monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Quote:

...sigh of relief:

My relief will occur when Trump and his cohorts, cronies, family and others have been cemented in the historical past. Shown as examples of how things should never be.

For now, it's too early to become lackadaisical and comfortably settled. The Republicans in both houses who allowed the destruction to happen, are still in office. The mechanism which brought the U.S.A. to this place, has yet to be located and destroyed.

Don't forget, Hitler struck, then regrouped having learned lessons. It would not be without reason to believe many Republicans might be trying something similar. Oh, it may be a different face at the helm; yet, the same agenda.

Do not get lulled into a false sense of security by the exit of Trump.

Livestreams of the count aren’t a new phenomenon – but after Trump’s baseless vote fraud claims, many are wondering if this method of transparency is too vulnerable

At a vote-counting center in Montgomery county, Maryland, a man sat in a room with other election workers, wearing a grey hat and dark purple rubber gloves. He unfolded a ballot, looked around and leaned forward to mark it. The man appeared on a Yahoo Finance livestream of the center. The video went viral, one version ending up on YouTube, where the narrator said they found it on 4chan.

“Do you notice that, folks?” said the narrator. “How he looks around to see if anyone is watching him – as if he’s about to commit a crime?”

The video spread across social media, viewers claiming the election worker was committing fraud. Then election officials launched an investigation and found the voter hadn’t used a dark enough pen to mark their ballot; the worker was darkening their selections – a routine practice.
[...]
In Delaware county, Pennsylvania, a video was taken from the livestream showing a woman filling in ballots. It went viral, proliferating further after Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point, a rightwing student organization, showed it during his election livestream.

A spokesperson told USA Today the video had been misleadingly cropped; there were election observers at the end of the table and the worker was manually transcribing damaged ballots, a common and lawful practice.

“The issue comes where information can be picked up, cut, taken out of context and reframed or reinterpreted,” said Kate Starbird, associate professor at the University of Washington and cofounder of the Center for an Informed Public. “That just becomes raw material for people trying to create conspiracy theories.”
... ... ...

Photographer Zach D Roberts has been chronicling Donald Trump’s rallies from the beginning. And he was there last weekend for one of their last gasps during Trump’s presidency, the Million MAGA March in Washington, where he documented a now-familiar sight: Violent far-right groups like the Proud Boys mingling interchangeably with rank-and-file Trump supporters, intent on instigating the protesters and counter-protesters as much as possible.

Roberts kept his nerve for five years. His photos have appeared in both right- and left-leaning publications, which is good, he told me, because it makes himself easier to pass himself off as “neutral” when covering groups like the Proud Boys, Patriot Front, and the Boogaloo movement. Roberts was documenting right-wing rallies long before Trump was on the scene—he covered NRA marches back in 2006—but he says he’s never seen marches like the ones he has recently. Over the phone, we talked about what he’s captured in four years of rallies, whether he believes his work might amplify the extreme groups he covers, and what happens once Trump leaves office. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.

I just got back, so I’m starting to process everything. I went to the White House just to see what was going on. The MAGA people were in town, and it was Friday night, so you know they were going to be getting drunk. And a bunch of them showed up specifically to start things. I just happened to walk by a place called Harry’s Bar, next to the Hotel Harrington in D.C., which is the hotel Proud Boys typically stay at anytime they’re in town. They were instigating people. They threatened me twice.

The real problem is, I have never seen the police ever arrest a Proud Boy. I’ve witnessed multiple fights between Proud Boys and I guess you could call them “antifascists,” but unless you’re willing to walk away after getting shoved and being spit in the face by a Proud Boy, then **** is going to happen. And they’re not the ones getting arrested. In every place I’ve ever covered these fights—in Portland; Columbus, Ohio; Philadelphia; New York City; or Washington—the person that gets arrested is not the Proud Boy. The Republican Clubs in NYC was a big anomaly, but that’s what generally happens.

Would be interested to hear what some of you think about the article below, penned by Irish journalist, Fintan O'Toole.

But the Trump presidency has been no nightmare. It has been daylight delinquency, its transgressions of democratic values on lurid display in all their corruption and cruelty and deadly incompetence. There may be much we do not yet know, but what is known (and in most cases openly flaunted) is more than enough: the Mueller report, the Ukraine scandal, the flagrant self-dealing, the tax evasion, the children stolen from their parents, the encouragement of neo-Nazis, Trump’s admission that he deliberately played down the seriousness of the coronavirus. There can be no awakening because the Republicans did not sleep through all of this. They saw it all and let it happen. In electoral terms, moreover, it turns out that they were broadly right. There was no revulsion among the party base. The faithful not only witnessed his behavior, they heard Trump say, repeatedly, that he would not accept the result of the vote. They embraced that authoritarianism with renewed enthusiasm. The assault on democracy now has a genuine, highly engaged, democratic movement behind it.

