in the spirit of Jefferson Davis (part four)

 

 

Part four.

 

"Where ballots fail, bullets will prevail" was a favorite catch phrase of Right-wing, White Nationalist, and Terrorist Mentor Louis Beam, who was the great popularizer of the idea of “Leaderless Resistance,” itself a variation of “the idea and the deed” promoted by Left-leaning Anarchists in the late-19^th and early 20^th centuries. Leaderless Resistance is a key element of Terrorist tactics, inspiring others to very specific acts of violence even when you have no direct contact with them, because a command-and-control infrastructure is always at some risk of assault, but if the Command needs no direct Control, that risk is lessened. The Terrorist network of Dash (my preferred nomenclature for what most people prefer to call ISIS) operated under Military structures in those regions where they needed to capture and control territories, in places where mayhem alone was the goal, their tactics were using Social Media as a recruiting tool, and those who listened created their own maybe, with little resources, and less direction; they were an early fulfillment of Beam’s dream, though very likely, he doesn’t like them.

 

Beam is credited for bringing Right-leaning American Terrorism into the computer age in the 1980s, before the emergence of Social Media and when few of us even had email. He was tried for Seditious Conspiracy in 1987, but acquitted. In a lot of ways, he is the true father of the January 6^th, 2020, attempted Coup, though less had been heard of him since 2002, when he was accused of raping his two daughters (he wasn’t prosecuted).

In the USA, Voter turn-out had been declining since the 1960s, but starting increasing significantly in 2004, which saw a 60% turn-out, and 2016 saw only a modest slip, less than a percentage point; though such turn-outs are nothing to brag about, they were vast improvements over what had happened most Presidential Election years for decades prior.

 

2020 gave us shocking, just shy of 67% turn-out, and this was in the context of only 28% of the ballots cast were in-person and on Election Day itself. The mail-in ballots that Trump had been obsessively attacking made up 48% of the voice of the people during the largest turn-out in more than a century.

 

Trump lost, and did so definitely. Despite earning more votes than he had in 2016, the enormous voter turn-out had him lose the Popular Vote by a full 4%, and among the Electoral Votes, the ones that have legal consequence, Biden beat Trump by more than seventy.

 

Trump immediately started launching legal challenges to the counts in multiple states, because unlike the far closer 2000 and 2016 elections, he’d have to reverse several states results to retain his Presidency. More than 90 law suits were filed by his team (countless others were filed by other parties), and virtually all were thrown out. Significantly, the only winners very short-term wins, and were about technical issues, none of his fraud allegations survived even the most casual scrutiny because of a total lack of evidence. Several Judges appointed by Trump threw out his frivolous law suits. The SCOTUS, which he’d been allowed to stack, rejected his acolytes twice. People started quitting his legal team because the arguments they were required to present in open court were so absurd that their reputations within the community were at risk.

 

Still, on Election Night, things were still undecided. Trump was leading in the states that had declared, but among the undeclared states, Biden seemed to have a more-than-modest advantage, neither had gotten even close to the all-important threshold of 270 Electoral Votes. Despite this Trump declared victory, and insisted that the counting be stopped. Such things were not in his power, but if it had been, he would’ve been able to toss out the ballots of nearly half the USA because most states don’t permit the laborious counting of mail-ins until Election Day itself. He harped about alleged manipulation of the numbers, calling it “a major fraud on our nation.” Meanwhile, Biden declared, “It ain’t over till every vote is counted.”

 

Narratives of dead people were being counted, non-citizens were being counted, and Trump’s base, mostly rural, less educated, white, and male, were being made to disappear, propagated. One-after-another these charges were dismissed.

 

Detroit, Michigan, was a city that was clearly going to go to Biden, was in a state that otherwise was leaning towards Trump, but Detroit’s population was large enough to, usually, guarantee Biden would capture all of the State’s 16 electoral votes. Devaluing Detroit’s population, and other fictional scandals across the rest of the state, were essential to Trump’s futile post-Election Day strategies. Key in this was Michigan had a whopping three million mail-in ballots which, by law, couldn’t be counted until Election Day; that’s three million out of almost five and a half million votes cast. Only Election Night, Trump had a narrow lead, but that lead meant nothing, and that’s why he needed to stop the count.

 

This triggered a tsunami of evidence-free mail-in ballot fraud claims; the exaggeration of a clerical error in a small, rural district, blown-up into evidence of nation-wide manipulation of software that was purchased by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion Voting Systems was falsely claimed to be in cahoots with an already long-dead, Central American Socialist Dictator (a Dictator who won free-and-fair elections for President of Venezuela three times before he died in 2002, Hugo Chavez may not have deserved he’s people’s love, but there’s little denying he had it.)

 

There was aggressive recruiting of Trump supporters to gather at the TCF Center in Detroit, where the absentee ballots were being counted, some were inside as Poll Watchers, many more were protesting outside, banging on the windows, chanting, “Stop the vote.”

