I first noticed the article because the leftist blue checks were breathlessly passing it around with dire exhortations for their followers to read it. The hyperbole was running hot, with words like “coup,” “civil war,” and “existential threat” being flung about. Anticipating amusing hysteria, I clicked through to the linked article, and it did not disappoint.
“TRUMP’S NEXT COUP HAS ALREADY BEGUN,” panicked the headline.
“January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election,” tantalized the subhead.
The article, which appeared Monday in The Atlantic, first of all reveals how concerned the Left is that Orange Man Bad will win the 2024 election. They’re so worried, they’re already setting out narratives to discredit his potential victory. Great care was put into the piece, with a principal author, Barton Gellman, a contributing author, Joe Stephens, possibly a bit of a travel budget, and months’ worth of research and development. It’s literally as long as a novella, and I spent way too much time reading through it.
Executive summary: conniving Trump-loyalist Republicans are going to steal the 2024 election at the state legislature level, and also, white supremacists.
Let’s look at the purported state-level legislative machinations first.
For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
The paranoia is suffocating. In reality, state legislatures are simply reasserting control over an election process that the left had long been taking out of their hands and manipulating, culminating in the insane election of 2020.
You see, we on the right have finally caught on to what the left has been doing since they went apoplectic over their failure to finesse a “victory” for Al Gore in 2000: targeting and seizing control of key offices in battleground states, which will then allow them to do whatever is necessary to pull their candidates over the finish line when votes are counted.
The effort began in earnest when George Soros’s Democracy Alliance helped launch the Secretary of State Project. Ballotpedia describes the initiative as “an independent 527 political organization founded in July 2006 for the purpose of advancing ‘election protection’ measures. Members believed that the only way in which to accomplish such a goal was to devote all efforts and resources toward helping get Democrats elected to the offices of Secretary of State in selected swing, or battleground, states, specifically those whose margin of victory in the 2004 presidential election contest was 120,000 votes or less.”
Politico reported on the SOS Project’s growth in 2008:
In anticipation of a photo-finish presidential election, Democrats have built an administrative firewall designed to protect their electoral interests in five of the most important battleground states.
The bulwark consists of control of secretary of state offices in five key states — Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio — where the difference between victory and defeat in the 2004 presidential election was no more than 120,000 votes in any one of them.
With a Democrat now in charge of the offices, which oversee and administer their state’s elections, the party is better positioned than in the previous elections to advance traditional Democratic interests —such as increasing voter registration and boosting turnout — rather than Republican priorities such as stamping out voter fraud.
Perhaps more important, in those five states Democrats are now in a more advantageous position when it comes to the interpretation and administration of election law — a development that could benefit Barack Obama if any of those states are closely contested on Election Day. (emphasis added)
Since then, as Democrats have spent the GDP of entire small countries on forcing their operatives into key decision-making roles, it has become commonplace for Election Day to stretch into Election Week or Election Month, as leftist agents “advance Democratic interests.” And the end result is somehow always the same: where once the Republican had won a close election, new votes are “found” or ruled to be eligible for counting, dumped into the mix before anyone can isolate and examine them, and voilá! The Democrat gets the trophy.
The network of Leftist manipulation reached its apex in the historic 2020 national election. Democrats spent the run-up to the election preparing the battlefield. They milked the COVID-19 situation for everything it was worth, demanding last-minute changes to long-established voting practices. Suddenly, ballots were mailed out indiscriminately in battleground states, and anyone could fill them out and drop off reams of votes anonymously into the ballot collection boxes that sprang up like mushrooms in a fetid swamp. The U.S. Postal Service couldn’t keep up with the vote-by-mail free-for-all, a problem that state-level operatives pounced upon as an excuse to extend the deadline for “votes” to be received and counted. When it looked like there might be a court challenge to their shenanigans, Democrats would disingenuously launch the anticipated lawsuit themselves, taking care to shop for a friendly judge first, and secure the court’s blessing upon their fraud enabling. The media supplied air support, advising Americans that it would initially appear as though Trump had won, but that it was just a “red mirage” that would dissipate by morning, once all the votes that were needed to assure Biden’s victory had been counted.
Act 2 came on Election Day itself. Ballots of questionable origin flooded the system, mixed in among the legitimate votes of citizens who had been so panicked by the media’s endless COVID porn that they were too fearful to vote in person. And in the tightest battleground states, you could see the “Midnight Magic” happen in real time. By an amazing coincidence, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and North Carolina all had to pause vote-counting or reporting at some point on election night. When they started up again, we saw those amazing charts of the vote totals, where the line representing Biden’s vote count magically went straight upwards in a vertical jag, until it superseded Trump’s total. (I tried to find an example to post here, but all the graphs have magically disappeared from the internet.)
Joe Biden got the most votes of any president in US history then one day magically became one of the least popular presidents in US history overnight but we are not allowed to question it
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) December 7, 2021
Sorry, Mr. Gellman, but we’ve had enough.
One of Big Left’s favorite tactics, when taking over an institution (or country) is to grab the steering wheel. When they have the presidency, they rule by executive command. When they have the court, they rule by judicial decree. When they want to decide how a state votes, they concentrate on getting their operatives into a state-wide position of power. But the more local the level, the harder the power is to grab with out-of-town money. Thus, state legislatures are more populist and therefore tougher to take over.
