This business will get out of control, and we'll be lucky to live through it
It feels like a powder keg is about to explode.
JVL, who directed many of you here, is fond of using this clip of Fred Dalton Thompson from The Hunt for Red October:
As I write this, no one has been killed because of post-election hysteria. Hopefully that hasn’t changed by the time it’s posted. With my track record, I probably just jinxed it.
Political extremism in America has never been just a right-wing thing. As I noted on Wednesday, the far left adopted the tactic of confronting and intimidating politicians at their own homes a long time ago. This past summer, CHOP/CHAZ in Seattle, in which anarchists took over a neighborhood because they felt like it, was treated like a big laugh until people started getting murdered. (And now there’s another autonomous zone” developing in Portland, at the behest of an alleged “sovereign citizen,” speaking of movements that have gotten people killed.)
But these kooks don’t have a major political party in lockstep behind them. If anything, Joe Biden became the Democratic Presidential nominee, and subsequently President-elect, precisely because he was the Democrat least willing to pander to his party’s fringe.
On the other side, Donald Trump has remade the Republican Party in his own image. When GOP Senate candidates are supporting longshot litigation that would annul the votes from their own state, you know the line between “political party” and “cult” has been crossed.
Paul Waldman, in The Washington Post, fears this will get a lot worse before it starts to get better:
When Joe Biden is inaugurated in a little over a month, he’ll face an opposition that has convinced itself that the election was stolen from them, that the public health measures he encourages to get control of the coronavirus pandemic are a terrifying assault on their freedom, and that Biden and his party will literally attempt to destroy the United States.
We can’t know for certain how this era in our national life will play out. But the potential for a wave of right-wing domestic terrorism is absolutely real, and we ignore or dismiss it at our peril.
Even Republican politicians understand that the threat is moving beyond the realm of ordinary politics — primary challenges, letter-writing campaigns, the occasional angry voter at a town hall — to a place where people’s physical safety is at risk.
[…]
All over the country we’re seeing conservative rage reaching right up to the line that separates activism from violence, as they vent their feelings about both the election and public health measures meant to contain the pandemic:
Heavily armed protesters surrounded the home of the Michigan secretary of state, after a plot to kidnap the state’s governor was thwarted.
Other secretaries of state who refused to steal the election for Trump have found themselves and their families threatened.
A prominent supporter of the president went on TV and said that a federal official who countered Trump’s false claims about voter fraud should be “taken out and shot.”
In Idaho, anti-mask protesters terrorized local officials’ families.
Public health officials all over the country have been threatened and harassed.
The American right made a hero out of a teenager who went to a protest and allegedly killed two people.
The situation right now is terrifying. And in a month it’s going to get much worse.
I say that because all this is happening while Donald Trump is still president. As panicked as his supporters are about losing power, he’s still in the White House and they can delude themselves into thinking he’ll find a way to stay there.
Like Waldman, I think most - in fact, the overwhelming majority - of Trump acolytes screaming about a “stolen election” will burn themselves out and go back to whatever it was they were doing all day before November 4. But even a tiny hard core of dead-enders can still do a lot of damage:
If just 1 in 100,000 of the people who voted for Trump came to that conclusion, you’d have an army of 740 domestic terrorists. How much death and chaos could they cause with a campaign of bombings and mass shootings?
Nineteen years ago, twenty men armed with box cutters, directed by a man living in a cave, murdered thousands of Americans and changed the world forever. In 1963, one disgruntled Communist killed a President and basically ended the relatively idyllic postwar era. (Note: Oswald acted alone. Deal with it.) And in 1914, a devastating war that ravaged an entire continent was sparked by one Serbian nationalist with a pistol.
It only takes one person. And as I was writing this, the President of the United States was tweeting:
He knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t care. Pray for America.
The Texas-led lawsuit trying to overturn the election results - joined by several other Republican Attorneys-General, because that’s how cults operate - is too much even for some anti-anti-Trump lawyers. First, Erick Erickson:
Ken Paxton, the Attorney General of Texas, is under a federal investigation and would love a presidential pardon. His lawsuit is just more performative leg humping by someone desperate to curry favor with President Trump.
The various attorneys general who have joined his lawsuit all want to either get re-elected or seek higher office. Joining the lawsuit gives them some measure of ring kissing or protection from any rabid Trump supporters who wanted a “just fight” moment.
