#we are gerrymandered to hell and back. peoples’ votes are actively suppressed

[creampuffqueen]

you cannot fucking begin to understand the voter suppression the south has faced unless you’ve lived it. i have quite literally seen it in action with my own two eyes. our government KNOWS republicans are unpopular and unsupported so they make it as difficult as humanly possible for people to vote - especially people in historically blue areas. wanna know how i know?

my hometown is fairly small. we have one high school, and my graduating class was about 400 students. you can drive from one end to the other in less than 30 minutes. an interesting thing about my town is that it contains two counties: one historically red, and one historically blue

the first time i voted was in a state election. i live in the part of town that’s in the red county. when it was time to vote, there were polling places EVERYWHERE. there were 3 within walking distance of my house. when i went to vote, they were well staffed and efficiently run. i was in and out in ten minutes

one of my friends lives in the blue county. her house is just on the other side of town. we went to high school together. but because she lives on the blue side, when she went to vote…

there wasn’t a polling place to be found. every polling station was at least 40 minutes away, all concentrated in the city. she drove that 40 minutes. and she had to wait in line for TWO HOURS to vote

again. SAME election. SAME town. just different counties

oh, and i have another friend who also lives in the same town! she currently goes to school out of state but is still registered for our county. for the presidential election she requested a mail in ballot because she couldn’t afford to fly home just to vote

the state never sent her one.

still don’t believe me? for a fun activity, go look up texas’s district lines. notice how they’re drawn in the most convoluted ways possible to include/exclude the major cities (which always vote blue) in order to minimize their votes. take a look

and then try and tell me we voted for this again :)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Trump admits voter suppression

Trump went on Fox and Friends to talk about switching the 2020 election to mail-in, and said, that if you allowed everyone to vote, "you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again."

Jon Queally calls it "Saying the quiet part out loud."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/30/saying-quiet-part-very-loud-trump-admits-youd-never-have-republican-elected-country

It's a pretty consequential slip, though. Trump was discussing the GOPs opposition to providing funding to states to retool for postal voting, which is likely to result in high-stakes litigation. And courtrooms - even ones presided over by GOP appointees - take these frank admissions of intent to heart.

Just look at the weird tale of Thomas Hofeller, creator of REDMAP and architect of the GOP's nationwide gerrymandering campaign.

Hofeller's key insight was the redistricting was "an election in reverse" where, "instead of voters choosing their politicians, politicians choose their voters." He convinced GOP donors that funding state-level gerrymanders was a huge bargain on political influence.

We know what happened next: the US became more antimajoritarian than ever and started to elect antimajoritarian politicians - politicians who embrace the core right-wing tenet that some people are better than others and those people should be in charge.

White nationalists want whites in charge. Dominionists want rule by Christian men. Libertarians want rule by bosses. But they all believe that nature made some to rule and others to be ruled.

This is a hard ideology to make work in a democracy, which is notionally a majoritarian project. To get elected, antimajoritarians have two main tactics.

The first is scapegoating. White supremacy is how the GOP gets turkeys to vote for Christmas:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#turkey-shoot

LBJ's Southern Strategy was remarkably frank about this: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

Right now, the GOP and its state media organ, Fox, have opted to put its main base (old white people) into harm's way by converting high-risk activity into a marker of tribal loyalty. They could kill of a LOT of their base. It's a weird flex.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/19/gb-whatsapp/#fox-cult

But then there's the other antimajoritarian way to win: cheating (i.e. gerrymandering), which brings me back to Hoeffler.

Hoeffler was really careful about never saying the quiet part out loud.

Not only did he never admit he was gerrymandering on racial lines, he also exhorted his allies to never write down anything like this, not to send emails or make notes to themselves about it.

But Hoeffler wasn't good at following his own advice. When he died suddenly in 2018, he left behind computers and thumb-drives stuffed with frank admissions that REDMAP was a cheat, designed to steal the votes of nonwhites and other traditional Democratic voters.

Worse (for Hoeffler and the GOP), the person who inherited his data was his estranged, anarchist daughter, Stephanie. She put all that data online:

https://archive.syndicate.si/hofeller/

She dumped it all in raw form, so no one could accuse her of putting Hoeffler's deeds and intentions in a false negative light -- it's all there, including materials that reflect badly on Stephanie. She was more interested in truth than her own feelings.

Before Stephanie doxed her father, court cases over REDMAP gerrymandering had been stalled and nosediving. Afterwards courts - presided over by GOP-appointed judges - had no choice but to find in favor of the plaintiffs, against GOP redistricting.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pked4v/the-anarchist-daughter-of-the-gops-gerrymandering-mastermind-just-dumped-all-his-maps-and-files-on-google-drive

Proving intent is key to prevailing in court challenges to redistricting and other election fuckery. It's really hard. The bar is set incredibly high. If the redistricters can make ANY sort of claim of a legit purpose for the new boundaries, they usually win.

But not when they come right out and say the quiet part out loud. When the President goes on NATIONAL TELEVISION and announces that he wants fewer people to vote because otherwise, "you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again," well...

Both figuratively and literally, Trump has a really hard time keeping it in his pants. He ALWAYS says the quiet part out loud from "rapists and drug traffickers" to his statement that he would withhold aid from states whose governors criticized him.

He's really good at running across the river hopping from the back of one alligator to the next before the jaws snap closed, but that's a strategy much better suited to owning the news cycle than the courtroom.

Because courts don't lose focus when your outlandish deeds are chased by more outlandish ones, obliterating the previous scandal from the public mind. They are deliberative, slow, plodding.

Remorseless.

Remember when Trump's Muslim ban got struck down because courts weighed his statement that it wasn't a Muslim ban against his tweets where he said it was? Saying the quiet part out loud is good antimajoritarian electioneering. It's a terrible legal strategy.

Running across a river on the back of alligators works great...until it doesn't. It's hard to keep running once you lose a leg.

Trump no longer has a leg to stand on.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 6, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Six months ago today, rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, intending to stop the counting of the certified ballots that would make Joseph R. Biden president and Kamala Harris vice president. This attack was unprecedented. It broke our nation’s long history of the peaceful transfer of power.

