All hands on deck moment

If you think this is a moment to stand on the side, cover your ears and eyes and let heroes save you, I’m here to tell you that nobody is coming to save you. The only heroes who can save us are us. We are in an all hands on deck moment here in the free world. Whatever you personally can do in this fight, you need to do. The fight is against a determined, well-funded, tightly organized movement that believes destruction of all enemies is the will of God Almighty.

This moment is not the same as any other historical moment, except perhaps the eve of a cataclysm like World War Two. The overpopulation of the planet, the rising heat, rising oceans, mass extinction, disappearing water, historically savage inequality, restless armies of enraged grievants serving the will of our most psychopathic citizens, authoritarians ruling most of the planet — a recipe for mass murder if there ever was one.

It’s unpleasant to be reminded that a group like the Nazis started in a room, arguing among themselves, until the proper organizational and promotional geniuses arrived. Within a decade you had a potent, violent political force, organized under a rousing banner, indomitably roiling the most civilized nation in Europe. Before the next decade was over you had an unrivaled military power, with a Nazi as the commander in chief, declaring its right to unlimited living space. The rest, as they say, is history.

Once there is sufficient momentum for this kind of movement of true believers, and the voices of reason are silenced, this impulse to dominate the “weak” turns into an avalanche. People at one time merely supremely opportunistic, ambitious, competitive, greedy, superior become the defenders of death camps as necessary to the maintenance of the status quo, the protection of decency and godliness itself.

The Nazis didn’t open a series of death camps in their first year, or their fifth, or even their tenth. Opening mass killing centers is a process that marches step by step, inexorably, carried out by rabidly loyal partisans who ask no questions along the way and echo whatever the leader says, no matter how otherwise insane it might be.

This is what we are looking at right now, boys and girls. You can choose to ignore it, of course, the same way you can ignore history or any other cause and effect in your life. It may not be a wise choice, in the long run, or even in the short run, but it is certainly a popular one.

MAGA vs. majoritarian tyranny

Those few born “booted and spurred” to ride the backs of their inferiors (in that great phrase Jefferson stole from a Scottish patriot who said it before his execution) have always abhorred the tyranny of the majority. In recent times their well-paid political wordsmiths came up with the wonderfully arch “majoritarian tyranny”. You can’t have 98% of people deciding for everybody else.

John Roberts, Federalist Society member and dedicated corporatist (in private practice he was the genius who came up with the arbitration clause — severely limiting the legal rights of those harmed by corporations — that is now in virtually every contract corporations make with buyers) is a steadfast defender of anti-majoritarianism. Here’s one example, from the balls and strikes umpire’s tenure as chief justice of the only court in the world without an enforceable code of ethics:

In striking down enforcement of the Voting Rights Act (based on a demonstrable lie, but that’s for another time) the 5-4 Federalist Society conservative-libertarian majority overruled overwhelming bipartisan support, eh, majoritarian tyranny.

How overwhelming?

Reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, after massive deliberation and debate, passed 390-33 in the House.  The vote on the Senate, after a similarly rigorous process, was 98-0.  Republican president George W. Bush made a speech praising the importance of the Voting Rights Act to our democracy as he signed the reauthorization into law.  

Roberts, with Scalia (first faculty advisor to the Federalist Society), Thomas (most corrupt Supreme Court member in history, whose strong, independent wife was paid on the down low by the paymaster of the Federalist Society), Alito (whose strong, independent wife forced him to fly flags supporting the Trump insurrection), and Anthony Kennedy (who’d later retire in a deal allowing his former clerk Kavanaugh to take his place) made up the one vote majority that overruled the democratic will of majoritarian tyrants.

Sic semper tyrannis, motherfuckers.

Nonpartisan far-right doctor aspires to far-right opinion polling-backed nonpartisanship

Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative-libertarian Heritage Foundation, calls the aspirations of the far right “think tank” nonpartisan. Let’s take him at his word. He was interviewed on MSNBC the other day, about the Heritage Foundation’s autocratic Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise.

MSNBC: Is your organization going to accept the results of the 2024 presidential election?

Dr. Roberts: Yes, if there isn’t massive fraud like there was in 2020.

MSNBC: There was not massive fraud in 2020.

Dr. Roberts: Yes, there was massive fraud… we have an election fraud database that has documented that over years. By the way the Heritage Foundation has been concerned about election integrity for decades, not just about 2020. We’ve been documenting this problem for a very long time, and if, one of the…

MSNBC: I believe, according to the Heritage Foundation, sir, by your count, Heritage Foundation has done an investigation and according to your count there have been 1,513 proven instances of voter fraud across the United States since 1982. 1,513.

