The Ongoing Fascist Coup d'Etat in America, Volume Two - Where we are and where we're going

These articles try to go a little beyond the "what's happening today " level. That information is all over everywhere!

America is at a watershed moment.

Thought is needed...

The State of the Nation
You can see Hungary from America's front porch

Shortly after 2:20 a.m. on November 4, the president of the United States declared victory. He said, “Frankly, we did win this election.”

The president also said that the current process—in which votes are being counted across the country—is fraudulent. “This is a fraud on the American public,” the president said.

And then the president declared that he intended to stop unnamed forces from “disenfranchising” his supporters. “We’ll be going to the Supreme Court,” Trump said. And then he said, “We want all the voting to stop.”

This is an attempt to bring authoritarianism—real, genuine authoritarianism—to America. It is not mere irresponsibility. It is dangerous.

And here is what should scare you just as much as the specter of the president holding yet another campaign rally inside the White House, in flagrant violation of the Hatch Act:

Trump might still win   through legitimate means . Probably not—the actual vote counting suggests that Joe Biden is on track to surpass 270 Electoral votes. But nothing is certain.

It is one thing for a country to fall under the yoke of authoritarianism because it is forced. It is another thing to choose it freely.

And in this moment, Donald Trump—the same man   openly   calling for the stealing of an election—will have received more votes than any Republican to ever run for president.

He will have—despite the quarter of a million dead, despite the racism, despite the debates, despite the unemployment—almost certainly have   increased   his vote share from 2016.

This—the authoritarian strongman—is what the American people want. Not all of the people. Not quite a majority of the people. But a large enough percentage to put our country at risk of Orbánism.

Nearly half of America chose this. Not once, but twice.

For the last four years, the sophisticates and the climbers on the right have waved away the notion that Donald Trump was a danger to the liberal order. He was too clownish to be dangerous, they said.

Today, there will be sophisticates and climbers who try to wave away Trump’s words. It doesn’t matter if the president claims to have won Pennsylvania, they’ll say. His saying so doesn’t make it true. It’s “regrettable.” It’s “distressing.” It might even be “irresponsible.” But, you know, no need to get hysterical.

They are wrong.

The commander-in-chief has claimed victory in an election. He claims that “fraud” is being committed and that American citizens are being “disenfranchised.” These remarks—all by themselves—should disqualify him from holding the office.

If we are   lucky   then this will only serve to make his supporters—again, some 45 percent of the country—regard the outcome of this election not as merely rhetorically or morally, but   literally , illegitimate.

And if we are not lucky? You saw what happened in Lafayette Square. You saw how eagerly the president and his party floated the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act. You’ve seen how democracies have failed across the world over the last two decades.

We are standing on the cusp, right now. And we will remain there for the foreseeable future. Even if Joe Biden eventually wins the election and is sworn in as president.

Because this is what a very large share of our fellow citizens want.

Good night, America. And good luck.

The Sound of a Landslide Not Happening
by John Scalzi

This election should have been a landslide.   Faced with a choice between a decent, if uninspiring, former Vice President with a long and solid track record of competent governance, and literally the worst president since the Civil War era — a president under whom the economy cratered, corruption reigned, human rights were stripped and mocked, social inequality reached new heights and a pandemic was allowed to blaze unchecked, killing a quarter of a million American souls — the decent man should have walked away from this election with 400 electoral votes at least.

America should have forcefully repudiated Donald Trump; this wannabe despot, this childish authoritarian who fawned over dictators, this incipient fascist whose first impulse towards American Nazis was to collect them into his embrace, and could only querulously condemn them under duress. This liar, this racist, this cheat, this sociopathic bundle of insecurities and anhedonia, this sad example of a human for whom the White House was merely an ATM with an oval office, this pathetic creature for whom everything was about who would flatter him and who he could punish, this impeached debauch, this   bad man , should have been shown the door on the end of a broom.

Instead, Donald Trump received (at the time this was written) seventy million, four hundred thousand votes — 47.7% of the total vote. Four years of being worst president in modern history gained him seven million, four hundred thousand more votes than he received in 2016, and nearly two percentage points more of the total voting electorate. Seventy million, four hundred thousand American voters lived through four years of corruption and incompetence and eroding social norms and decided they wanted another four years of that. They saw a president be a bully and a bigot and a thug, and voted to give the bully four more years. They saw four years of a man siding with fascists, and then sided with him.