You know the story of that day. Former president Donald Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, insisting that he had lost only because the election had been “stolen” from him, despite Biden’s decisive victory of more than 7 million votes and 74 electoral votes. He urged his supporters to stop Biden’s election from becoming official.

What has surprised me most in the six months since is how quickly the leaders of the Republican Party turned from establishing oligarchy—a process that the country has undergone in the past—to embracing authoritarianism, which it hasn’t.

Since 1986, Republican leaders have pushed policies that concentrate wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. In 1986, they began to talk of “voter integrity” measures that would cull Black voters from the rolls; by 1994, after the Democrats passed the Motor Voter Act allowing voter registration at state offices like the Registry of Motor Vehicles, Republicans began to say they were losing elections only because of “voter fraud.” Suppressing the vote became part of the Republican strategy for winning.

But voter suppression has a long history in America. Especially in the 1850s and the 1890s, political parties concerned about losing power cut their opponents out of the vote.

After the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, Republican leaders accepted the support of talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, who created a narrative in which Democrats were dangerous socialists, out to destroy home and family. With the establishment of the Fox News Channel in 1996, that narrative, shared not by reporters but by personalities behind sets meant to look like newsrooms, skewed reality for FNC viewers.

But promoting a false narrative through media is not new to the United States. Elite enslavers in the 1840s and 1850s similarly shaped what information their neighbors could hear.

In 2000, Republicans put into office George W. Bush, who had lost the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes. The election came down to the state of Florida, where more than 100,000 voters had recently been removed from the voter rolls. A recount there stopped after a riot encouraged by Roger Stone, and the Supreme Court then decided in favor of Bush.

In 2016, Trump, too, lost the popular vote, but the distribution of those votes enabled him to win in the Electoral College.

But installing a president who has lost the popular vote is not new, either. In 1877 and 1889, presidents Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison both took office after losing the popular vote, Hayes by 250,000 votes, Harrison by more than 100,000.

In 2010, Republican leaders used Operation REDMAP (the Redistricting Majority Project) to win control of swing state legislatures and deliver the states to the Republicans by gerrymandering them. It worked. After the 2010 election, Republicans controlled the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Republicans received 1.4 million fewer votes for the House than Democrats did, but won a 33 seat majority.  

Still, gerrymandering has been around for so long it’s named for early Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, whose name a journalist mixed with “salamander” in 1812.

Taken together, all these old tactics, amplified by modern technology, enabled the Republican leadership to lay the foundation for an oligarchy. Beginning in 1981, wealth began to move upward significantly, reversing the trend from 1933 to 1980, when wealth compressed. By 2017, lawmakers who had initially opposed Trump appeared to come around when he backed a huge corporate tax cut and put three originalists who endorsed the Republican vision of America on the Supreme Court.

Then Trump lost the 2020 election.

Before January 6, Republican lawmakers seemed to humor the outgoing president as he refused to accept the outcome. Trump and his people launched and lost more than 60 lawsuits over the election. They tried to pressure election officials in both Georgia and Arizona to change the outcome in those states. They refused to start the normal transition process that would enable Biden and Harris to set up their administration. And Republican lawmakers, trying to court Trump’s help in the Georgia Senate special runoff elections of January 5, kept their mouths shut.

And then January 6 happened. At a rally on Washington, D.C.’s Ellipse, Trump lied to his supporters again and again that the election had been stolen “by emboldened radical-left Democrats.” “We will never give up, we will never concede,” he told them. “You don't concede when there's theft involved.” He promised (falsely) that Vice President Mike Pence could send the ballots back to the states for recertification in his favor, “and we become president and you are the happiest people.”

“[W]e're going to have to fight much harder,” he said, “[b]ecause you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated…. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.”

“So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

In the ensuing crisis, lawmakers had to be rushed out of the chambers as rioters broke in. Five people died, and 140 police officers were injured. It could have been much worse: the insurrectionists erected a gallows for Pence. Nonetheless, even after the insurrection, 147 Republicans voted against certification of the electoral votes.

Still, at first, many Republican lawmakers appeared to condemn the events of January 6. But they quickly came around to defending the Big Lie that Trump won the election. That lie is behind the voter suppression measures enacted by a slew of Republican-dominated states, as well as the new measures in Arizona and Georgia that enable legislatures to have control over election results.

In the House, the Republicans removed Liz Cheney from a leadership position for her criticism of Trump and rejection of the Big Lie, replacing her with a Trump loyalist, tying House Republicans as a group to the former president. Republicans in the Senate came together to kill a bill to create a bipartisan, independent committee to investigate the events of January 6. Lawmakers and pundits are downplaying the insurrection itself, claiming either that it was not a big deal or that Democrats are using it to suppress rightwing activism.

And now, of the 700 Republicans who have filed paperwork to run for Congress next year, at least a third of them have backed the idea that Trump won the 2020 election.

In American history, the attempt to overturn our election procedures for one man, based on a lie, is unprecedented.

—-

Notes:

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial

https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-election-results-studies/index.html

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[reading-writing-revolution]

From Facebook - lots of great points:

Blue Waves of Hubris

Why 2018 Taught Us the Wrong Lessons

All the talk of packing the Court and admitting two more states has subsided. Not only did we fail to flip six seats in the Senate for a comfortable majority, we didn't get a majority at all. All prayers and cash are now being directed to Georgia, where, even if we get a two seat gain in the January runoffs, we'll still wind up with a 50-50 Senate split. (Yes, Vice President Harris would make it 51-50, but don't count on Joe Manchin to vote for Puerto Rican statehood or a 14-member Supreme Court.)

In the House, we were confident that the Blue Wave would take us to a new, virtually bulletproof majority. Some races remain undecided, but right now, Democrats have only a four-seat majority margin, a net loss of 14 seats. There is credible talk about Kevin McCarthy becoming the next House Speaker in 2022.

As the attached NY Times article by Trip Gabriel makes clear, the disappointments extend all the way down-ballot to local elections around the country. There were opportunities to gain control of several state legislatures - critical since these legislatures will be apportioning Congressional districts for the next 10 years, based on the 2020 Census. None of those opportunities materialized for Democrats.

