A fascist Christian GOP attack on democracy and voting: Fix a non-existent problem

The Washington Post reports that an investigation into significant voter and election fraud by Republican lawmakers in Michigan concludes there was none. The investigation's final report was blunt that all the allegations of voter fraud and election fraud were false, had no basis in fact or even understanding of the process of voting and vote counting. WaPo writes:

On Wednesday, a Republican-controlled state Senate committee issued a report forcefully rejecting the claims of widespread fraud in the state, saying citizens should be confident in the results and skeptical of “those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.”

The report even went so far as to state that people who pushed the election fraud lies should be investigated for committing criminal fraud and prosecuted if the evidence would support a prosecution.

One would think that would be the end of Republican concerns in Michigan about vote and election fraud. One would be wrong. 

Fixing what isn't broken

Immediately after releasing the investigation report, Michigan Republican lawmakers announced that they are going to pass 39 new laws to regulate voting in Michigan. The reason given was that strict limits on voting are necessary to address citizen beliefs that elections are fraudulent. Republicans claim they are making elections and voting even more secure than they are now. 

Thus, despite clearly acknowledging there is no problem with voting and election security, Michigan Republican lawmakers reinforce GOP voters' belief in election fraud by writing and passing new election restriction laws. People who believed all along that there was widespread voter and election fraud will feel vindicated in their false beliefs. After all, if the legislature is passing laws to prevent fraudulent elections, there must have been a reason to do so. 

In essence, fascist Republicans have found a way to reinforce unfounded fears of election fraud by saying it does not exist but also passing laws that are argued to make elections more secure.

This represents a sophisticated attack on voting rights. Most Republican politicians and leaders now understand that the tyrant-wannabe ex-president, and his mouthpiece liars, were lying about election fraud. GOP politicians and leaders can no longer pretend it is otherwise. Given that Republican leaders know that voting needs to be restricted for Republicans to win elections, they have no choice but to limit voting. So they are going to limit voting and rig elections as best they know how. 

The trick Republicans face is how to advantage Republican voters, while suppressing enough Democratic votes to tip elections for republican candidates. How can this kind of selective targeting be done?

From what I have seen so far, it looks like the job can be done by limiting voting access in urban areas to rough parity with rural area access. For example, a new law in Texas limits ballot drop boxes to one per county. In a county with hundreds of thousands of voters, tens of thousands of voters will not have access to the drop box. By contrast, one drop box in a rural county will limit access for lower proportion of voters. More Democratic drop box votes will be suppressed compared to suppressed Republican votes in rural areas.

Tactics that Republicans use to preferentially target Democratic areas also include (i) expanded rights for Republican poll monitors to intimidate voters and poll workers, and (ii) intimidation of poll workers who try to help voters cast their ballots. Republican poll monitors are deployed in urban areas where Democrats dominate. The argument is that Democrats commit vote fraud, not Republicans. The most severe attack comes from laws that give Republicans power to simply overturn election results they do not like. That effectively nullifies all voter power wherever that power is available and exercised.

Republican intent is clear. They see an existential threat in open and accessible voting. That dictates rigging elections to favor Republican candidates as much as possible and to disadvantage Democratic candidates as much as possible. Obviously, some Republican votes will be suppressed as unavoidable collateral damage in a political war of Republican fascism against democracy and the rule of law. 

The big question

The key question is this: How effective will fascist Christian Republican laws be in rigging elections to favor Republicans. We should have some kind of an answer within a few weeks after the 2022 elections. If it appears that Republican voter suppression laws are not effective enough for Republican satisfaction, one can reasonably expect fascist Christian republicans more laws to pass laws intended to be more effective at election rigging. In that case, the results of the 2024 elections will provide more data points for the fascist Christian GOP to use to improve the effectiveness of targeting Democratic votes.

If the 2022 laws and election results prove to be satisfactory, what the party might do thereafter is not clear. That might depend on how American voters react, assuming they react in any significant way.