And let’s be blunt: “They” here are mostly white people.   The exit polling, while not perfect, makes this clear . White men, white women, white people without college degrees, white people who make over $100,000 a year, evangelical white people — the majority of them who voted gave Donald Trump their vote last Tuesday. They did it   again , please note; these same people gave him their vote in 2016,   in nearly the same percentages . And while of course hashtag Not All White People — I mean,   I   didn’t vote for him — at the end of the day, according to those exit polls, 57% of white voters in America decided this awful man, with his lies and his hate and his corruption, was who they wanted, and who their country deserved to have. Again.

There is no excuse for it. I’m not going to be the white man who sanctimoniously tries to apologize to the rest of the United States population for the fact that the majority of white voters, when given a choice, will vote for an ethnically “pure” pseudo-Christian police state with an angry tinpot dictator at the tippy-top. Twice. It’s not my place to do that, not least of all because I’m well aware of how much I benefit, unwillingly or otherwise, from their tendencies. But at the very least I can   acknowledge   that even someone like me can see there is something wrong with whiteness in America: Something pathological, something hateful, something inexpressibly   awful   about it. This election was a literal no-brainer, possibly the easiest moral litmus test any presidential election has offered in the more than 220 years of presidential elections in the United States, and 57% of white voters just   failed   it, a non-trivial number of them flying vast “Trump” flags from their pickups as they did so.

Yes, I know. Folks who are not white (and a lot of them who are, but   also   happen to be LGBTQ+ or disabled or non-Christian) are rolling their eyes at me and saying “welcome to the party, pal.” I’m not under the illusion that I am telling anyone who has lived under whiteness all this time anything new about it. But let me re-emphasize here that this election was an easy test for white folks, likely the easiest of all possible tests. I mean, Jesus, the Democrats ran with   Biden , the whitest of all possible white candidates this year, just to make it easy for other white people who don’t want to acknowledge their ingrained racism to do the morally and ethically correct thing! And still: 57% of white voters voted for Trump. 70.4 million voters, of which white people comprised the great majority. He   gained   votes and percentages after the four worst years any president has had since Hoover at least.

What I came away from the 2020 election knowing was that when given a choice between the worst president in living memory, who would happily dismantle the country and all its institutions if he could suck a nickel out of it — because he did   just that   for four straight years — and   not that , white voters in their majority chose the worst. White voters will not defend the United States against its worst impulses. White voters will not save the United States from itself or anyone else. They’ll let it burn, to “own the libs,” but in reality because they’d rather be on the top of a pile of ashes than just another part of anything else, with people who they don’t see as being like them.

Which, well. Is   disappointing .

Trump won seventy million, four hundred thousand votes. Joe Biden, thankfully, won seventy-four million and won a bare majority (50.5%) of the available voting populace, and the majority of the electoral college. White people   did   vote for Biden, of course; 42% of those who voted. But others voted for him   more , in percentages if not raw numbers. Biden won because of black women and black men, because of Hispanics and Latinos, because of Asian Americans, Native Americans and others, all of whom came out to vote for Biden in much larger percentages than white people.They voted despite racist state and federal policies and ploys established to make it more difficult to vote — for fuck’s sake, the Trump administration started dismantling the   postal service   to keep early Democratic (read: minority) votes from arriving on time, and Republicans from Texas to Ohio made it more difficult to vote early in person. They voted as if their lives depended on it, because they did.

So did the life of our nation, at least as we understand it today. We don’t have to wait for history to say it, we can say it now: it was black women voters and black men voters who pulled the United States back from the brink. It was Latino and Hispanic voters. It was Asian American and Native American voters. It wasn’t just them — LGBTQ+ voters and new voters (many of whom overlap those aforementioned categories) broke toward Biden as well. They held better faith in the United States than white voters did. In his victory speech, Biden wisely acknowledged that his voters came from all quarters and pledged to make his administration look like the nation that had voted for him.

He had better keep that promise. It’s not enough to thank those who saved us — all of us, even the ones who voted for the wannabe dictator — from four more years of moral and institutional decay. Give them the levers of power that they should have access to already. Let them make this country better and more fair for everyone. We know what the alternative is. We’ve just had four years of it.

And if you think we can’t go back to it, remember: Trump got 7.4 million more votes and almost two percentage points more of the voting population after four years of being the worst president in living memory. Those voters aren’t going away, and not all of them will be peeled away from voting for the worst possible option, so long as it is white, before they shuffle off this mortal coil. 2024 is coming (and 2022 mid-terms before then). We’ll be fighting white supremacy for a long time, folks. At the very least, I can’t pretend to be surprised about it any more.

