stop the steal

11/14/20 sorta belated for legal and activist/mob militia attempts to stall Biden 

part long timevoter suppression(maybe more intense/urgent after gop post mortem?

this includes legal BS/ suppression

recent roots 2016 ~ trump list pop vote by 3 mil, thus must be illegal voters/fraud

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REVEAL

Behind the Tweet That Became the Rallying Cry for the Insurrection

by Stan AlcornNovember 24, 2021

*This story is a collaboration withMother Jones.

On the evening of Monday, Nov. 2, 2020, the 35-year-old attorney who would jump-start the #StopTheSteal hashtag says he was meeting with Trump campaign officials in Philadelphia.

The city was a Democratic stronghold in a state Donald Trump won to secure the presidency in 2016 and needed to win again to remain in the White House. It was also a city long dogged by Republican accusations of election fraud. Will Chamberlain had driven up from Washington, D.C., to chase these allegations as a last-minute volunteer with the group Lawyers for Trump.

But Chamberlain wasn’t merely a lawyer. Although he had briefly worked at a commercial litigation firm in Los Angeles after passing the bar, he left that job in the spring of 2016, moved to D.C. and spent the Trump years running MAGA Meetups, relaunching a right-wing magazine and generally reinventing himself as a pro-Trump social media figure. When the campaign realized he had roughly 150,000 followers on Twitter, his role changed. “They figured out I’d be more useful doing stuff that wasn’t just legal,” Chamberlain told me.

He would still be on the lookout for “irregularities” – broken machines, verbal abuse of Republican officials, violations of law – but he wouldn’t be collecting affidavits or filing legal briefs. “If anything bad happened,” Chamberlain recalled, “we would put it out on social media.”

The next morning, at 8:19 a.m. on Election Day, he tweeted a video of a confrontation outside a polling place that would succeed beyond his wildest dreams. He wasn’t the first to make use of the #StopTheSteal hashtag, but according to an analysis conducted for Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, his tweet was the first to go viral. When it did, it took a little-known slogan of far-right activists and, in a matter of hours, transformed it into a ubiquitous rallying cry of what would become a nationwide movement to overturn the 2020 election.

Looking back, Chamberlain calls the movement that led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 “disappointing,” “frustrating,” and “scary,” but he is also quick to disown any personal responsibility.

“We weren’t thinking we were setting the stage for this massive campaign. All we were thinking was, like, this is a catchy hashtag,” he recalls. “I guess I underestimated how crazy certain people could get.”

It’s now clear that the ramifications of what’s become known as the Big Lie didn’t end with the events of Jan. 6. Far from it. A year later, a persistent, overwhelming majority of Republicans continue to believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. That false belief has been used to justify a wave of new voting restrictions, with the Brennan Center for Justice documenting 33 laws in 19 states, many of which experts say disproportionately disenfranchise people of color, college students, elderly voters and disabled voters. At least 10 Republicans who questioned the election results are seeking to oversee future elections in battleground states as candidates for secretary of state. A recent CNN poll found that a majority of Americans believe it is at least somewhat likely that an elected official will overturn an upcoming election to favor their political party. Only 6% say our democracy is not in danger.

This state of affairs wasn’t created by a single tweet. The edifice of #StopTheSteal was constructed on a foundation of false claims of widespread election fraud that predates Trump’s candidacy. But by tracing the convoluted journey of the tweet that started #StopTheSteal, you can see exactly how these long-standing beliefs, the singular rhetoric of Trump, and the evolving online and offline organizing tactics of the far right came together to create an unprecedented misinformation cascade. The dynamics that made this possible haven’t gone away. In fact, in some ways, the prospects for our upcoming elections are even worse.

On Election Day in Philadelphia, Will Chamberlain was paired with another volunteer, a local GOP activist and former state Senate candidate named Gary Feldman. As a Philadelphia resident, Feldman was able to register as an official Republican poll watcher, allowing him to legally enter voting locations to observe the process firsthand – he’d later say he was “the eyes and the ears of the president.” The plan was for the two of them to spend the day driving around Philadelphia, looking for what Chamberlain calls “shenanigans.” Should they see anything that fit that description, Feldman would investigate while Chamberlain would wait outside, taking pictures and videos and broadcasting his findings on Twitter.

Philadelphia has a long history of this kind of semi-official partisan videography. In 2008, when Barack Obama was running against John McCain, a recent college graduate working for the local GOP shot a video of a member of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense standing outside a polling place holding a nightstick. No voter claimed to be intimidated and no criminal charges were filed, but the video was endlessly replayed on Fox News after right-wing operative Mike Roman posted it to his Election Journal website. The idea of reviving this approach at the Philadelphia polls in 2020 came directly from Trump himself.

It happened at the end of the first presidential debate in September, when moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News tried to pin Trump down on a question he’d been publicly evading: “Will you urge your supporters to stay calm during this extended period, not to engage in any civil unrest?” Wallace asked. “And will you pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election has been independently certified?”

Instead of encouraging calm and making the pledge, Trump famously replied: “I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully because that’s what has to happen. I am urging them to do it. As you know, today there was a big problem. In Philadelphia, they went in to watch. They’re called poll watchers, a very safe, very nice thing. They were thrown out. They weren’t allowed to watch. You know why? Because bad things happen in Philadelphia.”

While Trump had been summoning the specter of fraud in Philadelphia since his first campaign, the “big problem” he was referring to happened that morning. It was opening day for a number of satellite election offices the city of Philadelphia had created to help its residents register and turn in ballots as part of a newly expanded mail-in voting program. Someone had walked into one of these offices, camera rolling, seeking to “observe,” and been politely turned away.

Andrew Wellbrock, now deputy attorney general in New Jersey and recently assistant district attorney in Philadelphia and leader of the city’s Election Task Force, says this was clearly the right move. Under Pennsylvania law, poll watching is something that only credentialed observers do, and only on Election Day at polling locations set up to ensure voter privacy. The video showed someone with no relevant credentials showing up at an office neither logistically nor legally set up to accommodate them. “It would be like someone saying they have a poll watcher certificate to come watch me do my work in my office,” Wellbrock says. “It’s just not how the law works.”

The video was tweeted out by Roman, who was Trump’s Election Day operations director. He offered a very different analysis. “TRUMP observers are being blocked entry to all of the satellite voting locations in Philly!! What are they hiding?” he tweeted. Trump and his two adult sons’ retweets went further. “This is Biden’s only hope to cheat you out of an election by preventing a fair and honest election,” tweeted Donald Trump Jr.

The Trump campaign followed up the tweets and debate complaints with a lawsuit, but it was thrown out eight days later. But the courtroom loss did nothing to extinguish the excluded-poll-watcher narrative, as the reaction to Chamberlain’s tweet would soon make spectacularly clear.

IFrame Content

Chamberlain told me that the first tip he and Feldman got on Election Day was that a polling site at a funeral home in South Philadelphia wasn’t admitting Republican poll watchers. Chamberlain and Feldman raced to the scene.

When they arrived, Feldman walked inside, only to be promptly ejected while Chamberlain recorded video on his phone. “I have a citywide watcher’s certificate,” Feldman says in the video, holding up the slip of yellow paper. “Not for this location,” one of the poll workers responds.

As it turned out, Feldman was right, and the poll workers were wrong. “It was all a mistake,” the election judge who denied Feldman’s entry told me when I reached him by phone. (Reached by email, Feldman declined to answer my questions.)

It was the kind of misunderstanding that happens at every election without affecting the outcome and that the Philadelphia district attorney’s Election Task Force typically resolves over the phone. Feldman and Chamberlain needed only to call the Election Task Force’s hotline, and one of the more than 90 lawyers on call could have directed the poll workers to let Feldman in. But, as Chamberlain told me and the Election Task Force confirmed, they didn’t call.

“That’s not what they wanted,” Wellbrock says. “They wanted a show. They wanted that headline.”

Or more to the point: They wanted that tweet.

IFrame Content

The tweet went out at 8:19 a.m.

Two minutes later, its viral journey began, with a retweet from Jack Posobiec.

Posobiec was a correspondent and host at the pro-Trump cable network One America News, but his real power came from Twitter, where he regularly posted hundreds of times a day.

“I would argue that Jack is the worst actor in the history of that website,” says Michael Edison Hayden, an investigative reporter at the Southern Poverty Law Center, who wrote a series of articles on how Posobiec built an audience by spreading conspiracy theories, inspiring harassment campaigns and working with White supremacists. Posobiec is “very good at setting the right-wing media agenda,” says Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “He tends to have a very loyal and dedicated fan base that knows what to do when he tweets something.”

By the 2020 election, Posobiec had amassed a Twitter following of 1.2 million that included right-wing influencers such as Trump himself – a fact that Posobiec leveraged to maximum effect. “Remember, folks, the President watches this space closely,” Posobiec tweeted months before the election. “That’s right Jack,” Trump tweeted in response. “Keep up the good work!”

When Posobiec tweeted Chamberlain’s video, his pro-Trump Twitter network sprang into action, with immediate retweets from a Trump campaign staffer and from Paul Joseph Watson, aka @PrisonPlanet, the British protege of Trump ally and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Kate Starbird, faculty director of the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, says in an email that this was a typical beginning for viral election misinformation. “We’ve talked about that kind of effect as a ‘spotlight’ tweet (where a user with a larger following casts a spotlight on a tweet/user with a smaller following and helps it take off).”

If Posobiec’s followers missed his initial tweet, no matter; he would spotlight the poll-watching video three more times in the space of three minutes. After the last of these, at 8:32 a.m., Donald Trump Jr. took notice and tweeted it, twice, to his 6 million followers.

Thanks to these prominent retweets, by 20 minutes after its release, Chamberlain’s video had been viewed nearly 200,000 times; in an hour, it was approaching half a million. In their analysis for the Election Integrity Partnership, researchers at the Center for an Informed Public documented more than 600,000 tweets related to Chamberlain’s video. That doesn’t include posts on other platforms where it was quickly reproduced, such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.

The engine powering this viral spread was what the Center for an Informed Public calls “repeat spreaders”: a small number of influencers with large follower counts who disseminated not one but many false or misleading narratives about the 2020 election. Their analysis ranked Posobiec, Trump Jr. and Roman among the 21 most prominent, alongside right-wing media figures like @BreitbartNews and Sean Hannity, as well as Twitter-specific influencers like “Cat Turd” and the QAnon account @prayingmedic.

Throughout the 2020 election season, these accounts acted as misinformation tastemakers, taking tweets from more obscure accounts like Chamberlain’s and then broadcasting them to their larger followings. While Posobiec happened to be the first to find Chamberlain’s tweet, it was their collective action that made them potent. One researcher I spoke with compared the swarm of influencers retweeting a new nugget of conspiratorial content to a flock of crows descending on a single french fry.

“You just need to hit one person in this network of right-wing influencers, and then it will spread to all the others,” says Center for an Informed Public graduate researcher Andrew Beers.

As Chamberlain’s video spread, the claims attached to it grew increasingly detached from the mundane reality it depicted. The first of Trump Jr.’s tweets amplified a quote tweet that prefaced it by saying, “Look, we don’t need any pesky poll-watchers interfering with the result that has already been preordained by Democrat officials.” The second: “They’re straight up stealing Philadelphia.” The front page of Breitbart News soon read: “ ‘The Steal Is On’ in Pennsylvania: Poll watchers denied access.”

It’s a pattern Starbird calls “participatory disinformation,” and it would occur again and again all across the country on Election Day and in the days and weeks and months thereafter. Trump voters who’d been primed for months with MAGA-world narratives of hacked voting machines, dead voters and rampant mail fraud, while being urged by the president to “watch very carefully,” ventured out to collect “evidence” that appeared to support their suspicions. Influencers, in turn, found these fragments and repackaged them into more compelling posts, which they then spread to their much larger audiences. If you were glued to far-right media, you saw not just scattered anecdotes, but a ubiquitous, consistent narrative repeated across social media, TV and radio. “(It) starts to take on the character of something that must be true because a lot of people are saying it,” Donovan says. “And that’s really what media manipulators and disinformers bank on. That’s what their strategic advantage is.”

The ultimate manifestation of this shows up at the end of Chamberlain’s tweet in the form of a hashtag.

“Stop the Steal” was not invented by Chamberlain. Its first incarnation was in 2016 when longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone picked up on Trump’s talk of a “rigged election” and founded an organization called Stop the Steal to prevent Ted Cruz from “stealing” the Republican primary. In the general election, Stop the Steal turned its attention to Hillary Clinton, signing up activists to monitor “key precincts” to thwart an alleged Democratic plot to hack voting machines and “flood the polls with illegals.” Posobiec was Stone’s point person in Philadelphia, where, in a haphazard premonition of 2020, he drove around the city with a local GOP staffer while telling his livestream followers that he was documenting “voter fraud.” (A Reveal producer was riding shotgun, so you can hear this play out firsthand.) The stunt had limited reach, and when Trump won the election, it was quickly forgotten.

Viral lies LINK

From wild anti-vaccine conspiracy theories to “Stop the Steal” and QAnon, we examine how misinformation swiftly spreads online – and the lives it disrupts.

Listen here

June 5, 2021

The name and strategy were revived in 2018 by associates of Stone, including Posobiec and future Stop the Steal protest ringleader Ali Alexander, to claim election fraud in Broward County, Florida. In September 2020, Alexander said on a livestream, “I’m thinking of bringing ‘Stop the Steal’ out of retirement.” (He also insisted, “Every precinct in the country needs a Republican poll watcher. Every precinct in the country needs a Republican poll watcher.”) That same day, Posobiec sent a tweet (later deleted) that said simply, “#StopTheSteal 2020 is coming …” In a brief phone conversation, Posobiec said of this and other tweets about #StopTheSteal and false election fraud allegations, “I share things for my followers that they might find interesting,” before declining to comment further.

For his part, Chamberlain admits that he had discussed using the hashtag in advance of the 2020 election with other right-wing Twitter users, including Posobiec. But he claims that when he employed #StopTheSteal, he didn’t mean to imply that the election was actually being stolen. “In that context,” he explains, “the ‘steal’ is shenanigans. Basically Election Day shenanigans.”

This is, needless to say, not how it was understood online.

The handful of #StopTheSteal tweets that preceded Chamberlain’s hadn’t gotten any traction, but as soon as his caught fire, people borrowed its hashtag and attached it to a rapidly multiplying mass of conspiracy theories, from dead people voting to ballots invalidated by Sharpies.

“(Chamberlain’s) one original tweet pretty much sets the “#StopTheSteal” hashtag into motion,” Starbird says. “Where it begins with that one incident and then starts to snowball and pick up/incorporate other incidents/narratives as it goes.”

In a brief, punchy, alliterative phrase, it grouped these disparate stories together, implied they were proof of a plot to “steal” the election and called Twitter users to action to “stop the steal.”

At its Election Day peak, tweets tagged #StopTheSteal were posted more than 10,000 times an hour. Riding the wave of the hashtag’s viral success, the next day, Alexander would launch a #StopTheSteal website – StopTheSteal.us – and Women for America First would launch a Stop the Steal Facebook group to organize on-the-ground protests. The last of these protests would take place at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. “To use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with: We will stop the steal,” Trump told the crowd. And the crowd roared.

While the Stop the Steal movement mutated and metastasized, Chamberlain’s tweet and the narrative attached to it continued to shape right-wing election-related discourse and policy.

As the vote totals in key swing states began to favor Joe Biden, the real-world protests that sprung up in Phoenix, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta and elsewhere focused their “Stop the Steal” chants on those doing the counting. The story of wrongfully excluded Republican election observers lived on – only now, it was the tabulation of ballots they claimed to be unable to witness.

Two days after the election, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) went on Fox News and falsely claimed, “By throwing the observers out, by clouding the vote-counting in a shroud of darkness, they are setting the stage to potentially steal an election.”

“THE OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED INTO THE COUNTING ROOMS,” Trump tweeted that Saturday, after the Associated Press declared him the loser in Pennsylvania and the nation as a whole. “BAD THINGS HAPPENED WHICH OUR OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE.”

Even after the votes had been fully counted and certified in Pennsylvania (with Republican poll watchers observing), Republican legislators held a hearing at a Wyndham hotel in Gettysburg that used the stories of poll watchers to hint at more elaborate conspiracies. “The issues are galore,” Doug Mastriano, a Republican state senator representing south-central Pennsylvania, said in a lengthy opening statement that compared the election to the Civil War. “You’re going to hear about poll watchers being denied access, where election software vendors refuse to testify before the General Assembly. What do they got to hide?” Among the witnesses called were Republican observers of both Election Day voting and the subsequent counting of votes. One of those witnesses was Gary Feldman.

Feldman’s appearance was brief, and news coverage of the event focused instead on the rambling false claims made by Rudy Giuliani and Trump himself, who participated by phone. But on the conspiratorial fringe, the hearing was treated as a pivotal event, with Trump’s recently indicted ex-adviser Steve Bannon referencing it repeatedly on his podcast, and Mastriano capitalizing on it to elevate his own profile.

Mastriano would gain infamy as an early champion of so-called private “audits” of election results, like the Cyber Ninjas in Arizona, hunting for fake ballots with telltale “bamboo fibers” (and still finding that Biden won the election). On Jan. 6, Mastriano joined the pro-Trump mob on the Capitol grounds and even chartered buses for his constituents.

By April 2021, Mastriano went on to co-sponsor all four Pennsylvania Senate bills on the Brennan Center’s list of restrictive voting bills, as well as the Poll Watcher Empowerment Act, which, among other provisions, seeks to penalize “any election officials who block, impede, or otherwise intimidate a poll watcher while performing his or her official duties on Election Day.” If passed, it would mean that an election judge could be jailed for months for making the same mistake that briefly kept Feldman out of a polling place.

The Pennsylvania bill is one of more than 40 pieces of proposed legislation in 20 statesseeking to give poll watchers more power. The most infamous was the omnibus voting bill in Texas, which was delayed but not defeated when Democratic lawmakers took the dramatic step of fleeing the state.

The Texas bill was signed into law in September, and its poll-watching provisions go further than anything proposed in Pennsylvania. It explicitly grants watchers “free movement” at voting sites, specifying they should be able to get close enough to “see and hear” election workers’ actions. It not only makes it a crime for election workers to obstruct watchers, but it also prohibits them from removing watchers who violate the law, unless they personally witness the violation. Multiple federal lawsuits have challenged these provisions as unconstitutional and discriminatory, saying they will increase voter intimidation and curtail election officials’ ability to keep voters safe and their ballots secret. “That is a recipe for making elections more chaotic and less secure,” says Tommy Buser-Clancy of the ACLU of Texas.

The centering of partisan watchers also underlies even seemingly unrelated voting restrictions. The Texas law rolls back the drive-thru and 24-hour voting that boosted turnout in heavily Democratic Harris County in 2020. Those forms of voting were explicitly attacked as insecure because they couldn’t easily be observed by partisan poll watchers.

“Taking that argument to its logical conclusion, you can only have in-person Election Day voting,” says Alex Gulotta, All Voting Is Local Arizona state director. “It’s not about observing voting; it’s about stopping voting.”

There’s a certain historical irony to Republican legislators casting partisan poll watchers as election integrity’s last line of defense.

Two hundred years ago, poll watchers were called “party agents” and were anything but neutral referees. In a time before lists of registered voters, opposing party agents actively debated and horse traded their fellow citizens’ voting rights, according to Cornell University professor Richard Bensel, author of “The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” “Poll watching in the sense that the Republicans mean it today didn’t exist,” Bensel says.

In the modern era, partisan poll watching evolved to serve a different function. Republican “ballot security programs” enlisted poll watchers to show up in the 1960s to enforce state literacy requirements, challenging voters standing in line to read aloud passages from the Constitution and demanding they leave the voting line if they could not. In 1982, the Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit alleging that Republicans in the 1981 elections had hired local law enforcement officers to patrol Black and Latino districts in New Jersey and question prospective voters about their qualifications. The lawsuit resulted in a consent decree that enjoined the Republican National Committee from similar activities until the decree expired in 2017. This meant the 2020 presidential election was the first in 40 years in which the Republican National Committee could openly sponsor and promote efforts to monitor the polls.

Many Democrats feared the result would be widespread voter intimidation, particularly after the Trump campaign claimed it would deploy a 50,000-strong Army for Trump led by Roman. When this “army” failed to materialize, voting rights historian J. Morgan Kousser was not surprised. He says the expense and challenging logistics, not to mention the possibility of a backlash, meant the rhetoric was always “puffery,” aimed more at fashioning a narrative than a genuine effort to recruit volunteers to do the boring work of observing the functioning of the country’s hundreds of thousands of voting locations. “For a long time, there has been a feeling in the election law community that these laws (allowing partisan poll watchers) had two purposes,” Kousser says. “One was to intimidate people, particularly Blacks and Latinos, from voting by giving them the idea that it is going to be difficult and may be dangerous to vote. And the other is that it’s simply one of the things that they’re doing to play to their base, to play up the idea that there is a lack of voter integrity.”

The RNC’s election integrity director, Josh Findlay, recently claimed the party would be stepping up its official poll-watching efforts in 2022. Even if this promise proves to be more “puffery,” as long as there are large numbers of Republican voters who believe election fraud is widespread, there will likely be some who will do their own unofficial poll watching. And if nothing else changes, there will also be a network of activists ready to transform their efforts into viral narratives on social media. Only five of the top 20 “repeat spreaders” of 2020 election misinformation identified by the Center for an Informed Public have been kicked off Twitter. The other 16 – including Posobiec, Trump Jr. and Roman – remain active and have millions more followers than they did last November.

In a recent report, the Center for an Informed Public pointed out that researchers and journalists have repeatedly found that a small number of influential “superspreaders” drive the spread of misinformation on social media. They suggested a solution could be for social media platforms to hold influential accounts to a higher standard, instead of doing the opposite. “It’s an incredibly obvious solution that they don’t want to do,” says Andrew Beers, a graduate researcher at Center for an Informed Public, “for I think very obvious political reasons.”

*This story was edited by Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, Nina Martin and Andrew Donohue.