Dr. Roberts: They’re very hard to document, and the Democrat [sic] party is very good at fraud. The key thing here, which I think we would both agree on, is that we aspire at Heritage Foundation to seeing a poll after this election where every American believes their vote was counted. I care as deeply about someone on the political left, with whom I disagree, saying that they have confidence in the outcome of the election, it seems rather than turning this into a partisan conversation, which you do a good a job of at MSNBC, we might say we aspire to something more noble, which is that every American believes their vote counts.

Something more noble, specifically, Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft! (“the leader’s word is LAW”)

You can listen to Dr. Roberts giving it to the partisans at MSNBC here.

For more details on the Heritage Foundations “election integrity” efforts over the years, here’s a good digest, from September 2020.

Nonpartisan — a new alternative definition

If everything you say is based on passionately held feelings, and your goal is to persuade people of the absolute rightness of your provably wrongheaded positions, and you don’t mind being untruthful and resorting to tired tricks to avoid answering basic questions, you can give exactly the interview this “nonpartisan” MAGA spokesman for the Koch Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 did on MSNBC.  A masterclass in all that really.

Robert Reich explains what Project 2025 is, asking for support for Inequality Media so they can spread the word on this brazen blueprint for a “conservative-libertarian” dictatorship:

https://www.inequalitymedia.org/

Heather’s concise history of the roots of MAGA

Heather Cox Richardson, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Klan murders of three voting rights activists in Klan controlled Mississippi:

Those opposed to Black equality saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act as a call to arms. On July 16, two weeks after Johnson signed the bill and a little more than three weeks after Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner disappeared and while they were still missing, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater strode across the stage at the Republican National Convention to accept the party’s nomination for president. To thunderous applause, he told delegates that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The votes of the delegates from South Carolina, the state that launched the Civil War in defense of American slavery, were the ones that put his nomination over the top.

On August 4 the bodies of the missing men were found in the dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

It turned out that Deputy Sheriff Price, who had arrested Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, and his boss, Sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey, were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Price had alerted his fellow Klansman Edgar Ray Killen that he had the three men in custody, and Killen called the local Klan together to attack the men when they got out of jail. Then Price dropped the three civil rights workers into their hands. 

While the state of Mississippi would not prosecute, claiming insufficient evidence, in January 1965 a federal grand jury indicted 18 men for their participation in the murders. The Ku Klux Klan members, who were accustomed to running their states as they saw fit, did not believe they would be punished. An infamous photograph caught Price and Rainey laughing during a hearing after their federal arraignment on charges of conspiracy and violating the civil rights of the murdered men

Ultimately, a jury found seven of the defendants guilty. Killen walked free because in addition to being a Klan leader, he was also a Baptist minister, and a member of the jury would not convict a minister. Price was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison (he served four). Rainey, who was not at the murder scene, was found not guilty, but he lost his job and his marriage and blamed the FBI and the media for ruining his life.

Voters in the 1964 election backed Johnson’s vision of the country, rejecting Goldwater by a landslide. Ominously, though, Goldwater won his own state of Arizona and five states of the Deep South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. The Republican Party had begun to court the segregationist southern Democrats. 

In 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan spoke in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on August 3, sixteen years almost to the day after the bodies of the three men had been found.

“I believe in states’ rights,” he said. “I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”

source

43% of Americans voted by mail in 2020

43%

Why worry about a US Postmaster General/megadonor for one of the presidential candidates who has crippled mail delivery across the country?

In desperation, and madder than the overheated freaks in Trump’s war room, I wrote my congressmember today, sending a copy of my letter to the Postal board of governors:

My attached letter to the chair of the Election Mail Committee poses this question: what is the Election Mail Committee doing in relation to the nationwide slowdown in mail delivery in the months before a national election that appears likely to be decided by mere thousands of votes in a few states?

It is staggering to me, and depressing, that nobody in the government seems to be addressing this serious issue ahead of an election where unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud are embraced by a partisan official, Postmaster Louis Dejoy, in position to make sure millions of mail-in ballots (26.6 million mail in votes were cast nationwide in the 2020 primaries, 43% of all votes cast in the 2020 election were by mail — per US Census) are not received in time to be “fraudulently” counted.

