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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — October 6, 2022

By October 6, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

The Majority Of Republicans On The Ballot This Fall Are Election Deniers 

  • Washington Post: A Majority Of Gop Nominees — 299 In All — Deny The 2020 Election Results: A majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices — 299 in all — have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election, according to a Washington Post analysis. Candidates who have challenged or refused to accept Joe Biden’s victory are running in every region of the country and in nearly every state. Republican voters in four states nominated election deniers in all federal and statewide races The Post examined. Although some are running in heavily Democratic areas and are expected to lose, most of the election deniers nominated are likely to win: Of the nearly 300 on the ballot, 174 are running for safely Republican seats. Another 51 will appear on the ballot in tightly contested races. The implications will be lasting: If Republicans take control of the House, as many political forecasters predict, election deniers would hold enormous sway over the choice of the nation’s next speaker, who in turn could preside over the House in a future contested presidential election. The winners of all the races examined by The Post — those for governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, Senate and House — will hold some measure of power overseeing American elections.

Discussion Of Civil War And Political Violence Is Surging Online 

  • New York Times: Talk of ‘Civil War,’ Ignited by Mar-a-Lago Search, Is Flaring Online: Soon after the F.B.I. searched Donald J. Trump’s home in Florida for classified documents, online researchers zeroed in on a worrying trend. Posts on Twitter that mentioned “civil war” had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours as Mr. Trump’s supporters blasted the action as a provocation. Similar spikes followed, including on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, Parler, Gab and Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform. Mentions of the phrase more than doubled on radio programs and podcasts, as measured by Critical Mention, a media-tracking firm. Posts mentioning “civil war” jumped again a few weeks later, after President Biden branded Mr. Trump and “MAGA Republicans” a threat to “the very foundations of our republic” in a speech on democracy in Philadelphia. Now experts are bracing for renewed discussions of civil war, as the Nov. 8 midterm elections approach and political talk grows more urgent and heated. More than a century and a half after the actual Civil War, the deadliest war in U.S. history, “civil war” references have become increasingly commonplace on the right. While in many cases the term is used only loosely — shorthand for the nation’s intensifying partisan divisions — observers note that the phrase, for some, is far more than a metaphor.

Liz Cheney Warns That The GOP Slate In Arizona Is A Threat To Democracy 

  • NBC: Cheney Warns Arizona Voters That The GOP Nominees For Governor And Secretary Of State Are Threats To Democracy: Rep. Liz Cheney urged voters to reject Arizona’s Republican nominees for governor and secretary of state in next month’s midterm election, casting them as existential threats to U.S. democracy. “If you care about democracy and you care about the survival of our republic, then you need to understand — we all have to understand — that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections,” Cheney, R-Wyo., said Wednesday night at an event at Arizona State University.

In The States 

GEORGIA:  Mass Voter Challenges By Republicans Threaten To Hamstring Georgia Elections 

  • The Guardian: Will Challenges To Voter Rolls Hamstring Georgia’s Election System?: Voter challenges in Gwinnett, and across Georgia (there have been 64,000 according to one voting rights group) are one example of how groups are undermining confidence in US elections after the 2020 vote. These conservative groups seed a public perception that there is something amiss with the voter rolls, and suck away resources, increasing the possibility of mistakes and chaos, which Republicans could wield to question the results of elections. Groups have filed similar challenges to voter eligibility in Texas, Michigan and Pennsylvania. But Georgia faces a unique battle. After a large grassroots effort increased turnout among Black and other non-white voters and helped Democrats win upset victories in the 2020 presidential and US Senate races, Republicans responded and passed a 98-page measure, SB 202. The law placed sweeping new restrictions on voting, even after the state affirmed repeatedly that there was no evidence of fraud. Now voting rights activists say SB 202 is a thinly veiled effort to make it harder for non-white voters to cast a ballot, exacerbating a major battle over voting access that looms over Georgia as the state hurdles toward highly competitive midterm elections next month. Even if a small number of voters are disenfranchised, it could make a huge difference: Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Georgia by 11,779 votes in 2020 – just a fraction of the number of voters challenged in Gwinnett county alone.

