When they show you who they are, etc.
Jane Mayer’s New Yorker reporting unmasks the dark money behind efforts to undermine faith in the American democratic process via endless audits of the 2020 election results. Many of the usual players, naturally, including the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Über-rich, right-wing “reactionaries” long to restore themselves to their rightful place in the firmament. As rulers.
As Greg Sargent notes, actually finding voter fraud unicorns is no longer their goal:
Instead, those making such accusations need to create just enough confusion to enable well-placed Republicans to say the actual outcome of a given election is fundamentally unknowable. The coin of the realm is not concocted proof; it’s manufactured uncertainty. This is what will lay the groundwork for attempting to overturn a future election.
As I have said for years, listen carefully for the weasel words in voting malfeasance stories circulated on the right. This or that perceived election discrepancy might be, may be, could be, possibly, or is potentially fraud. Precious few actuallies, with the notable exception of Bladen County, NC. Thus did a federal district judge dismiss as worthless Rudy Giuliani’s binderful of affidavits from people who saw something they thought meant something about which they knew nothing.
What matters to these saboteurs, Sargent writes, is the “manufacturing of fake reasons to keep alive baseless impressions of uncertainty, in the full knowledge that they are manufactured.” This is a dry run for 2022 and 2024, for “inventing new ways to say an outcome is unknowable, which would then justify efforts to resolve the outcome in some other way.”
This from people who know a zygote is a baby.
This week, neo-fascist Tucker Carlson is stroking the ego of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán in Budapest. “On paper,” writes Heather Cox Richardson, “Hungary is a democracy in that it still holds elections, but it is, in fact, a one-party state overseen by the prime minister.” That is where America’s kookocracy hopes to take this country:
Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy, replacing it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” with “the Christian family model.”
No matter what he calls it, Orbán’s model is not democracy at all. As soon as he retook office in 2010, he began to establish control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party, Fidesz, and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012, his supporters rewrote the country’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, he used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. While Hungary still has elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for Orbán’s opponents to take power.
Trump supporters have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to have elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy.
Just as they pretend now to support this country’s founding documents and principles.
Currently, political patterns in America look much like those Orbán used to gather power into his own hands. Republican-dominated legislatures are passing new measures to suppress the vote, aided by the Big Lie that former president Trump did not lose the 2020 election. Trump and his supporters are focusing on the so-called “forensic audit” of Maricopa County in Arizona, paid for and conducted by Trump loyalists who insist that Trump actually won despite the repeated investigations that have proved the election was clean.
For Carlson to broadcast from Hungary at this time, says Richardson, seems to be “a deliberate demonstration of the Trump Republicans’ plans for our future.”
When they show you who they are….