*Stan Alcorn can be reached at salcorn@revealnews.org. Follow him on Twitter:@stan_alcorn.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/rudy-giuliani-2649698626/

12/20 an alexh

Although Joe Biden's inauguration is only three weeks away, President Donald Trump and many of his loyalists have yet to acknowledge the president-elect's victory. And that includes the president's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who has announced yet another election-related lawsuit challenging Biden's win in Wisconsin.

Making debunked and totally baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, Trump and his allies have filed one lawsuit after another in the hope of overturning the 2020 presidential election results — and most have already been dismissed or rejected in the federal courts. That includes the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal to even consider a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who asked the High Court to throw out the election results in four states that Biden won: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia.

Giuliani, according to Independent reporter Justin Vallejo, is challenging a December 14 ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court — which rejected the Trump campaign's efforts to get more than 50,000 ballots thrown out in Wisconsin. The former New York City mayor is hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court will invalidate the Wisconsin Supreme Court's decision.

Vallejo notes that Trump's campaign "says its petition will present claims that ballots were counted by voters without identification, incomplete absentee ballots were counted, and ballots were collected by hand at events held before the election."

Previously, a lawsuit from the Trump campaign asked the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the election results in Pennsylvania, but it refused to consider that case. And the justices later rejected Paxton's widely condemned lawsuit out of Texas.

When the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against the Trump campaign on December 14, it was a 4-3 decision — and Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote, "Our laws allow the challenge flag to be thrown regarding various aspects of election administration. The challenges raised by the campaign in this case, however, come long after the last play or even the last game; the campaign is challenging the rulebook adopted before the season began."

During a recent appearance on the podcast of former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon — who is facing criminal fraud charges for allegedly defrauding donors to the We Build the Wall campaign — Trump campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn insisted that the campaign will continue to fight the election results in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and claimed that there will be "action out of Georgia" as well.

The U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate are scheduled to officially count the Electoral College results during a joint session of Congress on January 6. Some far-right House Republicans, including Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, have vowed to challenge the election results that day. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has acknowledged Biden as president-elect and Sen. Kamala Harris of California as vice president-elect and is urging other Senate Republicans to do the same. Since Democrats still control the House of Representatives, and a majority of the Senate acknowledges Biden's win, Trump has no path to overturn the election in Congress, despite his hopes.

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1220 an kps

...Here is a nice list of the 126 Republican officials who whether charged with sedition and treason or not, are guilty of trying to, at the very least, thwart the will of the American people and overturn our democratically elected president:

Mike Johnson of Louisiana's 4th Congressional District made small headlines this past summer when his attempts to "gotcha" assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland Aaron Zelinsky for not appearing in person during a pandemic blew up in his face. Zelinsky, who had a newborn at home, explained that he had spoken with his family's doctor and they thought potentially exposing the newborn to a pandemic wasn't a good move.

Gary Palmer of Alabama's 6th Congressional District is one of those conservative think tankers whose big ideas include:attacking same sex marriage and nonbinary public restrooms. Big thinker.

Steve Scalise of Louisiana's 1st Congressional District is a storied hypocrite and swamp creature of epic proportions.

Jim Jordan of Ohio's 4th Congressional District is a person, so cowardly and so craven, he has built a career on his ability to ignore some of the most heinous crimes happening under his watch. Jordan's act of sedition comes down lower on his list of sins than most others on this list.

Ralph Abraham of Louisiana's 5th Congressional District is a shoot from the hip bigotwith ideas that were last considered fresh in 1770.

Rick W. Allen of Georgia's 12th Congressional District has one truly great claim to fame, he "disgusted" some Republicans once upon a time by reading anti-LGBTQ passages from the Bible. Different times. Different times.

James R. Baird of Indiana's 4th Congressional District was attacked with an insensitive and offensive mailer, by an out of state conservative super PAC in 2018, during his Republican primary. He seemed pretty offended at the time, but I guess he's decided to let all of that go in order to overthrow the government.

Jim Banks of Indiana's 3rd Congressional District spent the early weeks of the global pandemic to help pen a nonbonding resolution blaming China for COVID-19. That's what he did to help Americans.

Jack Bergman of Michigan's 1st Congressional District blamed the press for the domestic terrorist shooting that injured Rep. Steve Scalise.

Andy Biggs of Arizona's 5th Congressional District didn't go so far as to call Democrats who didn't applaud during Donald Trump's State of the Union "treasonous" but did believe they were "disrespectful" and that they might have to answer to God. He's also had to leave public events after being booed offstage for saying that climate change wasn't settled science.

Gus Bilirakisof Florida's 12th Congressional District came into the office he sort of inherited from his father. He's been a good anti-women's rights Republican since 2006 and pretty much does what he's told to do. And he's in Florida where Republicans tell you to do the real bottom of the barrel stuff.

Dan Bishop of North Carolina's 9th Congressional District came into office after *actual* election fraudster Republican Mark Harris had to step away due to controversy over … election fraud. Bishop is best known for writing North Carolina's anti-trans "bathroom bill."

Mike Bost of Illinois's 12th Congressional District is famously prone to outrageous outbursts. He's also known for cowering away from constituents when asked about his attempts to rip away millions of people's health insurance.

Kevin Brady of Texas's 8th Congressional District was that diminutive bald white guy that got a nice grin going in the Rose garden for when the Republican Party gave away billions to the rich in their tax scam. That's his great achievement.

Mo Brooks of Alabama's 5th Congressional District read Adolf Hitler's *Mein Kampf*on the floor of the House in a twisted attempt to skewer the Democratic officials over their pursuit of an investigation into Trump's campaign ties to Russia. He did this on the heels of calling for the National Guard to "be allowed to use whatever force is necessary to secure that border."

Ken Buck of Colorado's 4th Congressional District has faced questions over whether he pressured another party official to submit incorrect election results and then blew through some RNC money to make that fraud work. To call Buck a scumbag is offensive to bags filled with scum.

Ted Budd of North Carolina's 13th Congressional District is one of the Republicans who signed on to this bit of treason while in quarantine, after announcing he had tested positive for COVID-19.

Tim Burchett of Tennessee's 2nd Congressional District believes in Bigfoot and eating roadkill instead of providing better social services.

Michael C. Burgess of Texas's 26th Congressional District is the kind of guy that called for President Barack Obama to be impeached over Benghazi and then became suspiciously silent when Donald Trump was impeached for his law breaking and corruption-filled campaign.

Bradley Byrne of Alabama's 1st Congressional District took time away from releasing racist attack ads to sign on for fascism!

Ken Calvertof California's 42nd Congressional District is a famous "family values" hypocrite (see busted with pants around his ankles, with a sex worker who was not his wife).

Earl L. "Buddy" Carter of Georgia's 1st Congressional District. I couldn't find much on Buddy, but I do know that he doesn't believe in democracy.

Ben Cline of Virginia's 6th Congressional District was one of the dozen security threats with feet that breached national security for a hack partisan performance piece, led by Florida man Matt Gaetz.

Michael Cloud of Texas's 27th Congressional District owes his seat to the fact that repeatedly disgraceful Blake Farenthold had to leave office, and Republicans have successfully repressed the vote in his district.

Mike Conaway of Texas's 11th Congressional District knows a ton about stealing elections as he famously said, in 2017, that Democratic Sen. Harry Reid and other Democrats had enlisted "Mexican soap opera stars, singers and entertainers who had immense influence in those communities into Las Vegas, to entertain, get out the vote and so forth. Those are foreign actors, foreign people, influencing the vote in Nevada."

Rick Crawford of Arkansas's 1st Congressional District is maybe best known for his opposition to taking down Confederate monuments saying it was akin to Holocaust denialism and would lead to the closure of Holocaust museums. There's not much else to say about that.

Dan Crenshaw of Texas's 2nd Congressional District is a dirtbag who lies and pretends he isn't just a groveling McConnell follower.

Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida's 25th Congressional District has the distinction of being the first member of Congress to test positive for COVID-19. He will also be remembered as one of those Republicans who refused to speak to Donald Trump's describing countries as "shitholes." Courage is something these men do not have.

Jeff Duncan of South Carolina's 3rd Congressional District has enjoyed trying, and failing, to do away with important census data,by attempting to have it legislated out of being collected. Too much thinking for Mr. Duncan, I guess.

Neal P. Dunn of Florida's 2nd Congressional District has made sure to tell news outlets how worried he was and is for children separated from their loved ones due to Trump and the Republican Party's zero tolerance immigration policies. Not surprisingly, he's done absolutely nothing to fix this inhumane practice.

Tom Emmer of Minnesota's 6th Congressional District has complained about constituents wanting stuff like healthcare protections and he's tried in vain to weaken the Endangered Species Act. He's never been particularly interested in a Democracy and doesn't plan on starting now.

Ron Estes of Kansas's 4th Congressional Districtliterally walked in a swamp in the hopes of riding his way through a tight election. Sadly, Estes never left that swamp, he seems to have just grown gills.

Drew Ferguson of Georgia's 3rd Congressional District has a social media team that can't tell the difference between World War II American soldiers and Nazis. True story!

Chuck Fleischmann of Tennessee's 3rd Congressional District is the kind of guy that takes a question about the many outrageous attacks made publicly by Donald Trump and answers it by blaming Nancy Pelosi for being mean. But in Fleischmann's defense, he's been peddling the election fraud fantasy publicly, with zero evidence, since his lord and liege Trump told him to.

Bill Floresof Texas's 17th Congressional District has made sure to point out that he would ignore the calls from his constituents in regards to Trump's problematic relationship with Russia and instead make claims that same sex marriage led to civil unrest in Baltimore. The civil unrest in Baltimore connected to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody and the lack of justice he ultimately received.

Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska's 1st Congressional District got off his high horse to finally openly expose himself as the right-wing, batshit bananas hack that he's always been and pretended not to be.

Virginia Foxx of North Carolina's 5th Congressional District took time away fromanalogizing the regulation of for-profit colleges with the Holocaustto practice some good old Nazi fascism and overthrow our Democracy. She also once tried to argue that the murder of Matthew Shepard was not a hate crime. In fact, she said the premise was a "hoax."

Russ Fulcherof Idaho's 1st Congressional District is a climate denier … as of 2018. He also claims that God wants Idahoians to mine the ground and log away the trees in the state.

Matt Gaetzof Florida's 1st Congressional District is this guy. What can be said about Matt Gaetz that hasn't been written in excrement on the soles of Donald Trump and Sean Hannity's tiny shoes?

Greg Gianforte, governor-elect of Montana, assaulted a reporter for asking tough questions and then lied about it to police.

Bob Gibbs of Ohio's 7th Congressional District is the classic overly emotional conservative white male politician that uses hyperbole but demands that people take that incongruous hyperbole as fact.

Louie Gohmert of Texas's 1st Congressional District is an unintelligent person but he is also a relatively powerful and disturbingly racist and unintelligent person.

Lance Goodenof Texas's 5th Congressional District has been in the pocket of a Texas hotelier for years and owes most of his financial support to him. In fact, Gooden is in business with millionaire Monty Bennett and it seems that Bennett is the only person in the state of Texas that Gooden feels he needs to answer to. Gooden's one claim to fame over the past couple of years was coming up with a plan to DNA test all new immigrants at the border, something that is problematic for about 1 million reasons.

Sam Graves of Missouri's 6th Congressional District is the kind of guy thatruns on homophobia.

Mark Greenof Tennessee's 7th Congressional District is also a homophobe with a history of trying to create laws that would allow for the wholesale discrimination of LGBTQ folks in businesses throughout the Volunteer State.

Michael Guest of Mississippi's 3rd Congressional District is on the House Committee on Ethics. Drink that in: a guy that signed on for a coup d'etat represents Republican ethics in the House. Guest is also a supporter of Confederate fashion-lover and general old-timey racist Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Andy Harris of Maryland's 1st Congressional District is a person who ran on a campaign against the Affordable Healthcare Act and then demanded to know why his government-sponsored healthcare didn't take effect until after one month in office. And his dad was a Nazi-supporter—not like a neo-Nazi supporter, but an actual Germany during World War II Nazi supporter. Hubris is too nice a word for what Andy Harris is about.

Vicky Hartzler of Missouri's 4th Congressional District is really most famous for being an anti-gay activist. Imagine if that was your claim to fame?

Kevin Hernof Oklahoma's 1st Congressional District is directly connected to arguably the single most corrupt official in recent Oklahoma history, Scott Pruitt. He's also been a big promoter of superspreader COVID-19 events.

Clay Higgins of Louisiana's 3rd Congressional District is a former Louisiana police officer who lost his job for what would be considered criminal behavior if he hadn't been on the unjust side of the thin blue line. He's also a scary racist fascist who believes in authoritarian rule.

Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana's 9th Congressional District believes that the hundreds of thousands of Americans dead from COVID-19 are the "lesser of these two evils." The other evil in that sentence is "our way of life as Americans."

Richard Hudson of North Carolina's 8th Congressional District is your run-of-the-mill, anti-women's rights, Obama birther conspiracy theorist, demands drug testing in exchange for food assistance Republican.

Bill Huizenga of Michigan's 2nd Congressional District has been investigated for corruptionand has gone so far as to try and get rid of corruption laws that might conflict with his … corruption.

Bill Johnson of Ohio's 6th Congressional District is abig Islamophobe GOP official. That seems to be his main strength. Like many of the people on this list, Johnson came into office on the ultra-conservative tea party wave of 2010.

John Joyce of Pennsylvania's 13th Congressional District is new to the scene, but we now know one thing about his political ideology.

Fred Keller of Pennsylvania's 12th Congressional Districtbarely understands his own elections, let alone national ones.

Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania's 16th Congressional District has been on board this election fraud train since suing to have Black people's votes in Pennsylvania nullified.

Trent Kellyof Mississippi's 1st Congressional District gave his in-person seal of approval on the Trump administration's family separation practices.

Steve Kingof Iowa's 4th Congressional District is a lame duck racist who would sign anything so long as the devil told him to.

David Kustoff of Tennessee's 8th Congressional District's biggest claim to fame is being a sort of poor man's Tom Cotton.

Darin LaHood of Illinois's 18th Congressional District took time away from trying to govern women's bodies with his Bibleto sign off on treason!

Doug LaMalfa of California's 1st Congressional District has been promoting doubt about the Democratic process, with zero evidence, since the beginning of November. LaMalfa is a mixture of painfully pathetic xenophobia along with quoting the bible to deny climate science.

Doug Lamborn of Colorado's 5th Congressional District is the guy that continued to force his staff to work in the close proximity of his office during the current pandemic, and then reportedlytold his staff not to tell their roommates about COVID-19 symptoms they were having after coming into contact with someone with COVID-19. Think about that.

Robert E. Latta of Ohio's 5th Congressional District has magically increased his wealth while in Washington by a reported 238%, and while he isn't the wealthiest Ohio Republican, he's made the biggest jump in wealth since entering office. Strange!

Debbie Lesko of Arizona's 8th Congressional District once said that the dozens of sexual assaults alleged against Donald Trump should be investigated and then promptly forgot all about that as she co-sponsored a billthat would require women to prove to their employers that they took birth control for reasons other than … birth control.

Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri's 3rd Congressional District's main function in the Republican Party is to figure out ways to allow payday lenders to launder their money.

Kenny Marchant of Texas's 24th Congressional District is retiring and throwing democracy under the bus as he walks out the door.

Roger Marshall of Kansas's 1st Congressional District is the kind of guy that runs away from answering questions and participating in debates while also plagiarizing other people's campaigns, because he has no ethical standards.

Tom McClintockof California's 4th Congressional District is the kind of guy that was still hanging out with right-wing criminal and strange lying machine Dinesh D'Souza. D'Souza is one of those guys that almost makes you feel bad for being a human being.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington's 5th Congressional District is a person that literally said she had made "protecting those with pre-existing conditions" a "priority" during her time in office. She voted to repeal those very protections nine times—as in one less than 10 times.

Dan Meuserof Pennsylvania's 9th Congressional District has called the Postal Service's dismantling by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy a "fabricated problem being pushed by Democrats."

Carol D. Miller of West Virginia's 3rd Congressional District has the distinction of being the only new woman Republican congressional member in the 2018 blue wave election cycle. Miller wants to make sure the other fascists in her party know that she, too, can be a fascist!

John Moolenaar of Michigan's 4th Congressional District's only claim to fame has been to vote against calling Donald Trump's racist statement against "the Squad" racist. This makes John Moolenaar a racist.

Alex X. Mooney of West Virginia's 2nd Congressional District was one of the dunderheaded crew of Matt Gaetz-led legislators breaking the law and threatening the country's national security in the hopes of being on camera

Markwayne Mullinof Oklahoma's 2nd Congressional District doesn't know how many branches of government there are, nor does he understand how government works. He's clearly not alone in this.

Gregory Murphy of North Carolina's 3rd Congressional District told the public that the only reason Sen. Kamala Harris was chosen to be Joe Biden's running mate was because of "her color and her race." He finished that thought by wondering aloud if this was "how we pick our leaders now in America??" I guess Murphy is hoping that we just pick a white pseudo-billionaire to make important decisions for a majority of people that do not want him to?

Dan Newhouse of Washington's 4th Congressional District is one of the many Republican officials that recently contracted COVID-19.

Ralph Norman of South Carolina's 5th Congressional District brandished a loaded weapon during a constituent breakfast and placed it on the table in front of people discussing gun safety.

Scott Perryof Pennsylvania's 10th Congressional District once argued that God, as in the Judeo-Christian deity of the Bible, was an environmental polluter like, say, Duke Energy.

Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania's 14th Congressional District believes that the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police means that taxpayers should invest more money into police departments. He's also a guy that wrote a forward for an incredibly hate-filled book, and then said he hadn't read the book, even though his forward was about reading the writer's hate-filled work. U-S-A!

Tom Rice of South Carolina's 7th Congressional District spent weeks in the state legislature refusing to wear a mask indoors and then announced that he and his wife and his son had all tested positive for COVID-19.

John Rose of Tennessee's 6th Congressional District's big claim to fame was being one of the many Republicans, at different times, to block disaster relief help for Puerto Rico.

David Rouzer of North Carolina's 7th Congressional District is a Trump defender with all of the general Republican bonafides we have come to expect: tax breaks for the rich, voting against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, and being a part of the Gaetz impeachment crash party.

John Rutherford of Florida's 4th Congressional District has frequently been dragged on Twitter for the most racist and idiotic attacks on Democratic women of color.

Austin Scott of Georgia's 8th Congressional District recently tested positive for COVID-19.

Mike Simpson of Idaho's 2nd Congressional Districttook his head from out of his own ass long enough to sign on for fascism.

Adrian Smith of Nebraska's 3rd Congressional Districtsort of disappeared on his constituents, just like the rest of the Republican Party during this year's pandemic.

Jason Smith of Missouri's 8th Congressional District's great moment of cleverness was when he attacked the ACA for taxing tanning salons, saying Democrats might as well "tax the sun." He also spun it as a tax on women. Of course, Smith had a long history of attacking women in the legislature by trying to defund Planned Parenthood, as well as attacking children by voting against Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program funds.

Ross Spano of Florida's 15th Congressional District took time away from his campaign finance scandal, and losing his primary, to support another one-term corrupt politician.

Elise Stefanik of New York's 21st Congressional District is something of an easily verifiable liar. Let's all look forward to the day, likely a few weeks from now, when Stefanik tells a local news reporter that she never supported the wholesale destruction of the democratic process.

Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania's 15th Congressional District is a big Second Amendment fella who has said things in the past like "You know, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting. It's about safety. If someone is coming into my house in the middle of the night to hurt my family, I want as many bullets as possible." I guess he needs all the bullets to shoot holes in Democratically casted votes?

Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin's 7th Congressional District knows lots about election fraud and election law violations as he has been tied to all kinds of under-the-table, dirty, and likely illegal tricks to win his position in Wisconsin's legislature.

William Timmonsof South Carolina's 4th Congressional District is most recently remembered for defending Trump's racism by saying everybody is being called racist and so nobody is racist. Trying to get rid of Black Americans' votes wholesale is a great example of an attempt at systemizing racism. Just a thought.

Ann Wagner of Missouri's 2nd Congressional District is one of the legislators in Congress with the least amount of votes on actual legislation. I guess she's lazy? She was one of the first Republican officials to stand in front of microphones and tell Americans that based on her high level of knowledge, from "multiple, multiple briefings at the federal level," she knew—as of March 7—that the United States was at a very "low risk" of having a COVID-19 pandemic. Ann Wagner should be disqualified from doing anything but eating oatmeal.

Tim Walberg of Michigan's 7th Congressional District is one of those "family values" Republicans who wants to take away everyone else's rights using the federal government.

Michael Waltz of Florida's 6th Congressional District is already having newspapers who endorsed him apologize for supporting sedition. This is one of those "never Trumpers" who very quickly began licking the boots of Donald Trump the moment Trump came into power.

Randy Weber of Texas's 14th Congressional District replaced Ron Paul in Congress.There's not much more that needs to be said. A second-rate version of Ron Paul, while better than the fifth-rate version of Paul that is Rand, is still worse than having an old can of Tab sitting in a seat and being your representative.

Daniel Webster of Florida's 11th Congressional District is … so much Florida!

Brad Wenstrup of Ohio's 2nd Congressional District just followed in the footsteps of Jim "I-turn-the-other-way-when-being-told-about-the-wholesale-molestation-of-young-people-I'm-supposed-to-be-in-charge-of" Jordan.

Bruce Westerman of Arkansas's 4th Congressional District has sat on top of a pile of logging industry money for years and shockingly (read: "not shockingly") has been a lead sponsor on some super anti-climate, pro-logging bits of legislation that attempt to hand our trees over to private industry for profit.

Roger Williams of Texas' 25th Congressional District is the guy that tried to pressure a bank to help out his flailing oil investor donor. Swamp stuff.

Joe Wilson of South Carolina's 2nd Congressional District loves to vote for American wars but not for healthcare funding for American veterans of said wars. He's almost a perfect Republican! He's also in a district that's drawn deeply red and acts like the petty little emperor he wants to be.

Rob Wittman of Virginia's 1st Congressional District was able to fly mostly under the radar for his attempts at profiteering off of the COVID-19 pandemic when he bought into a pharmaceutical company which was producing an antiviral drug that hoped to help with COVID-19 treatments, and at the exact same time emailing his constituents that there was no coronavirus pandemic in the United States, and you didn't need to worry about it. You know, like a real piece of shit.

