American fascism update: Georgia Republicans are purging non-Whites from roles in elections

I’ve been resisting labeling Republican fascism as racist. It has certainly been bigoted with lots of dislike for disfavored groups. But now, the Republicans have crossed the line. What they are doing cannot be denied, deflected from or spun into fantasy or bullshit that just isn’t true. What the Republicans are doing arguably is racism, plain and simple. 

An article in the New York Times reports that Georgia Republicans are ejecting democrats from administration of elections. In the past, both parties selected election board members and county commissioners were selected by both political parties. Now G.O.P.-controlled county commissions have he sole authority to restructure boards and appoint new members. 

The NYT spoke with Troup County election board member, Lonnie Hollis. She is a black woman who the Republicans will ethnically cleanse from her position to Whiten the place up and move it toward fascism. The NYT writes:  

Lonnie Hollis has been a member of the Troup County election board in West Georgia since 2013. A Democrat and one of two Black women on the board, she has advocated Sunday voting, helped voters on Election Days and pushed for a new precinct location at a Black church in a nearby town.

But this year, Ms. Hollis will be removed from the board, the result of a local election law signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican. Previously, election board members were selected by both political parties, county commissioners and the three biggest municipalities in Troup County. Now, the G.O.P.-controlled county commission has the sole authority to restructure the board and appoint all the new members.

“I speak out and I know the laws,” Ms. Hollis said in an interview. “The bottom line is they don’t like people that have some type of intelligence and know what they’re doing, because they know they can’t influence them.”

Ms. Hollis is not alone. Across Georgia, members of at least 10 county election boards have been removed, had their position eliminated or are likely to be kicked off through local ordinances or new laws passed by the state legislature. At least five are people of color and most are Democrats — though some are Republicans — and they will most likely all be replaced by Republicans.

Ms. Hollis and local officials like her have been some of the earliest casualties as Republican-led legislatures mount an expansive takeover of election administration in a raft of new voting bills this year.  

G.O.P. lawmakers have also stripped secretaries of state of their power, asserted more control over state election boards, made it easier to overturn election results, and pursued several partisan audits and inspections of 2020 results.

Republican state lawmakers have introduced at least 216 bills in 41 states to give legislatures more power over elections officials, according to the States United Democracy Center, a new bipartisan organization that aims to protect democratic norms. Of those, 24 have been enacted into law across 14 states.

G.O.P. lawmakers in Georgia say the new measures are meant to improve the performance of local boards, and reduce the influence of the political parties. But the laws allow Republicans to remove local officials they don’t like, and because several of them have been Black Democrats, voting rights groups fear that these are further attempts to disenfranchise voters of color.  

“It’s a thinly veiled attempt to wrest control from officials who oversaw one of the most secure elections in our history and put it in the hands of bad actors,” said Jena Griswold, the chairwoman of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State and the current Colorado secretary of state. “The risk is the destruction of democracy.”

Officials like Ms. Hollis are responsible for decisions like selecting drop box and precinct locations, sending out voter notices, establishing early voting hours and certifying elections. But the new laws are targeting high-level state officials as well, in particular secretaries of state — both Republican and Democratic — who stood up to Mr. Trump and his allies last year.  

[L]ast month, Arkansas Republicans wrote new legislation that allows a state board of election commissioners — composed of six Republicans and one Democrat — to investigate and “institute corrective action” on a wide variety of issues at every stage of the voting process, from registration to the casting and counting of ballots to the certification of elections. The law applies to all counties, but it is widely believed to be aimed at Pulaski, one of the few in the state that favor Democrats.

Part of what is terrifying here is the sheer transparency of the lies the Republicans are spewing in defense of their fascist ethnic cleansing project. Asserting that this is just an innocent attempt to “improve the performance of local boards” is a blatant racist lie. The local boards performed just fine in the 2020 election. In the case of Arkansas, a GOP legislator defended the new measure as a “necessary extra level of oversight of elections ... because otherwise Republicans could not get a fair shake.” There was no specific reason given to believe that Republicans did not get a fair shake. None of this seems to bother most people (~95% ?) who vote for republicans.

And, it isn't just Georgia that is working to resurrect and expand the Confederacy. Arizona is joining in the Republican fascist election coup. Arizona Republicans introduced a bill that strips Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, of most of her authority over election lawsuits. That bill would expire when she leaves office. Republicans hope to get a Republican in office to replace her. Another bill gives the Republican Legislature added power to set guidelines for election administration, which is task carried out by the secretary of state.

