state GOP

1220 texas, az, formerly WI, Oregon, MI (karamo) , PA voter suppress, Nevada FLORIDA, MAN

missouri?

colo?

see state GOP wackos

orig for party itself but bleeds over into state legis?

see rinaldi pow texas

SEE SWING STATES

IOWA HOMAN GRIFT 7 26

see fake electors trump coup in swing states GA AZ

see Mich state gop

primary on texas 6 22 bellweather?!

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// GA? MIKE COLLINS 3 STAFF KKK?

AN 9 26

An exclusive Talking Points Memo investigation by Christopher Mathias reports that a Republican candidate for House District 10 in Florida was photographed marching with white supremacists at the infamous Charlottesville, Virginia, rally that left one woman dead and 35 injured.

Marshall Rawson attended the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally alongside members of the League of the South, which is a white nationalist, neo-Confederate organization.

TPM spotted Rawson and his wife arriving at the rally in archived video footage. They're greeted by fellow members of the League. Footage and photographs reviewed by the outlet reportedly place him carrying a League of the South flag and marching with neo-Nazis, including James Alex Fields Jr. He was the man who later killed counterprotester Heather Heyer by driving his car into a crowd of people.

Rawson has never denounced the League of the South, apologized for his participation in the violent rally or spoken out against many of the people he marched with.

The League has a documented history of white supremacist, antisemitic, anti-immigrant, homophobic and secessionist advocacy, and its leaders have openly promoted the idea of a white ethnostate in the South, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center's database of hate groups.

TPM cited a 2025 Facebook post in which Rowson claimed, “I am happy to talk about my past advocacy and activism on any issue. I am also proud of the advocacy work that I have been involved with for the past 13 years.”

Rawson's ideology is a close match to the League's values, particularly when it comes to LGBTQ people. A 2023 statement from him, cited by TPM, expressed his support for the death penalty for gay people in Uganda.

“This is how you would run the pervs and miscreants out of Florida," he said.

“A one-way ticket to no more sexualizing of children and the LGBTQ+ agenda in Florida!” he added.

The investigation by TPM alleged that "there are indications Rawson may have still felt the need to operate a pseudonymous social media account where he could express even more extreme sentiments. There are several data points linking an X account that posted from 2017 to 2020 under the handle 'RockOfDixie' to Rawson. Some of the posts from this account compiled by researcher ShermanMarching seem to have since been deleted, and the account’s most recent post is from 2020."

The account "features a bodybuilder flexing on stage," which is the same image in an online gallery of photos from the 2016 National Physique Committee’s Galaxy Championships. The researcher found that the bodybuilder in the image was identified at that time as Marshall Rawson. He finished fourth out of six.

One of the policies he advocated for is to bring back lynchings.

“Multiculturalism kills and public lynchings worked," said the "RockOfDixie" account.

Fellow League of the South members have opened their checkbooks in support, TPM found. So far, he's received more than $15,000 from dozens of people the report said are tied to the League of the South, neo-Nazi circles, white nationalist groups or other extremist activism.

One of the donors is a former Klan lawyer, and others also attended the Charlottesville riot. When asked about it, Rawson said he doesn't "screen" his donors or their views before he takes their money.

Rawson won the August Republican primary by just over 2,000 votes and is widely expected to win the November general election in the heavily conservative district. TPM argues that his candidacy illustrates how ideas once associated with fringe white-nationalist groups have gained a greater foothold within Republican politics.

Neither the Florida GOP nor the national Republican Party responded to TPM’s requests for comment.

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AN 8 26

The Republican Party's lawsuit against the state of Nevada over the law allowing ballots be counted up to four days after the Election Day has been dismissed.

In several states, ballots that are postmarked on Election Day are still counted, even if they are received by election officials a few days after the election. Nevada's law allows up to four days to continue receiving ballots. Ballots with missing or unreadable postmarks may also be counted as long as they arrive within the three days that follow.

The RNC and Nevada Republican Party sued Nevada in 2024 to block the ballot counting, claiming that the law passed in 2021 unlawfully extends Election Day. They pointed to federal laws that set a uniform national date for federal elections. They also claimed that counting late-arriving ballots could dilute Republican votes and provide Democrats an unfair advantage. Nevada officials and voting-rights advocates countered that the relevant act is casting or mailing the ballot by Election Day, not the postal service’s delivery date, and that the law helps ensure legally cast votes are counted.

In the lower-court ruling, U.S. District Judge Miranda Du dismissed the appeal, saying that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. The plaintiffs then appealed to the Ninth Circuit, where the case remained pending until Friday's decision.

According to decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals similarly decided on procedural grounds, not on the law itself, Democracy Docket posted.

The three-judge panel explained that the plaintiffs were not actually harmed by the lower court’s ruling. And if they were not harmed by it, they had no legal right (no standing) to pursue the appeal. The court therefore dismissed the appeal.

This isn't the only case the GOP has filed related to mail-in ballots received after Election Day.

The most important case came from Mississippi, where the RNC, Mississippi Republican Party and individual voters challenged a law allowing absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day to arrive up to five business days later.

A federal district court initially rejected the challenge, but the Fifth Circuit struck down the law. In June 2026, however, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that ruling in Watson v. Republican National Committee in a 5–4 agreement

"The federal Election-Day statutes do not prevent Mississippi from counting absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day but received up to five days thereafter; nothing in the federal Election-Day statutes requires ballots to be received by Election Day," explained SCOTUSblog.

-=-=-=

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CONTEXT

RWW

07/10/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Melissa Gira Grant @ The New Republic: ICE Is Hoping You Won’t Notice the Man Agents Killed In Texas

The administration may have changed its P.R. strategy for Trump’s mass deportation campaign. The violence hasn’t changed at all.

Edgar Sandoval and Hamed Aleaziz @ The New York Times: Man Killed by Federal Agent in Houston Was Not the Target of ICE Search

Officials say agents believed a passenger resembled one suspect, but the encounter quickly escalated into a fatal shooting.

Arelis R. Hernández @ The Washington Post: Migrants who saw man killed by ICE in Houston say he did not ram officers

Three men who were in the vehicle alongside Lorenzo Salgado Araujo are contesting the Department of Homeland Security’s account of the fatal shooting.

RWW

//

07/13/2026

Peter Montgomery

While the number of killings by ICE officers is climbing, and DHS is sending agents to intimidate American citizens over social media posts critical of ICE officials, what’s “terrifying” to the Iowa Republican Party is criticism of Trump administration border czar Tom Homan.

An email sent from “MAGA Alerts” Monday morning carried the subject line, “What happened to Tom Homan today serves as a terrifying Reminder!”

The email began ominously:

Patriot:

Your immediate attention is required.

Please confirm you are in a safe and private place to correspond, ensuring no Democrats can read the following message over your shoulder.

When you are ready, please direct your undivided attention to the following:

Readers who click through once they’re in a secure location got this message:

At 8:58 AM, local time, a national MAGA alert was placed into effect under direct orders from Executive MAGA Leadership.

Tom Homan just said something on national television that has prompted Democrats to push for his immediate forced resignation as United States Border Czar.

What Homan said—more than a month ago on the right-wing outlet Newsmax—was that Democratic officials had “sold out” the country for political power by encouraging illegal immigration. It was inflammatory rhetoric, but certainly not the first time someone in Trump world has made that kind of accusation.

The fundraising letter then claimed falsely that Democrats were “dangerously close” to forcing Homan’s removal, adding, “All efforts and resources of the Democratic Party have been directed toward seeking his resignation.” There’s no evidence of that.

After a bit more inflammatory anti-immigration rhetoric, the email asks people to sign a petition defending Homan and to make a monthly contribution “to combat the Democrats’ ongoing attacks on President Trump and his administration.”

And there’s a bit of intimidation for anyone who might be hesitating:

Contributions to the email are being shared by the Republican Party of Iowa and Trump National Committee Joint Fundraising Committee.

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Muslim Republican in tears after being told to leave TX GOP convention — and the country

AN 6 26

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an 525

Arizona Republicans remove requirements from their own jobs

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AN 3 26

A campaign accountant who served as the Maryland Republican Party comptroller since 2017 has been indicted, court records unsealed on Monday show.

The Baltimore Banner reported James Appel's name is no longer included on the GOP's website, and the details aren't immediately viewable online, but the indictment shows that he is being accused of wire fraud and money laundering.

Appel had been questioned in February by the FBI after a discrepancy of more than $100,000 popped up in Maryland Del. Kathy Szeliga’s campaign finance account.

"In a campaign finance report submitted at 2:30 a.m. on Jan. 21 to the Maryland Board of Elections, the Friends of Kathy Szeliga — the delegate’s campaign election committee — had a bank account balance of $287,481.55," reported FoxBaltimore in February. "The filing documents more than $106,000 in new campaign donations during the 2025 reporting period and slightly more than $52,000 in expenditures.

Appel managed as many as 40 campaign accounts as the campaign treasurer, including former Gov. Larry Hogan (R-Md.), his LinkedIn page confirms. Under an entity registered to Appel called GOP Compliance, it reported $1,900 in expenditures during the same period. However, "between January 2020 and February 2026, GOP Compliance received $239,453.02 in payments and reimbursements from 22 campaign committees."

Szeliga alone reported paying GOP Compliance $1,900 last year.

Maryland GOP executive director Ashleigh Presnar told the Banner that Appel is no longer at the party but wouldn't give details on when that changed.

He was also the original treasurer of the Maryland Freedom Caucus, the report said. It includes seven conservative state delegates who pooled money as a slate. The caucus has also removed Appel as the treasurer.

Del. Matt Morgan, who chairs the caucus, told the Banner that they've "gone through our account and I’m not aware of any money missing."

Appel's LinkedIn shows that he owned a sandwich shop until he was appointed to be the Chief Financial Officer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) Marine Fisheries in March 2007.

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an 4 25

Swing state GOP in explosive disarray as Republican's PAC is accused of extortion - Alternet.org

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an 4 25

Even before California became deep blue during the 1990s, its neighbor to the north, Oregon, was leaning Democratic. President George H.W. Bush won California in the 1988 presidential election, but he lost Oregon to Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis by roughly 5 percent.

Nonetheless, some rural areas of Oregon still lean GOP, and the Oregon Republican Party performs well in some rural areas of the state — especially those near Idaho. But the Oregon GOP is experiencing some turbulence following the resignation of its former chairman, the Rev. Jerry Cummings, on Wednesday, April 9. With Cummings' resignation, former Oregon Vice Chair Connie Whelchel took over the position.

According to Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) reporter Dirk VanderHart, Cummings resigned "amid revelations of ongoing personal financial woes and troubling allegations from a 16-year-old divorce."

VanderHart reports, "The quick fall from party influence comes less than two months into Cummings' tenure atop the Oregon GOP. It follows a story from the Oregon Journalism Project on Tuesday, (April 8) that detailed a litany of court proceedings that cast him in a negative light. One of those is a 2009 divorce case that contains allegations Cummings' ex-wife used to obtain a restraining order against him."

IFrame Content

Cummings' ex-wife, according to follows, accused him of violence — an allegation the former Oregon GOP chairman flatly denies.

"More recent legal troubles involve two 2024 civil filings that call Cummings' fiscal responsibility into question," VanderHart explains. "One case suggests he deposited invalid checks at OnPoint Community Credit Union, then withdrew more than $17,000 that didn’t actually exist. The other accuses Cummings of taking out $93,000 in business loans that he failed to make payments on."

The OPB reporter adds, "The financial cases present a significant concern for a person at the helm of a political party. Cummings’ responsibilities as GOP chair included fundraising, and donors were unlikely to trust him with their checks after the lawsuits came to light."

Whelchel is describing the allegations against Cummings as "deeply troubling."

In an official statement, Whelchel said, "These revelations were not known to the Executive Committee or Party leadership prior to their publication, and they are in no way reflective of the values or standards we hold While these developments are deeply unfortunate, they will not derail our mission."

*Read the full Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) articleat this link.

===

an 4 25

Chaos as Montana GOP kicks 9 senators out of the Republican Party

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an 1 25

Geoff Duncan, the former Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia, on Monday was expelled from the state's Republican Party over "alleged disloyalty," according to Fox 5 Atlanta.

The Georgia Republicans announced Duncan's ouster via X, writing: "MEDIA ADVISORY: Geoff Duncan having been formally expelled, we ask that you refer to him as 'expelled Republican Geoff Duncan' or 'ousted Republican Geoff Duncan' when you go to him for quotes trashing President Trump and the Republican Party.'"

The party tagged CNN and the Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) in its announcement.

Aiming his response at party Chair Josh McKoon, Duncan replied, "Hard to believe this is a good use of time for a party that’s only got a limited amount of time to figure out mass deportations, world peace and global tariffs. Learn how to take a victory lap not light another dumpster fire @JoshMcKoon"

According to Fox 5, the Georgia GOP's "resolution outlines a series of allegations against Duncan, including accusations of undermining Republican candidates, endorsing Democratic opponents, and leveraging his GOP affiliation for personal gain."

Weeks before President Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race, the former Republican lieutenant governor announced that he planned to vote for the president's reelection.

"Unlike Trump, I’ve belonged to the GOP my entire life. This November, I am voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass," Duncan wrote in an op-ed published by the AJC.

The ex-GOP leader took his criticism of President-elect Donald Trump further when he announced that Vice President Kamala Harris would get his vote.

*Fox 5 Atlanta's full report is available here.

===

12 24

Ex-Proud Boy from Miami is sent to prison for role in Jan. 6 assault on U.S. Capitol Gabriel Garcia, a former member of the Proud Boys and Miami-Dade GOP's Executive Committee, was sentenced to a year in prison for...

substack 10 24

Rachel Walden, Republican candidate for the Arizona Corporation Commission, has repeatedly expressed belief in far right conspiracy theories, including making false claims about climate change, COVID vaccines, and that “MS-13 gang was a creation of the CIA.”

===

sep 2024

14 fake electors from 2020 are Donald Trump electors again in 2024

Fourteen so-called fake electors who participated in former President Donald Trump’s 2020 scheme to throw the election results into chaos will once again serve as electors for Trump in 2024, including several who currently face criminal charges.

With input from the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, Republican state parties in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Nevada have renominated 14 of the 84 fake electors from the 2020 election. Wisconsin's electors aren't publicly available until the first week of October, according to state election officials. A legal settlement bars unauthorized Wisconsin 2020 electors from serving as electors for Trump again.

There are no repeat electors from 2020 on this year’s Republican slates for Arizona and Georgia, the other two states where fake electors signed certificates incorrectly declaring Trump the winner.

The 14 former fake electors who are serving again include the Nevada Republican Party chairman, the Republican National Committeeman from Pennsylvania and several current or former county chairs.

usatoday

"Politically or in terms of the health of our democracy, the idea that people who potentially committed a crime in trying to further a scheme to subvert the results of the 2020 election... the idea that they are in any way involved in politics is troubling," Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law Rick Hasen said.

While some may have acted with the belief that they were just a back up if there was a legal change to the outcome, Hasen noted, "some of them, there have at least been allegations that they knew what they were doing and they knowingly engaged in criminal conduct."

None of the 14 repeat electors responded to USA TODAY's attempts to contact them.

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump is facing four felony charges in Washington, D.C. related to leading conspiracies to reverse the 2020 results and disenfranchise millions of voters. He has refused to commit to unconditionally accepting the results of the upcoming 2024 election, and while he has sometimes acknowledged that he lost the 2020 race, he has also continued to falsely tell supporters that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.

Pending charges

Charges have been brought against the fake electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada, as well as some people working with Trump.

Some of the cases are moving very slowly. In August, a Maricopa County judge set a tentative trial date of Jan. 5, 2026, for Arizona's fake electors case. The state GOP did not renominate any of the 2020 electors. In Nevada, the state has appealed to the state supreme court a lower court decision to reject the fake electors case stating it had been filed in the wrong county.

More:‘Somewhat dicey' and ‘problematic’: Inside Trump's bid to have fake electors overturn 2020 election

Still, electors might think twice about being party to signing such certificates again, Hasen said.

"Anyone who's an elector who's asked to do something shady this time, might think, hmm, last time around, these people were indicted, so maybe I shouldn't do that," Hasen said.

Michigan

The Michigan Republican Party has renominated the most fake electors. Six names that appeared on a certificate falsely claiming that Trump had won the state are on the 2024 list of 15 electors provided by the Michigan Secretary of State's office: Amy Facchinello, John Haggard, Timothy King, Marian Sheridan, Hank Choate and Meshawn Maddock–a former co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party.

Trump lost Michigan in 2020 by about 154,000 votes.

All six of them face criminal charges. The trial has not yet been scheduled but isn't expected to begin this year.

Choate's attorney, David Kallman, said the pending 2020 charges shouldn't affect who is picked to be a 2024 elector. Choate has pleaded not guilty.

"This was another election year. This really has nothing to do with the last 2020, election," he said. "I don't think it really impacts the criminal case at all."

Kallman said that Choate didn't know he was doing anything wrong in 2020. He said Trump's attorney's told the electors that the certificate would only be used if Trump's campaign won a court case overturning the results of the election in Michigan or if the state legislature stepped in.

"My client was told by people he trusted, attorneys at this meeting, that this wasn't going to be used unless one of those things happened," Kallman said.

He said electors were only presented with the page to sign their names, not the page that falsely claimed that they voted in the Capitol building and that Trump won.

Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania Republicans submitted a list of presidential electors to the secretary of state’s office with five former fake electors: Bill Bachenberg, Bernadette Comfort, Ash Khare, Pat Poprik and Andy Reilly. The state has 19 electoral votes. Trump lost in 2020 by about 80,000 votes.

Reilly, an attorney, is also the Republican National Committeeman from Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania electors wouldn't sign the fake certificate in 2020 unless the forms specifically said that their votes weren't to be counted until the courts ruled in Trump's favor. Therefore, electors have not been charged with a crime.

Khare, who has been an elector since 1990, told USA TODAY in April that he advocated to include that clause.

"We wanted to make sure that we’re not doing anything illegal," he said.

Nevada

The Nevada Republican Party renominated Michael McDonald, the chair of the state party, and Jesse Law, chairman of the Republican party of Clark County, both of whom signed the 2020 certificate although Trump lost the state by 154,000 votes. The state has six electoral votes.

McDonald, a longtime friend of Trump's who is senior adviser to the 2024 Trump campaign, and Law were among the electors indicted in Nevada. The case, which was dismissed over questions of whether it was filed in the correct county, has been appealed by Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat, to the state Supreme Court.

Trump lost Nevada by more than 30,000 votes.

New Mexico

The New Mexico Republican Party renominated Deborah Weh Maestas, the former state party chair. The state has five electoral votes. It's role in the scheme was always considered an outlier. New Mexico is not a swing state and has supported Democrats in every presidential election since 2008. Trump lost there in 2020 but about 100,000 votes.

Like in Pennsylvania, the 2020 New Mexico electors wouldn't sign unless the forms specifically said that their votes weren't to be counted until the courts ruled in Trump's favor. New Mexico electors have not been charged with a crime.

More:Wisconsin is the last state that may prosecute Trump’s fake electors, but AG Josh Kaul is mum

A key legal change since 2020

Electors normally draw little to no attention. In a presidential election year, each party nominates state electors who will vote for their presidential nominee in the Electoral College if their candidate wins. Party leaders such as the county party chairs or local elected officials are normally selected. Their names must be submitted to the state before the election and made publicly available.

But in 2020 GOP officials in seven states that President Joe Biden won sent fake electoral certificates to Congress stating that former President Donald Trump had actually won. The certificates were an effort to baselessly convince lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence that there were substantial questions about the outcome of the election in swing states.

The House Select Committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol and Trump's efforts to stay in power after losing the election found that the fake electoral certificates were part of a coordinated effort by Trump's allies to block Congress from certifying the election results. They wanted Congress to return th

Pence refused to accept, or even consider, the "alternate" electoral slates.

Jonathan Diaz, Director of Voting Advocacy for advocacy group Campaign Legal Center, said it is unlikely that scheme would be successful again. In 2022, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act, which changed the rules so Congress can only count electoral certificates signed by the governor of the state or another official approved by state law when the House and Senate meet to count the votes on Jan. 6. It also raised the threshold for members of Congress to object to counting a state from one representative and one senator to one-fifth of each chamber. Also, in 2023 the Supreme Court ruled in Moore v. Harper that state legislatures have little power to overturn election results.

"It's really going to be much, much more difficult for a slate of fake electors to try the same kind of shenanigans that they did in 2020," Diaz said. "The [2022 law] was really targeted at plugging the holes that existed in the previous process, because the law was so old, and really making sure that the kind of effort that we saw focused on that joint session of Congress can't occur again."

*USA TODAY reporter Erin Mansfield contributed to this article

===

an 7 24

Arizona is no stranger to election interference tactics, as 18 of Donald Trump's MAGA allies in April were "charged with using false or unproven claims about voter fraud related" to the 2020 presidential election, according to The Associated Press.

Two years later, NBC News reported that a pair of "Republican supervisors in Cochise County, Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, County — were charged for allegedly conspiring to interfere with the county’s midterm election — in part by pushing for a full hand count of ballots."

Now, according to a Tuesday, July 16 report published by Votebeat, "previously unreported text messages" reveal that Arizona Republican officials' "privately pressured county leaders across the state to count ballots by hand instead of using machines."

Votebeat reports that "newly obtained text messages from Cochise County, which American Oversight fought for in court and shared with Votebeat, show that a state senator was trying to pressure Judd during the public meeting when the supervisors held the key vote on hand-counting ballots."

Cochise County-based state Senator David Gowan (R), according to the report, "texted Judd just as the meeting began," writing, "Does the Cochise bos know there is no law prohibiting them from hand count? From President Fann" — "referring to the county supervisors."

Votebeat reports, "In Pinal County, the day supervisors discussed hand-counting ballots in this year’s election, state Sen. Wendy Rogers, a Republican who represents parts of Pinal County, texted Supervisor Kevin Cavanaugh, also a Republican, to assert that hand-counting all ballots was legal — something the Secretary of State’s Office and state Attorney General’s Office have said is not true."