Ron Wright of Texas's 6th Congressional District is a relatively new congressman, whose views on school mass shootingsinclude calling for public hangings as a solution. Not working on the gun thing, just hanging people.

Ted S. Yoho of Florida's 3rd Congressional District is the soon-to-be retiring congressman from Florida who famously "didn't attend one single deposition" as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee when Congress was investigating Trump's Ukrainian bribery. He's also the sweetie pie who, in a confrontation with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez resorted to calling her a "fucking bitch," because his ability to debate matches the size of his courage.

Lee Zeldin of New York's 1st Congressional District is best known for his intense Islamophobia and his unerring and idiotic support of the Trump administration from Day One.

Remember these (mostly white) men (and a couple of white women). They are the people who hope to be a middle-management fascistic vanguard in an oligarchy for the rich

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/texas-supreme-court/

truscott salon

they didn't bother with writing articles of secession this time. No, Ken Paxton, the disgraced attorney general of the state of Texas, did that for them when he filed a lawsuit directly with the Supreme Court seeking to overturn the presidential election. On Wednesday, Missouri and 16 other states filed a brief with the court seeking to join the Texas lawsuit, which alleges that the four decisive swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia violated the Constitution by allowing mail-in voting in the November election. On Thursday, a majority of the Republican caucus in the House, 126 members of Congress, signed on to the lawsuit along with the instigator in chief, Donald Trump. Twenty-five states and territories signed a brief opposing the Texas lawsuit. Friday evening, the Supreme Court rejected the suit out of hand.

The 18 states and 126 members of Congress, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise, are seceding from democracy.It amounts to nothing less than an act of sedition by the entire Republican Party, 70 percent of whom believe that Joe Biden's election was illegitimate, according to a Quinnipiac poll released on Thursday. In contrast, 98 percent of Democrats think Biden's victory was legitimate, along with 62 percent of independents.

The last time anything like this happened was in 1860, when the election of Abraham Lincoln led almost immediately to declarations of secession by seven states between Dec. 20, 1860 and Feb. 1, 1861. Two months later, on April 12, the bombardment of Fort Sumter began, and the Civil War was underway.

It's not a shooting war — yet — but Texas didn't just file a lawsuit this week, it set a match to the Constitution of the United States. It isn't just that these Republicans don't recognize Joe Biden as our next president. They don't want to be part of the democracy that this country was founded on. They don't respect the votes of their fellow citizens. They don't want what more than 80 million people wanted when they cast their votes in this election. They want what Donald Trump wants.

Thankfully, it's not the whole country. The Quinnipiac poll found that 60 percent of registered voters think that Biden's victory was legitimate. But it wasn't the whole country in 1860, either. It was only after the election of Lincoln that the Southern states seceded from the Union over the issue of slavery.

This time there isn't a single issue, there's a single man: Donald Trump. In this way, what's happening right now in this country is eerily similar to what happened in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s with Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Trump has identified and used the same sort of mass hysteria Hitler did — a sense of resentment among his supporters that somehow they have been left behind and misunderstood and humiliated, and that only he, Trump, understands them and is willing to stand up for them and will bring back their rightful way of life.

So far, Trump has only played around with the kind of violence that Hitler made use of to achieve power and then consolidate it. Trump used implied violence in the chants of "Lock her up" that energized supporters at his rallies in 2016 and throughout the campaign of 2020. By staying silent this year when armed protesters occupied the State Capitol in Michigan, Trump implied his support, and his exhortations to "liberate" states that were mandating lockdowns to fight COVID were taken by many as invitations to violence.

Now armed protesters have gathered outside the home of the Michigan secretary of state, and Georgia election officials report that they are receiving death threats and racist voice mails. The Republican Party of Arizona has retweeted exhortations from those who say, "I'm willing to give up my life for this fight," suggesting it's time to "die for something." The New York Times _{reported this week}_ that the chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission has said that "people on Twitter have posted photographs of my house." Another tweet mentioned her children and threatened "I've heard you'll have quite a crowd of patriots showing up at your door."

The conservative website The Bulwark _{reported this week}_ that far-right websites have been posting addresses and other personal information about Republican elected officials in Georgia, superimposing target crosshairs over images of their faces. Right-wing Republicans are in full cheerleader mode trying to turn Kyle Rittenhouse, who is accused of murdering two people and wounding another at a Kenosha, Wisconsin, protest, into a hero of the Trump cause. A Democratic state representative in Pennsylvania told the New York Times that "we've been getting emails all the time, all hours of the day and night," and that "they're getting more angry, and a lot of calls are saying we won't be forgetting."

This kind of stuff is not a joke. The fantastic lie that has gripped the Republican Party started out with everyone going along with Trump's fantasy and kind of humoring him. But now it's taken a deadly turn. Trump has been calling Republican state representatives on the phone and pressuring them to go along with his demands that they ignore the votes that have taken place in swing states and appoint electors that will vote for him. If they step out of line, they're branded as traitors, cowards, RINOs. He's doing this kind of stuff to his own people, to loyal Republicans who have voted the party line since they were in short pants.

When you add in what's been happening in red states with COVID, it's jaw-dropping. Governors and Republican-controlled state legislatures are so intimidated that they won't pass mask mandates and bar closures, not to mention rules against mass gatherings. COVID cases and hospitalizations in red states are off the charts. They are lining up refrigerated trucks outside hospitals in states like North and South Dakota. Republicans are killing their own people in craven attempts to keep Donald Trump from attacking them on Twitter. God only knows what's going to happen in those states when the COVID vaccines become widely available, although we're getting some idea with reports of people standing up at meetings of county commissioners pledging not only that they won't wear masks, they'll also refuse to be vaccinated.

The Mason-Dixon line is psychological this time. These people have lost their minds. They have seceded from sanity and reason. This Civil War isn't being fought with rifles and pistols. It's a war fought with lies and delusions. This week it passed the number of Americans killed in World War II, and its victims are just as dead as the bodies buried at Anzio and Normandy. Americans are dying every time Mitch McConnell stands up and blocks a COVID relief bill. They are dying every time a Republican senator like Ron Johnson presents testimony from an anti-vaxxer as if it were a sane person instead of an outright idiot. They're dying by the thousands with their mask-less hubris. They're dying for Donald Trump, but at least for now, our democracy has not died with them.

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• How a post-election GOP 'civil war' could 'tear the party apart': reporter - Alternet.org ›

===

tide turns w/ pat robertson and

an 1220 no twt

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/newsmax-fact-check/

dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic have received a great deal of attention as right-wing media figures promote the claims of attorney Sidney Powell and other Trump allies who have made up claims that ballot-counting software stole the 2020 election for Joe Biden. But now Newsmax, which has grown in popularity since the election by elevating President Donald Trump's bogus election fraud claims, has been forced to debunk unfounded claims about Smartmatic and Dominion stealing the election, much of to the chagrin of its own readers and viewers.

Recent Newsmax segments showed anchors reading conspicuously and carefully scripted claims about the election systems companies that sharply contrasted with the outlet's previous claims.

Host John Tabacco explained:"Since Election Day, various guests, attorneys and elected officials have appeared on Newsmax and offered opinions and claims about Smartmatic and Dominion Systems — both companies that offer voting software in the U.S. And Newsmax would like to clarify its news coverage and note that it has not reported, as true, certain claims made about these companies. There are several facts our viewers and readers should be aware of."

Tabacco continued: "Newsmax has found no evidence that either Dominion or Smartmatic owns the other or has any business association with each other. We have no evidence that Dominion uses Smartmatic's software or vice-versa." [twt]

an article published on Newsmax's website offers some more clarifications — for example, "Dominion has stated its company has no ownership relationship with the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's family, Sen. Dianne Feinstein's family, the Clinton family, Hugo Chavez, or the government of Venezuela. Neither Dominion nor Smartmatic has any relationship with George Soros."

Powell has claimed that Dominion's equipment was used in Venezuela to the advantage of the late Huge Chavez. But Dominion, in response, stressed that its equipment has never even been used in that country. And Newsmax's article noted, "Smartmatic is a U.S. company and not owned by the Venezuelan government, Hugo Chavez or any foreign official or entity. Smartmatic states it has no operations in Venezuela."

Newsmax TV, like One American News, has been promoting itself as more favorable to President Donald Trump than Fox News. The viewers have clearly gotten used to this positioning, though, and comments on the outlet's site suggest many are angry that the outlet has been forced to defend Dominion and Smartmatic — almost certainly because Smartmatic has threatened legal action.

"Newsmax is so WEAK," said one commenter in response to the article fact-checking claims about the voting systems.

"Now I learned, that NewsMax is just a part of the DeepState, supporting the cheaters and trying to wipe the traces of the vote-stealing..." said another. "What a pity, I almost thought that this channel will be the the new Robin Hood of news agencies... So they will be not."

One commenter with the name Flacon2325 said: "WAY over 300 SWORN affidavits ARE evidence of illegal activity but the liberals everywhere just ignore the truth. They are not after Justice . They are after POWER!"

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) on Monday tore into President Donald Trump for hosting a summit at the White House last week in which he was implored to declare martial law in a desperate bid to retain power.

Appearing on CNN, Kinzinger was asked what he thought of disgraced former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn floating a plan to declare the results of the 2020 election void and then deploy the United States military to do a re-do of the vote.

"I think it's nuts," he said. "I think there's a lot of people that don't necessarily understand what martial law is. They know it basically sounds ominous. Martial law is basically the federal military coming in and suspending the authority of state or local governments."

Kinzinger went on to demolish some of the other conspiracy theories being floated by the president's allies.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-election-challenge

...IMI]...That there will be an attempted coup is no longer a matter of speculation. In an appearance on "Fox & Friends" on December 14,Stephen Miller, perhaps the most deranged and malevolent of Trump's senior advisers, openly declared the administration's plan to overturn the election results in the upcoming joint session.

A gambit under the 12th Amendment is a long shot, to be sure, but so was Trump's initial presidential bid back when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his first campaign and stigmatize undocumented Mexican migrants as "rapists" and drug traffickers. It behooves us, then, to take Trump and Miller seriously.

Ratified in 1804 in the aftermath of the hotly disputed election of 1800 (which ultimately seated Thomas Jefferson as the nation's third president), the 12th Amendment modified the procedures that govern the Electoral College. And while the 12th Amendment itself was modified by the 20th Amendment (which moved up the presidential inauguration from March to January), its basic provisions remain intact.

Of particular relevance to Trump's machinations, the 12th Amendment stipulates that after the electors of the various states (there are 538 of them today) cast and certify their votes for president and vice president, their ballots are transmitted to the president of the Senate. Under the Constitution, the president of the Senate is the vice president, currently Pence.

...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/rand-paul/

late stop steal

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-network/

after weeks of refusing to acknowledge or accept the outcome of the 2020 election, President Donald Trump's "alternative facts" news networks are clearly struggling with how to proceed. But with the meeting of the Electoral College, the reality of President-elect Joe Biden's win is creeping in. Newsmax is finally reporting the truth about Biden becoming the next president of the United States, while One America News Network has a slightly different stance.

The Washington Post reported that, unlike Newsmax, the smaller OANN downplayed the Electoral College in its television coverage. Nevertheless, the network quietly shared a retweet acknowledging the vote.

That tweet read: "BREAKING: Joe Biden has cleared the 270-electoral-vote mark to formalize his presidential victory with California's 55 votes. (Per AP)"...However, their site continues to publish pieces suggesting that widespread voter fraud is the reason for Biden's victory despite having no evidence to support those claims. The allegations of fraud are supported by misinterpretations of the facts, misunderstandings of the law, special pleading, and some outright lies.

Both conservative networks have been the main television sources airing Trump's unfounded grievances and unproven claims of voter fraud. Fox News, which played a significant role in initially calling the election for Biden, alienated many of its viewers with the truth, even as much of its coverage gave excessive credence to Trump's fraud claims.

No matter how outlandish the claim, Newsmax and OANN have enthusiastically reported the president's claims and refused to accept the outcome of the election.In fact, they have even advocated for Trump's attempts to overturn the outcome of the election. Conservative attorneys Victoria Toensinga and Joseph diGenova said on Newsmax still believe there will be more avenues to argue Trump's points.

"There will be a lot discussed about this over the next 24 hours," diGenova said, the Post reported. Toensing chimed in as she added, "Maybe only on Newsmax."

However, it appears NewsMax is generally turning a corner.The Post reported that one of the outlet's anchors tried to break the news of Biden's win gently to its audience.

"What I'm trying to do is manage everyone's expectations," host John Bachman said. "These judges don't seem to be taking up these cases. This is the reality. This is the motion set in place."

Meanwhile, the Newsmax homepage now highlights Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) remarks acknowledging Biden's win.

"Many of us had hoped the presidential election would yield a different result," McConnell said of Biden's win. "But our system of government has the processes to determine who will be sworn in on Jan. 20. The Electoral College has spoken."

Like the conservative networks and McConnell, a number of other Republican lawmakers have finally conceded that Trump will not be re-elected for a second term. Sen. John Thune (R-S.C) also another top-ranking Republican senator, admitted that there comes a time when you just have to move forward. For him, the official vote on Monday was a breaking point.

"At some point, you have to face the music," said Thune. "Once the Electoral College settles the issue today, it's time for everybody to move on."

==

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-georgia-2649520984/

lin wood? jail kemp and raff

wow after scotus 9-0

aLEC’s Pennsylvania Leaders Lobby to Overturn 2020 Election Results in Last-Minute Effort

By David Armiak and Arn Pearson | December 8th, 2020 at 8:18 AM (CST)

The Pennsylvania state chairs of the American Legislative Exchange Council are leading a GOP effort to overturn the state’s presidential election results when Congress convenes in January to certify the Electoral College’s election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

1220 an hunter

sow doubt disinfo

...

In this particular case, however, (most) House Republicans do not sincerely intend to win. But neither would they feel chagrined if their actions further provoked the sort of far-right violence seen in Washington, D.C., this weekend—the very public suggestion that non-Republican rule can simply no longer be tolerated by the unwashed masses, and that their non-Republican opponents should begin contemplating their own safety if they intend to continue thwarting Republican demands. That is the goal behind nearly all of this nonsense: to delegitimize; to put the stochastic notion in public heads that if The Base suffers a setback in its ambitions, it can only be because The Base was conspired against. It was conspired against by the urban, and the globalists, and the socialists.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/michigan-election/

hunter kos

the *Detroit Free Press* reports that the Michigan House and Senate buildings will be closed both to staffers and the public on Monday as the state's electors to the Electoral College meet to cast their votes for the state's presidential winner, Joe Biden. The Capitol was already expected to be closed to the public during the Electoral College meeting; this new, expanded closure also includes the building's legislative staff.

While neither Michigan State Police nor a spokesperson for the House Speaker's office would explain the reason for the closure, other than it being due to "security concerns," :{State Rep. Kevin Hertel tweeted that it was due to ":(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{credible threats":(style="background-color:#ffff00;"):}: that "have been made as Michigan's electors" meet.

The state has been a hotspot of fascist militia activity. Michigan legislators has been the subject of armed protests by the far right and the Michigan governor, a Democrat, was the intended victim of a domestic terrorism plot in which members of a far-right group sought to kidnap and possibly execute her over the state's pandemic safety measures.

Only a week ago, armed rightwing protesters with the intellect of flatworms demonstrated at the house of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson over rabid Republican conspiracy theories claiming Joe Biden's win over Donald Trump was fraudulent and/or a conspiracy.

There is no word on what security measures are in place as a response to the apparent "credible" threats aimed at disrupting the electors' official vote. Michigan state Republicans, however, have repeatedly encouraged the state's violent conspiracy theorists, most recently by inviting Trump "lawyers" Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis to present their election conspiracy claims to the Republican-led House.

an raw 1220

according to a report from the New York Times, hardcore supporters of Donald Trump who serve in the House are willing to attempt to deny the transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden if Donald Trump gives them a thumbs-up to proceed.

With the president insisting on Saturday during a Fox News interview that "It's not over," and Biden would be an "illegitimate president," a few Republicans are making plans to use the rules of the House to contest the election results.

"As the president continues to refuse to concede, a small group of his most loyal backers in Congress are plotting a final-stage challenge on the floor of the House of Representatives in early January to try to reverse Mr. Biden's victory," the Times reports. "Constitutional scholars and even members of the president's own party say the effort is all but certain to fail. But the looming battle on Jan. 6 is likely to culminate in a messy and deeply divisive spectacle that could thrust Vice President Mike Pence into the excruciating position of having to declare once and for all that Mr. Trump has indeed lost the election."

According to the report, the effort is being led by Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) who has amplified the president's accusations of voter fraud despite a complete lack of evidence.

"We have a superior role under the Constitution than the Supreme Court does, than any federal court judge does, than any state court judge does," the conservative GOP lawmaker explained. "What we say, goes. That's the final verdict."

As the report points out, "Under rules laid out in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act of 1887, their challenges must be submitted in writing with a senator's signature also affixed," with the likelihood that either Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) or Rand Paul (R-KY) might step up.

"Once an objection is heard from a member of each house of Congress, senators and representatives will retreat to their chambers on opposite sides of the Capitol for a two-hour debate and then a vote on whether to disqualify a state's votes," the report notes. "Both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state's electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century."'

That, in turn, could put Vice President Mike Pence — with an eye on his own political future — on the spot.

"The dilemma is particularly acute for Mr. Pence, who is eyeing his own presidential run in 2024. As president of the Senate, he has the constitutionally-designated task of opening and tallying envelopes sent from all 50 states and announcing their electoral results," the Times reports. "But given Mr. Trump's penchant for testing every law and norm in Washington, he could insist that Mr. Pence refuse to play that role. And either way, it will call for a final performance of the delicate dance Mr. Pence has performed for past four years, trying to maintain Mr. Trump's confidence while adhering to the law."

Adding to that, an attempt to throw out the election results and defy the will of the voters could cast a cloud over the Republican Party whether it works or not.

As for Republican Brooks, "It remains unclear how broad a coalition he could build. More than 60 percent of House Republicans, including the top two party leaders, joined a legal briefsupporting the unsuccessful Texas lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to overturn the election results. But it is one thing to sign a legal brief and another to officially contest the outcome on the House floor."

You can read more here.

==

12/11/20 9-0 loss scotus

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/newsmax/

maga party kelly?

===

right-wingers on Parler call for  civil war after SCOTUS dumps Trump's election fraud case

Daniel Villarreal The New Civil Rights Movement

After the Supreme Court refused to hear Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's case seeking to toss hundreds of thousands of votes in four swing states, right-wingers on Parler, the far-right version of Twitter, are literally calling for...

===

an 1220

In his column for the Daily Beast, conservative commentator Matt Lewis expressed exasperation with evangelical leaders who are set to lead what has been dubbed the "Jericho March" in Washington D.C. on Saturday under the belief they can pray God into helping Donald Trump remain in the Oval Office for four more years.

Lewis, who wears his faith on his sleeve, has long condemned members of the Christian community who have attached them to the president who, by his actions and his deeds, has never exemplified any Christian values other than giving them occasional lip service.

As the Daily Beast columnist sees it, the group scheduled to appear are a motley crew who do not exemplify the best the evangelical community has to offer.

Writing that "some prominent members of the Christian church are undermining the church's witness," Lewis added, "For evidence, look no further than this Saturday, when former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn (who recently shared a message calling on Trump to declare 'limited martial law' and hold a new election) will give his first post-pardon speech at something called the Jericho March in Washington, D.C. Aside from Flynn, the roster includes other prominent MAGA names like Mike Lindell (the MyPillow guy), Eric Metaxas (a radio host who punched a protester and recently said, 'I'd be happy to die in this fight'), Ali Alexander (formerly Ali Akbar), and C.J. Pearson. Afterwards, the crowd will converge on the National Mall for the 'ROAR' prayer rally."

rudy and jenna pos

kos

So you probably heard that Benito Shit-giggles is trying to overturn our election, and he's sent Four Seasons Total Lawyering founder Rudy Giuliani out to the wastelands to do his bidding.

And you probably saw some of that fake hearing in which Rudy — screwy-as-an-Argentine-bluebird-duck's-penis Rudy Focking Giuliani — tried to shush his (presumably drunk and loony) witness Mellissa Carone.

Yeah, you remember.

Well, there's more. Carone did an interview with SarahPalin.com today — because 2020 needed far more toppings for the shit sundae — and … erm … this happened:

When it comes to her feelings on politics or just about anything, Carone doesn't mince words. While she's been called 'a drunk' and 'stupid' by the basement dwellers, this mother of a four-year old and a four-month old keeps telling her story with a smile.

"This is what they do to Trump," Carone said. It's not going to work with me. I won't back down because I am very religious and I know God is watching over me. This started with COVID. The Obamas funded that Wuhan lab to make COVID. Then the impeachment process. They've used every avenue possible to cheat, they used Dominion. Dominion software was created to cheat. I have a binder from Dominion that proves this. There's so much more that will be exposed."

:{

}:

[vid]

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an raw story

ore than 100 Republican lawmakers and nearly half of state attorneys general have signed on to a Texas lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump's election loss, and a top political analyst revealed an alarming reason why they're willing to upend democracy.

Texas attorney general Ken Paxton asked the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate votes from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and 106 GOP House members and 17 other state attorneys general signed on to the challenge.

"I get a question all the time from my friends, people in Washington, outside of Washington -- why are Republicans doing this?" Washington Post reporter Robert Costa told MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "Why are they behaving this way? Isn't President Trump going out the door?"

"That's not what they think," Costa added. "He's not going away. There's a growing acceptance, while he may be at Mar-A-Lago in 2021, he will not run from the scene. He may prepare to run in 2024. Even if he doesn't, he's going to be meddling in primary races in 2022, so many of these Republicans are operating sometimes out of loyalty, sometimes to be sharing in the theatrics of the moment and sometimes out of fear."

Some of the lawmakers are making a cynical gamble, Costa said, but some of them seem to believe Trump has a path to victory.