In Kansas, Republicans overrode a veto from Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat. That election coup enacted laws that took power to modify election laws from the governor.  It also blocks the secretary of state, a Republican who repeatedly vouched for the security of voting by mail, from settling election-related lawsuits without the Legislature’s consent. 

The Republicans are precise in their targeting of all mechanisms of power and even individual people in office right now or political offices that can exert election influence. Republicans are giving themselves complete power to steal elections and commit vote fraud on a massive scale.

Where all of is this going?

Either people can see the threat of they can’t. To a few Americans (~10% ?), the threat to democracy and elections is clear, grave and urgent. To others, e.g., Joe Manchin, the situation may feel moderately or mildly unsettling, but basically no big deal. To most Republicans (~98% ?), this is a valiant, patriotic defense of democracy and freedom against the imminent takeover of America and democracy by vicious Democratic socialism, tyranny and/or cannibalistic pedophilia. 

Of course, there is no way to know how this will play out if Democrats are unable to act to defend elections. Maybe people like Manchin are right and things will just work out fine. Maybe. But what if those people are wrong? If we are witnessing the rise of a true White Christian American racist fascism, there will probably be no way to go back without civil war.

That’s a major problem with democracies. They really are fragile. They can fall to hundreds of seemingly small incremental but important attacks without alarming the masses. By the time the masses wake up, they are enslaved and stuck in an arrogant, heartless autocracy. Americans could wind up working for racist White Christian fascist kleptocratic elites. 

Questions: (1) Is it objectively false, irrationally alarmist and/or unwarranted to see racism as a major driving force in Republican politics and policy, e.g., not all Republicans are racist so it is irrational to call the movement racist? 

(2) If this isn’t racism, is it just morally acceptable bigotry, or is American on the verge of falling to some form of a vicious Democratic socialism, tyranny, forced atheism and/or cannibalistic pedophilia?

(3) Is it possible for racism to be one major factor and a pro-democracy mindset to be another that Republicans are targeting for removal from power, i.e., can the Republicans be targeting multiple things at the same time that stand in the way of establishing an American White Christian fascism or a new Confederacy? 

(4) Is it objectively false, unfair, irrationally alarmist and/or irrationally divisive to even use the labels American White Christian fascism or to refer to resurrection and expansion of a new American Confederacy? 

An interesting Q&A with the My Pillow guy

At a rally for the ex-president, Johnathan Klepper briefly interviewed Mike Lindell and a couple of the attendees. Lindell organized the rally to reassert his self-professed knowledge that the ex-president will be reinstalled as president in August and Biden will be kicked out of office. Lindell asserts that there is rock solid evidence of widespread vote fraud, but he provides no details.

Lindell ended the interview with a stream of incoherent blither and bumbling frustration with Klepper’s questions, finally commenting “You guys are horrible.” The irrationality and attendant incoherence and irrational fantasy land that Lindell and the resurrectionists inhabit are shocking and frightening. 

https://youtu.be/jGGR7vxq7B4

Compare and Contrast…

It’s high school graduation time.  This year, we have three new graduates in two of our extended families.  Though both of these families consider themselves to be Christian-oriented, as you can see from the reverse side of the invitations below, they are operating under two different “you’re heading into the future now, young man” messages that are being suggested to their respective sons.  Neither family knows the other family, so there is no inter-family influence going on there.

Family 1’s message is in the top half of the image 

Family 2’s message is in the bottom half of the image:

I was going to go into a long “personal opinion” spiel here, but I changed my mind on that.  I wanted to keep the OP presentation “neutral.”  And granted, while I haven’t given you much to go on (other than an “at face value” situation), I wanted to ask you:

Q: What do you deduce from the two invitations?  In other words, what’s your armchair psychologist’s analysis of the two different graduation messages?  Discuss.

Thanks for posting and recommending.

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Note: Since religion (in particular Christian Nationalism) has been a topic of late, I thought it would be alright to post this OP on this political blog.  Politics and religion seem to be highly related, especially these days.

Is press neutrality about GOP authoritarianism really neutral, or is it incompetent or sloppy reporting?