There has been much finger-pointing. The pollsters screwed up: All that money to beat Susan Collins and it wasn't even close. The House was bungled either because Democratic messaging was too "corporatist" or too "socialist." If Bernie had won . . .

Apart from some misleading poll numbers, the greatest cause of Blue-Wave overconfidence was the 2018 midterm elections. So many suburban Republican seats flipped to moderate Democrats that everyone could "clearly see" that the Republicans, through Trump's toxicity and the complicity of spineless Senate enablers, had turned off suburban women in particular. Suburban women were now going to be part of the Democratic coalition. Hell, we were looking at a "Blue Tsunami."

Except that it never happened.

We have all been intrigued about what on earth could get 73 million people to vote for Trump. It's a cult. They are racists. They are so poorly educated that they couldn't tell that Trump was not only lying to them, but actively working against their best interests. It's all right-wing media manipulation, propaganda.

Those are fair assertions, but identifying them probably won't dislodge the Trumpist core voters anytime soon. The more potent question is whether marginal Republican voters can be brought around to vote for Democrats again.

What do Democrats stand for?

We like science, and extending a hand to the downtrodden.

We like universal health care and fair and free elections.

We want to curtail crooked businesses and fix the environment.

We want to redistribute wealth so that college kids aren't buried under debt.

We want great public education.

We recognize and want to fix structural racism.

We want to strengthen law enforcement so that police aren't called upon to do work that belongs in the social services sector.

We want to strengthen labor laws and increase employment opportunities so that everyone can be assured a living wage.

We go on and on. And all of it is noble and good and . . . not enough people are listening.

The Republicans quote some of our worst marketing ("defund the police" and "Democratic Socialists") and they nail their landing in suburbia and in Little Havana. And we're still talking about why use of that terminology is intellectually honest. The Green New Deal has become, amazingly, a point of contention because Republicans have successfully cast it as impractical, job-killing legislation instead of an intended strategic framework.

What do Republicans stand for?

Winning.

Consolidating wealth

Consolidating power by suppressing opposition voting

If there's a legitimate philosophical core beyond that, I'm willing to listen. Ballooned deficits brought on by tax cuts for the wealthy have no significance - except when it comes time to exercise caution with "Democrats' tax and spend social welfare agenda."

The strongest force behind Democrats' electoral successes in 2018 was not philosophy or strategy: It was abhorrence of Donald Trump. The strongest force behind Biden's win in 2020 was exactly the same thing- contempt for Donald Trump.

The mythical "New-Democrat" suburban voter readily jumped back to her old, comfortable Republican voting patterns down ballot because she could do so while directly expressing her contempt for Trump in a Biden vote. In 2018, to express contempt for Trump you had to vote against enabling Republicans.

Somehow, Democrats need to find a better way of communicating who we are. Quit spending time trying to figure out what's bubbling under all those red hats. Let's figure out how to sell our own positive agenda.

Above all else, let's stop kneecapping each other with demands for philosophical purity. And lets quit being smug about being the majority party. Unless and until we consolidate our strength down ballot, Republican will continue to gerrymander and exploit their structural advantages in the Senate and the Electoral College.

[jewrocker]

Republicans Cross the Rubicon Into Full Blown Treason Because There’s Nothing to Stop Them.

According to Wikipedia, the textbook definition of “Treason” is criminal disloyalty to the State.  Treason, by definition, does not need to be aiding a foreign power with information that would be detrimental to our national security - although there’s plenty of evidence of that, too.  There’s treason happening in front of our eyes and ears on a daily basis.  For years now.  

If you swear an oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States, and, with each subsequent breath, spend every waking moment either looking the other way while others seek to undermine every principle contained within that document, or worse, play an active role in obstructing those seeking to uphold those principles, is that not treason?  Is that not a blatant disregard of your sworn duties?  Shouldn’t the punishment for our highest elected officials who knowingly and willfully violate their oaths of office, to such an obscene extreme, be something other than free healthcare for life and a golden parachute?

Every Republican lawmaker currently in office who fits the above description needs to be held accountable for their betrayal of their oath to defend the Constitution. Otherwise, what’s the point of any of this?  And why isn’t there any remedy in our founding document calling for criminal penalties for those found guilty of violating their official duties?  There’s penalties in almost every other area of our society for betraying your official duty, i.e. if you’re a cop and you violate your oath to serve and protect, you’re terminated almost immediately - sometimes, even imprisoned.  Why shouldn’t our top lawmakers be held to the same, if not higher, standards? If you said, it’s because they write the laws that govern them, you’d be correct. 

The Constitution is not up for debate.  You’re not allowed to decide which side of it you come down on.  Any elected official, Republican or Democrat, who bases his/her willingness to uphold their oath to defend the Constitution on the shameless, self-serving position of whether or not he/she is up for re-election, should be stripped of their citizenship and shipped off to a Siberian prison, last week.  However, if that were the case, McConnell, Gaetz, McCarthy, Graham, Nunes, Meadows, Collins, Jordan, etc. would be on their fortieth case of hand warmers by now.  

Not for nothing, but the fact that, in close to two and a half centuries, Mitt Romney became the first Senator to vote to remove a president from his/her party in the history of our Democracy, says something about our judgement as a nation with regards to the leaders we elect to govern us.

Republicans swore an oath to defend and protect the principles contained in that document - be it convenient or inconvenient - and by pretending the facts are not real, or they’re all a smoke screen by the “Deep State Conspiracy,” you’re not only making yourselves out to be pathetic fools, you're betraying your country with every passing second.  And for what?  To defend the self-serving criminal acts of an ignorant, sociopathic, misogynistic, megalomaniacal reality TV has-been?  One who would happily throw you, your constituents, and the rest of us under the bus in the blink of an eye without a second thought if it meant saving himself?  

Is this the way Republicans want to be remembered by their grandkids?  A cult-like mob of spineless cowards, happily ready to abandon their oaths in blind servitude to a hapless Russian asset?  The GOP have made it clear, they are more interested in avoiding a “mean tweet” from the orange emperor, than upholding the Laws of the land they swore to defend.  