"Some of it's cynical, but let's not forget that in some channels of the conservative media, there is a belief still that President Trump has an ability to win this election through going to the Supreme Court," Costa said. "President Trump is watching these media outlets, he's reading the media outlets [and] it's creating an echo chamber inside of the Republican Party. So the motives aren't all just to stand with President Trump in solidarity, to show voters who are frustrated with President Trump's defeat that they're doing that. It's about actually believing the cause, and that's where American politics is going. They are not shared facts at this moment."[vid]

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/republican-ags/

With the Trump operation's legal effort to overturn the November election going nowhere, nearly 20 Republican attorneys general have decided to throw their support behind Texas AG Ken Paxton's desperate—and, according to analysts, doomed-to-fail—Supreme Court lawsuit against four key battleground states that have certified President-elect Joe Biden's victories.

Filed on Tuesday and enthusiastically celebrated in right-wing circles, Paxton's lawsuit (pdf) baselessly alleges "significant and unconstitutional irregularities" in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and pleads with the high court to delay next week's scheduled certification of presidential electors for those four states.

That the lawsuit was mocked as "utter garbage" and "factually untethered" by legal experts did not dissuade 18 Republican attorneys general, led by Missouri AG Eric Schmitt, from expressing support for Paxton's effort.

As of this writing, the Republican attorneys general of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia have backed Schmitt's amicus brief(pdf) in support of the Texas lawsuit. Arizona Attorney General MarkBrnovich has filed a separate brief (pdf) "respecting" the Texas suit.

The New York Times reported that Trump asked Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Tuesday to argue the case if the Supreme Court hears it, and Cruz has agreed.

Late Wednesday, Trump—who has openly pleaded with the Supreme Court to undo Biden's decisive victory—filed a brief with the high court seeking to intervene in support of Paxton's lawsuit. Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said the president's filing "reads like a rally speech."

"Were the Supreme Court to agree to hear this meritless suit brought by Texas," Clarke added, "we might as well toss the Constitution."

More than 3,000 Americans died from covid today, a new record, and instead of saving thousands of lives 18 GOP stat… https://t.co/tuKGOs12Mi

— Ari Berman (@Ari Berman)1607565108.0

The Supreme Court—to which Trump successfully appointed three right-wing justices over his four years in office—has not yet decided whether to take up the case, despite viral right-wing social media posts to the contrary.

In a blog post, Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, called Paxton's complaint "a press release masquerading as a lawsuit." He elaborated:

Texas doesn't have standing to raise these claims as it has no say over how other states choose electors; it could raise these issues in other cases and does not need to go straight to the Supreme Court; it waited too late to sue; the remedy Texas suggests of disenfranchising tens of millions of voters after the fact is unconstitutional; there's no reason to believe the voting conducted in any of the states was done unconstitutionally; it's too late for the Supreme Court to grant a remedy even if the claims were meritorious (they are not).

While Paxton's lawsuit will almost certainly fail, observers warned that the willingness of so many top state law enforcement officials to back the effort to overturn the presidential election highlights the threat the right will continue to pose to democracy long after Trump leaves office.

"The president will leave the White House on January 20. The conservative attorneys who have become radicalized under his influence, however, will remain in power across the country," Slate's Mark Joseph Stern wrote Wednesday. "Paxton's suit asks the Supreme Court to throw out every vote in four states won by Joe Biden—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—then direct each state's legislature to declare Trump the winner."

"This act would constitute the single biggest incident of voter nullification in American history," Stern continued. "Paxton alleges that all four states illegally expanded mail voting, permitted egregious fraud, then concealed evidence that Democrats stole the election. There is no basis in truth for his factual claims and no basis in law for his legal theories."

Clarke of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law added on Twitter, "This is what anti-democratic conduct looks like."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/failed-coup-trump/

salon

Trump is still trying to steal the election from Joe Biden, and while he is still going to fail, the terrifying reality is that a few cracks in the wall protecting democracy have started to appear.

While many pundits continue to minimize this entire situation, sneering at people who use phrases like "attempted coup," the grim reality of our current moment is that Trump got far closer to succeeding than many people would like to admit. He's only stopped now by the fact that too many people voted against him in so many different parts of America. Every indication suggests that if it were up to Republicans, who still hold a disproportionate amount of power, Trump might very well have been illegally installed for a second term in office.

The Washington Post reported that Trump reached out to Bryan Cutler, speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, on Monday in an effort to get Cutler to invalidate the state's presidential election results, citing "all these issues in Philadelphia." This is the third Republican state leader Trump has reached out to with this request — he's also contacted Georgia's Gov. Brian Kemp and brought Michigan legislators to the White House — and the third strikeout.

In fact, it's arguably the fourth. Trump also called Arizona's Gov. Doug Ducey. Ducey claimed the president wasn't trying to pressure him — but c'mon, Trump's "information gathering" is just more Trumpian code for his pressure campaign.

So why isn't Trump getting what he asked for? Much of the coverage of the recalcitrant Republican leaders portrays these officials as brave defenders of democracy, or at least people who have had enough of Trump's corruption and are drawing a line.

That's nonsense.

It's evident that what's holding Republicans back is not honor or decency, but a lack of options. There simply aren't legal processes to pull off what Trump wants, no matter what Newsmax or OANN might say, and state leaders know it. They are saying no to Trump not because they want to, but because, legally, they have to. Witness, for instance, what the Pennsylvania House speaker's spokesperson told the New York Times about the discussion with Trump: "Cutler made it very clear what power the legislature has and does not have."

Missing, of course, is any mention of the importance of democracy or a robust defense of the right of Pennsylvanians to vote. Cutler sympathizes with Trump's desire to overturn a free and fair election, which is why he signed a letter to the state's congressional delegation asking them to object to the state's electoral votes. He just doesn't have the power to vacate the election results.

Georgia's Kemp issued a similar response, noting how much effort he's put into "auditing" the vote, but underlining that he's hamstrung from doing any more. Again, this is not a high-minded defense of the right of Georgians to have their votes counted. On the contrary, Kemp has a long history of being an eager vote suppressor, and that's likely why he's governor today. He's just hit the limit of his powers to deprive voters of their right to be heard. The Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has received widespread praise for his "courage" in standing up to Trump's coup effort. This is further nonsense. While Raffensperger has been more outspoken in defense of the election results than other Trump-toadying politicians, he too is acting more out of legal necessity than a desire to defend democracy.

Raffensperger has a long history of supporting voter suppression. Indeed, he's exploiting the current situation by conflating Trump's attacks on the election with the fight by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to *ensure*free and fair elections, on the grounds that both are losers who are critical of Georgia's election process. Of course, the two couldn't be more different, starting with the fact that Abrams is telling the truth about voter suppression and Trump is lying about voter fraud. But the larger point here is that Raffensperger's instinct is to use Trump's coup as leverage to strip away more voting rights.

Raffensperger is no hero. He's just legally constricted from being a villain in the particular case of Trump's coup.

Indeed, there was surprising enthusiasm for Trump's efforts in the days after the election from state-level Republicans, which is why 10 Republican state attorneys general filed an amicus briefon Nov. 10 demanding that the Supreme Court gut a Pennsylvania law giving mail-in ballots mailed by Election Day up to three days to arrive. What's happened since then, however, is mounting evidence that Democratic voters, egged on by the party's calls to vote early, outwitted Republican efforts to steal the election through such legal maneuvers. For instance, only 10,000 votes arrived in that three-day post-election window in Pennsylvania, so even if Trump's lawsuit had been successful, it wouldn't have changed the results of the election in that state.

Even in the face of all this, some state-level Republicans are still looking for any angle they can find to overturn the election. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Tuesday demanding that the Supreme Court prevent state delegations from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin from voting in the Electoral College. Notably, all four states have been subject to accusations from Trump that the votes from large, racially diverse cities are specifically illegitimate.

On the federal level, the same dynamic is in play.

The Washington Post surveyed 249 Republicans in Congress about Trump's attempts to steal the election, and the numbers are disheartening, to say the least. Only 27 GOP congressional members openly opposed the coup by acknowledging that Biden had won the presidential election. Two members said publicly they believed Trump had won, and the rest — 220 duly elected Republican members of Congress — wouldn't answer the question either way.

Saying nothing is tacit support. These members would be perfectly willing to go along with Trump stealing the election if he could pull it off. They just aren't getting on board publicly because they know it won't work. Even if some congressional Republicans object to the state electors — and every sign shows that a handful will — Democrats control the House, so nothing will likely come of it. But this silence speaks volumes about who would happily collaborate with Trump's coup if they had any confidence it would work.

Of course, not all of them are silent. A group of House Republicans, led by Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mo Brooks of Alabama, are publicly calling on Trump to continue fighting even after the Electoral College legally certifies the election for Biden next week. There has been no rebuke from the Republican leadership to these extremists, not even from leaders who hail from the states where Trump is trying to have legal votes thrown out. The Republican stance, on both the state and federal level, is clear: They wish they could help Trump overturn the election, but they just don't see a path forward. They were prepared to abuse their power as far as they could to help him, and have hit the wall

Unfortunately for Trump, time has run out. Tuesday is the deadline for states to certify their results, and next Monday the Electoral College will finally make Biden's win official. The results are clear, not because Republican leaders have any integrity, but because voters showed up in large enough numbers to render all these shenanigans effectively moot. Trump will leave office on Jan. 20, and the only people who deserve credit for that are Democratic voters and organizers, who made sure Biden's win was big enough that it couldn't be stolen away.

today safe harbor for electors?

cruz offers go to scotus, dobbs po'd at s miller for not?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/texas/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/texas-election-lawsuit/

today safe harbor for electors?

cruz offers go to scotus, dobbs po'd at s miller for not?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/texas/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/texas-election-lawsuit/

Legal experts weighed in on Tuesday with their disapproval of the state of Texas' latest lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court against four battleground states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin — over the outcome of the presidential election.

The president and his legal team have claimed widespread fraud marred the election results, but their attempts to provide even a sliver of convincing evidence for this bold claim have fallen flat as judges have tossed out more than 45 of their lawsuits in states across the country. The new :{lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) accuses states of " electoral irregularities.:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{":(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}: Although President-elect Joe Biden has already been declared the winner of the election, and the vote counts have been rigorously vetted, the lawsuit claims the so-called "flaws" within the election process "preclude knowing who legitimately won the 2020 election," according to Law & Crime.

"Plaintiff State respectfully submits that the foregoing types of electoral irregularities exceed the hanging-chad saga of the 2000 election in their degree of departure from both state and federal law. Moreover, these flaws cumulatively preclude knowing who legitimately won the 2020 election and threaten to cloud all future elections," Texas said.

It adds: "Taken together, these flaws affect an outcome-determinative numbers of popular votes in a group of States that cast outcome-determinative numbers of electoral votes. This Court should grant leave to file the complaint and, ultimately, enjoin the use of unlawful election results without review and ratification by the Defendant States' legislatures and remand to the Defendant States' respective legislatures to appoint Presidential Electors in a manner consistent with the Electors Clause and pursuant to 3 U.S.C. § 2."'

Legal experts see this lawsuit as yet another likely dead end for the Trump campaign. Steve Vladeck, an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law, pilloried the effort with a string of fiery tweets criticizing the lawsuit.

Vladeck tweeted, "It looks like we have a new leader in the 'craziest lawsuit filed to purportedly challenge the election' category: The State of Texas is suing Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin *directly* in #SCOTUS."

According to Vladeck, the Supreme Court will "never" hear this case.

Although the Supreme Court has “exclusive” jurisdiction over disputes between states, it does not automatically hea… https://t.co/KGzhLlmIrV

— Steve Vladeck (@Steve Vladeck)1607436791.0

Josh Douglas, election law and voting rights professor at the University of Kentucky Rosenberg College of Law, also had critical remarks about Paxton and the lawsuit, which he described as "insane."

He tweeted, "Texas AG Ken Paxton--who is under FBI investigation for using his office to benefit a political donor and whose top lawyers blew the whistle and resigned--is now trying to have Texas sue PA, GA, MI, and WI over the presidential election. Insane."

Texas AG Ken Paxton--who is under FBI investigation for using his office to benefit a political donor and whose top… https://t.co/xikhafPvao

— Josh Douglas (@Josh Douglas)1607437990.0

The lawsuit is also being seen as an attempt to delay the Electoral College vote. However, like many of Trump's other post-election lawsuits, most legal experts are expecting this one to fail, as well.

1220 mma

This week, we compiled some of the right-wing media figures who have supported Trump’s efforts to spread false claims and conspiracy theories about the election. Here are just a few examples (there are dozens more):

• Maria Bartiromo: The Fox Business anchor hosted Trump for a phone interview, during which she further aided and abetted his various false claims about the election. Bartiromo began the interview: “Mr. President, you have said many times that this election was rigged, that there was much fraud — and the facts are on your side.”
• Sean Hannity: The day after the election, the Fox News host called the continued vote count in Pennsylvania “an absolute disgrace.” The next day, he called for Republican state legislatures to override the vote results in their state and install pro-Trump electors.
• Laura Ingraham: In the days after the election, the Fox News host brought on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to spread conspiracy theories and sow doubts about the election result. She then blamed the outcome, in part, on “huge amounts of money from Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros” and told him that Republicans had “better remember who helped expand this party. … It was Donald Trump. And they better stand and fight for him.”

==

an12/6?/20

just 27 out of 249 congressional Republicans acknowledge that Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, according to a Washington Post survey, and Trump on Saturday demanded that they be identified.

More than a month after President-elect Biden claimed a decisive victory over the lame-duck president—winning the popular vote by more than 7 million and garnering 306 votes in the Electoral College—Reps. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) still insist Trump won the race, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Another 220 GOP members of the House and Senate—roughly 88 percent of congressional Republicans—refuse to say who won.

Those are the findings of a Washington Post survey conducted this week.

Beginning "the morning after Trump posted a 46-minute video Wednesday evening in which he wrongly claimed he had defeated Biden and leveled wild and unsubstantiated allegations of 'corrupt forces' who stole the outcome from the sitting president," a team of 25 reporters contacted aides for all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate by email and phone, thePost explained.

In addition to researching "public statements made by GOP lawmakers in recent weeks to determine their stance on Biden's win," the Post reporters asked three questions:

1. Who won the presidential contest?
2. Do you support or oppose Trump's continuing efforts to claim victory?
3. If Biden wins a majority in the Electoral College, will you accept him as the legitimately elected president?

According to the Post,only nine congressional Republicans oppose Trump's ongoing efforts to claim victory, nine others—including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)—support his attempt to overturn the election results, and 231 declined to answer.

Brooks and Gosar said they will not accept Biden as the legitimately elected president of the U.S. regardless of what happens when electors meet on December 14.

"In my judgement, this is the worst election theft in the history of the United States," Brooks said, while Gosar claimed that there is "too much evidence of fraud."

The lawmakers' statements come just days after Attorney General William Barr, a key Trump ally, admitted that "we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have" affected the outcome of the election, as Common Dreamsreported.

Thirty-two congressional Republicans said they will accept Biden's victory if he wins a majority in the Electoral College, and 215 did not respond.

The Post distilled the survey results into the following chart:...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/rudy-giuliani-star-witnesses/

drunk?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-dictator/

flynn dobbs oann

no lnx twt

Here's why Republicans who are calling for a Trump dictatorship should not be taken lightly — and aren’t going away

Trump condemned for White House 'dictator' statement to cast doubt on election results

The Conversation

Alex Henderson December 04, 2020

The United States dodged an authoritarian bullet when former Vice President Joe Biden, a centrist Democrat, became president-elect, winning 306 electoral votes and defeating defeated President Donald Trump by more than 6 million in the popular vote. But when Republican Lin Wood, a pro-Trump attorney who has been fighting the election results in Georgia, implores Trump to impose martial law and elections officials are receiving death threats for acknowledging Biden as president-elect, it is painfully obvious that there is a strong appetite for fascism in parts of the United States. And journalist Sasha Abramsky, in an article published by The Nation on December 4, warns that Republicans who are openly calling for fascism should not be taken lightly.

"We are less than seven weeks away from the inauguration, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't counting down the seconds," Abramsky writes. "For the last spasms of Trumpist rule are truly a sight and sound to behold. Trumpism is, at this point, nothing more than a blend of cultism and fascism — a violent, nihilistic howl against the pillars of American democracy unparalleled in presidential history."

Abramsky adds, however, that when "people surrounding Trump are calling for dictatorship," it "ought to send a chill up all Americans' spines." And Abramsky cites some specific examples of Trumpistas who haven't been shy about showing their authoritarianism.

"Trump campaign attorney Joe DiGenova said that Chris Krebs, the election security official whom Trump fired by tweet last month after he defended the integrity of the election, should be 'drawn and quartered' and 'taken out at dawn and shot,'" Abramsky observes. "Stalin couldn't have said it better himself when talking about his perceived enemies in the Soviet bureaucracy.

Former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell…. retweeted a call to invoke the Insurrection Act, suspend the meeting of the Electoral College and set up military tribunals to deal with Trump's enemies. The following day, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, coming off a recent presidential pardon from Trump, urged his erstwhile boss to declare martial law, suspend the Constitution, and order new presidential elections under the supervision of the military."

Abramsky adds, "Far-right media personalities have joined the fascist clamor. Lou Dobbs of Fox Business recently called for Trump to take unspecified 'drastic action' against his enemies. The One America News Network has also suggested that Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act as a way to remain in office."

The journalist stresses that "when a fanatical movement's hold on power starts to diminish, the extremists have a tendency to eat their own." And Abramsky points to the recent attacks on Attorney General William Barr from the far right as a disturbing example.

Barr has been one of Trump's most aggressive defenders, often inspiring unflattering comparisons to the late Republican attorney Roy Cohn (who was an ally of Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s and represented Trump during the 1970s). But Barr, during an interview with the Associated Press, essentially acknowledged Biden as president-elect and said there was no evidence that widespread voter fraud swung the election in Biden's favor — and Trumpistas like Dobbs are furious with Barr for it.

It should be noted that far-right fascists don't necessarily come to power through a violent coup d'état or golpe de estado; sometimes, they are voted into office and try to gradually undermine a democracy's system of checks and balances. That has happened in Turkey with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and in Hungary with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and hopefully, Brazil's checks and balances will withstand the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Meanwhile, in France, far-right white nationalist Marine Le Pen (leader of the National Front) lost the country's 2017 presidential race but is likely to run for president again.

Most Americans rejected fascism in the United States' 2020 presidential election. But Abramsky warns that the appetite for fascism in the U.S. hasn't gone away.

"Trump's fascist yammering and the GOP Senate's collaborationist behavior isn't just a footnote to the 2020 election campaign," Abramsky warns. "Rather, it's a prologue to what could come next…. The GOP as an institution has entirely abandoned its commitment to the democratic process…. It's a hell of a warning shot as to how the Grand Old Party intends to conduct itself in the months and years ahead."

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alexh 1220

note strike team also fedsoc; site has nothing on election https://fedsoc.org/ but 2nd amend protects weapons of war

Although President-elect Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election has been certified in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and other battleground states, President Donald Trump's legal team is continuing to fight the election results in court. But attorney and election law expert Richard L. Hasen, this week in an article for Slate, salutes the Republican officials who have been standing up to Trump's campaign and acknowledging Biden as president-elect.

The GOP officials Hasen mentions in his article range from Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, who certified Biden's victory in that state, to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. When push came to shove, Hasen argues, these Republicans did the right thing.

"Along with a number of Federalist Society-aligned judges, other GOP governors and lower-ranking Republican election officials, Ducey and others have earned this praise in the wake of Trump's ongoing — and ultimately futile — effort to overturn the 2020 election," Hasen explains. "We can thank principled people on the right for helping to assure that we will have a peaceful transition of power between Trump and Biden."

Ducey and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Hasen notes, "rejected Trump's calls to declare their states' elections fraudulent despite Trump's personal entreaties and attacks." And Hasen points out that "on Tuesday, even Trump's attorney general Bill Barr — who had scandalously backed Trump's claims of a potential for voter fraud in the past — told the AP that the Department of Justice has uncovered no kinds of fraud or irregularities that could change the outcome of the election."

Another Republican Hasen mentions is Christopher Krebs, who Trump fired from his position as a cybersecurity specialist in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

"When it comes to upholding the fundamental rule of law, many on the right deserve praise in this moment," Hasen writes. "And that might seem like a very low bar, but it is important to consider the alternative. In just the past few days, one of the president's lawyers, Joe diGenova, said that former federal cybersecurity head Chris Krebs, a Republican who has vouched for the integrity of American elections, should be shot…. (Georgia attorney) Lin Wood, also involved in (Trump's) litigation, said that the president should declare martial law and hold a new election."

In light of how unhinged some of Trump's diehard loyalists are, Hasen says, it is important to acknowledge those on the right who still respect democracy.

"We are not out of the woods yet, and it is going to take continued vigilance by all people of the left and right to assure continued support for the rule of law," Hasen emphasizes. "Some of what we are hearing from the president's most ardent supports is very ugly, antidemocratic and anti-American. In this fight, we should be appreciative of Federalist Society voices and others standing up for what is right."

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==

// to TP grift after BO 2008? // direct mail hype /fear forever?

the weeks following Joe Biden's victory, right-wing media figures grifted their followers by asking for money to supposedly help President Donald Trump stage a coup and overturn the results. 

Over the years we have documented how right-wing personalities have frequently scammed their audiences. So it’s no surprise that right-wingers have seized on Trump’s lies about the “stolen” 2020 election to get money from readers.

Here are a few examples of email solicitations that Media Matters has received relating to false claims of stolen election or voter fraud after Biden was elected.

• Charlie Kirk: “The Dems stole this election. Will you help me fight with President Trump and ensure only legal votes are counted? Rush $25 right here.”
• Newt Gingrich: “There is voter fraud in this Election that MUST be reported and uncovered. … Contribute $45 IMMEDIATELY to stand with President Trump and to DEFEND this Election.”
• Candace Owens: “Dominion Voting stole the Election from President Trump. … Will you help me fight, by pitching in $25 or more to support me and my work in the critical days to come

==

A Republican congressman from Pennsylvania has cast doubt on his own legitimacy to serve in Congress with his failed lawsuit attempting to overturn the 2020 election results.

Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) attempted to have the courts block certification of the 2020 election results, but his effort was rejected by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Saturday.

"The PA Supreme Court dismisses the case brought by U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly that sought to overturn last year's law creating no-excuse mail voting and to throw out those mail ballots cast in this election," Philadelphia Inquirer correspondent Jonathan Lai reported Saturday. "This is the case the Commonwealth Court had earlier blocked certification in."