Rogers typed, "Don’t let them lie today."

NBC News last year reported:

*After the 2020 election, the Arizona state Senate authorized a controversial hand-count audit of two races. The audit took months and cost millions, and — by its leadership’s own account in text messages obtained by The Arizona Republic — failed to result in an accurate count.

Furthermore, Votebeat notes:

{The issue with hand-counting ballots is not just the law. Multiple studies, trials, and attempts to hand-count ballots across the country — including in Pinal and Mohave counties — have proven that hand-counting instead of using machines would cost more money, require hundreds to thousands more workers, lead to inaccurate results, and potentially delay or disrupt the certification of results. Yet the conversations about instituting hand counts continue in Arizona, especially as many of the county supervisors run for reelection this year.*}:

The Guardian reported in May that "Judd told Votebeat that she wasn’t a driving force for a hand count in the first place and voted for it because of what she was hearing from constituents."

The GOP county supervisor said, "You can ask anyone. I never pushed for it."

Votebeat notes that "supervisors ultimately rejected" the requests from Senator Rogers and Supervisor Cavanaugh. "So far, all Arizona counties plan to use machines to count ballots for the upcoming election. The supervisors in Pinal and Mohave, specifically, decided against a hand count after the counties’ lawyers told them they would potentially be violating state law and could be held personally liable if they went ahead with it."

*Votebeat Arizona's full report is available at this link.

===

June 28, 2024 rww

Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein @ Politico: Steve Bannon to report to prison Monday after Supreme Court declines to give him a reprieve

The decision means the influential right-wing podcaster will head to prison on July 1, with his release date just days before the November election.

Kate Riga @ Talking Points Memo: Supreme Court Executes Massive Power Grab From Executive Branch In New Ruling

The Supreme Court overruled a key pillar of federal agency authority Friday, appropriating a massive amount of executive branch power to itself.

Rachel Olding @ The Daily Beast: Supreme Court Upends Hundreds of Capitol Riot Cases

In a ruling that will have implications for one of Donald Trump’s criminal cases, the high court ruled that the feds must narrow their use of obstruction charges.

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling @ The New Republic: Trump Proudly Brags About Rollback of Abortion Rights in Biden Debate

Donald Trump proudly took responsibility for the overturning of Roe v. Wade during the first presidential debate on Thursday, rewriting history as though he had accommodated the majority of Americans in choosing to do so.

Carl Gibson @ AlterNet: CO GOP chair who said he wanted to ‘burn all the Pride flags’ loses congressional primary

While June is typically celebrated as LGBTQ+ Pride month, Colorado Republican Party chairman Dave Williams has spent the last several weeks bashing the LGBTQ+ community. And on Tuesday night, Centennial State Republicans handed him a major loss.

Angry White Men: Joel Webbon Prays With Holocaust Denier For Israel To ‘Repent’ Of Its ‘Perversion’

Yesterday, Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon appeared on the show of Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer Stew Peters. During the interview, Webbon claimed that no religion has a “more hostile view towards the person and work of Jesus Christ” than “talmudic Judaism.” Webbon also said a prayer for Israel to “repent” of its “perversion.”

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an 6 24

alternet-no lnx

Why this Trump ally is 'most important person charged' in Wisconsin scheme: legal expert

Maya BoddieJune 04, 2024

Attorney Kenneth Chesebro was one of three former President Donald Trump allies charged by the state of Wisconsin Tuesday in connection to the 2020 fake elector's scheme led by the ex-president's campaign in efforts to overturn the election.

The fake elector ploy architect was indicted alongside Wisconsin lawyer James Troupis and former Trump campaign official Michael Roman — each on one count of forgery. CBS News reports, "The three are set to make their initial appearances in Dane County Circuit Court on Sept. 19, court records show. The charge carries a sentence of up to six years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000."

MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin explained to host Katy Tur how the Wisconsin charges differ from 2020 election fake elector charges in Georgia and Arizona, and why Chesebro is the "most important person charged in this document today."

READ MORE:Kenneth Chesebro among Trump allies hit with new fake elector indictments in Wisconsin

Rubin explained, "There are five suits now with respect to these fake elector schemes. Ken Chesebro is charged only in two of them. He was charged in Georgia, where he pled guilty and, now today, he's charged in Wisconsin. I want to tell you what makes this different, because Ken Chesebro's involvement in Wisconsin is qualitatively different. First of all, Wisconsin is where it all began. This is the state for which he wrote the original memo about fake electors in early December of 2020."

The legal expert continued, "Secondly, he attended the meeting of fake electors in Wisconsin. He basically crashed it, even though he had no right to be there."

Tur asked, "Isn't the argument in Georgia that he never went to Georgia and he couldn't be involved in the conspiracy because he never stepped in the state?"

Rubin replied, "It may have been one of his arguments before he pled guilty, but now having pled guilty, whether or not he stepped into the state of Georgia is irrelevant."

READ MORE:Watch: Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro strikes last-minute plea deal with Georgia prosecutors

"But here, he was in Wisconsin?" Tur added.

Rubin emphasized, "But here he was in Wisconsin, definitely involved in the meeting itself, then with the Wisconsin documents don't reach Washington, DC, and aren't received by members of congress, the Wisconsin republican party has a part-time aide fly them out there, who is there to receive them from her? None other than Ken Chesebro. And finally, while he did conduct an interview with wisconsin investigators, they discovered that he lied to them about his Twitter account, something that Michigan investigators also discovered. So, unlike in other states where he is theoretically a cooperator and an unindicted co-conspirator, here, he's probably the most important person charged in this document today.

Watch the video below or at this link.

Why Kenneth Chesebro is 'most important person charged' in Wisconsin: legal expert

youtu.be

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A 'trove' of newly obtained docs detail Trump lawyers’ scheme to keep him in the White House: report ›

Kenneth Chesebro among Trump allies hit with new fake elector indictments in Wisconsin ›

'Awkward situation' for Ron Johnson as new docs 'shred his tortured explanations' of WI fake electors - Alternet.org ›

'History-making gaffe': Observers stunned after Trump trashes key swing-state city - Alternet.org ›

Controlling elections

The Texas GOP’s conventions have traditionally amplified the party’s most hardline activists and views. In 2022, for instance, delegates approved a platform that included calls for a referendum on Texas secession; resistance to the “Great Reset,” a conspiracy theory that claims global elites are using environmental and social policies to enslave the world’s population; proclamations that homosexuality is an “abnormal lifestyle choice”; and a declaration that President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected.

The 2024 convention went a step further.

It was the first Texas GOP convention set against the backdrop of a civil war that was sparked by the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton and inflamed by scandals over white supremacists and antisemites working for the party’s top funders:{, West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. This year’s convention was also sparsely attended compared to past years, which some longtime party members said helped the Dunn and Wilks faction further consolidate their power and elect their candidate, Abraham George, for party chair.}:

“What we're seeing right now is a shift toward more populism,” said Summer Wise, a former member of the party’s executive committee who has attended most conventions since 2008, including last week’s. “And the [party’s] infrastructure, leadership, decision-making process, power and influence are being controlled by a small group of people.”

(https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/_X93OkVqWjKf0MF0YqIovXarXM4=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/37d777dfbb61f282f112bd04a575cbbc/0523%20GOP%20Convention%20EH%20TT%2055.jpg)

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, wave to attendees during the Republican Party of Texas convention in San Antonio on Thursday, May 23, 2024. Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune

That shift was most evident, she said, in a series of changes to the party’s rules that further empower its leaders to punish dissent. The party approved changes that would dramatically increase the consequences of censures — which were used most recently to punish House Speaker Dade Phelan for his role in impeaching Paxton, and against U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales for voting for gun safety legislation.

Under the changes, any person who is censured by the party would be banned for two years from appearing on GOP primary ballots — including judges, who are elected in partisan races but expected to be politically neutral once on the bench. The party also voted to unilaterally close its primaries, bypassing the Legislature, in a move intended to keep Democrats from voting in Republican primaries.

“It’s pretty hypocritical,” Wise said of the changes, which legal experts and some party members expect will face legal challenges. “Republicans have always opposed activist judges, and this seems to be obligating judges to observe and prioritize party over law — which is straight-up judicial activism.”

The convention came amid a broader embrace of Christian nationalism on the right, which falsely claims that the United States’ founding was God-ordained and that its institutions and laws should reflect their conservative, Christian views. Experts have found strong correlations between Christian nationalist beliefs and opposition to migration, religious pluralism and the democratic process.

*[Proposed Texas GOP platform calls for the Bible in schools, electoral changes that would lock Democrats out of statewide office]

Wise said she has seen parts of the party similarly shift toward dogmatic political and religious views that have been used “to justify or rationalize corrupting the institution and stripping away its integrity, traditions, fundamental and established principles" — as if “‘God wants it, so we can rewrite the rules.’”

“Being Republican and being Christian have become the same thing,” she said. “If you're accused of being a (Republican in Name Only), you're essentially not as Christian as someone else. … God help you if you're Jewish.”

The “rabbit hole”

Bob Harvey is a proud member of the “Grumpy Old Men’s Club,” a group in Montgomery County that he said pushes back against Fox News and other outlets that he claims have been infiltrated by RINOs.

“People trust Fox News, and they need to get outside of that and find alternative news and like-minded people,” Harvey, 71, said on Friday, as he waited in a long line to meet Kyle Rittenhouse, who has ramped up his engagement in Texas politics since he was acquitted of homicide after fatally shooting two Black Lives Matter protesters.

Rather, Harvey’s group recommends places such as the Gateway Pundit, Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News or the Epoch Times, a far-right website that also had a booth at this year’s convention and is directly linked to the Falun Gong, a hardline anti-communist group.

Such outlets, Harvey said, are crucial to getting people “further down the rabbit hole,” after which they can begin to connect the dots between the deep-state that has spent years attacking former President Donald Trump, and the agenda of the left to indoctrinate kids through the Boy Scouts of America, public schools and the Democratic Party.

Harvey’s views were widely-held by his fellow delegates, many of whom were certain that broader transgender acceptance, Critical Race Theory or “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives were parts of a sinister plot to destroy the country and take over its churches.

The culprits behind the ploy differed — Democrats, socialists or “globalists,” to name a few. But their nefarious end goals loomed over the convention. Fearing a transgender takeover of the Republican Party of Texas, delegates pushed to explicitly stipulate that the party’s chair and vice chair must be “biological” men or women.

At events to recruit pastors and congregations to ramp up their political activism, elected leaders argued that churches were the only thing standing between evil and children. And the party’s proposed platform included planks that claim gender-transition care is child abuse, or urge new legislation in Texas that's "even more comprehensive" than Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, which prohibits the teaching of sexual orientation or gender identity in public schools.

![](https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/ciJpskJjFVkA32MexM-6q3bGI6M=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/8fc7586ac950819feeeabb4760560fb8/0523%20GOP%20Convention%20EH%20TT%2072.jpg)

Kyle Rittenhouse shakes hands with conventioneers at a meet and greet during the Texas GOP convention on Thursday in San Antonio. Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune

“Our next generation is being co-opted and indoctrinated where they should have been educated,” Rep. Nate Schatzline, R-Fort Worth, said at a Friday luncheon for pastors and churches. “We are in a spiritual battle. This isn't a political one.”

For at least a half-century, conservative Christian movements have been fueled by notions of a shadowy and coordinated conspiracy to destroy America, said Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University who focuses on movements to put the Bible in public schools.

“It's like the boogeyman that won't go away, that gets summoned whenever a justification is needed for these types of agendas,” he said. “They say that somebody is threatening quintessential American freedoms, and that these threats are posed by some sort of global conspiracy — rather than just recognizing that we're a pluralistic democracy.”

In the 1950s, such claims were the driving force behind the emergence of groups such as the John Birch Society, a hardline anti-communist group whose early members included the fathers of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Trump. After decades of dwindling influence, the society has seen a revival since Trump's 2016 election. And in the exhibit hall last week, so-called Birchers passed out literature and pamphlets that detailed the New World Order's secret plans for "world domination."

Steve Oglesby, field director for the Birch Society's North Texas chapter, said interest and membership in the group has been on the rise in recent years — particularly, as COVID-19 lockdowns and international climate change initiatives have spurred right-wing fears of an international cabal working against the United States.

"COVID really helped," he said, adding that the pandemic proved the existence of a global elite that has merely shifted its tactics since the 1950s. “It’s not just communism — it’s the people pulling the strings.”

Throughout the week, prominent Republicans invoked similar claims of a coordinated conspiracy against the United States. On Friday, Patrick argued that a decadeslong decline in American religion was part of a broader, “Marxist socialist left” agenda to “create chaos,” including through migration — despite studies showing that migrants are overwhelmingly Christian. Attorney General Ken Paxton echoed those claims in his own speech minutes later, saying migration was part of a plan to "steal another election."

“The Biden Administration wants the illegals here to vote,” he said.

![](https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/XrT-lkapyY0opApzI2UV_yF-8JE=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/f65ff0a8564b0acdb321e69bd3b233c7/0523%20GOP%20Convention%20EH%20TT%2011.jpg)

Ella Maulding and Konner Earnest watch as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick speaks during the Republican Party of Texas convention in San Antonio on Thursday, the first day of the gathering. Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune

As Paxton continued, Ella Maulding and Konner Earnest held hands and nodded their approval from the convention hall’s front row. Last year, the two were spotted outside of a Tarrant County office building where Nick Fuentes, a prominent white nationalist and Adolf Hitler fan, was hosted for nearly seven hours by Jonathan Stickland, then the leader of Dunn and Wilks' most powerful political action committee. They eventually lost their jobs after The Texas Tribune reported on their ties to Fuentes or white nationalist groups.

Maulding has been particularly vocal about her support for Great Replacement Theory, a conspiracy theory that claims there is an intentional, often Jewish-driven, effort to replace white people through migration, LGBTQ+ acceptance or interracial marriage. Once a fringe, white nationalist worldview, experts say that Great Replacement Theory has been increasingly mainstreamed as Republican leaders, including some who spoke last week, continue to claim that migration is part of a coordinated effort to aid Democrats. The theory has also been cited by numerous mass shooters, including the gunman who murdered 22 Hispanic people at an El Paso WalMart in 2019.

Five hours after Paxton and Patrick spoke, Maulding took to social media, posting a cartoon of a rabbi with the following text: “I make porn using your children and then make money distributing it under the banner of women’s rights while flooding your nation with demented lunatics who then rape your children.”

David Barton

Kason Huddleston has spent the last few years helping elect Christians and push back against what he believes is indoctrination of children in Rowlett, near Dallas. Far too often, he said, churches and pastors have become complacent, or have been scared away from political engagement by federal rules that prohibit churches from overt political activity.

Through trainings from groups like Christians Engaged, which advocates for church political activity and had a booth at this year’s convention, he said he has been able show more local Christians that they can be “a part of the solution” to intractable societal ills such as fatherlessness, crime or teen drug use. And while he thinks that some of his peers’ existential rhetoric can be overwrought, he agreed that there is an ongoing effort to “tear down the family unit” and shroud America’s true, Christian roots.

“If you look at our government and our laws, all of it goes back to a Judeo-Christian basis,” he said. “Most people don’t know our true history because it’s slowly just been removed.”

He then asked: “Have you ever read David Barton?”

Since the late 1980s, Barton has barnstormed the state and country claiming that church-state separation is a “myth” meant to shroud America’s true founding as a Christian nation. Barton, a self-styled “amateur historian” who served as Texas GOP vice chair from 1997 to 2006, has been thoroughly debunked by an array of historians and scholars — many of them also conservative Christians.

![](https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/Pr4f05aMyQrJ6_1ubGg9az8vwjQ=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/7acf1f2412dd7df9c6f492e50a5f07ee/BD%20INC%20Barton%20David%20748%202012)

David Barton, left, of WallBuilders, at a Texas Eagle Forum reception at the Republican Party of Texas convention in Fort Worth on June 7, 2012. Credit: Bob Daemmrich for The Texas Tribune

Despite that, Barton’s views have become widespread among Republicans, including Patrick, Texas Supreme Court Justice John Devine and U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson. And his influence over the party was clear at last week’s convention, where his group, WallBuilders, maintained a booth and delegates frequently cited him.

This year’s platform, the votes for which are expected to be released later this week, included planks that urged lawmakers and the State Board of Education to “require instruction on the Bible, servant leadership and Christian self-governance,” and supports the use of religious chaplains in schools — which was made legal under a law passed by the state Legislature last year.

Warren Throckmorton, a former Grove City College professor and prominent conservative, Christian critic of Barton, told the Tribune that the platform emblematized Barton’s growing influence, and his movement’s conflicting calls to preserve “religious liberty” while attempting to elevate their faith over others. The platform, he noted, simultaneously demands that students’ religious rights be protected, and for schools to be forced to teach the Bible.

“What about the other students who aren’t Christians and who don't believe in the Bible?” he said. “This is not religious liberty — it’s Christian dominance.”

As Zach Maxwell watched his fellow Republicans debate and vote last week, he said he was struck by the frequency and intensity with which Christianity was invoked. Maxwell previously served as chief of staff for former Rep. Mike Lang, then the leader of the ultraconservative Texas House Freedom Caucus, and he later worked for Empower Texans, a political group that was funded primarily by Dunn and Wilks.

He eventually became disillusioned with the party’s right wing, which he said has increasingly been driven by purity tests and opposition to religious or political diversity. This year’s convention, he said, was the culmination of those trends.

“God was not only used as a tool at this convention, but if you didn’t mention God in some way, fake or genuine, I did feel it was seen as distasteful,” he said. “There is a growing group of people who want to turn this nation into a straight-up theocracy. I believe they are doing it on the backs of people who are easily manipulated.”

Nancy Leclerc poses for a photo in front of a GOP elephant statue during the Texas GOP convention in San Antonio on Thursday, May 23, 2024. Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/28/texas-gop-convention-elections-religion-delegates-platf

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5 24 some neglect?

Colorado Republican Party's chairman is experiencing stiff backlash from candidates running for office after suggesting they should be enthusiastic backers of former President Donald Trump.

According to the Colorado Sun, GOP candidates running in the Centennial State's June primary were sent a three-page questionnaire to determine whether they would receive the endorsement of the party ahead of the primary — a major break from past tradition. One of the criteria for an official endorsement is if a candidate supports "President Trump’s populist, America-first agenda." Colorado GOP chairman Dave Williams was blasted by candidates for appearing to put his finger on the scale over candidates with more raw voter support.

"Grassroots conservatives spoke at the [Congressional district] Republican assembly," said Colorado Board of Education member Stephen Varela, who is running for the GOP nomination in the state's 3rd Congressional district. "I won top line. Why would a handful of party bosses disrespect the grassroots and consider endorsing someone else?"

County-level Republican leaders are also pushing back against Williams' purity testing of candidates. La Plata County GOP chairman Dave Peters said he "strongly advise[s] him to remain neutral on all candidates," though he added he was "generally supportive" of Williams' leadership.

Candidates who went door to door to gather petition signatures to appear on the GOP primary ballot similarly criticized state party leadership for abandoning neutrality. Republican state senator Larry Liston, who represents the GOP stronghold of Colorado Springs, gathered roughly 1,300 petition signatures to qualify for the ballot in a door-to-door canvassing campaign. He told the Sun that level of voter engagement sets him apart from his two primary opponents who have only engaged with the roughly 100 voters that attended the 10th senate district GOP assembly.

“It’s only divisive and shouldn’t be done,” Liston said of the 2024 primary endorsement plan. He added that Williams and other Republican leaders “hate the petition process, because they don’t have control over who makes the ballot.

"It’s a lot more work to petition on than to go to a county assembly," Liston said.

One of the Centennial State GOP's most notable endorsements in the 2024 cycle is of Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), who is running for reelection to represent an entirely new district. The Colorado Republican Party's endorsement may very well give her the edge she needs in the crowded five-person primary, with all of her other opponents gathering petition signatures to win ballot access.

"The COGOP and Chair Williams are completely out of line,” stated Colorado state representative Richard Holtorf, who is running against Boebert. “Voters want to vote, not be told for whom to vote by the state party."

Colorado's Republican primary will take place on June 25.

*Click here to read the Colorado Sun's report.

an 4 24

Wyoming Republican Party was having a hard time having its precinct committeemen and women actually show up for meetings — but its new solution is likely to be thrown out in court.

Local Wyoming news site WyoFile reported recently on bylaws changes approved at a recent Wyoming GOP meeting, in which an elected precinct person can be stripped of their position for not showing up at three meetings over a one-year period. The party approved the change after a wave of no-shows prevented the party from accomplishing basic governance tasks, and Park County GOP State Committeeman Vince Vanata argued the new rule was necessary after multiple precinct people failed to show up to even one meeting over a two-year term.

He also maintained that the bylaws change was not about "booting or kicking out people from the party," and that Republicans were "just trying to put a mechanism in place so that we can be an effective organization."

But attorney Colin Simpson told WyoFile that the rule change might not survive challenges in the courts, given one major issue.

Oklahoma woman facing murder and kidnapping charges chaired rural county’s GOP - Alternet.org

rww 1 24

Arizona Republican Party elected Gina Swoboda its new chair on Saturday. Swoboda, the director of election day operations for former President Donald Trump in 2020, replaces Jeff DeWit, who resigned last week after being targeted by MAGA Senate candidate Kari Lake.

Swoboda’s bid for state party chair was promoted by Lake and endorsed by Trump, Nick Fuentes ally state Sen. Wendy Rogers, and Arizona-based far-right activist Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA. Lake, who has never accepted her loss in the 2022 governor’s race, called Swoboda’s selection a “massive victory” for her campaign and for Trump’s, the Associated Press reported.

Swoboda runs VoteRef.com, which is part of a network of MAGA movement projects to enable challenges to voters’ eligibility, which American Oversight reported in December “could be used not just to compromise individual privacy, but also to intimidate voters, cause mass cancellations of voting registrations, and inundate local elected officials with burdensome, time-consuming, and inaccurate challenges.” Swoboda’s efforts have been funded by far-right megadonor Richard Uihlein.