What’s Not the Matter With Georgia?
A Democratic win offers hope — but also a warning

Right now, we all have Georgia on our minds. It’s probably going to end up called for Joe Biden; his lead is razor-thin, but most observers expect it to   survive a recount . And the January runoff races in Georgia offer Democrats their last chance to take the Senate.

Beyond the immediate electoral implications, however, the fact that Democrats are now competitive in Georgia but not in Ohio, which appears to have become   Trumpier than Texas , tells you a lot about where America is heading. In some ways these changes in the electoral map offer reason for hope; but they also suggest looming problems for U.S. democracy.

How did Georgia turn faintly blue? As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson   wrote , in a phrase I wish I’d come up with, the great divide in American politics is now over “density and diplomas”: highly urbanized states — especially those containing large metropolitan areas — with highly educated populations tend to be Democratic.

Why this particular partisan association? Think about the longer-term political strategy of the modern G.O.P. Republican economic policy is relentlessly plutocratic: tax cuts for the rich, benefit cuts for everyone else. The party has, however, sought to win over voters who aren’t rich by taking advantage of intolerance — racial hostility, of course, but also opposition to social change in general.

But both living in large, diverse metropolitan areas and being highly educated seem to make voters less receptive to this strategy. Indeed, many big-city and highly educated voters seem repelled by G.O.P. illiberalism on social issues — which is why so many affluent Americans on the coasts back Democrats even though Republicans might reduce their taxes.

In practice, density and diplomas tend to go together — an association that has grown stronger over the past few decades. Modern economic growth has been led by knowledge-based industries; these industries tend to concentrate in large metropolitan areas that have highly educated work forces; and the growth of these metropolitan areas brings in even more highly educated workers.

Hence the transformation of Georgia. The state is home to greater Atlanta, one of the nation’s most dynamic metropolises, which now accounts for   57 percent   of Georgia’s population. Atlanta has drawn in a growing number of college-educated workers, so that at this point the percentage of working-age adults with   bachelor’s degrees   is higher in Georgia than in Wisconsin or Michigan. So at some level it shouldn’t be surprising that Georgia apparently joined the “blue wall” in securing the presidency for Biden.

But if there’s one thing I hope Democrats have learned these past dozen years, it is that they can’t simply count on changing demography and growing social liberalism to deliver election victories. Red-state Republicans have fought tooth and nail to hold power — not by moderating their policies, but through gerrymandering and vote suppression. And Democrats need to do what they can to fight back.

Which is why Georgia’s blue shift is in one way a reason for hope.

Why, after all, did Biden win Georgia even as he was losing North Carolina, another relatively well-educated state with growing knowledge industries? The answer, in two words: Stacey Abrams.

Stacey Abrams        Ethan Miller/Getty Images

But what she did instead was much more effective: She led a   hugely impressive effort   to get eligible Georgia citizens registered and to the polls. In so doing, she achieved a victory that would probably have delivered the White House to Biden even if he hadn’t carried Pennsylvania. Her efforts are a reason to think Democrats still have a chance at getting those two Senate seats. And partisan politics aside, we should celebrate evidence that hard work can sometimes overcome voter suppression.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the same forces that made it possible to turn Georgia blue are also exacerbating the underlying flaws in American democracy.

For the Senate hugely overrepresents voters in states with small populations — which mainly means states that are relatively rural and don’t contain big metropolitan areas. The Electoral College has a similar though smaller slant.

And the growing divide between rural and metropolitan voters means that outcomes like 2016, when Donald Trump won office despite losing the popular vote by a substantial margin, are increasingly likely.

Indeed, Joe Biden will become president only after winning the popular vote by a near-landslide; once all the votes are counted, he’ll probably be ahead by around   five percentage points . And the evidence keeps mounting that the party that benefits from this skewed system is fundamentally opposed to democracy.

So the news from Georgia is encouraging in itself, but is also a warning that American democracy remains very much at risk.

Steve Bannon Caught Running a Network of Misinformation Pages on Facebook
Who could have possibly seen this coming.

Steve Bannon has been outed for his involvement in running a network of misinformation pages on Facebook. Who could have possibly seen this coming.

Facebook has talked a big game about monitoring election misinformation, and yet the independent activist network Avaaz said it had to alert the company to the pages before it removed them for coordinated inauthentic behavior. The group didn’t need an army of   35,000 moderators   to figure this out, and yet Facebook consistently fails to spot the troublemakers that journalists and researchers with less funding and staff seem to keep spotting. As they say: makes you think.