Marc Elias, the top Democrat fighting lawsuits by Republicans seeking to overturn the vote, believes the lawsuit may have brought into question the legitimacy of Rep. Kelly serving in Congress.

"Congressman Mike Kelly has asked a PA judge to block certification of his own election. Even after this lawsuit is dismissed, the US House should refer his credentials to the Admin Committee prior to seating. If he doesn't think he should be certified, the House should take note," Elias argued on Wednesday.

Following the Supreme Court rejecting the lawsuit, Elias followed up on his argument.

"I stand by this," Elias wrote. "Even thought the PA Supreme Court dismissed this lawsuit, Congressman Mike Kelly's effort to block certification of his own election warrants a review by House Admin. If he doesn't think his election should be certified, the House should not seat him."

The House Administration Committee is chaired by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA).

I stand by this. Even thought the PA Supreme Court dismissed this lawsuit, Congressman Mike Kelly's effort to blo… https://t.co/PiGZDZv4ms

— Marc E. Elias ...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-lawyers/

raw

According to the Washington Post's in-depth look at Donald Trump's strategy to save his presidency with accusations of massive election fraud, the report notes that thepresident's legal options were impacted when lawyers working for the campaign fled rather than implement the president's plans.

The report notes that the president and his team started game-planning out a strategy to contest election results back in June with the expectation that he was looking at a tight election and plans were worked out to have Trump declare himself the winner the night of the election.

However, after Fox News called Arizona for Vice President Joe Biden that evening, those plans fell apart which led to an all-hands-on-deck meeting to come up with a new approach.

According to the report, that led to Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani's ill-fated press conference held in a landscape maintenance company's parking lot which set in motion an exodus of legal expertise.

The Post reports that the president's inner circle, "briefed Trump on a potential legal strategy for the president's approval. They explained that prevailing would be difficult and involve complicated plays in every state that could stretch into December. They estimated a '5 to 10 percent chance of winning,' one person involved in the meeting said. Trump signaled that he understood and agreed to the strategy."

The report goes on to note, "some lawyers around Trump began to suddenly disappear from the effort in what some aides characterized as an attempt to protect their reputations. Former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, who had appeared at a news conference with Giuliani right after the election, ceased her involvement after the first week."

According to one campaign insider, "Literally only the fringy of the fringe are willing to do pressers, and that's when it became clear there was no 'there' there."

Giuliani's widely-derided press conference then led to a gulf "between the outlooks of most lawyers on the team and of Giuliani, who many of the other lawyers thought seemed 'deranged' and ill-prepared to litigate, according to a person familiar with the campaign's legal team. Some of the Trump campaign and Republican Party lawyers sought to even avoid meetings with Giuliani and his team. When asked for evidence internally for their most explosive claims, Giuliani and Powell could not provide it, the other advisers said."

According to the report, Giuliani's claims that he could win the case led to a shouting match between the former New York City mayor and Trump deputy campaign manager Justin Clark during a conference call where Clark "called Giuliani an expletive and said he was feeding the president bad information. The meeting ended without a clear path, according to people familiar with the discussion."

The report goes on to note that "the next day, a Saturday, Trump tweeted out that Giuliani, [Jenna] Ellis, [Sydney] Powell and others were now in charge of his legal strategy. Ellis startled aides by entering the campaign's Arlington headquarters and instructing staffers that they must now listen to her and Giuliani."

Powell has since been fired by the president for making claims about voter fraud that even the president found too farfetched.

You can read more here.

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thos more WI

Trump spent $3 million on Wisconsin recount — only for Joe Biden to gain 132 more votes

more absurd

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-legal-battles/

an 1120 win-loss 33-3?

pennsylvania judge halts further certification of election results — Gov. Wolf vows to appeal

==

an 1120

President Donald Trump's chief allies are sitting out of his efforts to overturn his election loss.

Top campaign officials, including campaign manager Bill Stepien, and major Republican donors haven't been involved in the president's legal challenges and have privately said they want nothing to do with them, and some of them have publicly stated their opposition, reported The Daily Beast.

"The president is entitled to whatever legal defense he wants to have, [but] I don't think it's going anywhere," said GOP mega-donor Shalabh "Shalli" Kumar. "But he's entitled to it, and I am not going to contribute any funds to that. I will in fact plead with him to concentrate on Georgia's Senate races and I'll contribute to that."

Kumar believes the president could win again in 2024, but he called Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani "a joke."

"This is all crazy, lunatic stuff," he said.

The president's top allies are confused by Trump's strategy, and his top independent political groups have declined to weigh in by purchasing TV ads to pressure state officials to play along with his efforts to overturn election results.

"No idea why they've gone quiet," said Foster Friess, a top Trump donor. "Maybe they've run out of money."

One Republican official told The Daily Beast that grassroots fundraising had filled the void, saying The Trump Make America Great Again Committee had raised "well over ten million dollars a day online" to fund the president's legal battles — but conceded they would likely fail.

"I'm not aware of many folks beyond [campaign lawyer] Jenna [Ellis] and Rudy who think there is any path forward," that source said. "But the base does."

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cs legal death blow?

Republican leaders in both Michigan and Pennsylvania join Trump scheme to halt certification of vote

Mark Sumner Daily Kos

November 22, 2020

Donald Trump is seeking to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 election and install himself as dictator for life. There's no doubt about that part. The whole idea is outlandish, infuriating, and should be such a remote possibility that it can be dismissed out of hand. Except...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-voters-2649007931/

roger s salon

Plaintiffs in a number of the Trump campaign's lawsuits challenging the president's electoral defeat have peddled conspiracy theories and made racist comments. One of them, a plaintiff represented by Rudy Giuliani in federal court this week, was even implicated in an election fraud scheme of his own.

The new revelations, first reported by Salon, add another dimension of doubt to President Donald Trump's widely discredited, last-ditch legal challenges to President-elect Joe Biden's electoral victory.

"We are through the looking glass when Rudy Giuliani is appearing in court to allege voter fraud in the presidential race on behalf of a plaintiff who has previously been implicated in election fraud schemes himself," Kyle Herrig, president of government watchdog Accountable.US, told Salon in a statement. "The plaintiffs in these cases have long histories peddling conspiracy theories online. It is time for this legal freak-show to exit the courtroom and go back to the chat room where it belongs."

Among the more recent of the campaign's lawsuits is a complaint filed in Pennsylvania, which seeks a court order to block the certification of votes in the state. Giuliani took over that case on Tuesday, when he made his first arguments before a federal bench since 1992.

The amended complaint to that case includes allegations from a Uniontown resident named Larry Roberts, who claims the state did not notify him after his ballot was canceled.

"We are through the looking glass when Rudy Giuliani is appearing in court to allege voter fraud in the presidential race on behalf of a plaintiff who has previously been implicated in election fraud schemes himself," Kyle Herrig, president of government watchdog Accountable.US, told Salon in a statement. "The plaintiffs in these cases have long histories peddling conspiracy theories online. It is time for this legal freak-show to exit the courtroom and go back to the chat room where it belongs."

Among the more recent of the campaign's lawsuits is a complaint filed in Pennsylvania, which seeks a court order to block the certification of votes in the state. Giuliani took over that case on Tuesday, when he made his first arguments before a federal bench since 1992.

The amended complaint to that case includes allegations from a Uniontown resident named Larry Roberts, who claims the state did not notify him after his ballot was canceled.

Roberts is a former Pennsylvania Democratic state representative, who served from 1993-2006. During that time, he was accused of violating campaign laws multiple times, including election fraud.

In 2004, Roberts was accused of bribing a stalking-horse candidate to siphon primary votes from a Democratic challenger. That spoiler candidate, Michael Ciampanelli, at the time 20 years old, told the local board of elections that Roberts had paid him $200 to put his name on the ballot. A state grand jury investigated the claims, as did the attorney general, but what became of the probe is unclear.

That same year, the rival also accused Roberts of forging 33 signatures on his own nominating petition. The allegation was backed up by a woman who worked in one of Roberts' offices. The woman said Roberts staff told her to lie about the matter, warning her she could face jail time "if the real story came out," according to the Associated Press.

In 2007, the Pennsylvania State Ethics Commission slapped Roberts with a $600 fine for violations in 2001 and 2004, including unlawfully using legislative staff to organize campaign events and co-opting his legislative office as a drop-off point for campaign materials.

A separate Pennsylvania lawsuit dropped on Thursday by the campaign featured Ted Dannerth as a plaintiff, a man who has repeatedly spread conspiracy theories online.

For instance, Dannerth has tweeted multipletimes this year about "Project Blue Beam," an apparent reference to a fringe conspiracy theory falsely claiming that a NASA-Illuminati joint effort is engineering earthquakes in order to establish a new-age religion led by the antichrist. Dannerth has also called women a "weapon" against what he considers to be the "imminent threat" of sterility that would accompany a COVID-19 vaccine.

The Trump campaign plaintiff stitched a number of baseless fringe, QAnon-adjacent theories together in a lengthy Facebook post this April. Among other things, he claimed that Oprah Winfrey's house had been raided in a sex-trafficking sting and the media had brainwashed Americans against the president, who "is working from the bottom up, to remove the Democrat/Communist/Socialist Epstein/Deep State/CCP scourge from the planet."

Dannerth was also involved in a previous 2020 election lawsuit challenging public use of a private grant to fund election initiatives over his opposition to "the election of progressive candidates in local, state and federal elections." That suit was dismissed by District Judge Matthew Brann, who is presiding over the Trump campaign's current lawsuit.

Several plaintiffs in the campaign's challenge to block Michigan canvassers from certifying Detroit-area ballots present similar personal histories.

Eric Ostergen, a Republican poll challenger named in the suit, has repeatedly pushed misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. This April, he shared a Washington Times op-ed calling coronavirus "the biggest hoax in political history," on Facebook. In a separate post, he endorsed the since-discredited treatment hydroxychloroquine.

Ostergen posted two times on Facebook about lawsuits he filed against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., over coronavirus measures, saying that "the tyrants will now be reeled in." He has also denied climate change science on Facebook, a platform where he has also posted baseless claims about Hunter Biden's laptop and voter fraud in Detroit's 2016 election.

The Trump campaign's Michigan case also features another coronavirus truther, Marian Sheridan, head of the Michigan Conservative Coalition (MCC), who in October led a "guard the vote" project after Trump's calls to recruit an "army" of poll-watchers.

In April, Sheridan's group staged "Operation Gridlock," where thousands of protesters jammed the streets of Lansing with their vehicles to express displeasure with Whitmer's stay-home orders. MCC also launched "Operation Haircut" in defense of a barber who opened his shop for illegal haircuts amid the state's lockdowns. And Sheridan hosted a Tea Party event to educate the public about "the common roots of COVID-19 hysteria and climate change."

A third plaintiff in the Michigan lawsuit, Grosse Pointe City Councilman Matt Seely, has mocked allegations of sexual assault in social media posts, including against Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

"I'M SORRY THAT BAD MAN TOUCHED YOU INAPPROPRIATELY," read one meme, featuring a crying woman, which Seely shared during the Kavanaugh hearings. "LET'S WAIT 30 OR 40 YEARS … UNTIL HE RUNS FOR OFFICE … AGAINST A DEMOCRAT."

Seely also drew criticism for a social media post in which he connected four Democratic Congresswomen of color, known collectively as "the Squad," to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In the post — which was published on the 2019 anniversary of the attacks — Seely said the elevation of those women to Congress was "proof we have forgotten" about 9/11. The words accompanied a picture of the Twin Towers on fire.

Seely pushed back against criticism over the post, saying he could express political views on his private Facebook page. In doing so, he was backed by the mayor of Grosse Pointe Shores and other city council members.

In Nevada, former Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle — who already had a mail-in ballot case tossed in October — filed a lawsuit parallel to other GOP election challenges in the state, asking the court to stop the state from certifying its votes.

Angle is known for repeatedly pushing right-wing conspiracy theories, such as warning that American towns would fall to Sharia law and claiming fluoride in drinking water is a "communist plot to undermine Western democracy."

In a radio interview ahead of the 2010 midterms, Angle, who at the time was running against Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, alluded to armed insurrection as a remedy for a liberal Congress, saying — citing Thomas Jefferson — that "it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years."

"I hope that's not where we're going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying, 'My goodness, what can we do to turn this country around?" Angle said. "I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/michigan-2649008572/

michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield (R) on Sunday explained how a constitutional crisis could mean a win for President Donald Trump despite losing the popular vote in his state.

In an interview with Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Chatfield defended his recent meeting with Trump. Prior to the meeting, critics warned that it gave the current president an opportunity to push Michigan lawmakers not to certify President-elect Joe Biden's victory.

"When the president of the United States calls, you take that meeting," Chatfield insisted. "There was this outrage that the president was going to ask us to break the law and he was going to ask us to interfere. And that simply didn't happen."

The Michigan lawmaker went on to outline Trump's path to victory in his state, which began with a Republican Party request to delay certification of the election for two weeks.

"We have 71 percent of the precincts in Wayne County, their absentee ballots books don't match what is on the rolls," he said. "That's why the legislature, we've been doing our own investigations."

"If there were to be a 2-2 split on the state Board of Canvassers, it would then go to the Michigan Supreme Court," Chatfield continued. "If they didn't have an order that it be certified, well now we have a constitutional crisis in the state of Michigan. It's never occurred before because as the federal constitution says, this is left up to the state legislatures. The state legislature decided long ago to do it this way."

"What if the state legislature is mixed on whether or not they have confidence in who won the greater number of votes?" Hegseth replied. "Then you're in a interesting place."

"It's a place I really don't want to be in," Chatfield remarked. "There's reports of irregularities, reports of fraud. The fact is, no Republican or Democrat should be upset about an investigation done by the legislature. And we've begun those investigations."

Democratic state Rep. Matt Koleszar responded to Chatfield on Twitter.

"Mr. Speaker continues to use vague language in his interviews and statements about safeguarding the election," Koleszar said. "The constitutional crisis has already begun sir. It began the day you and other leaders refused to stand behind our clerks and election process."

"This is the crisis," he added.

Watch the video below from Fox News.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/million-maga-march-draws-thousands-in-gathering-of-%e2%80%8bpro-trump-conspiracy-theorists/

someone had determined that the man wearing all black with a red bandana around his mouth was “antifa.” Pro-Trump supporters swarmed the man, who put his hands in the air and refused to budge, ​even as a large man wearing a camo hat but no mask began yelling for him to leave​, his finger pointing in the bandana-wearer’s face. ​A man in the crowd shouted repeatedly, “You’re destroying America!” while a Trump supporter chased off a member of the press who tried to tape the incident.

:{

}:

The confrontation outside of the Supreme Court Saturday erupted out of thin air; just minutes before, the crowd seemed slightly tired, ready for lunch and a nap. This scene ended with the alleged anti-fascist demonstrator leaving the scene with the help of police, followed down the street by Trump supporters carrying flags ​emblazoned with the name of their hero, chanting “U​-S​-A!” But later that evening, ​real brawls would break out between counterprotesters and the Proud Boys hate group​—whose members President Donald Trump famouslytold to “stand by” during his Sept. 30 debate with now President-elect Joe Biden.Police reported 21 people werearrested, and one man who was stabbed in the back was taken to the hospital. [3x/ gay? kpfa interview]

Going by “Million MAGA March,” “Stop the Steal,” and “March for Trump,” the ​Nov. 14 rally-march event was portrayed by GOP political operative Ali Alexander as an organic uprising of Americans who believe the presidential election was “stolen” from President Donald Trump. In reality, it was an astroturfed campaign pulled together by Alexander, who has ties to Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, to push a false narrative of voter fraud and cast doubt on integrity of the election.

On display Saturday was how much the right—and Republican Party under Trump​—has embraced ​what in the past would have been considered its most fringe elements​. In addition to the far-right street fighting Proud Boys, gathered in the nation’s capital were members of the QAnon conspiracy​-theory movement, white nationalists, and militia groups​, brought together by their common reverence of Trump.

Trump repaid them ​in the morning by driving past the rally in his motorcade on his way to play golf, waving from his limousine window at the throngs of MAGA-hat wearing supporters. By noon, the official start time of the rally, Freedom Plaza, which sits just east of the White House, was packed with thousands of supporters​, their flags waving high in the sky​. The banners featured such slogans as “All aboard the Trump train,” “Trump 2020,” “Blue Lives Matter​;” and images of Trump as an action hero​, his head superimposed on the body of the then-buff Sylvester Stallone in Rambo mode. 

As he walked into the plaza, a man wearing an InfoWars T-shirt unfurled his Trump-Pence flag. ​(Alex Jones, the leader of the conspiracy-theory outlet, had led a caravan from Austin, Texas, to the nation’s capital, picking up followers along the way.) Another man attached his “I See Dead People Voting,” sign to his backpack; the sign was in reference to a conspiracy theory pushed by Alexander’s “Stop the Steal” campaign ​positing that the identities of dead people were used to vote in the election. Epoch News, a leading purveyor of right-wing disinformation that has peddled the QAnon conspiracy theory, handed out free newspapers that explained why they wouldn’t call the race for Biden even though every major news outlet has. 

With one visible loudspeaker and a stage that wasn’t high enough off the ground, most speakers couldn’t be heard or seen, unless one wanted to shove their way past maskless rallygoers to make it close to the stage. As a result, the main event took a backseat at times to the general commotion, of which there was plenty.

Competing for attention was Nick Fuentes’ America First group, ​a youth-focused white-nationalist outfit whose members refer to themselves as “groypers​.” Fuentes stood on an elevated area of the plaza ​with his followers, waving America First flags ​leading ​rally-goers in a​ chant of “Fox News sucks!”​ Contempt for Fox News has become a primary fixture of the Stop the Steal campaign, having fallen out of favor among right-wing audiences for ​being the first major news outlet to call Arizona for Joe Biden.

When they tired of the Fox News chant, the group then began chanting, “Nick,​ Nick, Nick,” prompting Fuentes to take the ​bullhorn. ​But by the time Fuentes stepped up to address his acolytes, the next speaker on the main stage drowned him out. His speech still garnered cheers from the crowd before his followers launched into an “America First” chant. Fuentes took part in the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist gathering, where a counterdemonstrator was murdered, and he hassaid that he had similar political complaints as those of the El Paso shooter, who published a white nationalist manifesto before he killed 22 people in a massacre at a Walmart[twt vid]

nick Fuentes’ white nationalist“groypers”commanded the crowds attention at Freedom Plaza with chants of “America First.” pic.twitter.com/KPXjENFHz3

— Kristen Doerer (@k2doe) November 14, 2020

Fuentes and his America First group were welcomed with open arms by Alexander, who tends to point out whenever someone is Jewish and has joined Fuentes on his podcast. Alexander eventually took ​the main stage and offered rally-goers a way Trump could stay in power.

“Next week, start lobbying the state legislatures of Pennsylvania, of Wisconsin, of Michigan, of Arizona, and of Georgia. We’re going to tell them to ignore the rigged elections and send Republican electors to the electoral college, or we’re going to deprive both candidates of 270​,”​ Fuentes said, referring to the number of electoral votes a candidate needs to accumulate in order to win the presidency. ​”Then we’ll send it to the House of Representatives where Donald J. Trump will win,” he continued, adding, “Let’s terrify this town.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon-supporting Republican from Georgia who will be walking the halls of Congress come January, closed out the rally at Freedom Plaza ​with a torrent of falsehoods, offering a sense of what kind of colleague she’ll be on Capitol Hill.

“This is only the beginning,” she said. “The Democrat Party is the party of socialism, the party of riots, the party that wants to murder babies up until birth and make taxpayers pay for it, they’re the party that wants to take away your guns.”

With that, the rally blasted the song “YMCA” unironically, and the march to the Supreme Court began. 

***

[clothes code interesting blk yel polo] Dozens of members of the Proud Boys hate group march by the Capitol building on Nov. 14, 2020. The far-right fight club gathered in the nation’s capital for the “Million MAGA March.” (Photo: Kristen Doerer)]

​Running down Pennsylvania Avenue in an apparent effort to get to the front of the procession, Jack Posobiec, the far-right activist and One America News Network figure, slipped and fell in front of the Justice Department before getting up and continuing his quest. The night before, Posobiec had called for rally-goers to “Police the crowd,” claiming that “Anarchists wait to strike” and “know how to blend in.” ​Passing him by was a man wearing a Hawaiian​-style shirt​; its bright print featured both flowers and machine guns. The Hawaiian shirt has become the uniform of the Boogaloo movement, a militia-style movement whose members believe that a race war or civil war is ​inevitable, and see it as their charge to accelerate its commencement.

​Near the Dirksen Senate office building on Constitution Ave, dozens of Proud Boys in their signature black-and-yellow polos walked in the opposite direction of the crowd, making the “OK” hand gesture, which has become a symbol of white power, high in the air.

The Proud Boys are known to instigate fightsand then claim self-defense, as they did in the melee that took place after a talk by the group’s founder Gavin McInnes at the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York City in 2018. ​That incident led to two Proud Boys members​ being sentenced to four years in prison for kicking and punching protesters​.  

The Oath Keepers militia group, whose leader Stewart Rhodes promised to place his armed men outside of the District borders should Trump call on them, were also in attendance, as were ​members of the Three Percenters militia group. ​(Across the border between D.C. and Virginia, the law allows for the open carrying of firearms, which is prohibited in the nation’s capital.) 

​By the Capitol building, ​Trump supporters closed in around a counterprotester shouting at the Trump fans from his bike. A man ​employing a bullhorn tried to keep the peace: “Let him leave. Stop! We are not those types of people.”

A woman looked on. “Shit’s getting real. It’s about time!” she yelled.

In this strange gathering were also families and strollers, which may be one reason why—despite the confrontations and handful of scuffles—things did not turn more violent until the evening. The other may be that counterprotesters appeared to mostly give up any plans to ​gather at the rally site for a demonstration, so those looking for a fight had no one to turn on. 