Swoboda has collaborated with Cleta Mitchell, a former Trump attorney who took part in the notorious call on which Trump tried to bully Georgia’s secretary of state into “finding” him enough votes to overturn the election; Mitchell now runs a coalition of right-wing groups that are working to enable voter suppression in the name of “election integrity.”

A Pro Publica investigation of Swoboda’s Voter Reference Foundation in 2022 reported:

ProPublica contacted election officials in a dozen of the states where VoteRef has examined voter rolls, and in every case the officials said that the methodology used to identify the discrepancies was flawed, the data incomplete or the math wrong. The officials, a mix of Democrats and Republicans, were in Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin…Election experts say the type of work being done by VoteRef risks leading to further misinformation or being weaponized by people trying to undermine the legitimacy of the past election or give the sense that voter fraud is a more encompassing problem than it’s proven to be. Or it could be used to harass or intimidate valid voters under the guise of challenging their legitimacy.

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an 1 24

earlier this week, Arizona GOP Chairman Jeff DeWit abruptly resigned after failed gubernatorial candidate and 2024 US Senate hopeful Kari Lake threatened to "leak additional recordings of their private conversations."

In a statement released via X/Twitter on Wednesday, January 24, Dewit commented on the single recording Lake had already released, in which the Republican chair can be heard telling Lake "that he spoke with associates 'back East' who asked about 'any companies out there or something that could just put [Lake] on the payroll to keep her out [of the 2024 US Senate race],' and that there were 'very powerful people' who wanted her to stay on the sidelines."

On Saturday, according to the Daily Beast, "Lake nominated Gina Swoboda, another right-winger who was endorsed by Donald Trump, on Saturday at a GOP meeting in north Phoenix, where she was reportedly met with boos and jeers as she took the stage."

Swoboda won the title by a "landslide," The Daily Beast reports, even as someone who "spread false claims about the integrity of the election system" as the "Trump campaign’s state Election Day director in 2020."

In his statement, Dewit emphasized, "Lake has a massive megaphone that I cannot compete with. I question how effective a United States Senator can be when they cannot be trusted to engage in private and confidential conversations."

*The Daily Beast's full report is available at this link (subscription required).

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OFFERED HER A JOB IF WD QUIT SENATE RACE? 'Resigning as Lake requested': AZ GOP chair quits amid threat of more leaks from Kari Lake - Alternet.org

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an 1 24 deep debt //

More questions than answers persist as to who is running the Michigan GOP - Alternet.org

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the Michigan Republican Party has convened a special meeting for this Saturday where the fate of chairwoman Kristina Karamo will be decided.

According to the Detroit Free Press, Republicans in the Mitten State are so determined to remove Karamo that they're also considering a change to their own bylaws that lowers the threshold for removing a chairperson from a 75% vote of the state committee to just a two-thirds vote. Karamo — a former community college professor and 2020 election denier who ran a failed campaign for secretary of state in 2022 — has not yet served even just one year as head of the Michigan GOP.

"You were chosen as chairwoman because the majority of the Republican delegates strongly respected your commitment to a new era of transparency, honesty and meaningful involvement on the part of the State Committee," read letter co-signed by eight of the Michigan GOP's 13 district chairs. "Regrettably, these policies no longer seem to be a priority in your administration and the Party’s financial stability is quickly deteriorating."

The New York Times reported last week that under Karamo's leadership, the party has been driven into more than $620,000 of debt heading into the 2024 general election in a state whose electoral votes has played a deciding role in the last two consecutive presidential elections. Karamo has been criticized for her "autocratic" leadership style and lack of transparency, and in November, a Comerica Bank attorney sent the state party a default notice for not paying interest on a loan in excess of $500,000.

"The Michigan Republican Party is on the verge of imploding. I have more money in my campaign account than the state party has in its,” State Representative Mark Tisdel said. “Sooner or later, the creditors are going to come calling.”

At the party's 2023 Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference — which has in the past attracted major GOP power players like former Vice President Mike Pence — the main speakers were far more lackluster. Keynote speaker Jim Caviezel — a QAnon conspiracy theorist who played Jesus in Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ — was paid a six-figure sum for a short speech. And aside from entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, none of the current Republican candidates for president attended the conference. British rapper and far-right social media personality Zuby was also a headlining speaker.

Karamo has called the attempt to oust her illegal, telling the Free Press in a statement that the organizers of the Saturday meeting "have zero legal authority to conduct business regarding the Michigan Republican Party or its State Committee." there is not yet any consensus on who would replace Karamo if she is removed from her position.

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houston chron no lnx

Texas Politics

Texas Republicans say GOP chairman has 'weaponized' the party as internal strife continues

:{By Cayla Harris, Austin BureauUpdated Nov 14, 2023

Matt Rinaldi, chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, during the third and final day of this year’s Republican Party of Texas Convention Saturday, June 18, 2022, held at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, TX.

Texas GOP Chairman Matt Rinaldi was in and out of the building in 45 minutes.

Rinaldi has said he didn’t know his close friend and colleague, Jonathan Stickland, was meeting in the same office complex on Oct. 6 with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who has praised Adolf Hitler. He has denounced Fuentes in no uncertain terms.

But in the month since, Rinaldi has not addressed his relationship with Stickland, then the president of the deep-pocketed Defend Texas Liberty PAC that is among the state party’s top donors. Nor has he responded to nearly half of the party’s 64-person executive board who have signed a letter calling on the party to cut ties with Stickland and the PAC.

READ MORE: Texas GOP fractures as some criticize leaders for slow response to denounce antisemitism

The fallout from the meeting has worsened tensions both within the Texas GOP and between Rinaldi and other prominent Texas Republicans. For many, it has underscored an ongoing shift in the state party, which was once primarily focused on fundraising and helping support local Republican clubs and candidates.

Over the past three years, and especially since Rinaldi took over in 2021, the organization has tried instead to assert itself as a driving force behind right-wing policy positions, eager to challenge elected Republicans who they believe are not conservative enough. Rinaldi has been particularly vocal after the Texas House overwhelmingly voted in May to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton on corruption charges, setting off months of infighting.

“We are no longer a political institution,” said Morgan Graham, a member of the state party’s executive committee who represents the Rio Grande Valley. “We are, if anything, something that has been subjected to a hostile takeover and weaponized.”

Some hard-right Republicans argue that Rinaldi, who previously served in the Texas House, is only better aligning the party with the grassroots and advocating for conservative policy. Others — led by House Speaker Dade Phelan — say Rinaldi is neglecting the party’s responsibilities and turning Republicans against each other, especially ahead of a contentious primary season that will pit Rinaldi’s favored right-wing candidates against incumbent House Republicans.

Rinaldi, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has accused Phelan of aligning with Democrats by continuing a long-standing tradition of appointing some of them to lead committees and failing to pass a school voucher plan that would allocate state money to send children to private schools. That proposal, a priority for Gov. Greg Abbott that is still under consideration in the lower chamber, has bipartisan opposition, and some of the biggest adversaries are rural Republicans.

RELATED: All eyes on House Speaker Dade Phelan as school voucher session nears

“Speaker Dade Phelan ignited a civil war in the Republican Party when he appointed Democrats to top House leadership positions and then joined with them to stage a sham impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton,” Rinaldi said. “The Republican Party has, as it should, taken the side of the Republicans in this dispute by defending its statewide officeholders against political persecution by Democrats.”

Rinaldi did not respond to the accusations that he has neglected the party’s core functions of fundraising and supporting Republican candidates. But Rinaldi has said online that the party spent millions to elect Republicans in 2022, though much of that money came from national GOP organizations.

Phelan and his allies have shot back at Rinaldi in recent weeks. In an interview, Phelan said he has only spoken to Rinaldi once since he was elected — when they ran into each other at an event.

“That’s a problem, and that’s not on me,” Phelan said in an interview. “That’s on the (party). They don't have any money. When they need money, they go to a couple benefactors to keep the lights on over there. But as far as voter registration and reaching out to new voters as they move to Texas, because we’ve grown so fast — as far as grassroots efforts, they do nothing.”

'Never a serious legislator'

Phelan and Rinaldi were elected to the Texas House in the same year — but where Phelan established himself as an ally of House leadership, eventually teeing up his run for speaker, Rinaldi joined the hardline Texas Freedom Caucus. Rinaldi’s most famous, or infamous, moment on the House floor was when he nearly got into a physical fight with then-state Rep. Poncho Nevárez after calling federal immigration officials on protestors during a heated debate over a controversial immigration bill.

Rinaldi, an attorney by trade, lost his seat during a Democratic wave in 2018. Originally hailing from Connecticut, the chairman came to the Dallas area in 2001 after earning his law degree from Boston University.

Phelan, who has been especially critical of Rinaldi and the party after the Fuentes meeting, said the chairman was “never a serious legislator,” and over the past three years, the Texas GOP “has gone completely off the cliff.”

“You tell me who your friends are, and I'll tell you who you are,” the Beaumont Republican said of Rinaldi’s relationship with Stickland and the PAC. “Meeting with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers … if you're meeting with these individuals and strategizing with them, then you are them.”

He said the party is at an “inflection point.”

When journalists reached out to executive committee members after the Fuentes meeting, which was first reported by the Texas Tribune on Oct. 8, Rinaldi’s administration removed their contact information from the party website.

“There's no transparency anymore,” said Jan Duncan, a member of the executive committee who represents the Austin area. “Originally, what the SREC is supposed to do — our job is supposed to be to represent our constituents and to get Republicans elected. And it has now become very much like a little mini legislature, which is not good and not appropriate.”

At least three executive committee members say Rinaldi has also been more combative than past chairs and has threatened them with challengers if they do not vote in line with his priorities during quarterly meetings. Rinaldi did not address these allegations in his statement.

The party has also increasingly embraced censures, which under a 2020 rule change now allow the state GOP to spend money against censured candidates in primaries.

The executive committee, which includes Rinaldi, censured U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales in March for his bipartisan votes on guns and same-sex marriage, and the party is poised to censure a top House Republican who led the impeachment effort. If school vouchers don’t pass, Phelan is likely next.

“It’s ‘our way or the highway’ mentality, which will be very destructive to the Republican Party in the years to come,” said Chad Wilbanks, who served as executive director of the party from 2003 to 2004 and ran an unsuccessful bid against Rinaldi for chairman in 2021.

Phelan said Rinaldi and a handful of his allies want to sow chaos in the Texas Legislature similar to the way a few Republicans in D.C. upended the U.S. House last month by ousting Kevin McCarthy from the speakership, leaving the chamber without a leader for three weeks.

“They want to empower a small group of people to have that same type of influence in Austin,” Phelan said.

Dozens of Republican House members have sided with the speaker, and some of the chamber’s most conservative members also voted for or led the effort to remove Paxton from office.

But Rinaldi said “the fact that a few Republicans like Dade Phelan have joined the Democrat team does not change the party’s position or render us neutral” — and there are many Republicans who agree with him, too.

“The role of our party is to be a tool for the grassroots — average Texas families to organize, identify protections and liberties they see as worthy of being enshrined in Texas policies, then provide this in writing (the platform) as a helpful brightline to those who step forward to SERVE our great Republic,” Rachel Horton, a member of the executive committee who represents parts of North Texas, posted on social media.

Shifting priorities

John Beckmeyer, who served as executive director of the party under Rinaldi from July 2021 to August of this year, said the party has been central to passing conservative priorities, including a sweeping elections bill two years ago.

“I absolutely believe that the party has a larger role than to just get Republicans elected,” he said.

The party approved a 40-page platform at last year’s convention that includes bread-and-butter GOP issues, like cutting government spending, reducing business regulations and eliminating unfunded mandates. It also declares homosexuality as an “abnormal lifestyle choice,” opposes “all efforts to validate transgender identity,” supports the placement of the Ten Commandments in public schools and calls for the elimination of hate crime laws.

More than a dozen Republicans interviewed for this story described different points at which they believe the party started to turn more into an advocacy group. For some, it was the censure of former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus in 2018. For others, it was former Chairman Allen West’s decision to protest in front of the governor’s mansion in 2020.

West, who did not respond to a request for comment, left the chairmanship in 2021 to launch an unsuccessful primary challenge against Abbott. The party’s executive committee then elected Rinaldi, who promised to work “with, and not for” elected Republicans. He was re-elected to a full term last year at the state party’s convention, where U.S. Sen. John Cornyn was booed on stage for his work on bipartisan gun reforms after a shooting at a Uvalde elementary school.

That convention — where U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw was also aggressively confronted by a far-right YouTube personality — was another turning point for some party observers. No matter when it started, though, they agree that Rinaldi has embraced a more hostile leadership style that has pitted the state party against many of its elected representatives, especially this year.

“I kind of miss the days when party chairs weren’t always causing drama,” Rolando Garcia, another member of the party’s executive committee who represents the Houston area, said after a recent social media battle between Rinaldi and members of Phelan’s leadership team.

Brendan Steinhauser, an Austin-based GOP consultant, said Rinaldi has taken the party to “the next level, which is using the party apparatus to push for an agenda and to call out Republicans by name.”

Because the 2021 redistricting cycle eliminated most competitive races across Texas, there’s more room for the party to get involved in primaries and policy debates, Steinhauser said.

“The right is making the argument that you can’t deny the grassroots,” he said. “You have to empower them. They're the ones that go door to door, knock on doors, turn out voters. They're the ones that get those voters, those Republicans to show up in the generals. … I think they have a really good argument.”

By Cayla Harris

Cayla Harris covers Texas politics and government for the San Antonio Express-News and Houston Chronicle. She can be reached at cayla.harris@hearst.com.

She also serves as training director of the Hearst Fellowship Program, a two-year initiative allowing early-career journalists to gain experience at Hearst newspapers across the country.

She previously covered New York state government for the Albany Times Union. She grew up in New Jersey and is a 2019 graduate of the George Washington University, where she studied journalism and Spanish.

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Florida GOP chair wants huge payout to quit after alleged rape and three-way sex scandal: report - Alternet.org

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rape threesome

The crashing and burning of Moms for Liberty co-founder, the Florida GOP and Ron DeSantis - Alternet.org

moms-for-liberty-silent-on-having-registered-sex-offender-in-leadership

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At the Moms for Liberty national summit in Philadelphia this summer, attendees reveled in attention from right-wing leaders, with multiple Republican presidential hopefuls and far-right activists telling them they were the secret to saving America from Marxists, teachers unions, the LGBTQ equality movement, and “the left” in general. Just a few months later, voters across the country said “not so fast,” rejecting most of Moms for Liberty’s endorsed school board candidates.

Moms for Liberty started in Florida as a protest against COVID-19 pandemic school closings and mask and vaccine requirements. The group’s leaders parlayed their Republican connections and fawning coverage from right-wing media into partnerships with some of the most powerful parts of the right-wing political infrastructure that hoped “parental rights” would be a winning political message this year and next. They embraced an authoritarian right-wing agenda, promoting book bans, attacks on teaching about race and sexuality, and joined a nationwide project by religious-right and right-wing groups to take over local school boards and get the power to impose their ideological agenda on teachers and students.

While Moms for Liberty propaganda says it is about uniting parents to save America, the impact of the group’s censorship and school board campaigns has disrupted school systems and divided communities. The shock-and-awe approach to governing displayed after Moms for Liberty candidates take over school boards—firing successful and popular superintendents, censoring books and curricula, reversing policies supporting LGBTQ students—have created turmoil.

That destructive turmoil has sparked energetic resistance from students, parents and educators who have organized to defend public schools and the freedom to learn – including People For the American Way’s Grandparents for Truth organizing project, which was launched during this summer’s Moms for Liberty summit.

In its report on Election Day defeats for Moms for Liberty candidates, Forbes magazine examined how this dynamic played out in Bucks County, Pennsylvania:

...

Arizona Republicans convene a COVID hearing chock full of misinformation — again - Alternet.org

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an 11 23

lINCOLN — The first Nebraska Republican Party fundraiser of 2024 features former television reporter, U.S. Senate candidate and election denier Kari Lake of Arizona. She visits Omaha on Jan. 5, the eve of the third anniversary of the storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Lake, a Republican who lost her 2022 gubernatorial election to Democrat Katie Hobbs in Arizona, is running a 2024 race against Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in December. Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., is running as well.

Like a man she calls her political muse, former President Donald Trump, Lake denies losing her race. Lake rose to national prominence by embracing Trump’s rejection of his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden. She sharply criticized Republicans who acknowledged his defeat.

She is visiting Nebraska during an Iowa campaign trip for Trump. Her event is the latest push to excite the base by new leadership of the Nebraska GOP, which in July 2022 ousted a team loyal to then-Gov. Pete Ricketts. The new team includes similarly Trump-focused Republicans.

Party spokeswoman Dawn Liphardt said Nebraska conservatives are interested in Republicans retaking the Senate and are interested in Arizona’s race. She called Lake “a strong speaker” who will “get Republicans excited” about the 2024 elections locally, which include two Senate races.

Lake is well-liked among some conservatives for aggressively critiquing members of the press and for her loyalty to Trump and his populist approach to politics. Like him, she emphasizes border security.

The Nebraska GOP announced the event by email, selling $50 general admission tickets, $25 tickets for booster club members, $600 for a book signing with Lake, and a $10,000-per-person VIP event before the candidate speaks at 7 p.m. at CHI Center Omaha.

‘Doubling down’

Nebraska Republican Party Chairman Eric Underwood speaks as former GOP gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster and former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway listen in August 2023 in Norfolk, Neb. (Aaron Sanderford/Nebraska Examiner)

Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Kleeb said the Lake fundraiser shows the Nebraska GOP “doubling down with their election denying and reproductive rights denying strategy.”

That, Kleeb said, risks turning off voters and flipping more seats the Democrats’ way.

GOP-led Nebraska is no swing state. Trump won the state easily in 2020, beating Biden in two of the state’s three congressional districts. But Trump lost an Electoral College vote to Biden in the Omaha-based 2nd Congressional District.

Nebraska, like Maine, awards a single electoral vote to the presidential popular vote winners in each of the state’s three congressional districts. The Nebraska Legislature has been discussing moving back to winner-take-all elections.

Omaha-area state senators and voters have pushed back against such proposals, arguing that the state benefits economically from the spending by both presidential campaigns competing for the electoral vote that might prove vital in a close race.

Nebraska Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Cate Folsom for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com. Follow Nebraska Examiner on Facebook and Twitter.

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Trump’s 'carnivorous pack of followers' will 'eat their own' in 2024: Arizona columnist - Alternet.org

an ah 1023

arizona's political landscape is radically different from what it was 30 or 40 years ago. The Arizona of the past was a deep red state that was synonymous with the GOP conservatism of Sen. Barry Goldwater and his successor, Sen. John McCain.

In 2023, Arizona is a swing state with a Democratic governor (Katie Hobbs), a Democratic U.S. senator (Mark Kelly), an independent U.S. senator who used to be a Democrat (Kyrsten Sinema), and a Democratic attorney general (Kris Mayes). The Arizona GOP, however, has taken a far-right ultra-MAGA turn and moved away from the traditional Goldwater/McCain conservatism of yesterday.

In a biting opinion column published on October 30, the Arizona Republic's E.J. Montini argues that Donald Trump's "carnivorous pack of howling, growling, backbiting followers" are getting ready to "cannibalize" each another in 2024.

"It shouldn't surprise anyone that MAGA sycophants like Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar and failed governor candidate and current U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake, who supported one another in previous elections, are at loggerheads when it comes to who should replace retiring Rep. Debbie Lesko in Arizona's heavily Republican Congressional District 8," Montini explains. "Gosar is backing failed Republican U.S. Senate candidate Blake Master…. Lake, on the other hand, is backing failed Arizona attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh."

Montini argues that Lake's endorsement of Hamadeh "doesn't come because she particularly likes Hamadeh, but because she did not like the fact that Masters thought of challenging her for the Senate nomination."

"The competition must seem odd to casual observers," Montini writes. "Masters and Hamadeh are of the same stripe, the same breed. Essentially, they're the same person. They share a lack of qualifications, a fealty to Trump and a history of losing. But this is a different kind of pack. They eat their own."

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4138124-trumps-fake-electors-7-states-he-lost/

no lnx

What’s happening with Trump’s ‘fake electors’ in 7 states he lost

BY NICK ROBERTSON - 08/04/23

Former President Trump was arraigned Thursday on four charges alleging that he attempted to orchestrate a scheme of fraudulent electoral college votes to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

In seven states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — so-called “fake electors” signed paperwork attempting to cast electoral college ballots for Trump instead of their states’ actual winner, President Biden.

The groups hoped that former Vice President Pence would count the fake electors’ certifications instead of the legitimate ones when the electoral college vote was certified on Jan. 6, 2021, changing the result of the election, the indictment alleged. None were successful.

Here’s what each state is, and isn’t, doing to investigate and prosecute them.

Arizona

A group of 22 Arizona Republicans, including the Republican Party chair and multiple state legislature members, signed papers intending to cast false electoral college votes in December 2020. That paperwork is now the focus of both a federal and state investigation.

State Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) ratcheted up her investigation into the group in July, requesting records from involved figures. The investigation is in its early stages.

Figures surrounding the case also received federal subpoenas for information and communication, according to local media.

Georgia

On the day that Georgia certified its electoral results in favor of Biden, 16 Republicans — led by the state’s Republican Party chair — allegedly met in a secret meeting in the state capitol to discuss plans to send an alternate slate of votes to Washington. The group also signed paperwork making their plans official.

The scheme is central to prosecutor Fani Willis’ (D) state probe into attempts to overturn the 2020 election, which may result in an additional indictment for Trump.

At least eight of the fake electors have signed immunity deals with Willis’ office, offering to cooperate in exchange for not being prosecuted.

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Radicals Took Over the Michigan GOP. Now They Can't Stop Losing ... ›

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an 8 23

Far-right extremists keep making the Michigan GOP lose key elections: report

Alex Henderson August 23, 2023

During the 2022 midterms races, many right-wing media pundits predicted that Democrats would get clobbered in Michigan. It didn't happen. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was reelected, defeating far-right Republican challenger Tudor Dixon by 11 percent.

