Madison Square Garden Rally Lays the Groundwork for Post Election Chaos

The incitement and preparation for post-election conflict coming from Donald Trump and his merry band of billionaire bootlickers was on display for all to see over the past weekend.

The MAGA mega-event in New York City featured a non-stop parade of haters, grifters, and groupies saying things that only the most committed supporters would find appealing. The point, as Puerto Ricans, Jews, Blacks, women, Gays, and immigrants were maligned from the stage was to excite the excitable and provoke liberal tears.

There was especially notable push back from Puerto Rican celebrities, in response to  comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s racist joke about Puerto Rico:

• “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now,” Hinchcliffe said. “I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, recording artists J-Lo and Ricky Martin all took to social media to endorse VP Kamala Harris and denounce Trump. Republican candidates in districts with high numbers of Puerto Rican voters distanced themselves from the “joke.” The Trump campaign claimed the remark wasn’t pre-cleared… except that according to The Daily Beast, Hinchcliffe's remarks were "pre-loaded into a teleprompter, indicating that they would likely have been vetted by the campaign in advance."

Some claim that the rally cost the former president votes; I don’t think he really cares, as long as the media covered the rally. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigeig opined that the outrages were deliberate, designed to keep the Democratic candidate’s campaign further down in coverage.

The headlines: 

• Politico “Fallout spreads from racist rhetoric at Trump’s MSG rally” 

• The Associated Press “Trump’s Madison Square Garden event features crude and racist insults” 

• The Washington Post “Trump rally speakers lob racist insults, call Puerto Rico ‘island of garbage.’”

• The New York Times “Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism.” 

 And then:

• The San Diego Union-Tribune’s email edition version of the Associated Press story: “As Harris Visits Philadelphia, Trump Holds Madison Square Garden Rally” - online version featured original headline.

• The Los Angeles Times “Trump, Harris, focused on fears of voters” with no mention of actual events at Madison Square Garden.

While liberals and some media gave proper notice of the hatefest/reincarnation of the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, they missed the promise made by the Republican candidate’s otherwise predictable address as an exhausted audience left the building.

Pointing at House Speaker Mike Johnson, Trump said:

• I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the house, our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a little secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that Donald Trump is such a sociopathic egomaniac that he can’t wait to spring his plans to sabotage the election results on the nation. I believe his campaign has already concluded their candidate will lose the popular vote and that the electoral college vote is where they can win.

The plan is to sow enough doubt about election results in key states so that the House can declare a contingent election and proclaim Trump the victor, since each state would be given one vote and there are more GOP delegations in the lower chamber.

Strategically placed MAGA operatives in key election positions within swing states are planning to wreak post-election havoc with the intent of making it impossible for one or more counties to certify their results. Several states have laws barring them from assigning their electors until ALL counties have certified.

This is version 2.0 of what the Trump side hoped might happen in 2020, if Vice President Pence had illegally refused to certify the ballots.

Via NBC News:

• U.S. intelligence agencies have identified domestic extremists with grievances rooted in election-related conspiracy theories, including beliefs in widespread voter fraud and animosity toward perceived political opponents, as the most likely threat of violence in the coming election. 

• In a Joint Intelligence Bulletin that was not distributed publicly but was reviewed by NBC News, agents from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security warn state and local law enforcement agencies that domestic violent extremists seeking to terrorize and disrupt the vote are a threat to the election and throughout Inauguration Day. 

The New York Times article, Far-Right Figures Escalate Talk of Retribution and Election Subversion:

• In July, the website Raw Story reported that Mr. Raiklin — who has been seen sitting alongside right-wing Republican members of Congress at hearings on Capitol Hill recently — was maintaining a “target list” of hundreds of officials and other political enemies for “retribution.” The report led Representative Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who served on the House Jan. 6 committee, to describe the list as “a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.”

• A man who was arrested this month after driving to a Trump rally in Coachella, Calif., with several firearms in his car was later identified as a frequent livestreaming partner of Mr. Raiklin’s on the right-wing video platform Rumble. (Federal law enforcement officials have since said that Mr. Trump was “not in any danger” from the man, who was released on bail.)

The extremists mentioned in the media are just the tip of the iceberg. Republicans in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania passed sweeping election laws in 2020 preventing any mail-in ballots from being counted until Election Day, guaranteeing that election workers would be overwhelmed and the results would be delayed.

The idea here is that regardless of the outcome, Trump will declare victory on election night, since ballots cast in person will be counted first, and, as in 2020, creating a mirage of a Red Wave.

Here’s Thom Hartman at The New Republic:

• Many in the GOP see this election as a life-or-death moment for the party. That’s why they’re willing to lie, cheat, and offer favors to billionaires and foreign dictators just to get Trump into the White House.

• The GOP hasn’t won the White House by majority vote, as mentioned, since 1988. And the two Republican presidents prior to Bush Sr., Nixon and Reagan, both chose to engage in naked treason—Nixon blowing up LBJ’s Vietnam peace deal, and Reagan getting the Iranians to hold the U.S. hostages, respectively—to gain the White House.

