assistance Commission, which certifies voting systems—including voting machines—and advises local officials on compliance with federal regulations.

Richard Graber

CEO, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

This Milwaukee foundation has assets of some $900 million. Graber is a member of the board of governors of the CNP, while CNP election strategist Cleta Mitchell is one of the foundation’s 11 board members. The Koch network and the DeVos family philanthropies may have received more attention, but the Bradley Foundation’s strategic, longtime focus on state-level politics has allowed it to make a major impact, using its home state of Wisconsin as a laboratory. In 2012 to 2013, the foundation spent more than $8 million on a network of groups promoting a right-to-work law also supported by then-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (a fellow CNP board member) and attacking Wisconsin trade unions. The resulting right-to-work law crippled the unions and contributed to Wisconsin’s shift from a Democratic to a swing state. In 2021, the Bradley Foundation earmarked $600,000 for the American Legislative Exchange Council’s voter management campaign software and other activities, bringing its ALEC contributions to $5.4 million over the previous decade. In 2020 and 2021, the foundation gave $200,000 to the Claremont Institute. Claremont has played a critical role in the radical right’s promotion of false claims of fraud and the efforts to rewrite voting laws in advance of the 2024 elections; John Eastman, who drafted the infamous six-point memo used by Trump to challenge the Electoral College on January 6, is a Claremont senior fellow. The foundation also contributed $300,000 to the Public Interest Legal Foundation (chaired by Cleta Mitchell) and $175,000 to the Heritage Foundation’s election law initiative, both of which promoted Trump’s false claims of fraud.

Lisa Nelson

CEO, American Legislative Exchange Council

Nelson came to ALEC in 2014 after previous stints on Newt Gingrich’s staff and at GOPAC, the Republican state and local political training organization. ALEC was co-founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, also a co-founder of the CNP. ALEC convenes corporate sponsors and Republican state legislators to “collaborate” on model bills—including legislation to oppose environmental regulation and gun control. In April 2020, The Washington Post reported that Nelson, Jenny Beth Martin, and Adam Brandon were leading an effort to organize a group of businesspeople to help Trump “jump-start” the economy in the depths of the Covid epidemic. Nelson continued her efforts over 2020 and doubled down after the Biden’s victory. From December 2 to 4, 2020, ALEC hosted a secret “process working group” for Republican state legislators, election commissioners, and attorneys to develop strategies on election oversight and redistricting. In July 2021, ALEC hosted and financed an “academy” under the rubric of the “Honest Elections Project” in conjunction with its annual meeting, with panels featuring Cleta Mitchell and other CNP strategists. Nelson offered a preview of their project to rewrite election laws at the CNP’s May 2021 meeting: “We’ve been targeting our efforts on those states that have had issues—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Florida to a certain degree.” Currently, Republicans control 30 state legislatures, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. If successfully implemented, the independent state legislature initiative could determine the outcome of the 2024 elections, regardless of the popular vote.

Daniel J. Schultz

Attorney and founder, Precinct Strategy

Schultz was an early proponent of the idea that Republican-controlled legislatures could overturn election results—later promoted as the “independent state legislature doctrine.” In some interpretations, Republican-controlled state legislatures could nullify the popular vote and send their own electors to put Trump in office. The key to his strategy? Purging from the Republican Party inconveniently ethical officials like Brad Raffensperger, starting at the precinct level. “We can take over the party if we invade it,” Schultz told Steve Bannon on his podcast in February 2021. Over the following months, there was a surge in candidates for precinct chairman positions across the country. Schultz has pointed to the strategy’s success in Arizona as a model. ProPublica reported that in one Maricopa district, the precinct roster grew by 63 percent in less than six months. Schultz’s website asks: “Can we get 3/10 of 1% of the 74 M Trump America Firsters to Become Republican Precinct Committeemen? To TAKE OVER The Republican Party? To Save the Republic?” He points out that precinct committeemen are the ones who elect the state party leaders and are the only ones who can vote to endorse primary candidates; in some states, they are the only ones who can nominate candidates to fill vacancies in state legislatures. The logic is that full slates of pro-Trump precinct chairs could guarantee pro-Trump candidates on the Republican state-level ballots in 2022, who could be activated to enact the independent state legislature doctrine in 2024—subject to judicial review. Donald Trump approves. On February 27, 2022, he issued a statement endorsing ­Schultz’s project.

Anne Nelson @anelsona

Anne Nelson is the author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. She has taught at Columbia University for over 20 years and is currently a research scholar at Columbia’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.

Read More: Magazine, May 2022, Politics, The Soapbox, Feature, Democracy, January 6, Republican Party, Donald Trump, Right Wing Extremism

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/magazine/arizona-republicans-democracy.html

terry gross no lnx

The Arizona Republican Party’s Anti-Democracy Experiment

First, it turned against the establishment. Now it has set its sights on democracy — the principles, the process and even the word itself.

A primary eve rally in Phoenix featuring onstage, from left, the former Trump official Richard Grenell, the gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, the state attorney general candidate Abraham Hamadeh and the U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters.Credit...Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times]

By Robert Draper

Aug. 15, 2022

R​​ose Sperry, a state committeewoman for Arizona’s G.O.P., answered immediately when I asked her to name the first Republican leader she admired. “I grew up during the time thatJoe McCarthywas doing his talking,” Sperry, an energetic 81-year-old, said of the Wisconsin senator who in the 1950s infamously claimed Communists had infiltrated the federal government. “I was young, but I was listening. If he were here today, I would say, ‘Get him in there as president!’”

Sperry is part of a grass-roots movement that has pushed her state’s party far to the right in less than a decade. She had driven 37 miles the morning of July 16, from her home in the Northern Arizona town Cottonwood to the outskirts of Prescott, to attend the monthly meeting of a local conservative group called the Lions of Liberty, who, according to the group’s website, “are determined to correct the course of our country, which has been hijacked and undermined by global elites, communists, leftists, deep state bureaucrats and fake news.” That dismal view of America today was echoed by nearly every other conservative voter and group I encountered across the state over the past year.

Arizona has become a bellwether for the rest of the nation, and not just because of its new status as a swing state and the first of these to be called for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. It was and has continued to be the nexus of efforts by former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies to overturn the 2020 election results. At the same time, party figures from Trump down to Rose Sperry have sought to blacklist every Arizona G.O.P. official who maintained that the election was fairly won — from Gov. Doug Ducey to Rusty Bowers, speaker of the state’s House of Representatives. Such leaders have been condemned as RINOs, or Republicans in name only, today’s equivalent of the McCarthy era’s “fellow travelers.”

The aggressive takeover of the Arizona G.O.P. by its far-right wing was made manifest on primary night earlier this month, when a slate of Trump-endorsed candidates — the gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, the U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters, the state attorney general candidate Abraham Hamadeh and the secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem — all prevailed. As a group, they maintain that the 2020 election was stolen, have promoted conspiracy theories about Covid and have vowed to protect Arizona’s schools from gender ideology, critical race theory and what McCarthyites denounced 70 years ago as “godless communism.”

They have cast the 2022 election as not just history-defining but potentially civilization-ending. As Lake told a large crowd in downtown Phoenix the night before the primary: “It is not just a battle between Republicans and Democrats. This is a battle between freedom and tyranny, between authoritarianism and liberty and between good and evil.” A week later, in response to the F.B.I.’s executing a search warrant at Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, Lake posted a statement on Twitter: “These tyrants will stop at nothing to silence the Patriots who are working hard to save America.” She added, “America — dark days lie ahead for us.” Far from offering an outlier’s view, Lake was articulating the dire stance shared by numerous other Republicans on the primary ballot and by the reactionary grass-roots activists who have swept them into power.

Whether that viewpoint is politically viable in a swing state is another question. Arizona’s two U.S. senators, Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema, are both Democrats. The tissue-thin Republican majorities in Arizona’s State Legislature — 31 to 29 in the House, 16 to 14 in the Senate — are the most precarious the G.O.P. has experienced in over a quarter-century as the ruling party. And, of course, Trump lost Arizona in 2020, in large part by alienating the college-educated suburbanites who have relocated to the Phoenix metropolitan area of Maricopa County in increasing numbers.

Arizona has thus become what the state’s well-regarded pollster Mike Noble characterizes as “magenta, the lightest state of red.” In the face of this shift, the state’s G.O.P. has aggressively declined to moderate itself. Instead, it has endeavored to cast out some of its best-known political figures. Last year, it censured its sitting governor, Doug Ducey; its former U.S. senator Jeff Flake; and Cindy McCain, the widow of the U.S. senator and 2008 G.O.P. presidential nominee John McCain, arguably the state party’s second-most-famous elected official, after Barry Goldwater.

In the weeks leading up to its Aug. 2 primary, and now as it turns toward the general election in November, Arizona has presented an American case study in how backlash to demographic and social change can cause a political party to turn on itself,even at its own electoral peril. “The fact that so much energy is being spent RINO-slaying and not beating Democrats is not a healthy place for our party to be in the long run,” one political consultant who works in multiple Western states including Arizona (and who requested anonymity to not alienate current and potential clients) observed fretfully.

When I recently spoke by phone with the state G.O.P.’s chairwoman, Kelli Ward, and shared this consultant’s concern, she offered a defiant laugh. “That’s the same argument that they’ve been making again and again and again, decade after decade,” Ward told me. “And they deliver us these spineless weaklings who cave in like rusty lawn chairs at the snap of a Democrat’s finger. I’m sick of it, and the people are sick of it.” A day after we spoke, Ward announced on Twitter that party officials had voted to censure yet another of their own: Bowers, the sitting House speaker, one of the few state Republican leaders who had remained steadfast in publicly saying that Trump lost Arizona fair and square, and had recently testified to the Jan. 6 House committee that vengeful opponents had driven a van through his neighborhood with a video screen calling him a pedophile. Bowers, Ward proclaimed in her tweet, “is no longer a Republican in good standing & we call on Republicans to replace him at the ballot box in the August primary.” (Bowers was defeated.)

But there is more at stake than the health of the Republican Party when its core activists, as well as a growing number of officials and those campaigning for governmental positions, openly espouse hostility not just to democratic principles but, increasingly, to the word “democracy” itself. It has long been a talking point on the right — from a chant at the 1964 Republican convention where Goldwater became the G.O.P. nominee to a set of tweets in 2020 by Senator Mike Lee of Utah — that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. The idea, embodied by the Electoral College’s primacy over the popular vote in presidential elections, is that the founders specifically rejected direct popular sovereignty in favor of a representative system in which the governing authorities are states and districts, not individual voters. But until very recently, democracy has been championed on the right: President George W. Bush, a subject of two books I’ve written, famously promoted democracy worldwide (albeit through military aggression that arguably undermined his cause). For that matter, in Trump’s speech at the rally on Jan. 6, he invoked the word “democracy” no fewer than four times, framing the attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a last-ditch effort to “save our democracy.”

