Denial.
Everything has become about denial. Covid denial. Mask Denial. Election denial. Reality and fact denial with crazed Qanon conspiracy theories. Nearly half of this nation refuses to believe the truth. They’ve grown cynical and jaded. Haughty. They think they know better than the “experts” who actually “know” things.
And it’s turning dangerous.
Over a week ago Georgia State Official Gabriel Sterling stated to Trump: “Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence…. someone’s going to get killed.”
A top election official in Georgia had strong words for President Trump and other top Republican leaders who have attacked Georgia's election system in recent weeks after reports of harassment and death threats against officials overseeing the state's recount.
"Someone's going to get hurt, someone's going to get shot, someone's going to get killed," Gabriel Sterling, with the secretary of state's office, said Tuesday afternoon in an emotional and forceful news conference. "It's not right."
Among other things, a Twitter thread accusing a young technician working on the recount of altering votes led to his identity being released and calls for him to be "hung for treason."
Meanwhile, caravans of horn-honking Trump supporters constantly parade past Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's private residence, and his wife has reportedly received sexually explicit threats. The president himself, who has falsely suggested he won Georgia's 16 electoral votes, has called on Republican Gov. Brian Kemp to overturn the election.
Now that Biden’s win has been certified in all 50 states we have a last-minute bonkers Hail Mary lawsuit from Texas AG Ken Paxton, who is under Federal Investigation for Bribery, to overturn the results in Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia which has been signed onto by 17 GOP AGs the crazy is just getting more cray cray.
Sterling's statement happened while the Georgia Secretary of State had to call out GOPers who won’t condemn the death threats issued against him.
Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensberger, a Republican, took aim at other Republicans for failing to condemn death threats he and his family have faced following the battleground state’s hand recount affirming President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory.
President Trump’s allies — which include Sens. David Perdue (R-GA), and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) — attempted to pressure Raffensperger into resigning amid Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. Raffensperger also accused Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) of demanding that he disregard all absentee ballots in counties where there was a high rate of signature-matching rejections.
In a Washington Post report published Saturday night, Raffensperger maintained that it’s his job as Georgia’s secretary of state to follow the law.
“People made wild accusations about the voting systems that we have in Georgia,” Raffensperger told the Post, referring to a Trump-touted bogus conspiracy theory alleging that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems were programmed to hand Biden more votes. “They were asking, ‘How do we get to 270? How do you get it to Congress so they can make a determination?’”
After telling the Post that he’s “not supposed to put my thumb on the Republican side,” the Georgia secretary of state argued that fellow Republicans are only harming themselves by feeding into unfounded allegations that are an attempt to delegitimize the election process, which Raffensperger warned could discourage Republicans from voting in the Senate runoffs.
There is no valid evidence of widespread voter fraud. That fact has been stated by Attorney General Bill Barr.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday the Justice Department has not uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
His comments come despite President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the election was stolen, and his refusal to concede his loss to President-Elect Joe Biden.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Barr said U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but they’ve uncovered no evidence that would change the outcome of the election.
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” Barr told the AP.
So that should be it right? We're done. It’s over.
But no, Trump-lovers have now begun demanding that Trump pressure Barr into assigning a Special Counsel for election fraud.
In a desperate move to egg on President Trump’s no-chance efforts to win a second term, twenty-seven GOP lawmakers on Wednesday issued a desperate plea to Trump to force Attorney General Bill Barr into appointing a special counsel to investigate election irregularities.
Barr told the Associated Press last week that the Justice Department couldn’t find evidence proving the sitting president’s unsubstantiated election fraud claims as Trump’s legal battles contesting the legitimacy of the election process have fizzled out.
In a letter obtained by Politico on Wednesday, Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX) told Trump that Americans “deserve a definite resolution” into uncertainty around the election and that “legitimate questions of voter fraud remain unanswered.”
The letter led by Gooden, who originally sent the letter to Trump with his signature alone last week following the release of Barr’s remarks the AP, was signed by 27 other Republican House members.
[...]
“The appointment of a Special Counsel would establish a team of investigators whose sole responsibility is to uncover the truth and provide the certainty America needs,” Gooden said.
