MAGA Republicans will kill us to win
Voter intimidation is one of MAGA's most potent weapons
Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around. Vote by any means necessary. (AI-generated image)
Issue #556 The Choice Thursday, April 4, 2024
The Republicans already know they can’t win in November playing by the rules. Not even with the twisted mathematical formula that is the Electoral College. They have no policies, their leading candidate is a convicted rapist and con man facing 88 criminal charges and four court cases - one of them coming up in a matter of weeks - who is quite clearly losing his faculties. Furthermore, the Republican assault on abortion rights is not only massively unpopular across the country but it has galvanized the Democratic opposition in a way not seen in American politics since…I dunno. Long damned time.
Which leaves them with violence and intimidation as two of the biggest weapons in their arsenal to win in November by any means necessary. And that means - literally - that if they have to kill or severely injure somebody or somebodies to make that happen then that is what they are prepared to do. More specifically, anybody (like poll workers and voting officials) who is not wearing a red MAGA hat and who is not demonstrably insane could be at risk.
Because monkey see monkey do. On January 6, 2021, when Trump’s supporters were busy conducting an insurrection, they threatened to hang former Vice President Mike Pence for not doing Trump’s bidding by refusing to pervert his position to illegally derail a presidential election. Trump had no problem with that, as indicated by the fact that he never, not once urged his followers to reconsider.
And if the insurrectionists had caught Mike Pence, they almost certainly would have followed through on their threats. An angry and deranged mob can be a terrible thing, developing a hive mentality legitimizing horrific acts that, as individuals, most members of the hive would never have the courage to do. Trump, coward that he is, definitely could not have hung Pence or anybody else on his own. But he damned sure would have enjoyed a front-row seat in the bleachers with some popcorn.
This MAGA blood lust is now being focused on poll workers, and nowhere is this Red Rage more evident than in Arizona. From the online newspaper AZ Central:
Nationwide, there has been a sharp increase in threats and harassment of election officials due to false claims of a stolen election in 2020.
The impact in Arizona, however, has been staggering.
Ongoing harassment has contributed to 12 of the state’s 15 county election officials leaving since the 2020 election.
As a result, 98% of Arizonans will have new officials running their elections in 2024, representing a drain of 176 collective years of experience.
It’s not hard to see why election workers need our support: In Maricopa County – the fourth largest county in the country – election workers faced more than 100 violent threats and intimidating communications in the run-up to the 2022 midterms. Most of them were based on election conspiracy theories.
So no, it’s not President Joe Biden’s age that is the problem. I’m going to stick my neck out and say that despite what many of the polls say about how terribly close this race will be, it’s not because most Americans just can’t make up their mind about whether they should support Madness or Competence. And I still can’t quite believe that the race will be that close, to be honest. But if it is, it will largely be because the electoral system has been continuously under assault by the MAGA right since 2020 whose sole focus since then has been to twist and pervert the system to fit their desires. Miraculously in 2022, despite all of that turbo-charged manipulation the Democrats still not only held them off but managed to prevail.
Now they are only angrier. And most regular folks, who do not have paid security protection around the clock, can be forgiven if they don’t want to risk their own lives and the lives of their families to be an honest poll worker or official. During the civil rights struggles of the ’50s and ‘60s, the images we didn’t see were the majority of Black people who did not participate in the marches or any of the protests because they were scared to death, and for good reason. They weren’t cowards, they were regular people with very legitimate fears.
But then there were those others who, somehow, managed to overcome that fear. Those others whose names we will never know. And between now and November, it will again be those unknown, unsung heroes who will once again carry the day.
And they will carry the day.
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