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What is different now is the use of “democracy” as a kind of shorthand and even a slur for Democrats themselves, for the left and all the positions espoused by the left, for hordes of would-be but surely unqualified or even illegal voters who are fundamentally anti-American and must be opposed and stopped at all costs. That anti-democracy and anti-“democracy” sentiment, repeatedly voiced over the course of my travels through Arizona, is distinct from anything I have encountered in over two decades of covering conservative politics.

It’s the failure to reinstall a legitimately defeated president, under the misguided belief that victory was stolen from him, that seems to have ushered in the view among Arizona Republicans — and many more across the nation — that democracy itself was at fault and had been weaponized by the political left, or the “enemies from within,” as McCarthy once put it. As it happened, Rose Sperry wasn’t the first person to invoke the Wisconsin senator at the Lions of Liberty event. “I had a weird dream last night about Joseph McCarthy,” said one of the morning’s featured speakers, Jim Arroyo, the head of Arizona’s biggest chapter of the Oath Keepers, a far-right paramilitary group made up largely of current and former members of the armed forces and law enforcement. McCarthy, he said, “was not only right — he understated the seriousness of it.”

Arroyo’s eschatological rhetoric was echoed by the down-ballot Republican candidates who spoke to the group. One of them was Selina Bliss, a precinct committeewoman and nursing teacher at Yavapai College who was running for a State House seat. (On Aug. 2, she was defeated by the G.O.P. incumbent, Quang Nguyen, who earlier this year authored legislation, later signed into law, requiring that Arizona high school students receive anti-Communist civics instruction.) Bliss reminded her friends and neighbors that they belonged to a thriving activist movement: “We Republicans, we conservatives, we’re the grass roots, we come from the bottom up.”

Image Blake Masters, in white shirt, outside a campaign rally in Tucson, Ariz., in July.]

But after the seeming paean to political participation, she took a turn. “I want to address something that’s bugging me for a long time,” Bliss said. “And that’s the history and the sacredness of our Constitution and what our founding fathers meant.” She then said: “We are a constitutional republic. We are not a democracy. Nowhere in the Constitution does it use the word ‘democracy.’ When I hear the word ‘democracy,’ I think of the democracy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That’s not us.”

It once would have been jarring to hear a candidate for state legislative office ignore the usual parochial issues — property taxes, water access, state funding for universities — and instead repudiate the very idea of democracy in America. But Bliss’s view was hardly out of place here. Sperry, the activist sitting in the audience, had posted on Facebook a few months before: “Please strike the word democracy from your vocabulary! WE ARE A REPUBLIC!!!”

The Republican activities across Arizona before its primary could have been mistaken, at first glance, for a collective celebration of democracy rather than a threat to it. Rows of yard signs, nearly all of them for G.O.P. candidates, stretched along highways from Maricopa County to the northern conservative strongholds of Mohave and Yavapai Counties. Candidate meet-and-greets, held in coffee shops and strip malls and V.F.W. halls, were hosted by activist groups like the Granite Mountain Republican Women and United Patriots AZ. Among the candidates, the closest thing to an entrenched party war horse was two six-term congressmen from the 2010 Tea Party class, Paul Gosar and David Schweikert, each of whom were now, because of redistricting, having to sell themselves to voters in newly drawn but still red districts. (Both incumbents won.) Otherwise, the field was replete with political novices, suggestive of what Selina Bliss, at the Lions of Liberty meeting, referred to as a seeming “bottom up” democratization of the Republican Party.

But most of the G.O.P. candidates seemed to share Bliss’s fears of majority rule as well as a desire to inflict harsh punishment on those they perceive as threats, deviants and un-American. Possibly the most notorious Arizona Republican to appear on the primary ballot wasState Senator Wendy Rogers. She was censured in March by her fellow state senators for telling a white-nationalist group, referring to state and federal officials who had enacted Covid vaccine mandates, “If we try some of these high-level criminals, convict them and use a newly built set of gallows, it’ll make an example of these traitors who betrayed our country.”

Yet Rogers would go on to win her primary, easily defeating a fellow G.O.P. state senator, Kelly Townsend, whose communications with Trump lawyers have been subpoenaed by the F.B.I., presumably for information she might have about the plot by Trump allies to replace Arizona’s legitimate electors with fake ones. No moderate herself, Townsend recently vowed that vigilantes at primary polling stations would monitor voters they deemed suspicious: “We’re going to have people parked out there watching you, and they’re going to follow you to your car and get your license plate.”

The leading name in this new Republican wave is that of Lake, the gubernatorial candidate, who was a well-known personality on Phoenix’s Fox affiliate for over two decades. At a Trump rally in Arizona I attended in January, she called for the arrest of illegal border-crossers and also of Dr. Anthony Fauci for unspecified Covid-related offenses, as well as unspecified conspirators “in that corrupt, shady, shoddy election of 2020.” To this litany of suspected criminals, Lake has also added teachers. “Put cameras in the classroom,” she told the Arizona conservative talk-radio host Garret Lewis last November, arguing that parents should have access to video evidence of “something being taught in the classroom” that they might deem objectionable.

Lake neatly if hyperbolically described the Arizona G.O.P.’s us-versus-them outlook on Twitter in June: “They kicked God out of schools and welcomed the Drag Queens. They took down our Flag and replaced it with a rainbow. They seek to disarm Americans and militarize our Enemies. Let’s bring back the basics: God, Guns & Glory.” On her campaign website, Lake describes the media — her former profession — as “corrupt” and “the enemy of the people.” A campaign video displays her bashing televisions to bits with a sledgehammer and a baseball bat. At a rally the night before the primary, she directed her audience to turn around and “show these bastards” — referring to the camera crews positioned on a riser — their disapproval, which they proceeded to do with loud jeers.

Lake has said she decided to leave journalism in 2021 because of disenchantment with the news media’s liberal bias. In fact, Lake herself donated to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008. A decade later, Lake’s preference had changed. She visited the White House in June 2019 to do a story for the local Fox affiliate on Stephanie Grisham, who years before served as the press secretary for the Arizona House Majority Caucusand who had just been named communications director for the first lady, Melania Trump. “What got me was how much of a fangirl for Donald Trump she was,” Grisham told me. “When she got there, she was absolutely gushing about him. I remember thinking, Even for Fox, this is a bit much.”

Trump endorsed Lake last September, a few hours after she wrote on Twitter that the likeness of the former president should be chiseled into Mount Rushmore. Trump also endorsed Blake Masters, now the Arizona Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate against the incumbent Democrat, Mark Kelly. Masters, the 36-year-old former C.O.O. of Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, embraces the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. “If you say as a candidate, ‘Obviously, the Democrats, they hope to just change the demographics of our country, they hope to import an entirely new electorate,’ they call you a bigot,” he told Rob Hephner, who goes by Birdman, on the “Patriot Edition” podcast in April. Such views are in alignment with those of Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, who gave Masters his “forceful endorsement.” (Masters rejected the endorsement.) The campaign yard signs for Masters that I saw festooning Arizona’s highways bore pledges like “Blake Masters Will Prosecute Fauci” and “Blake Masters Won’t Ask Your Pronouns.”

Trump’s interest in Arizona officeseekers like Masters and Lake is anything but casual. For nearly two years running, he has repeatedly cited both his continuing desire to overturn the 2020 presidential election and Arizona’s centrality to that effort. At a rally in Prescott Valley on July 22,Trump spoke glowingly of the G.O.P. state chairwoman, Kelli Ward — “she’s winning so much.” Ward has championed the State Senate’s election audit of Maricopa County, calling it “America’s Audit.” (Arizona election officials had already conducted a succession of recounts and audits before this one by an outfit called Cyber Ninjas, headed by a conservative election denier named Doug Logan, which found in the end that Biden had won 99 more votes and Trump 261 fewer than originally recorded.)

A primary eve rally in Phoenix, in August.

The most telling among Trump’s Arizona endorsements is that of the secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, whom Trump has described in an official statement as “a true warrior” who took an “incredibly powerful stance on the Massive Voter Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election Scam.” Indeed, Finchem, as a state representative, was one of Arizona’s first public officials to baselessly claim that the state’s voting machines had been corrupted in Biden’s favor. At a candidate forum I attended in mid-July, Finchem disclosed to the audience that he had charged $5,000 to his personalAmerican Express card to rent out a Phoenix hotel conference room where, on Nov. 30, 2020,he and Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani staged a multihour presentation to Finchem’s fellow state legislators of supposed fraud in Arizona, even as state officials were certifying the election for Biden a few miles away. As secretary of state, Finchem would be Arizona’s top election official during a potential rematch of Trump and Biden in 2024 and could work to invalidate the results, which the current secretary of state, the Democrat Katie Hobbs, now running for governor, refused to do in 2020.

The enmeshment of Finchem and other Arizona Republicans in the tumultuous final weeks of Trump’s presidency is remarkable in its depth and complexity. On Nov. 4, 2020, the day after the election, Representative Paul Gosar conceived the first protest of the results anywhere in the United States, marching to the Maricopa County recorder’s office in Phoenix, where the ballots were still being tallied. Joining Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell in a postelection lawsuit seeking to invalidate Arizona’s results, on the factually unsupported grounds that “old-fashioned 19th-century ballot stuffing” had occurred there, was the Phoenix lawyer Alexander Kolodin, who on primary night won a seat in the State Legislature (no Democrat will oppose him in the general election). As the flurry of Arizona lawsuits failed one by one, the state’s G.O.P. chairwoman, Ward — who had also filed an unsuccessful election lawsuit — maintained a weekslong pressure campaign against the Republican-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to throw out the results, saying in one ominous text message (among many that were obtained by The Arizona Republic), “I know you don’t want to be remembered as the guy who led the charge to certify a fraudulent election.”

Two weeks after the Nov. 30 election-fraud hearing convened by Finchem and Giuliani, while state officials were certifying the Arizona results, the official state G.O.P. Twitter account posted a video of Ward and 10 other Republicans signing documents falsely proclaiming themselves to be the state’s electors and declaring the election results illegitimate. Among the phony electors were three Republicans who would later appear on the 2022 primary ballot: the U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon and the State Senate candidates Anthony Kern and Jake Hoffman. (Lamon was defeated by Masters; Kern and Hoffman won.) This fake-elector scheme had been in the works for over a month and involved Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who in emails obtained by The Washington Post urged two Arizona lawmakers, Speaker Rusty Bowers and State Representative Shawnna Bolick, to “take action to ensure that a clean slate of electors is chosen.”

When that maneuver also failed to bear fruit, several Arizona Republicans joined with Trump in attempting a final desperate postelection measure. On Dec. 21, 2020, Gosar and his fellow Arizona congressman Andy Biggs, then the head of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, were among a group of G.O.P. House members who met with Trump in the White House to discuss actions including calling on Vice President Mike Pence to decertify the election results unilaterally.Two weeks later, on Jan. 5, 2021, 16 Arizona legislators — Bolick, Kern and Finchem among them — signed a letter to Pence that was also signed by Republican legislators in four other contested states, urging him to delay certifying the election results for 10 days. Pence refused to do so, and on Jan. 6, Kern and Finchem were among the Arizonans who descended on the Capitol. Finchem photographed the riotous mob and posted it on Twitter with the caption, “What happens when the People feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud.”