The letter signed by 27 GOP lawmakers comes two days after Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) asked Barr to appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden’s business affairs, renewing the Trump campaign’s attacks on President-elect Joe Biden prior to the election.
As it turns out the DOJ has been investigating Hunter Biden’s “tax affairs” since 2018 — so all of that effort to push Ukrainian President Zelensky into “announcing” an investigation of Biden was actually unnecessary.
So yeah, yet another giant bowl of fail.
All of this election fraud bullshit is clearly flowing tons of money into Trump’s coffer as he’s raised $495 Million from his voting fraud fundraiser. It's a scam. It’s a grift. The rubes are getting fooled again, but it's no game. They are also growing closer and closer to deadly violence.
Echoing calls from Trump attorney Joe DiGenova that former Cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs be “drawn and quartered” and also “shot at dawn” for saying there was “no election fraud” reports are that a Pro-Trump shadow group is targeting him and other officials for “assassination” in a “tangible move towards terrorism.”
An attorney for an election security official fired by President Donald Trump says his client has been targeted by violent threats from a “shadow group.”
The pro-Trump group has called for the assassinations of Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and other officials they say stole the election.
“We became aware tonight that a shadow group has launched a campaign on a website called ‘enemies of the people’ proposing the assassination of various Republican and Democratic leaders who they falsely claim are complicit in manipulating the 2020 presidential campaign,” Walden said in a statement. “If anyone needs to be reminded that public calls for violence beget violence, this is the clarion call. If blood is spilled, it is on the hands of the president, his campaign, his lawyers, and the silent Republicans standing in the president’s shadow.”
That’s in addition to Texas Trump supporters who say their ready to take up arms as soon as he gives the order.
Some supporters of President Donald Trump in Texas say they’re willing to take up arms against the American government the minute that Trump gives them the order.
In an interview with Reuters, Texas-based chiropractor Brett Fryar says he has joined a militia group called the South Plains Patriots who are conducting firearms training sessions in case they need to stage an armed revolt against the American government.
“If President Trump comes out and says: ‘Guys, I have irrefutable proof of fraud, the courts won’t listen, and I’m now calling on Americans to take up arms,’ we would go,” he explained.
Well, he did say “stand by and stand back” to the Proud Boys, I frankly wouldn’t put it past him to let loose the dog of civil insurrection, Terrorism, against his fellow Americans if he thinks it will force the right official to swing things his way. Do it “Trump’s way” or else. Some of this may be people blowing off hot air, but after the Tree of Life massacre which was fostered by Trumpian rhetoric about Jews brining in “Illegals” jumping all over these groups is probably a good idea.
Particularly since a Pennsylvania GOP Leader says “my house would be bombed" if she doesn’t support the election overturn efforts.
Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward (R) laid out in stark terms the pressure she and other Republicans are experiencing from their base to boost President Donald Trump’s corrupt war against the 2020 election results.
In an interview with the New York Times published on Wednesday, Ward described the backlash that she would’ve been dealt if she openly stated that she didn’t want to sign her fellow Republican colleagues’ letter last week requesting that federal Pennsylvania lawmakers invalidate the state’s Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden.
“If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’ I’d get my house bombed tonight,” Ward said.
The fact is, now over a month since the election, agitated Trump supporters are still in denial and coalescing into a conspiracy minded election movement.
Georgia’s Trump supporters are not giving up. On Saturday, scores massed outside the statehouse in Atlanta, a small sea of mostly men in red MAGA hats hoisting signs hurling accusations against Joe Biden and wearing campaign tee-shirts saying “STOP the STEAL.”
It barely mattered that Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had certified Biden’s unexpected nearly 13,000-vote victory one day before. Also irrelevant was Georgia’s unprecedented manual hand count of presidential votes on 5 million paper ballots, which was more than any 2020 swing state has done since Election Day to verify its votes.
Instead, Trump supporters in Georgia, like many across the country, are not just embracing a growing catalog of vote-counting conspiracy theories as the president pressures state officials to reject the popular vote and select him, via Electoral College slates, for another term. Among Trump’s ranks are activists who witnessed the latest vote-counting steps as credentialed GOP observers and have studied these steps via social media and online forums. These activists appear to be coalescing into a new right-facing election reform movement, much like left-leaning activists launched a progressive “election integrity” movement after the fraught presidential elections in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004.