Moreover, Democrats won majorities in both houses of the Michigan State Legislature. Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was reelected by 14 percent, and incumbent Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel enjoyed an 8 percent victory over MAGA Republican challenger Matthew DePerno.

Those wins followed President Joe Biden's win in Michigan in 2020.

Benson was up against Kristina Karamo, a far-right MAGA conspiracy theorist and Christian nationalist who falsely claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump in her state. Karamo lost badly, but instead of distancing themselves from her, Republicans made her chair of the Michigan GOP.

Many Never Trump conservatives have argued that in order to regain the ground they have been losing in Michigan, Republicans should be nominating sensible moderate conservatives like former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). But in an article published in late August, Mother Jones' Noah Lanard warns that the Michigan GOP has been taken over by extremists — and keeps losing key races as a result.

"Just seven years ago," Lanard explains, "Donald Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Michigan since George H.W. Bush. But as the state GOP moved further and further to the right, Democrats capitalized on the extremism to string together major victories in 2018, 2020 and 2022, when they took full control of the state government for the first time in four decades. In the wake of this rout, the GOP has doubled down."

Lanard continues, "Karamo's ascension to chair is what a Republican Party freed from the constraints imposed by consultants and donors looks like in the Trump era. It is messy, short on cash, and arguably more democratic than ever before. While Karamo and her supporters fixate on 'election integrity' and culture war issues like transgender rights, convinced that it will lead to future victories, ousted moderates look on with schadenfreude. This battleground state fissure is a gift to President Joe Biden's reelection campaign and Democrats' efforts to hold an open Senate seat that is essential to maintaining control of the chamber."

READ MORE: Ethics defenders cheer as Trump 'Big Lie' allies charged in Michigan

Lanard points to an early June fundraising dinner as a prime example of the Michigan GOP's extremist direction.

Karamo, a featured speaker, ranted, "The Democrat Party is the party of Satan…. They're evil. They're definitely a Lucifer. But they have their standards, and they stick to 'em."

Karamo, according to Lanard, received "the only standing ovation of the night."

READ MORE: New leak paints 'alarming financial picture' of Michigan GOP: report

Mother Jones' full report is available at this link.

'He kicked me right in my crotch': Bodycam video shows aftermath of brawl at Michigan GOP meeting

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timeline

TRUMP'S LAWYER VISITS GEORGIA

DECEMBER 3, 2020 — DECEMBER 10, 2020

In the days after the 2020 general election, Trump’s legal team includingRudy Giuliani visited Georgia’s state Capitol in an attempt to persuade lawmakers that they should illegally reverse Biden’s win. Giuliani’s team showed a video they claimed was evidence of ballot-counting improprieties after polls closed. Giuliani alleged then Fulton County elections workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea Moss, handled a suitcase of fraudulent or stolen ballots that tilted the election for Biden

STATE GOP 'ELECTORS'FALSELY CERTIFY ELECTION

DECEMBER 14, 2020

Sixteen Georgia Republican electors, including then-state Sen. Burt Jones, who is now lieutenant governor, and state Republican Party Chairman David Shafer, signed false election certificates that were sent to the vice president and other government officials to be counted by Congress. The bogus Republican electors met at the state Capitol on the same day as legitimate state Democratic electors selected Biden as the winner of the 2020 election.

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7 23

Arizona Republican Party is clinging to one-vote majorities in the state House and Senate and has only $50,000 remaining in its bank account. "That's not much money to fund crucial expenses such as rent, payroll, and campaign operations," reports The Arizona Republic (paywall).

Just four years ago, it had $770,000, but the whackos in charge blew its war chest on fake audits, hopeless lawsuits, and other dubious expenditures.

According to The Arizona Republic, the party's inane and obnoxious antics have prompted large numbers of registered GOP voters to change their affiliation to "independent."

As of April, 34.6% of voters are registered as Republicans. This compares well to the 30.3% who are Arizona Democrats. But between the two parties is the growing contingent of the unaffiliated.

Independent voters now account for 34.3% of registered voters in the state. By head count, a net gain of just 10,077 new independents would make them the largest "party" in Arizona.

The reasons for this are pretty obvious. In our angry politics of hot takes and sick burns, a growing number don't want to be associated with the more, ahem, passionate segments of either party.

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https://boingboing.net/2023/05/24/georgia-gop-chair-is-a-flat-earther-and-says-we-are-being-brainwashed-by-globes-everywhere.html

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an 4 23

police late last week were called in after a physical fight broke out among attendees at the Michigan Republican Party's new state central committee meeting.

Bridge MI reports that a fight erupted on Friday night at the Doherty Hotel in Clare, Michigan between allies of current Michigan GOP Chairman Kristina Karamo and ally-turned-rival Matthew DePerno.

"A video recording obtained by Bridge Michigan shows a confrontation between Kalamazoo Republican Party Chair Kelly Sackett and Macomb County GOP Secretary Melissa Pehlis," the publication writes. "After they exchanged words, Sackett appeared to knock a cigarette and phone from the hand of Pehlis, who responded by thrusting an open hand at Sackett's head."

In an interview with Bridge MI, Sackett revealed that she filed a police complaint against Pehlis over the incident, which was apparently a dispute about DePerno's moves to purportedly purge people loyal to Karamo from the Kalamazoo Republican Party.

While Sackett did not elaborate further on the incident, DePerno himself went on the record to condemn Pehlis as a ""Karamo sycophant who was there, it appears, to intentionally harass" Sackett.

DePerno also took a shot at Karamo, who defeated him to become the Michigan Republican Party Chair earlier this year.

"There's big internal disputes within the party right now, and Karamo has done nothing to bring the party together," he said. "And how could she after she ran on a platform for the chair to divide the party? Her platform was to burn it down to eliminate the people who don't agree with her."

Watch the video below or at this link.

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lgbt

https://www.mediamatters.org/education/new-colorado-gop-chair-opposes-public-schools-because-they-purportedly-teach-students

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https://www.mediamatters.org/education/new-colorado-gop-chair-opposes-public-schools-because-they-purportedly-teach-students

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no lnx

'Absolutely hideous': Wisconsin Republican buried for saying there are 'positive outcomes in rape situations'

Brandon Gage March 15, 2023

Republicans in Wisconsin unveiled a bill on Wednesday to carve out exceptions for rape and incest in the state's abortion ban that dates back to 1849.

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The legislation would "clarify when abortions that protect the health of the mother would be allowed," although it "would not return the same rights that were in place under Roe v. Wade," the Associated Press reported.

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Despite garnering "immediate bipartisan opposition," as AP noted, one GOP lawmaker insisted that the changes would be good for victims – if they would only look toward the bright side of their trauma, so to speak.

READ MORE: 'Absurd and inflammatory': TX activists condemn 'outrageous' wrongful death lawsuit over abortion medication

That was the argument presented byState Representative Donna Rozar (R-69th District)at a press conference.

"One thing that I would like to say is that because we, because I personally believe in life from conception to natural death, it is important that we tell women who are victims of rape and incest to support them if they choose to carry those pregnancies to term," Rozar, a registered nurse, said.

"I have had friends and family members who have been a victim of rape, not of incest," Rozar chuckled, "but of rape, and that pregnancy was carried to term. There was support there."

Rozar recalled that the "baby was relinquished for adoption and I'm sure blessed the family in another state that the baby was adopted into."

READ MORE: 'Wrong on the law': Experts fact-check Walgreens' claim its hands are tied on abortion pill

Rozar then stated that "there can be positive outcomes in rape situations where babies are carried to term and then, um, relinquished for adoption. We need to make sure that those supports are there for those women, and I am part of some support groups that do that."

Rozar's comments were swiftly condemned.

Jessica Clarice יִסְכָּה: "Yuck. Positive for who? The victim forced to carry a rapist's baby who didn't want to be pregnant? Just gross."

Michael E.: "I was beaten and robbed once. There was no positive outcome to my traumatic and terrifying ordeal. I suspect a rape victim would feel the same."

From Little Acorns: "I guess if being reminded each day of what I can only imagine was a person's worst trauma that one could ever experience every day for the rest of one's life then sure."

Old and out of patience: "It's so arrogant of her to say this is the case for all women. She simply does not have the right to say all women can make rape a positive. How sick."

July Baby: "I have never heard anything this horrible in my life. A rape victim should keep a baby that was conceived by a violent act b/c something good might come of that. Would she think the same if her daughter or loved was a rape victim?"

Umer: "Why force a baby to grow up without parents? How horrible."

T.D.: "What an absolutely hideous woman and sadly typical among Republicans."

The Gimp Factory: "Pro-Rape Republicans."

Donna Gratehouse Domestic Infant Supply 1968 model: "Your family made a rape victim give birth and then relinquish for adoption? You suck, Donna Rozar."

Watch below or at this link.

READ MORE: Gavin Newsom hits Walgreens where it hurts after company refuses to dispense abortion pill

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an ah 3 23

if the Arizona Republicans of the 1980s and 1990s had been able to predict the future, they would have no doubt been shocked by the state's political environment of 2023. Arizona, in those days, was a deep red state, and its most influential Republicans were Sen. Barry Goldwater and the conservative who took over his U.S. Senate seat in January 1987, Vietnam veteran John McCain. Goldwater suffered a landslide defeat at the hands of Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964's presidential election; in Arizona, he was a conservative rock star, and McCain was proud to be called a "Goldwater Republican."

But in 2023, Arizona is as much of a swing state as Pennsylvania and Virginia and has a Democratic governor (Katie Hobbs), a Democratic U.S. senator (Mark Kelly), a Democratic state attorney general (Kris Mayes) and a once-Democratic U.S. senator who is now an independent (Kyrsten Sinema). Arizona is way more Democrat-friendly than it was 30 or 40 years ago, yet much of the Arizona Republican Party has moved to the extreme right. And MAGA Republicans like Kari Lake (the conspiracy theorist who Hobbs defeated in 2022) regard the late McCain and his admirers as RINOs (Republicans in Name Only).

In an article published by HuffPost on March 7, journalist Matt Shuham examines the divisions in the Arizona GOP and the disdain that MAGA conspiracy theorists have for more traditional conservatives.

"Since the 2020 elections," Shuham explains, "Arizona has been Ground Zero for wild conspiracy theories about supposed voter fraud leading to Joe Biden's victory. The claims gripped state Republicans to the point that nearly the entire slate of GOP midterm candidates for statewide office last year consisted of election deniers. To this day, Kari Lake, who lost the governor's race, maintains that she is actually Arizona’s governor now. Even after getting washed out in the midterms, state Republicans can't quit these outlandish theories. And now, it has thrown the party into chaos. For the past two weeks, Republicans have faced wild accusations of bribery, money laundering and election fixing — from their own supporters."

Two of Arizona's MAGA conspiracy theorists, according to Shuham, are attorney John Thaler and his ally Jacqueline Breger. During her testimony at an Arizona State Legislature hearing on February 23, Shuham notes, Breger 'accused everyone from state officeholders to judges, prosecutors and court-appointed medical health care advisers of accepting bribes from a criminal enterprise." And she "alleged that dozens of public officials were on the take, from judges to state officeholders and everyone in between."

Breger has accused fellow Arizona Republicans of being allies of Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, whose infamous former leader,Joaquín "El Chapo"** Guzman, is serving a life sentence in a Colorado prison and has been the subject of numerous narcocorridos (Mexican corridos about the drug trade). Thaler and Breger'sconspiracy theories, according to Shuham, have "created" a "near-civil war…. within the Arizona GOP."

"Following Breger's appearance (at the February 23 hearing) — Thaler left the state months earlier due to fears about his safety, he says — the two became instant celebrities among election conspiracy theorists," Shuham observes. "And Republican politicians now find themselves, some for the first time, on the wrong end of unfounded conspiracy theories and angry right-wing social media mobs."

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===

// to state gop?

an raw 2 23

Republicans in Arizona are in the midst of an internal battle after they hosted a panel of election conspiracy theorists last week who implicated some of them in a supposed drug cartel bribery scandal.

The Arizona Mirror reports that Republican Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma called out freshman Arizona State Rep. Liz Harris by name in denouncing her role in organizing the hearings, which featured allegations of criminal activity leveled against Mesa Mayor John Giles and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, both of whom are Republicans.

“What should have been a joint hearing to examine commonsense election reforms devolved into disgraceful fringe theater,” he said. “I’m not alone in believing that it was irresponsible and bad judgment for Ms. Harris to invite a person to present unsubstantiated and defamatory allegations in a legislative forum.”

Republican Arizona State Sen. T.J. Shope endorsed Toma's comments on Twitter and said that the hearing was "a disgrace and an embarrassment to the Arizona Legislature."

While the bribery allegations were initially limited just to Giles and Richer, the man behind them subsequently implicated MAGA favorite State Sen. Wendy Rogers in an interview in the days after the hearing.

Although Rogers was initially supportive of the election conspiracy theory hearings, she put out a statement earlier this week saying that the legislative hearing was not an appropriate place to level allegations of criminality against serving Republican officials.

There is no evidence that any of these officials have taken any bribes from drug cartels.

===

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see ariz fake electors

kelli ward

December 17, 2020

Ron Watkins, former administrator for the extremist bulletin board 8chan, urges Trump to “cross the Rubicon.” The phrase refers to Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon River with an army to install himself as sovereign, which precipitated starting a bloody Roman civil war. The phrase is echoed by Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward days later.

(Source: Twitter)

The Women for America First bus tour, meanwhile, pays a visit to a firearms academy near Nashville, Tennessee, and tour participant Jennifer Lynn Lawrence posts a video of herself, Kylie Jane Kremer, Dustin Stockton and Amy Kremer posing with rifles.The website for Tactical Response, the location where the video was reportedly filmed, features a tagline on its website: “We teach good people to kill bad people.”

(Source: Facebook)

Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona alleges on Twitter that 700,000 votes were compromised and that Trump won Arizona despite the stated election results. Gosar includes the hashtag #StopTheSteal and tags Ali Alexander in his post.

(Source: Twitter)

December 19, 2020

Trump tweets out a call for his supporters to protest in D.C. on the day when Electoral College votes are set to be certified by Congress. “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election,” Trump says, adding, “Big protest in DC on January 6th.Be there, will be wild!”

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yikes how much xian nat'l wacko?

an kos 2 23

In today’s Republican Party it is no longer enough to deny that Donald Trump lost in 2020. The true Republican diehards demand that their leaders deny that Republicans ever lose any election.

That played out at the Michigan GOP convention over the weekend, with Trump’s pick for state party chair being defeated by a candidate who is even more extreme an election denier. It took three rounds of voting—counted by hand because Republicans have also made it an article of faith not to accept voting technology, even at their own convention—but Kristina Karamo prevailed over second-place finisher and Trump endorsee Matt DePerno.

Karamo ran for secretary of state in 2022, losing by 14 points. DePerno ran for attorney general, losing by 8.6 points. But DePerno conceded that he had lost, while Karamo refused to concede. At the state party convention, she made that part of her campaign message, saying, “Conceding to a fraudulent person is agreeing with the fraud, which I will not do.”

When it comes to 2020, DePerno has been an election denier in good standing, having made his name as a Republican and earned Trump’s endorsement on the basis of his quest to prove fraud in that election. He’s even faced a criminal investigation for tampering with voting machines in 2021. That is the kind of stuff that gets you Donald Trump’s endorsement to lead a state Republican Party. But apparently it is not enough for Michigan Republicans. “Matt ran out on us; he didn’t fight for us,” one delegate told The Washington Post.

Election denial isn’t Karamo’s only angle, though. At the convention, she said, “My goal number one as a Christian is to bring people to Christ, and secondarily to save our country.” A few nights earlier, in a speech to a far-right “patriot” group, she went into a little more detail.

“When we start talking about the spiritual reality of the demonic forces, it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, this is crazy, we can’t go there,’” Karamo said. “No. It’s like, did you read the Bible? Didn’t Jesus perform exorcisms? … Scriptures are clear. And so if we’re not operating as though the spirit realities of the world exist, we’re going to fail every time.”

The convention that elected Karamo to lead thestate party was attended by 2,000 delegates—but not one of the outgoing party co-chairs or any member of the state congressional delegation. But Karamo claimed the party would move forward unified. “We cannot wait to get work done as one Michigan Republican Party,” she said. “And we are going to beat the Democrats.”

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===

an 2 23 salon

Arizona's Republican-controlled state legislature advanced bills last month that they claim will improve election transparency — but voting rights advocates worry will actually have the opposite effect.

The state House elections committee last week voted to pass House Bill 2308 – a bill that would bar any future secretary of state from overseeing and confirming the results of an election if they are a candidate. The bill comes after then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs won the gubernatorial election in November.

"There's a lack of confidence from some of my constituents in the election itself," Republican state Rep. Rachel Jones of Tucson, who presented the bill, said during the committee meeting. "I think the optics of that – of a secretary of state running their own election for governor and then certifying that election was a major concern."

State Rep. Melody Hernandez, a Tempe Democrat, questioned why the bill was being presented now but wasn't a concern when GOP Secretaries of State Ken Bennett and Michele Reagan were on the ballot in 2014 and 2018.

Jones countered that the environment changed after the 2020 election and claimed that "there's a lack of confidence in our election process" now, which brought the issue to the forefront.

When state Rep. Oscar De Los Santos, a Democrat from Laveen, asked her if she had "any concrete evidence that there were any misdeeds from the secretary of state in the 2022 election," Jones responded saying "It was more just the optics."

"It was instilling a lack of confidence in the results of the election," she added.

While there has been no evidence of corruption in the election process, Arizona Republicans have continued to sponsor bills they claim will instill faith in the election system for voters. Citing a survey from Rasmussen Reports, which has a history of Republican-leaning polling, Jones shared that 71% of U.S. voters stated they believed the midterms were "botched" during the committee meeting.

But voting rights organizations raised concerns that advancing such bills can create more uncertainty around the election system and even increase threats against election administrators.

"These are the same people who brought you the 'fraudit' following the 2020 election," a Democratic source who asked to remain anonymous told Salon. "So, it just continues to be more bad-faith conspiracy theories and, frankly, I think voters are tired of it. This has been going on now for two years. And because of it, we've seen so much of violent rhetoric, resulting in threats to the safety of secretaries of state and election administrators up and down the ballot."

The Maricopa County elections office recorded nearly 140 threatening and hostile communications against election workers between July and August of last year, according to Reuters.

Many of these threats stemmed from conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election that were promoted by former President Donald Trump and his allies.

The threats asserted false claims of fake ballots, fixed voting machines and corruption among election officials in the county during the 2020 election.

The same efforts that were used to sow doubt about the election system after the 2020 election are being repeated now, said Hannah Fried, executive director of All Voting is Local and All Voting is Local Action.

"Despite the fact that our elections were overwhelmingly proven to be secure, reliable, trustworthy, there are still going to be efforts to drive mis- [and] disinformation from 2022, and use that as a pretextual basis for passing new laws, and that is exactly what we are seeing in Arizona," Fried added.

The Arizona legislature also passed three other bills, two of which the committee split along party lines.

House Bill 2319 would tell judges to "aggressively" favor an election-law interpretation that provides greater transparency and HB 2322 would put observers appointed by each party in charge of voter signature verification.

Observers would have the ability to challenge the decisions of election workers at polling places, voting centers and other counting facilities.

"Signature verification processes, often, the way they're carried out can be to the detriment of older voters," Fried said. "For example, people whose signatures have changed, you really want to be mindful of any kind of change because it can have a really direct impact on people's right to vote."

Beyond Arizona, other states are also enacting similar efforts to "chip away" at the opportunities that have helped more people access voting, she added.

If these efforts continue to advance in other states, it will allow legislators to strip power from people they didn't agree with, which defeats the purpose of having separate branches of government, a Democratic source told Salon.

"This is a hyper-partisan attack based on the fact that they don't like election results," said Kim Rogers, the executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. "And I think that Arizona, frankly, has one of the strictest voter fraud guidelines already in the country."

Republicans have pushed out unproven claims of voter fraud when it comes to in-person early voting and voting by mail. Many candidates even made the centerpiece of their campaigns promising to ban some of these efforts.

Republican Arizona gubernatorial nomineeKari Lake said she would support slashing early and mail-in voting citing unsubstantiated or disproven claims of widespread voter fraud. When she lost to her Democratic opponent Katie Hobbs by just over 17,000 votes in the midterm election, Lake refused to concede and instead filed a lawsuit against Hobbs and Maricopa County election officials claiming election fraud.

While her suit was dismissed in court last month, her efforts to sow doubt in the integrity of the election system have continued.

Lake came under fire recently for posting photos of voters' signatures on Twitter. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes asked Attorney General Kris Mayes to investigate her for potentially violating a state law that prohibits "records containing a voter's signature" from being used by another person who isn't the voter.

Even after election workers in Maricopa County were forced into hiding after receiving threats related to the 2022 midterms, Lake has continued to peddle conspiracy theories.

Now, the Republican-controlled Arizona legislature is passing bills fueled by such election conspiracy theories, which Fried pointed out has been a concerted effort to undermine election integrity for the last couple of years.

"There are points of connectivity between all of this," she added. "It's not happening by accident… people who are trying to break our systems are getting smarter about it, and the really kind of over-the-top stuff that we sometimes see getting replaced with things that look reasonable on the surface are not reasonable."

===

an 2 23 raw?

Republicans in Arizona suffered a string of brutal defeats this past fall after a string of hardline Trump-backed MAGA candidates flamed out against Democratic opponents.

However, Politico reports that the Arizona GOP isn't responding to this by trying to rehabilitate its image and is instead getting even angrier and doubling down on the election denialism that cost the party winnable races in 2022.

To illustrate this, the report notes that the party recently considered resolutions to censure Republicans who were involved in past elections on the grounds that those Republicans were part of a conspiracy to help Democrats win.

One particularly angry attendee stood up at the meeting and said traditional censures did not go far enough.