It appears that a few people are starting to wake up to the threat the Republican Party poses to democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. Dick Polman, a national political columnist in Philadelphia and writer in residence at the University of Pennsylvania (dickpolman7@gmail.com), wrote:

On a podcast the other day, national political reporter Thomas Edsall analyzed the mounting threat of Republican authoritarianism and posed a great question:

“Trump and the Republican party have created a real dilemma for the media… A party of sedition is trying to (enact) rules that even when it loses, it wins… We have a different animal in the ballgame now. One side is dominated by a party that is willing to accept lies, that is delusional… a party that is on the verge of becoming something unseen in America, beyond the point of no return…When you have a party that is moving in this extreme fashion, how do we in the media describe it?”

Easy answer: Describe reality.

The old days of both sides false-balance journalism, the old days of writing “on the one hand, on the other hand,” the old days when both parties honored democracy by accepting the election results – those days are over. When one party openly declares that it no longer believes in democracy, when indeed it is working non-stop to destroy it, journalists can no longer take refuge in “neutrality.”

Richard Tofel, founder of the investigative journalism website ProPublica, wrote recently that neutrality is an “attractive value” only “if you view public life as an endless series of fights between two sides distinguishable most importantly by the primary colors of their uniforms.” But all too often – and especially now – neutrality is merely “an appropriate pose for the uninformed.”

Any journalist who’s remotely informed about what’s going on in 2021 should be compelled to point it out in plain language. If arsonists are torching a house, and it’s burning in front of your eyes, you report it and identify the arsonists. It’s not enough to say “Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell hopes to win the chamber in 2022.” It’s factually accurate to simply say, “Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, after voting to exonerate a president who inspired an anti-democratic coup attempt, hopes to win the chamber in 2022 and strengthen Republican vote-suppression efforts in 2024.”

In a national civic emergency, the mainstream media needs to be pro-democracy and pro-truth. That is not “bias.” That is patriotism.

The problem, however, is that too many journalists (especially the older, more seasoned ones) are stuck in the old paradigm. Jay Rosen, a media critic at New York University, said it well last week: The press is still too invested in “the game – ‘who are the winners and losers, who’s ahead, what’s the strategy?’ You can keep doing that right up until the point when democracy disintegrates.”

I agree. So does Tom Edsall: “In times of big change, reporters have a harder time finding ways to describe it and to deal with it. Reporters are usually fixed in a language that they’ve (long) been using to describe political competition.” Nevertheless, “you have to look at the truth…The press has been reluctant to look at the truth adequately… That is what the press is supposed to do. I’m personally against mincing words,” whereas, at too many mainstream outlets, “the pressure is to mince words.”

Granted, the word authoritarian upsets a lot of people. But what more empirical evidence do we need that the GOP wants to turn America into Turkey, Hungary, or worse? In plain sight, its state-level lawmakers are working to sabotage future free elections – ensuring that Republican state legislatures have the power to invalidate Democratic wins, installing local election officials who can refuse to certify Democratic wins, enacting a string of new voter suppression laws that are designed to protect their white minorities.

Meanwhile, the GOP’s national leaders remain in thrall to the loser who thinks the 2020 election was stolen, and they continue to pretend that the insurrectionist coup attempt was a mirage. As Edsall says, “stuffing things down the memory hole is precisely what authoritarianism does.” If we journalists don’t point that out, we’re not doing our jobs.

James Madison, who championed the Bill of Rights, warned more than two centuries ago that a free country starved of accurate knowledge “is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both.”

Both indeed. The clock is ticking. (emphasis added)

 

Question: Does Polman make good points, or is he just a hyperbolic alarmist?

Corporate money slithers quietly back to feed hungry swamp creatures

A New York Times opinion piece describes the quiet, ongoing return of lobbyists and corporate cash into the coffers of Republicans who supported the 1/6 coup attempt. The swamp is refilling with sleazy, self-serving intentions backed by money. Pay-to-play politics, a/k/a/ legalized bribery, is coming back. The NYT writes:

The swamp is healing.

The early months of 2021 were rough for many members of Congress, as they confronted every politician’s worst nightmare: a major disruption to the usually reliable gusher of corporate campaign cash.

Following the Jan. 6 sacking of the U.S. Capitol by MAGA zealots high on Donald Trump’s lies about election fraud, a host of corporate PACs and industry groups announced reviews of their policies on political giving. From Bank of America to Disney, from Microsoft to Raytheon to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, many of the nation’s big donors hit the pause button. Some suspended all contributions to congressional races. Others drew up a more targeted “no-fly” list featuring members of the so-called Sedition Caucus, the 147 Republicans who voted on Jan. 6 to overturn the election results.

