Time Continues, But The Threat Remains
Footprint on the moon, photo by NASA on Unsplash
I took a summer hiatus to enjoy the weather, ready for the fall, and organize my thoughts. I failed to complete all three, though I feel rested, but not really writing for the last month hasn’t been the best cleanse. Instead, it feels like things are bottling up, waiting to explode into a lawless screed of pent-up anger and boiling anxiety.
Every day there’s another revelation that shows how hard Trump tried—and is trying—to overturn the 2020 election, and it’s forgotten in minutes, buried under Twitter dunks, hot-takes, and the latest GOP batshittery ricocheting around the internet. The insurrection still feels surreal, a movie millions of us watched at a Wednesday matinee, shocked, stunned, and enraged at what we saw happening in Washington, D.C. But what we all saw play out live on TV and social media was the public distraction to a far greater conspiracy brewing behind closed doors.
Here’s The Tip Jar!
The bipartisan Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is just beginning, but the slow grind of Congress will diminish the impact of any revelations revealed during the hearings. Countless questions continue to go unanswered about what exactly happened, who knew what when, and who did nothing to help, and the mounting evidence paints a bleak picture for the state of democracy in America.
We don’t know how deep the traitorous rot has taken hold.
Election reform bills have passed in several states, with legal challenges against them working their way through the courts. In some, such reforms have stalled or were quickly vetoed. Others are wrestling away local control of elections to ensure them favor the predetermined winner, with some going as far as openly diminishing the number of polling places in Democrat- and minority-leaning areas while overstocking Republican and overly white ones.
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We’re careening toward totalitarianism and the 2022 mid-term elections, and Republicans will do everything to invalidate, intimidate, and interfere with our next Federal election. No state election audit has found fraud or malfeasance, though the lack of election fraud evidence hasn’t stopped Republicans from passing laws to prevent such spectral tomfoolery from ever happening again.
The fact that the laws would intentionally diminish votes for Democrats is just a consequence of election security that Republicans are comfortable making, which is quite a sad admission of defeat for a supposed powerhouse of democracy. However, it’s indicative of the sheer laziness that infects the modern Republican Party.
It’s been nine months since the election, and we have yet to grapple with the homegrown, and growing, threat to our democracy by an increasingly radical and religiously fanatical right-wing cult. Voters are beaten and battered, and the growing COVID-19 surge across the country is ready to make for yet another dark winter.
By this time next year, mid-term candidates will be duking it out on the campaign trail, rushing to shore up votes ahead of the 2022 election, and it’ll be as brutal and bloody as ever. Retaking the House is key to the Republican Party’s plan to circumvent the will of the American people in 2024 to install a dictator, and we can expect further shenanigans from it as the next election approaches.
Links I Loved This Week
“Why is China smashing its tech industry?,” Noah Smith, Noahpinion
“Notes on Nationalism,” George Orwell, The Orwell Foundation
“The route to stealing the 2024 election begins with a simple step,” Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
“As Hikers Vanish, These Mountains Hold Tight to Their Mysteries,” Yan Zhuang, The New York Times
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