"We should duct tape people to a tree in a dog park, so the dogs can pee on them," the man declared. "And then, when they’re there for a few hours and they have to crap in their pants, they can wallow in their own sh*t.”

Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelly Ward, who herself has dabbled in conspiracy theories about chemtrails, similarly saw no need for reflection and insisted that "things are going great" with a party that lost a governorship, a Senate race, and a secretary of state race in the same election cycle despite having a favorable political environment.

Barrett Marson, an Arizona GOP strategist, told Politico that he wasn't sure how many more losses his party would have to take before they reckoned with the fact that running on election denialism is a loser strategy.

"The party may have to die to be reborn," he said.

===

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an 1 23 raw tom

A Michigan Republican Party co-chair, who is under the cloud of a possible investigation over attempting to overturn the 2020 election results, is reportedly stepping aside but her GOP colleagues fear she is not done sowing seeds of discontent after she is gone.

According to a report from the Daily Beast's Jon King, avid Donald Trump supporter Meshawn Maddockwill reportedly not run for another term as a co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party in the wake of the "ass-kicking" the party received in the 2022 midterm election that saw Democrats gain a super-majority in the legislature.

However, some Republicans think she is behind pushing her son-in-law, 22-year-old Parker Shonts, as a candidate for youth vice chair where he will continue her work elevating election conspiracies and disrupting plans for the 2024 election.

As the Beast's King put it, some of Maddock's colleagues see Shonts as a "poison pill" designed to be forced "down the throat of the party faithful."

According to King, "While the position itself is largely seen as ceremonial, and the vast majority of attention is being paid to the race for the next chair of the party, skeptics see Shonts’ candidacy as a proxy to affirm Maddock’s continued influence. In other words, some Republicans say, Shonts stands for doubling down on the same far-right, election-denying politics that may have doomed the party last fall."

Former county and district chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, Tom Stroup, claims Maddock and her husband, Republican State Rep. Matt Maddock, have been a thorn in the side of the party for years.

“I have known the Maddocks long before they came to power in the Michigan Republican Party, and they have been a problem in our party basically since day one,” he explained before adding, "Meshawn did such a poor job as co-chair of the party.”

He then suggested her son-in-law's bid “is a part of trying a power play to try and stay in power in some form.”

As for Shonts, King reports he ".... has been endorsed by a host of election deniers, including My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell andMichigan GOP District Chair Shane Trejo. The latter—who, as The Daily Beast reported, hosted a podcast with a member of the white supremacist group Identity Evropa—called for the ouster of a fellow Republican who voted to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 win."

According to Dennis Lennox, a GOP strategist in Michigan, Shonts bid to be a youth vice chair is not one to be taken lightly.

“Historically, it has been the most contested, the nastiest race,” he pointed out. “I can remember running races for a youth chair at the convention, winning some, losing some, and hating the people because you’re 20 years old and you hate the person who wins. Then, 10 years later, you’re both political professionals and you’re working together.”

You canread more here.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/manipulated-video-biden-awarding-medal-honor-gets-millions-views-social-media

mma 7 22

no lnx twit pix vid

misleading manipulated video of President Joe Biden awarding the Medal of Honor to a veteran has received millions of views on social media platforms. The video has spread on multiple platforms, including Twitter, even though the platform seemingly prohibits this kind of deceptive content.

On July 5, Biden awarded the Medal of Honor to four veterans for their service during the Vietnam War. He bestowed the honor by putting the medal around their necks, as is normal procedure for awarding government medals.

:{:{}:

A grainy and blurry version of a clip in which Biden put the medal around one of the veterans, Dwight Birdwell, started circulating on social media platforms, with users falsely claiming that the president put the medal on backwards. A Media Matters review has found that the video has received more than 3.4 million views on mainstream platforms.

The vast majority of those views have been on Twitter, where just one upload of the video had at least 2.3 million views. Other uploads on the platform have also received hundreds of thousands of combined views. Multiple right-wing figures have also shared the video on Twitter as an accurate depiction of the ceremony, including the chairperson of the Texas Republican Party, a Newsmax host, and Infowars personality Paul Joseph Watson.}:

[Drebonacci Twitter video]

Twitter rules prohibit “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.” If the platform does not remove the content, then it “may provide additional context on Tweets sharing the misleading media where they appear on Twitter,” which includes applying “a label and/or warning message to the Tweet.” Thus far, the uploads of the video have not been removed, nor has a label been put on them. Twitter has previously struggled to consistently enforce its labeling policy.

The spread of the video was not limited to Twitter. Multiple uploads of the video have gone up on YouTube, including a YouTube Short of the video with more than 170,000 views. YouTube rules prohibit “content that has been technically manipulated or doctored in a way that misleads users (beyond clips taken out of context) and may pose a serious risk of egregious harm.”

YouTube Short Biden medal video views

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:{:{Daniel J. Schultz}:

Attorney and founder, Precinct Strategy}:

Schultz was an early proponent of the idea that Republican-controlled legislatures could overturn election results—later promoted as the “independent state legislature doctrine.” In some interpretations, Republican-controlled state legislatures could nullify the popular vote and send their own electors to put Trump in office. The key to his strategy? Purging from the Republican Party inconveniently ethical officials like Brad Raffensperger, starting at the precinct level.

“We can take over the party if we invade it,” Schultz told Steve Bannon on his podcast in February 2021. Over the following months, there was a surge in candidates for precinct chairman positions across the country.

Schultz has pointed to the strategy’s success in Arizona as a model. ProPublica reported that in one Maricopa district, the precinct roster grew by 63 percent in less than six months. Schultz’s website asks: “Can we get 3/10 of 1% of the 74 M Trump America Firsters to Become Republican Precinct Committeemen? To TAKE OVER The Republican Party? To Save the Republic?”

He points out that precinct committeemen are the ones who elect the state party leaders and are the only ones who can vote to endorse primary candidates; in some states, they are the only ones who can nominate candidates to fill vacancies in state legislatures.The logic is that full slates of pro-Trump precinct chairs could guarantee pro-Trump candidates on the Republican state-level ballots in 2022, who could be activated to enact the independent state legislature doctrine in 2024—subject to judicial review[maybe not, see scotus]. Donald Trump approves. On February 27, 2022, he issued a statement endorsing Schultz’s project.

Anne Nelson @anelsona

:{:{}:

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

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

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omg yikes

an 6 22

Sewell Chan and Eric Neugeboren, The Texas Tribune

June 18, 2022

"Texas Republican Convention calls Biden win illegitimate and rebukes Cornyn over gun talks" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

HOUSTON — Meeting at their first in-person convention since 2018, Texas Republicans on Saturday acted on a raft of resolutions and proposed platform changes to move their party even further to the right. They approved measures declaring that President Joe Biden “was not legitimately elected” and rebuking Sen. John Cornyn for taking part in bipartisan gun talks. They also voted on a platform that declares homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice” and calls for Texas schoolchildren “to learn about the humanity of the preborn child.”

The actions capped a convention that highlighted how adamantly opposed the party’s most active and vocal members are to compromising with Democrats or moderating on social positions, even as the state has grown more diverse and Republicans’ margins in statewide elections have shrunk slightly in recent years.

Votes on the platform were collected at the end of the party's three-day convention in which party activists moved to add multiple items to the official Texas GOP platform. As the convention closed, two separate sets of ballots — one allowing delegates to choose eight of 15 legislative priorities and another allowing delegates to vote on the 275 platform planks — were gathered. Those will now need to be tallied and certified in Austin, but it is rare for a plank to be rejected, according to party spokesperson James Wesolek.

The convention reinforced the extent to which former President Donald J. Trump’s unfounded claims of a stolen election continue to resound among the party faithful — even though his claims have repeatedly been debunked, including by many of his own former aides, and after a week of televised hearings about the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The denunciation of Cornyn represented a remarkable rebuke to a Republican who has served in the Senate since 2002. The hall at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston filled with boos on Friday as he tried to explain the legislation, which would allow juvenile records to be incorporated into background checks for gun buyers younger than 21 and encourage “red flag” laws that would make it easier to remove guns from potentially dangerous people, along with more funding for school safety and mental health.

Meanwhile, the party platform vote on Saturday by roughly 5,100 convention delegates would argue that those under 21 are “most likely to need to defend themselves” and may need to quickly buy guns“in emergencies such as riots.” It also would say that red flag laws violate the due process rights of people who haven’t been convicted of a crime.

About 9,600 delegates and alternates were eligible to attend; organizers said turnout was a bit more than half that.

The new platform would call for:

Requiring Texas students “to learn about the humanity of the preborn child,” including teaching that life begins at fertilization and requiring students to listen to live ultrasounds of gestating fetuses.
Amending the Texas Constitution to remove the Legislature’s power “to regulate the wearing of arms, with a view to prevent crime.”
:{:{}:

Treating homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” language that was not included in the 2018 or 2020 party platforms.
Deeming gender identity disorder “a genuine and extremely rare mental health condition,” requiring official documents to adhere to “biological gender,” and allowing civil penalties and monetary compensation to “de-transitioners” who have received gender-affirming surgery, which the platform calls a form of medical malpractice.
Changing the U.S. Constitution to cement the number of Supreme Court justices at nine and repeal the 16th Amendment of 1913, which created the federal income tax.
Ensuring “freedom to travel” by opposing Biden’s Clean Energy Planand “California-style, anti-driver policies,” including efforts to turn traffic lanes over for use by pedestrians, cyclists and mass transit.
Declaring “all businesses and jobs as essential and a fundamental right,” a response to COVID-19 mandates by Texas cities that required customers to wear masks and limited business hours.
Abolishing the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, and guaranteeing the right to use alternatives to cash, including cryptocurrencies.

Not every far-right proposal was advanced. The party chair, Matt Rinaldi, ruled that a motion to defend the due process rights of those who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and to “reject the narrative” that the riot was an insurrection was out of order and could not be voted on.

Taken together, the new provisions would represent a shift even further rightward for the Republican Party of Texas, once known as the party of Presidents George Bush and his son George W. Bush. Land Commissioner George P. Bush, a grandson and nephew of the two presidents, was defeated handily in May in his runoff race against Attorney General Ken Paxton, an arch-conservative who sued to challenge the 2020 election outcome and convinced voters that he was the truer Trump loyalist.

Party platforms are mission statements rather than legal doctrines and, in Texas, they have long reflected the opinions of the most activist wings of the parties. Republican elected officials are not bound to adhere to the platform, and party activists at times have expressed frustration that some parts of their platform and legislative priorities have not become law, despite complete Republican control of the state Legislature.

But the platforms are broad indicators of the sentiments of the most active Republican voters — those who dominate party primaries. Republicans have controlled every statewide elected office in Texas since 1999 and both houses of the Legislature since 2003, so the wishes of the party’s populist, pro-Trump base inevitably affect actions taken in Austin.

“The platform is largely symbolic but important as a measure of ideological drift,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston. “Party platforms are often used as a cudgel in party primaries. A more muscular ideological platform eventually leads to a more conservative legislature as challengers knock off more moderate members.”

The convention was noteworthy for the relatively low profile of top officeholders. Gov. Greg Abbott, who is seeking a third term in the November election, only appeared at a reception on Thursday on the sidelines of the convention. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who effectively controls the state Senate, addressed the convention, but House Speaker Dade Phelan only spoke at a luncheon, not to the main body of delegates.

Tensions within the party at times got personal. Video posted online showed far-right activists physically accosting U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, calling the conservative Republican “eye-patch McCain” over his criticism of Russia. The group included self-identified Proud Boys and Alex Stein, a social media activist from North Texas. A Navy SEAL veteran, Crenshaw lost his right eye to a bomb in Afghanistan.

“A more aggressive party platform sends a clear message to politicians about where the base is going,” Rottinghaus said. “Donald Trump radicalized the party and accelerated the demands from the base. There simply aren’t limits now on what the base might ask for.”

Mark P. Jones, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston, said the 2022 platform indicated how emboldened hard-right party activists now feel — a far cry from 2020. Significant gains by Texas Democrats in state House elections in 2018 raised the prospect of the Republican Party losing its dominant status in Texas, making it moderate its platform in 2020 to focus on bread-and-butter issues. Texas Republicans did well in the 2020 elections — even though Biden won 46.5% of the Texas vote, the highest proportion for a Democrat since 1976 — and this year, culture-war issues were once again at front and center.

Jones said that Republican redistricting has made incumbents safer and less inclined to appeal to moderates. Moreover, inflation, the risk of a recession, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and growing acrimony over race, gender and sexuality make it seem increasingly likely that Democrats will lose the U.S. House in the November midterm elections.

“As a result, the 2022 GOP feels free to veer to the right to its heart’s content, confident that it won’t come back to haunt the party in November, except perhaps in a half dozen races,” Jones said. “And even the party’s pragmatic center right conservatives lack the ability to argue, as they did successfully in 2020, that an ultra conservative platform could cost the GOP its majority status in the Lone Star State. This year, even the absolute worst case scenario has the GOP winning statewide, increasing its number of U.S. House seats, boosting its Texas Senate majority by a seat, and maintaining the 83 seats it held in the 2021 Texas House.”

Before delegates voted on the platform, party activists delivered fiery speeches attacking Democrats.

“They want to destroy the racial progress we have made by saying that we are a racist nation,” said Robin Armstrong, a Black doctor in Texas City who treated COVID patients with unapproved drug therapies touted by Trump, including hydroxychloroquine. “The Democratic Party are now a party of chaos. They benefit from causing us to question the foundations that this country was built upon. The misery, the crime, the drug abuse, the high gas prices are all by design, so that the Democratic Party can permanently transform society. We Texans cannot and we will not allow this to happen.”

The Republican-dominated Legislature last year passed new voting restrictions that prompted Democratic lawmakers to flee to Washington to break quorum in an ultimately futile protest. However, Republican leaders said repeatedly on Saturday that it was the other side that was a threat to fair elections.

“The Democrats wants three things: Their goals are to steal elections, suppress Republican votes and federalize elections,”said Cindy Siegel, the chairperson of the Harris County GOP and a former mayor of Bellaire.

Immigration continued to be a major theme, with delegates lamenting Biden’s reversal of Trump-era border policies. U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, of Lubbock, described an “unprecedented, unmitigated, self-inflicted disaster that is creating the worst humanitarian and national security threat to the American people in the history of our southern border,” adding, “this is an invasion, folks.”

“President Biden has ceded control of our borders to paramilitary, narco-terrorist cartels,” Arrington told delegates.

The mood of this convention was not hopeful. The themes ran dark, and activists spoke in apocalyptic, even cataclysmic, terms about the state of the country.

“Everything is topsy-turvy. What’s right is wrong and what’s wrong is right,” said state Sen. Donna Campbell, an emergency room doctor in New Braunfels, reflecting a state of uncertainty that is shared by Americans of many political backgrounds, even if they don’t agree on the causes. “Our country is on a trajectory to self-destruct, unless we change the direction.”

Campbell and other activists frequently spoke of their Christian faith.

“I believe that in the sovereignty of God, you and I were purposely born into this moment, into this confusing time that we face,“ Campbell said. “We’re meant to be alive, at this time, right now, and here in this state.”

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key in stop steal/coup fraudit BS: Ginni AZ

REUTERS

...

In Arizona, Republicans in the state Senate pushed for a “forensic audit” of the vote in the state’s largest county.

Arizona’s Senate president, Karen Fann, turned to Florida cybersecurity contractor Doug Logan to do the job. Logan’s firm, Cyber Ninjas, had no experience running audits or elections, though Logan said he had done previous work reviewing 2020 election disputes. Logan told Reuters he wasn’t sure how his company was picked for the task; he said he didn’t submit a proposal until Fann contacted him.

Logan did have connections, though. He confirmed to Reuters he was among those who huddled with Flynn at Wood’s estate after the election. And he received an endorsement from Waldron, who called him “very reputable” in a text message to Sen. Fann before she selected him to run the audit, records released in a public records lawsuit show.

“If you’re talking to an audience that cares what General Flynn thinks, and you tell the audience, ‘I did this in this military,’ then they’re more likely to be impressed.”

Pauline Shanks Kaurin, a professor of military ethics at the U.S. Naval War College]

“We did things the right way,” Logan said. Through a spokesman, Fann declined to comment.

:{:{}:

The Arizona Senate audit cost $5.7 million. It was largely financed by Flynn’s team.

Nearly $1 million came from a nonprofit called America’s Future, which until then had been largely dormant, Internal Revenue Service filings show. Flynn now chairs its board. His brother Joe Flynn was a director. And his sister, Mary O’Neill, was executive director.

Joe Flynn declined to comment. O’Neill did not respond to a request for comment.

Michael and Joe Flynn also briefly served as directors of Powell’s nonprofit Defending The Republic, which kicked in $550,000 for the Arizona audit.

Another $3.5 million came from The America Project, whose website features a video from Flynn declaring, “Our great nation was under a new type of attack.” Joe Flynn is one of the nonprofit’s three board members, and Flynn its senior strategic advisor.

The America Project’s chief executive, former Overstock CEO Byrne, told Reuters Flynn “asked me to come down and set this up.” Flynn “is a driving force” to continue fighting the results of the 2020 election, said the group’s operations officer, Carl Johnson. The America Project told Florida regulators it expected to raise $50 million this year, records show. Byrne said the group raised closer to $10 million, mostly from him.

The resulting Arizona audit featured reviewers with little training who scrutinized ballots using procedures that were widely criticized by election experts; Logan defended the auditing work. The review confirmed Biden won.

This November 19, retired captain Keshel and current reserve lieutenant colonel Raiklin were featured speakers at an “election integrity” rally in Manchester, New Hampshire. Citing polls saying a growing number of rightwing Americans believe the election was rigged, Raiklin and Keshel told a crowd of about 75 that their movement is succeeding.

Noting his legal and military intelligence background, Raiklin laid out what he called a “deep state” conspiracy theory of a stolen election. “I connected these dots,” Raiklin told the crowd.

Keshel, now a paid consultant for The America Project, said Trump supporters faced a “two-front war” – auditing the 2020 election and preparing for 2024.

“It sounds a little crazy,” Keshel said. “But I do believe wholeheartedly … that the future will reflect the truth of the 2020 election, that Joe Biden was illegitimately elected.”

Both men received standing ovations.

END

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/facebook-ad-algorithm/

Facebook pages run by state and local level Republican Parties appear to have received more exposure and engagement than the same types of pages belonging to the Democratic Party, new research finds.

On Wednesday, June 8, research was made public highlighting an apparent "gap in engagement growth 'unique to Facebook' between the GOP pages and their Democratic counterparts by 2019."

According to HuffPost, the findings also noted a distinct difference in the level of engagement for posts shared by both parties. Posts shared by local Republican Parties had “a doubling of the total shares” compared to Democratic posts.

The authors of the study also weighed in with more details about their findings.

“Regardless of Facebook’s motivations, their decision to change the algorithm might have given local Republican parties greater reach to connect with citizens and shape political realities for Americans,” the research authors noted.

"The fact that private companies can so easily control the political information flow for millions of Americans raises clear questions for the state of democracy," they added.

Kevin Reuning, an associate professor at Miami University who also co-authored the study, took to Twitter with visual representations of their findings. With the visual, he tweeted about the "weird patterns" in the data.

"In 2018, local Republican parties on facebook started to receive substantially more attention than local Democratic parties did," he tweeted.

[twt graf]

In response to the research data reports, Meta spokesperson Dani Lever pushed back arguing the data “'doesn’t add up' to what Facebook’s 2018 change to prioritize 'meaningful social interactions' actually did for the platform," per HuffPost.

Writing to NBC News, Lever wrote, “The trends here instead seem to coincide with a divisive election cycle, and since the differences between political parties in the U.S. have been growing for decades, the idea that a change to Facebook ranking would fundamentally shift how people choose to engage with political parties is implausible."

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/ginni-thomas-2020-more-extensive/

The efforts of far right-wing lobbyist and pro-MAGA activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas to overturn the 2020 presidential election, disenfranchising millions of voters in the process, were even more extensive than have previously been reported.

In addition to her month’s long text messaging with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, urging him to find a way to falsify the 2020 results and have Donald Trump declared the winner, Thomas reached out to members of the Arizona House, urging them to choose different presidential electors who would represent Trump.

Earlier reporting indicated Thomas had tried to pressure two Arizona Republican lawmakers.

But it wasn’t just two who Thomas tried to have overturn the election results. In total it was 29.

Ginni Thomas, the spouse of a U.S. Supreme Court justice, “sent the messages using FreeRoots, an online platform intended to make it easy to send pre-written emails to multiple elected officials,” according to The Washington Post.

“New documents show that Thomas indeed used the platform to reach many lawmakers simultaneously. On Nov. 9, she sent identical emails to 20 members of the Arizona House and seven Arizona state senators. That represents more than half of the Republican members of the state legislature at the time.”

Thomas “urged lawmakers to ‘stand strong in the face of political and media pressure’ and claimed that the responsibility to choose electors was ‘yours and yours alone,'” which is false. “They had ‘power to fight back against fraud’ and ‘ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen,’ the email said.”

Thomas’ actions did not stop on November 9.

“Before you choose your state’s Electors …consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” she wrote to 22 additional lawmakers on December 13. Her email “linked to a video of a man urging swing-state lawmakers to ‘put things right’ and ‘not give in to cowardice.'”

U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) last month blasted both Ginni Thomas and her Supreme Court Justice husband, Clarence Thomas, saying the “conflict of interest just screams at you.”

“Here you have the wife of a Supreme Court justice,” Schiff said, the Post notes, trying to “get Arizona to improperly cast aside the votes of millions. And also, to add to it, her husband on the Supreme Court, writing a dissent in a case arguing against providing records to Congress that might have revealed some of these same e-mails.”

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an 6 22

2022 wacko-rama

although Arizona has gone from being a deep red state to being a swing state, the Arizona GOP has not responded by purging itself of extremists. In fact, far-right MAGA conspiracy theorists like Kelli Ward (who chairs the Arizona Republican Party), gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (a former television news anchor) and Rep. Paul Gosar have becoming increasingly prominent in Arizona politics. And Arizona Republic opinion columnist Phil Boas, in his June 2 column, has a recommendation for the Arizona GOP: ditch the MAGA extremists and return to a more traditional Barry Goldwater/John McCain type of conservatism.

