Reporting after the 2020 elections noted several cases where Republican state officials -- Secretaries of State, Attorneys General, etc. -- played pivotal roles in rejecting fraudulent claims of voter fraud which under different circumstances could have been accepted without commotion allowing an Orange Coup d'état. Reporting since the election has also shown how some of those same officials are coming under attack for doing their jobs with integrity and speaking truth to insanity and are being targeted for elimination in favor of more extreme actors.
With those trends, it is frightening to think that a race to fascism is only being held back by individual Republican officials in key positions of power continuing to do the right thing for the larger country and resisting the pressure to support an even greater fealty to ignorance and fear. The odds are particularly scary after realizing that the Republican Party has already been curating any moderation out of its DNA for twenty plus years and failed two of the most obvious sanity checks possible by supporting Trumpism in 2016 and 2020. The odds of a quorum of mid-career Republican officials still holding the line against the growing insanity seem vanishingly small.
Here are two case studies of the forces of freedumb at work. Pay attention. They are probably already at work in your community.
Case Study #1 --- Proposed legislation in Arizona illustrates the tactics extremist Republicans are willing to adopt in order to explicitly thwart representative government and fair elections. House Bill 2596 was proposed by Republican Representative John Fillmore on January 21, 2022 and included these changes to Arizona election laws:
- eliminate mail-in voting for convenience (still OK for military, hospitalized, out of state on voting day)
- return to geographically based voting locations -- cannot vote at any arbitrary polling location
- require all ballots to be counted within 24 hours of polls closing
- require HAND COUNTING of all votes (in 24 hours...)
- require the legislature to call itself into session after each election to review ballot tabulation processes
- allow the legislature to REJECT any result, thus allowing any qualified voter to file a motion in court to re-do the election
In other words, the legislature is proposing giving itself the power to indefinitely delay the consequence of any vote with which it doesn't agree, presumably including a result that might toss members of the extremist sect out of power. Here's the full language of the bill for those interested:
https://www.azleg.gov/legtext/55leg/2R/bills/HB2596P.htmPerhaps more newsworthy about this turn of events in Arizona is news that the bill appears to have been sent to the legislative equivalent of a tar pit from whence it is unlikely to escape by Rusty Bowers, the Republican Speaker of the House. Bowers read the legislation for exactly what it is -- an inexcusable assault on the most basic civic process in a representational democracy -- and on February 4, 2022 he routed the bill through TWELVE different subcommittees for review, virtually assuring it will never reach the floor for a vote.
That sounds encouraging, right? Finally, some Republicans are starting to show some sanity and backbone to fight the lunatic fringe that has taken over their party, right? Look at it another way. This is another case where this level of insanity is being blocked by a SINGLE PERSON. The House in Arizona is 31/29 Republican so if BOWERS wasn't #31, this travesty could have made it much farther in the process, perhaps into law. Bowers has served in government for 30 years. He's 70 years old. How has his profile in courage been rewarded?
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2022/02/01/ahouse-speaker-just-killed-arizonas-most-outrageous-election-reform/9307151002/For standing on principle, Bowers was targeted by the Arizona Patriot Party for recall and Trump supporters cruised his neighborhood, using a loudspeakers to call him a pedophile. Since then, his fellow Republican legislators have introduced no fewer than 70 bills to “reform” our elections, the worst of them being Fillmore’s scheme to essentially take away our vote.
And the Representative who proposed HB2596? He previously proposed legislation that would have allowed the Arizona legislature to select candidates for the United States Senate.
So what happens when the one indispensable Republican leaves the scene or is forcefully removed from power? For that, we turn to Shasta County, California.
Case Study #2 --- A recall election for a County Supervisor seat in Shasta County, California demonstrates the variety of fringe groups with different priorities acting together to impair moderate government deemed insufficiently belligerent to their enemies. Shasta County is traditionally conservative and has a Republican controlled Board of Supervisors consisting of five elected supervisors managing the county's affairs. In the age of covid, the county made no serious effort to enforce State mandated mask policies in local schools and businesses but mere passivity was not deemed sufficient for a fringe set of community members.
As those people began showing up at public meetings for county government and school issues and disrupting meetings screaming about tyranny, masks, et al, they began to gain support from a local group called the Cottonwood militia with ties to The Proud Boys who joined in those disruptions and took things to the next level. The fringe then tried collecting signatures to recall three of the five Supervisors on the county board then decided to focus on just one member. At that point, the effort gained support from a Connecticut millionaire who eventually contributed $400,000 to the recall effort. He also donated $100,000 to the 2020 campaign for Patrick Jones, a fellow supervisor and supporter of the recall.
So what is the background of these fringe forces? The leader of the recall effort, Carlos Zapata was arrested with two companions after getting into a fight at a local restaurant on May 4, 2021 with another Redding resident who was a supporter of the supervisors targeted by the recall. All three were charged with battery and disturbing the peace. On October 4, the companions were convicted on both charges while Zapata was only convicted on the peace charge. The Connecticut millionaire bankrolling the recall? Reverge Anselmo had a zoning dispute with the county in 2007 related to a vineyard property he owned in the county.
And the background of the recall target? Leonard Moty, chair of the Board of Supervisors, lifelong resident of Shasta county, thirty year veteran of the Redding Police Department (ending his career as Chief) and lifelong Republican. There are still uncounted ballots that officials estimate could take one to two weeks to count but current figures show the recall passing by a 56/44 margin among the roughly 8700 votes in his district. The replacement with the highest vote total to replace him is aligned with the Cottonwood militia / Proud Boys fringe and by knocking off one Supervisor in one county government, the lunatic fringe gains another foothold and provides a lesson for those in other jurisdictions in how to expand their power.
And how were Moty and other county supervisors and election officials treated in the run-up to the recall? https://www.sfgate.com/california-politics/article/Shasta-County-Republican-recall-warzone-16810959.phphttps://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-02-04/extremists-take-over-shasta-county-northern-california-nextBoard of Supervisors meetings went virtual after death threats were made against Moty and the other two more moderate supervisors. Moty said that the threats are unlike anything he's ever experienced in his time as a public official.
One person indicated that bullets are expensive but ropes are reusable; and someone else talked about tarring and feathering me," Moty said. "There's been talk of guillotines, things like that. It’s been very difficult for my family, difficult for my wife and kids to hear attacks like that.
“We have to make politicians scared again,” Carlos Zapata, a bar owner and militia member, told my colleague Hailey Branson-Potts, as the militia was heating up its tactics. “If politicians do not fear the people they govern, that relationship is broken.” It isn’t just politicians who are cowed. Regular citizens are, too. People came up to Moty and said they supported him, “but they didn’t want to have their name out there because they are afraid,” he said.
It was safer to be quiet because those who opposed the recall, along with county employees deemed problematic, have received death threats and had their home and work addresses posted online. (Recall supporters say the same has happened to them.) Moty, who spent three decades in law enforcement including six as chief of the Redding Police Department, has been threatened, accused of being a pedophile, of taking bribes, of colluding with voting machine maker Dominion Voting Systems to defraud the election, being against the 2nd Amendment (a big insult in these parts) and more, he told me Wednesday.
Note the similarities between the two cases… Especially the baseless charges of pedophilia out of nowhere.
Yup. Sounds like freedumb to me.
WTH