 

Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee Chairwoman, was on the outside, and told the press, "The American people need to have confidence in our elections … Right now, we don't have that because across the country Democrat officials are shutting down transparency, especially here in the state of Michigan."

 

But on the inside, a different story was reported. Mohamed Qasim, a Democratic Poll Watcher who reported Republican Poll Watchers were present in the count area and using every opportunity they had to slow down the ballot counting process. “There was an instance where they weren’t abiding by the rules, they were talking directly to the poll workers which they weren’t allowed to. So, all this nonsense saying they weren’t allowed in, that wasn’t true.”

 

Another Democratic Poll Watcher, Heather Mourer, reported, “We started hearing the GOP challengers come around and instruct each other to stand at the table to challenge every single military vote that came through and just challenge everyone individually to stop every single one. Don’t let them be counted.” 

 

This would drag out for days, and in some parts of the country, for weeks. Trump would keep Tweeting false claims, and each would trigger an enraged reaction from his base. When a single Board of Country Canvassers in Michigan voted not to certify their election results Trump announced, "Wow! Michigan just refused to certify the election results! Having courage is a beautiful thing. The USA stands proud!" Well, one local Board isn’t the same thing as the whole state of Michigan, and those same electors reversed decision even before that meeting was over. When the larger Board of State Canvassers held their meeting a week later, they did certify Biden’s win.

 

After numerous law-suits were thrown out of both State and Federal court, Michigan’s the Republican-controlled State Legislature began a series of oversight hearings into alleged "irregularities." Many of their witnesses were testifying based on affidavits that had already been tossed out of court. Errors were found for sure, but as former Director of Elections, Chris Thomas, whose long tenure included both Democratic and Republican Secretaries of State, explained under oath, “Few elections are perfect. There are mistakes for sure. However, it is an unreasonable leap to equate mistakes with fraud. Quite simply fraud is not a mere mistake. Fraud requires intent."

 

State Representee Cynthia Johnson, a Democrat from Detroit, asked why the witnesses making allegations of serious criminal misconduct weren't testifying under oath and why there were no Democratic election workers invited to testify. She pressed the Republican Committee Chair, "The world is watching us right now," but then was gaveled down for being out of order before getting answers to her questions. After the meeting, she started receiving death threats. When she posted a Facebook video urging her supporters to "Do right. Be in order. Make them pay." Because of these statements, Johnson was stripped of her committee assignments by Republican leadership, claiming her statements constituted threats of violence.

 

Eventually State Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, a Republican, had to admit, "Our investigation, which has been very intense, discovered none, none of the allegations and accusations against Dominion [are] true."

 

Republican Public Relations Consultant John Sellek had initially supported the hearings, then soured on them. He blamed Trump’s Personal Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, who came in from out-of-state and dominated the proceedings. "Giuliani and his team put on an embarrassing show that ultimately exposed the clear lack of evidence of voter fraud and likely backfired with somewhat-questioning voters who then saw the entire thing turned into a skit on Saturday Night Live.”

 

During this time, Trump promoted three separate events in Washington DC between Election Day and the Certification of the Electoral Votes on January 6^th 2021, (the third, of course, proved to be a Coup attempt. Every form of Social Media was employed, and multiple dozens of groups, connected only by their belief in Trump’s lies, advertised, organized, and provided logistics. The rhetoric was increasingly inflammatory, names and addresses of alleged “traitors” (usually Government employees who had some role in the mechanics of the election) were distributed, death threats became increasingly common, violence was encouraged, and the phrase “Civil War” was bandied about a lot.

 

Former Trump White House Strategist Steve Bannon had to resign in disgrace in 2018, but remained active in Trump-related causes. In August 2020 he’d be arrested when it was exposed that his pro-Trump not-for-profit “We Build the Wall” was a fraud and money-laundering scheme (in 2021 Trump would pardon Bannon even before Bannon went to trail). During the first week of November he was permanently banned from some Social Media because he made terrorist threats. “I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats.” The main target of his ire on that date was National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

 

Jumping back to the earlier-mentioned battleground state of Pennsylvania, on November 6^th, Police in Philadelphia arrested two pro-Trump Protestors from Virginia; they had received a tip that the men were heavily-armed and crossing state-lines and their way to the Convention Center, where some of the absentee ballots were being counted, to create mayhem. The car proved easy to spot because it was emblazoned with QAnon stickers. Sure enough, they were heavily armed with firearms they could not legally carry in the state of Pennsylvania, and some not even in their home state. One of them, Joshua Macias, the co-founder of Veterans for Trump, would be awaiting trial for these crimes when a video of him meeting with leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers Terrorist groups emerged, making his legal troubles that much deeper. Despite this, and his violating a bail directive to stay off Social Media, remains un-incarcerated as I write this.

 

Biden’s win was obvious by November 7^th, but Trump refused to concede. He continued to launch trivial law suits and make false statements. As the situation became uglier and more dangerous, even those Republicans who refused to get on Trump’s “Big Lie” bandwagon showed little interest in stopping the circus parade. Standing on the floor of the US Senate, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, "A few legal inquiries from the president do not exactly spell the end of the republic." Less than two months later, that would be ground-zero for the deadly attempted Coup that was perpetrated by those he was trying to placate.