Lake, who has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump, and Ward have been aggressive promoters of the Big Lie — falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. Such “whackadoodles,” Boas writes, have been a thorn in the side of non-MAGA conservatives like former Sen. Jeff Flake.

“In Arizona, the whackadoodles took control of the Arizona Republican Party a decade before Trump,” Boas explains. “They were loud and eccentric and loved to censure John McCain. But they were never trusted with more power than, say, your average hamster, so they were perfectly adorable andeasily ignored. That changed when the Maricopa County Republican Party invited Donald Trump to speak at the Arizona Biltmore in 2015.”

Boas adds, “Trump then was still considered a pretender in the race for the White House, and his sometimes crude comments led more powerful Republicans such as U.S. Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake to protest.”

McCain, a Barry Goldwater disciple who died in 2018, was a scathing critic of Trump and the MAGA movement. And in 2018, Flake — obviously frustrated by the MAGA extremists who had taken over his party — decided not to seek reelection. That seat is now held by a centrist Democrat: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who has been a frequent source of frustration to the progressive wing of her party but gets along well with members of the McCain family — including John McCain’s widow Cindy McCain and his daughter, Republican activist Meghan McCain, a former co-host of ABC’s “The View.”

Arizona’s other U.S. Senate seat — the one once held by Goldwater and later, McCain — is also held by a centrist Democrat: Sen. Mark Kelly, who is up for reelection in the 2022 midterms. A state that was, for many years, synonymous with Goldwater/McCain conservatism now has two Democratic U.S. senators.

Boas notes that Lake and Ward have become “the most visible evangelists of Trump Republicanism in Arizona,” arguing that both of them have been terrible for the Arizona GOP.

But Boas stresses that the type of MAGA extremism that Lake and Ward champion was recently rebuked in some GOP primaries in Georgia, where incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp defeated a Trump-backed challenger, former Sen. David Perdue, by a whopping 52%. And incumbent Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was victorious as well, defeating his challenger, Rep. Jody Hice, by 18%.

Perdue and Hice, like Lake in Arizona, campaigned on the Big Lie.

“In Georgia, a state long considered a peer to Arizona because of its demographic similarities, the old-school Republicans stomped Trump candidates for governor, secretary of state and attorney general,” Boas observes. “Brian Kemp won reelection as Georgia governor, beating Trump errand boy David Perdue by 52 points. That’s not a landslide. That’s a collision of planets, an exploding ball of flame that can still be seen through the drapes at Mar-a-Lago.

Boas adds, “If you’ve been buying what the Arizona GOP televangelists have been selling, this might be a good time to short.”

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bannon?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/michigan-gop/

members of Michigan's Republican Party are installing conspiracy theorists for election-related positions.Although the individuals currently in position have years of experience, they are being replaced with Trump enthusiasts who have no political experience. It appears their only qualification is adhering to the Trump agenda.

According to The Daily Beast, a former official for the Michigan Republican Party have weighed in to express their concern about the disturbing shift in the political party's leadership. The publication reports that Michigan Republican officials are working to put canvassers in place who will continue to support Trump's election-related conspiracy theories.

Jeff Timmer, who was the former executive director of Michigan's GOP, expressed concern about what can be expected in the coming months as he suggested the political party is heading down a "rabbit-hole."

"There's no resistance within the Republican Party," Timmer said. "They are wholly invested, almost to a person, in the delusional Big Lie that there was some widespread irregularity and malfeasance in the last election, and that they need to take extraordinary steps, either by changing laws or in this case, changing elections personnel in order to fix a non-existent problem."

With an alarming number of individuals still buying into Trump's "big lie," Timmer explained how alarming Republicans' efforts are to strategically put people in place who have no problem hijacking democracy.

"It's kind of scary-looking ahead because the Republicans are making no secret about their plans to create chaos and throw a wrench in the gears of the next election," Timmer said, adding, "trying to put people in place who will go beyond what the law allows and do things in the next election that they didn't feel they had people in place to do in the last one."

However, the issue isn't just concerning for traditional Republicans but also Democratic lawmakers. Speaking to The Beast,David Knezek, a Democratic commissioner for Wayne County, also criticized the origin of the latest conspiracy-driven movement.

"Across the country there is a sad and systematic effort to create an alternate reality in which Donald Trump won the 2020 election," Knezek said. "Part of that effort is to seat canvassers who want to perpetuate this lie and call into question the validity of all elections across the country. Americans of both political parties must come together to put aside partisanship and protect our system of democracy by passionately advocating for the truth."

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race to the botton is ampl fdbk sys:

Conservative pundit recently expressed concern about Republicans in Arizona, Texas, and Florida as he detailed what he describes as the "race to the bottom" to "see who can be the most MAGA."

On Friday, October 15, Charlie Sykes, founder of the conservative website The Bulwark, appeared on MSNBC where he specifically criticized the "absolutely batshit crazy" Republicans in Texas. "I know that Republicans in Texas have been conservative for a long time but there was a time when conservative Republicans in Texas were not absolutely batshit crazy," Sykes said to MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace.

He went on to compare the differences he sees between Texas Republicans of the past and present. He also highlighted common behaviors he's seeing in Republicans across three states: Texas, Florida, and Arizona.

Sykes' remarks came amid a discussion about Texas law requiring teachers to develop that offers "opposing perspectives on historical events," HuffPost reports. In fact, a school administrator was recently criticized for insisting educators "should 'make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one' with alternative viewpoints."

"Texas Republicans used to be respectable," Sykes continued. "And now we are almost in this competition … between Florida, Arizona, and Texas to see who can be the most MAGA, who can play the most hair-on-fire culture war games, because that seems to be this race to the bottom that we're talking about here."

Sykes, however, insisted that it is "easy to beat up on the administrator" but "the focus ought to be on the law and the fact that the teachers are terrified. They don't know what's going to happen."

"What is the other side of the Holocaust?" Sykes later asked. "Are you going to assign fourth-graders 'Mein Kampf'? Are you going to make them listen to Seb Gorka's radio show? I just don't know what she actually had in mind. But again, this is exactly what you get when you have politicians playing culture war and then trying to ram that into badly thought out draconian legislation."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/pennsylvania-gop/

bypass governor voter suppr

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/vaccinated-2655082656/

mich budget ~ vax mandate

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/trump-gop-2653364196/

kos

When Donald Trump reentered the public spotlight last weekend at the North Carolina Republican Party Convention, the first thing he did was upend the GOP primary for the state's open Senate seat. Trump welcomed far-right Rep. Ted Budd to the stage and promptly gave him a surprise endorsement, leaving two other top Republican contenders to pick up the pieces.

One of them, former Gov. Pat McCrory, held an impromptu news conference in which he tried to convince reporters that Trump's endorsement fell "flat" with the room of attendees, according to The *Washington Post*.

Trump ally and former Rep. Mark Walker was also likely caught off guard by his change of fortunes, since he had just won the straw poll—an informal gauge of who attendees hope will prevail in the GOP primary.

Get ready to see a lot more mayhem in critical battleground states as Trump ramps up his rallies this summer. The truth is, even as I continue to be alarmed by the fascist turn of the Republican Party and its voter suppression efforts, I am simultaneously impressed with how much havoc Trump is already wreaking on GOP officials at both the state and federal level.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell effectively admitted this week that Trump is on his own mission and it doesn't align with the Republican Party. Asked by Fox News hosts if he would welcome Trump's involvement in the midterms, McConnell offered, "Well, he has his own agenda," before pivoting to his own message for 2022. That's a pretty telling statement from the highest ranking Republican in the country.

Trump's agenda, naturally, is self-aggrandizing Trump, and the Republican Party is merely a means to that end. Numerous outlets have now reported that Trump is obsessed with theGOP-led and QAnon-funded sham audit in Arizona, which he views as a leverage point for potentially invalidating the election and ultimately being "reinstated" as commander-in-chief.

In fact, one could view Arizona as ground zero for a lot GOP headaches to come. Inside the state, the Republican-led board of supervisors for Maricopa County, where the Senate GOP-inspired audit is taking place, has called the project a "sham" and a "con." Republican state officials who defended the election results and could make solid statewide candidates are also struggling to navigate Trump, including state Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who's running for Senate. Gov. Doug Ducey is term-limited out of running again in 2022, but he chairs the Republican Governors Association. He isn't even on speaking terms with Trump, despite the fact that he's in charge of defending GOP-controlled governorships nationwide. Trump will also be a dominant presence in the Republican scrum to replace Ducey, which could yield a candidate who isn't ideally positioned to win statewide.

But the Arizona audit is alsohaving nationwide ramifications, as Trump-aligned GOP lawmakers make pilgrimages to observe the effort in a bid to launch their own fraudits back home. Three Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers kicked off the frenzy, Georgia Republicans weren't far behind, and now Republicans from Colorado, Nevada, Alaska, Virginia, and Wisconsin all want in on the action.

But the places where fraudit efforts are roiling the Republican Party most is in states like Arizona, where GOP officials ultimately certified the election and are now getting eaten by their own. When it comes to midterm battleground states, nowhere is that toxic dynamic more pronounced than in Georgia. As I reported this week, the Peach State GOP is being torn apart at the seams as Republican state lawmakers absolutely vilify all the GOP executive officials who certified and defended the vote. Gov. Brian Kemp was booed at the same party convention last week where two state lawmakers were presented with "Warrior Awards" for their work to overturn the election. Both of those lawmakers made the trek to observe Arizona's audit, as did Kemp primary challenger Vernon Jones, a former Democrat-turned-Trumper. At the same time, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger continues to be pilloried by Trumpers and tragically, his family continues to receive death threats more than half a year after the state's results were certified. Attorney General Chris Carr is also fighting for his political life as he takes to the campaign trail for 2022.

What I think the national media is missing here, as Republicans and Democrats in Washington resume a predictably contentious fight over President Joe Biden's agenda, is just how corrosive Trump's effect is on Republican politics at the state level. Even in Ohio, which Trump won pretty handily, a Trumper haslaunched a primary challenge to Gov. Mike DeWine. And in Florida, where the election results were never really in question, GOP state lawmakers responded to Trump's Big Lie by making it more difficult to vote by mail there, tearing apart a decades-old Republican playbook in the Sunshine State that has proven pretty effective.

In states like Pennsylvania, where Republicans don't control the governor's mansion and a coveted open Senate seat is up for grabs, two Trump-aligned candidates recently announced their bids for governor and Senate—Lou Barletta and Sean Parnell, respectively. Trump's stamp of approval in a swing state like Pennsylvania could help cement victories for both men.

Jim Lee, president of Susquehanna Polling and Research, conducts voter surveys for Republican candidates and says Trump's hold on GOP voters in the state continues to be strong. But he also described opposition to pro-Trump candidates among independent voters as a "brick wall with a couple layers of thickness to it."

"What's an asset in a primary could potentially be a liability in the fall," Lee told the Associated Press.

The picture that's developing is one in which Trump and Trumpism is upending the Republican Party in all different types of states—states like Georgia and Arizona, which could be in the throes of a political tipping point; states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina, where Trump could play kingmaker in the primary only to doom Republicans in the general election; and even states like Ohio and Florida, where Trumpism might actually upend a political landscape that has provided pretty solid footing for the Republican Party in the recent past.

The other X factor in all this is the white-hot intensity of the Republican divisions in states such as Georgia and Arizona, where base turnout will almost surely prove decisive in several critical races that determine the state's leadership, along with its representation in the U.S. Senate. Whichever faction of the GOP prevails in these statewide primaries will almost surely suppress at least some base enthusiasm for the general election. There's nothing normal here about the political wrangling over the direction of the party. Rather the battles have such an existential feel to them that they could leave one side or the other completely disillusioned and unenthusiastic about the general election push.

Once again, the country and the Republican Party, in particular, are in completely uncharted territory. The fact of the matter is that a lot of GOP voters in these battleground states voted against Trump at the top of the ticket, and then for Republican candidates down-ballot. Republican Party leadership then took that information and decided to double down on Trumpism even as Trump himself faded from political view for a handful of months after leaving office. That decision was almost unprecedented in modern political history: Parties simply don't double down on the persona and agenda of presidential losers immediately after they have lost an election.

None of this to say that Republicans are doomed next year, or that they couldn't cheat their way out of election losses. But it is to say that the deep rifts currently roiling the party cannot possibly be maximizing their turnout potential at the ballot box next year.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/gop-big-lie/

After the 2020 presidential election, then-President Donald Trump had no shortage of Republican allies — from members of Congress to attorneys — who were anxious to help him promote his conspiracies and join him in making the false claim that the election had been stolen from him because of widespread voter fraud. And some of those Republicans, according to journalist Zach Montellaro, are now trying to become election officials in their states.

In an article published by Politico this week, Montellaro reports, "Republicans who sought to undercut or overturn President Joe Biden's election win are launching campaigns to become their states' top election officials next year, alarming local officeholders and opponents who are warning about pro-Trump, 'ends justify the means' candidates taking big roles in running the vote. The candidates include Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia, a leader of the congressional Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 Electoral College results; Arizona State Rep. Mark Finchem, one of the top proponents of the conspiracy-tinged vote audit in Arizona's largest county; Nevada's Jim Marchant, who sued to have his 5-point congressional loss last year overturned; and Michigan's Kristina Karamo, who made dozens of appearances in conservative media to claim fraud in the election."

Hice, Finchem and Marchant, Montellaro notes, are all running for secretary of state "in key battlegrounds that could decide control of Congress in 2022 — and who wins the White House in 2024."

"Their candidacies come with former President Donald Trump still fixated on spreading falsehoods about the 2020 election, insisting he won and lying about widespread and systemic fraud," Montellaro explains. "Each of their states has swung between the two parties over the last decade, though it is too early to tell how competitive their elections will be. The campaigns set up the possibility that politicians who have taken steps to undermine faith in the American democratic system could soon be the ones running it."

In Maricopa County, Arizona, Trump supporters have been conducting a bogus "audit" of the 2020 presidential election — and Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, is one Republican who has been vehemently critical of that farce. Gates told Politico, "Someone who is running for an election administration position, whose focus is not the rule of law but instead, 'the ends justify the means,' that's very dangerous in a democracy. This is someone who is trying to tear at the foundations of democracy."

Hice is challenging in Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a conservative Republican who angered Trump when he declared that now-President Joe Biden won the Peach State fair and square and pushed back against Trump's bogus voter fraud claims.

In Arizona, Finchem has been a vocal supporter of the Maricopa County "audit," and Stephen Richer, a Republican who serves as Maricopa County recorder in Arizona, is among his outspoken critics on the right.

At a recent press conference, Finchem said, "Mark Finchem is running for secretary of state. Process that," he said. "If the election was completely fraudulent, as he says, why would you run for secretary of state?

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/ammon-bundy/

david n kos

One of the consequences of the GOP's sidelong embrace of its extremist elements—from the insurrection denialists and Big Lie gaslighters to the QAnon cultists like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert—is that far-right extremists are now perfectly comfortable identifying as Republicans. In some cases, they're demanding the overthrow of the party's establishment—which can't seem to decide whether to fight back or just succumb willingly to the incoming far-right tide.

Establishment Republicans in Western states are particularly under siege from extremist elements among their voting base. I**n Idaho, for instance, armed-standoff-guru-turned-pandemic-denialist Ammon Bundy filed paperwork to run for governor, in a race already featuring another leading state "Patriot" movement figure. In:{Nevada, an insurgent far-right group organized on social media and led by Proud Boys members are attempting an open hostile takeover of the Clark County GOP, the state's largest county-level Republican organization.}:

Bundy's filing is rich in irony. For starters, he is currently banned from the Idaho Statehouse in Boise after his two ejections and arrests for defying masking requirements, for which he is currently standing trial. For another, as KTVB notes, Bundy himself is not even registered to vote in Idaho, and has apparently never done so in the five years or so that he has lived in Emmett.

He also named himself the treasurer of his campaign, which means that he will have to refile the paperwork, according to the Idaho Secretary of State's office, which tweeted out an explanation: "Because a treasurer must be a registered Idaho voter, Ammon Bundy will either need to register and refile or name a new treasurer by refiling. IDSOS staff have notified him as such."

The Republican field to replace incumbent Governor Brad Little (who has not announced whether he will seek re-election) is already large, and Bundy's competition in the primary already features another leading "Patriot" movement figure, Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin,who announced her candidacy last week. While Bundy was probably the earliest far-right figure in Idaho to take up the cause of opposing COVID-19-related public-health restrictions, McGeachin—who has supported Bundy and his fellow standoff-loving "Patriots" steadfastly from her office in Boise—has also been on the pandemic-denialist bandwagon.

McGeachin appeared alongside Bundy at one anti-restriction rally in Boise. More notoriously, she appeared in a video in which she brandished a handgun and a Bible while sitting in the driver's seat of a pickup, railing against coronavirus restrictions.

The political insurgency inside Clark County's NV] GOP was reported Friday by Rory Appleton at the *Las Vegas Review-Journal,*who explained that a group of far-right activists with deep ties to the Proud Boys are positioning themselves to take over the county Republican leadership. Some of its members, meanwhile, are alleged to have threatened a number of prominent Republicans.

The group, Appleton reported, organized online—primarily using the encrypted chat app Telegram—while reveling in anti-Semitic and white-nationalist memes and rhetoric. "Two Republican women in public office told the Review-Journal they've been threatened by leaders of the fringe movement, as did the current board of the Clark County party, which is hiring security for a crucial meeting Tuesday," the story reads.

Calling itself the "Republican Chamber of Commerce" (despite lacking ties to any known GOP organization), the far-right group first made its presence felt last month when it organized a late surge in votes favoring the censure of Barbara Cegavske, the state's Republican Secretary of State, for refusing to play along with attempts to overturn the 2020 election results based on Donald Trump's false claims of election fraud.

Since then, it has been preparing to provide a similar wave of votes to sweep three of their three leading figures—Rudy Clai, Matt Anthony and Paul Laramie—into the leadership of the Clark County GOP. The group has no record of doing business anywhere in the state of Nevada, and has no connection to any of the known chamber or Republican groups already established in Nevada.

Yet its website appears to be a nominally mainstream GOP group. Its primary emblem resembles the Republican National Committee's logo but inverted, with a red elephant on a white background encircled in red with the letters "RCC" and "Republican Chamber of Commerce" within.

Anthony has achieved a level of media notoriety as one of Las Vegas' most prominent Proud Boys, though he insists the local chapter is nonviolent and nonracist. After the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, he defended the people arrested and warned against a law-enforcement crackdown on "Patriots": "They're basically going all in on tyranny, guys. … They're watching. It's to be expected. They're the enemy. They're going to shut down our ability to communicate."

As it happens, Anthony is also a fugitive: He is the subject of an arrest warrant from the state of Michigan after he broke probation by moving to Nevada and then refusing to return after Nevada declined to oversee his probation, all stemming from his 2012 arrest on a drug charge.

The group's Telegram channel—owned by Anthony, and administered by Clai—is titled "Keep Nevada Open," apparently an offshoot of a Facebook group with the same name that boasted 17,000 members and organized anti-masking and other pandemic-related protests. Appleton describes a review of the channel's contents by the Clark County GOP executive board, led by chief of staff Richard MacLean:

MacLean showed his fellow board members several pictures and videos posted within the group, though not specifically by Anthony and Clai.

One photo blamed the 9/11 terrorist bombings on Jews. Another video featured a long clip of an Adolf Hitler speech and Nazi soldier marches. Some featured cartoon characters with negative Jewish stereotypes, and one photo featured messages written on dollar bills.

A post even poked fun at Republicans, claiming they seemed to be shocked at certain current events while white nationalists were thrilled by them.

The board promptly ejected the three men from the party. However, on Thursday, 10 people including Anthony and Clai filed a lawsuitagainst both the county and state party central committees, accusing them of illegally boxing them out of Clark County GOP meetings. They claim Clai and Anthony are heading up an alternative leadership slate, and are running against a mainstream ticket headed up by state Sen. Carrie Buck.

Despite the pushback by local Republican officials, the extremist elements remain emboldened in no small part because national-level Republicans have shown their eagerness to ignore the radicalism and even embrace it. Certainly, the local far-right leaders are confident that the party's base supports them, and not the establishment players.

"We have the numbers, and they don't, so they have to play dirty," Anthony said in an interview Thursday. "It's that simple."

McGeachin's campaign signs feature the hashtag #IAmIdaho. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are at a pivotal moment in history, not just for Idaho but for our nation," McGeachin said.

Bundy told NBC News on Monday that, despite the filings, he hasn't formally announced his candidacy, but is preparing to build a campaign organization.

"The people of Idaho are very freedom-minded," Bundy said. "I had never desired (to run for office), but I knew as early as 2017 that I would run for governor of Idaho."

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crazy pending

Arizona vote 'audit' sinks deeper into insanity as state GOP chair threatens her own officials with arrest

Brad Reed Raw Story

May 20, 2021

The Trump-backed "audit" of the 2020 election in Arizona is sinking deeper into madness, as Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward this week threatened her own party's officials with arrest.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/republican-paramilitaries/

no lnx

ron Johnson said recently that he wasn't scared when, on January 6, armed insurgents sacked and looted the United States Capitol. They "love this country," the Wisconsin Republican said. But "had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa [stormed the seat of government], I might have been a little concerned."

That statement was disturbing not only for the implicit racism it carried, but for the stunning confirmation of what's becoming clear to those of us who are paying attention. The Republican Party has a paramilitary problem, and it isn't new.

During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump alleged, without proof, that the electoral system was fraudulent, raising concerns about the impact that his false accusations would have in the event of his defeat. His unexpected victory opened the door to the far-right fringe and legitimized efforts that contributed to strengthening the ties between them. Many feared that this close relationship would be critical in the 2020 presidential election cycle, with rising domestic tensions and the role that paramilitaries would play in addition to Trump's false claims about the election.