Your help in bringing this issue forward – and fixing it in time for the upcoming election – will be greatly appreciated. It is impossible for me to understand why I seem to be the only Democrat with hair on fire about this obvious form of voter suppression. It can be applied surgically, pinpointed by zipcode, making it all the more pernicious.

Subtract the Atlanta-area totals from the Georgia state vote and you guarantee the man who lost the state by 11,779 votes in 2020 all of Georgia’s Electoral College votes. The math is horrific in a democracy where the Electoral College has the final say, no?

The GOP’s aggressive lie about massive voter fraud

Go to the Heritage Foundation’s website.  Alongside Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project, blueprint for an America based on the credo of the Thousand Year Reich (Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft — “the Führer’s word has the force of law”), you can see the database a far right crank named Hans von Spakovsky has been maintaining since the 1980s.  Here are my own calculations, based on the Koch’s own Hans von Spakovsky’s important work. 

If the relentless 0.00025% fraud rate seen since 1982 increases tenfold (to 25 ten thousandths of one percent), the tally in the 2024 election nationwide might feature literally dozens of fraudulent votes, possibly even triple digits!  This is why the GOP is hammering the fraudulent theme of MASSIVE ELECTION FRAUD in MAIL-IN VOTING, as Bill Barr publicly did for weeks before the 2020 election (before telling Trump, after he lost, that the fraud argument was bullshit).

Repeat a lie enough times and, in politics as in any family, it becomes the truth.

Nazi Logic

Main technique: remove the context needed for an informed discussion and you can win any argument among emotionally stirred up people.

Take a video clip of Joe Biden smiling and giving a thumbs up to a paratrooper who has just landed. Edit out the paratrooper. Now Biden is seemingly smiling, a little dementedly, and giving a thumbs up to the air, before his aide puts a hand on his back and leads him back to the group of G7 leaders. Sure makes the old man look dotty as hell, doesn’t it? Rupert Murdoch’s FOX thought so, so did the tens of millions who saw the edited footage.

Nazi logic, like the “logic” of anyone who can never be wrong no matter what (and will kill you to prove it), is absolute.  Make an assertion, stick to it, come hell, high water or the best arguments of entire associations of learned experts (Jews, üntermenschen, cucks, liars, Muslims, feminazis, Jesuits, etc.). Repeat it over and over, bash the face of any enemy who tries to refute it using dirty tricks like evidence and common sense (especially if these villains are Jews, üntermenschen, cucks, liars, Muslims, feminazis, Jesuits, etc.).

Take my man Steven Gow Calabresi, co-founder and chairman of the board of directors of the venerated “conservative-libertarian” judicial fraternity The Federalist Society.   Check out his position on Alito’s and Thomas’s clear violation of the federal statute requiring Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from any case in which the justice’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.

The petulant fifth-grader tone of this esteemed legal scholar’s writing puts me in mind of our favorite seething private schooler, Boof Kavanaugh:

NY Times on renowned American legal scholar Steven Gow Calabresi.

Mail-in voter fraud 0.00025%

From my probably futile letter to the US Post Office Board of Governors:

Regardless of which party is actually favored or disadvantaged by the suppression of mail-in ballots, it is indisputably anti-democratic (not to mention unconstitutional) to suppress a citizen’s right to vote based on a public delivery service’s inability/refusal to fulfill its basic contract with people who pay for and rely on their services (see details about weeks’ delayed and undelivered certified mail on last page.)

From my probably futile e-message to the Senate Committee that oversees the Post Office:

subject: Letter to the US Postal Board of Governors

I’d like you to have a copy of the letter I sent to the board of one of the agencies your committee oversees.

During a nationwide disruption of mail service, as partisan chatter ramps up about massive mail-in voter fraud (which does seem to occur at a steady 0.00025%, according to the Heritage Foundation database) and the RNC begins bringing lawsuits to limit the counting of mailed ballots postmarked on time but received late, it is hard to understand how nobody with oversight is taking action to correct long, random, 
system-wide mail delays.  

In an election expected to be very close in the five or six states that decide every presidential contest, eliminating as many as a few thousand “late” votes can swing the election to one side or the other.  Deliveries from the new Atlanta mail processing center were 98% on-time in its first year, 2022.  Then the efficiency rate was corrected:  2023: 52%, 2024 YTD 72%.  

I would love to be in communication with your committee on this issue.  If there is anything else I can provide, or any answer you have to reassure me that steps are being taken to correct this systemic bug in time for an election untainted by this form of voter suppression, please have your office get in touch with me.

Yours in the fight to protect our experiment in democracy,

G. Gordon Liddy
(should I have used my real name?)