Avaaz said that it alerted Facebook to the pages on Friday night. By that time, in aggregate, Avaaz says the top seven pages—Brian Kolfage, Conservative Values, The Undefeated, We Build the Wall Inc, Citizens of the American Republic, American Joe, and Trump at War—had collectively gained over 2.45 million followers. In some cases, Bannon and Brian Kolfage, co-conspirator in the “We Build the Wall, Inc.”   fundraiser/alleged scam , were co-admins.

Avaaz campaign director Fadi Quran told Gizmodo that its team identified the Bannon ring by running an “influencer analysis,” keeping tabs on frequent guests on Bannon’s podcasts and pages affiliated with Bannon’s former “We Build the Wall” grift. Avaaz, which is comprised of 40 investigators and data analysts, has kept tabs on habitual misinformers and their coordinated sharing through custom software.

They noticed that the Bannon-related pages tended to publish content at the same time and linked to the Populist Press, an even more right-wing Drudge Report copycat trafficking in disproven election fraud claims. The pages avoided warning labels by laundering links through the Populist Press domain rather post the original URLs for stories Facebook had already flagged as misinformation. Avaaz says they’d previously alerted Facebook to a network of 180 Bannon-connected pages and groups which have been sharing misinformation.

“We’re a small team run with small donations,” Quran told Gizmodo. “If we can spot this stuff, a multi-billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees focused on the election and disinformation most certainly can. We are tired of doing their job for them.”

Quran added that Avaaz has been alerting Facebook to its problems all year. “If 2016 was an accident,” Quran added, “2020 has been negligence.”

Last week, Facebook removed two videos posted to Bannon’s official page, including   one in which Bannon suggested   the beheading of Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray. CNN   reported   that the video had amassed over 200,000 views before Facebook removed it. Bannon’s page remains live, but Facebook’s content discovery platform CrowdTangle shows that his page immediately stopped posting on Saturday.

Avaaz’s findings beg the question of what’s even in Facebook’s   war room —possibly a few dudes posing for   photo ops , or a competent team lost in Facebook’s labyrinthian policy loopholes. Either way, the   self-described honey badger   doesn’t give a shit. “In 2016, Steve Bannon was buoyed by the Facebook algorithm and helped define the political narrative for millions of Americans,” Quran said in a statement shared with Gizmodo. “Over the last few months, pages and groups connected to him pushed ‘voter fraud’ and other misinformation content to millions. Now, he is seeking to further divide America and spread chaos in this post-Election Day landscape, again using Facebook. Facebook has finally acted after Avaaz’s pressure, but the question is: Why did the company not act earlier?”

Beats me. Steve Bannon keeps leaving Facebook one   trash fire   after another .

Facebook   announced   ahead of the election that it would “work proactively to remove” content that “attempts to interfere with or suppress voting.” As for undermining faith in democracy after an election, though, Facebook has only said that it will remove “threats of violence” related to an election outcome, which resulted in the removal of a “Stop the Steal” page, which had gone viral before Facebook shut it down for   inciting violence . Predictably, general charges that Democrats stole the election only seem to warrant a half-hearted   “see the results” label , or   nothing   at   all .

Quran said that Avaaz will continue to monitor voter fraud claims, incitements to violence, and, in particular, misinformation targeting Georgians during their contentious run-off elections.

The Republican Party Is Attacking Democracy
Our survival as a nation depends, above all, on the loser accepting the results of an election

It turns out there was a coordinated attack on the 2020 election after all. It began several years ago and accelerated in the last several months. Now that Election Day has passed, it has launched into overdrive.

Its weapons are baseless insinuation and evidence-free charges, deployed solely to sow chaos and undermine the results of a free and fair election — one that produced a clear winner and an even clearer loser.

But the most dangerous attackers of American democracy aren’t the Russians or the Chinese. They are the leaders of the Republican Party.

In the face of a commanding national triumph by President-elect Joe Biden — not just an Electoral College victory but a popular-vote margin that is approaching five million — President Trump and top Republicans are behaving like spoiled children refusing to let go of their toys.

“President Trump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options,”   said Mitch McConnell , the Senate majority leader, even as he celebrated Republican pickups in the House of Representatives. Apparently, the same ballots that may be fraudulent at the presidential level are fine a few lines farther down, where Republicans are winning more of them.

Attorney General Bill Barr, who has repeated the president’s lies that absentee ballots were a source of widespread voter fraud,   authorized the Justice Department   to look into “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities. In response, the department official who oversees voter-fraud investigations stepped down.