As a result of their involvement in Trump’s efforts to steal back the presidency, Finchem, Ward, Biggs and other Arizona Republicans have been issued subpoenas by the Jan. 6 committee. (Though Ward taunted Democrats last year for their resistance to the State Senate audit in Arizona — “What are they hiding?” she demanded at the time — she has since sued to block the committee from obtaining her cellphone records.) Back home in Arizona, however, they have faced no reprisals within their party. Far from it: Their willingness to assist Trump in overturning the 2020 election was rewarded across the boards on primary night.

There was no mystery as to why. According to a state survey of Arizona voters last year, 61 percent of Republicans believed the 2020 election “was stolen from President Trump.” Perhaps not by coincidence, the G.O.P. primary candidates who spoke the most vociferously about fraud in the 2020 elections were those like Kari Lake and Blake Masters, who were not in Trump’s trenches back then and now had to work overtime to prove themselves fit for combat against the enemy.

“We are a Wild West state,” Lake proudly declared to a cheering audience at the Trump rally I attended in January. She was saluting her state’s undomesticated spirit and distinguishing it from what she termed the “socialist garbage” prevalent in California. Much like Texans, residents of the last contiguous state to enter the Union have long evinced a certain pride in their nearly uninhabitable territory, insofar as doing so confers a toughness that their effete neighbors to the west may lack. Lake was no doubt also nodding to the worrisome demographic reality that some 60,000 Californians relocated to Arizona in 2020. What some activists on the right derisively refer to as the looming “Californication” of Arizona — high taxes, increased gun restrictions and liberalization of social values — ranks high on the list of existential anxieties among the state’s conservatives. “They don’t win with their ideas,” Lake said of progressives to her supporters the night before the primary, “because their ideas are what sunk California.”

Roughly 39 percent of Arizona’s land is federally owned. The local hostility to government control, combined with the sense of rough-hewn independence fostered by its desert climate, has meant that conservatism in Arizona has long possessed an extremist underbelly. One former longtime state G.O.P. operative brought up the congressional district long represented by Gosar, which includes most of Mohave and Yavapai Counties, two of the two most conservative in Arizona. (The home page for the Mohave County G.O.P. contains the banner headline, “Protecting Our Republic ... One Voter at a Time.” The Yavapai County G.O.P.’s website includes links to the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast as well as to the Gateway Pundit website, which has been banned on Twitter and demonetized by Google for promoting ludicrous conspiracy theories.) “These are the ranchers of the West,” the former operative told me. “They literally will meet you with a gun at their door if you try to say hello. It makes canvassing very difficult.” This person noted that Kingman, a town in Mohave County, was where Timothy McVeigh spent several months discussing with fellow extremists his plans to bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. As the former operative told me, “This is the part of the country where they believe Timothy McVeigh was right.”

Other political observers in Arizona point to Gov. Evan Mecham, elected in 1986 and impeached and removed from office only 15 months into his term (for obstruction of justice and misusing public funds to prop up his ailing auto dealership), as an early sign of a far-right base that Trump would later exploit. Mecham, who rescinded the state holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. while blaming America’s high divorce rate on women’s entering the labor force, vowed to his death that his political career had been undone by a vast conspiracy.

The bridge between Mecham and Trump would prove to be Joe Arpaio, who took office as Maricopa County sheriff in 1993, five years after Mecham’s removal, and stepped down in 2017 after losing his latest re-election bid. Styling himself as “America’s toughest sheriff,” Arpaio achieved notoriety for his barbaric attitude toward county inmates before later refashioning himself as Arizona’s foremost proponent of strict border-enforcement measures and, later still, as a pioneer of the “birther” conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born outside the United States. Arpaio became an early spokesman for candidateTrump, who as president would pardon Arpaio after he was found guilty of contempt of court. Arpaio, now 90, was also on the ballot for the Aug. 2 primary, barely losing a campaign to be mayor of Fountain Hills, an affluent town in Maricopa County with a population of some 24,000.

Of course, Arizona’s dominant modern-day political figures — the Democrats Carl Hayden and Morris Udall, the Republicans Goldwater and McCain — have shaped the state and its national standing in ways that Arpaio and Mecham never could. But it’s also the case that McCain, the state’s most powerful Republican for the past quarter-century, commanded as much distrust as he did allegiance from the grass roots. Conservative Christians in Arizona did not readily forgive McCain for denouncing Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance” during his first presidential run in 2000. McCain’s partnership with the Democrat Ted Kennedy to reform the nation’s immigration system in 2006 further alienated his conservative constituents. Another grudge was the senator’s opposition to a 2014 Arizona bill that would permit businesses to deny service to gay customers on religious grounds, insisting that in Arizona, “We welcome all people of all persuasions.”

That year, despite McCain’s status as a war hero, the Arizona G.O.P. censured him “for his continued disservice to our state and nation,” in essence accusing its best-known Republican — and the 2008 G.O.P. presidential candidate — of being a RINO. Following the censure, several McCain associates set up a political action committee called Arizona Grassroots Action and aggressively filled vacant precinct committee seats with loyalists, who in turn voted for like-minded party chairs.

Among the precinct committeemen who continued to view McCain with disfavor was a libertarian-leaning engineering technology professor at Mesa Community College named Joe Neglia. In 2012, Neglia attended the state party convention and watched with chagrin as the Republican establishment used delay tactics to deprive Ron Paul of any delegates and ensure victory for the presidential nominee Mitt Romney. “It was a day that really changed my life,” he told me in mid-July over breakfast in Tempe. “Because I thought: This can’t possibly be right. This can’t possibly happen.”

Neglia began to catalog the means by which the party establishment maintained the upper hand: how, in 2015, they brought in busloads of McCain supporters to a party meeting so that the senator would not be greeted entirely by boos; how, in 2016, they invoked an obscure rule to shut down an “Endorse Anyone but McCain” resolution. “That’s when I started studying to become a parliamentarian,” Neglia told me. “Now I’ve got the RINOs running scared, because every meeting I go to, they see me, and they know they can’t get away with anything anymore.”

A former Maricopa County G.O.P. chairwoman, Rae Chornenky, ruefully described to me how Neglia turned the tables at the state party meeting in January 2019. “We were deciding who the next state chairman would be, and Neglia threw a bomb in the middle of it,” she said. “He insisted on a roll-call vote, so that people would have to say out loud who they voted for. In politics, you don’t always want to have to do that. It’s because of that procedure that many people feel she was able to eke out her win.”

A Republican precinct committeeman outside his home in Tempe, Ariz., in July.

“She” was Kelli Ward, an osteopathic physician, Tea Party activist and state senator who unsuccessfully challenged McCain in the 2016 Senate primary and subsequently failed to win a Senate primary in 2018.(Ward would later suggest in one of her books that her loss to McCain may have been due to fraud.) “McCain was like a Mafia don,” Ward told me, “whose henchmen were willing to take out people who wouldn’t kiss his ring. That’s why it’s so painful now for his cronies, because they’re used to being rewarded for their loyalty, just like in the mob. And we are seeing a resurgence or a surge of populist grass-roots people who understand how our country was founded and are tired of that kind of machinery controlling the Republican Party.”

Ward’s evocation of mobster fealty in McCain’s circle might strike some as ironic, given her unyielding fidelity to Donald Trump, whom she first met at Mar-a-Lago in December 2017, tweeting seven months later, “Every day I thank God for @realDonaldTrump & the amazing job he is doing to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain both here at home & across the world.” In February, Ward self-published a book about the State Senate audit titled “Justified: The Story of America’s Audit” and dedicated it “to President Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States of America, who should still be president today.” Though the audit failed to achieve the objective of demonstrating fraud, the taxpayer-funded exercise counted as a huge win for Ward’s party organization, which raised over a million dollars during the time of the audit, far more than it did the previous year. As the G.O.P. consultant who works in Western states told me, “The audit was a tremendous windfall for the party, it was good business, the small dollar donations went through the roof.”

Ward now sits atop the state G.O.P. hierarchy, which has made her an object of carping from the grass roots, who wonder whether she is drifting away from their ideals. “Even she will violate the rules that we have,” Neglia told me, and he then went on to describe how Ward defied “Robert’s Rules of Order” in abruptly shutting down a party meeting this past January just as Neglia was trying to argue for a transparency measure. Still, Neglia remains an ally of Ward’s — “She’s definitely not a RINO,” he said — and now shares with her the view that widespread fraud tainted the 2020 election.

What persuaded Neglia, he said, was the stolen-election film polemic “2000 Mules,” directed by Dinesh D’Souza, whom Trump pardoned four years ago after D’Souza pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign contributions. Neglia told me that he met D’Souza in May at the Maricopa County G.O.P.’s annual Lincoln Day lunch. “Very nice, reasonable guy,” he said. “I don’t think he has a dishonest bone in his body.”

“So I was in the movie ‘2000 Mules,’ and I’ve been on that issue nonstop,” said Charlie Kirk as he stood before a gathering of fellow Republicans at a restaurant in the Maricopa County town Goodyear on a Thursday night in July. Kirk, 28, is the leader of the Phoenix-based conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, arguably the nation’s most high-profile Trump-adjacent activist group. He was there to raise campaign funds on behalf of his Turning Point lieutenant Austin Smith, who was running in a State House primary, which he would go on to win on Aug. 2. (Smith, in his brief stump speech that night, paid tribute to Trump announcing his presidential bid in 2015 as “a guy with golden hair coming down a golden escalator to save our country.”) But after a few perfunctory words of support for Smith, Kirk — an accomplished orator who combines earnestness, comic timing and doomful soothsaying in one smooth and youthful package— proceeded to describe, unhinged from the fact-based world, how America in general and Arizona in particular rested on a knife edge of anarchy.

“We’ve taught our kids to hate themselves, hate the country and believe there is no God,” Kirk told the audience. “And we wonder why our country’s falling apart.” Kirk told the crowd he knew who was responsible: the Democrats. “They want 7,000 illegals across the border to come into our country every day. They want C.R.T. They want this graphic transgenderism in our schools.” As with Kari Lake’s good-versus-evil formulation, Kirk went on to describe the stakes in zero-sum terms: “There’s no compromise when you want to teach 8-year-olds transgender sexual education. I’m sorry, there’s no bargaining. There’s no compromise here. I’m just going to have to get more votes than you, and we’re going to have to defeat you.”

