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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — May 16, 2022

By May 16, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

Trump Endorses Coup Plotter Doug Mastriano For Pennsylvania Governor In Tomorrow’s Primary 

  • Politico: Trump Endorses Mastriano For Pennsylvania Governor:  Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano on Saturday landed the coveted endorsement of former President Donald Trump with days to go before the gubernatorial primary. The prospect of Trump’s endorsement of Mastriano, a leading voice in the movement to overturn the 2020 election results and who was present at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection, had alarmed local and national Republicans concerned about his ability to win a general election. “There is no one in Pennsylvania who has done more, or fought harder, for Election Integrity than State Senator Doug Mastriano,” Trump wrote in a statement. “He has revealed the Deceit, Corruption, and outright Theft of the 2020 Presidential Election, and will do something about it. He will also Fight Violent Crime, Strengthen our Borders, Protect Life, Defend our under-siege Second Amendment, and Help our Military and our Vets. He is a fighter like few others, and has been with me right from the beginning, and now I have an obligation to be with him,” Trump continued.
  • Washington Post: Leading GOP candidates in Pennsylvania Were in Washington on Jan. 6:  A top candidate for the Republican nomination for governor in Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary — endorsed Saturday by former president Donald Trump — participated in the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, the day the U.S. Capitol was attacked. So, too, did a surging candidate for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. And so did one of the Republican contenders to be the state’s lieutenant governor. The trio are part of a phalanx of Republican candidates nationwide who so strongly embraced Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him that they traveled to Washington to participate in the rally that preceded the violent attack on the Capitol, temporarily disrupting congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Most of the candidates, including the Pennsylvanians, have said they did not enter the Capitol building that day. But they have made their commitment to Trump’s baseless claims key to their campaigns, and their rise shows the extent to which many in the party’s grass roots have embraced participation in Jan. 6 as a badge of honor.

Democracy Is At Stake In The Midterms 

  • Washington Post (Margaret Sullivan): Democracy Is At Stake In The Midterms. The Media Must Convey That: Since Jan. 6 of last year, a growing chorus of activists, historians and political commentators have spoken of “democracy on the brink” or “democracy in peril.” What they mean is that, thanks to a paranoid, delusional and potentially violent new strain in our nation’s politics, Americans may not be able to count on future elections being conducted fairly — or the results of fair elections being accepted. And at least some news organizations are taking heed. The Washington Post established a “democracy team” to expand reporting on the nationwide battles over voting rules, access to polls, and efforts to create unfounded doubt about the outcome of elections. At the New York Times, soon-to-be executive editor Joe Kahn is talking frankly about the need to investigate efforts to undermine the institutions that uphold democracy. (If they don’t, he told the Columbia Journalism Review, “we’re not doing our job as a leading news organization.”) A number of regional journalists are beginning to push against industry norms to speak more clearly about the threat: The Philadelphia Inquirer boldly declined to use the euphemism word “audit” to dignify state Republicans’ endless probes for nonexistent voter fraud — essentially the GOP’s attempt to cast unwarranted doubt on the results of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania. But the clearest recognition I’ve heard so far came last week from a managing editor for CNN. Alex Koppelman is not the editor overseeing the network’s political coverage; instead, he supervises business and media news. But CNN gave him a voice to lay out the harsh reality of what the nation is up against, and what we in the media need to do about it. Koppelman underscored what we should all be clear about by now: that most of the Republican Party publicly touts the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election but that the vote was rigged and victory stolen from him. The Republican elected officials who won’t back Trump are being driven out of office by his faithful. “Those true believers think there is no way Trump could lose a presidential election,” he wrote, “and maybe that no Republican nominee could.”

What Experts Are Saying

Kathleen Belew, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago, re: Buffalo Tragedy: Q: “What do you think are appropriate responses that policymakers should be considering?” A: “I think that this is such a deep and broad problem that we need every solution on the table. And that ranges from telling a real story about what happened on January 6 to real accountability for impacted communities when there is an act of mass violence to broad, far-reaching changes in all of our sort of strata of social response. We don’t have the right laws on the books. We also don’t have the right funding for agencies that do the work of stopping acts like this. We don’t have – you know, there have been major strides in how we tell stories about what this is and what it means so that we don’t immediately think of, quote, unquote, ‘lone wolf actors’ when this is not a lone wolf problem. But we need more, and we need as many things as we can think of. I think that we need to be talking about our history in a more, you know, serious and sustained way. I think we need civics education, and I think we need local community response. And honestly, it’s only in the last two years maybe that we’ve started to see some institutional change that really directs resources at this problem. And even when we do direct resources at this problem, oftentimes, the sort of headline of the response has been about policing. And when we expand those resources, they often come back around and doubly impact the communities that are being targeted by these activists in the first place. So I think we have a really difficult, complicated knot of a problem, and it’s going to take all of us to solve it together.” NPR 

TNR Live: Democracy in Peril: Wed, May 18, 2022: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT: Join The New Republic for a livestream of TNR Live: Democracy in Peril. Can liberal democracy survive? The evening’s conversation will be moderated by TNR editor, Michael Tomasky. With: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian, author | David Rieff, journalist, author | Barbara Walter, professor, author LINK 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections 

Bolts: Conspiracies Swirl in Idaho Primary for Chief Election Official

New York Times: A Fracture in Idaho’s G.O.P. as the Far Right Seeks Control

WCCO: Gubernatorial Hopeful Scott Jensen Says Elections Chief Steve Simon Should Be Jailed