[A man wears a QAnon pin on his hat at the “Million MAGA March” by the Supreme Court on Nov. 14, 2020. (Photo: Kristen Doerer)

The far-right QAnon conspiracy theory also made a showing, with the QAnon slogan, “Where we go one, we go all,” abbreviated to “WWG1WGA,” on T-shirts, “Q” pins on hats, and posters about child-sex​-trafficking. One man wore a sweatshirt that read, “Investigate Pizzagate,” referring to the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory that preceded QAnon and ended with a gunman showing up to a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. Meanwhile, Alex Jones, who pushed that theory, was given the microphone on the same stage at which recent electeds Lauren Boebert and Madison Cawthorn, who both have dabbled in QAnon, would later speak.

After claiming that “globalists are making their move against us,” Jones led the crowd in a prayer. “We absolutely commit to you on your holy altar to never submit to Satan and these globalist pedophiles, and we will defeat their new world order. Amen!” he yelled before starting the crowd on a “U-S-A!” chant.

Matt Schlapp, president of the American Conservative Union, took the stage ​outside the Supreme Court​. His organization hosts the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, the largest gathering of conservatives in the world. “I want you to know your president loves you​,” he said, ​flaunting his access to the commander-in-chief. He then led the crowd in a chant of “We love Trump.” ​And by all appearances, indeed they do.

Tags: Alex Jones Ali Akbar Ali AlexanderDonald Trump Jack Posobiec Lauren Boebert Madison Cawthorn Marjorie Taylor Greene Matt Schlapp Nick Fuentes Roger Stone Steve Bannon Stewart Rhodes Disinformation groypers Million MAGA March QAnon Stop the Steal American Conservative Union InfoWars Oath Keepers Proud Boys Three Percenters

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/republicans-trump-2648997598/

11/21/20

amanda

Donald Trump and his, uh,lawyer Rudy Giuliani are moving into the next phase of Trump's attempted coup, which entertainingly involves Giuliani sweating out the previous day's martinis into his hair dye while barking incomprehensible conspiracy theories at bewildered reporters.

Unfortunately, the less amusing and more worrisome aspect of the whole ordeal involves Trump's efforts to lean on Republican-run state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors in states where Joe Biden clearly won.

Like most people reading this, I, too, wish I had a crystal ball and could look into the future at Jan. 20, 2021, to see how this all shakes out. In the meantime, the main point of concern is that nearly all Republican politicians are, to one degree or another, supporting Trump's efforts. Some, like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, are flirting with openly seditious behavior by actively trying to get legal ballots thrown in the trash. Most, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, are playing word games to avoid saying who they think will be or should be sworn as president in two months. The only Republican senator to speak out so far is Mitt Romney of Utah, who was also the only Republican senator who voted to convict Trump after his impeachment trial earlier this year.

The common theory in the political class is that this silence is borne out of fear of Trump and his tweeting fingers. Former President Barack Obama, who has been blunt in his concerns about the threat Trump represents to our democracy, characterized the GOP's passive consent to this coup exactly this way.

"I'm more troubled that you're seeing a lot of Republican officials go along with it, not because they actually believe it, but because they feel intimidated by it,"**Obama** told MSNBC's Jonathan Capehart on Thursday.

Obama is right on two out of three counts. It's true that Republican officials don't believe a word of Giuliani's sweaty conspiracy theories, which Heather Digby Parton has described as "going full Infowars." It's also true that this GOP compliance is the real problem here. As I explain in the latest Standing Room Only newsletter, successful coups rely on various bureaucrats and lower level politicians who go along. If Trump pulls this off, it will be entirely because he has the tacit support of both state and congressional Republicans all along the way.

But Obama is wrong on the third front: Republicans aren't doing this because they're scared of Trump. They're doing this because most of them, on one level or another, want him to succeed. And even if he fails, they appreciate him advancing the idea that voters in certain areas — notably, cities where Black people outnumber white people — shouldn't really have the right to vote.

Let's face it: The reason Trump has gotten this far is that he's building on decades of Republican antipathy to democracy, an antipathy borne out of resentment that people they deem as "less" American than themselves — people of color, urban people, people who know what "tempeh" is — have the right to vote at all.

For instance, look at this 2016 article from Heritage Foundation writer John Merline, who argued that Hillary Clinton's popular-vote lead in that election didn't really matter, because if "you take California out of the popular vote equation, then Trump wins the rest of the country."

Breitbart writer Joel Pollak made a similar argument regarding this year's election, claiming on Twitter, "Biden won the popular vote — unless you exclude California." He went on to say that "you shouldn't" exclude California, but implied that this alleged fact is "worth noting," which is only true if you believe California voters are somehow less American than other voters. (For the record, this isn't even true. Biden's overall popular-vote lead now exceeds his 5 million-vote lead in the Golden State.)

This belief of Republicans that some voters shouldn't really be voters is especially evident in their enthusiasm for voter suppression, which has kicked into high gear ever since 2013, when Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This kicked off a flood of GOP-sponsored efforts clearly aimed at stopping as many people of color as possible from exercising their right to vote.

While it's become routine these days for pundits to lament Giuliani's supposed fall from grace, the reality is the man was always a virulent racist. As Radley Balko reminded readers of the Washington Post in 2016, Giuliani kicked off his 1993 New York mayoral campaign by helping to incite a racist police riot aimed at denying that elected Black leaders should have any authority over the NYPD. Giuliani led the drunken and armed crowd of cops as they blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, waving signs with racist cartoons of then-Mayor David Dinkins, and calling Black elected officials the n-word. The cops also physically terrorized two Black city council members.

Trump and Giuliani's official arguments for why Trump deserves to invalidate the election are a bunch of incoherent and baseless conspiracy theories. The actual argument underlying all that, however, is simple: The coalition Joe Biden built is composed of people who don't deserve the right to vote.

The reason the larger Republican Party isn't pushing back is that they largely agree with this underlying argument. Whatever personal distaste many Republicans may have for Trump's gauche behavior or the alcohol content of Giuliani's shoe polish sweat, they're inclined to see only upside for themselves in letting this play out.

Maybe Trump pulls off a miracle and succeeds in his coup, which means their party captures the White House for four years — or more.

But even in the far likelier event that the Trump coup fails, it's a win-win for most Republicans: He has done an immense amount to advance the goal of delegitimizing huge swaths of the American electorate that prefer Democrats. Besides, "establishment" Republicans don't have to go out to dinner with Trump anymore and listen to his vainglorious monologues. So of course Republicans aren't standing up to him. Why mess with a good thing?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-michigan-2648986286/

amanda

If  you want proof that Donald Trump is not an anomaly, but rather a symptom of the racism and anti-democratic yearning that define the modern Republican Party, look no further than what's going on in Wayne County, Michigan. It's the county that encompasses the majority-Black city of Detroit as well as many of its majority-white suburbs, and the normally staid process of certifying an election there has gone badly off the rails.

This situation starkly illustrates how Trump's long-shot coup attempt — which is more a money-grabbing con job at this point — relies heavily on everyday Republicans being too blinded by their own racism and hatred for democracy to really grasp the ways Trump is using them, as he uses everyone.

To recap what happened for those who didn't get embroiled in the blow-by-blow drama of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers this week: On Tuesday, the board, which certifies local election results before sending them along to the state board, held a public meeting. By any reasonable measure, this should have been a quick vote to certify the results, as usually happens after such a clean and relatively smooth election. Instead, the two Republican members of the board — who are both white — refused to certify the vote count, angering and bewildering the two Democratic members, who are both Black.

Their formal excuse for this refusal to was that the vote count apparently included a few minor mistakes and anomalies, of the sort that occur in any election, in the precinct counting reports. This would, at most, affect a few hundred votes in a county where Joe Biden won by 350,000 votes.

The real reasons, of course, were racism and a desire to steal the election for Trump. The two Republicans, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, were making a last-ditch attempt to keep the votes of Detroit, a city whose population is nearly 80% Black, out of the final Michigan vote count. It was a temper tantrum based on the longstanding, but usually better-concealed Republican belief that there's something not quite right about letting Black people have the same right to vote as white people.

After being the target of the wrath of the citizens of Wayne County for the next two hours, Palmer and Hartmann cracked and voted to certify the election. But after talking on the phone with Trump himself later on Tuesday night, the two circled around again, demanding a chance to rescind their votes. They are continuing to push baseless conspiracy theories clearly meant to imply that there's something shady about the very concept of treating Detroit's election the same way elections everywhere els are treated.

Sean Hannity, of course, protested on Fox News that it was a set of "truly vile smears" to suggest that racism was to blame for Republicans' singling out Detroit's election results for unnecessary delays. Of course, the racism here is self-evident. During deliberations, Palmer said, "I would be open to a motion to certify communities other than the city of Detroit." In case there's any lingering doubt, journalistDel Quentin Wilber was able to remove it with a cursory Facebook search[twt pix BO racist memes]

trump's efforts to steal this election are, it must be reiterated, a long shot. Democratic strategist Chris Marshall has argued otherwise here at Salon, suggesting that those of us who believe this are being too sanguine about the Republican eagerness to end democracy.

But the belief that Trump will fail is not based on any faith that Republicans will do the right thing. As this Wayne County situation shows, the entire Republican Party is rotten to the core, ready to throw out democracy rather than accept that people of color have equal rights to vote. Rather we are assuming, as has proven correct so far, that Trump and his minions are too disorganized and incompetent to pull off a coup, especially in the making-it-up-as-they-go-along fashion evident in the repeatedly failed lawsuits of the past couple of weeks.

Indeed, the weirdest aspect of Trump's ongoing litigation efforts is that the most immediate victims of his conspiracy are his fellow Republicans: They're the fools who keep responding to Trump's emails begging for cash. But the money Trump's fans donate, believing it may help Trump's electoral Hail Mary, is mostly going toward his "Save America" leadership PAC, not to his legal efforts.

These "leadership PACs" rose up after the Supreme Court forcibly deregulated campaign finance law in Citizens United vs. FEC, and they are often total scams. The people who run them often treat them like slush funds, using them to pay for personal expenses and luxury vacations, as well as lining the pockets of various consultants. For instance, former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin started a PAC in 2009, which she promised would be dedicated to funding Republican candidates. Palin raised millions of dollars for her PAC, but only gave 5% to 8% of the money to candidates in any given election cycle. Instead, most of the of the money was spent on travel, media and mailing groups whose job was to promote Palin's brand under the umbrella of "fundraising."

Trump will almost certainly find even more creative ways to pocket the money, probably by having his PAC hold "fundraising" events at Trump properties. His team of lawyers is getting whittled down quickly to Rudy Giuliani, who is trying to wet his own beak by demanding $20,000 a day to waste the court's time with incoherent conspiracy theories.

Who is bankrolling all this chicanery? Ordinary Republican voters, who foolishly open Trump fundraising emails and keep hitting that "donate" button. And their foolishness is driven by bone-deep racism.

Trump and his allies haven't been subtle about their race-baiting, repeatedly attacking Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Atlanta, all cities where white residents are a minority. The lawsuits have targeted cities with large Black populations. These suits are failing in court, but succeeding at the main goal of stirring up racist hysterics in the GOP base and turning those hysterics into cash.

Trump's message to his voters is clear: The votes of people of color are inherently "corrupt" and shouldn't be counted. Sadly, that's a message that's causing GOP wallets across the country to fly open. Republican racism is so strong it trumps the common-sense understanding that it's unwise to hand over money to an obvious con artist like Trump.

It might be funny to watch fools parted from their money like this, except for the fact that the very fabric of our democracy is being torn asunder. Fully half of Republicans reportedly believe that Trump "rightfully" won the election, which is to say, they're embracing conspiracy theories that allow them to believe that white votes are the only legitimate votes. Trump will soon be leaving office and finding creative ways to pocket his PAC money, but the poison he's pumped into the system by telling millions of white Americans that their racism is righteous will linger on for decades.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/did-donald-trump-steal-the-election-2648992261/

digby

Back in September, Politico's Anita Kumar reportedthat for the previous year the Trump campaign had been assembling a team of election lawyers from all over the country to familiarize themselves in local election laws and prepare "prewritten legal pleadings that can be hurried to the courthouse the day after the election, as wrangling begins over close results and a crush of mail-in ballots." The effort was led by "a 20-person team of lawyers" from major law firms who were overseeing a strategy in "key states the Trump campaign is targeting, like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan." It sounded like a very serious and professional operation, one which came as no surprise to me, since Republicans have specialized in disenfranchising Democratic voters for many decades.

Trump himself repeatedly made clear on the campaign trail what he planned to do, from contesting the validity of mail-in ballots to declaring himself the winner on election night regardless of whether the votes had been counted and filing a flurry of lawsuits contesting the election with an eye toward having "his" judges (including newly-minted Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett) deliver the election to him if necessary. I don't think anyone can possibly say they are surprised at how he has reacted to losing the election.

In the weeks before Nov. 3, Trump did have that team of high-powered legal talent arguing cases around mail-in ballots and shifting deadlines in various states, some of which did make it to the Supreme Court. But then the election actually happened and vote-counting began, and since then Trump's crack team has been been remarkably unsuccessful. The good lawyers have either been pressured to to quit orthrew in the towel themselves as it became patently obvious that they had no evidence of voter fraud.

That hasn't stopped Trump from plowing ahead anyway with the self-described "elite strike force" led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, last seen prior to the election with his hand down his pants in the latest Borat movie and famously presiding over a post-election press conference at a landscaping company next door to a sex shop and a crematorium. Trump was evidently impressed by Rudy's performance in both venues, because he gave the former LifeLock spokesman (hat tip to Salon's Roger Sollenberger) full authority to conduct the legal strategy to overturn the election results by any means necessary.

CNN reports that Giuliani has taken full control. For instance, upset by what he was hearing from three of the lawyers assigned to argue one of the Pennsylvania cases, the man once described as "America's mayor" fired them on the spot and took over the case — which was being argued the very next day — himself. He hadn't been inside a courtroom in more than 30 years, and it showed. He was very nearly laughed out of court.

Giuliani was undaunted. He immediately pulled together the other members of the "elite strike force": Sidney Powell, who is former national security adviser Michael Flynn's Fox News lawyer; veteran right-wing husband and wife team Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, also Fox News lawyers; and over-the-top Trump defender and campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis. None of them have any expertise in election law, but then they don't have a legal strategy either.

Having lost over and over again in court, Trump and his team have switched to their Plan B, which, as longtime Democratic strategist Chris Marshall spelled out in detail in Salon on Thursday, is to delay the certification of the vote in certain states and try to get Republican legislatures to assign electors to vote for Donald Trump instead of the actual winner, Joe Biden. This is based on the theory that if they can create enough chaos around the election results, Republican loyalists will rise to the occasion and "save democracy" from the Democrats, who are allegedly stealing the election.

This idea has been pushed by conservative talk show host Mark Levin and picked up by the right wing as a way to keep their beloved president in office for at least four more years. It's a theory that is very unlikely to prevail, particularly since the Supreme Court just decided a case on "faithless electors" last July, in which the justices made it very clear that whatever the founders may have anticipated in the 18th century, our democracy today demands that electors express the will of the people. It will take some convoluted intellectual gyrations for them to conclude that state officials can simply change the results at their discretion.

In order to blow the smoke as thick as possible, Giuliani and the "strike force" held a press conference at Republican National Committee headquarters on Thursday which was so surreal that it may have displaced the COVID task force briefing where Trump suggested that people might inject disinfectant as the all-time weirdest press conference of the Trump era.

Giuliani, Powell and Ellis held forth for 90 minutes, going full Infowars and throwing out one insane conspiracy theory after another. They said that Dominion voting machines had been created by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (who has been dead for seven years) and financed by George Soros, the Clinton Foundation and "communistic" countries China and Cuba. Just in case that didn't work, the corrupt Democrats had also rigged the vote with a sophisticated computer hack that was only foiled because Trump won so overwhelmingly that it tripped up the algorithm which allowed the "strike force" to catch them in the act. Also, the mail-in ballots were fraudulent because so many of them were filled out properly. (Yes! The fact that there were very few problems with mail-in votes was somehow evidence they were fake!)

Meanwhile, rivulets of black liquid were running down Giuliani's face as if he were an extra in an Alice Cooper video from the 1970s. The assumption is that it was some kind of temporary hair dye. But it could have been embalming fluid, for all we know.

Powell later made the rounds to expand on their theory and she made no bones about what they hope to do:

You'll notice that she just blithely uses the term "overturn," as if that were perfectly normal.

If that doesn't work, the "strike force" are also talking about a Plan C, which would be to delay the vote certification for so long that the states can't send Biden's required 270 electors to Congress by the deadline, which under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution would throw the election to the House, where every state's delegation gets one vote. As luck would have it Republicans hold 26 of the 50 delegations. Surprise!

Is any of this remotely possible? Sure. It's unlikely, but it's possible. It's tempting to think this is all so nuts that it could never possibly happen, but we thought everything Donald Trump has done over the past five years was nuts, and here we are. All our hand-wringing about this plot being un-American and destructive to our democracy is sadly irrelevant — not just to the preposterous Giuliani and the equally preposterous Trump but to the entire Republican Party. They have learned the power of total shamelessness, and it is profound. I would never count them out.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/tucker-carlson-2648986602/

no lnx

on Thursday night, Fox News' Tucker Carlson got an impressive scoop. Unfortunately for him, it didn't fit with his ideological agenda. So instead of presenting it in the most straightforward and direct way possible, he skewed the news in such a warped fashion that an observer who wasn't paying close attention might not realize what the real bombshell was.

Here's what happened: Sidney Powell, an extreme right-wing lawyer, has joined the Trump campaign's efforts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election. She appeared Thursday afternoon alongside Rudy Giuliani to deliver a litany of wacky talking points and absurd conspiracy theories, all aimed at supporting that idea that President Donald Trump won a second term (he didn't). For her part, Powell alleged a massive conspiracy involving vote-counting software that manufactured votes for Joe Biden to prevent a Trump win.

To be clear, there's no reason to believe this is true, and it's hard to believe it could even possibly be true. States use different systems for their elections, and they typically use paper ballots as backups. Recounts and audits can check electronic counts by hand and verify their accuracy. And trying to mess with the voter tallies in a plausible way would be incredibly challenging to pull off, given the complexity of the system and the amount of scrutiny the process gets from all sides. (And apparently Democrats who were rigging the election, in her delusional account, apparently forgot to rig several key Senate elections that they lost.)

But conservatives, of course, are inclined believe it's true because Trump has told them the election was stolen. So on Thursday, Carlson revealed on his nightly show that his team looked into her claims. And she is completely unwilling to back them up.

"We took Sidney Powell seriously," he said. "We've no intention of fighting with her. We've always respected her work. We simply wanted to see the details. How could you not want to see them? So we invited Sidney Powell on this show. We would have given her the whole hour. We would have given her the entire week, actually! And listened quietly the whole time at rapt attention. That's a big story!"

He continued: "But she never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of requests. Polite requests. Not a page. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting. When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they told us Powell has never given them any evidence either. Nor did she provide any today, at the press conference. Powell did say that electronic voting is dangerous, and she's right — we're with her there. But she never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another."

Like Carlson said — this is a big story! But clearly, it's not the one he wanted to tell. It's not the story he wanted to be true.

He refused to tell his viewers the straightforward take: One of the president's lead attorneys is positing an absolutely gargantuan conspiracy theory but refusing to show even a friendly news outlet any evidence for it. She won't even provide evidence to her own allies on the Trump campaign. The only reasonable inference is that she has little or no basis for her claims at all, which is what we should have assumed in the first place, because the theory itself is so absurd.

This is a massive scandal. The president's lawyer is in all likelihood completely fabricating a fanciful story about electoral fraud as he tries to cling to power.

But what Carlson wants viewers to take away from the story is nothing about presidential scandal at all. He even strained to avoid even mentioning Trump in the discussion. (Carlson often does this when covering topics that reflect badly on Trump.) Instead, Carlson focused on the fact that he took the story very seriously, even though Powell was unable to support it.

"So why are we telling you this?" he said. "We're telling you this because it's true. And in the end, that's all that matters: The truth. It's our only hope. It's our best defense. And it's how we're different from them. We care what's true, and we know you care too. That's why we told you. Maybe Sidney Powell will come through with details on exactly how this happened and precisely who did it. Maybe she will. We are certainly hopeful that she will. What happened with the vote-counting this month, and at the polling places in Detroit, and at the polling places in Philadelphia, and so much else, actually matters. It matters no matter who you voted for, it matters whether or not you think this election is already over. Until we can answer those questions conclusively, and we can agree on them, this country will not be united."

It may strike some as odd that Carlson said he is "certainly hopeful" that Powell can prove that a massive, world-historical fraud took place to steal the presidential election. Why would he be hopeful for that? But the point of the whole segment is that Carlson is delivering a bitter pill to his audience: It certainly looks like Powell is lying.

To make that pill go down easier, and to avoid turning off his fans who love the president, Carlson carefully reassures them that he's on their side. He does this by saying he wanted Powell to be true, because that would mean Trump could remain president, as both he and most of his viewers surely want. And he also tries to show he's on his viewers' side by trying to claim the mantle of righteousness — "We care what's true." He doesn't, actually. He lies to and misleads his audience all the time. But when someone goes so far over the line, as Powell has with her absurd statements, Carlson can use countering them to shore up his own credibility with viewers.

But he doesn't dwell on the fact that her claims don't add up — he focused on who the real enemy should be, in his eyes and the eye of his viewers. "It's how we're different from them," he says. "Them," of course, is Democrats and all non-conservative media. He wants viewers to remember that he hates the same people they hate, so they'll believe him when he says something they're inclined to believe may be false. "They" don't take Powell's claims seriously at all because, unlike me, he's essentially saying, they hate Trump.

And Carlson also gestures towards other vague, unsupported, and irrelevant claims that the Trump campaign and its supporters have put forward to undermine the election. That reminds viewers that, even if Powell's claim is false, they can be comforted that there are many more reasons doubt the election of Biden, which is of course what people tune in to Fox to hear.

The last sentence in the segment, too, is key. Carlson says the country cannot be "united" unless all "questions" he and others have raised about the election have been answered. Of course, many of the claims put forward by the Trump campaign have been tested in court, and they've been promptly thrown out or dismissed as irrelevant. Other insinuations are so unclear and unsupported that they'll never even make it to court. But Carlson wants viewers to believe they're important anyway, even though he knows these kinds of questions will never be fully answered, and he's happy to raise them and spread doubt about the election regardless. It's all fine with him, though, because he's doesn't want the country to be united. He wants it to be about us and them.

