Normally, the task of state electors is perfunctory, their work in December going unnoticed by the average citizen, who tends to tune out between Election Day and the inauguration in January. But Trump’s relentless effort to overturn his loss have thrust these anonymous functionaries into the spotlight and made them targets of the harassment that other election officials—from Democrats like Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to Republicans like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—have faced for carrying out their duties against Trump’s wishes.
In swing states, electors are receiving police escorts to the locations where they’ll be casting ballots. In Arizona and Pennsylvania, that location has been kept secret, even from the electors themselves, until Monday, as a safeguard against threats. And in Michigan, where electors will cast their ballots at the State Capitol, “credible threats of violence” have shut down state legislative offices. “This is some scary stuff, man,” Khary Penebaker, a Democratic elector from Wisconsin, told the New York Times. “This is not what America is supposed to be like.”
I’m going to guess that none of these threats are being covered in the right-wing news, including Fox.
After the Supreme Court once again declined to hear one of the frivolous lawsuits filed on his behalf, Trump supporters took to the streets in Washington, D.C., vandalizing Black churches, instigating street fights, and even threatening violence against the president-elect. “Joe Biden will be removed,” the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said at one point, “one way or another.” As the nation’s simmering political tensions started to boil (four people were stabbed in D.C. Saturday as the Proud Boys turned the demonstration into a riot; a right-wing protester allegedly shot a counter-protester at a separate demonstration in Washington state), Trump kept turning up the heat. On Sunday, he threatened that electors would be charged with a “severely punishable crime” if they made the results official, and at one point suggested that he will sandbag his own party in the Georgia runoff race next month if Governor Brian Kemp doesn’t give him his way.
The Proud Boys vandalized several historic Black churches over the weekend. If left-wing protesters had damaged church property, none of us would hear the end of it for months. But if right-wingers destroy church property, that’s okay. That’s because righties presume religion belongs to them, just like “patriotism” and “freedom” belongs to them, and the flag belongs to them. Violence, though, belongs to lefties. Or else it seems violence only counts as violence when lefties do it.
Trump and his allies, though, remain undeterred. The president said after his most recent Supreme Court humiliation that “we have just begun to fight.” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, one of 126 Republicans who formally endorsed the lawsuit seeking to disenfranchise millions of Americans, suggested in a Fox News interview Sunday that he still wouldn’t recognize Biden’s win after the Electoral College vote. And Trump adviser Stephen Miller told Fox & Friends Monday that an “alternate slate of electors from the contested states” would be voting at the same time as the actual electors, and would send those bogus results to Congress to help fuel the next stage of the challenge there. This is all corrosive to democracy, as even a majority in a recent Fox News poll recognized. But if the temperature continues to rise, so too will the risk of things boiling over into something even more dangerous.
Overturning the election in Congress requires several steps, including a majority vote of both houses, which ain’t gonna happen.
See also Assessing the threat from America’s far right at The Economist.
I guess maybe there's another Earth on the opposite side of our orbit around the Sun, so we can't see it. A mirror-Earth, with a mirror-America.
Or at least is seems that way, since America's Reich-Wingers act as if they're on it.
And apparently there, science, math, facts, and logic are just libtard plots to mess with good American white Christian's minds.
And there, in mirror-America, tRUMP won in an obvious landslide!
Everybody who counts in mirror-America is a white Christian, there's oil a-plenty, there's no global warming, and the NY Jets don't suck! And the women there are silent and supportive, the children all behave, and minorities are complacent and compliant, and are happy to do anything their "Massa's" ask or demand – OR ELSE!
Since our KKKonservatives are idiots who don't follow science or astronomy, I suggest we tell them that we have just discovered this KKKonservative mirror-America, and we can send them there – FOR FREE!!!
And so, when they sign-up, we load them into Musk's rockets and shoot them into space. We'll tell them they have to stay in the same spot in space for 6 months, until the mirror-Earth comes to them, and then they can land!!!
After those 6 months, and MORE, they'll be happy to land on anything!
So when we come around after another 6 months, they'll be more than happy to land back here! And then we tell them they'd better behave, or else we'll send them to Mars.
Shhhhh… Don't spill the beans.
Slightly OT:
Over the weekend, I realized just how badly our Democratic Senators and House members handle messaging: THEY BLOODY SUCKSUCKSUCK AT IT!!!!!
When asked about money for the people adversly affected by this tRUMP Plague, here's what I heard (from Dem Senators and House members THEMSELVES): "Well, Congress has to act."
REALLY? FUKKKIN' REALLY?!?!?!?!?
Why not say, "Well, It's Moscow Mitch McConnell and RepubliKKKLANS in the Senate holding-up desperately needed help!
Back in the Spring, Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats in the House passed 'The Heroes Act,' giving another stimulus check to everyone. And extended unemployment money, and money for rent, mortgages, utilities, and towns, cities, and state governments – FUNDING POLICE, fire departments, schools, etc… Blah-blah-blah…
SO CALL MOSCOW MITCH AND YOUR REPUBLIKKKLAN SENATORS TO STOP TRYING TO OVERTHROW THE ANMERICAN GOVDRNMENT, AND GET TO WORK DOING THEIR JOBS: HELPING AMERICANS. YOU NEED HELP?!? CALL THEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
"Congress has to act" my fat ass!
Retake Politics 101 you Democratic eedjitz!!!
I remember Kent State. For those of you who don't, National Guard troops had been called out because of antiwar protests at the university. They opened fire into a quad crowded with students, killing four. The victims seemed to have been cut down indiscriminately. The reaction was polarized – some were driven to defend the troops as "self-defense" while the antiwar movement decried it as overt fascism. None of the Nixon loyalists were moved to criticize anyone for the massacre. The left was just outraged.
Here's the point – people in the middle were moved. My Republican parents were horrified – unarmed college kids gunned down. It was a watershed moment that changed the direction of a nation divided about the war. Enough was finally enough. Two years later, the Paris Peace Accords ended the US involvement. I was offshore in 1975 when the last US troops were evacuated from Saigon.
The Proud Boys aren't going to fade away – they live in the fantasy that Charles Manson and Dylann Roof lived. Both massacres were intended to provoke a race war. It's on the way and the attacks will be racial and bloody. This isn't a prediction disconnected from the post. The Proud Boys in DC targetted black churches and BLM. (I don't think I'm paranoid, but if I was, I wouldn't know it. You decide.)
After Kent State, a lot of conservatives fervently opposed to communism effectively said, "Screw the war in Vietnam." The slaughter of Americans by Americans was a price too high. This might be the moment the GOP divorces itself from the sore losers in the Trump cult. It's a split that is inevitable and the party would like to claim the high moral ground, silly as that sounds after the treasonous events of the last month.
If it happens, BLM needs white folks to turn out in HUGE numbers and we all have to stand for non-violence or it won't be so easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys. That's not to say black neighborhoods should not defend themselves against a KKK attack (even if they call themselves the Proud Boys.) But we should march in large numbers unarmed and of all races – it will be the job of the police to guard us.
What I remember after Kent State was that all of the older folks called the students dirty hippies who deserved to be shot. That includes the one young woman who had been killed while changing classes.
OT, I watched Joe Biden's speech, after the Electoral College voted (saw a recording of it on MSNBC). He's a good speaker. It finally hit home that we elected our first woman vice president, and someone not white. It's been a LONG time since I've felt good about this country.
Looking forward to see other women move forward, AOC and Stacey Abrams