OHIO:  Despite No Evidence Of Voter Fraud, Ohio Secretary Of State Plans To Hire More Investigators For “Election Integrity Unit” 

  • Columbus Dispatch: Ohio To Hire Election Investigators To Tackle ‘Crisis Of Confidence’: As confidence in democracy and elections take a hit, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose wants to devote one or two investigators to root out fraud. LaRose, a Republican running for reelection this November, says illegal voting and election fraud are extremely rare, but they are still worth investigating. LaRose plans to hire the investigators for a new public integrity division following the 2022 elections. These investigators would probe threats ranging from racist robocalls made by far-right activists to an attempted data breach at the Lake County Board of Elections. The team would tackle illegal voting, campaign finance problems, cybersecurity and even unauthorized notaries. […] Democrats called LaRose’s proposal a political stunt to further his future U.S. Senate aspirations. “He’s creating a taxpayer-funded solution to a problem that doesn’t exist in order to further his own political ambitions,”Ohio Democratic Party spokesperson Matt Keyes said.

TEXAS: Election Officials Are Fighting An Endless Battle With Conspiracy Theorists 

  • Texas Monthly: Texas Election Officials Are Fighting an Endless Battle With “Stop the Steal” Activists: Election administrators across Texas have spent much of the past two years shooting down right-wing conspiracy theories about voter fraud, none of which are supported by evidence. Even in a state that Trump won by five percentage points, a significant proportion of Republicans are convinced that the election here was marred by fraud. A February 2021 poll conducted by UT-Austin’s Texas Politics Project found that just 30 percent of Republicans considered the state’s election results “very accurate,” compared to 65 percent of Democrats. Just one in five Texas Republicans believes President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.  The conspiracy theories about fraud, which often originate on social media or fringe websites before making their way to mainstream outlets, have led to widespread harassment of election officials. 

What Experts Are Saying

Kathryn Stoner, director of Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL): “‘We can all have many different visions of what America is,’ said Kathryn Stoner, director of Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). ‘But most would agree that it is — it should be — a democracy, and we’re coming close to it not being so right now. Democracy in the U.S. is in danger.’” The Stanford Daily 

Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Hoover Institution: “In many states, ‘election deniers are trying to get into positions that would enable them to subvert free and fair elections,’ said political science professor Larry Diamond ’73 M.A. ’78 Ph.D. ’80, who is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Hoover Institution. ‘If these candidates are elected, it could mean the end of free and fair elections in those states,’ Diamond said.” The Stanford Daily 

Lynn Vavreck, Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA: “The calcification we’re seeing today is born of four factors: The parties are farther apart than ever ideologically, voters within each party are more like their fellow partisans than ever, so many of our political conflicts are based on identity-inflected issues, and there is near balance between people who call themselves Democrats and Republicans right now.  That’s why politics feels both stuck and explosive: The stakes of election outcomes are very high because the other side is farther away than ever, and because of the balance between the parties, victory is always within reach for each side. That balance also means that when one party loses an election, instead of going back to the drawing board to rethink how they campaigned or what they offered, they don’t revamp their packages or strategies — they almost won! — they instead try to change the rules of the game to advantage their side. Preventing parties from changing the rules to erode democratic principles is the ultimate challenge to democracy.” UCLA Newsroom 

Kathleen Belew, researcher and professor at Northwestern University (Video): Dr. Kathleen Belew is a researcher and professor at Northwestern University, and author of “Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.” She traces the roots of the white supremacist movement in America, and talks with Ken about its ties to today’s Republican Party. Ken Harbaugh’s Burn The Boats podcast | Tweet 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

New York Times: ‘Defund the S.E.C.’ Becomes a Rallying Cry on Trump’s Social Media Site

Washington Post (Analysis): The NRA’s top-rated Republicans are also mostly election deniers

January 6 And The 2020 Election

HuffPost: Jan. 6 Rioter Arrested For Assaulting Cop Was Paid To Campaign For Glenn Youngkin

NBC: FBI arrests pastor who wore his company jacket on Jan. 6 and pushed into police line

Other Trump Investigations 

Politico: Appeals court expedites DOJ challenge to Mar-a-Lago special master

Opinion

Washington Post (Greg Sargent): Why Marjorie Taylor Greene is raging about the Biden ‘regime’

In The States 

CBS: Mark Finchem, Arizona GOP secretary of state nominee, still won’t say Biden was legitimately elected

Detroit News: Kent County clerk asks court to quash subpoena from MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell

Source NM: Experts alarmed by GOP secretary of state candidate’s conspiracy theorizing in NM