I personally think my company should pay me workers compensation for brain damage for having to read that lawsuit and related filings. It really is one of the stupidest bits of performative leg humping we have seen in the last five years. These attorneys general are willing to beclown themselves and their states all to get in good with the losing presidential candidate.
[…]
Let me explain just how absurd this case is:
Texas can cite no cases at all in its claim that it has standing to sue the states for the administration of their own internal elections.
Texas alleges the other states changed election laws due to the pandemic without the legislature’s blessing. You know one state not being sued that did that? Texas.
The states allege it is illegal to count ballots received after election day. Several of the states making that claim also do that.
Their expert argues a sign of voter fraud is that it is not likely Trump 2016 voters would vote for Biden in 2020. The expert also uses dubious statistical modeling comparing Clinton to Biden.
The Missouri amicus all but says they don’t necessarily agree with Texas’s legal statements, but the case is so important the Supreme Court should hear it.
Texas could not even get its Solicitor General — the man who argues on behalf of the state before the Supreme Court — to sign onto the lawsuit. That’s how frivolous it is.
This will persuade the fool and the gullible, but these are not meritorious arguments, particularly when many of the states on the plaintiff’s side of the lawsuit have done similar things and thus have unclean hands.
The level of debasement these people have been willing to engage in makes them seem more the ball-gagged gimp from Pulp Fiction, humiliating themselves for their master. They should be ashamed and embarrassed.
Andrew “Not the guy from Mannequin” McCarthy at National Review gives the case some more credit than it deserves (“It is true that Democrats labor mightily to undermine election integrity”) but still concludes that it’s really, really stupid:
If Texas’s theory is right, then every state now has standing to sue every other state over the latter’s administration of its own laws in connection with its own citizens if it can articulate some collateral consequence that may affect the allegedly injured state in some way. I have a hard time believing that the “Don’t Mess with Texas” State will want to live in the world that its attorney general proposes to create.
[…]
Already under indictment for securities fraud, Attorney General Paxton is currently caught up in yet another corruption investigation — one that has roiled his office. Now, he has filed a lawsuit so frivolous and so blatantly political that the top appellate lawyers in his office evidently declined to endorse it. To be clear, though, this does not mean questions about election-law improprieties are frivolous.
Federal law provides a procedure under which, on January 6, Congress will convene to count the electoral votes. If Texas’s elected representatives, or those of any other state, object to the counting of any state’s electoral votes, Congress will hear, debate, and vote on those objections at that point — mindful of what such disputes may portend for comity between the states. There is, however, no way the Supreme Court is going to entertain Texas’s lawsuit. There is also no way, I suspect, that Paxton doesn’t know that.
“I’m really tired of the Republican Party beclowning itself for a losing candidate out of fear for that candidate’s voters,” writes Erickson. Me, too. And yet…if Trump somehow got his do-over and there was a whole new election against Biden in early January, how would he and McCarthy vote?
Yesterday, Erickson also wrote about an alt-right website doxxing insufficiently loyal Republicans and calling for their assassination. Good on him for finding this, but did it give him any second thoughts about who to vote for?
Not everything is terrible. This weekend, we will see this at a Formula One event once again:
Mick Schumacher will be racing for the Haas team next year, and he will drive in a Free Practice session today. The medical condition of his legendary father Michael remains a closely guarded secret, but hopefully, on some level, he knows what his son has accomplished.
Like other manipulators, Trump tells us more or less directly what he intends to do, if we just read his tweets: “This is going to escalate dramatically. This is a very dangerous moment...”
One may look at the situation now and think that he’s wrong, that it will all get better when Biden is finally inaugurated. But when we find ourselves constantly reassuring ourselves that it will be fine while the president makes statements that don’t seem to be supported by the current facts, then it’s time to pay attention. We don’t have the benefit of knowing what’s going on in his mind, but we know that he is putting his intentions into words for us. He believes the situation will escalate not because the facts warrant it, but because he will ensure that it escalates. Ignoring that is like ignoring the nagging feeling that the guy waiting in the dark corner of the parking garage means trouble...until we step out of the elevator one floor up and he jumps on us.
Regardless of what we believe about Trump’s intentions, the sight of multiple people uttering death threats should be alarming in itself. It’s a slippery slope from normalizing the idea of violence to enacting it in reality.
Go Schumacher! When things are bad, it’s especially important to pay attention to the little things that make life fun. :)