Kirk helped start Turning Point USA in 2012. His organization did not take long to become one of the nation’s leading promoters of political disinformation. During the 2016 presidential election, a study conducted for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found, memes created by Kirk’s group were amplified by the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency as part of Russia’s effort to aid Trump’s candidacy. Two years later, according to an investigation by The Guardian, Kirk’s organization contracted an Arizona digital marketing firm, Rally Forge, to promote deceptive messages on Facebook with the apparent objective of persuading some Democratic voters to peel away and side with Green Party candidates, as was the case in 2016, when Jill Stein’s vote totals in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin exceeded Trump’s margin of victory in those three swing states.

‘In my lifetime, I never imagined this attack on democracy. I’ve been asking myself: Will this movement die out with Trump? Or are we the ones that will die out?’

In 2020, The Washington Post reported that Turning Point Action (an affiliate of Turning Point USA) commissioned Rally Forge to churn out disinformation about Covid and election security, using a Phoenix-based campaign likened to a troll farm that included teenagers as employees. That same year, Rally Forge’s chief executive, Jake Hoffman, was banned from Twitter. He was also elected to Arizona’s Legislature and was among the group of Arizona Republicans who, with Kelli Ward, proclaimed themselves to be electors in seeking to overturn Trump’s defeat. Hoffman is now vice-chairman of the state’s House Committee on Government and Elections and on primary night became a G.O.P. nominee for the State Senate.

The effect of disinformation on the growing extremism of Arizona’s conservative activist community was described to me by a former state Republican operative who asked not to be named so that he could speak candidly about a trend he found to be disturbing. He told me that he frequently received emails from several of the state’s conservative precinct committeepersons. “I’ve never known a group of people, many of whom I genuinely liked, to be so misinformed,” the former operative told me. “I wish I could send you a file of memes that I’ve seen from them over the years. They’re lies or half-truths designed to incite rage. So, what ends up happening is you start to get all these clustered groups that start to spread disinformation, but they’re also the same people that are the root source of power in Arizona’s political system, which is the local precinct committee.”

Arizona, the former operative said, is particularly susceptible to the churn of disinformation, owing to its large population of retirees. “These are all folks that have traded in their suit pants for sweatpants,” he said. “They’re on the golf course, or they’re in hobby mode. They have more than enough time on their hands. They’re digesting six to 10 hours of Fox News a day. They’re reading on Facebook. They’re meeting with each other to talk about those headlines. And they’re outraged that, ‘Can you believe that the government is lying to us about this?’”

At the event held in Prescott by the Lions of Liberty, I asked Rose Sperry, the G.O.P. state committeewoman, which information outlet she most trusted. She immediately replied, “OAN” — One America News, the Trump-touting network that provided daily coverage of “America’s Audit” in Arizona even as one of its show hosts, Christina Bobb, was helping to raise funds for and directly coordinate the operation between the Trump team and state officials.

One guest on OAN’s heavy rotation over the past year has been the secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, who appeared on a broadcast last September to discuss the State Senate audit of the 2020 election, accompanied by a chyron that read, “Exposing the Crime of the Century.” In July, I drove to Fountain Hills, where Finchem was speaking at a candidate forum hosted by the Republican Women of the Hills. Finchem sidled up to the microphone with a pistol conspicuously strapped to his right hip. After describing his work history in law enforcement, the private sector and Arizona politics, he then offered a different sort of qualification. With a grin, Finchem said, “The Atlantic put out a piece yesterday: I’m the most dangerous person to democracy in America.”

The article Finchem was referring to did not designate him “the most dangerous person” — but rather as one of “dozens” of election-denying candidates who “present the most significant threat to American democracy in decades.” Regardless, the notion of Arizona’s G.O.P. secretary of state front-runner as a threat to democracy was received rapturously. Several women in the audience yelled out “Whooo!” and applauded.

Throughout Arizona’s 2022 political season, the proactive denigration of democracy among Republicans became a chorus that was impossible to ignore in meetings, speeches and rallies across the state. “By the way,” Charlie Kirk made a point of saying at the fund-raiser in Goodyear, “we don’t have a democracy. OK? Just to fact check. We’re a republic.”At a gathering in Mesa that I attended in July, held by the conservative group United Patriots AZ, the evening’s host, Jeffrey Crane, asked the audience, “Are we a democracy?” They responded loudly: “Nooooo! Republic!”

In each case, the very notion of democracy was raised not so much to win a scholarly point but rather to shine a spotlight on it as an offending object. When I mentioned this emerging antagonism to McCain’s longtime state director, Bettina Nava, she was genuinely stunned. Reflecting on her former boss’s brand of conservatism, Nava told me: “At the root of it all was his deep belief in the experiment of democracy. When I was his state director, we met with everybody. And there were times when it was perfectly friendly and others where it was contentious. But he never shied away from it, because disagreement didn’t equal hate.”Nava feared for the Republican Party she once served. “In my lifetime, I never imagined this attack on democracy,” she said. “I’ve been asking myself: Will this movement die out with Trump? Or are we the ones that will die out? Are we the Whigs?”

Nava was describing a democracy reliant on a notion of comity that was no longer in evidence.As McCain’s grip on Arizona waned, Arizona conservatives began gradually to part ways with his beloved democratic experiment. That experiment had worked in the past, so long as the democratic principles in question redounded to the benefit of the state’s ruling conservative base. Arizona Republican legislators led the way three decades ago in championing early voting, and Republican voters overwhelmingly chose to cast their ballots by mail, at least until the 2020 election. But by Primary Day in August, many Arizona Republicans had come to view such conveniences, against all evidence, as a trap laid by a wily leftist conspiracy bent on engineering Democratic victories.

I spent that morning visiting about a dozen voting centers throughout deeply conservative Yavapai County, from Black Canyon City to Yarnell to Congress. Outside the Cottonwood Bible Church, a young bearded man in a camouflage shirt politely greeted every voter with a fistful of ballpoint pens he had purchased for the occasion. “I know they were passing out the felt-tip pens last election and not all the votes counted,” the young man said, referring to the disproved claim that election workers in Maricopa County sought to invalidate Republican ballots in 2020 by forcing voters to use Sharpies. “I just wanted to do my part.”

At a voting center in Clarkdale, three senior citizens, all G.O.P. precinct committeepersons, sat in folding chairs directly in front of the town’s only voting drop box a few yards away. When a car idled up, they craned their necks to see whether the driver was trying to stuff the box with multiple ballots, which “2,000 Mules” claimed was a frequent tactic. Two hours into their vigil, there had been no suspicious activity.

One of them, a woman named Sandy Jenocovich, led me to a nearby booth they had set up. It included leaflets for the conservative candidates they favored, as well as free copies of the Constitution, “in case anybody wants one, not that the Democrats go by it, because they certainly don’t,” she snorted. I asked Jenocovich about the hostility toward democracy I had heard voiced throughout Arizona. Nodding, she replied: “Well to me, what a democracy is, is like 51 percent of the people can decide that they want my property, and they can take it. Where a constitutional republic is: No, you can’t do that.” The three precinct committeepersons agreed that Republicans needed to “take it back” in 2022, lest critical race theory become embedded in school curriculums and children be urged to change their gender on a whim.

That evening, at Lake’s election-watch party in Scottsdale, the ebullient gathering — many of the attendees young and wearing date-night attire — grew restive as her opponent, Karrin Taylor Robson, held onto a commanding lead for several hours. Having been told for the past two years that early voting was rife with corruption, Lake’s supporters had mostly cast their ballots on Primary Day, and the totals were slow to come in. The candidate finally emerged onstage at close to 11 to assure the crowd that Primary Day’s voters were breaking her way — adding, “There is no path to victory for my opponent.”

Then Lake’s speech took a conspiratorial turn. “This is how they do it. They want to try to take you down in this movement. They don’t want you to celebrate.”

It wasn’t clear who “they” were in Lake’s scenario. By that point, there were news reports of widespread problems in Republican-dominated Pinal County, just to the south of Maricopa County. A miscalculation by election officials there had resulted in a shortage of ballots in several precincts, with some 750 voters being turned away (though most if not all were given the opportunity to vote later that day). “What in the hell is going on?” Lake exclaimed. To many in the audience, the question itself was enough and did not require an answer. Any glitch or ambiguity on voting day would be sufficient to dispute any future election results that did not emphatically produce the outcome desired by the ascendant reactionary right.

“That’s a compromised election,” Mark Finchem, the secretary of state candidate, said to me of Pinal County. “These are people who were disenfranchised.” He had arrived at Lake’s party after his own victory was all but assured. I approached him after he finished an interview with a reporter for the far-right outlet Real America’s Voice.Finchem told me that he had spent part of the day monitoring a voting center. I said that I had encountered other such monitors north of here. Given their prevalence, I asked him, was there any reason at all to suspect anything more devious than human error in Pinal County? Finchem thought for a second as beads of sweat rolled down from underneath his cowboy hat. Then, grimly, he answered.

“Everything is suspect right now.”

Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is the author of several books, most recently “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq,” which was excerpted in the magazine. Peter van Agtmael is a Magnum photographer. His latest book, “Sorry for the War,” is about the American disconnect with war.

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The internet and the digital revolution have changed journalism dramatically in the United States and other countries. What were once strictly weeklies (Time, Newsweek) now function as dailies on their websites, and daily newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune aim for a national audience. Moreover, something that would have been treated like strictly local news 25 or 30 years ago — for example, two people getting into an angry political argument in a local convenience store in Nevada — can easily become a national story in online journalism.

In the high-tech journalism landscape of 2022, according to Axios reporter Sara Fischer, one of the things that is suffering the most is local journalism. And Fischer, in an article published by Axios on July 4, points out that this “local news crisis” is aggravating the United States’ political divisions.

Discussing a new report from Northwestern University in the Chicago area, Fischer explains, “Around two newspapers in the U.S. are closing every week, according to a new report, suggesting the local news crisis spurred by the pandemic will worsen in coming years. Why it matters: Hyperlocal communities are being disproportionately impacted by the fall of local newspapers compared to bigger cities.”

READ MORE: Ford Foundation president calls for Americans to overcome a ‘toxic culture of absolutism’

Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications and the report’s primary author, described the shortage of local journalism as “a crisis for our democracy and our society” in an official statement on the report. And she elaborated during an interview with Axios.

Abernathy told Axios, “While the economic decline in many communities was occurring prior to the rise of news deserts, the loss of a local news organization will leave local residents without the critical information to begin to address those problems. At a minimum, the loss of local news worsens the political, cultural and economic divisions in this country."

Fischer notes that “news deserts” in the U.S. tend to have more poverty and less education than areas that aren’t news deserts.

“The average median annual income of a home in a news desert is $15,000 less than the average U.S. household,” Fischer observes. “Only 20% of adults living in news deserts have bachelor’s degrees compared to 38% in the U.S. The lack of reliable local news compounds governance issues that make communities less efficient and prosperous.”

Fischer describes the “local newspaper sector” as being “in in a state of terminal decline.”

“More than 360 newspapers shuttered between late 2019 and May 2022, according to the report,” Fischer explains. “The vast majority of those papers were printed weekly. At this rate, the country is on track to lose more than one-third of its total newspapers by 2025. It's already lost more than a quarter, 2500, since 2005.”

