Character assassination, fake scandals, scare talk, and gaslighting

David Neiwert of Daily Kos looked at a study from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). The report isn’t about the military, it’s about armed groups that claim to be patriots. The study looked at the most active groups and mapped the locations most likely to have heightened activity by these groups before, during, and after the election. The findings should be a warning to election security and law enforcement. Alas, law enforcement seems preoccupied by supposed violence from the left. Five states are most likely to see disruptive behavior. Yeah, one of them is Michigan. The other four are Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Oregon. These groups used to be generically anti-government. They have changed to being specifically anti-democratic and aligned entirely with the GOP and the nasty guy. They’re based on conspiracy theories and a “grotesquely distorted conception” of patriotism. The tactics before the election are focused on repressing opposition candidates (like ours) and supporters (like us). During the election they may show up on election day and stifle voters. After the election they will focus on vote counting – shutting down counting they think will make their candidate lose. xaxnar of the Kos community summarized a new post this way:

The Republicans have no ideas, no governing ability, and nothing but the desire to hang onto power. They do it by convincing voters Democrats are worse than they are. No lie is too big to use — the bigger (and worse) the better. They are launching a huge barrage and they won’t stop however the election turns out. Unless you hang out in the dark corners of the internet, you have no idea how disgusting and how extensive the attacks are. Their base will never accept a Democratic administration and the GOP will obstruct in every way possible. It’s not going to be over any time soon. Be prepared to play the long game.

The GOP arsenal includes character assassination (current target is Hunter Biden and, by extension, his father). Then fake scandals (but her emails) and scare talk of what Democrats will do. And on to gaslighting. This won’t stop if the nasty guy loses. The GOP will continue with the character assassination, fake scandals, scare talk, and gaslighting And if the nasty guy is forced out he will stage a scorched earth tantrum to dig as big a hole as possible for Biden. Fox News will spread as much smear as they can. And his base will not quietly accept defeat. In addition there will still be Vladimir Putin, the billionaires that financed the GOP into this ruin, the COVID-19 virus, climate change, and massive inequality. There will also be, floating in the public consciousness, all the toxic waste the GOP has been spewing for decades. The election, all by itself, won’t fix things. It is only the start of a long slog of restoration. And that must include demonstrating to the GOP that there are consequences – more severe than losing an election – for what they’ve done. There’s a long road ahead. Mark Sumner of Kos discussed the problems of the Supreme Court and said it can’t be fixed without expanding it. He explained it this way:

The small number of seats on the Supreme Court, and the enormous power that institution enjoys, has from the very beginning ensured that the fight over a single seat rises to near nation-wrecking status. Imagine if there were only nine members of Congress, and their selection was not via voters, but by a process that was indirect, arcane, and openly in the service of a few extremist organizations. The imagination required is minimal. … When you think of expanding the court, don’t think of it as “packing.” Think of it as “demilitarization.” The court shouldn’t just be expanded in order to give Democrats an edge, the goal needs to expanding until the replacement of a justice is just short of routine, rather than a civil war. The small court means that senators like Mitch McConnell don’t give a damn about any piece of legislation they’ve ever passed, or how well they represent their state. They don’t count victories by legislation passed. They measure their careers in justices. They subjugate their own branch into a platform for feeding another. The small court generates huge incentives to cut deals, disrupt government, break rules, and simply cheat. For weeks, McConnell has been unwilling to even consider taking up legislation that could save thousands of lives, because he wouldn’t take a chance that it might slow Barrett’s confirmation. This is a broken system. … A larger court would also mean that justices would feel freer to retire at any point without feeling that the weight of the nation was on their shoulders. Appointments might still be for life, but justices would not be under such pressure to die with their robes on.

An appropriate legacy for Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be a court where the rights of millions wouldn’t be balanced on the health of one person. Joan McCarter of Kos says that Moscow Mitch’s rush to put Amy Coney Barrett onto the Supreme Court has only stiffened the resolve of Democrats to add more justices. Mitch might gloat now … A quote for the day, as posted by Meteor Blades in his night owl column for Kos:

We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. ~~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (1973)

Over the last couple years while riding my bicycle I would see a version of the American flag where all the red and blue had been replaced by black, then one white stripe was changed to blue. I had to look it up. What I saw online said it meant whatever the person flying it wanted it to mean, though it mostly meant Blue Lives Matter. More recently I’ve seen lots of signs, about the size of political yard signs, that showed this flag and explicitly say “Blue Lives Matter” or “We love our police.” The flag and signs are definitely a repudiation of Black Lives Matter. Jeff Sharlet, who has been documenting the influence of Evangelical Christians in the federal government, noticed something alarming about this black, white, and blue flag. He tweeted a thread:

First the black, white & blue anti-Black Lives Matter flag flew outside of Trump rallies, then on stage, next to the US flag; in Wisconsin last week it replaced the US flag behind Trump; now the American flag, with all its complications, is just gone, & a fascist banner waves. Growing dominance of "Blue Lives Matter" flag w/in Trumpism suggests a formation close to but not identical w/ both white nationalism & police state: I'll call it "police nationalism." Identity founded on fetishization of an explicitly brutal & implicitly racist idea of policing. Police nationalists, like the civilian creator of the Blue Lives Matter flag, are mostly *not* law enforcement. Rather, they're people who form an identity, a sense of themselves, *through* fantasizing punishment for others. Hence the popularity of the Punisher motif. Police nationalists are white supremacists (including occasional non-white ones; it's an infectious disease) who don't want to think of themselves as such. Police nationalism allows them to fetishize force as "law" and relieves them of having to think about what law is. Police nationalists often merge "law & order" w/ an authoritarian idea of Christianity. But in essence I think it's a secularization of authoritarian faith, fetishization of a fixed, received "law & order" similar to fundamentalist "natural law" w/ state power replacing divine. … I've been reporting on the Right for 20 years. I believe self-definition matters. Police nationalists now call their flag "Back the Blue"--a statement they experience not as non-partisan but as transcending partisanship. It's an assertion of ultimate authority. But worse... Implicit in the slogan "Back the Blue" when used by police nationalists is the fantasy of a coming conflict (which aligns neatly with QAnon's idea of a "storm") in which "backing the Blue" will mean choosing a side in a civil war not so much feared as anticipated.

Sarah Pulliam Baily, a Washington Post reporter, tweeted a thread to introduce an article on the paper’s website:

President Trump has sparked a rise of "Patriot Churches." Patriot Churches are about loving Jesus and loving this country. They belong to what religion experts describe as a loosely organized Christian nationalist movement that has flourished under Trump.

Bad enough that conservative churches say we get to go to heaven and you don’t. Now they’re adding we’re patriots and you aren’t. Yeesh.