[...]
“There’s so many unknowns,” her friend and fellow GOP observer added. “We don’t know where they’re bringing them from. We don’t know where they’re taking them to. Who’s watching? Who’s watching?” She sighed. “There’s a lot of question marks. We feel really powerless. We want to be here with good intentions. But we feel powerless.”
There’s a direct line between campaign observers such as these women and the affidavits—or sworn statements by witnesses in lawsuits—that Trump’s lead lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was waving at a widely ridiculed 90-minute news conference on Thursday, November 19. Giuliani reeled off allegations of dishonest election administration and vote-counting processes in other states that Biden won—denying Trump another term. Giuliani’s affidavits, often based on what people thought they saw, which was not necessarily accurate nor the full picture, were from Republican observers like Stacey and her friend.
So even those who are not prone to resort to physical violence, are essentially preparing to do violence on our democracy with their ridiculous distortions and claims.
They don’t even try to hide it anymore as White grievance, anxiety and racial antagonism have become a badge of pride for Trump supporters.
Many Never Trump conservatives were hoping that if President Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, the GOP would reject Trumpism and return to a more traditional conservatism. Trump lost, and President-elect Joe Biden won 306 electoral votes in addition to defeating Trump by more than 6 million in the popular vote. But author Richard North Patterson, in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark this week, laments that despite Biden’s victory, Trumpism will continue to plague the GOP for the foreseeable future.
[...]
Trump, Patterson stresses, “did not materialize from the ether,” but rather, “rose from a political party bent on thwarting demographic change by subverting the democratic process; a party whose base was addicted to white identity politics, steeped in religious fundamentalism, and suffused with authoritarian cravings — a party which, infected by Trumpism, now spreads the multiple malignancies metastasized by Trump’s personal and political pathologies.”
The GOP’s brand, according to Patterson, is now “white grievance and anxiety,” and “racial antagonism” has become a “badge of pride” for Trump and his devotees. Trump, Patterson writes, “comprehends his audience all too well” — and that audience is an angry one.
“For many in the Republican base, he fulfills a psychic longing for an American strongman,” Patterson notes. “This will to autocracy as self-defense is supplemented by fundamentalist fanaticism. . . When electoral defeat augurs a religious apocalypse in the minds of evangelicals, democracy itself becomes their enemy.”
Patterson describes Trump’s refusal to accept the 2020 presidential election results as “banana Republicanism,” noting Trump’s “spate of bogus lawsuits seeking to invalidate many thousands of ballots in five critical states — particularly those cast by African-Americans in major cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta and Milwaukee.”
“One danger has become abundantly clear: far too many elected Republicans are just fine with Trump’s anti-democratic moves, or at least would not honor their sworn responsibility to defend the Constitution from his depredations — often because they are simply too terrified of their party’s base, and the voracious right-wing media which inflames it,” Patterson observes.
This phenomenon is not new, Trump didn’t invent any of this, he merely coalesced and focused it. It’ goes back as far as the John Birch Society.
This isn’t much different from the 51 percent of Republicans who “doubt” that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, the 50 percent of Republicans who believe that the QAnon theory that a secret ring of pedophiles run the federal government is, at least, “partially true,” and the 40 percent of Americans who are creationists.
[...]
To begin by reaching for the low-lying fruit, let’s start with the far right. The late Richard Hofstadter, a Pulitzer-winning historian, authored a famous book in 1964 called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Despite a few errors, Hofstadter’s analysis of the delusions and fears of the right gains relevance with each year.
In his introduction, the historian explains that Americans are increasingly responsive to politics as competing gestures of emotional symbolism, rather than debates about material interest or theories of effective governance. On the right, an affinity for symbolism combines with the “apocalyptic carryovers” of the “evangelical spirit” to create the foundation for the paranoid style. Hofstadter’s nuanced and detailed definition of the eponymous term of his text is worth reading in full, but here is a key excerpt:
When I speak of the paranoid style … it is, above all, a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself. Webster defines paranoia, the clinical entity, as a chronic mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions of persecution and of one’s own greatness. In the paranoid style, as I conceive it, the feeling of persecution is central, and it is indeed systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy. But there is a vital difference between the paranoid spokesman in politics and the clinical paranoiac: although they both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression, the clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him; whereas the spokesman of the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others. … His sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic, in fact, goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation.