The rot pervades the administration. The Trump-appointed head of the General Services Administration, Emily W. Murphy,   has yet to recognize   Mr. Biden as the winner of the election and the president-elect, preventing him from accessing millions of dollars in funds, national-security tools and other essential resources to begin the long and complex task of presidential transition.

On Monday, Mr. McConnell   snidely remarked , “Let’s not have any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election.”Oh, please. Hillary Clinton conceded the 2016 election less than 24 hours after polls closed, even though Mr. Trump had barely eked out wins in three decisive swing states and was trailing badly in the popular vote. So did other top Democrats, including, crucially, President Barack Obama,   who called Mr. Trump   before sunrise to congratulate him and to “invite him to come to the White House tomorrow to talk about making sure that there is a successful transition between our presidencies.”

This is what you do when you lose an election. Republicans still howled in outrage because Mrs. Clinton had dared to hold off conceding on election night itself.

It is now one full week after Election Day 2020. Joe Biden has prevailed in the Electoral College by a margin that, if current leads hold, will be identical to Donald Trump’s in 2016. When the counting is complete, his popular-vote margin could be twice as big as Hillary Clinton’s.

And yet with painfully few exceptions, Republicans are silent. No congratulations to Mr. Biden and his running mate, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. No concessions. No acknowledgment that any world exists beyond their fantasy one in which only Republicans may rule. Instead we hear endless droning about “voting irregularities” or “fraud” or whatever euphemism Republicans have agreed on this year to describe Black and brown people voting in large numbers.

By the way, for a party that professes to care so much about election integrity, Republicans have an odd way of showing it. Democrats have tried to pass multiple measures enhancing election security in recent years, some with bipartisan support. Mitch McConnell keeps   blocking them , or being stingy with funding.

Of course any election irregularities should be brought to light, if they exist. But what Republicans have brought forth instead is a slurry of unverified allegations and flat-out bogus claims racing around social media, and filing lawsuits that would be sanctionable under normal circumstances. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina   said , “Philadelphia elections are as crooked as a snake,” without offering any evidence. The new generation of Republican leaders   preach   and   preen   about how only “legal” votes should be counted, as though they have discovered some long-lost secret rather than a mundane fact about all elections.

The truth is that Republicans have conditioned themselves to refuse to accept that they could lose despite, or precisely because of, all the built-in structural advantages they currently enjoy, like the Senate and the Electoral College.

Speaking of those advantages, do you hear any Democrats saying that the Senate was “stolen,” even though their minority has consistently represented many millions more Americans than the Republicans’ majority? Instead, after a disappointing election night, they regrouped and said, we have to get out the vote and win those two runoffs in Georgia. That’s what you do in a democracy.

Sure, Democrats are mad at Mr. Trump and opposed to his presidency — not only because he lost the popular vote by so much, but because he was and remains so manifestly unfit to hold the office, as many top Republicans   used to say   themselves.

One of the countless measures of Mr. Trump’s unfitness is his willingness to accept or even solicit foreign interference to win. That is why, if there was any cheating in the 2020 election, it was committed by the president himself, when he tried to extort a foreign nation to gin up dirt on Mr. Biden and his son Hunter. For this high crime he was impeached by the House of Representatives. To be clear, that impeachment was not the result of Democrats’ refusal to accept his legitimacy to govern; it was a result of his decision to squander that legitimacy yet again by behaving like a strongman.

But the bigger picture here is the decades-long descent of the Republican Party which now prefers conspiracy theories over facts, magical thinking over science and delegitimizing its political opponents over substantive and responsible governance. Just a few recent examples: The racist birther slurs that Mr. Trump spearheaded against Mr. Obama; the reflexive opposition to everything Mr. Obama tried to do, even before he took office; the blanket denial of his appointment of federal judges, culminating in the theft of a Supreme Court vacancy that arose nearly a year before he left office; and finally, the seating of Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee only days before an election that he lost fair and square.

Republicans have been working tirelessly to make voting harder for many years, and especially this year, for precisely this reason. They knew that Mr. Trump was unpopular and that Mr. Biden would probably win if more people voted. When voter suppression failed, they had only two options: accept their fate like serious and responsible people do, or claim that any loss they suffered was by definition the result of fraud.

Once again, they picked door number two. This is the problem with getting comfortable with the perks of minority rule, as Republicans have over the past several decades. It’s not just that you can ignore what most Americans want. It’s that you genuinely believe that there’s no way your opponent can win — much less by an absolute majority — without cheating.

That attitude is fatal to a democracy, the survival of which depends, above all, on the loser accepting the results. The Democrats, along with most of the rest of the world, understand this. One party alone is responsible for dragging the nation to this perilous place.