An example of racism, or an example of poor assumptions?

 Disturbing and disturbed.

I am fully on board with recognizing the injustices of the past, but are there cases where we have gone TOO FAR in calling something an injustice? Or calling something racism?

Here is why I am posting this:

Watched an episode of New Amsterdam the other night and one scene disturbed me.

My common law wife found the scene acceptable so we had a discussion (debate even) about it.

One of the doctors mentioned traveling on a subway and was perturbed when a white male chastised a black mother because her child was causing a ruckus and disturbing the other passengers.

This doctor - who is white - felt that if his young daughter had made the same ruckus the white male wouldn't have said anything, therefore CONCLUDED that the white male was a racist - and actually called him that.

I was thinking WTF? I may have told the parent off as well if their child was disturbing other passengers or causing a scene, and I wouldn't have done it because of color either.

Two things bothered me about this scene:

The automatic assumption that the white male was racist, while at the same time, painting (unintentionally - hence bad script writing) children of black mothers as disruptive. Talk about stereotyping.

Was the doctor right though? Are white people more prone to chastise a black parent than a white parent? OR is this an example of where a fictional TV drama wanted to write something about injustice towards blacks, and completely FLUBBED IT?

Your thoughts?

Thoughts on defenses against tyranny

American democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties are pretty close to falling to Republican fascism and Christian Nationalism. Therefore, it is timely to consider some thoughts that experts who study the fall of democracies to demagogues, dictators and autocrats have about defenses against the rise of demagogic autocracy and tyranny. 

In his short 2017 handbook on resisting the fall and dealing with it when it comes, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century, history professor Timothy Snider writes about language, how we use it and how to help keep minds from being trapped by language tricks that tyrants and demagogues routinely deploy to deceive, distract, divide and manipulate nations and groups of people. 

Philology: the branch of knowledge that deals with the structure, historical development, and relationships of a language or languages

This is from lesson 9, Be kind to our language. Snyder writes:

Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey the thing everyone is saying. .... Read books.

Victor Klemperer, a literary scholar of Jewish origin, turned his philological training against Nazi propaganda. He noticed how Hitler's language rejected legitimate opposition. The people always meant some people and not others (the president uses the word in this way), encounters were always struggles (the president says winning) and any attempt by free people to understand the world in a different way was defamation of the leader (or, as the president puts it, libel).

The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is looking at a picture. we take this collective trance to be normal. we have slowly fallen into it.

More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens. the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought.

Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires having more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading.

What to read? Any good novel enlivens our ability to think about ambiguous situations and judge the intentions of others. .... One novel known by millions of young Americans that offers an account of tyranny and resistance is J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. If you or your friends or children did not read it that way the first time, then it bears reading again.

Some of the political and historical texts that inform the arguments made here are "Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell (1946), The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947), The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951), .... Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (2014). 

What is Snyder saying?

My read is that Snyder says authors like George Orwell, Ray Bradbury and others noticed a narrowing or 'degradation' of both language and knowledge or point of view generally (always?) accompanied the rise of 20th century demagogues and dictators. This makes a lot of sense. Framing issues in different ways often requires different words or phrasing, e.g., estate tax vs death tax, illegal immigrant vs undocumented worker (or, illegal employer). Exposure to multiple frames of an issue tends to free the mind to see different points of view. That tends to humanize and legitimize different points of view and the people who espouse them. 

Snyder's suggestion regarding the Harry Potter book is to reframe the book and read it as a fight between demagoguery and tyranny vs. truth and distributed power, roughly democracy or at least governance with less violence and coercion.[1] 

As discussed here before, framing issues in politics is a very powerful tool of persuasion. A specific frame tends to trap minds into seeing and thinking about issues as the speaker wants the audience to see and think. Politicians are expert at playing the frame game. Smart politicians know that if they "step into an opponent's frame" by engaging directly with the opposing frame, they usually lose the persuasion game (explained in the post the link goes to).

