The terrifying mendacity and fascism of Republican elites

Evidence of Republican Party mendacity and authoritarianism continue to accumulate. A week or so ago, Rachael Maddow reported that pro-ex-president attorney John Eastman disavowed a legal strategy memo he wrote that described how Mike Pence could have subverted the 2020 election and kept the ex-president in office. It would have been easy and effective. Legal experts believe the memo was crackpot nonsense and its implementation would have amounted to an overthrow of the government.

Maddow reported that last Friday Eastman disavowed his own memo to an interview with the National Review.

Then last night Maddow reported that in private on last Saturday, Eastman was clear that he still believes his strategy was sound and it would have been legal and effective at keeping the ex-president in power. He claimed it failed only because Mike Pence was a weak establishment Republican who refused to get on board with a rank and file Republican movement to keep the ex-president in power. An undercover reporter, Lauren Windsor, falsely posing as an ex-president supporter and person present at the 1/6 coup attempt approached Eastman on Saturday. After she dished out some flattery to Eastman about him doing God’s work, saving democracy and whatnot, she got him to speak candidly about the memo and Pence. 

Windsor to Eastman: You're doing the Lord’s work

Windsor to Eastman: Your legal strategy was totally solid

Eastman to Windsor: Yeah

Eastman to Windsor, Pence was just an 

establishment guy

In other reporting last night, Maddow reported that the same reporter, Lauren Windsor, conned Republican candidate for governor, Glenn Youngkin, into admitting that he is much more anti-abortion than he is willing to admit to the people of Virginia. The New York Times reported on Oct. 7:

Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor of Virginia, revealed to her that he could not publicly press his anti-abortion agenda for fear of losing independent voters. 

A spokesman for Mr. Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia denied he had said anything privately that he had not uttered publicly, even though he told Ms. Windsor that he had to be discreet about his anti-abortion views. “When I’m governor and I have a majority in the House, we can start going on offense,” he said to her in their encounter. “But as a campaign topic, sadly, that in fact won’t win my independent votes that I have to get.”

At least in some competitive races, at least some Republican candidates feel it is sad that they have to deceive voters to get the votes they need to win elections. So, while in the midst of all-out attacks on democracy and elections, FRP (fascist Republican Party) elites are lying when they tell us they fighting hard to save democracy and elections. Meanwhile, the FRP members of congress either openly support these tactics or are complicit by their silence. FRP mendacity and fascism is nationwide and mainstream, not local or fringe crackpottery in the party.

Advocacy journalism, or immoral or unfair tactics?

The NYT commented on Lauren Windsor’s reporting tactics:

Ms. Windsor, 40, calls herself an “advocacy journalist,” though her methods fall beyond the pale of mainstream journalism, where reporters generally shy away from assuming false identities and secretly recording conversations.

She says her stings are justified by Republicans’ efforts to spread disinformation about the election and to weaken the nation’s democratic underpinnings through restrictive new voting laws and measures taking greater control over how elections are run.

“Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures,” she said in an interview. Assuming a false identity, she argued, can produce a truer record of a politician’s views. “Acting like you’re one of them — you’re going to elicit different answers than if you have a recorder in somebody’s face and they know you’re a journalist.”

While Ms. Windsor’s videos are often picked up by left-leaning news outlets, the political impact of them can be limited. Some of her Republican targets dismiss her videos as nothing they haven’t said before, in so many words.

The bait she dangles to draw out a response can be highly tendentious. “This is a Christian state, and Democrats are not Christian,” she told a cowboy-hatted Texas legislator in the Capitol in Austin.

Claiming to have been at the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, she challenged Mr. Pence about why he didn’t “stop the election from being stolen.” The former vice president didn’t bite: “Read the Constitution,” he said, before offering parting praise of her “heart.”  

Her practices have drawn inevitable comparisons to the right-wing gotcha squad Project Veritas, but she says there are crucial differences.

While Project Veritas has embedded moles in left-leaning groups and Democratic campaigns, Ms. Windsor says she avoids such methods.  

She makes her undercover recordings at public events in brief encounters. She usually uploads the full interaction to her YouTube page, The Undercurrent, or in segments on Twitter (which limits a video’s length).

Questions: 

1. Is what is reported here about Republican elites reasonably called mendacious or fascist?

2. Are Windsor's deceptive tactics to gather candid comments from Republicans who want their real beliefs hidden from voters unfair or immoral, or as some people argue, should fairness and morals[1] be mostly or completely ignored in politics because they are too subjective and/or irrational? 

3. Do candidates for elected office in a democracy, unlike political leaders in a tyranny, have any duty, legal, moral, ethical or otherwise, to be honest with voters, or is that ideal too utopian to be taken seriously, with most or all politicians mostly alike regardless of the form of government and kind of society they operate in?

4. Is the Democratic Party just as bad in terms of mendacity and authoritarianism or fascism as the FRP?

Footnote:

1. Fairness has been cited as an example of an essentially contested concept. Wikipedia writes:

Essentially contested concepts involve widespread agreement on a concept (e.g., “fairness”), but not on the best realization thereof. They are “concepts the proper use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users”, and these disputes “cannot be settled by appeal to empirical evidence, linguistic usage, or the canons of logic alone.”

Morals and morality are also essentially contested concepts. From what I can tell, the FRP decided years ago that the sacred ends (single party power, wealth at the top, and Christian God in government) justify essentially all means, including lies, deceit and even illegal means when they can get away with it.