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edit b 6 22 longish

...These polls are a picture of systemic displeasure with a president who isn’t doing enough to bring down the price of gas, food, housing and more. Evidently, Joe Biden should have considered inflation before going off half-cocked in allied defense of Ukraine’s national sovereignty.

Democracy is great and all, but seriously.

Is it more important than cheap gas?

No, said Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan: “Real America [white people] doesn’t care about the January 6 committee. Gas is over $5 per gallon!”

To which we liberals say: no. Real Americans are all Americans, because all Americans have a stake in the continuation of this democratic republic.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/ron-desantis-black-congressional-seats/

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msnbc 6/6/22?

dem atty desantis ignore gop state scotus 4x? 5?  nottime to sue/win for 2022 but there is for 2024

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6 22 sattler an

who wouldn’t like to see Marjorie Taylor Greene’s career-ending after one uselessly nauseating term in the US House of Representatives?

Who wouldn’t like to see her spending more time chilling with Putin-loving white nationalists, harassing kids who survived school shootings, or groping photoshopped cutouts of Donald Trump?

It’s just the way our brains need things to work.

Q-curious spreaders of Jewish Space Laser conspiracies who incite violence against public servants aren’t supposed to win reelection.

They’re supposed to be defeated – forced to fly away to an even worse fate, like fleeing Congress to run Trump’s failing fake Twitter site.

Our brains are so desperate to make this true that Marcus Flowers, a possible Democratic opponent, has raised almost $5 million with 87 percent coming from donations of less than $200 – even though his home seems to no longer be in Greene’s district in Georgia.

To be honest, it wouldn’t matter whether Flowers, or any Democrat, raised $50 million or even the more than $90 million Amy McGrath spent to lose to Mitch McConnell in 2020, Greene is going to win – likely by more than the nearly 20-point margin, McGrath lost by.

Why?

Because gerrymandering doesn’t care about your feelings.

If picking your voters didn’t work, Republicans wouldn’t bother rigging maps. No one knows better than Republicans that their future as a party depends on turning fewer (and whiter) votes into more power.

A genius candidate with a bursting war chest could overcome a five-point or 10-point or possibly even a 20-point advantage if everything including the earth’s axis swings to her advantage.

But no candidate is going to overcome a 45 percent Republican lean, not in a country whose largest export is now negative partisanship.

Greene could marry Hunter Biden, put her pronouns on her Twitter bio and give herself a real-time abortion on Tucker Carlson’s desk while wearing a rainbow-colored N95 mask – she’d still win.

All she needs are the votes from her party.

They’d vote for a cumquat as long as it had an “R” next to it.

The urge to lance this human boil from our body politic is obviously born of the best intentions. Democrats must contest every race, including in the second-most Republican House district in Georgia. Remember the success of Howard Dean’s “50-state” strategy?

A “whole ballot” strategy is crucial to confronting the menace of a GOP that has chosen Trumpism (aka American Putinism) over democracy.

You could even argue that investing millions in Georgia’s 14th could end up helping Georgia’s Senator Raphael Warnock, whose race could easily decide control of the upper chamber of the Congress, or Stacey Abrams, who lost to Brian Kemp in her first effort to become the first Black woman governor in US history by a mere .4 percent in 2018.

But whoever runs against Greene is going to have plenty of cash – too much cash, in fact – so why not just give to Warnock or Abrams!

Better yet, donate to Democrats in the House majority who face tight races, including 13 whose races are deemed toss-ups by the Cook Political report. Those races could decide control of the lower chamber of Congress. Even better, how about helping the effort to take control of at least one state House in every key swing state?

I hate lecturing anyone on the best ways for doing politics given the last election I won was for the honor of “Most Talkative” in the ninth grade. But I know one thing. Democracy is on the ballot in 2022.

If the GOP takes both chambers and retains control of legislatures in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or Michigan, the chances of a Democrat being fairly elected president in 2024 will veer dangerously close to zero.

Don’t believe me. Believe election law expert Rick Hasen. He fears that Republicans could swipe the presidency in one of two ways.

Try employing an absurd legal theory giving state control of elections that has support from at least four Republicans on the Supreme Court.

Or try swaying the actual vote count by corrupting state and local election officials or by threatening their non-corrupt counterparts.

All that’s holding up Nightmare No. 1 is Democratic governors in blue states, all of whom are running for election and facing tight races.

Steve Bannon is aiming for Nightmare No. 2 with a laser focus on local elections to pick the hands that guide the machinery of democracy.

On the Democrat’s side, there’s no national figure trying to rally the party in preparation for a full-ballot assault favoring democracy.

Run for Something is an incredible organization. It’s focused on helping young progressives get on the ballot and win.

But Run for Something’s national budget in the last election was less than half of what Marcus Flowers has raised to lose to Greene.

By November, the millions spent on Flowers’ already-decided race may exceed the $39.3 million spent on all the 2020 races for the Michigan House. And Democratic control of the Michigan House could stop the Trump effort to steal that state in 2024 through the legislature, cold.

Patriotic Democrats should have no delusions about the enormity and importance of the challenge they face.

No Democratic president has seen his party hold both chambers of the Congress through his first midterm election since 1978. Rick Hasen has said that if Kevin McCarthy – who’d likely be the Speaker of the House were the Republicans to win in 2022 – were in chargeback in 2020, “I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now.”

You can’t beat Marjorie Taylor Greene.

But you can do even better.

You can help stop a plot to destroy democracy. You might even keep Greene mostly irrelevant with zero committee assignments.

This will require matching, then exceeding Republicans’ ruthless focus on winning. That begins with fixating on where our democracy is decided, not burning money to make our brains feel a little bit better.

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// voter suppression, filibuster, gerry

an 5 22

minority rule is killing America. This is most obvious in our Senate and Supreme Court, although it’s also hurt the credibility of the presidency and is damaging many of our states.

It’s happening because of two issues dating back to the founding of our republic, which brought us the Electoral Collegeand unequal representation in the US Senate.

First, here’s how the Electoral College came about, stripped of all the mythology (hint: it mostly had to do with avoiding somebody like Donald Trump ending up in the White House):

After the Revolutionary War, the nation was abuzz about one of that war’s most decorated soldiers, Benedict Arnold, once considered a shoo-in for high elected office, selling out to the British in exchange for money and a title.

Arnold‘s name had been floated for president, and it raised the question of how we could make sure that a stooge working for a foreign government — or just for his own enrichment — didn’t end up in the White House.

Back then, America was so spread out it would be difficult for most citizen/voters to get to know a presidential candidate well enough to spot a spy or traitor, Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist 68. Therefore, the electors — having no other governmental duty, obligation, or responsibility — would be sure to catch one if it was tried.

“The most deadly adversaries” of America, Hamilton wrote, would probably “make their approaches [to seizing control of the USA] from more than one quarter, chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.”

A hostile foreign power influencing public opinion or owning a senator was nothing compared to having their man in the White House. As Hamilton wrote:

“How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy [presidency] of the Union?”

But, Hamilton wrote, the Framers of the Constitution “have guarded against all danger of this sort, with the most provident and judicious attention.”

The system they set up to protect the White House from being occupied by an agent of a foreign government was straightforward, Hamilton bragged. The choice of president would not “depend on any preexisting bodies of men, who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes.”

Instead, the Electoral College would be made up of “persons [selected] for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment” of president.

The electors would be apolitical because it would be illegal for a senator or house member to become one, an injunction that is still in the Constitution.

Hamilton wrote:

“And they have excluded from eligibility to this trust, all those who from situation might be suspected of too great devotion to the President in office. No senator, representative, or other person holding a place of trust or profit under the United States, can be of the numbers of the electors.”

This, Hamilton was certain, would eliminate “any sinister bias.”

Rather than average but uninformed voters, and excluding members of Congress who may be subject to bribery or foreign influences, the electors would select a man for president who was brave of heart and pure of soul.

“The process of election [by the electoral college] affords a moral certainty,” Hamilton wrote, “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

Indeed, while a knave or rogue or traitor may fool enough people to even ascend to the office of mayor of a major city or governor of a state, the Electoral College would ferret out such a con man or traitor.

Hamilton wrote:

“Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence” of the men in the Electoral College who would select him as president “of the whole Union. . .”

Hamilton’s pride in the system that he himself had helped create was hard for him to suppress. He wrote:

“It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters preeminent for ability and virtue.”

Unfortunately, things haven’t worked out that way (as we can see with Trump still clinging to his loyalty to Putin and refusing to condemn Russia’s attack of Ukraine).

By the time the telegraph was in widespread use in the late 19th century, the Electoral College had long outlived its usefulness. And now in the past few decades we have seen two terrible presidents, Bush and Trump, put into the White House over the objection of the majority of American voters.

The Senate is also profoundly unequal in its representation of the American people; this is mostly because different states have different sizes and resource bases.

While this was a small problem at the nation’s founding, today, for example, California’s vast resources (unknown in 1787 — Lewis and Clark were still children and thus hadn’t even hit the Pacific yet) have turned it into a such an economic powerhouse that if it were independent it would be the sixth richest nation in the world.

California alone contains 39 million people, almost nine percent of the entire population of the United States, larger than Canada’s 37 million people, with an economy larger than Russia’s.

And yet it is represented by only two senators, the same as Wyoming which has only a half-million citizens (the size of Micronesia), a tiny economy, and few natural resources.

These inequalities have been exacerbated over the past 40 years both because of these 18th century structural errors built into our Constitution, and because, over the past 40 years, a campaign has been undertaken to exploit them by a small group of rightwing billionaires and religious fanatics, with the Powell Memo as their polestar.

They’ve used the wealth and power they’ve inherited or accumulated to manipulate and seize control of our lawmaking institutions at the federal level and in nearly every state.

And Americans have noticed that fair competition has died:

Neither of the last two Republican presidents, for example, was elected by the majority of Americans; the Senate is massively out of balance; and almost every House seat has been gerrymandered to the point where it is no longer in play.

Which is creating a crisis for our nation.

Humans, like most animals, are wired for fairness. Give five toddlers a cookie each and everything is fine; give one of them an extra five cookies and all hell will break loose.

Democracy is in our genes, as is the case with virtually every other animal species on Earth.

When fish swim, bees swarm, or birds migrate it seems like their actions are coordinated telepathically. In fact, each wingbeat or tail twitch left-or-right is noticed as a “vote” by those around them. When more than 50% of the group are twitching to the left, for example, the entire school, swarm, or flock veers to the left. Democracy.

When a mob showed up at the US Capitol threatening to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House, it was because they genuinely believed Donald Trump’s lie that the majority of Americans had voted for him. People will put their lives and their freedom at risk to right such a perceived minority-rule wrong.

Minority rule almost always ends up producing unfair results that are resented by the majority. We’re seeing this today with a Supreme Court dominated by four rightwing justices who were appointed by presidents who lost the majority vote and who were confirmed by Republican senators who represent 41.5 million fewer Americans than the Senate’s Democrats.

