What I feared would be in place for the 2020 elections may be ready to go in 2022, armed citizens enforcing the “Election Integrity” measures enacted in response to a sore loser’s repeated lies about election fraud.  The sore loser had Bagpiper Bill Barr, in the lead up to 2020, making repeated claims about the “obvious” potential for massive voter fraud, from mail-in and drop-box voting, before Barr told the sore loser, privately, amid dozens of voting fraud cases dismissed for lack of evidence, that DOJ investigations found no fraud anywhere on a scale that would have changed any election.  

The thing I worried about tin 2020 was intimidation of voters by armed goons at polling places and everywhere else.  It didn’t happen on a wide scale, thankfully, but these assholes have had two years to work out the kink in that plan of organizing an army of MAGA “poll watchers,” the army of armed loyalists MAGA man had called for before the 2020 election.   Here’s Heather Cox Richardson from last night’s Letter to an American:

Over the weekend, the Maricopa County Elections Department announced that two people, both armed and dressed in tactical gear, stationed themselves near a ballot drop box in Mesa, Arizona. They left when law enforcement officers arrived. At least two voters later filed complaints of voter intimidation, both complaining that they were filmed dropping off ballots. One complained of being accused of “being a mule,” a reference to people who are allegedly paid to gather ballots and stuff drop boxes for Democratic candidates.

Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and Recorder Stephen Richer issued a statement: “We are deeply concerned about the safety of individuals who are exercising their constitutional right to vote and who are lawfully taking their early ballot to a drop box…. [V]igilantes outside Maricopa County’s drop boxes are not increasing election integrity. Instead they are leading to voter intimidation complaints.”

She then goes on to describe the Redeemers, violent racist motherfuckers in the former Confederacy who employed terrorism to rescue endangered White Women from the ravages of “Negro Rule”.   It started with the Ku Klux Klan, who killed an estimated 1,000 southerners before the 1868 election to ensure their cherished way of life would not be changed by voters, or based on the victors’ dictates after an unfairly won war.   The terrorism of the Klan was not enough to ensure the prewar status quo, rich whites organized to make sure to preach loudly, so that any changes would be rejected by the populace. They’d win if all their folks were riled up to go vote and they made it hard for the wrong people to vote.  They used now familiar MAGA arguments and displays to motivate their aggrieved base to vote their little hearts out.  Heather:

Black voting, they insisted, was “Socialism in South Carolina.”

In 1876, “Redeemers” set out to put an end to the southern governments that were elected in systems that allowed Black men to vote. “Rifle clubs” held contests outside Republican political rallies, “Red Shirts” marched with their guns in parades.

Their intimidation worked. Democrats took over the South and created a one-party system that lasted virtually unbroken until 1965. Without the oversight that a healthy multiparty system provides, southern governments became the corrupt tools of a few wealthy men, and the rest of the population fell into a poverty from which it could not escape until the federal government began to invest in the region in the 1930s.

The great triumph of Movement Conservatives in the 1980s was to convince Republican voters to ditch the ideology of their founding and instead embrace the ideology of the old Confederacy.

After World War II, the vast majority of Americans in both parties agreed that the government should protect equality before the law and promote equal access to resources. That system gave us highways, business regulation, world-class universities, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, clean air and water, labor protections, and a narrowing gap between rich and poor.

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/october-23-2022?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

The former Confederacy, in many ways, and certainly in every way for Blacks, was run like a fascist state, in many cases also like a feudal state, ruled by a few wealthy white employers who made the law for everyone.  Heather then describes the effort, accelerated by the actor Ronald Reagan’s administration (1980), but starting right after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruled segregation in public schools illegal (and started the rise of private white schools, school vouchers, Betsey DeVos, etc), to return America to the good old days of the former Confederacy in the south, where one party ruled unmolested, making laws to ensure its one-party rule in perpetuity.   Making the Confederacy Great Again.

To paraphrase a giant, stinking, organge pile of scats:  We have to fight like hell, because if we don’t fight like hell, we’re not going to have a sometimes successful experiment in democracy anymore.

Friends have long chided me for saying the rabid, lying, authoritarian fact-deniers of the current Republican party are Nazis.  “Everything reminds you of Hitler!  Everyone’s a Nazi to you,” they often say.   Well, not everything.   But every lying sociopath who mobilizes the visceral hatreds of millions for his own self-serving ends, and is indifferent to mass suffering and countless deaths, tends to remind me of old Herr Hitler.  Every faithful follower of a lying sociopath, while also a victim of that leader, is a fucking Nazi.

I know a lot about Nazis, their motivations, techniques and ultimate aims, having studied them for years in class and in my reading.  Many of the top Nazis were very much like our Kevin McCarthy, Mitch, Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Perjury Taylor Green, Clarence and Ginni Thomas, people without any real core beliefs about anything but power.  Power is an end to itself to ambitious people and as Robert Caro pointed out in his excellent essay on power (sadly available only through Bezos’s paid service…) you can judge what a person believed the whole time they were climbing to power (Caro says “cloiming” in his  wonderful NY accent) by what they do once they have it.   

Like, in the case of our radicalized, lockstep Republicans, shutting down a government they controlled to pressure the country into submitting to something the vast majority didn’t want.   Like repeating angry, divisive lies disproved over and over again to mobilize the rage of their aggrieved base.  Like pointing a loaded gun at the Capitol and pulling the trigger to prevent the peaceful transition of power.   Like many ugly things they have shown no hesitation whatsoever to do.  Amid the silence of the Republican “moderates”, as afraid to speak the truth as the many in government who are already hounded by literal lynch mobs, who live in fear of stochastic, lone wolf terrorism from people goaded to deadly violence by insane lies spread by our own home grown white nationalist reality TV avatar of totalitarianism and those who march behind him.