When considering listening to Fox News or engaging with fascist GOP and other toxic politics sites such as Town Hall or Breitbart, Snyder's point becomes clear. Those sources are very disciplined. They all use the same frames and same limited language. They repeat their propaganda points using the same language over and over and over. The minds of people who are siloed into this world of demagoguery and lies tend to be trapped because they are not exposed to other competing frames, facts or reasoning. For those people, there is only one world view and political opposition is illegitimate. Or as Christian nationalists see it, there is only their world view frame and all else is against God.

Question: People tend to not read books about politics and the science about human biology and behaviors that drive politics. It is boring for most people. Is Snyder's suggestion to read books too diffuse (or 'academic') to be helpful to most people who are unaware of his reasoning and the underlying biology and history? 

Footnote: 

1. In my opinion and based on my political morals, truth and distributed power or democracy  vs. demagoguery and tyranny mostly boils down to the endless fight of good against evil. 

That belief is based on most people's self-professed belief in democracy, even in tyrannies. For example, the original North Korean dictator named the country Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 1948. It still goes by that name, despite it not being anywhere close to a real democracy in the sense of average people having any power via voting or any other mechanism. The country is better named Dictatorlandia or something akin to that. 

Chapter review: Up from Slavery: The Ideological Origins of Christian Nationalism

Context

Up from Slavery: The Ideological Origins of Christian Nationalism, is chapter 5 in Katherine Stewart's 2019 book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise if Religious Nationalism. 

The content of this chapter should be mandatory reading for all American school children, especially children in religious schools. Without this knowledge, most modern conservative Christians probably hold major false beliefs and historical misunderstandings. That is due to the intense, ruthless bombardment of people with deceit and false propaganda by the CN movement. The point is to create misinformed minds to help advance the CN's religious, social and economic agenda. I suspect most Americans (~95% ?) are mostly or completely unaware of this important slice of American history. I was on of them. 

Stewart traces the sources of modern Christian nationalism (CN) from its origins. A key early figure was Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898). Dabney was an American Christian theologian, Southern Presbyterian pastor, Confederate States Army Chaplain, an architect and chief of staff and biographer to confederate general Stonewall Jackson. Although bits and pieces of CN ideology were present at and before the founding of the republic, Dabney was probably the single most influential figure in crystallizing the thinking and rigid theological reasoning[1] that underpins the overall CN ideology today.

The next main influencer after Dabney was Rousas John Rushdooney (1916-2001). Rushdooney was an American Calvinist philosopher, historian, and theologian. He is credited as the father of Christian Reconstructionism and a key inspiration for the modern Christian homeschool movement. He was born to Armenian immigrants who fled the 1915-1917 Armenian genocide, which was a key influence on his life. The genocide was always in his mind and it influenced a key part of his rigid religious belief. Specifically, the lesson he learned was that, as he wrote in 1997, “In Armenia, there was no neutral ground between Islam and Christianity. And I came to realize there is no neutral ground anywhere.” Rushdooney came to believe that, as Stewart puts it, “only absolute submission to the word of God could save the human world from chaos.”

Review

Before Dabney: An antecedent to CN ideology -- the founding of the secular Republic: An early source of CN complaint arose with the founding of the Republic, a period of Christian anti-fundamentalism. Founders such as Jefferson and Paine were enlightenment thinkers who asserted that in time, all Americans would become unitarian or maybe even reason-based deists. The fundamentalist Christian backlash led to two outcomes. One was the establishment, mostly in the Northeast, of a “hard core theological establishment .... radically opposed to both religious liberalism and political liberalism,” which bitterly criticized “the godless nature of American democracy.” The other was coalescence of support for the institution of slavery, which was rationalized as promoting “the values of biblical literalism and absolute submission to authority,” presumably meaning the Christian God’s absolute authority. Stewart elaborates:

“.... the new generation of leaders promoted a theological vision that emphasized the divine origins of the existing order, which invariably involved domination and subordination, always of men over women, and frequently of white people over Black people, too. .... many of the most famous abolitionists .... were routinely denounced as heretics; leading orthodox ministers in the North and South repeatedly condemned abolitionism as a breeding ground for ‘infidelity’ and -- just as bad -- feminism.” 