And what will happen to them for this utter betrayal?  After working tirelessly, day in, day out, to weaken the fabric of our Democracy, after choosing a “scorched earth” policy rather than let the Dems get the “upper hand,” will these deplorable traitors be held accountable?  Will they be put on trial, themselves?  Nope.  Nada.  There simply doesn’t seem to be any remedy in The Constitution for this kind of brazen betrayal on such a grand scale.  The House can’t even enforce a subpoena, as they know the president’s ‘human bidet”, bloated sycophant William Barr, would laugh in their faces.  

Ask the German People what happened when their Parliament caved to the whims of an unhinged lunatic.  If you think it can’t happen again, you must’ve missed the DOJ memo immediately following Trump’s acquittal addressed to every State AG, forbidding them to open ANY investigation into presidential candidates w/out his sole approval.  

After all this - after disgracing the memory of every soldier who fought to defend the principles held within the document these traitors chose to use as toilet paper, after ignoring the most crushing/damning evidence ever put forth against a president in history; after turning a political no-brainer into a three-ring circus, the epic cowards who make up the House and Senate will simply sail off into the sunset, unscathed, with the aforementioned golden parachute of free healthcare for life and full pensions all around - on us.  A nice reward for playing a starring role in the destruction of the institutions they’re entrusted with protecting.

FYI, those of us out there still relying on the theory of ‘voting them out,” it’s time to get with the program.  Even if we succeed in ousting some of these miscreants, we won’t accomplish anywhere near the amount needed to restore decorum/sanity to our State/Federal offices- nor is voting them out enough; considering the level and extent of such an egregious abandonment of duty.  Letting these cockroaches off the hook simply by voting them out is like asking the Manson family to move. 

Not to mention, after appointing an illegitimate, sex-assaulting SCOTUS judge, after blocking bills to protect us from election interference, and now the crowning of their idiot King, there’s no way in Hell we will see a fair and balanced election.  Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to have their heads examined. Get ready for election interference the likes of which we’ve never seen; i.e., rampant voter fraud, voter suppression, gerrymandering, ballot stuffing, ballot losing, ballot fixing, voting machine tampering, misinformation, disinformation, help from foreign governments, etc. etc. etc.

For a bunch of self-professed “truth seekers,” and “Defenders of the Realm” Republicans sure have hitched their wagon to the wrong horse.  Not only do they not see the storm brewing on the horizon, but if you’re going to hang your reputations, and what’s left of your honor, out to dry, as well as decimate your centuries-old party for generations to come, at least do it with a POTUS who has a modicum of class, dignity, and Statesmanship.  Not the Chernobyl of American Democracy. 

As crazy as it may be, as we speak, Republicans continue to try and get the American People to believe that every witness who’s testified to date is a liar, and the only one we can trust is a lying, thieving, charity-bilking, bank-swindling, tax-cheating, draft-dodging, environment-killing, Justice-obstructing, pornstar-bribing, student-defrauding, Russia-colluding, war-mongering, pussy-grabbing, megalomaniacal sociopath.   

Sad as it is to look back on this inexplicably insane shit show, was it that hard to predict a lifelong grifter who defrauded banks, partners, wives, mistresses, cities and students out of billions, who bribed porn stars then lied about it, who happily abandoned our sworn allies in the Middle East after just a five minute phone call; is it that hard to imagine this shameless putz would do the same to the nation he swore to protect and defend?  

If there’s one thing Republicans will never be accused of, it’s good judgement.  They’re so blind with hatred for the left, they’d rather see their kids grow up speaking Russian and their country torn apart than admit their boy is a colossal failure. That would require character.  Something only Mitt Romney appears to possess.

The president of the United States abused the power of his office and attempted to leverage a foreign government’s congressionally approved aid in exchange for dirt on his political rival.  Yet, in spite of the truckload of evidence, “Moscow” Mitch McConnell just etched in stone why he is the worst Senator in American history, by a landslide.  No doubt he’s earned a spot in Letterman's top ten of the Worst Americans of All-Time, as well.  Yet, ask yourself, with things being as they are, i.e., no legal consequences for their actions, why would any of these low-lifes feel the sudden urge to break precedent and, for once, uphold his/her vow?  After all, who’s afraid of a golden parachute?  

Raise your hand if you’ll vote for the first candidate who makes prosecuting these cockroaches their first official act of office.

[filipfatalattractionrblog]

