Get out and vote. Vote against American Nazism. It is a cliché because it always works this way, but first fascists come for those they deem helpless, poor, frightened women, and girls, and then political opponents, and then other enemy groups they have a vendetta against. In the end, if they haven’t gotten to you yet, they inevitably come for you.

I never had a strong feeling about Jake Tapper one way or the other. Tapper seemed reasonable enough, the few times I watched him opining on the news.

New leadership at CNN, formerly disparaged by the right as the “Clinton News Network,” determined to capture more centrist viewers with content more sensitive to the views of American Nazi types.

In the aftermath of the horrific assassination attempt at Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco, and in the stinking wake of new Twitter CEOs tweet claiming Pelosi’s husband was drunk and fighting with a male prostitute (tweet since taken down) Jake Tapper weighs in to remind CNN viewers that certainly not all political violence is restricted to the extreme right.

In fact, in 2017, Tapper intones, it was a left-winger who shot up a bunch of Congress people at a softball game. He then goes down a short list, a guy wanted to shoot Boof Kavanaugh. He includes on the short list the (right-wing, pro-Trump) punks recently convicted for their plot to kidnap and execute the Democratic governor of Michigan, and a presumably left wing attack on MAGA NY gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin to, eh, prove his point. Both sides are violent!

Apparently a highly paid shill like Tapper will read whatever is placed on his teleprompter. Fuck media pundits like Jake Tapper, who know better, but speak with the authority of paid celebrity product endorsers.

Listen for yourself to how fair and balanced CNN’s presentation of political violence is. No reason to mention that American intelligence (Homeland Security) and law enforcement (FBI) have rated the alarming rise of right-wing, white supremacist terrorism as the number one threat to our democracy.

Or, as Jake Tapper points out, political violence is never acceptable and does not belong to either party. Here’s 90 seconds of fair and balanced influencer Tapper, giving both sides, for his new boss at CNN.

Mehdi Hassan explains the weaponization, by America’s pugnacious Minoritarian party, once know as the Grand Old Party, of paying government debts already incurred. A government shutdown over the artificial “debt ceiling” was unthinkable until Charles Koch and friends’ unlimited, secret, tax deductible money and hundred tentacled political machine got enough traction in Congress and was amply amplified by dedicated right-wing media.

Put the “debt ceiling” right up there next to the sacred filibuster, something the sainted framers of the Jesus Christ-dictated Constitution never imagined in their wildest nightmares. But there it is, sacred and inviolable, ready and waiting for MAGA, to wield like Thor’s hammer as they unleash the Kraken that will destroy America’s credit rating and shake the global economy. A small price to pay for absolute power…

Give Mehdi a few minutes to explain, he does a great job.

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.