• Republican leaders and the billionaires who own them know that if they lose this election in a blowout, it might be years before they can again climb to power, particularly if the Harris administration is successful in rebuilding the American middle class that’s been gutted so badly by Reaganomics.

Finally, let me share a bit of Noah Berlatsky’s analysis at Public Notice on the billionaire bootlickers and their last minute cancellations of editorial endorsements of Kamala Harris at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.

• The problem in this case is that Bezos and those like him don’t really care what the public says. They don’t care if they debase themselves. In fact, debasing themselves is the point. Bezos and Soon-Shiong have decided to lick Trump’s boots. If Trump’s happy with the shine, why should they worry about what anyone else thinks?

• The fact that they are getting pushback from subscribers is if anything, from their perspective, a good thing. It shows Trump they think he is more important than their readers. The destruction of journalistic credibility is a feature rather than a bug. Trump hates the Washington Post; he wants to destroy it. Bezos, in an act of fealty, has gone a good way towards destroying it. What more could a fascist leader want from his lickspittle?

• Bezos, Soon-Shiong, and the rest of the mainstream media are giving us a little preview of the shameless lies, crony capitalism, groveling abasement, and lack of public accountability that we can expect under the next Trump administration. Canceling newspaper subscriptions, or Amazon subscriptions, won’t do much to change that. If you want to rebuke Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, the only option in the short term is to elect Kamala Harris.

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Monday News You Should Read

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Why can't I quit the NFL? By Brendan Dentino at Out in Left

• My theory is this: the NFL is the suburbs, and the embodiment of the suburbs is the stroad.

• A stroad is designed for maximum vehicle throughput—the “road” part—at the same time as it incorporates the services and commerce of a typical urban street. In other words, a stroad tries to move cars as fast as possible while it also tries to provide for human needs. Everyone knows what a stroad is even if they’ve never heard the term. It’s those thoroughfares with speed limits somewhere between 30 and 65 mph that are lined by big box stores and strip malls and punctuated by lighted intersections. These intersections are usually veins connecting car-oriented communities to the main artery. My native New Jersey is one giant stroad.

• Because cars have to stop at intersections, whose light intervals are long to accommodate the traffic levels, the average speed is low, even if everyone floors it between lights. And because driving is the only viable transportation mode on stroads, the adjacent businesses must dedicate much of their land to parking lots. It’s a horribly inefficient transportation design, to speak nothing of the environmental and social impacts. 

• This basically explains an NFL game. Players wear protective gear (the car) so that they can go fast during the play (green light), then they stand around waiting for the next time to go fast (the red light). Just like drivers at a stoplight, football fans poke at their phones between plays. And as any American motorists knows, stroads provide some of the ugliest, most visually uninteresting driving. Being inefficient and boring are related. 

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More Proof: Charter School Experiment FAILED by Thomas Ultican at Tultican

• The theory was that “failing” schools in the bottom 5% of testing data would be taken over by charter schools. The goal was to show that these privatized schools would soon be in the top 25% of schools on testing results. It was a complete failure. None of the 33 charterized schools ever left the bottom.

• This experiment demonstrated that it was not the public schools causing poor performance and privatizing them provided no improvement. The type of school, charter or public, made no difference. However, unstable schools are harmful and “Doomed to Fail” shows that charter schools induce a failure rate crap shoot.

• The NPE report describes how professional marketing campaigns convince parents that the new charter school is different and better than the nearby public school. “Doomed to Fail” states:

“However, as hundreds of thousands of families have found, enrolling your child in a charter school comes with enormous risk. Charter schools close at far higher rates than public schools. And, unlike public school districts where infrequent closures are orderly with the district finding a new school for the child, charter school closures are often chaotic and abrupt, taking parents by surprise.” (Doomed Page 1)

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Forced Prison Labor in California Could Be Stopped if Voters Pass Prop 6 by Nicholas Tirado at Teen Vogue

• California's legacy of slavery and forced labor includes the exploitation of Indigenous people in Spanish missions and African Americans during the Gold Rush. Since the inception of California's prisons, the system has exploited this type of labor, from forcing incarcerated people to construct the state’s first prison to operating facilities like the still-active Folsom Prison license plate factory. Our prison system is built on this exploitation and punishment.

• Today, California relies on prison labor for operations and maintenance, including food service. We produce more than 1,400 products and services like road signs, textiles, medical equipment, furniture, and license plates that are largely sold to government agencies. For our labor, most of us earn cents per hour.

• Some see prison labor as beneficial, but for me and my fellow workers forced labor offered no positives and ultimately hindered our progress. I went to prison to change my behavior, not to wash dishes. Earning pennies for menial jobs didn’t aid my rehabilitation or skill development. I needed guidance and education to overcome my criminal record, but instead, I was trapped in kitchen labor and missed valuable programs.