First off: Donald Trump is a moron. No matter how much time and effort pundits and democratic party officials try to gin him up as some conniving mastermind so they can convince themselves their candidate didn’t get beaten by a man who thinks health insurance is dirt cheap because he sees life insurance for babies advertised on Fox News, he is an ignorant dipshit of the highest order. His attention span is nil and his ideas can be changed by whoever talked to him last, or whoever just butters him up enough to play to his ego. He is not a clever man, or a consistent one. He’ll say anything, then change it in the next minute. The few things he sticks consistently to are his ego, his bigotry, and his predatorial behavior towards women. Steve, on the other hand, is portrayed as a very clever man. Not just historically as Captain America, but here in the modern Secret Empire arc and everything leading up to it. How he plays people against each other, manipulates connections and government power to get what he wants, putting together all sorts of tricky plots to end up deposing the Red Skull and also taking over America. The way Donald Trump rose to power was heavily pinned on old fashioned bigotry. Not just his personal bigotry either, which he’d use to fire up overt and latent racists, but how the GOP has spent decades suppressing minority vote, especially black vote. And when keeping them from getting to the ballot isn’t enough, just straight up purging votes, or them ending up getting ‘lost’. Manipulation of the right to vote itself, and also, fostering state level power via gerrymandering and more, continuing to play to bigoted ends, to prop up their own power and also continue to use racism and other forms of bigotry to solidify their base. We did not put some too-clever-for-us genius in power. We elected a short-sighted moron who was willing to tear all the dogwhistles off on standard southern strategy GOP campaign racism, whose power was solidified from a local to national level with a GOP who stand behind his actual policies and decisions 100 percent even if they may dislike how erratic he is as a person. Which leads nicely into the next way Steve is a poor fit as a representative for Trump: Steve isn’t racist. Steve isn’t even secretly racist, as Spencer will tell us over and over again, and that Hydra is actually the wokest fascists in the world and more socially progressive than the standard democrat. Steve is so much not-a-racist that even while using Inhumans being shoved into concentration camps as minority metaphors, and mutants being exiled to their own nation as another set of minority metaphors, none of the writing will take the leap to say that Steve is bigoted against these minority metaphors. Even while using them as symbols of the damage bigotry does, Steve himself, fascist in charge of it all, gets to stay clean, gets to be “I don’t personally have anything against mutants and Inhumans…” Trump, on the other hand, is a racist in the extreme. Not a secret racist, not a dogwhistle “welfare queens” and “urban youth” racist, he is very publicly a racist. He has been for decades. He called for the death of the Central Park 5, even took out ads for it, no matter how thoroughly their innocence was proven. He got a federal investigation into the fact that he wouldn’t allow properties to be rented out to black people. Before he started his 2016 campaign, he had spent years and years railing against Obama, calling for his birth certificate, believing and inflaming a racist conspiracy theory that Obama wasn’t an actual American citizen. A racist conspiracy theory that even “mainstream” GOP members found themselves having trouble explicitly denouncing. He kicks off his campaign early calling Mexicans rapists and criminals. He casually puts out the idea of Muslims having to be registered in America. And that’s not even getting into his sexism, either, which modern Steve Rogers would be painted as being totally devoid of. Trump preys on women, talks about them like objects, sexually assaults them, and when one of them infuriates him, his misogyny is constant, even against conservatives who would be believed to be on his “side”. And even all that wasn’t enough to stop him from getting the majority of the white women vote, which shows a hell of a lot of the power of explicit racism. The stunning reality of how much people will tolerate or even cheer for. Then there’s the fact that while both Hydra Steve and Trump are fascists, Steve was a secret fascist the whole time, and Trump was very much publicly so. So much so that there was whole debates on “should we call him a fascist?” while the campaign was still going, and if there was any foolish doubt left before he got elected, the time inbetween certainly removed it. America did not elect someone who hid his true, fascist intentions, relying on their belief in him as a good, moral, and certainly not bigoted man; we elected someone who publicly called for reporters and protesters to be assaulted, that said he’d pay for the legal troubles of anyone who beat up people at his campaign stops he didn’t like. We elected someone whose racist behavior was publicly documented daily and decades ago in legal courts. We elected someone who talked about registering Muslims, who talked about building a wall to block out Mexico and forcing them to pay for it to boot. We elected someone who did absolutely nothing to hide his beliefs, or his intentions. He shouted them out, and loved the attention it got him. He did not go through backdoors, and he did not use socially acceptable dogwhistles the way types like Paul Ryan might have. He just threw it all out in the open. He was what he showed us to be. He called for his own opponent to be thrown in jail while he was campaigning. His fascism was naked. Which leaves the other thing. Steve wasn’t elected, he was appointed. The way Trump takes power is far more banal than Steve’s byzantine plot and use of Hydra soldiers to take the country by force. Trump was elected, and despite the fact that yes, there was meddling from various Russian interests, that cannot, and does not, explain the whole situation. If GOP hadn’t been suppressing black vote year after year after year, this wouldn’t have been a contest. You can blame hacking on political interests from another country, but you’re going to have a hell of a time trying to blame GOP racism which has been in action for longer than I’ve been alive on Russia. Trump didn’t need soldiers on the ground either, though there was plenty of random racist civilians trying to intimidate people at voting booths. People tend to imagine fascism can only come into power by sheer military force, but here it is, through vote suppression of various flavors, through rallying of bigoted interests all across America, from a fucking presidential campaign that was allowed to do whatever the hell it liked, and given infinite coverage by networks because it was too good for their ratings. Hell, even extends to social networks like twitter, which could’ve cut off his influence forever ago because of his racist and abusive comments breaking the TOS, but twitter never wants to rock the boat there, and is constantly scared of ‘losing’ users, no matter how much people like Trump and his followers drive others off. There are people who actively collaborated in Trump’s win, and there are people and corps who enabled it, and there’s even liberals like Spencer who tsk-tsked protesters who shut down a Trump rally because it was “bad optics” and “giving Trump what he wants”, instead insisting on some meaningless silent protest that would’ve been ignored by CNN anyway. It’s not hard, either - news networks ignored the massive anti-war rallies when Bush was pushing it. Whether protesters did anything or not, Trump was still getting that media attention, cuz media wanted to give it to him. Trump didn’t need a bunch of costumed goons with guns to take America for him. All he needed was the fact that America can and does vote for racist fascists, and even supposed liberal, progressive people and groups will sit back and let him do and say what he likes because they fear disrupting order and comfort more than they fear the damage of what Trump and his followers were doing and still are. If you wanted to tell a story about American style fascism, you’d be better off talking about elections and how much bullshit America is actually willing to tolerate, or even enthusiastically vote for. Hell, you can look back at the original Secret Empire. The guy in charge of that entire plot was already in office. America doesn’t need to be tricked into fascism, we vote for it. We vote for it regularly, and often, enthusiastically. In all these ways, Steve Rogers is a terrible fit as an analog for Trump. But the racism, the bigotry, sticks out a lot. Intentionally avoiding grappling with bigotry in Steve Rogers’ Hydra, his ascent to power, and his rule over America means what you have to say about America? About American fascism? About fascism at all? Is fundamentally dishonest. It omits some of the most important things. You cannot have effective fascism without bigotry of some form. It just doesn’t happen. No bigotry? You’re not taking the throne, that’s for sure. If Trump wasn’t as racist as he was? If Trump was, in some bizarre alternate universe, not racist at all the same way Steve is portrayed as? He never would’ve stood a chance at getting elected.He would’ve never been allowed to get anywhere near power in America. His racism did not fell him, it empowered him, because we, as a country, are racist as hell. Our history is racist, our government is racist, our present reality is racist.