It is worth remembering at this point that the main big lie that underpins modern CN is its false claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, not a secular one. Stewart repeatedly makes that point clear throughout her book, e.g., discussed in this post and this post. Evidence that the claim of a Christian founding is a CN lie is that the early American Christian fundamentalists themselves understood that America was founded as a secular nation, not a Christian nation. The fundamentalists bitterly criticized American democracy and secularism for that reason.

Oppressed White people: One of the key beliefs that Dabney held was that White Americans were oppressed in various ways. One of the most important sources of brutal White oppression was White people being forced to support public education for Blacks. Dabney was clear that it was oppression to support the “pretended education to the brats of black paupers.” Stewart continues:

“These unjustly persecuted white people, as Dabney saw it, were also forced to contend with ‘the atheistic and infidel theories of physical science.’ he had two sciences in mind -- geology and evolutionary biology -- ‘the one attacking the recent origin of man, the flood etc., the other presuming to construct a creation without a creator.’ The malevolent tormentors of the wholesome white taxpayers were the secular, liberal elites who dominated national political life. .... before the civil war, he sermonized loudly about the ‘righteousness’ of slavery and argued that opposing slavery was ‘tantamount to rejecting Christianity. In this respect, he was an unexceptional figure in his time.’”

Dabney called democracy “mobocracy.” He wanted all Christian voters to turn out to win every election for the CN cause of imposing a fundamentalist Christian biblical worldview on American government and society. That belief among modern CN adherents is alive and well today. According to the modern CN narrative, Whites are being horribly persecuted in America by secular education, civil liberties and voting rights (both are now crumbling under CN attack), inconvenient science, secular public education, women’s rights and other unspeakable anti-Christian horrors.

Regarding public education, Dabney’s animosity was clear and intense. He wrote: “.... the ‘government school’ has ‘leveled its guns at God and family. Liberal education is inevitably pluralistic.”

Propaganda: the tactics stay the same over time: Persuasive propaganda usually relies mostly on some combination of lies, distortions, slanders, exaggerations, emotional manipulation and motivated reasoning. That was true in Dabney’s time. Dabney and his contemporaries did not hesitate to do their best to persuade, reality and reason be damned. Stewart writes:

“[A Dabney contemporary minister wrote] ‘The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders -- they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins, on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other.’ .... In the eyes of proslavery theologians, the United States was a ‘Redeemer Nation’ .... Perhaps the most aspect of proslavery theology .... was its fusion of religion with a radicalized form of nationalism.’”

As the radical agitator Saul Alinsky observed, to get people to act, one needs to wrap one’s cause in morals, patriotism, fear and whatever else there is at hand to foment emotional responses and a belief in the obvious rightness of the cause against lying, evil, barbaric opposition. Maybe there really isn’t any significant neutral ground. Modern CN’s constant resort to blatant propaganda and divisive lies has lots of precedent in American history. The war CN wages today against American democracy and civil liberty is all-out and dead serious.

Rushdooney’s education: In college, he was forced to read secular horrors like Homer and Shakespeare. He hated it. He called his experience “the ugliest experience of my life” and asserted that such education and books were just “humanistic garbage, devoid of wisdom.” He came to agree with Dabney that the Union victory was “a defeat for Christian orthodoxy” and “Abolitionist leaders showed more hate than love on the whole.” Stewart writes, and here the big CN lie and smaller lies pop up:

“In Rushdooney's telling, it was not the intention of America’s founders to establish a nonsectarian representative democracy. .... The First Amendment, he argues, aimed to establish freedom ‘not from religion but for religion’ -- a phrase widely parroted by Christian nationalists today. ‘The constitution was designed to perpetuate a Christian order,’ he said. For Rushdooney, the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which included a guarantee that all citizens receive equal protection under the law ‘began the court’s recession from its conception of America as a Christian country.’ Now the job was to redeem America from its commitment to godless humanism.”