Minority rule has taken over the White House:

We saw it when Bush and Cheney lied us into the war in Iraq after being put in the White House by five Republicans on the Supreme Court, despite having lost the vote to Al Gore by a half-million votes. It provoked the largest demonstrations against a presidential action in the history of the world at the time.

Similarly, when millions protested Trump’s inauguration it was motivated in large part by the widespread knowledge that he’d lost the 2016 election by nearly 3 million votes. Unfairness infuriates people, and rightly so.

Minority rule has taken over our Supreme Court:

A small group of wealthy ideologues spent millions to pack our courts, and we’ll see the backlash in our streets this weekend as people across the nation come out to protest Alito’s assertion that Sir Matthew Hale’s 1670 interpretation of British witchcraft laws should determine the fate of America’s 21st century women.

Minority rule has taken over Congress:

Democrats in the Senate represent 41.5 million more Americans than do Republicans. Yet that minority of Republicans, using the filibuster, have been able to stop everything from voting rights to healthcare to rebuilding our nation from the damage of 40 years of Reaganomics’ neoliberalism.

A total of 77.3 million Americans voted in 2020 for Democrats for the House of Representatives; only 72.8 million voted for Republicans.

Multiple states where the statewide vote is within a point or three of 50/50 (including Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Wisconsin) send far more Republicans than Democrats to the US House than their votes would dictate because of Republican gerrymanders.

This fall things will get even worse because of 2021 gerrymanders, meaning that when over half of Americans again (if history and polling holds) vote for Democrats for the House, the GOP will nonetheless likely take control of that body.

Minority rule has taken over multiple states:

Most of the states listed above suffer from the same problem in their own legislatures. In statewide elections, because most voters choose Democrats, all but two of those states ended up with Democratic governors; nonetheless, even though only a minority voted for Republicans, their legislatures are still Republican-controlled because of gerrymandering.

Whenever a minority rises up and tries to rule over a majority, particularly if that rule violates basic principles of fair play and empathy, the result is conflict.

In most minority rule situations, that conflict is managed with the power of guns and jail cells: nations that were once democracies — like Russia, Turkey, Egypt, the Philippines, Hungary, Venezuela and others — become police states where dissent and political activity are not tolerated.

We saw Donald Trump, who lost the majority vote in 2016, try this when he ordered Defense Secretary Mark Esper to have our military shoot protestors in the streets of Washington, DC.

We humans, like most animals from the simplest to the most complex, are wired by evolution for majority-rule to make the decisions that will best serve our immediate interests as well as preserve our species.

The principal idea of democracy is that there is wisdom in numbers. That the majority is more often right than any minority. As Aristotle wrote in hisPolitics, “[I]t is possible that the many, though not individually good men, yet when they come together may be better, not individually but collectively…”

If we want to preserve this nation, we must try actual representative democracy.

Whoever wins the majority vote becomes president, as 15 states and the District of Columbia — representing 195 electoral votes — have chosen (states representing another 75 votes are needed to end the Electoral College).

Expanding and unpacking the Supreme Court would restore fairness and balance to the head of that branch of government, and adding Washington, DC and Puerto Rico as states would help ease the unfairness of representation in the Senate.

And Congress must pass a federal mandate that every state cease gerrymandering and use nonpartisan redistricting commissions like California and several other Democratic-controlled states have already done to insure fairness and equal representation.

Republicans not only cling to minority rule, they now want to go to the next step and impose a neofascist Taliban-style government on America run by the morbidly rich and fanatically religious.

If the Democratic Party is serious about preserving America as a constitutional republic, they must put democracy at the top of their priority list.

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an 3 22 no lx

The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum is great at writing “big picture” essays and think pieces that tie one subject or event in the news into a broader theme. And in an article published on March 31, the 57-year-old journalist, author and historian links Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the broader attack on democracy that is occurring everywhere from Latin America to the Middle East.

Applebaum, author of the2020 book “Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism,” recalls that after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, the “liberal world order relied on the mantra of ‘Never again’” just as it did after the end of World War 2 in 1945.

Applebaum writes, “Never again would there be genocide. Never again would large nations erase smaller nations from the map. Never again would we be taken in by dictators who used the language of mass murder. At least in Europe, we would know how to react when we heard it. But while we were happily living under the illusion that ‘Never again’ meant something real, the leaders of Russia — owners of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal — were reconstructing an army and a propaganda machine designed to facilitate mass murder, as well as a mafia state controlled by a tiny number of men and bearing no resemblance to western capitalism.”

Now, in 2022, Applebaum adds, Russia is carrying out a “brutal invasion of Ukraine” in which President Vladimir Putin’s military has targeted “civilians, hospitals and schools” — and “never again” is being “exposed as an empty slogan.”

“There is no natural liberal world order, and there are no rules without someone to enforce them,” Applebaum warns. “Unless democracies defend themselves together, the forces of autocracy will destroy them.”

More than once in her Atlantic essay, Applebaum stresses that the “liberal world order” isn’t something that occurs naturally — democracies have to promote it. And if the United States and its democratic allies don’t make a concerted and aggressive effort to promote democracy, she writes, authoritarians will continue to make advances.

“Take democracy seriously,” Applebaum advises. “Teach it, debate it, improve it, defend it. Maybe there is no natural liberal world order, but there are liberal societies — open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do. They are hardly perfect; our own has deep flaws, profound divisions, terrible historical scars…. Perhaps, in the aftermath of this crisis, we can learn something from the Ukrainians.”

Applebaum continues, “For decades now, we’ve been fighting a culture war between liberal values on the one hand and muscular forms of patriotism on the other. The Ukrainians are showing us a way to have both. As soon as the attacks began, they overcame their many political divisions — which are no less bitter than ours — and they picked up weapons to fight for their sovereignty and their democracy. They demonstrated that it is possible to be a patriot and a believer in an open society, that a democracy can be stronger and fiercer than its opponents. Precisely because there is no liberal world order, no norms and no rules, we must fight ferociously for the values and the hopes of liberalism if we want our open societies to continue to exist.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/a-return-to-jim-crow-aoc-fears-the-us-will-cease-to-be-a-democracy/

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/alarm-grows-as-florida-gop-advances-plan-to-gut-ballot-initiative-process/

citizen initiative process that gave Floridians the power to raise theminimum wage and restore voting rights is under grave threat after the state's House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday advanced a Republican proposal to dramatically limit the scope of future ballot measures.

Led by state Rep. Mike Beltran (R-57), House Joint Resolution 1127 would alter Florida's constitution to limit citizen initiatives to "matters relating to procedural subjects or to structure" of the government—a restriction that likely would have blocked $15 minimum wage, voting rights, medical marijuana, and conservation amendments.

"Lawmakers should respect the will of the people and Floridians' right to participate in our democracy."

Having passed out of the GOP-controlled judiciary panel, the proposal is soon expected to receive a vote in the full state House of Representatives. If the Florida Legislature passes Beltran's resolution, voters will have to approve the amendment for it to be added to the state constitution.

Final approval of the resolution would effectively spell the death of the state's citizen initiative process, theACLU of Florida warnedin a statement Tuesday evening.

"These proposed changes to the citizen initiative process are not about fixing problems—they are about interfering with the will of Floridians," said Kara Gross, the group's legislative director and senior policy counsel. "Through ballot initiatives, citizens have been able to improve the lives and well-being of Floridians."

Gross characterized the Florida GOP's attack on the citizen initiative process as part of a broader trend of "politicians trying to rewrite the rules because they do not like it when voters use their power is a trend that must come to an end."

"Florida lawmakers should respect the will of the people and Floridians' right to participate in our democracy through the citizen initiative process," Gross added. "They should vote no on these proposals and end the crusade of sabotaging the right of the people to be heard."

House Joint Resolution 1127 is hardly the Florida GOP's first attempt to gut the citizen initiative process, which empowered voters to enact broadly popular policies that would've gone nowhere in the GOP-dominated state Legislature.

In 2020, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill containing a number of new ballot initiative restrictions, including an increase of the signature requirement. Last year, DeSantis signed a measure limiting donations to citizen initiative campaigns—a limit that was later blocked by a federal judge.

Aliki Moncrief, executive director of Florida Conservation voters, told a local CBS affiliate on Tuesday that the state GOP's efforts are "basically about limiting the power of people to raise important public policies and important public issues that they don't feel the Legislature is considering."

"So, it's horrible in a word," Moncrief added. "If the people really wanted this done, they would have done it."

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/expert-on-civil-wars-warns-that-the-u-s-is-facing-a-downward-spiral-of-instability/

no lnx etc

Expert on civil wars warns US faces 'downward spiral of instability'

Alex Henderson January 24, 2022

In the past, Barbara F. Walter — author the new book “How Civil Wars Start, and How to Stop Them” — served on an advisory panel for the Central Intelligence Agency, she helped CIA agents identify signs that a country is facing serious political instability and the potential for widespread conflict. Now, in 2022, Walter is pointing to her own country, the United States, as a country with that potential.

Walter, in an op-ed published by the Washington Post on January 24, compares the political tensions in the U.S. to what she observed in other countries in the past.

“I will never forget interviewing Berina Kovac, who had lived in multi-ethnic Sarajevo in the early 1990s, when Bosnia and Herzegovina (were) moving toward independence from Yugoslavia,” Walter recalls. “Though militias had begun to organize in the hills and former colleagues increasingly targeted her with ethnic slurs, Kovac continued to go to work, attend weddings and take weekend holidays, trusting that everything would work out.”

“One evening in March 1992,” Walter continues, “she was at home with her infant son when the power went out. ‘And then, suddenly,’ Kovac told me, ‘you started to hear machine guns.’ The civil war that followed, however, was not surprising to those who had been following the data. A year and a half earlier, the CIA had issued a report predicting that Yugoslavia would fall apart within two years and that civil war was a distinct possibility. One reason, the agency noted, was that citizens were organizing themselves into rival ethnic factions — which tends to occur in societies that political scientists call ‘anocracies.’”

Walter goes on to explain what an “anocracy” is and why the Center for Systemic Peace (CSP), at one point, considered the U.S. an “anocracy.”

“Anocracies are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic,” Walter explains. “Their citizens enjoy some elements of democratic rule, e.g., elections, while other rights — e.g., due process or freedom of the press — suffer. In the last weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, the respected Center for Systemic Peace (CSP) calculated that, for the first time in more than two centuries, the United States no longer qualified as a democracy. It had, over the preceding five years, become an anocracy. That rating improved to ‘democracy’ just this month, but to put it in perspective, the current U.S. score is the same as Brazil’s 2018 rating — the most recent available for that country — which was two points below Switzerland’s.”

When Trump “attempted to halt the peaceful transfer of power” following the United States’ 2020 presidential election, Walter notes, the CSP believed the U.S. had slipped into “anocracy” territory.