Colin Spacetwinks, Comics and Cowardice

[artrock77]

For the 45th consecutive time in our nation’s history, we got exactly the president we deserve.

We have a sociopathic 70 year-old’s finger on the nukes button thanks in large part to willful ignorance, voter apathy and suppression, gerrymandering, pantsuits and a hilariously outmoded system of vote counting. USA! USA! USA!

All seriousness aside, it is incumbent on us not to fall for the misdirection practiced by this White House from Hell. While you’re getting fired up about some (admittedly) outrageous quip by President Twitter Feed, other members of this end-of-days administration he formed are doing truly heinous shit: America, say goodbye to your health care plan, coal companies will resume dumping sludge into the water supply, the mentally ill are no longer barred from purchasing assault rifles, the EPA will be dismantled by an avowed climate change denier, the Department of Education will be destroyed by a billionaire with the apparent brainpower of a toaster oven, and banking rules will be repealed in order to help billionaires get richer, while simultaneously screwing over the very constituency that put them all in office.

Whether you’re liberal or moderate, keep your eye on the ball: someone’s got to be the adult here. Calling the Donald names is exactly what Bannon and his gang of idiots wants you to do: Smart people wasting precious energy turning Trump’s toupee into a cartoon character while the wrecking crew gets to work sending this country back to the Stone Age is Plan A, B and C.

So be the bigger person: The next time you feel compelled to call Trump a “Door-To-Door Steak Salesman,” “Agent Orange,” a “Cheeto-dusted Bag of Cole Slaw,” “The Marmalade Man-Baby,” or “The Angry Creamsicle,” don’t go there.

No “Fuckface Von Clownstick,” “Fascist Carnival Barker,” or “Tangerine Tornado.” Please refrain from referring to him as “Hair Gropenfuhrer,” “Rome Burning,” “He Who Shall Not Be Named,” or “El Puto de Naranjo.”

Drawing comparisons to “America’s Black Mole,” a “Mangled Apricot,” a “Bloviating Sac of Flesh,” a “Decomposing Jack-O-Lantern” or “Ferret-wearing Shitgibbon” should also be avoided.

Tags like “Darth Hater,” “Dudley Do-Wrong,” “Tanning Bed Warning Label,” “Vanilla ISIS,” “Tyrannosaurus Von TinyHands”, “Bozo Baby Fingers”, and “Trumplethinskin” get us nowhere.

Associations with infamous dictators, like “Tangerine Twitler,” “Sunkist Stalin,” “Mandarin Mugabe,” “Mein Trumpf,” “Mango Mussolini,” or “Butternut Squash Batista,” are simply not the way a respectable adult conducts a serious conversation.

Think of it this way: very time you call the holder of the highest office in our land “Squirrelwig McRacistPants,” the terrorists win. And by terrorists, of course, I’m referring to Vladimir Putin.

I’m not saying a sense of humor doesn’t help – at some point it might be all we have left. But to fight this administration’s shitstorm of lies and powers to distract, we need a tidal wave of truth and activism. Stand up for journalists. Continue to call out the lies and the liars that tell the lies. And for all our sakes, keep marching.

They are counting on us to lose our will and concede this battle with protest-fatigue. Keep your sense of humor close at hand, but keep the truth closer.

(All credit for the majority of the preceding nicknames is due to Dana Carvey, Ashley Feinberg, Charles Blow, Graydon Carter, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Martin O’Malley, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Rosie O’Donnell, Jon Stewart, the NY Daily News, Some Scottish Twitter Feeds and if I missed anyone else I sincerely apologize.)

[theconservativebrief]

The midterm election confirmed once again that black women show up for progressive candidates. But white women? Not so much. As a black feminist historian, I’m not surprised, but I am always disappointed by the ways white women vote.

As exit polls roll in from some of the high-profile races of 2018, it appears that black women voted overwhelmingly — specifically, 92 percent nationwide — for progressive candidates. In three key races where Democrats challenged conservative incumbents, such as Florida’s Andrew Gillum, Texas’s Beto O’Rourke, and Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, black women turned out in similarly high numbers for these progressive candidates. The election of black women such as Massachusetts’s first black woman Congress member, Ayanna Pressley, Lucy McBath in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, and Connecticut’s first black woman Congress member, Jahana Hayes, were also important outcomes carried by black women. In all the races in which exit poll data exist, black men were not too far behind in turning out for progressive candidates.

But nationally, white women were a much more divided group. Forty-nine percent of white women voted Republican nationwide (49 percent voted Democratic too). Forty-seven percent of white women voted for Gillum, while O’Rourke only received 39 percent and Abrams 25 percent of the white female vote. This early exit poll data follows a disturbing recent political trend: The majority of white women have not been part of a Democratic voting bloc throughout the 2000s.

While many white women and the majority of voters of color tend to vote more progressively, disaggregating these polls by race and gender reveals some hard truths about the potential for building a progressive coalition. White women and even Latinx voters of all genders continue to lag behind black voters — in particular black female voters — when it comes to showing up for Democrats.

One of most repeated statistics from the 2016 election is that more than half of white women voted for Donald Trump. Despite recent polls suggesting the percentage might be slightly less, the headlines for the 2018 midterms could and should be similarly scathing in its critique of white female voters.

And, to be frank, a vote for a large percentage of GOP candidates at this point in our nation’s history is largely a vote for white supremacy, xenophobia, and misogyny. The Republican Party has not distanced itself from the rise of contemporary white nationalism — Florida GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis spoke at a Muslim-bashing event alongside white nationalists Milo Yiannopoulos and Steve Bannon. Texas Senate candidate Ted Cruz refused to denounce the racist comments of Republican Rep. Steve King.

Beyond embracing bigoted rhetoric, today’s GOP has refused to acknowledge the pervasiveness of racist policing, pushed for restrictive immigration, and confirmed an alleged sexual predator to the Supreme Court. In spite of this, white female voters show up by the millions for the GOP.

It’s been said many times that we should “trust black women.” Those platitudes expressed by nonblack women through GIFs, memes, and cute T-shirts mean very little if black women cannot count on nonblack women to faithfully show up for the best interests of those affected by white supremacy, poverty, sexism, ableism, xenophobia, transphobia, or homophobia. So where do we go from here?