The lies are blatant and shameless.

Libertarianism and the plutocrats: Along the bumpy road to modern CN, plutocrats got interested because the developing ideology was inherently in favor of wealthy people’s interests in accumulating and keeping power and wealth. The libertarians, e.g., Milton Friedman, were open to CN ideology, but sometimes felt their religion was maybe a bit too intense and over reaching. By contrast, CN leaders who found libertarianism liked the autocratic economic theory, but found practitioners like Ludwig von Mieses and Friederich Hayek not religious enough for their liking. Talk about blind, siloed minds, jeez.

Anyway, CN leaders started weaseling their way into the coffers of rich and powerful people and companies. The rich people and companies, which are now people too, saw the tremendous economic and power enhancement potential in an alignment with CN ideology. For defenders of democracy and civil liberties, it was a marriage made in hell.

One focus of libertarian and CN hate was the speedbump called the New Deal. Stewart writes:

“.... a new group of libertarian economic thinkers emerged that shared their fear and loathing of government, if not necessarily their religion. [The libertarian leaders] warned that the modern welfare state would soon overwhelm the free market and put humanity on the road to serfdom. They denounced labor unions, public education, redistributive programs and other governmental interventions in the free market, which they believed would produce peace, prosperity, and the solution to all major social problems if left free to its own devices.” 

Even the libertarians jumped all over public education but embraced CN. And, as Stewart writes, “Libertarian economics came to dominate Christian nationalism.”

The rational for tyranny of the minority: Christian fundamentalism and CN have probably always had the problem of being a minority of Americans. But that’s no problem for a motivated reasoner hell-bent on defending sacred ideology and beliefs. Rushdooney articulated the doctrine of “the remnant.” According to that theological reasoning, humans are destined to be governed by a motivated minority. Stewart writes about Rushdoony’s view of the matter:

“When history takes a wrong turn, he says, God leaves behind a ‘remnant’ of true believers, tasked with guarding the light in the dark times and then retaking civilization -- or as he called it ‘the task of reconstruction’ -- thus bringing about the term Christian Reconstruction. The job of Reconstructionists, according to Rushdoony, is to remain faithful no matter what. ‘History has never been dominated by majorities, but only by dedicated minorities who stand unconditionally on their faith.’ .... Many of Rushdoony’s ideas justify the politics of today -- perhaps in ways the even he didn’t intend.”

So there it is. The CN movement is perfectly comfortable with a tyranny of their own minority. Contrary majority public opinion is a nuisance to be worked around somehow, but not something of fundamental importance to be taken seriously. The CN movement is clearly not democratic. It is autocratic, fascist and for the wealthy and powerful elites at the top, kleptocratic.

The great CN contradiction: I have pointed out here many times that obvious hypocrisy and blatant logic flaws and inconsistencies do not even mildly faze most (~99.5% ?) ideologues. The ends morally justify the means and that’s that. No moral qualms bubble up, so no second thoughts occur.

Stewart comments that, to their shock, in the late 1970s, observers of the American religious landscape saw that Christian fundamentalism was back. The cognoscenti or whoever was in charge of seeing things, falsely believed that old-fashioned Biblical literalism was fading away as society and science progressed. Boy were they wrong. 

At that time, ultraconservative Christians were starting to vote their religion in increasing numbers. What was happening in modern times had happened in the 1800s and again in the 1700s. The main thing that changed was the technology of communications. But the message changed only a little, e.g., support for slavery was muted and driven underground. The theological reasoning going back to Dabney and Rushdooney barely changed.

In modern times, the great CN contradiction is obvious: It always preaches love and usually acts cordially and warmly in public, but it routinely practices intolerance and hate in overt and subtle ways. 

