Deplorables’ Delusions Aim to Disrupt Democracy This Summer
A way to help break government is to make people hate it.
Online conversation among Trump supporters and QAnon followers on new and emerging social media platforms is creating concern on Capitol Hill that President Donald Trump's continued perpetuation of the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen could soon incite further violence, three congressional sources tell CNN.
Ugh. I have a really bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. The Former Guy is emerging from hibernation. Rabid followers like Rep. Matt Gaetz and Ret. General Michael Flynn have put the dog whistles away when it comes to getting the troops fired up for Insurrection Version 2.0.
NBC News' Jonathan Allen reported Tuesday:
"Trump returns to the electoral battlefield Saturday as the marquee speaker at the North Carolina Republican Party's state convention. He plans to follow up with several more rallies in June and July to keep his unique political base engaged in the 2022 midterms and give him the option of seeking the presidency again in 2024."
One can only hope assorted video platforms and broadcast networks remember the damage they did in 2015 by uncritically giving him airtime based at least in part on the notion that nobody would actually be crazy enough to vote for the guy.
From MSNBC’s Heyes Brown:
Trump held just shy of 50 campaign rallies in 2015. Many were aired from beginning to end on cable news, with little fact-checking or real-time contextualizing. The Washington Post's Philip Bump later argued that the first of Trump's rallies to be fully televised, in Phoenix on July 11, 2015, marked the true beginning of his rise.
In those early days, rallies were free content. And the result was a massive surge in earned media for the Trump campaign — coverage granted via interviews and articles in newspapers, on TV and on social media, in contrast to purchased ads. The same amount of screen time, according to a widely cited analysis from The New York Times' Upshot, would have cost somewhere around $2 billion by March 2016.
Gadfly lawyer Sidney Powell took to the stage in Dallas at the “For God & Country Patriot Roundup” and again repeated false claims that Trump had won the 2020 election and could still be “reinstated” as president.
https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1399707794375426051?s=20
Per Business Insider:
The anti-democratic conspiracy theory [that Trump will be “reinstated” as president] has been bubbling up in fringe conservative media for several months. It has no basis under the Constitution or any legitimate legal framework. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has been a prominent proponent of the theory. The former Trump attorney Sidney Powell also floated the idea at a QAnon conference over the weekend.
The anticipation of a Trump reinstatement on a certain date could spread further among the most dedicated Trump supporters. The calls to help overturn the 2020 election on January 6, for example, gained steam through a pro-Trump bus tour by a fringe group and led to the insurrection at the Capitol. Lindell has said August is when he would go to the Supreme Court to present evidence he's acquired that would be so convincing that the justices would be forced to reject the 2020 election result.
A podcast from the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has amplified the conspiracy theory, as Lindell and others have gone on the show to promote it with minimal pushback. The podcast is influential among GOP lawmakers hoping to avoid a primary challenge while seeking reelection. Trump’s lawyers and other Republicans filed dozens of lawsuits related to the election; all failed.
All this loose talk has served to simply amplify the Former Guy’s delusions, even as he seeks to further soak followers for donations.
https://twitter.com/DrDigiPol/status/1400212247583113225?s=20
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Whether or not Trump ascends to his former throne in August, his frontier followers are cooking up stuff around the fourth of July. Once again, the CNN story:
Over the weekend, when former national security adviser Michael Flynn appeared to endorse a coup in the United States, one influential QAnon peddler who has more than 70,000 followers on Telegram commented, "General Flynn says the quiet part out loud." Flynn later denied he had endorsed a coup. But for months, some Trump supporters have celebrated the violent coup in Myanmar and looked to it as a possible inspiration for a similar push here.
Telegram was founded in Russia in 2013 and quickly became popular as a propaganda and organizing tool for members of ISIS. The company did take some steps to tackle ISIS content
Let me make something clear. Except for the most delusional Trump supporters, the leaders of these maybe-gonna-happen disruptions don’t expect to “win” anything. Like everything the Former Guy inspires, they are just making a statement designed to erode trust in democracy.
The so-called Arizona audit of 2020 ballots from Maricopa County is a prime example.
From NPR:
"It's an audit in name only," says Masterson, a former Department of Homeland Security official who helped lead the federal government's election security preparations leading up to November's election. "It's a threat to the overall confidence of democracy, all in pursuit of continuing a narrative that we know to be a lie."
By lie, he means the assertion from former President Donald Trump and some of his allies that election fraud cost him a second term in the White House.
And, Masterson says, the strategy chosen by the Arizona's Republican state Senate leaders is working as intended to undermine confidence in the outcome of last year's vote.
The process is a simple exercise in how disinformation spreads and takes hold in 2021. And experts fear it presents a blueprint for other states and lawmakers to follow, one that is already showing signs of being emulated across the country.
Look for attempts at “audits” in Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire. The increasingly vocal protests months after the general election show how deeply the former president has undermined confidence in the nation’s elections, an attack begun early in the 2020 campaign as state and local officials expanded mail voting in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The erosion of trust in institutions is the real point… ...throw so much fear mongering garbage at people that they become indecisive in the face of real threats.
It’s not just Trump. He’s just playing the same game as others are.
https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1399713048219295747?s=20
While I’m at it, I’d like to point out the political benefits to these same people caused by the recent rash of ransomware attacks. I have no doubt that the people doing the hacking are in it for a profit; I also think their actions --disrupting the supply chain, etc-- are of benefit to the nation that just happens to allow all of them to operate.
It’s so bad that experts were saying (it’s probably not valid anymore) one way to fend off ransomware attacks is to load the Cyrillic alphabet into the background of the operating systems, since much of the hacking software won’t infect computers that might be in Russia. They don’t want to poop where they eat, after all.
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We didn’t get to this point in our country overnight, and there is no miracle cure for MAGA ailment. I’ll close with Chauncy Devega’s analysis, titled Trump is an idea, not a man — and that's why his movement is so dangerous at Salon:
Democrats and others who remain invested in "the system," and who value protecting existing institutions in hopes of a return to "normal," fail to understand basic truths: They are not fighting a political movement that fits within that conceptual framework, but one that intends to destroy it. Fighting Trumpism and other forms of fascism is like grappling with a mud monster or ectoplasm, something that is both a liquid and a solid and nearly impossible to grasp firmly...
...Trump-Republicans and other rank-and-file neofascists must also have their internal belief systems broken down through a personal epiphany. The Democrats and their allies cannot directly create that outcome, but they can alter the political and material realities so that such a change in thinking is more likely to occur...
...Ultimately, to win the battle for America's future the Democrats must tell better stories than the fascists do. They must emphasize moral struggle, the meaning of real patriotism and the existential importance of this struggle against a party and a movement that hungers to uproot democracy and replace it with tyranny.
https://twitter.com/Teri_Kanefield/status/1400124261012967424?s=20
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Lead image: Something a fan created that inspired Don Jr to post it on Instagram