“Anocracy, not autocracy, is our most immediate threat,” Walter warns. “Anocracy is usually transitional — a repressive government allows reforms, or a democracy begins to unravel — and it is volatile. When a country moves into the anocracy zone, the risk of political violence reaches its peak; citizens feel uncertain about their government’s power and legitimacy. Compared with democracies, anocracies with more democratic than autocratic features are three times more likely to experience political instability or civil war.”

When Walter appeared on Joy Reid’s show, “The ReidOut” on MSNBC on January 11, she laid out some reasons why — as someone who has studied civil wars around the world — she finds the United States’ political divisions so troubling. The modern-day Republican Party, Walter told Reid, is obsessed with White “identity” politics rather than “ideology,” and White Americans on the far right fear becoming a minority in the future.

Walter has also discussed her concerns with Reid’s MSNBC colleagues Mehdi Hasan and Lawrence O’Donnell.

“If experts like those who prepared the CIA report on Yugoslavia had assessed the United States at the end of Trump’s term, they would almost certainly have deemed us at ‘high risk’ of instability and political violence,” Walter writes in her Post op-ed. “The United States was an anocracy, the CSP found, with parties increasingly organized around identity-based grievances. These underlying forces are not going away. We could easily slip back into anocracy. This is what average citizens should be thinking about when they hear that America’s democracy is declining. They are being led, unaware, into a downward spiral of instability, in which extremists and opportunists spread fear — and then grab power by force.”

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civil war expert recoils in horror at interviews with Trump fans: 'They don’t want democracy anymore'

Travis Gettys Raw Story

The U.S. recently fell out of the rankings of democratic nations, and one expert worries that it will happen again -- and tip the country into civil war...

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chris h with 12/10/21 nice job on linear/serial lock-picking. very good on analysis of democ erode lately

==

biden deliver on democ summit, PO's china ussr claim new cold war (putin 150k troop on border, sez defensive ~ nato

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an

The strangest thing about Donald Trump and the GOP's increasingly open embrace of political violence is how unnecessary it is, even by the right's own grotesque standards.

Ever since Trump's failed coup that culminated in the January 6 insurrection, Republicans have been carefully laying the groundwork for a bloodless destruction of democracy.They've commandeered election offices and filled them with Trump lackeys eager to break the law for their leader. They've gerrymandered elections so that Republicans "win" even when Democrats have strong majorities. And they toss on a robust amount of voter suppression so Democrats can't get to the polls in the first place. Even Trump's path to retaking the White House despite quite likely losing in 2024 is laid out without the need to fire a single gunshot: Republican-controlled state legislatures and Congress could nullify the vote in districts Joe Biden wins and throw the election to Trump.

"Democracy's primary assailants today are not generals or armed revolutionaries," Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt explained in The Atlantic, but rather politicians "who eviscerate democracy's substance behind a carefully crafted veneer of legality and constitutionality."

But even though a bloodless fascist takeover is in the works, Trump and other leaders of the Trumpist movementhave spent the past years ratcheting up enthusiasm on the right for political violence. For months, Trump and his allies have been trying to rewrite the narrative of January 6, casting the insurrectionists as heroes and martyrs. Now, in the wake of the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse — who shot three people, killing two, at a Black Lives Matter protest in August 2020 — they're doing the same. Rittenhouse is cast on the right as a noble hero, instead of what he is, an unsettling creep who had no business swinging an AR-15 around in a volatile situation.

As soon as the trial was over, Fox News host Tucker Carlson brought Rittenhouse on for an interview, praising him as "the kind of person would you want many more of in your country." (As a reminder, Rittenhouse was photographed in a Michigan bar in January, partying with Proud Boys and flashing a white nationalist hand gesture.) Trump also brought Rittenhouse to Mar-A-Lago to pose for pictures in front of a wall showily festooned with a photograph of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Trump called Rittenhouse — who shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26 — a "nice young man."

Trump and Carlson are doing this, even though they know full well that it's encouraging more insecure men to view political violence as a way to ameliorate their own gnawing fears of mediocrity. Indeed, manipulating men into committing violence appears to very much be the point. As Mark Follman wrote in Mother Jones last week, "Trump has made freshly evident, in other words, that he is serving as the inspirational leader for a domestic terrorism movement."

But again, the question is why?

Most available evidence suggests that not only can Trump's desired fascist takeover happen without violence, it would actually be more likely to work if it was bloodless. The best weapon of the 21st-century autocrat is not violence, but demoralization — wearing down the opposition by making it seem there's no legal avenues to save democracy. As Michelle Goldberg explained Monday in the New York Times, there's a "growing hopelessness born of a sense that dislodging Trump has bought American democracy only a brief reprieve," and the result is "progressives retreating into private life to preserve their sanity, a retreat that will only hasten democracy's decay."

Without violence, the Trumpist right can pretend their gutting of democracy is above-board and grind their opponents into a state of learned helplessness. Violence, however, makes it very hard to pretend that rising fascism is anything but what it is. Without the Capitol riot capturing the public's attention, Trump's attempts to steal the 2020 election through bureaucratic corruption could have been shoved down the memory hole. Right-wing violence, on the other hand, is unambiguous. It solidifies the left's resistance instead of undermining it.

Part of the infatuation with violence is due to Trump's personality. Unlike his father, who was arrested in a KKK riot in 1927, Trump is a physical coward. He loves the idea of violence, however, and adores sending minions out to commit violence in his name. That was true when he praised rioting neo-Nazis as "very fine people" in 2017, when he sent cops to tear gas peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park in 2020, and when he incited the Capitol riot in 2021.

Trump likely understands that his most ardent followers also love violence and are also caught up in fantasies of beating and killing liberals — and of getting away with doing so. An analysis from Media Matters released Tuesday shows that the Rittenhouse verdict was a traffic bonanza for right-wing pages on Facebook. Such pages got nearly 30 million interactions on November 19, an especially high number since the verdict was announced late on a Friday, which is usually a low traffic period online. The only other days these pages got more traffic were in response to January 6 and its aftermath, Trump's acquittal for inciting the riot, and Biden's inauguration. Notably, 4 out of the 6 highest traffic days were due to Trump and his allies exalting or inspiring political violence. Clearly, the base is really into the idea of cracking skulls in the name of Trumpism.

To be certain, Republicans have other uses for political violence.

The beatification of Rittenhouse, like the tear-gassing of protesters in Lafayette Park, is about scaring progressives away from protest. That could matter if and when progressives take to the streets in response to efforts to steal elections. Cleaning house of honest election officials, to replace them with Trump stooges, is also being aided through violence, as demonstrated by the number of election officials quitting rather than put up with death threats.

But mostly, the violence seems to be about motivating the Trump base. The idea of a bloodless fascist takeover doesn't really get the right-wing juices going. What fires them up is memes celebrating the deaths of political opponents. A lot of these folks have been spending thousands of dollars for years, even decades, building up arsenals. Destroying democracy through paperwork probably feels unsatisfactory. As one man at a Turning Point event in October plaintively asked: "When do we get to use the guns?"

Keeping these folks activated and engaged means dangling the fantasy of political violence. Trump and Carlson get that, which is why they're determined to turn Rittenhouse into a right-wing hero.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/robert-kagan-2655176730/

[big lie] ignore elections]

...When Stelter asked Snyder what "role" right-wing media play in this "scenario," the historian responded, "Right-wing media, with a few honorable exceptions, is one giant safe space for the Big Lie. What's happened is that rather than facts coming up from below to shape stories, we now have one enormous fiction — which is that Mr. Trump won this election. And that one enormous fiction, rather than casting light on things, just casts a huge shadow. Anything that doesn't fit that fiction can't be talked about. Anything which seems like it might somehow support that fiction gets all the airtime."

Snyder's appearance on "Reliable Sources" came only three days after the Washington Post published a sobering essay/op-ed by Never Trump conservative Robert Kagan, who warned that "the United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War." Stelter mentioned Kagan's article to Snyder, who didn't find Kagan's dire warning to be the least bit alarmist. In fact, Stelter and Snyder seemed to agree that Kagan's warning is spot on.

Stelter asked Snyder if the mainstream media need to be spending more time talking about "worst-case scenarios" in the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election, and the historian responded, "Those aren't worst-case scenarios. That's the mainstream…. When you have a two-party system and one of the parties is lining up against democracy, we're not talking about a worst-case scenario — we're talking about a situation where democracy is not something that can be taken for granted as a background to all the other news. Democracy itself is the foreground, and the struggle as to whether this country as to whether this country will be democratic in the future…. is the main story…. The story is whether we have a democracy or not."

Echoing the warnings in Kagan's article, Snyder added that the GOP has a game plan for stealing the 2024 election.

Snyder told Stelter, "The game is we cast doubt on 2020, we pass voter suppression laws…. If we get ahold of the House and the Senate in 2022, we plan not to certify a Democrat if he wins in 2024. We pass memory laws and voter suppression laws at the state level which give the states themselves the right to allocate electors…. We do all of that to aim for an outcome in 2024 in which the guy who loses is nevertheless the winner…. That is not a worst-case scenario. That is happening before our eyes right now."

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fraudit --> death threats ppl quit eg san luis obispo

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/election-workers-2653372964/

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some one asked democ lost in hungary? // trump. courts, make harder for opps to vote...

~ vote law over 400 in ---states? beto sez hr1 only hope

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/scholars-democracy/?rs=182

As Republican lawmakers continue to push for legislation to restrict voting, a Washington Post columnist is shedding light on a major warning from more than 100 scholars and experts: America's democracy is at risk.

More than 100 scholars of democracy signed in support of a new public statement of principles, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. The scholars aimed to make one thing very clear: "On the line is nothing less than the future of our democracy itself," they wrote.

"Our entire democracy is now at risk," the scholars write in the statement, which WaPo columnist Greg Sargent obtained before it was released. "History will judge what we do at this moment."

The scholars have a dire request for lawmakers. "We urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary — including suspending the filibuster — in order to pass national voting and election administration standards," the scholars wrote as they referenced the voting rights protections included in the For the People Act.

In the letter continued:

In future elections, these laws politicizing the administration and certification of elections could enable some state legislatures or partisan election officials to do what they failed to do in 2020: reverse the outcome of a free and fair election. Further, these laws could entrench extended minority rule, violating the basic and longstanding democratic principle that parties that get the most votes should win elections.

Democracy rests on certain elemental institutional andnormativeconditions. Elections must be neutrally and fairly administered. They must be free of manipulation. Every citizen who is qualified must have an equal right to vote, unhindered by obstruction. And when they lose elections, political parties and their candidates and supporters must be willing to accept defeat and acknowledge the legitimacy of the outcome.

Speaking to Sargent, Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, weighed in to explain the purpose of the scholars' collective statement.

"We wanted to create a strong statement from a wide range of scholars, including many who have studied democratic backsliding, to make it clear that democracy in America is genuinely under threat," Drutman said.