People who deviate from CN orthodoxy, secular Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, women, LGBQT, and everyone else are to be punished. Where CN places people in society is to be accepted. All deviants are condemned to burn in hell forever. CN is neither loving nor caring for anyone outside the tribe. For the outsider, the CN wants to exert total economic and social domination. CN ideology demands that the heathen be controlled and punished or converted to see the light and accept the role God assigns them as told to them by self-serving CN elites.

Stewart writes about how the CN rationalizes all of this ill-will and incoherence, including that of many captive minds of low income rank and file believers, whether they even know what CN actually is or not:

“.... the movement drew its energy from the needs and anxieties of a mass of struggling Americans -- even as it allied itself with concentrations of economic power in its time. Just as in the days of proslavery theology, the contradictions were almost too obvious to be seen. Poor whites were, apart from enslaved people themselves, the system’s greatest losers, and yet, with guidance of men like Dabney, they joined with its loudest supporters. ....today’s Christian nationalists follow the logic, if not necessarily the theology, laid down by Rushdoony.

.... an astonishing number settled on one version or another of dominionism, or the fundamental idea that right-thinking Christians should assume power in all spheres of life.

Gary North put his finger on the deeper forces at work when he observed that ‘the ideas of the Reconstructionists have penetrated into Protestant circles that are for the most part unaware of the original sources of the theological ideas that are beginning to transform them.’

In the final analysis, Rushdoony and his Reconstructionists were effects of history, too, not its causes. .... the hierarchies that arose in the Gilded Age hit some roadblocks in the progressive era [the New Deal], but that hardly stopped the plutocrats from enlisting new champions of theological legitimation.

The many paradoxes and contradictions of Christian nationalism make sense when they are taken out of the artificial ‘culture war’ framing and placed within the history of the antidemocratic reaction in the United States. To any outside observer, it must seem odd that Christian nationalists loudly reject ‘government’ as a matter of principle even as they seek government power to impose their religious vision on the rest of society. .... At bottom, they agree with Rushdoony that there is no neutrality: the state either answers to God or it answers to something worse.”

Jerry Falwell and the thin veneer of CN cordiality and love: Stewart points out that CN members present as loving parents, involved in community concerns, decent and polite. The CN contradiction is strong in them. Stewart uses Falwell as an example:

“Jerry Falwell more than anyone embodied this unsettling mix of love and hate. A jovial presence with an easy manner, Falwell was often celebrated as ‘a loving man’ and ‘a big heart.’ Yet he regularly spewed toxins, as when he blamed ‘the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians’ for the September 11 attacks. .... a pastor in Falwell’s style [Carl McIntire] [commented]. ‘Separation involves hard, grueling controversy. It involves attacks, personal attacks, even violent attacks . . . Satan preaches brotherly love to hold men in apostacy. .... [aggression] is an expression of Christian love.’”

 

So there it is, the faces of CN in public and in private. None of this is a secret. But despite its importance in American society, politics and commerce, few Americans know what CN is. Probably most conservative Christians (85% ?) in the CN movement do not truly understand what they are a part of. 

Questions: Is Stewart being hyperbolic or irrationally alarmist, or does what she say seem at least plausible in view of recent history and current events? 

Does it seem reasonable to see the current fascist Republican party push to subvert elections as a reflection of CN ideology, tactics and pro-tyranny of the minority mindset? 

Essentially all people in the CN movement vehemently claim that they are not bigoted or racist, but is that strong denial persuasive in view of the movement’s dogma that assigns subservient or secondary roles to non-Whites, women and non-heterosexuals in society, religious life and commerce?