Among women voters, white women voters continue to be the weakest link. They are also among the most visible in public discussions about the need for change. While white men remain the strongest opposition to electoral politics skewing left, white women heading to the polls continue to choose to uphold white supremacy and patriarchy. In the 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential elections, the majority of white women voted for the GOP candidate. The numbers don’t lie.

The historical record bears a brutal truth: White women have always been active participants in sustaining white supremacy in America. Elizabeth Gillespie McRae’s groundbreaking book, Mother of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, offers a robust history of how white women reinforce white supremacy. White women educators censored textbooks and downplayed the role of slavery in the Civil War as a way to infuse the public education curriculum with white supremacist politics. White women were also an integral part of the Ku Klux Klan. White mothers virulently and violently protested the integration of schools. This abundance of evidence contextualizes what happened in this most recent election — it’s tradition.

Calling out white women’s continued support of conservative politicians isn’t excusing or ignoring white men’s commitment to electing these candidates. It’s an assertion of a profound and perpetual sense of betrayal. Far too many white women are willing to throw women of color under the bus — and, indeed, vote against their own best interests — in favor of white supremacy and, often, misogyny.

Digging deeper, we also need to ask difficult questions about the growing Latinx voting demographic. In all but a few races such as the New York gubernatorial race in which 93 percent of Latina women voted for the Democratic candidate, Andrew Cuomo, both Latinx men and women fell below 70 percent in their support of more progressive candidates. For example, in the Florida gubernatorial race, only 49 percent of Latino men voted for Gillum and only 58 percent of Latina women voted for him. In the Texas Senate race, only 66 percent of Latina women voted for O’Rourke and only 62 percent of Latino men voted for him.

Exit polls don’t account for racial differences among Latinx voters. Nevertheless, it is unnerving that such a significant percentage of Latinx voters could vote for candidates who aligned with a president hell-bent on rhetoric and policies that criminalize and demonize people from Mexico, Central America, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Because Latinx voters are composed of different nationalities and races, many may distance themselves from the Latinx people they see the Trump administration targeting.

Sociologist Helen Marrow refers to some anti-immigrant sentiments among Latinx voters as “racialized nativism,” whereby Latinx citizens and permanent residents feel they suffer a loss of economic opportunities as a result of undocumented Latinx immigrants. Additionally, religion plays a significant role in shaping a conservative segment of the Latinx electorate, including those opposing birth control, abortion, marriage equality, and the rights of trans people. This social conservatism has and does lead millions of Latinx voters to support conservative candidates, in spite of explicit racism and xenophobia.

Latinx voters are not yet a fully reliable progressive voting demographic. This is and will be a formidable challenge for organizing around progressive candidates — but perhaps not as insurmountable as galvanizing white women to repudiate white supremacy and sexism with their votes.

The exit polls from the 2018 midterms don’t give us the whole story. But the snapshot they provide does tell us that black women continue to lead the charge for progressive electoral politics. Despite voter suppression and disenfranchisement and gerrymandering, which are significant barriers for black voter participation, black women flip districts and make formerly “unwinnable” races highly competitive. If you’re not voting like a black woman, you are probably on the wrong side of history.

At this juncture, the building of a broad coalition of voters requires intentional work from progressive white female and Latinx voters, which includes voter education and organizing with these voting blocs in the years between and leading up to elections. Women as a cohesive progressive voting bloc may never be a reality, but progressive white female voters must continue to work in their communities to move more white women to the left.

Treva B. Lindsey is a professor at Ohio State University. Find her on Twitter @divafeminist.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

Original Source -> The betrayal of white women voters: in pivotal state races, they still backed the GOP

via The Conservative Brief

[cityofmorgantown]

Jay Redmond Doth Protest Too Much, We Think

In 2013, Jay Redmond ran for Morgantown’s City Council and lost. He ran as part of a group called Victory For Morgantown, a group that lied about its very existence despite considerable evidence of its existence. Despite his love for coordinated campaigning, he criticized his opponents for their coordinated campaign.   

In 2015, Jay Redmond ran for Morgantown’s City Council and won. He ran with the same group of people that had supported him in 2013, and worked together with them on numerous efforts to unseat his opponents. Despite his love for coordinated campaigning, he criticized his opponents for their coordinated campaign. 

It is 2017 and Jay Redmond is running for Morgantown’s City Council. He is running with the same group of people that supported him in 2013 and 2015 and is working together with them on numerous efforts to unseat his opponents. Despite his love for coordinated campaigning, he is still asking you to believe that coordinated campaigning is bad. Hypocrisy is a hell of a drug. 

We should start with Redmond pointing his supporters toward this, a blog post written by a man named Roger Banks. Banks is a local who has worked tirelessly to suppress voter participation, and who has also been involved in an ongoing effort to gerrymander wards represented by his political opponents. 

To read that post, and to look at Redmond’s endorsement of it, you would swear that Redmond must oppose coordinated campaigns. If that didn’t do it for you, Redmond’s double-down at last week’s Evansdale Neighborhood Association’s candidates night would do it for. There, he said, 

To me, it is very easy to identify what the cause of that rancor is and I think it is the fact that a voting bloc was created on City Council by a past special interest political action committee. I think you could trace just about all of the problems on council in the last two years back to that bloc. Most of the things on council were decided before we got in the room. Input was not welcome from people who were not in that particular bloc. So the issue that I think is really important is that we have another political action committee, another special interest group that is involved in this election. And they have recruited and selected and are backing and supporting with finances and labor several candidates in this election...  ...I think we’ve already seen the effects of what happens when that happens. I don’t think that’s good for the city. I don’t think that’s good for council. Anybody that thinks that City Council should have seven like-minded individuals on it, I’m afraid I have to say to you that you do not understand democracy.

If Redmond really believes this, he has apparently changed his mind very recently, because he has spent an awfully long time believing in something very, very different. 

Blocs Of Candidates Throughout Recent History

In 2013, Morgantown Together was created. It was a group of five candidates who ran for City Council. Morgantown Together was open about the fact that they were running together, using the name in advertising materials and social media efforts. They made no attempt to hide the fact that they were, in fact, united.