It has been clear for some time now that the Republican Party had a more-than-welcoming attitude toward certain paramilitary groups.The deadly events in Charlottesville in 2017, although fundamentally led by white supremacists called by the former president "very fine people," also had protection services provided by paramilitaries. The following year, more signs of backing for their man in the White House came from Trump-supporting paramilitary groups targeting Muslims. In Oregon, a walkout staged by Republican state senators, in 2019, gained support from paramilitary groups that made credible threats against a planned rally.

For almost three decades, these paramilitaries (thought to be in the hundreds across the country) have viewed the government as the adversary. With a friend residing in the White House, however, these groups experienced an identity crisis. This need for an enemy explains the shift into targeting immigrants and religious minorities. It wasn't just to please their man. It was to embrace a cause allowing them to grow.

After Trump won, there was an increase in the number of paramilitary groups, but the GOP has been no stranger to them. In 2017, a local chapter of the Republican Party in Oregon passed a resolution allowing paramilitaries (the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, for instance) to provide security at the local party events. These groups are part of the Patriot Movement, a loose far-right network affiliated with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and armed confrontations in Nevada and Oregon in 2016.

The Republican Party seems to be very comfortable with these groups around, as we have seen in Nevada, Oregon, Michigan, and other states. However, this is not a recent venture, since the accounts of strengthening ties can be traced back even before Trump won the election in 2016. The openness about their common interests is perhaps new, but it's not surprising. Alarms were sounded when state Senate Majority Leader, Republican Mike Shirkey of Michigan, participated in a rally organized by paramilitaries that stormed the Michigan Capitol back in April 2020 alongside a member of a group involved in the planned kidnapping of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Though Michigan has a history of paramilitaries, the state GOP had tied itself to them, especially since the election as party co-chair of Meshawn Maddock. She organized a protest to interrupt ballot counting in Detroit, where paramilitaries were present.

Johnson's statement is outrageous, not only for the racism, but also for the approval of white armed groups as opposed to unarmed groups as well as the acknowledgement that he didn't feel threatened by them since they were exercising their freedom. Compare that to his comments about BLM and Antifa, but that's another discussion.

The connections the Republican Party has with paramilitaries are not ambiguous, yet the ongoing investigation into the Capitol attack will likely provide more evidence of the extremely disturbing behavior of the formerly conservative party. Ties between not only Trump and his associates, like Roger Stone, whose security detail included members of the Oath Keepers, but the GOP at state and local levels, should bring into the discussion how one of the major parties in the country is going to stand for democracy while leading a double-life with paramilitaries bent on racial supremacy.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/republicans/

no lnx

Republicans who keep a finger on reality are discovering that their voters have gone off the deep end

David Neiwert and Daily Kos February 02, 2021

It's becoming much clearer why Republicans in Congress are so reluctant to acknowledge factual reality—such as that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential fairly, or that Donald Trump incited a mob that attacked the Congress and ransacked the U.S. Capitol—and have doubled down on their embrace of anti-democratic disinformation that fueled the insurrection: If they dare admit any of it, they risk the insane wrath of the millions of GOP voters out there who have wholly swallowed all that false Trumpian propaganda.

That's become especially self-evident among Republicans at the state and local levels throughout the country in the weeks since the January 6 riot. As Hunter recently explained, the GOP at the ground level not only has fully embraced the conspiracist rot that Trump promoted after he lost, but it also has become even more openly extreme than it was before the election. Liz Cheney is finding that out.

Whenever Republicans have made any gestures toward acknowledging either Biden's win or Trump's seditionist behavior, as the Guardian recently reported, voters at the state and local level have responded with outrage and threats.

"The evidence is overwhelming that local parties across the country, in blue states and red states, are radicalized and support extremely far outside the mainstream positions like, for example, ending our democratic experiment to install Donald Trump as president over the will of the people," Tim Miller, former political director of Republican Voters Against Trump, told the Guardian.

"They believe in insane COVID denialism and QAnon and all these other conspiracies. It's endemic, not just a couple of state parties. It's the vast majority of state parties throughout the country."

The list is long and worrisome:

Arizona: The state Republican party last weekend re-elected Kelli Ward, a conspiracy-theory-promoting "Trump Republican" who unabashedly promoted the "election fraud" disinformation. Party officials also voted to censure Governor Doug Ducey for certifying Trump's loss in Arizona, along with Cindy McCain, the widow of Senator John McCain, and former Senator Jeff Flake, both for having supported Biden in the election.

Texas: The state Republican Party encouraged its members to follow them on Gab, the favorite social-media platform of white nationalists, with a pro-QAnon conspiracy trope: "We Are the Storm." Even after Biden's inauguration, the party insisted that he had won fraudulently: "It took a global pandemic, a thoroughly corrupt media, and massive election irregularities for President Trump to be removed from office," the GOP said in a statement on its website.

Hawaii:The Hawaii Republican Party's official account published a thread of tweets sympathizing with supporters of QAnon—dismissing cult's conspiracy theories that Democrats and media figures are secretly operating as global pedophilia ring, but arguing that adherents nonetheless were engaged in a form of patriotism. The same account also praised the "generally high quality" work of a Holicaust-denying YouTuber named Tarl Warwick, saying: "It is good to periodically step outside the 'bubble' of corporate commentators for additional perspective." The party deleted and condemned the tweets; the communications official who sent them resigned.

Oregon:The state's Republican Party issued a lengthy statement stuffed full of conspiracy theories and disinformation condemning the 10 Republican members of Congress who voted to impeach Trump after the insurrection. It claimed "there is growing evidence that the violence at the Capitol was a 'false flag' operation designed to discredit President Trump and his supporters." Some 23 Republican members of the state House repudiated the statement, noting that "there is no credible evidence to support false flag claims," adding that such rumormongering had become a distraction.

Wyoming: State activists opened up a campaign to "recall" Congressman Liz Cheney after she joined the Republicans voting to impeach Trump, and have collected over 55,000 signatures. Ten county-level parties in the state voted to censure Cheney. A state senator named Anthony Bouchard announced a 2022 campaign against the congresswoman. The Wyoming Republican state party said "there has not been a time during our tenure when we have seen this type of an outcry from our fellow Republicans, with the anger and frustration being palpable in the comments we have received."

Pro-Trump Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida even traveled to the state to lead a rally attacking Cheney. "We are in a battle for the soul of the Republican party, and I intend to win it," Gaetz told the rally.

The sentiments in Wyoming were deep and widespread. A Gillette woman named Shelley Horn started the Cheney recall petition, and told CNN: "You just can't go, 'Oh well, I need to vote with my conscience.' No! Vote for what your people put you in there to do. You're a Republican, you're supposed to back your party regardless."

Trump supporter Taylor Haynes told CNN, "In my view, she's done in Wyoming." A poll commissioned by the Trump political operation purportedly showed the impeachment vote had hurt her popularity. "Liz Cheney's favorables there are only slightly worse than her father's shooting skills," quipped Donald Trump Jr.

Other polls, however, supported the claim. A January 27 McLaughlin poll that showed 70% of Wyoming voters believe the impeachment trial was unconstitutional; more than two-third disapprove of Cheney's vote, and 63% say they are unlikely to vote for Cheney again.

Some longtime GOP figures defended her. Gale Geringer, a veteran Republican strategist, told CNN that Cheney showed "courage" in casting the Trump impeachment vote: "I don't underestimate the anger people are feeling right now. It's huge. And Liz Cheney has become the target of that anger, but I don't think she's really the cause of it. I think it's fear of what the Biden administration is going to do to Wyoming. We're petrified. Our entire economy, all of our jobs, our tax base has been threatened. And there's nothing we can do about Joe Biden for four years. But we can take that fear and anger out on Liz Cheney."

But Politico reporter Tara Palmieri tagged along with the CNN crew, and found it nearly impossible to find anyone in the state who wasn't angry with their Congressman. Her impression was that Cheney is in serious political trouble.

Honestly, it was hard to find anyone who would defend Cheney — and I really tried to talk to as many people as I could not at the rally. I stopped at a biker bar, a gun shop, a vape shop, a hardware store, a steakhouse, a diner, a dentist's office and a pawn shop …

— At Harbor Freight Tools, when I uttered the name "Liz Cheney," an employee behind the cash register hurled a threatening epithet. Then a beefy and tattooed supervisor, Torrey Price, 48, came over mad as hell. His mask hung below his nose when he told me, "I don't think she spoke for Wyoming."

Price never votes in primaries but said he will in August 2022 — to oust Cheney. He shared more of his thoughts: the election was stolen, the U.S. Capitol raid was staged, and the number of Covid deaths were grossly inflated. He and his colleague Joe agreed on all of these points, adding that they would not be getting the vaccine.

— At the Outlaw Saloon, I envied the way a recently vaccinated NYT reporter sauntered into the biker bar maskless, when earlier, a middle-aged DJ in a cowboy hat asked me for my credentials. Likely because there were only two masks in the bar — the one on my face and another on a table, with the words "political prisoner" printed in red. The guy who threw down that mask predicted the size of the rally against Cheney, telling me the night before, "I guarantee you there will be 600 people there." I didn't believe him.

— At the steakhouse, our comely waitress said "a lot of people are fired up" about Cheney. As a lifelong native of Wyoming, she said Cheney made a grave mistake by not representing the people of her state.

Palmieri concluded: "If there was any doubt this is still Trump's Republican Party, my time in Cheyenne dispelled it."

The push to embrace Trumpism is roiling other state Republican parties. In Wisconsin, where 15 Republican lawmakers signed a letter to Vice President Mike Pence the day before the D.C. riot urging him to postpone the certification, and two Republican congressmen, Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Tiffany, objected to the electoral votes, the party is divided into two camps: in several states that Biden won.

"The Republican Party right now is relatively divided, but it's not the traditional ideological divisions that used to be in place, as much as it's between the sane and insane wings of the party," RightWisconsin editor James Wigderson told the Madison Capital Times. "I think that there's a chance of a real fracture coming."

Establishment Republicans such as former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, however, defended the Trumpists for their paranoia and embrace of partisan disinformation: "That is the perspective they have, that is the view that they have and it's valid; you can't say someone's opinion of a subjective matter is invalid," she said. "I mean, what gives us the right to judge someone's opinion like that?"

In Michigan, where Republicans also embraced the "Stop the Steal" campaign prior to the insurrection, the impulse to maintain their embrace of Trumpism remains largely undiminished. The Allegan County Republican party censured Congressman Fred Upton because he voted to impeach Trump.

"Not a lot appears to be changing. We have former Ambassador Ron Weiser (expected to be the new Michigan GOP chair) and Meshawn Maddock (expected to be Weiser's co-chair)," WKAR politics reporter Abigail Censky observed. "(Maddock) led 'Stop the Steal' efforts in the state and was a key part of the kind of infrastructure to overturn the state's election results, which we know from bipartisan clerks and expert testimony was a fair and safe and secure election. It's interesting to see that that's kind of beyond reproach still, and that, that leadership is still going to go into place."

And in Georgia, Republican Party officials are grimacing at the wounds being inflicted on their voter-appeal operations by the presence of QAnon-loving Congressman Majorie Taylor Greene in the state's delegation, as well as in the media as her multiple conspiracist pronouncements—such as her approval of lynching House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—have come increasingly to light.

"If you have any common sense, you know she's an anchor on the party. She is weighing us down," said Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia Republican election administrator who criticized the baseless election conspiracy theories espoused by Trump and his supporters.

"Some people are saying maybe Nancy Pelosi will throw her out" of Congress, Sterling said. "The Democrats would never throw her out. They want her to be the definition of what a Republican is. They're gonna give her every opportunity to speak and be heard and look crazy — like what came out Wednesday, the Jewish space laser to start fires. I mean, I don't know how far down the rabbit hole you go."

The unhinged behavior and conspiracism is widespread. The Oregon GOP's statement was rife with conspiracy theories, including a passage explaining why they viewed the January 6 insurrection as a "false flag" operation:

Whereas this false flag will support Joe Biden plans to introducing new domestic terrorism legislation likely placing more emphasis on themes from post-9/11 Patriot Act such as allowing those charged with terrorism to be automatically detained before trial, outlawing donations to government-designated terrorist groups, allowing electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists, letting the government use secret sources in those trials, and perhaps new provisions such as codifying putting conservatives on a secret no-fly list without recourse to due process and restricting free speech, similar to the Sedition Act of 1798, which criminalized making "false statements" critical of the Federal government.

The peculiar combination of self-righteousness, persecution complex, and projection endemic to extremist conspiracism were omnipresent. Shelley Horn, the Wyoming petitioner, blamed Cheney's impeachment vote for dividing the nation: "It's just sows more hate and division," Horn told the Cowboy State Daily, "and people are tired of it. Our country can't stand much more."

As Zack Beauchamp observed at Vox:

It's obvious that some of the party's national leaders, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, don't actually believe in these conspiracy theories. But for too long, the party has been comfortable letting their rank-and-file supporters believe them because it's politically advantageous. Now, true believers are rising up and capturing the leadership of state parties and local activist groups — putting pressure on national politicians to conform to extreme ideas or risk a serious primary threat.

This makes the GOP's post-Trump trajectory look even scarier. No one person or organization is in charge of the party, in a position to fix the root causes of its continuing turn toward extremism. Reforming the party requires a fight on multiple levels and in multiple arenas: reforms to the local and national party, transformations of both the party and adjacent institutions like Fox News.

This what Barack Obama adroitly describes as America's "epistemological crisis." It will not stop happening as long as there are news organs that traffic in falsehoods as a profit model, and who devote 24 hours a day, seven days a week of broadcast time using those lies to coach half of the nation how and why to hate the other half—and politicians who gleefully profit from it as well.

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an 221 he has back-pedaled w/ attn

watch: Michigan Senate majority leader caught on video calling deadly Capitol siege a 'hoax'

Meaghan Ellis

A top-ranking Michigan Republican lawmaker is facing intense criticism after footage captured him...

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still stop steal?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/arizona-gop-2650398660

According to a report from USA Today, the Republican majority in the State Senate is threatening to arrest members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors if they don't turn over copies of mail-in ballots and voting machines so they can conduct another vote count of the 2020 presidential election results that led to Doinald Trump losing.

The report notes that the Maricopa board is also predominately Republican but that hasn't stopped state senators from going after them.

"The Arizona Senate, controlled by Republicans, has threatened to hold the supervisors, nearly all Republicans, in contempt for not responding to subpoenas asking for copies of all the county's mail-in ballots and access to voting machines. The Senate wants to perform its own audit," the report states. "Some senators have even threatened to arrest the supervisors over the matter, and the body could vote on the contempt resolution as early as Monday."

The report notes that "For the hand count, the county examined ballots from 2% of vote centers, as well as 5,000 early ballots, and found that the county's voting machines counted the ballots with 100% accuracy. Political parties appointed representatives to select which vote centers to audit, and they helped perform the hand count," and that tests showed that, " machines operated without error."

According to USA Today, "The Senate wants a more thorough hand count of ballots. And they want to do it themselves – or to choose who will."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/voter-suppression

comm dr

since former President Donald Trump failed to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, Republicans in more than two dozen states have introduced over 100 bills to restrict voting access, an alarming development that voting rights advocates have pointed to as yet another reason for Democrats to abolish the filibuster, an anti-democratic tool currently allowing the GOP minority to block the enactment of a suite of popular pro-democracy reforms.

Mother Jones journalist Ari Berman on Thursdayreported on the GOP's ongoing nationwide push to make voting more difficult—particularly for communities of color and other Democratic-leaning constituencies—and in some cases to empower state legislatures to overturn election results. He called state-level Republicans' efforts "a huge scandal that should be getting as much attention as Trump's plot to overturn the election."

Republicans across the country, Berman said, are "weaponizing Trump's lies" about fraud in an attempt to roll back voting rights after last year's historic turnout and expansion of mail-in ballots.

"Democrats have a clear choice," Berman continued. "They can get rid of the filibuster to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For the People Act to stop GOP voter suppression, or they can allow the GOP to undermine democracy for the next decade."

"The stakes," Berman added, "couldn't be higher." That's because, according to an analysis conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice in late January, Republicans at the state level have introduced three times as many bills to chip away at voting rights compared to the same point last year.

Already this year, 106 bills have been introduced in 28 states—including 17 under complete GOP control, where passage is more likely—to undermine access to the franchise. According to the Brennan Center's report, "These proposals primarily seek to: (1) limit mail voting access; (2) impose stricter voter ID requirements; (3) limit successful pro-voter registration policies; and (4) enable more aggressive voter roll purges."

"These bills," the report argues, "are an unmistakable response to the unfounded and dangerous lies about fraud that followed the 2020 election."

106 bills introduced in 28 states already this year to restrict voting access finds @BrennanCenter That's 3x as h… https://t.co/o69lHRGgsd

— Ari Berman (@Ari Berman)1612459832.0

And this week, as CNN reported on Friday, "lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Georgia Senate added more. They include proposals that would eliminate no-excuse absentee voting for many state residents and end automatic voter registration when obtaining a driver's license."

According to Berman, the nine bills that Georgia Republicans introduced on February 1 would amount to "one of the worst voter suppression laws ever passed."

On first day of Black History Month Georgia Republicans introduced NINE bills to make it harder to vote, including… https://t.co/qwLmKWq6o7

— Ari Berman (@Ari Berman)1612458849.0

Not to be outdone, Arizona Republicans have since the start of 2021 introduced 34 bills to make voting harder, including reducing the number of polling places in Maricopa County from 100 to 15.

Arizona Republicans have introduced 34 BILLS to make it harder to vote, including ending mail voting, purging list… https://t.co/4kXh0wNIMT

— Ari Berman (@Ari Berman)1612459235.0

Georgia and Arizona are not alone; similar reactionary proposals are being pushed by Republicans in more than two dozen additional states.

The spike in anti-democracy bills represents an intensification of an existingtrend rather than a new development. As Common Dreamsreported last November, Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) admitted shortly after the election that making voting more accessible hurts the GOP's electoral prospects.

"If we don't do something about voting by mail, we're going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country," Graham told Fox News host Sean Hannity.

The GOP has been trying to undercut efforts to expand voting access for years. "A decade ago," Bermanwrote, "Republicans passed new voter ID laws and other efforts to curtail voting rights when they took power in the states following [former President] Barack Obama's election."

But now, he added, "Republicans are taking their assault on voting rights to the next level." Like the Brennan Center, Berman attributed the surge in anti-democracy legislation to Trump's failed bid to subvert the will of the people in last year's election.

According toBerman, the GOP is "trying to accomplish through legislation what Trump couldn't with litigation. All in all, these efforts amount to the most concerted attempts to roll back voting rights since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965."...

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/gop-future

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/qanon-and-evangelicals-republicans-baptized-in-crazy/

no twt lnx

QAnon and evangelicals: Republicans baptized in crazy

QAnon Shaman is admitting he was 'duped' by Trump — and blaming him for inflaming the Capitol attack

Meaghan Ellis

David Cay Johnston January 29, 2021

Donald Trump is out, but parts of the Republican Party warmly embrace his dark legacy of white supremacy, the crazy QAnon conspiracy and civil war wrapped in faux Christianity.

Like Trump, these fake Christians reject turning the other cheek in favor of threatening or promoting violence.

The problem here isn't partisan politics, but public mental health. DCReport has covered extensively the mental-health debacle thanks to Dr. Bandy X. Lee, Harper West and other experts on how delusions spread like viruses, with Trump being a carrier.

The evidence of craziness seems to be found entirely in the Republican Party. We looked for, but have yet to discover any Democratic Party leaders pushing baseless conspiracy theories or urging civil war.

:{:{}:

Readers who have found such material, please send links via our DCReport Tipline.

Here are some of the ways that Republican leaders reveal their affinity for the anti-democratic nature of Trumpism and QAnon, its attendant conspiracy theory:

In California, the Sacramento County Republican Party elected to its Central Committee a Proud Boys member who has advocated violence.

"Illegal immigrants should have their heads smashed into the concrete," a 2018 post by an antifascist group quotes Perrine as saying.

:{:{}:

Perrine didn't deny this call to violence, he only insisted that he's not a racist.

:{:{}:

He told the newspaper, "They can call me a Nazi all they want, and I know I have plenty of friends of all races that don't always agree with me, but they still love me.

:{:{}:

"The Proud Boys that I affiliate with are all working men, all married men, they all have good jobs, they all believe in God."

Only after The Bee reported this did some Republicans in the California capital come to their senses and demand Perrine's ouster.

Oregon's Republican Party this month aligned itself with conspiracy theories as well as denouncing all 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the murderous attack on our Capitol.

Texas' GOP uses a QAnon conspiracy phrase—We Are The Storm—in its new logo.

The slogan comes from a poem, not crazies, according to the Texas party chairman, Alan West. He is the former congressman from Florida and retired military officer known for making bizarre statements. In 2011, he wrote, "When I see anyone with an Obama 2012 bumper sticker, I recognize them as a threat to the gene pool."

Arizona GOP for Trump, Still

Texas GOP Twitter Page

Arizona's GOP retweeted messages in December asking if people were ready to die for Trump and his baseless claim that he really won in 2020. The original Stop The Steal tweet was deleted, but the party's official Twitter account still refers to a person who says he's ready to die for Trump. It states: "He is. Are you?"

You might think that the party leadership in the Grand Canyon state, long a bright red jurisdiction, would examine its position after Democrats won both U.S. Senate seats and Joe Biden beat Trump in Arizona.

While the GOP added registered voters in 2020, it lost in ballots cast. Instead of reassessing, however, Arizona's Republican leaders decided to enforce Trumpian purity. On Jan. 23 the Arizona GOP censured three leading Republicans for not embracing Trumpian madness: Gov. Doug Ducey, former U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain. The widow of Sen. John McCain said she considers the censure a badge of honor.

Party leaders also re-elected the erratic and autocratic Kelli Ward as the Arizona GOP leader. She said her party suffers from "people who have been namby-pamby, lie down and allow the Democrats to walk all over them."

