When do we get to use the guns?

April Siese of Daily Kos reported that there was a conference of devotees of the QAnon conspiracy in Las Vegas last weekend. One of the speakers was Jim Marchant. He’s running for the Secretary of State job in Nevada. He’s part of a coalition of candidates hoping to solve the nonexistent issue of voter fraud – so we know what their goals are. Siese wrote:

“I can’t stress enough how important the secretary of state offices are. I think they are the most important elections in our country in 2022,” Marchant said at the “For God & Country Patriot Double Down” event. “And why is that? We control the election system. In 2022 we’re going to take back our country.”

David Neiwert of Kos discussed ...

The politics of eliminationism—in which ordinary democratic discourse is replaced by the constant drumbeat of demonization that depicts one’s political opponents as inhuman objects fit only for extermination—has been growing steadily in America for well over a decade, reaching a fever pitch during Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House. But now, in the post-Trump era, his rabid fans have ripped off the mask of plausible deniability and are now openly calling for killing liberals and Trump critics—which includes anyone who believes he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

At a conservative event in Nampa, Idaho an audience member asked Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA:

At this point, we’re living under a corporate and medical fascism. This is tyranny. When do we get to use the guns? [Crowd whoops.] No, and I’m not, that’s not a joke, I’m not saying it like that. I mean literally, where’s the line? How many elections are they gonna steal before we kill these people?

Kirk replied:

No, uh, hold on. Stop, hold on. I’m gonna denounce that and I’m gonna tell you why. Because you’re playing into their plans, and they’re trying to make you do this. That’s okay … They are trying to provoke you and everyone here. They are trying to make you do something that will be violent, that will justify a takeover of our freedoms and liberties the likes of which we have never seen. We are close to have momentum to get this country back on a trajectory using the peaceful means that we have at us. So to answer your question—and I just think it’s, you know, overly blunt—we have to be the ones that do not play into the violent aims and ambitions of the other side. They fear—let me say this very clearly—they fear us holding the line with self-control and discipline, taking over school board meetings. They’re the ones that are willing to use federal force against us.

There was more to Kirk’s response, though what I quoted has enough projection to demonstrate what Kirk is all about. Neiwert concluded:

The impulse for eliminationist violence, moreover, is latent in all of this: Even if Kirk’s audience takes his advice and bides their time, the threat remains intact to overthrow local authorities if they fail to enact their extremist ideas and displace reality—such as Joe Biden’s election as president—with their conspiracy theories and disinformation. We already saw how that played out on the ground on Jan. 6 at the Capitol after the “Stop the Steal” rally, an event at which TPUSA was a major sponsor, providing seven buses carrying 350 people. If right-wing propagandists like Charlie Kirk and his army of devoted followers have their way, that scenario will be playing out again. But the next time, if the eliminationist extremism of his army’s footsoldiers continues to fester, it may very well be with guns.

Hunter of Kos started a post by writing:

There are two things to know about the Republican Party's organized attack on non-corrupt secretaries of state and other state election officials. The first is that it is resulting in more chaos in more places than you might think. The second is that it is working. It is having exactly the effects Republican lawmakers and party leaders intended when they grabbed hold of Donald Trump's absolutely false hoaxes claiming a random and varying assortment of supposed election plots against him.

I could quote a large part of Hunter’s post. Instead, I’ll quote a bit and try to summarize. When you whip up your base into a frenzy based on lies, then say that person is stealing the country from you, your base is will act against where your finger is pointing.

The point needs to be made again: The threats of violence being delivered to elections officials, from secretaries of state to local precinct volunteers, are the intent of Republican lawmaker's repetitions of election-hoax language. Unleashing the rage of a propaganda-fed base is the point of crafting that false propaganda to begin with.

Up to 40% of poll workers in the largest jurisdictions have said they will not return for the next election, according to CNN. The reason is the expectation of violence. Some of those positions won’t be filled, resulting in long lines, reduced turnout, and general chaos. Some will be filled by the people who drove out the previous workers, ready to do their part in cheating for their party. Calls for election integrity, if they are raised with false information, are invalid.

You craft a propagandistic hoax only to achieve a goal that cannot be justified using the truth. The moment Republicans adopted the Big Lie as touchstone and as test of loyalty, the moment they claimed that the country was in peril due to fictional conspiracies by the movement's opponents, it became self-evident that they were seeking remedies against their enemies that normal politics could not supply. The moment the once-conservative, now ideologically vacant party adopted flagrant hoaxes as means of stoking public fury, it turned to fascism.

Macomb County, Michigan borders on Detroit to the north and is along Lake St. Clair. It is very much a red county. Krery Elevled of Kos reported the GOP chair of the county said, “We are determined to make the fraud of 2020 the issue of the election.” That is not what the national GOP wants to hear. They want to make the issue Biden and his agenda, not the loser who left Washington for Florida. They’re afraid the county’s focus will depress the vote. A few days ago I wrote about the Great Resignation. Dartagnan of the Kos community noticed a couple things about the states with the highest numbers of resignations. First, these states had the highest rates of COVID infections in August, the middle month of the Resignation. People forced back to work in an unsafe environment chose to quit instead. Second, the states with both the highest rates of turnover and the highest infection rates are also “right to work” states, where the legislatures passed policies to discourage unions. And unions protect against unsafe workplaces. So a crappy job in a labor market that encourages looking elsewhere and workers are going to use the little leverage they have. There is another thing states who have passed right to work laws and have high COVID rates have in common. They’re controlled by Republicans. Abraham1771 of the Kos community wrote about Sen. Sinema and the things she is wrecking to please her corporate paymasters. Rather than writing about that again, I’m mentioning this post because of the chart at the top. It is a graph of the national debt as percent of GDP since 1940. It goes back that far to include the debt from WWII, which was above 120% of GDP. From that peak it fell until 1980, when Ronald Reagan cut taxes, claiming Supply Side Economics. The debt was about 35% of GDP at the time. When Bush I left office the debt had climbed to about 65%. Clinton championed budget surpluses and brought the debt below 60%. Bush II pushed it above 80%. Obama slowed the growth of the debt, though it went above 100% of GDP. And it has jumped upward again under the nasty guy, getting close to 120%. Conclusion: Starting with Reagan every GOP president has increased the speed at which the debt has risen. Both Democrats reversed the rise or tried to slow it. Republicans break the economy. Democrats clean up after them.