This enraged the City Council’s then majority. That group - led by former mayor Jim Manilla, and joined Wes Nugent, Linda Herbst, and Ron Bane - cried foul, insisting that candidates working together was an (unheard of) affront to Morgantown’s electoral history. How, they wondered, could anybody possibly think it was appropriate for candidates to coordinate with one another? This just wasn’t done, or at least, it wasn’t done in the version of the story that they were telling publicly. 

What those four left out of the story was that, behind the scenes, they had formed their own electoral group. It has had various names over the years but it generally was identified as Victory For Morgantown. 2011

The group emerged in 2011. It was led by a man named Roger Banks. He called that group The Citizens Collective Of Morgantown but used “Victory For Morgantown” in his marketing. You can see that below:

That’s blurry, but if you look closely above the yellow box, you can see the first-ever reference to the group. Banks didn’t stop there. He also bought a billboard which he proudly bragged about his voter suppression efforts. It indicated his stalwart opposition to various candidates including two still serving today: Jenny Selin and Marti Shamberger. 

Banks created the group in his successful bid to making voting in Morgantown’s elections much, much more difficult than it needed to be. He hated the idea of people participating in democracy, and he ran his campaign on it. He was joined in this opposition by candidates Manilla, Nugent, Herbst, and Bane, all of whom wanted to make voting significantly harder for the city’s residents.* Nugent liked Bank’s Citizens Collective Of Morgantown so much that he publicly praised them at the height of the 2011 election.

2013

Then, in 2013, the city’s winds had shifted, and Morgantown Together was formed in opposition to what the-then council majority was doing (which included intentionally suppressing voter participation by ending the Vote By Mail program). Morgantown Together was open and honest about its existence, and never claimed it wasn’t coordinating its activities. 

Manilla, Nugent, Herbst, and Bane publicly objected despite knowing at the time that they were part of a coordinated political effort behind the scenes. This effort involved many of the same people from 2011, including Banks, and also Guy Panrell and George Papandreas. They were also joined in this opposition by two more candidates that they had recruited to run: Bill Graham and Jay Redmond. This effort, this time under the header of Victory For Morgantown, recruited candidates, fundraised, and created a targeted voter list. You can see the evidence for all three below:

Unbelievably, these candidates most definitely wanted to have things both ways: they wanted to coordinate behind the scenes for themselves, and they wanted to viciously impugn their opponents for coordinating publicly. Needless to say, Morgantown’s voters didn’t buy any of this nonsense, with the exception of Nugent and Bane (who had run unopposed), each of Victory For Morgantown’s contested candidates lost badly. 

2015

By 2015, Victory For Morgantown had concocted an incredible scheme in which two of the group’s members - the aforementioned Roger Banks, and a second man named Guy Panrell (who had run, and lost, in the 2011 election) - worked to gerrymander city voting districts after having convinced themselves that anything done by the city’s Ward And Boundaries committee had to be then be approved by the city council, regardless of what the committee had actually done. The council’s majority balked at the blatant gerrymander and voted it down. Victory For Morgantown howled bloody murder, “They can’t actually vote down our blatant gerrymander, just because of how unbelievably blatant it was, can they?” This breathtaking legal argument led to one of Victory For Morgantown’s members - Papandreas, who has twice run for city council and twice been beaten badly - to sue the majority and insist that they be literally removed from office. (Papandreas, if you’re wondering, is in the picture above headlined “Meet leadership for Morgantown” as the final photo of a definite attendee.) To file this lawsuit, Papandreas had to petition for the majority’s removal. That necessitated getting signatures, something he managed to do within a four day window. He must have been very motivated. Here are some of the totally random names you’ll find in that petition, in no particular order: Roger Banks (created Citizens Collective Of Morgantown/Victory For Morgantown in 2011, served on Wards and Boundaries for gerrymander), Bill Graham (ran with Victory For Morgantown in 2013, 2015, and again in 2017), Ron Bane (ran with Victory For Morgantown in 2013, 2015, and again in 2017), Guy Panrell (ran in 2011, served on Wards and Boundaries for gerrymander), George Papandreas (ran in 2011 and again in 2015, supported Victory For Morgantown in 2013), Linda Herbst (ran in 2011 and ran with Victory For Morgantown in 2013), Wesley Nugent (ran in 2011 with Banks’s support, ran with Victory For Morgantown in 2013, 2015, and again in 2017), and there, at the very bottom, Jay Redmond (ran with Victory For Morgantown in 2013, 2015, and again in 2017). Here are those signatures, in case you’re wondering (and for some real fun, pay attention to the dates):

Unbelievably, judges found the legal argument, “But they didn’t vote for our blatant gerrymander!” unconvincing, and since it was originally filed, this group has lost in front of a three-judge panel assigned to hear the case and again at the Supreme Court, who simply refused to hear itt. 

2017

So now we are back in the current, and Jay Redmond is busy asking voters to believe that all of the city council’s rancor is the result of a group of candidates working together to undermine democracy throughout the city. So let’s give Jay Redmond some credit, in that he’s very, very right in part of his assessment: there absolutely is a group of candidates working together to undermine democracy throughout the city. He’s just wrong about which group. It isn’t his opponents, in other words. It’s his own.  The weird part of all of this is that all Victory For Morgantown really needed to do was acknowledge itself, run together as a group, and see what resulted electorally. Nobody forced the group to the lie about itself and, when confronted with evidence of their obvious coordination, to double-down on the first lie, and to then continue to double-down every single time the issue has come up. All the group had to do was be honest about its existence, and it would have immediately become a non-issue. 

--- *They achieved their dreams when their group got rid of the city’s wildly successful Vote By Mail program. That vote, for those wondering, was a pre-ordained outcome, precisely the sort of thing that Redmond was decrying above. Each of the four councilors entered chambers that night knowing that they would vote to end the program. Each then offered a series of outrageously dishonest explanations for their vote. Then they ended it. I was there those nights. I don’t remember Redmond being particular opposed such voting then.