 

On November 10^th, just before the first of the three big DC rallies, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, was interviewed by Alex Jones, and notorious Conspiracy Masturbater whom Trump was enormously fond of, actively promoted Trump’s Big Lie, but oddly was not found of the QAnon movement (professional jealousy?) Rhodes wanted Trump to invoke The Insurrection Act to overturn the election results. He also stated, “we have men already stationed outside D.C. as a nuclear option in case they attempt to remove the president illegally, we will step in and stop it,” these men would be “armed” and “prepared to go in, if the president calls us up.” He bragged that the Oath Keepers had been doing “recon” of DC for the past week. 

 

On November 12, Trump Tweeted regarding the rally on the 14^th, “Wow! Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal. Didn’t know about this, but I’ll be seeing them! #MAGA”

 

On November 13^th, Giuliani publicly humiliated himself at a press conference. He had planned to hold it outside the swanky Four Seasons Hotel, but his staffers didn’t know the Philadelphia area, and instead gave the press the address of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping company. Already off on the wrong foot, Giuliani aired grievances regarding Pennsylvania’s vote-counting process in a parking lot, buttressed by a crematorium and a dildo-store. One of the “witnesses” he presented as to having proof of wide-spread voter fraud soon proved to be a convicted sex offender. He claimed that Philadelphia had a “long history” of dead people casting ballots and specifically alleged that boxer Joe Frazier (who died in 2011) and actor Will Smith's father (who died in 2016) had cast ballots after they died; both claims were easily debunked. As it happens, the owner of the landscaping business was a Biden supporter, and mocked Giuliani in his next TV ad.

 

The first two DC rallies were called Million MAGA Marches, a reference to the Million Man March of 1995, organized by the indefensibly repugnant and racist Black Nationalist Louis Farrakhan (also a Trump hater). The 1995 rally was much larger than any of the pro-Trump events (between 400,000 and 850,000 attended Farrakhan’s march) and was without any violence, while each progressive pro-Trump event was bloodier than the one before. This might suggest that the repulsive Farrakhan represented a more honest patriotism than a sitting President, and Idea that I personally find terrifying.

 

Regarding the 14th, the Washington Post reported, “While much of the day unfolded peacefully, brief but intense clashes erupted throughout. Activists spewed profanity and shouted threats, threw punches and launched bottles. On both sides, people were bloodied, and at least 20 were arrested, including four whose allegiances remain unknown on gun charges. The chaos also left two officers injured.”

 

And Trump took to Social Media to praised his supports for their violence against counter-demonstrators. “Antifa SCUM ran to the hills today…DC Police get going - do you job and don’t hold back!”

 

The next day, the 15^th, Trump lost a recount in Georgia (before this was over, he’d lose dozens of recounts), and responded by Tweeting that it was “a scam, means nothing.” He echoed Celebrity Attorney and Conspiracy Masturbater Lin Wood by making false claims about “fraudulent signatures.” Wood not only believed Trump won Georgia, but had done so be a patently-impossible 70% landslide.

 

At this point, Georgia was the hotspot. Though overturning the election in Georgia would help, it would not win Trump’s case. But there was a second issue, overturned the election would give the Republicans back the Senate, important to the party even if they remained stuck with Biden (more on that later). Alex Jones directed his followers, nation-wide, to travel there the day after Trump lost the recount, and surround Governor Kemp’s mansion. Among the speakers was prominent White Nationalist Nicholas Fuentes. Trump would praise these protestors, “The proof pouring in is undeniable. Many more votes than needed. This was a LANDSLIDE!” Trump writes.

 

Chris Krebs had been Director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and was specifically tasked to the response to Election-related misinformation. Though he’d been a rising star in Federal Law Enforcement throughout the Trump Administration, his CISA job put him in direct conflict with his boss, because he was forced to contradict Trump’s Big Lie. On November 17, Krebs Tweeted that "59 election security experts all agree, 'in every case of which we are aware, these claims (of fraud) either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.'”

 

Trump fired him via Tweet.

 

By November 19^th, Giuliani testified in court that he and his team weren’t alleging fraud, a strange position to take indeed given everything they had so-far said, but a position he needed to take to avoid being punished for lying in court (ultimately, he was disciplined anyway). Minutes later, away from the Judges and in front of the Press, he said the complete opposite. "I know crimes. I can smell them. You don't have to smell this one. I can prove it to you 18 different ways." As he made these outrageous claims, hair-dye appeared to pour down his sweaty face.

 

On the 21^st there was a pro-Trump protest at the Pennsylvania Capitol. Anti-Government Militia groups involved in the march openly violated local gun laws.

 

On the 30^th, Trump campaign lawyer Joe DiGenova appeared on Newsmax TV and said Krebs, “should be drawn and quartered. He should be taken out at dawn and shot.”