The contemporary application of Hofstadter’s delineation of the “paranoid style” makes it clear that Donald Trump is flypaper for every pathology that Hofstadter, along with many psychiatrists, diagnoses, but also that Trump’s following marks the culmination of a right-wing divorce from reality that has unfolded over several decades.
This bias against reality, is a key feature of Republicanism. It’s been there for years. It’s baked into the cake. It’s going to be with us for the foreseeable future. I had hoped something would break the fever, something traumatic would shake people awake, force them to hit rock bottom and break the addiction to bullshit.
But with now over 290,000 Americans dead from the CoronaVirus and a clear electoral victory being denied. Rock bottom isn’t deep enough.
Here are the remaining events for this week:
December 3rd—
- Trump is considering firing Bill Barr. He and Barr have a “rough meeting” about election fraud. He derailed a secret GOP meeting by praising Qanon conspiracy theorists as “people who believe in good government.” [The Fuck they do.] Trump feels Barr “hasn’t looked hard enough” or the election fraud he says doesn’t exist. Just days before going out of business, Trump attempts a “Fire Sale” of Arctic Drilling Leases. He refuses to say whether he still has confidence in Bill Barr.
- Covid-19 hospitalizations (100,000) and deaths (2,760) set new records in the single worst day ever.
- Michael Cohen: Trump will create a “Parallel government” to hamper Biden.
- Graham implores Trump’s legal team to do a better job proving their bogus election fraud claims. [You can’t prove what didn’t happen, and they can’t lie in court.]
- Former Presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton will take the Covid vaccine to prove that it’s safe.
- Joe DiGenova is forced to resign from an elite club, says he was “Cancelled.” [Yep, like a mid-season replacement on the CW]
- Georgia Republicans are nervous about Trump’s upcoming rally: “If all he does is whine, he might as well not come.”
- Fauci says he’s going to meet with Biden transition team on Wednesday.
- Trump Inaugural Celebration big wigs — including Ivanka — sit for a DC Attorney General depositions on how they spent the money.
- Giuliani annoys Michigan GOP Legislators with his wacky election fantasies.
- After targeting Liberal Groups, Georgia’s Secretary of State targets a Republican lawyer for voter fraud.
- Morning Joe calls out Kushner’s financial ties to mid-east nations.
- Trump admin held back phone numbers and addresses that could have help reunite separated children.
- Ex-US Attorney asks Georgia Officials to probe Graham’s ballot toss scheme.
- Dozens of Trump’s political appointees will stay in office during Biden’s term.
- Trump aide Heidi Stirrup, an ally of top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who was quietly installed at the Justice Department as a White House liaison a few months ago, has been banned from DOJ building after pressuring staff to get case info on election fraud investigations.
- Bombshell report outs Florida Gov Desantis for lying to the people about Covid-19.
- Don Jr. wants to become head of the NRA and fire Wayne Lapierre. [Oh great, from a grifter to a stooge.]
- Michigan Republican rep admits that Giuliani “waded into a realm of insanity.”
- Trump’s inner circle turns on crazed lawyer Lin Wood after his bonkers press briefing in Georgia where he chanted “Lock Him Up” for GOP Gov Brian Kemp.
- Ivanka is slammed as a ‘two-bit con” for trying to equate herself with past Presidents; “Off the charts entitlement.” She also whines about “vindictiveness” after giving a deposition in the Inaugural fraud case.
- Sidney Powell bristles when confronted with all the errors in the text of her “Kraken” lawsuit: “Humans make mistakes.” [Yeah, but professional lawyers don’t.]
- James O’Keefe could end up in jail one year after crashing a CNN call.
- WH Communications director Alyssa Farah resigns.
December 4th -
December 5th —
December 6th —
December 7th —
December 8th—
December 9th—
December 10th—
December 11th —