The question going forward is, how much authority do the state legislatures have over elections? According to the Elections Clause of the Constitution, this much:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
Nope, nothing in there about Soros-championed activist secretaries of state, judges, or attorneys general.
And quite rationally, in reaction to the chaos, almost-palpable fraud, and manipulations of the left, and as they have every right to do, the Republican-led legislatures of battleground states are shoring up their laws to make sure it can’t happen again.
Good.
Now, on to the white supremacists under the bed. Gellman, like so many on the left, is convinced that the couple hundred unarmed hooligans who broke into the Capitol building on Jan. 6 would have — what, exactly? Held a vote of their own that was somehow legally binding? Captured legislators and forced them to re-install Trump as president, and then everyone would have had to respect that? For the life of me, I cannot figure how Jan. 6 was an actual threat to democracy.
Anyway, assaults on federal buildings are nothing new. The only novel feature of this particular incursion was that it was undertaken by righties. Thus, it was the worst thing ever!!! Yet during the Kavanaugh hearings, hundreds were arrested inside the Hart Senate Office Building, and Antifa thugs in Portland and Seattle routinely attack and damage federal buildings. I wonder how many of those rioters have been languishing indefinitely in solitary confinement in federal jail, like the J6 crowd?
Leftists also worry constantly that Trump supporters are increasingly okay with the idea that violence may be necessary to get their way politically. Gellman cites two studies that claim 8% and 12%, respectively, of people who believe the election was stolen for Biden also think violence may be justified in correcting the situation. Sad, but again, nothing new. These left-wing luminaries never think to check on what their own folks are up to.
A couple weeks before the 2020 election, Politico sounded the alarm about the growing approval of political violence among members of both parties:
In September, 44 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of Democrats said there would be at least “a little” justification for violence if the other party’s nominee wins the election. Those figures are both up from June, when 35 percent of Republicans and 37 percent of Democrats expressed the same sentiment.
And does Gellman really expect us to believe that the Left would have meekly accepted the results, had their machinations failed to deliver a Biden victory? The Federalist was only one of the numerous sources reporting on the hammer hanging over Americans’ heads:
Riot and protest instigators plan to “make sure Trump leaves the White House” by any means necessary after the Nov. 3 election, according to website posts from the group Shut Down DC and their allies. “[W]e’re making plans to be in the streets before the polls even close, ready to adapt and respond to whatever comes our way,” the group says on its website currently.
Even Progressive stalwart the Washington Post predicted (threatened?) massive violence if the Left didn’t get their way:
A landslide for Joe Biden resulted in a relatively orderly transfer of power. Every other scenario we looked at involved street-level violence and political crisis.
And these threats came after a solid year of leftist violence and destruction, culminating in the famous “Summer of Love” of 2020. The pundits and propagandists on the Left never seemed to notice it, but normal Americans were horrified by the arson, theft, violence, and wholesale destruction of entire neighborhoods perpetrated by BLM and ‘Fa rioters — and not only did it seem to go largely unpunished, but major corporations also handed over tens of millions of dollars to these organizations, enabling them to set up a permanent infrastructure of institutionalized political terror. Fair-minded people understand that this is an exponentially greater threat than the combined several hundred marchers in Charlottesville and at the Capitol.
Gellman worries so much about imagined future “white supremacist” violence that he is blind to the reality of the years of actual rioting and terrorizing that began back in Obama’s day. If he’s not careful, he’ll wind up on the dreaded wrong side of history. Just last summer, the Daily Wire reported:
As Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi picks members of a select committee to investigate the riots of January 6, a new poll finds that many Americans believe she’s focusing on the wrong riots.
One-third more Americans believe Congress should hold investigative hearings about last summer’s “Black Lives Matter protests that sparked violence” than think lawmakers ought to probe the riot at the capitol on January 6.
And far from being a “white supremacist” issue, this belief is widespread, holding true across racial, ethnic, and party lines:
Support for a federal inquiry into the riots that engulfed U.S. cities after the death of George Floyd cut deep across racial and political lines. “Sixty-seven percent (67%) of whites, 64% of black voters, 66% of Hispanics and 62% of other minorities think Congress should investigate the 2020 riots in U.S. cities,” reported Rasmussen Reports. “Seventy-five percent (75%) of Republicans, 60% of Democrats and 63% of voters not affiliated with either major party say Congress should investigate last year’s violent protests.”
The Atlantic and other publications and media outlets in their universe will continue to tremble in fearful certainty that Trump’s Neo-Nazi jackboots will be kicking in their doors any moment now. And they’ll keep working to spin their narrative that, should Trump be victorious in 2024, it’s illegitimate. In 2020, it was the Russian Collusion Hoax; in 2024, it’s shaping up to be the devious Republican-led state legislatures who suppressed the vote. This narrative has the advantage of being useful for undermining any Republican who wins, in case it isn’t Trump who runs.
Apparently, not letting Democrats cheat is the equivalent of a Trumpian coup. The web of delegitimization for 2024 has been chosen; now, watch them spin.