He continued, "The playbook that the Republican Party is executing at the state and national levels is very much consistent with actions taken by illiberal, anti-democratic, anti-pluralist parties in other democracies that have slipped away from free and fair elections."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/billionaire/

As we're struggling to recover from Trump's half-million unnecessary Covid deaths here in America, fighting to get a clear picture of how extensive the sedition was among Republicans in Congress around January 6th, and trying to pass legislation to ensure clean and safe elections and put the country back into shape, dark money, foreign oligarchs and rightwing media groups are hard at work tearing this nation apart.

This article was originally published at The Hartmann Report

And they're having considerable success.

About 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to "do what is right" when polled during most of the last years of the Eisenhower 1950s administration and early years of Lyndon B. Johnson's 1960s presidency.

In 2019, when the Pew Research Center released its most recent poll of public trust in the government, only 17 percent of Americans trusted their government. It's so bad that throughout 2020 armed protesters showed up nationwide to protest the "tyranny" of having to wear masks during a pandemic, and then stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election, all cheered on by the then-President of the United States and multiple rightwing media outlets.

This is no accident; it's the result of a five-decades-long campaign by some of America's richest people to tear apart the governing fabric of our nation, formally kicked off by their man, Ronald Reagan, proudly proclaiming at his January 20, 1981, inauguration that, "[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

Put yourself in the place of the heirs to a multimillion-dollar fossil fuel empire, a situation akin to the "heroic" brother and sister who inherited a railroad from their dad in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged:

• If you don't have to pay to dispose of cancer-causing byproducts from your refineries but can simply vent them into the air, and you make more money.

• If you can cut wages and threaten employees because they don't have a union, you make more money.

• If you can run a pipeline across sacred Native American land atop a major national aquifer with minimal safety oversight, you make more money.
• If you can hide your money from the IRS because the agency has had its budget slashed so badly that it can no longer do expensive audits of morbidly rich people, you can keep more of the money you've made.
• If you can get the government to cut social programs and public education, thus lowering your taxes, you can keep more of the money you've made.

So how do you pull this off, when every one of these things hurts average Americans?

Easy. Just embark on a 50-year-long campaign, through think tanks, right-wing media, and massive PR efforts to convince average Americans that government is the cause of, not the solution to, their problems. Convince working-class Americans that gutting government is a good thing that will ultimately help them in some mystical, magical way through the incredible "invisible hand" of the marketplace.

Lewis Powell, a lawyer for Big Tobacco, launched the movement to do just this with his infamous memo in 1971, and billionaires have funded and promoted politicians who jump on board the "government is evil" bandwagon ever since.

And it's largely worked, if the "trust in government" statistics compiled by the Pew Research Center since 1958 are accurate.

Years ago I was up late one night watching, as I recall, Bloomberg News on a hotel TV. The American host was interviewing a very wealthy German businessman at a conference in Singapore.

Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the German businessman what tax rate he was "suffering under" in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, "A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included."

"How can you handle that?" asked the host, incredulous.

The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.

A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.

The reporter went for a third try. "Why don't you lead a revolt against those high taxes?" he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American rebellion-making.

The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.

He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, "I don't want to be a rich man in a poor country."

There are a few wealthy Americans who understand this. But the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it's perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it makes them a few extra bucks.

They've funded and facilitated movements like the Tea Party and rightwing paramilitaries, media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart, and organizations like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC. They throw piles of money at Republican politicians, so long as they never stray far from the "deregulate, cut, denigrate" line about American government. They sponsor climate denial to increase their own profits.

And over and over again, they've been successfully pulling this off for the past 50 years. The most recent example is the disaster we're seeing in Arizona where the majority of Republicans in the Arizona Senate, totally owned by rightwing billionaires, went along with Trump and started a phony "audit"to further erode Americans' faith in our government. Reaganism has become Trumpism, and it's all pointing toward destroying faith in democracy in America just to make a buck.

Similarly, a Morning Consult poll about saving Americans from the Covid crisis a few months ago had this headline: "With Congressional Stimulus Fight Looming, 76% of Voters Back $1.9 Trillion Plan, Including 60% of Republicans." Yet every single billionaire-owned Republican in Congress opposed it, and now they're opposing President Biden's efforts to rebuild our infrastructure, both hard and soft.

As this nation recovers from a deadly pandemic that — unnecessarily — killed more than 500,000 of our fellow citizens, and struggles with rightwing hate groups that are trying to provoke a second Civil War, let's remember how this all came about. And all for a few extra pieces of gold.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/ayn-rand-myths

Coinbase's plan to go public in April highlights a troubling trend among tech companies: Its founding team will maintain voting control, making it mostly immune to the wishes of outside investors.

The best-known U.S. cryptocurrency exchange is doing this by creating two classes of shares. One class will be available to the public. The other is reserved for the founders, insiders and early investors, and will wield 20 times the voting power of regular shares. That will ensure that after all is said and done, the insiders will control 53.5% of the votes.

Coinbase will join dozens of other publicly traded tech companies – many with household names such as Google, Facebook, Doordash, Airbnb and Slack – that haveissued two types of shares in an effort to retain control for founders and insiders. The reason this is becoming increasingly popular has a lot to do with Ayn Rand, one of Silicon Valley's favorite authors, and the “myth of the founder" her writings have helped inspire.

Engaged investors and governance experts like me generally loathe dual-class shares because they undermine executive accountability by making it harder to rein in a wayward CEO. I first stumbled upon this method executives use to limit the influence of pesky outsiders while working on my doctoral dissertation on hostile takeovers in the late 1980s.

But the risks of this trend are greater than simply entrenching bad management. Today, given the role tech companies play in virtually every corner of American life, it poses a threat to democracy as well.

All in the family

Dual-class voting structures have been around for decades.

When Ford Motor Co. went public in 1956, its founding family used the arrangement to maintain 40% of the voting rights. Newspaper companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post often use the arrangement to protect their journalistic independence from Wall Street's insatiable demands for profitability.

In a typical dual-class structure, the company will sell one class of shares to the public, usually called class A shares, while founders, executives and others retain class B shares with enough voting power to maintain majority voting control. This allows the class B shareholders to determine the outcome of matters that come up for a shareholder vote, such as who is on the company's board.

Advocates see a dual-class structure as a way to fend off short-term thinking. In principle, this insulation from investor pressure can allow the company to take a long-term perspective and make tough strategic changes even at the expense of short-term share price declines. Family-controlled businesses often view it as a way to preserve their legacy, which is why Ford remains a family company after more than a century.

It also makes a company effectively**immune from hostile takeovers and the whims of activist investors.

Checks and balances

But this insulation comes at a cost for investors, who lose a crucial check on management.

Indeed, dual-class shares essentially short-circuit almost all the other means that limit executive power. The board of directors, elected by shareholder vote, is the ultimate authority within the corporation that oversees management. Voting for directors and proposals on the annual ballot are the main methods shareholders have to ensure management accountability, other than simply selling their shares.

Recent research shows that the value and stock returns of dual-class companies are lower than other businesses, and they're more likely to overpay their CEO and waste money on expensive acquisitions.

Companies with dual-class shares rarely made up more than 10% of public listings in a given year until the 2000s, when tech startups began using them more frequently, according to data collected by University of Florida business professor Jay Ritter. The dam began to break after Facebook went public in 2012 with a dual-class stock structure that kept founder Mark Zuckerberg firmly in control – he alone controls almost 60% of the company.

In 2020, over 40% of tech companies that went public did so with two or more classes of shares with unequal voting rights.

This has alarmed governance experts, some investors and legal scholars.

Ayn Rand and the myth of the superhuman founder

If the dual-class structure is bad for investors, then why are so many tech companies able to convince them to buy their shares when they go public?

I attribute it to Silicon Valley's mythology of the founder –- what I would dub an “Ayn Rand theory of corporate governance" that credits founders with superhuman vision and competence that merit deference from lesser mortals. Rand's novels, most notably “Atlas Shrugged," portray an America in which titans of business hold up the world by creating innovation and value but are beset by moochers and looters who want to take or regulate what they have created.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rand has a strong following among tech founders, whose creative genius may be “threatened" by any form of outside regulation. Elon Musk, Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong and even the late Steve Jobs all have recommended “Atlas Shrugged."

Her work is also celebrated by the venture capitalists who typically finance tech startups – many of whom were founders themselves.

The basic idea is simple: Only the founder has the vision, charisma and smarts to steer the company forward.

It begins with a powerful founding story. Michael Dell and Zuckerberg created their multibillion-dollar companies in their dorm rooms. Founding partner pairs Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and Bill Hewlett and David Packard built their first computer companies in the garage – Apple and Hewlett-Packard, respectively. Often the stories are true, but sometimes, as in Apple's case, less so.

And from there, founders face a gantlet of rigorous testing: recruiting collaborators, gathering customers and, perhaps most importantly, attracting multiple rounds of funding from venture capitalists. Each round serves to further validate the founder's leadership competence.

The Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has backed dozens of tech companies, including Airbnb, Palantir and Lyft, is one of the biggest proselytizers for this myth, as it makes clear in its “manifesto."

“The entrepreneurs who make it have a near-messianic attitude and believe their company is essential to making the world a better place," it asserts. True to its stated belief, the fund says it has “never removed a single founder," which is why it has been a big supporter of dual-class share structures.

Another venture capitalist who seems to favor giving founders extra power is Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. His venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is Coinbase's biggest investor. And most of the companies in its portfolio that have gone public also used a dual-class share structure, according to my own review of their securities filings.

Bad for companies, bad for democracy

Giving founders voting control disrupts the checks and balances needed to keep business accountable and can lead to big problems.

WeWork founder Adam Neumann, for example, demanded “unambiguous authority to fire or overrule any director or employee." As his behavior became increasingly erratic, the company hemorrhaged cash in the lead-up to its ultimately canceled initial public offering.

Investors forced out Uber's Travis Kalanick in 2017, but not before he's said to have created a workplace culture that allegedly allowed sexual harassment and discrimination to fester. When Uber finally went public in 2019, it shed its dual-class structure.

There is some evidence that founder-CEOs are less gifted at management than other kinds of leaders, and their companies' performance can suffer as a consequence.

But investors who buy shares in these companies know the risks going in. There's much more at stake than their money.

What happens when powerful, unconstrained founders control the most powerful companies in the world?

The tech sector is increasingly laying claim to central command posts of the U.S. economy. Americans' access to news and information, financial services, social networks and even groceries is mediated by a handful of companies controlled by a handful of people.

Recall that in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter were able to eject former President Donald Trump from his favorite means of communication – virtually silencing him overnight. And Apple, Google and Amazon cut off Parler, the right-wing social media platform used by some of the insurrectionists to plan their actions. Not all of these companies have dual-class shares, but this illustrates just how much power tech companies have over America's political discourse.

One does not have to disagree with their decision to see that a form of political power is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of companies with limited outside oversight.

Jerry Davis, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and Professor of Management and Sociology, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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