Further squelching the money flow, the coronavirus pandemic halted most in-person fund-raisers and other opportunities for lawmakers and favor seekers to hang out. Even if everyone puts on their best smiles — and pants — Zoom cocktail parties are a sad and sorry substitute for the usual parade of steak dinners, fishing trips, golf outings and other face-to-face schmooze fests. In the first quarter of 2021, corporate giving plummeted to individual members and campaign committees alike.

But as the election and pandemic traumas fade, corporate America is easing, quietly, back into the giving game. Lobbyists are suiting up. Fund-raising events are on the calendar. Wallets are reopening. It will take a while yet for the giving to return to its normal, obscene levels, but the trajectory is once more headed up — with the trend expected to accelerate in the coming months.

The editorial asserts that companies now think that the public outrage over the attack has subsided, making it safe to resume “currying favor” with Republicans, i.e., bribing, threatening, etc., without much shareholder and customer blowback. As the NYT writes: “After all, the Capitol was sacked more than five months ago. That’s an eternity in political time.” 

An analysis by Roll Call comments: “the top business and industry PACs contributing to the 147 G.O.P. lawmakers [who voted against certifying the election] were major defense contractors such as General Dynamics, as well as Duke Energy, American Crystal Sugar Company and PACs connected with the Associated Builders and Contractors and the National Association of Realtors.” 

Questions: Is it true that people are forgetting the horror of the 1/6 coup attempt? If so, is it now safe for quiet corporate money to quietly start flowing again to Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election? Do corporations care more about profit and power than democracy and elections?

Radical Christian nationalism is dividing the Southern Baptist Convention

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is the largest Protestant denomination in the US. At its annual convention, the delegates elected a moderate pastor as its president by 556 votes out of about 14,000. The split in the SBC is deep and increasingly bitter. The moderate, Ed Litton, defeated ultraconservative Mike Stone in a runoff after a first round of voting failed to elect a candidate. Unlike Stone, Litton tries to avoid culture wars. The radical conservatives are aggressive about culture war. Some delegates on either side may leave the SBC depending on how the conference plays out.

The New York Times writes: 

In Nashville, tempers were running high. Irate messengers [convention delegates] confronted at least two high-profile leaders in the halls of the convention center, accusing them of fomenting liberalism. Some leaders were provided with extra security.

“We are at a defining moment for our convention,” J.D. Greear, the departing president, told the assembly in a fiery speech hours before they would elect his successor. He excoriated the “Pharisees” within the denomination who placed ideological purity over its evangelistic mission, alienating Black and Latino pastors, sexual abuse survivors and others in their zeal.

“Are we primarily a cultural and political affinity group, or do we see our primary calling as being a gospel witness?” Mr. Greear asked. “What’s the more important part of our name: Southern or Baptist?”

Tuesday’s vote capped months of angry debate over race, gender and other cultural divides, as the denomination’s leaders and insurgents wrestled over whether their future hinged on wrenching the church even further to the right or broadening its reach.

The same plague of far right radicalism that has rotted the Republican Party and converted it to a fascist cult is now rotting Evangelical Christianity. 

The delegates passed a resolution to reaffirm the SBC 1995 apology for systemic racism. The SBC was founded before the Civil War to defend slavery. The convention rejected “any theory or worldview” claiming that racial discrimination is not sinful. At its 2019 meeting, delegates affirmed that critical race theory could be cited by faithful Baptists. That was seen by ultraconservatives as polarizing and alienating. Race is still dividing many Americans. 

In the months leading up to the convention there has been high-profile departures from the SBC and poisonous clashes. That comes despite a culture that used to be united about the essentials of Southern Baptist faith. It is not yet clear what the effects of this convention will be on the SBC.

Even with the election of a moderate, the SBC still sees liberalism as a threat. Outgoing president Greear warned of twin threats to Southern Baptists as the danger of liberalism and the danger of Phariseeism.

The ultraconservatives make clear that they are not going away. At a breakfast meeting hosted by the Conservative Baptist Network, an ultraconservative SBC executive committee member told attendees to not be discouraged if their candidate lost. “If we do not prevail today, we will come back next year and the next year and the next year. .... We are here to the death. We will not stop.” 

That sounds about like the apocalyptic political and religious far right radicalism that drives the fascist GOP today.