Watch the clip below:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/stop-the-steal/

The right-wing trolls behind the baseless "Stop the Steal" election fraud movement have launched a political action committee (PAC) to cash in on the false claim that the election was rigged against President Donald Trump, according to a filing posted this weekend on the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) website.

The organization, called Stop the Steal PAC, shows signs of being what campaign finance watchdogs know as a "scam PAC" — a for-profit fundraising vehicle that professes to support a cause but in reality ends up pocketing most of the money for its members, or shuffles it off to contracted firms.

Stop the Steal PAC's treasurer, Patrick Krason, and his wife Crystal are affiliated with a number of these small-time PACs. For instance, Krason also launched the Draft Sarah Huckabee Sanders for Arkansas PAC, but lives in West Virginia, had never visited Arkansas and had no connection to the former White House press secretary or her family.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Sanders' father, warned prospective donors away from Krason in 2019.

"[Neither] Sarah nor anyone connected to her has ANYTHING to do with it," Huckabee told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. "The person who launched it is unknown to everyone in Sarah's family, her political orbit, or her circle of friends."

Earlier this year a conservative watchdog group filed an FEC complaint against a Krason-led "social welfare" charity called the Stronger America Fund, alleging that he had unlawfully coordinated with a congressional campaign he was working on at the time.

Several of Krason's other PACs say they aim to legalize marijuana, and others — such as Make Virginia Great Again and MAGA Coalition — draw on familiar-sounding Trump-world phraseology. He also appears to have chiefly paid his own firms through campaigns, FEC filings show.

While Stop the Steal's FEC filing lists an address in Washington, D.C., it's only a drop box — Krason's actual office is in Charleston, West Virginia. The group's phone number is different from the one listed on Krason's own website, and directs calls to a Google subscriber mailbox after one ring.

Krason told Salon in a phone interview that while he had handled federal compliance for Stop the Steal, it was not his PAC, but would not disclose the client.

In addition to Krason, the PAC's registration with the FEC lists a man named Daniel Bostic as a designated agent.

Bostic's 54,000-follower verified Twitter profile says he is a former model and congressional staffer, a reference to his "full-time" work as a homeschooled South Carolina 17-year-old in the Washington office of then-Rep. Tim Scott, R-S.C. (Scott is now a U.S. senator.) The 20-something activist also claims a producer credit on a recent documentary about the widely-mocked efforts of Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., to discredit the Russia investigation. Bostic is an active member of the Stop the Steal movement, which he heavily promotes on social media.

But Bostic is just one of a number of MAGA-world second-stringers who appear to see Stop the Steal as a way to ride the fantasy of a stolen election into a future of relevance, influence and income after Trump departs the White House.

While the movement's name may suggest a reaction to the 2020 election, its roots trace to the 2018 midterms — and specifically Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott's 2018 narrow victory over then-incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson. That was when Roger Stone launched the group as a coda to the "Brooks Brothers riot" of 2000.

At the time, Stone had the help of a far-right operative and conspiracy theorist named Ali Alexander, an itinerant provocateur who signed on to recruit for the "Stop the Steal" campaign and appears to be the organizing force behind this year's post-Trump iteration.

Alexander's current approach echoes the eclectic appeal he envisioned in a Periscope in 2018, as reported in Right Wing Watch, where he hoped to motivate not just Republicans, but QAnon followers, Democrats and "homeless people in all the adjacent counties" to keep an eye on the vote count.

But Alexander, formerly known as Ali Akbar, has a checkered history even by the loose standards of the alt-right movement, and today he does not have the full confidence of MAGA-world, some of whom suspect him of being a disingenuous grifter.

As Ali Akbar, he was convicted of theft and credit card fraud in 2007 and 2008. He entered national politics as a John McCain campaign staffer in 2007, when he was apparently reprimanded — ironically enough — for discussing opportunities to committing voter fraud during the Republican primary campaign. (Former McCain campaign officials contacted by Salon did not recall him, or the alleged incident.)

More recently, in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, a PAC affiliated with Alexander got a $60,000 injection from billionaire far-right financier Robert Mercer. The next year he popped up amid the Unite the Right controversy, and in 2018 tried to help kickstart a short-lived Trump-centric alternative to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), called the American Priority Conference. He followed that up with an ill-fated joint troll operation in Minneapolis with right-wing personality Laura Loomer and indicted felon Jacob Wohl.

Today, Alexander is the organizing force behind Stop the Steal, which last weekend organized demonstrations in several U.S. cities to protest President Trump's defeat. The demonstrations served a dual role as promotional platforms for a hodgepodge of conservative and alt-right media personalities — e.g., Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, Scott Presler and Amy Kremer — described in a Mother Jones profile of the event as "a collection of disgraced right-wing internet figures."

Their rhetoric and messaging has been amplified by Trump himself and his high-profile allies, who have repeatedly peddled baseless claims that Democrats have "stolen" the election, making unfounded allegations about "missing" military ballots, "illegal ballots" and chicanery in vote-counting sites in multiple key battleground states.

The Stop the Steal PAC was born on Saturday, the day of the scheduled protests. That also coincided with a change to the group's website, which appears to have removed its "donate" button after it was revealed that contributions went straight to Alexander's personal accounts, including his PayPal, CashApp and Amazon Wishlist.

Given the warring factions within TrumpWorld, Stop the Steal's future as a cohesive movement appears tenuous, especially without the bonding agent of Trump at the top of U.S. politics. Alexander's apparent cash grab has already begun to draw fire from inside the tent. While the movement may now have the imprimatur of an officially FEC-registered PAC, the name defines the mission, and there are two full years ahead with no steal to stop.

Bostic and Alexander did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/rudy-giuliani/

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no attorney has done more to fight the results of the 2020 presidential election than former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has been claiming that President Donald Trump — not President-elect Joe Biden — is the real winner. He says Trump was deprived of a victory by rampant voter fraud, which Giuliani has offered no credible proof of. The fees that Giuliani charges as Trump's personal attorney are not cheap, and according to New York Times reporters Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman, Giuliani recently asked for$20,000 per day.

Schmidt and Haberman report, "The request stirred opposition from some of Mr. Trump's aides and advisers, who appear to have ruled out paying that much…. A $20,000-a-day rate would have made Mr. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who has been Mr. Trump's personal lawyer for several years, among the most highly compensated attorneys anywhere."

Giuliani, however, flatly denies asking for that amount. The Trump attorney told the Times, "I never asked for $20,000. The arrangement is, we'll work it out at the end." And Giuliani insists that anyone who told the Times that he wanted $20,000 per day "is a liar, a complete liar."[twt]

trump's campaign has been fighting the election results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and other battleground states that Biden won.And Schmidt and Haberman note that "there is little to no prospect of any of the remaining legal cases being overseen by Mr. Giuliani altering the outcome in any of the states where Mr. Trump is still fighting in court, much less of overturning President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s Electoral College and popular vote victory." But some Trump allies, the Times journalists report, believe that "Giuliani is encouraging the president to continue a spurious legal fight because he sees financial advantage for himself in it."

According to Schmidt and Haberman, "Mr. Giuliani had sought compensation for his work dating back to the day after Election Day, when Mr. Trump began publicly claiming that he won despite the results, according to people familiar with the request, who asked for anonymity to speak about sensitive discussions. At $20,000 a day, Mr. Giuliani's rate would be above the top-of-the-line lawyers in Washington and New York who can charge as much as $15,000 a day if they are spending all their time working for a client."

Despite Trump and Giuliani's bogus claims of widespread voter fraud, Biden's victory over Trump was decisive. In addition to winning thepopular vote by more 5 million, Biden won 306 electoral votes.

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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/olivianiland/dc-protests-million-maga-march-arrests-violence

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There Were Violent Clashes In DC After A Pro-Trump Rally

At least one person was stabbed and 20 people arrested following the "Million MAGA March."

Picture of Olivia Niland

Olivia Niland

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on November 15, 2020, at 2:02 p.m. ET

Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images

Police officers stand in line as they monitor a protest following the "Million MAGA March."

There were violent scenes in Washington, DC, on Saturday night amid clashes between Donald Trump supporters falsely disputing the outcome of the presidential election and counterprotesters.

Police said at least 20 people were arrested amid unrest after the so-called Million MAGA March attended by tens of thousands of Trump supporters in response to the president's baseless claims that Joe Biden's victory in the election was "rigged."

Video tweeted by both left- and right-wing attendees showed several instances of violence between the two sides.

"Fuck you, antifa!" alleged members of the far-right extremist men's organization the Proud Boys can be heard yelling in one video as they throw punches, followed by shouts of "Hey, we've got one on the ground!"

[twt this was Washington DC last night as the Proud Boys showed up and attacked us. What I say was proud boys mob beating people on the ground throwing glass bottles hitting someone next to me, and chasing people. Several folks were stabbed. One is in critical condition.

This was Washington DC last night as the Proud Boys showed up and attacked us. What I say was proud boys mob beating people on the ground throwing glass bottles hitting someone next to me, and chasing people. Several folks were stabbed. One is in critical condition.

Wayward.streamer

@StreamerWayward

This was Washington DC last night as the Proud Boys showed up and attacked us. What I say was proud boys mob beating people on the ground throwing glass bottles hitting someone next to me, and chasing people. Several folks were stabbed. One is in critical condition.

02:15 PM - 15 Nov 2020

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At least one person was transported after being stabbed at 11th Street and New York Avenue Northwest, a DC Fire and EMS spokesperson confirmed to BuzzFeed News.

Photos and videos showed Trump flags and hats being lit on fire and fireworks being thrown at apparent Trump supporters who were dining outdoors.

One graphic Getty photograph showed a woman supporting Black Lives Matter lying motionless on the ground and bleeding from the mouth after being injured. Another showed a Trump supporter being kicked as he lay on the ground.

Video also showed Trump supporters removing and stomping on Black Lives Matter signs that were displayed at BLM Plaza, and members of the Proud Boys speaking in defense of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who was charged with killing two people at Wisconsin protest against police brutality.

The Proud Boys' attendance contributed to a "notable extremist presence" at the march, the Anti-Defamation League said in a post Sunday.

Trump supporters are smashing the Black Lives Matter boards put up on the buildings here in DC #MillionMAGAMarch #MarchForTrump #DC

Brendan Gutenschwager

@BGOnTheScene

Trump supporters are smashing the Black Lives Matter boards put up on the buildings here in DC #MillionMAGAMarch #MarchForTrump #DC

05:04 AM - 15 Nov 2020

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Conservative commentators blamed so-called antifa for harassing Trump supporters, a sentiment echoed multiple times by the president himself Sunday morning.

"Antifa SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back. Antifa waited until tonight, when 99% were gone, to attack innocent #MAGA People. DC Police, get going — do your job and don’t hold back!!!" Trump posted on Facebook.

Antifa, short for anti-fascist, is a decentralized movement that protests against the far-right, with some occasionally resorting to violence. The far-right and some Republicans have repeatedly fearmongered about the group in a bid to denigrate all anti-racism protesters.

During the march, the largely maskless pro-Trump supporters pushed the president's false rhetoric of an unfair election with signs reading "Stop the Steal." They also continued the president's attacks on the US voting system, President-elect Joe Biden, and public health expert Anthony Fauci.

Among the attendees were right-wing figures including Alex Jones, MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, a supporter of the QAnon mass delusion who was recently elected to the US House of Representatives. All three gave speeches incorrectly claiming Trump had been reelected and falsely accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election.

In addition to the march in DC, a "Stop the Steal" protest in Sacramento Saturday stirred up clashes between Proud Boys and counterprotesters as well, according to ABC. No serious injuries were reported.

bbc

Mr Trump's supporters kicked off the demonstrations at about noon local time (17:00 GMT) on Saturday near Freedom Plaza, just east of the White House, and later headed towards the Supreme Court.

As well as more mainstream Trump supporters, members of the far-right Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia group were among the marchers. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones addressed the crowd.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/ivanka-trump

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As right-wing groups clashed with counter-protesters at pro-Trump demonstrations over the weekend, Ivanka Trump, the senior White House adviser and daughter of outgoing President Donald Trump, condemned the media on Twitter for "near total silence" over alleged assaults on conservatives. The tweet came as selectively edited video wrongly portraying Trump supporters as victims of violence circulated online in right-wing circles.NOTE THIS SETS UP RATIONALE FOR MORE RW VIOLENCE]

"The media's near total silence about the physical violence being perpetrated against conservatives is shameful & dangerous. Just image the outrage and indignation if this went the other way," Ivanka tweeted. "Violence is never the answer and instigators must be condemned and prosecuted." ATLAS, BANNON BOOGALOO...]

Donald Trump Jr. one-upped his sister's allegation an hour later by claiming, without evidence, that the media was "complicit." He also suggested that "they might as well" put Trump supporters on a non-existent Gulag list controlled by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. [THE NEW PELOSI?]

"The media's silence on the violence against Trump supporters is deafening. After four years of calling them Nazis, at this point they might as well just dox them all or add the[m] to AOC's lists for the Gulags," Don Jr. baselessly tweeted. "They are complicit in the violence. They are the worst of the worst."

Trump supporters and right-wing groups marched in several cities on Saturday in protest of the president's recent electoral loss to President-elect Joe Biden. The demonstrators echoed the president's evidence-free allegations of a stolen election.

Many of these groups were met by counter-protests, and violence broke out in some instances. The most serious of these incidents took place in Washington, where Proud Boys and other right-wing groups and militia members clashed with counter-protesters, according to multiple reports. Contrary to the Trump family's assertions, conservatives were filmed launching attacks. 2 STABBINGS ONE PROUD?]

It was not the first time Ivanka had misleadingly tweeted about political violence. In a tweet referencing "inner city communities," the first daughter cited the wrong number of people killed and wounded in the wrong location ("near a playground") over the course of a weekend in Chicago in August 2019.

In his first debate with Biden, President Trump told the Proud Boys to "stand back, and stand by." Unlike his offspring, the president outwardly applauded Saturday's violence in the streets.

"ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back," he tweeted.

The president also shared a selectively edited video posted by Andy Ngo, a right-wing sympathizer with a history of wrongly framing left-wing groups. The clip showed a man getting knocked out by a counter-protester after being attacked from behind.

"A close-up angle of BLM rioters knocking a man unconscious who was leaving the #MillionMAGAMarch in DC earlier today," Ngo wrote. "They also steal his phone when he's on the ground."

"Human Radical Left garbage did this," the president added, quoting Ngo's original tweet. "Being arrested now!"

But an extended clip appears to shows the man was with a group of Trump supporters who earlier attacked a counter-protester holding a bullhorn by pushing him down to the street and stepping on his head.

D.C. police on Sunday said they hadarrested nearly two dozen people, many of them on gun charges, according to The Washington Post. One person was stabbed,and four officers were injured.

Police Chief Peter Newsham told The Post that groups on both sides had descended on the city "intent on clashing," and "the police department was put directly in the middle of it."

In Sacramento, Calif., a group of Proud Boys met counter-protesters with bear spray, according to the Bay Area's ABC7 News. Police broke up the incident.

President Trump urged police to use force on counter-protesters, tweeting: "Antifa waited until tonight, when 99% were gone, to attack innocent #MAGA People. DC Police, get going — do your job and don't hold back!!!"

There is no evidence to support the protesters' accusations of widespread electoral fraud in the presidential election. Courts have summarily dismissed the vast majority of the Trump campaign's lawsuits.

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Following election day YouTube has allowed users to share videos pushing false conspiracy theories alleging interference with voting machines and election computer systems. The videos have racked up millions of views, and the platform has profited from some of them.

A variety of debunked conspiracy theories have circulated on social media, including one theorythat falsely alleged that some kind of supercomputer named “Hammer” and a computer program called “Scorecard” were used to alter vote counts (and that footage shown on CNN last year proves it); the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the Department of Homeland Security has called it “nonsense.”

The claims promoted in these videos are false, however YouTube have suggested that election misinformation that does not directly encourage people to interfere with the vote count does not violate its rules and says it is not algorithmically promoting inaccurate videos.

This week Media Matters used the tracking tool BuzzSumo to review videos posted between November 5 and November 12 that have at least 10,000 views and had “hammer” and “scorecard” or “dominion” in the title, and we found 41 such videos, with a combined total of nearly 3 million views.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/russian-media-are-promoting-trumps-bogus-voter-fraud-claims/

alexh

Many European leaders, from U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, were quick to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden on his victory over President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election — and it isn't hard to see that Johnson, Merkel and Macron all believe that U.S. voters made the right choice. But one leader who has yet to congratulate Biden is Russian President Vladimir Putin. And writer Cathy Young, in an article for the conservative website The Bulwark, stresses that Russian media pundits have been tirelessly promoting the bogus conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from Trump because of widespread voter fraud.

In Russia, Young notes, media pundits have been describing the 2020 election as evidence of the failure of U.S. democracy.

"So far, Putin is the only major national leader to have held back on congratulating Joe Biden on his victory," Young explains. "Meanwhile, the Russian state-run or state-friendly media have alternated mostly between open gloating over an American election in chaos and equally open sympathy for Trump."

According to Young, "On November 4, discussions of America's election drama on Russian airwaves eclipsed a patriotic holiday at home, Russian Unity Day, and the pro-Trump cheerleading grew more heavy-handed. That evening's edition of the political talk show 'Big Game' on TV-1, Russia's main federal channel, was almost entirely dominated by pro-Trump voices."

Young observes that "Big Game" host Andranik Migranyan, a staunch Putin supporter, told Russian viewers, "The majority of American voters want law and order, and today, alas, only Trump symbolizes the idea of law and order." Migranyan, according to Young, joined Trump in saying that Democratic governors and mayors in the U.S. are allowing rioters and looters to run amok — and Migranyan also made the offensive and racist comment that Democrats "get down on their knees and kiss the feet of Blacks."

Must read by @CathyYoung63 ---> Trump’s Men in Moscow https://t.co/OvhcN4CjVG via @BulwarkOnline

— Charlie Sykes (@Charlie Sykes)1605377956.0

Another Russian program that has been promoting Trump's baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, according to Young, is "Evening With Vladimir Solovyov," which airs on Russia's Rossiya-1. Host Solovyov echoed the talking points of Trump supporters in the U.S., claiming that Republican observers were kept away from vote-counting facilities.

Solovyov scoffed, "Some precincts simply barred observers…. It's just brilliant. This is what they call an electoral system."

One of Solovyov's guests, pundit Sergei Stankevich, told him, "Most likely, the Democrats will be able to torture the arithmetic until they get a win — that is, Biden will be declared president of the United States. But he will be a president without legitimacy, because a thick cloud of doubt will hang over his presidency for many Americans. Millions of his votes came from mail-in ballots, and no one will ever know how many of those votes were from real people."

Young observes, "The only anti-Trump voices in Putin's Russia came from the dissidents. Opposition activist Alexei Navalny, currently in Germany recovering from a poisoning widely blamed on Kremlin agents, congratulated Biden and (Vice President-elect) Kamala Harris on their victory in a 'free and fair election.'"

Young wraps up her article by noting how quick pro-Putin pundits in Russia believed pro-Trump conspiracy theories that were invented in the United States.

"For less discerning people in Russia and elsewhere," Young writes, "the claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election will surely undermine not only America's moral authority, but that of her democratic institutions. And that's on the people who have spread or condoned these toxic fictions."

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Trump's legal team takes to Fox News to cry election fraud — it didn't go well

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Opinions

Technology

Confusion and conflict stir online as Trump claims victory, questions states’ efforts to count ballots

As mainstream social media sites raced to address suspect claims, the chaotic environment showcased the fractured nature of the Internet

By

Craig Timberg,

Tony Romm,

Isaac Stanley-Becker and

Drew Harwell

November 4, 2020

President Trump throughout Wednesday repeated false declarations of victory, even as numerous swing states were still counting ballots, causing widespread confusion online and sparking bellicose talk on far-right forums and on mainstream platforms such as Twitter.

As most news organizations urged caution and patience, social media swelled with agitation, conflict and, in some cases, fury in response to the president’s assertions — a scenario that law enforcement officials and digital-threat analysts had warned about for months.

The furious talk would prove to be little more than chatter. But it was clear Trump’s and his allies’ use of Facebook, Twitter and text messages to press claims that the continued ballot counting was evidence of fraud resonated among some fringe actors on the Web — even though they contained no overt calls for action.

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists were among those who celebrated his messages as an invitation to conflict. On the messaging app Telegram, one anonymous poster shared an image of three rifles and a handgun, along with the words, “I’m ready.” Another poster wrote, “Get the guns and the amor ready.”

“I’ve been tracking some of the most vile chatter and outreach from terrorists for two decades, but there’s something different about what we’re seeing now," said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks online extremism. “It is in many ways more troubling, not to mention sadder. Many Americans legitimately believe they are at war with many of their fellow citizens and are willing — if not eager — to harm them.”

The tweets and other social media posts by Trump and his allies drew widespread rebukes and disciplinary action from the main social media companies, which have spent months planning for a scenario that involved premature calls of victory. Twitter quickly put a warning label on a Trump tweet claiming victory and limited its reach, an action experts said had moderate impact. Facebook also appended a label, saying the Trump post was misleading.

Trump’s early victory declarations test tech giants’ mettle in policing threats to the election

But some of the attempts by Trump and other prominent Republicans to discredit the electoral process still managed to go viral, reflecting the daunting task facing technology companies and election officials to keep a fractured nation calm, preserve democratic norms and ensure an orderly, safe end to one of the most contentious races in history.

“WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT?” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning, sharing another user’s concern about a steady uptick in votes for Biden in the crucial battleground state of Michigan.

Twitter labeled the retweet as misleading, even as Trump’s comment attracted more than 26,000 shares on the platform. Trump later turned to his campaign’s storehouse of voters’ phone numbers, blasting out a text message urging them to donate so that Trump’s election campaign could “FIGHT BACK.”

“Pres Trump & VP Pence: It’s so urgent we BOTH texted you. Dems & the Fake News want to STEAL this Election! 1000%-MATCH to FIGHT BACK! Act NOW,” read the text, a copy of which was shared by RoboKiller, a call-and-text-blocking app.