Footnote: 

1. As a concept, theological reasoning never made sense to me. Such reasoning can and does lead to many different, sometimes contradictory visions of “correct” religious dogma, belief and behavior. That is all based on human beliefs about what an unknowable supernatural deity or force asks or demands of humans. The bickering is endless. The Gods are different. Dogmas are all over the place. In my opinion, there is not, and can never be, an empirical basis for agreement or objectivity about what something supernatural wants. It is all a matter of personal faith and belief. For many or most average people, personal faith and belief often boils down to what religious leaders tell them they should be. That is the case, including when religious leaders tell people that cowboys with six shooters and dinosaurs coexisted on planet Earth.

Afghanistan update: Taliban has entered two provincial capitals

The New York Times reports that the ever-present Taliban offensive is gaining momentum. The Afghan military is crumbling with little resistance to the onslaught. The NYT writes:

The Taliban entered two provincial capitals in northern Afghanistan Sunday, local officials said, the culmination of an insurgent offensive that has overrun dozens of rural districts and forced the surrender and capture of hundreds of government forces and their military equipment in recent weeks.

In Kunduz city, the capital of the province of the same name, the Taliban seized the city’s entrance before dispersing throughout its neighborhoods. Kunduz was briefly taken by the Taliban in 2015 and 2016 before they were pushed back by American airstrikes, special operations forces and Afghan security forces.

To the west of Kunduz in Maimana, the capital of Faryab Province, Taliban fighters appeared at the city’s entrance before moving into the city’s periphery. The Taliban clashed with security forces into Sunday night, after a series of takeovers in past days in the capital’s surrounding districts. In one such recent battle, the Taliban killed more than 20 of the government’s most elite forces. In another, dozens of government troops surrendered together after running low on ammunition.  

In the last 24 hours, around a dozen districts have fallen to the Taliban — mostly in the country’s north. Since May 1, when U.S. forces officially began their withdrawal from the country, the Taliban — through local mediation, military offensives and government retreats — have taken more than 50 districts, according to data collected by The New York Times.  

On Saturday, in a clear sign of the deteriorating security situation, the Afghan government appointed a new acting minister of defense, minister of interior and army chief. (this clever tactic is a variation of the "rearranging the deck chairs" tactic, and directing the band to play music that is more upbeat 😊)

Other recent reports indicate that as Western civilian personnel supporting the Afghan military leave Afghanistan, its air force is projected to not be able to keep any aircraft or helicopters operational for very long. To be clear, the US projects that the Afghan air force will soon have zero functional aircraft. A few weeks is all the Afghan air force has left before it completely ceases to be operational, unless throwing paper airplanes armed with lit firecrackers at the Taliban constitutes being operational. So far, US and Afghan air power has been what kept the Taliban out of provincial capitals. That is soon coming to an end.

So much for 20 years of training the Afghan military to be self-sufficient. At the rate of progress over the last 20 years, another 20 would not make any difference. 

Meanwhile, the visa system the US set up to get Afghan people who worked for the US out of the country is in shambles. Thousands of translators and other Afghan allies are stuck in a useless US bureaucracy that is simply non-functional and drowning our Afghan allies in in red tape. A few people in congress, mostly former US military, are desperately trying to get our stupid, corrupt, broken congress to do something before the Taliban's festival of slaughter begins. It is not clear if their effort will lead to saving any Afghan allies or not. Unless something changes in a big way very soon, there will be a bloodbath. 

What do we want? Regime change! -- When do we want it? Right now!

Americans with a moral compass should want regime change in the US. The new regime should be led by an honest, competent, non-corrupted party in power, with the Democrats and Republicans relegated to permanent small minority status. Of course, that will not happen. We are stuck with two broken parties. The Republican Party in particular is corrupt, broken and incompetent. We have a system of governance that requires competence, good-will, cooperation and honesty. These days, the fascist GOP is the opposite of all of that.

OK, maybe most Americans do not want that kind of regime change. But I sure as hell do. A pox on both failed parties. In my opinion, the Democratic Party deserves some of the blame for the Republicans being in power at all, given how cruel, corrupt and inept the fascist GOP has been over the last 20-30 years.

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?