The threats to American democracy—and to the broader cause of freedom—are many, he said. He was withering on the subject of Donald Trump, but acknowledged that Trump himself is not the root of the issue. “I’m not surprised that somebody like Trump could get traction in our political life,” he said. “He’s a symptom as much as an accelerant. But if we were going to have a right-wing populist in this country, I would have expected somebody a little more appealing.”

Trump, Obama noted, is not exactly an exemplar of traditional American manhood. “I think about the classic male hero in American culture when you and I were growing up: the John Waynes, the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods, for that matter. There was a code … the code of masculinity that I grew up with that harkens back to the ’30s and ’40s and before that. There’s a notion that a man is true to his word, that he takes responsibility, that he doesn’t complain, that he isn’t a bully—in fact he defends the vulnerable against bullies. And so even if you are someone who is annoyed by wokeness and political correctness and wants men to be men again and is tired about everyone complaining about the patriarchy, I thought that the model wouldn’t be Richie Rich—the complaining, lying, doesn’t-take-responsibility-for-anything type of figure.”

Two issues that run deeper for Obama than Trump’s personal deficiencies concern the changes he sees in the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement. “I did not believe how easily the Republican establishment, people who had been in Washington for a long time and had professed a belief in certain institutional values and norms, would just cave” to Trumpian populism, he said.

He traces the populist shift inside the Republican Party to the election that made him president. It was Sarah Palin, John McCain’s 2008 running mate, he said, who helped unleash the populist wave: “The power of Palin’s rallies compared with McCain’s rallies—just contrast the excitement you would see in the Republican base. I think this hinted at the degree to which appeals around identity politics, around nativism, conspiracies, were gaining traction.”

The populist wave was abetted by Fox News and other right-wing media outlets, he said, and encouraged to spread by social-media companies uninterested in exploring their impact on democracy. “I don’t hold the tech companies entirely responsible,” he said, “because this predates social media. It was already there. But social media has turbocharged it. I know most of these folks. I’ve talked to them about it. The degree to which these companies are insisting that they are more like a phone company than they are like The Atlantic, I do not think is tenable. They are making editorial choices, whether they’ve buried them in algorithms or not. The First Amendment doesn’t require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there.”

This is Trump’s legacy, division and hate.

The cult continues.

but after Trump’s baseless vote fraud claims

I'm better than you,
na-na, na-na, boo-boo,
stick your head in doo-doo.

The threats to American democracy—

According to the FBI hate crimes are at their highest for more than a decade.

Hate motivated murders rose to 51 last year, more than half the amount killed in 2018.

I can’t post links, but the information is from the BBC website.

Black Americans Most Likely to Commit Hate Crimes, Join Hate Groups, and Commit Interracial Attacks. Here are the Numbers.

'Three Wrong Counts In Three Minutes': Georgia Recount Auditor Says Things Aren't Adding Up

A Republican National Committee monitor in the Georgia recount efforts came forward claiming he witnessed a counted wrongly calling out votes. According to the monitor, the counter called votes that should have gone to President Donald Trump and claimed they were for former Vice President Joe Biden.

"So, second person was supposed to be checking it, right. So, three times in three minutes she called out Biden. The second auditor caught it and she said, 'No. This is Trump.' Now, that's just while I'm standing there," Hale Soucie, the monitor explained. "So, does the second checker catch it every time? But this lady, three times in three minutes, from 2:09 to 2:12, she got three wrong."

Soucie said he left the original table he was where they were recounting ballots for Cobb County. He claimed he left the table because the second person wasn't looking at the vote but was automatically assuming that the first counter was correct.

According to the insider, table 17, where they were counting votes for Cobb County, was where the woman called the wrong votes. Table 18, which was also counting votes for Cobb County, is where Soucie said he witnessed the second person not looking at the ballots.

"So, I go and report it. They say, 'Oh, we'll talk to the [Cobb County] election officials.' They talk to her. And so I come back by again in a few minutes and she's not doing it after I've talked to her," he explained.


The RNC monitor stated that after he left the table, election officials kept a close eye on him and pointed him out despite him simply observing the process.

"I haven't done anything wrong. All I'm doing is writing down and observing to tell what happened," he explained.

Soucie said he made another slow lap around the room and reapproached the woman. He allegedly heard her say, "'I'm paid by the taxpayer and this f**king a**hole is coming out and watching me.'"

[... ... ...]
Is American democracy under threat? Our answer is yes: comparative experience suggests that these are not propitious conditions for democratic durability, and certainly not for effective government performance. How serious is the threat? It is hard to argue that contemporary American democracy faces a more acute threat than it did during the Civil War. But systematic disenfranchisement of American voters, or the use of executive power against regime critics, now seem disturbingly plausible. What is the nature of that threat? Our framework considers institutions, the boundaries of civic membership and status, and norms as bearing an interactive relationship to one another. The sorting of parties in a racialized polity has enabled a certain type of exclusionary politics in a far more presidential regime. This kind of interactive complexity raises the stakes for democratic stability, for it enables the corrosion of norms of executive restraint, with possibly broader repercussions for campaign strategy and voter mobilization around exclusionary white nationalist motifs.