Let’s just recap the latest united stand these Nazi motherfuckers continue to take behind anything that will hurt the Democrats chances, based on their actual successes, of keeping the House and gaining an actual, useable majority in the Senate.  As Jared’s pal MBS in Saudi Arabia squeezes the world oil supply to drive up inflation and hurt that communist dupe Biden and his radical socialist party in the approaching election.

Fucking F POTUS has, not surprisingly, continued to lie about the documents he stole from the government when he was dragged kicking and sulking from the White House.   He lied over and over, as he did to Mueller, about cooperating with the government.  Recall that his new AG Bagpiper Barr emphasized on live TV that his boy had cooperated fully with Mueller’s investigation, although Trump did not cooperate with the fake witch hunt at all, in fact, only obstructed it.  As to that obstruction, Mueller wrote that while he could not charge Trumpie while in office, he also could not exonerate him for obstructing his investigation.  It was, according to Eagle Scout Mueller, a matter for Congress, the DOJ and the courts, once POTUS was F POTUS.  About those stolen documents:

We were cooperating fully.  We didn’t lie, we never lied, we never lie.  The DOJ lies, to help Biden. We turned over everything.  They planted shit.  I declassified the shit before they could plant it.  I’m the rubber you’re the glue, scumbag.  We did nothing wrong.  We own those papers, and even if we don’t, we still do.  No backsies.  Finders keepers, losers weepers.  Executive Privilege, Attorney/Client Privilege, White Wealth Delay Tactic Privilege, Fuck your Mother Privilege.  Muhammed Bin Salman, one of the best people, a reformer, a visionary, gave Jared two billion as a small downpayment on what some of my documents are worth to him.   Putin, fine man, also, great customer.  What, am I not supposed to make money?  Jared and Ivanka made over $600,000,000 while public servants on the government payroll.  What am I, chopped liver?  I get to make money, too.   I’ve got mad bills to pay.

Anyone who thinks F POTUS would not sell top secret documents, has not already monetized those valuable papers he stole going on two years ago, probably also believes there are two parties who both do good things and bad things, who are roughly equivalent and equally corrupted by the big money donors.  Leaving the corrupting big money donors aside (and the legal unlimited use of dark money was a GOP initiative and great game-changing achievement that gave us MAGA), one party is trying its best to serve the needs of the vast majority of Americans.  The other is, I’m sad to say, the Nazi party, its only platform regaining unchallengeable power, behind an infallible, though often irrational, leader.  It is that stark, boys and girls.

The argument against the increasingly clear MAGA = Nazi argument:  Trump built not one single death camp!  Only one person that we know of was executed by federal agents who shot him on sight and claimed they were there to arrest him and that he resisted (that one unarmed antifa guy outside of Portland)!   Trump and Barr only executed one severely mentally ill prisoner on federal death row, and the bitch deserved it, no matter how extensive her daily cocktail of psychoactive drugs!  His government passed no law directly against the fucking so-called minorities, unless you consider the many new, restrictive voting laws in states where MAGA controls the legislatures.  There is no plan to invalidate future elections, unless you consider all the purity-tested MAGA election deniers who are campaigning on the promise to invalidate, as fraudulent, any election won by a non MAGA candidate.  Unless you consider the 6-3 MAGA Supreme Court poised to rule on a carefully constructed case designed to give a fig leaf of “originalism” to the pulled-out-of-somebody’s-ass “theory” of the Independent State Legislature, the most powerful sovereign bodies in America, whose actions are unreviewable by any court anywhere once SCOTUS bangs its 6-3 gavel.

Hitler had more time to make his mark on history.  It took him over a year in power before The Night of the Long Knives when he executed untrusted allies and hated enemies all over Germany.  It took five years before Kristalnacht, the Nazis’ first organized nationwide pogrom against Jews.  It was only after that he began secretly gassing “useless eaters” whose “lives were unworthy of life” in mental hospitals.  Six, almost seven years before he began the war of national self-defense the Jews forced him to wage to rescue the Aryans from destruction.   He hired violent criminals to oversee his war against partisans and Jews in countries he overran, and they did atrocious things, but it was eight long years before he started the mechanized mass murder machine in earnest and initiated that crowning Nazi achievement — historically efficient genocide.

So, F POTUS simply has not had time, in just one term, to make this country into Charles Koch’s wet dream (Koch’s dad built the oil refinery that produced the high octane fuel for the Nazi luftwaffe).   A country where the super rich can do whatever they want, in the name of liberty and freedom from majoritarian tyranny and government coercion, while everyone else is forced to do whatever they can to stay alive, subject to the whims of the best among us, guys like Koch, Murdoch, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, et al.   Not all Nazis, perhaps, but the next best thing — the biggest beneficiaries of a Nazi social structure.  In that society, if you are not one of the condemned classes, you go along to get along, privileges protected as long as you play ball, take your windfall profits and stay quiet on “social issues”.  It’s been that way since the first tough guy imposed his will on a tribe of half apes thousands of years ago.  It was that way during all twelve years of the Thousand Year Reich.

Vote like your democracy depends on it, because it does.   I’m writing postcards to “swing voters” in Pennsylvania.  Contact tinicumtogether@gmail.com to get some postcards and a succinct script to write on ’em.  Take action, no matter how small it may seem, elections can turn on very few votes in a given precinct or district.   Any good history of the Nazi era will convince you that we are way, way too close to it happening here to fall into enervated depression about it.  Take action, friends.   Otherwise, see you at one of the MAGA camps, coming soon to an anarchist jurisdiction near you, if the Nazis take over.