The party retweeted a menacing message. It is one of many from a Republican who holds himself out as a Christian despite tweets that are aggressively contrary to New Testament teachings about love, doing good to others and turning the other cheek:

"The Arizona Republican Party is still Trump country in all districts. Weak self-righteous sanctimonious Rs are on notice."

"Satan-Worshipping Pedophiles"

Arizona state Sen. David Farnsworth acknowledged last fall to the Arizona Mirror, a news website, that he believes the QAnon conspiracy theory but with a twist.

:{:{}:

He said some Republicans have joined the top Democrats who, he imagines, run a global Satan worshipping cabal of pedophiles Trump is singlehandedly trying to bring down. Farnsworth told audiences that Arizona's Department of Child Safety is covering up, or complicit, in child sex trafficking.

Meanwhile, the FBI says QAnon is a domestic terror threat.

Other delusional beliefs so deeply and broadly infect the Arizona GOP that its leaders blame antifascists for joining in when our national Capitol was violently invaded by a murderous mob of Trumpers on Jan. 6.

Mentioned earlier, theOregon Republican Party went further. It adopted a resolution asserting, "The violence at the Capitol was a 'false flag' operation designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters, and all conservative Republicans;this provided the sham motivation to impeach President Trump in order to advance the Democratic goal of seizing total power."

That's as crazy as QAnon.

Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, who riled up the Capitol mob, and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida also falsely blame the Capitol attack on antifascists.

Antifascist Nonsense

The FBI calls that nonsense, but you don't need law enforcement to know that the idea is ridiculous.

Saying Trumpers and Antifa jointly attacked our Capitol is like saying Trump is in league with Bernie Sanders. Believing, as the Oregon GOP leadership does, that the insurgents were lefties posing as Trumpers moves the party well into the realm of delusion.

In Hawaii, the official Republican Twitter account claims war is being waged against its members' values.And its relentless attacks on news organizations that check facts and correct mistakes include many fabrications.

Witness this Inauguration Day tweet: "Will you be joining PBS in calling for internment and re-education camps also?"

Nothing in the news clips it tweeted came close to substantiating the tweet, nor did the full PBS report.

There is a glimmer of hope that reality plays a role in the Hawaii GOP. On Sunday, Jan. 24, the state party's communications vice-chair, Edwin Boyette, resigned after sane Republicans complained about his tweets supporting QAnon.

Building a Theocracy

:{:{}:

It's not just Trump purity that many GOP influencers are pushing. There is also their brand of Christianity, which promotes racial animosity, hatred of Democrats, intolerance and would subvert our Constitution to create a theocracy.

:{:{}:

Consider Jenna Ellis, one of Trump's television lawyers who was paid at least $173,900 by his campaign. Ellis has met with GOP leaders in several states making fact-free claims that Trump won in November.

:{:{}:

Ellis has a long and well-documented history of just making self-aggrandizing claims. She has a checkered career and her accomplishments are negligible, but Trump got one look at her on television and was enchanted.

Some principled Republicans see no future in a party swaddled in craziness. On Monday Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, a conservative with a level head, announced that he won't seek a third term in 2022 because of what he called partisan gridlock.

While it's true that compromise is rare on Capitol Hill, intransigence traces back to anti-taxer Grover Norquist declaring, "Bipartisanship is just another name for date rape" and Trump repeatedly retweeting QAnon-supporting craziness.

Like Flake, a Libertarian whose family founded Arizona, Portman would face a primary challenge from the crazy wing of the GOP if he seeks third term.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

How we know the GOP really is the party of QAnon now - Alternet.org ›

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/qanon-and-evangelicals-republicans-baptized-in-crazy/

no twt lnx

QAnon and evangelicals: Republicans baptized in crazy

QAnon Shaman is admitting he was 'duped' by Trump — and blaming him for inflaming the Capitol attack

Meaghan Ellis

David Cay Johnston January 29, 2021

Donald Trump is out, but parts of the Republican Party warmly embrace his dark legacy of white supremacy, the crazy QAnon conspiracy and civil war wrapped in faux Christianity.

Like Trump, these fake Christians reject turning the other cheek in favor of threatening or promoting violence.

:{:{}:

Readers who have found such material, please send links via our DCReport Tipline.

Here are some of the ways that Republican leaders reveal their affinity for the anti-democratic nature of Trumpism and QAnon, its attendant conspiracy theory:

In California, the Sacramento County Republican Party elected to its Central Committee a Proud Boys member who has advocated violence.

"Illegal immigrants should have their heads smashed into the concrete," a 2018 post by an antifascist group quotes Perrine as saying.

:{:{}:

Perrine didn't deny this call to violence, he only insisted that he's not a racist.

:{:{}:

He told the newspaper, "They can call me a Nazi all they want, and I know I have plenty of friends of all races that don't always agree with me, but they still love me.

:{:{}:

"The Proud Boys that I affiliate with are all working men, all married men, they all have good jobs, they all believe in God."

Only after The Bee reported this did some Republicans in the California capital come to their senses and demand Perrine's ouster.

Texas' GOP uses a QAnon conspiracy phrase—We Are The Storm—in its new logo.

Arizona GOP for Trump, Still

Texas GOP Twitter Page

"The Arizona Republican Party is still Trump country in all districts. Weak self-righteous sanctimonious Rs are on notice."

"Satan-Worshipping Pedophiles"

Arizona state Sen. David Farnsworth acknowledged last fall to the Arizona Mirror, a news website, that he believes the QAnon conspiracy theory but with a twist.

:{:{}:

Meanwhile, the FBI says QAnon is a domestic terror threat.

That's as crazy as QAnon.

Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, who riled up the Capitol mob, and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida also falsely blame the Capitol attack on antifascists.

Antifascist Nonsense

The FBI calls that nonsense, but you don't need law enforcement to know that the idea is ridiculous.

Witness this Inauguration Day tweet: "Will you be joining PBS in calling for internment and re-education camps also?"

Nothing in the news clips it tweeted came close to substantiating the tweet, nor did the full PBS report.

Building a Theocracy

:{:{}:

Like Flake, a Libertarian whose family founded Arizona, Portman would face a primary challenge from the crazy wing of the GOP if he seeks third term.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

How we know the GOP really is the party of QAnon now - Alternet.org ›

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oregon GOP offers ridiculous excuse for US Capitol attack

Meaghan Ellis

January 26, 2021

The Oregon Republican Party insists there is "growing evidence" to support their baseless opinion that the U.S. Capitol riot was a "false flag" operation.

According to The Guardian, the resolution, published

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schumer boosts HR 1 -> S1

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/voting-rights hunter kos

Republican attempts to undermine democracy are continuing.The party's crackpot wing may have failed in their plans to reinstall Donald Trump as president by simply nullifying the electoral votes of multiple Biden-won states, and a clumsy but still earnest assassination attempt against Trump's own vice president, among others, may have been thwarted by luck and a handful of law enforcement officers, but the central tenet of Republicanism's fascist push remains the same: Only government by Republican loyalists is legitimate, and only votes by the Republican base are legitimate votes.

After premising a nonviolent-turned-violent coup on false claims and hoaxes claiming unspecified and undiscovered "fraud" centered, according to them, primarily in cities with large nonwhite populations, we move on to the predictable next phase: a Republican redoubling of efforts to keep Americans from voting in the states that swung away from their party after four years of abject disaster.

The problem Republicans face, according to party leaders themselves, is that too many Democrats took advantage of vote by mail during a freaking deadly pandemic, compared to Republicans who were dissuaded from voting by mail by Republican leaders bent on pretending the deadly pandemic was a hoax. Now that the party is freed from having to pretend their concerns revolve around anything other than an attempt to cling to power despite shedding voters, they are saying so outright: "They've got to change the major parts of [voting rules] so that we at least have a shot at winning," burped a Georgia Republican elections official last week.

The plan, then: End absentee voting, pandemic or no pandemic. Either make it so onerous that most voters cannot stomach it (as with an Arizona lawmaker's proposal requiring absentee ballots to be notarized), or simply outlaw it except in narrow cases. Again, we're in the midst of a deadly pandemic. People are choosing to vote by mail so as to ... not die.

Georgia may turn out to be the epicenter of these new restrictions, if only because the state's Republicans have largely unfettered power to enact them. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has been trying to make amends with his party after refusing to end democracy outright in his state by suggesting that the state's vote-by-mail system be eliminated. It was originally adopted by Republicans as a way to boost Republican turnout, since Republican voters tend to be, ahem, older, but having the common rabble use the same laws to Not Die during a pandemic has infuriated party leaders, many of whom believe it to have caused Donald Trump's loss in the state.

But similar bills are being proposed or have already passed in Arizona, which intends to strip the vast majority of voters from its early voting lists; Kentucky, where Republicans are looking to strip the Democratic governor's authority to implement "emergency" election changes and instead give it to, well, themselves; Montana, where Republicans are looking to end same-day registration for no apparent reason other than, again, to screw with voters; and New Hampshire, looking to do the same.

With any luck, we will not still be in the midst of a pandemic emergency two years from now, or four, but what Republicans appear to have taken as the central lesson of emergency voting procedures during the last election is that vote by mail is inherently dangerous to Republicanism. States like Georgia, which have long relied on manipulations such as closing polling places in non-Republican counties while expanding them in Republican ones, saw those previous efforts rendered useless when voters could return their ballots by mail. Long lines at polling places due to understaffing? Also circumvented.

Voting by mail, in other words, short-circuits many of the party's most popular methods of minority disenfranchisement. It was fine as a means of boosting Republican turnout; now that it has turned into a more general-purpose tool, the party now believes it's got to go.

We'll be seeing a lot of this in the next two years. The Republican push toward fascism—the notion that only Republican rule is legitimate, and that votes against Republican power are inherently not—will continue with aggressive moves to sabotage American elections one way or another. Limiting who can vote has been the go-to method since Reconstruction, and with a Supreme Court majority now itching for excuses to undo whatever civil rights legislation they can, will now become the party's signature issue.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/state-gop

the attempted Republican coup against our democracy is not over. It is changing form, now that Joe Biden has been formally sworn in as the nation's new president, but not abating. State Republican parties, in particular, are continuing to aggressively embrace the hoaxes, conspiracy theories and cult notions justifying the attempted violent insurrection to reinstall Donald Trump as an illegitimate leader. They are also retaliating against those Republicans who refused to abet those efforts.

Long a extremist hub, the Arizona Republican Party has been moving the swiftest to dole out consequences to anti-fascist Republicans. The party voted yesterday to censure Cindy McCain, Gov. Doug Ducey and ex-Sen. Jeff Flake, while reelecting far-right crackpot Kelli Ward as their state party leader. (All three censured Arizonans attended Joe Biden's inauguration just days before in a show of support for our continuing democracy, which may or may not be coincidental.)

Ducey was condemned for his imposition of pandemic-battling restrictions, as the party continues its obsessions with anti-science, anti-book-learning contrarianism even as the pandemic death toll inches towards a half million souls.McCain, however, was called out not only for her insufficient Trump support but for supporting "globalist policies," a reference to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory supposing that global "elites" are working behind the scenes to undermine national identity. To her credit, McCain responded by telling her state party to pound sand.

Lurching farther rightward still, the Texas Republican Party encouraged its allies to travel to neo-Nazi friendly site Gab while identifying itself with a pro-"Q" conspiracy trope.

After 2016, there was an avalanche of punditry about what Democrats needed to do to rebuild their party — mainly, e… https://t.co/ARCdePG4jU

— Matt McDermott (@Matt McDermott)1611496999.0

"We are the STORM" is, if the symbolism did not give it away already, a Q-ism borrowed directly from the neo-Nazi movement. The "storm" refers to a violent revolution to murder the enemies of the far-right, from antifa to Democratic and social leaders to insufficiently pure neighbors, under the premise that those enemies are secretly murdering children to harvest their blood. Once again, it is the thinnest possible veneer on fringe-right anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that have animated neo-Nazi justifications for violence since before they were neo-.

Donald Trump may be gone, left to stew for the moment on his loss and whether he truly wants to form a new far-right party or simply blow it off and go golfing, but the party that chose him as its incompetent, dishonest, blustering, and criminal figurehead has, if anything, only solidified its embrace of fascist techniques and principles. They are redoubling their efforts to radicalize their base, battle truths with hoaxes and to further impede the ability of non-white, non-conservative Americans to cast votes at all.

That they are doing so even after stoking a genuine violent insurrection is not surprising; the intent of the hoaxes to begin with was to overturn the election by any means necessary through the promulgation of hoaxes intended to so inflame the base that the citizenry itself would rise up to demand it. It remains the intent now. Violence is not a side effect of these efforts, but a tool. They will use it when they can.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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talking to texas

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/wyoming-secession

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121 intercept

az gop c0-chair Urged Violence at the Capitol. The Mercers Spent $1.5 Million Supporting Her.

Matthew Cunningham-Cook

The billionaire Republican megadonors have funded numerous organizations now peddling baseless claims about the election.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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an 121

"We're in! Let's go, keep it moving, baby!" shouted Derrick Evans, a newly elected Republican member of West Virginia's House of Delegates, as he is seen pushing his way through the rotunda at the U.S. Capitol with a throng of violent Trump supporters in a video live-streamed on Facebook.

"Trump, Trump, Trump!" he chanted as attackers rushed the doors.

The video, deleted by Evans after circulating Twitter, shows him donning a helmet and military gear, shouting, "Derrick Evans is in the Capitol [...] Patriots inside, baby!"

Evans, 34, won his first term as a state lawmaker in November and was charged by the Department of Justice on Friday for illegally entering the Capitol. He is one of several elected Republican lawmakers across the country who have been identified as either participating in or aiding violent pro-Trump attacks on legislative bodies this week.

Virginiastate Sen. Amanda Chase, who describes herself as "Trump in heels," spoke at the rally that preceded the riot on Wednesday. She later praised the rioters and blamed the violence on "antifa or BLM agents of destruction," for which her Facebook account was suspended on Friday. After Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem posted photos of himself at Trump's rally, he continued to push a baseless conspiracy theory— that anti-fascist activists, not Trump supporters, broke into the Capitol — which had already been debunked by the Department of Justice.

Missouristate lawmaker Rep. Justin Hill skipped his own swearing-in ceremony to travel to Trump's coup, where he admits he sat back and watched as an angry mob descended on the U.S. Capitol.Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a retired military colonel who said he helped organize a bus ride to the demonstrations, posed for photos with former Republican state representative Rick Saccone, who served for 18 years in the U.S. Air Force.

"We're storming the Capitol!" Saccone said in a. "They broke down the gates!" he continued. "They're macing them up there. We're trying to run out all of the evil people and all the RINOs that have betrayed our president. We're going to run them out of their offices!"

oregon Republican Rep. Mike Nearman was caught on video opening a door to protestors who rushed into the state Capitol in Salem on Dec. 21. Some rioters then sprayed six law enforcement officers with a chemical substance and others violently attacked journalists.

In light of his actions, West Virginia officials are now calling for Evans' hasty prosecution and resignation.

The West Virginia Democratic Party declared in a statement, "[Evans] must be held accountable for participating in an act of insurrection against the United States government and risking the lives of lawmakers and Capitol police." The Party added, "The West Virginia Democratic Party calls for his immediate resignation from the House of Delegates and that he be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law." A Change.org petition, with over 50,000 signatories, has also called for Evans' immediate removal from office.

Roger Hanshaw, the speaker of the West Virginia's House of Delegates, said Evans will have to "answer to his constituents and colleagues regarding his involvement in what has occurred today."

Evans responded to sharp rebukes online by claiming that he did not participate in any violence or destruction of property, and defended his involvement in the riot as "an independent member of the media." He added, "I want to assure you all that I did not have any negative interactions with law enforcement."

Evans' attorney John H. Bryan told NBCthat his client "did nothing wrong." Bryan explained, "He was exercising his First Amendment rights to peacefully protest and film a historic and dynamic event [...] He engaged in no violence, no rioting, no destruction of property, and no illegal behavior."

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an 121

huh?

In a New Year's Eve tweet, the Republican party for Arizona's 28th legislative district encouraged its followers to "respect of all our elected Republicans living & deceased," adding, "Hostility will not grow the Party or win elections. Home to the most current & former elected officials we honor their service & memory. Civility matters."

But the state's main Republican party chapter wasn't having it.

In response, the Arizona Republican Party Twitter account commented, "As the sun sets on 2020, remember that we're never going back to the party of Romney, Flake, and McCain. The Republican Party is now, and forever will be, one for the working man and woman! God bless."

Republican Senators Mitt Romney of Utah, Jeff Flake and John McCain of Arizona were all known for their willingness to work with Democratic colleagues. But the Arizona GOP doesn't want the likes of those three, including McCain who was a former military prisoner of war who died of brain cancer in 2018.

During the 2008 presidential election, McCain won Arizona by 10 points. In the 2020 presidential election, Trump lost Arizona by 0.3 points. So much for civility!

Keep in mind, the Republican Senate has largely not passed any signature legislation during the Trump Administration, save a tax break for the wealthy and two decreasingly helpful COVID-19 stimulus bills. That is, the inability of Senate Republicans to work with Democratic colleagues has largely made the institution useless, not even advancing an infrastructure bill that most Americans support.

It's no surprise that the state party is taking this inflexible, hardline approach seeing as its top members had largely signed onto an absolutely bonkers and bogus lawsuit seeking to grant Vice President Mike Pence the ability to singlehandedly declare President Donald Trump as the winner of the 2020 elections even though Trump lost by over 7 million votes.

That case, which even Pence himself wanted thrown out, was duly thrown out by a Trump-appointed federal judge last night.

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an 1220

arizona Supreme Court delivers major blow to GOP chair Kelli Ward

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/qanon-2649643344/

alexh

reporter Ben Collins, in an article published by NBC News' website on December 22, takes a disturbing look at QAnon supporters who are yearning for President Donald Trump to impose a fascist military dictatorship and end liberal democracy in the United States.

President-elect Joe Biden enjoyed a decisive victory in the 2020 presidential election, winning 306 electoral votes and defeating Trump by over 7 million in the popular vote. But QAnon supporters view Democrats as their enemy and have been promoting the hashtag @CrossTheRubicon — which, in QAnon terminology, means imposing a military dictatorship. And QAnon supporters, Collins reports, are urging Trump to "cross the Rubicon" and become a full-fledged dictator.

"With Trump's days in office dwindling," Collins explains, "QAnon influencers have become increasingly restless and militant — urging him to #CrossTheRubicon, a reference to Julius Caesar's crossing the Rubicon River after the Roman Senate explicitly told him not to, effectively kickstarting the Roman Civil War and Caesar's dictatorship."

To understand why QAnon believes that Trump deserves to be a full-fledged dictator, one needs to know about their bizarre and outlandish conspiracy theories. QAnon believes that the United States' federal government, especially the Democratic Party, has been infiltrated by an international cabal of Satanists, child sex traffickers, pedophiles and cannibals and that Trump has been put in the White House to fight the cabal. "Q," according to QAnon, is an anonymous figure who is providing updates about Trump's battle.

Claiming, without evidence, that the election was stolen from Trump because of widespread voter fraud, some far-right Trump supporters have been urging the president to declare martial law in order to prevent Biden from being inaugurated on January 20, 2021 —including former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Atlanta-based attorney Lin Wood and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

"Flynn, a hero in the mythology of the QAnon conspiracy theory who once took a QAnon 'oath' on video, has said in appearances on the conservative media channel Newsmax that Trump should use the military to'rerun' the election," Collins observes.

QAnon terminology, Collins points out, is being used by some prominent Republicans. For example, Kelli Ward, who chairs the Arizona Republican Party, has used the #CrossTheRubicon hashtag. And attorney Sidney Powell, who has been working with Wood on election-related lawsuits, has used the QAnon hashtag #TheStormIsComing, which, Collins notes, is "a QAnon phrase that refers to the extrajudicial roundup of Democrats at the heart of the theory."

Mr. President @realDonaldTrump - we are with you in #Arizona. We are working every avenue to stop this coup & to st… https://t.co/CP7RNETBdk

— Dr. Kelli Ward (@Dr. Kelli Ward )1608429214.0

Michael Flynn's new attorney, Sidney Powell, has repeatedly retweeted major QAnon accounts, including one of the 3… https://t.co/0DGjSw3Wf0

— Alex Kaplan (@Alex Kaplan)1560371762.0

Sidney Powell was probably the most powerful person to have ever believed in deep, mystic, devout QAnonism. Her Twi… https://t.co/9KWYwHGxt1

— Ben Collins (@Ben Collins)1606090386.0

According to Collins, "Some QAnon followers believe Trump is left with no choice but to declare martial law — a belief based in part on a series of wildly false news articles that have claimed that Trump is in a secret, ongoing land war with China in parts of the U.S. A series of fake news articles, YouTube videos and tweets that went viral among QAnon acolytes last week led followers to believe Trump was conducting clandestine military operations on U.S. soil."

Ron Watkins, who formerly ran the QAnon hub 8kun, recently tweeted:

Will @realDonaldTrump #CrossTheRubicon? Spread the hashtag and show POTUS how you feel about it.

— Ron (@Ron)1608307687.0

Rep. Denver Riggleman, a Republican with libertarian leanings, has been warning about how dangerous QAnon is. The outgoing Virginia congressman, who will be replaced by far-right wingnut Rep.-elect Bob Goodin January, told NBC News, "I'm losing friends and family over a straight-up cult based on anti-Semitism, fantasy and just bizarre made-up tripe. It's an idiocracy based on a digital prophet."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/allen-west/

state gop in tx and az off da hook?

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

cody f

after the Supreme Court decisively shut down a lawsuit attempting to overturn the 2020 election, Texas GOP Chair Allen West issued a disturbing statement floating the idea of possible secession over the result.

The case was brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, though it was widely panned by legal experts. Some believed that Paxton, currently under investigation by the FBI, was using the lawsuit as a vehicle to win President Donald Trump's favor and obtain a presidential pardon. Despite the lack of merits, the president and his allies rallied behind the lawsuit, with Trump himself calling it "the big one" — apparently trying to distinguish it from the more than 50 additional failed election lawsuits filed on his behalf.

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