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Far-right influencers lined up behind Trump, praising him for going “on offense”and lashing out at social networking services for applying labels to his posts that noted that the count was still ongoing. Some of the president’s most avid supporters baselessly suggested that the slow uptick in votes for Democratic candidate Joe Biden reflected evidence of fraud.

“This is a statistical impossibility — LOL. Time to open an investigation,” tweeted Candace Owens, a former communications director for the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA. “Democrats are trying to cheat. There is no denying that now.”

There were notable exceptions, however. Ben Shapiro, a conservative pundit with a vast online following, wrote in a tweet shortly after the president’s remarks from the White House, “No, Trump has not already won the election, and it is deeply irresponsible for him to say he has.”

No, Trump has not already won the election, and it is deeply irresponsible for him to say he has.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) November 4, 2020

On Twitter, unverified allegations that Democrats were trying usurp the vote surged under the hashtag #StopTheSteal throughout Election Day. The tone sharpened after Trump went before cameras at the White House shortly before 2:30 a.m. Wednesday to assert that “we did win this election.” He said that he would appeal to the Supreme Court to halt the counting of ballots in numerous states, though he did not say on what grounds he would make the appeal.

The information vacuum exploited by Trump was at least partly the result of the refusal by Republican-controlled state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan to make substantial changes to rules about when mail-in ballots can be processed. Numerous states modified their guidelines to authorize the earlier handling of these ballots, but the three critical battlegrounds did not, with Michigan allowing just an extra day.

Efforts by technology giants to slow the spread of the baseless allegations were hampered by their endorsement from prominent users, including a congresswoman-elect, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has expressed support for the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory. Twitter obscured her posts amplifying the conspiratorial #StopTheSteal narrative behind warning labels, while Facebook merely appended a link to additional voting information.

Michigan kidnapping plot, like so many other extremist crimes, foreshadowed on social media

SITE reported a Twitter account saying, “Trump won [and] any attempts to alter the outcome should be treated as acts of treason.”

The monitoring group found a different user on Twitter taking a more belligerent tone, “And so the boogaloo begins” — a reference to a far-right movement that contends the United States will soon descend into civil war. The movement, which is virulently anti-government, has been linked to numerous cases of real-world violence, including the fatal shooting of a security guard at a federal court in Oakland, Calif., in May.

A neo-Nazi group on Telegram, a messaging app with little moderation, predicted “actual civil war” could be weeks away, according to SITE.

Trump’s early victory declarations test tech giants’ mettle in policing threats to the election

On TheDonald, a pro-Trump message board previously banned from Reddit, roughly 6,000 accounts boosted an early-morning thread saying that “they are trying to STEAL the election. We will never let them do it.”

Dozens of users called for “war.” “Lock and load,” one responded. “I’m ready,” another said. One account, named “America1stAndOnly,” said they were “standing by and keeping my rifle by my side.”

Long before the polls closed, researchers tracking disinformation on social media had grown alarmed about the prospect of calls for violence in the case of a close, hotly contested election in which results were not immediately known. Numerous analysts and state officials had warned of the potential for late shifts toward the Democrats, who disproportionately voted through mail ballots, which in several states were counted later than others.

Misleading images showing piles of bricks, for example, were used Tuesday to bolster claims that left-wing activists were preparing for dangerous street brawls. University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, in a Zoom call with reporters for a disinformation-research consortium, warned that social media posts might amount to “a match thrown into a pile of dry leaves.”

But while anger played out in isolated and predictably partisan corners of the Internet, fears of widespread Election Day unrest did not unfold.

Facebook and Twitter, enforcing new policies governing premature claims of victory, applied labels to the president’s posts Wednesday morning accusing Democrats of “trying to STEAL the Election.”

A Trump tweet claiming victory was quickly hidden with a warning by the company. Facebook appended a notice advising, “Final results may be different from initial vote counts, as ballot counting will continue for days or weeks.”

Reaction to the president’s premature claims of victory and baseless assertions of fraud showed how he has advanced and exploited the fracturing of the country’s information ecosystem, with more and more Americans self-selecting to get their information from partisan echo chambers.

Many conservatives directed their ire at Facebook, Google and other big tech companies, echoing Trump’s months of assertions that they sought to censor the president and tip the election in Democrats’ favor — charges for which they offer no credible evidence and that the industry strongly denies.

On fringe platforms that have picked up new users because of heightened moderation on the major social networking services, Trump’s most hard-line supporters urged one another off cable networks that cautioned against the president’s claims, even longtime conservative favorite Fox News.

“Go to OAN,” one wrote on the MeWe service, in a channel devoted to Pennsylvania, recommending the adamantly pro-Trump One America News.

As Trump warns of leftist violence, a dangerous threat emerges from the right-wing boogaloo movement

“You have to get buy-in from the mainstream to have big cultural impact,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. As the results arrived on Tuesday, she said, “most people are watching the networks, not social media streams.” But as the count drags on in the ensuing days, more and more voters may search online for confirmation of their existing biases.

The harsh tone followed months of allegations by Trump, leading Republicans and popular online conservative figures that Democrats were planning to commit widespread fraud, especially in urban areas in swing states. Accounts of an Election Day incident in Philadelphia, when a Republican poll watcher was temporarily prevented from entering a polling place, garnered 287 million likes, retweets and views across Twitter, according to researchers who tracked the incident, which was recounted in misleading ways online.

The Trump campaign on Wednesday morning attempted to capitalize on anger over false allegations of a stolen election, sending fundraising emails saying Democrats will “do whatever it takes to manipulate the results.” We “ask for you to step up ONE LAST TIME and DEFEND YOUR PRESIDENT!” one email said just before soliciting donations. “Everything we’ve worked for is on the line.”

Some far-right users online said the social media sites’ increased levels of fact-checking and content moderation, such as marking certifiably false claims as “disputed,” were election-skewing attempts to censor the president and tantamount to “treason.” The companies said the rules applied to all posts across the political divide, and data shows Trump has had no issues getting his message across: On Twitter alone, he has gained more than 270,000 followers since Election Day began.

In stoking claims about the authenticity of the count, Trump touched off a wave of skepticism about the integrity of the system among his supporters online. They quickly blasted the election as fraudulent, sharing posts, photos and videos online questioning the veracity of mail-in ballots despite a long documented history of such voting being safe and secure. Some pointed to news organizations’ incomplete electoral maps — still being updated as states continue their counts — as a sign votes are being suppressed.

“Trump was winning in Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, North Carolina with only a few percent of votes remaining, when they stopped counting votes and all news channels went offline,” tweeted one user. “And suddenly Biden is apparently winning in all of these states?”

“They stopped counting votes because the Republicans were winning,” tweeted Brigitte Gabriel, the founder of ACT for America, which styles itself as a “grass-roots national security organization.”

Her post was shared nearly 5,000 times.

Russian and Iranian news services avidly tracked the unfolding drama in the United States, as did social media accounts previously identified as being operated by Russian operatives, including the infamous Internet Research Agency that aggressively interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

“A handful of covert Russian accounts tied to the IRA pushed stories overnight, with very limited traction,” said Camille Francois, chief innovation officer for Graphika, which tracks online influence operations. “One focused on the claim that the U.S. Postal Service had failed to deliver 300,000 ballots, and another piece, borrowed from American sources, described Trump as a sacrificial hero and divine figure.”

Elizabeth Dwoskin contributed to this report.

There's a potential for blood in the streets':  Here's what 2 top election lawyers think of Trump's lawsuits

BillMoyers.com

November 15, 2020

ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. President Trump still will not admit he lost. He tweets and repeats the lie that the election was a fraud, the vote rigged, the election stolen. There are fewer than ten weeks before he must leave office, but he refuses to...

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/despicable-dangerous-right-wing-assault-2020-election

Right-wing media’s pro-Trump echo chamber is not letting President Donald Trump go down without a fight. And its members are more than willing to make faith in the democratic system a casualty of their disinformation campaign.

Election experts long predicted that Election Day would end with a “red mirage” showing Trump in the lead, only for there to be a “blue shift” afterward as key states counted mail-in ballots that heavily favored Democratic nominee Joe Biden. That is exactly what is happening now. Biden’s popular vote margin has soared since Tuesday, and tightening margins in key states are bringing into focus his potential electoral path to victory.

Trump’s response has been to carry out the strategy he has foreshadowed for months. He falsely claimed victory, baselessly declared himself the victim of massive voter fraud, and said that he would be vindicated in the courts. Notably, these fraud claims are absent from his campaign’s actual lawsuits, which “appear mostly designed to generate headlines that Trump is contesting the outcome, rather than cases that could determine the outcome of the race,” as Popular Information’s Judd Legum pointed out after reviewing the filings.

But Trumpist media figures are recklessly touting false and nonsensical fraud accusations to bolster the president’s position. From MAGA social media influencers to right-wing YouTube stars, prime-time Fox hosts to conservative radio giants, their mutually reinforcing web is bombarding audiences with a full-spectrum effort to undermine confidence in the election results, raising tensions and fomenting unrest.

Here’s Tucker Carlson,the most popular cable news host in the country, along with the president’s lawyer Jenna Ellis, touting the since-retracted viral falsehood that Biden mysteriously received 138,000 votes in Michigan.

Here’s Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio host who has been a Republican kingmaker for decades and received the Medal of Freedom from the president this year, pushing the easily debunked viral lie that “Wisconsin now has more votes than people who are registered to vote."[11/4 show]

here’s Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker of the House and longtime Fox contributor, telling the viewers of the president’s favorite morning news show that there need to be Senate investigations and lawsuits due to purported fraud.

The fever-swamp mentality has engulfed right-wing social media and conspiracy-minded Trumpist websites.

It’s also spreading among the president’s more “intellectual” supporters. Here’s Ted Cruz, a prominent Republican senator who has argued cases before the Supreme Court, promoting Fox host Maria Bartiromo touting The Federalist’s baseless claim that “Democrats Are Trying To Steal The Election In Michigan, Wisconsin, And Pennsylvania,” which relies in part on the 138,000-vote lie.

These baseless fraud claims are fueling extraordinarily overheated rhetoric, as leading members of the Trumpist media urge their audiences to be “angry,” “outraged,” “worried,” and “concerned,” and to prepare “to fight” the Democrats who are “stealing your nation from you,” perhaps by trying to “surround” ballot counting locations to exert a “demanding presence.” 

As the frenzy builds, Trump supporters have already begun swarming those locations in Michigan and Arizona. In the latter state, election officials briefly stopped the count after being intimidated by the armed protesters, before sheriff’s deputies in tactical gear arrived on the scene. Some pro-Trump influencers appear to be getting ready to add to the scene in Michigan and generate a similar one in Philadelphia.

It’s unclear what impact, if any, all of this will have on the election’s result. But it seems overwhelmingly likely that a large portion of Trump supporters will come to believe that the election is illegitimate and has been stolen from him. His propagandists could try to forestall that, working to dampen tensions -- but instead they'd rather inflame them.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/pence-to-speak-to-secretive-council-for-national-policy-friday-cnp-members-involved-in-saturdays-stop-the-steal-rally/

no twt

As the results of the 2020 presidential election came rolling in, Vice President Mike Pence was notably out of sight ​and had even planned a Florida vacation for this week. But with ​the ratcheting up of Trump’s campaign to contest the outcome of the election, CNN reported that Pence canceled his getaway, remaining inside the Beltway ​to address the Council for National Policy, a highly secretive organization that includes some of the most powerful conservatives in the country.

As Pence stands at the podium before marquee names in conservative politics Friday, pro-Trump, far-right activists are making their way to Washington, D.C., for a rally organized and supported by some of the very right-wing leaders likely sitting in that room.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his InfoWars network are leading a caravan of Trump supporters to D.C.,Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers militia has promised to station his armed men outside of the District borders should Trump call on them, and the Proud Boys hate group has encouraged its members to to the nation’s capital, with leader Enrique Tarrio declaring Trump’s “Standby order has been rescinded.”

They, along with other ​conspiracy theorists, far-right groups and other Trump loyalists, have all promised to go to the Saturday event that goes by three names​: Million MAGA March, March for Trump, and Stop the Steal—to push a false narrative that voter fraud cost Trump the election. The event has been promoted by Fox News personalities Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham.

GOP operative Ali Alexander,who organized the gathering, was clear on the rally’s demands in a ​Nov. 10 Periscopepost. “We’re going down to the Supreme Court,​” he said, “and we’re telling our government that this election and the counting will be transparent, or we’ll get a new election. One or another.”

And they wouldn’t be on their way without​ the leadership and support of current and past Council for National Policy members for the Stop the Steal campaign. ​The CNP, which has been around since the Reagan administration, holds closed-door meetings, tells members not to speak to the press about the council, and has tried to keep membership rolls private, but its members’ names have leaked over the years.

Notable CNP members include Ginni Thomas, the influential wife of Clarence Thomas, and Tony Perkins, a former president of the organization and the current president of the Family Research Council, according to a 2020 membership directory published by Documented. CNP has also welcomed far-right figures like neo-Confederate Christian Reconstructionist Michael Peroutka, a major funder of former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s advocacy and political career.

CNP ​also counts among its members Ed Martin of ​Phyllis Schlafly Eagles,Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who has allied himself with dominionists and Christian nationalists in the past year—all of whom have pushed ​Stop the Steal messaging since Alexander launched the campaign and called on them to join it.

Martin has led sparsely attended D.C. rallies and blasted Phyllis Schlafly Eagles’ email list with Stop the Steal talking points, while Kirk attended a rally in Phoenix and took to conservative media to promote it. Though it does not appear Fitton has used the #StoptheSteal hashtag, he has echoed the campaign’s language, alleged an “electoral coup,” accusedstates of voter fraud, and called for votes to stop being counted in others.

Amy Kremer, who was listed as a member in a 2014 membership directory obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is organizing in the state of Georgia for Stop the Steal events.Even Ali Alexander, who formerly went by Ali Akbar, is listed twice by both names as a signee on a 2017 letter from CNP to Donald Trump obtained by the Christian Post. David Armiak of the Center for Media and Democracy has also reported on some of these connections.

On Nov. 4, as Americans ​awoke to see Trump’s election night lead overtaken by the counting of mail-in ballots, which came in record numbers for Joe Biden, Alexander was expressed dismay. On Twitter, he suggested that the Republican Party should have adopted his 2018 Stop the Steal operation, which he had launched with ​the help of Trump confidant and since convicted felon Roger Stone​ during the recount of Florida’s 2018 U.S. Senate race.

​On the day after the 2020 election, Alexander said he had no intention of rebooting it, but about an hour later, he suggested the only way he would restart the operation would be if a few key players were on board—among them, Tom Fitton, Amy Kremer, and Ed Martin. By around 2 p.m. that day, he’d added Charlie Kirk and others to the list.

"he’s decided only to do it under certain conditions and those conditions seem to be CNP support,” ​said Stephanie Lamy, a French information warfare researcher with Danaides who flagged the series of tweets​. “That’s very clear from this tweet by the people he mentions.”

And there’s good reason to ​seek CNP support given its power and its expertise in ​advancing unsubstantiated voter fraud narratives.

Last month, The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow got ​his hands on videos from an Aug. 21 CNP conference held at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City. Fitton, who Alexander called on to be in charge of the legal aspect of the ​Stop the Steal campaign, zeroed in on mail-in voting.“We need to stop those ballots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do,” Fitton said. “But this is a crisis that we’re not prepared for. I mean, our side is not prepared for.”

J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, also attacked mail-in voting at that meeting, telling activists, “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist and so forth.” Adams, a known voter suppressor, was also part of Trump administration’s short-lived “Commission on Election Integrity,” which folded after findingno evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Adams’ legal organization has issued two lawsuits since Nov. 4 claimingvoter fraud.

Current CNP Treasurer Kenneth Blackwell has promoted Stop the Steal on Twitterand Facebook and, as Right Wing Watch’s Peter Montgomery reported, baselessly charged Monday that “the Democrat-run Pennsylvania executive government only wants votes counted that support their agenda and their candidates.”

Trump himself has addressed CNP members—as recently as the Aug. 21 meeting and in the beginning of his campaign in 2015. According to The National Review, of the six Republican presidential candidates who addressed CNP in 2015, Trump was the “star attraction.”

Tags: Ali AkbarAli Alexander Amy Kremer Charlie Kirk Donald Trump Ed Martin Ginni Thomas J Christian Adams Ken Blackwell Michael Peroutka Mike Pence Tom Fitton Tony Perkins Disinformation Stop the Steal  Voter Fraud  Council for National Policy

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/right-wing-operative-ali-alexander-leads-stop-the-steal-campaign/

right-wing political operative Ali Alexander has brought back “Stop the Steal,” a campaign to get right-wing activists to discredit mail-in voting, disrupt vote-counting, and ​falsely accuse Democrats of stealing the presidential election—presumably because legally cast ballots are being counted in states that have yet to declare the winner of the 2020 presidential contest. (Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden appears to be prevailing among votes cast by mail-in ballots.)

The move comes after President Donald Trump declared a premature victory in the early morning hours Wednesday and accused Democrats of mass voter fraud, a false narrative he’s been pushing for months about mail-in voting. At a Wednesday afternoon press conference in Philadelphia, Trump’s legal team, including conspiracy theorist and Trump sycophant Rudy Giuliani, doubled down on those claims, as have right-wing activists. The race is still too close to call, but as more mail-in ballots have begun to be counted, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has taken the lead. 

In a panicked Periscope broadcast Wednesday evening, Alexander said he was “busy organizing thousands and thousands and thousands of people” to join “voter integrity” rallies in Phoenix, Arizona, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Detroit, Michigan, Madison, Wisconsin, and Atlanta, Georgia, (and perhaps Nevada) to protest. Alexander said the first rally would feature “Pizzagate” booster Mike Cernovichat the capitol in Arizona at 7 p.m. Wednesday evening, claiming that they’d have hundreds there and 10,000 attendees there by Friday. Asecond rally took place Wednesday night in Las Vegas. Alexander encouraged viewers to go to a website where they could register with the campaign and explained how he hoped to draw attention to these rallies. 

“We’re matching influencers with operatives, so every influencer will have an operative there also working with local media, capturing all the vehicles going in and out ‘dropping of ballots,’” Alexander said. “We’re gonna capture everything.”

“If you need a plane ticket, I’ll PayPal you money, because people have sent me money,” Alexander said, before clarifying, “We’re flying giant influencers. We’re flying those people who are offering to share their audiences.”

Earlier in the day, Ali had put out a call for right-wing political operatives to lead the campaign in a number of states where Trump and Biden are in tight races or where Biden has won by a slim margin.

He called on Scott Presler and far-right activist Jack Posobiec to join the effort in Pennsylvania;Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk and Cernovich in Arizona;Alex Bruesewitz in Wisconsin; and CJ Pearson and Daniel Bostic, a producer of “The Plot Against the President” in Georgia. He also called on Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, a right-wing legal outfit that doubles as a communications shop, to work the legal network and Amy Kremer of Women for Trump and Ed Martin of Phyllis Schlafly Eagles to work the campaign nationally. He also said that Ed Martin, Amy Kremer and Kyle Jane Kremer would be “running point” for aWashington, D.C.event 1 p.m. Thursday. 

At Wednesday’s rally in Phoenix, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, who has his own ties to far-right nationalists, introduced Cernovich to the assembled crowd waving Trump flags. Taking the megaphone, Cernovich claimed that 200 anti-fascist activists had planned to disrupt his rally, but he said they’d never show up because, “I’ll get sent to prison after kissing their asses—legally and lawfully under self-defense laws.”

Cernovich went on to attack Fox News. “Do you think Fox News is suppressing pro-Trump vote?” He asked the crowd. “Yes!” The crowd shouted back.

Alexander also lashed out at Fox News in his Periscope, saying the conservative, pro-Trump network’s coverage of the presidential election was why he launched the campaign. He asked his viewers to spend 15 to 20 minutes after his Periscope harassing Fox News reporters and producers.

“Fox News is about to call the election for Joe Biden. How does this happen? They called Arizona too early. … I think it’s going for Trump,” he said. “If they call Nevada for Biden, then they will accidentally be forced. You need to tweet the hell out of everyone at Fox News.” 

In September, Alexander took to Periscope to float the idea of revamping “Stop the Steal” for the 2020 presidential election, Jared Holtreported for Right Wing Watch then. At that time, Alexander had said that the 2020 “Stop the Steal” campaign would bypass social media by collecting phone numbers from supporters. 

Theoriginal “Stop the Steal” campaign was led by Alexander in 2018, along with convicted felon and self-described “dirty trickster” Roger Stone, who Alexander said came up with the phrase, and his associates, including Posobiec. The campaign featured protests and misinformation against a ballot recount in Florida’s 2018 Senate race between Republican Rick Scott and Democrat Bill Nelson. In that campaign, pro-Trump activists from around the country descended on Florida to protest and spread misinformation, a seeming reboot of the so-called “Brooks Brothers riot,” which broke out following Florida’s contested presidential election results in 2000. Stone was behind that riot, which shut down recount efforts in Miami-Dade.

For the 2018 “Stop the Steal” campaign, Alexander said that he had recruited QAnon followers as well as people experiencing homelessness to fill spots at the protest. Politico reported in 2016 that Alexander’s PAC had received a large donation from billionaire**Robert Mercer**; Ali claims to not be taking money from him for this campaign.

It appears the 2018 “Stop the Steal” campaign was an attempted dry run for the 2020 presidential election. On Twitter, Alexanderclaimed to have approached Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel about running the campaign and that she had mocked it. On Wednesday, Alexander lashed out at those around Trump andMcDaniel, who he called “the dumbest woman in history.” He said that the RNC, McDaniel, and the Trump campaign were not doing the campaign. [twt  forced errors in messaging and non-legal and non-protest actions coming out of the GOP right now is simply stunning. Trump may ruin his own efforts before they start. Why is no one around him doing this right?]

alexander claimed that his campaign of right-wing and far-right activists just want “a fair, predictive, determinative result” and that “This election is going to be conducted fairly where it produces a legitimate result that both sides can come together on.”

“I’m going to be here in Texas, just providing my friends with support,” Alexander said. “What I want to do is bring this country as much together as we can and have a certain outcome and ride off into the sunset.”