If Antifa is anti-fascist….
“Weird how this keeps happening and it keeps being Republicans,” Brian Beutler tweeted this morning on X in reference to Douglass Mackey (Politico):
A right-wing social media influencer was sentenced to seven months in federal prison on Wednesday for spreading falsehoods via Twitter, now known as X, in an effort to suppress Democratic turnout in the 2016 presidential election.
Douglass Mackey, who posted under the alias Ricky Vaughn, was convicted in March of the charge of conspiracy against rights after a trial in federal court in Brooklyn.
Prosecutors said Mackey, who had 58,000 Twitter followers, conspired with others between September and November of 2016 to post falsely that supporters of Democrat Hillary Clinton could vote for her by text message or social media post.
For example, they said, Mackey tweeted a photo of a woman standing in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign. “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” the tweet said. “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925.”
Meanwhile, election fraud propagandists are still “banging the drum” to promote their conspiracy theories, Molly Olmstead reports at Slate:
The Kansas Legislature hosted an odd contingent last month. Proponents of QAnon conspiracy theories, lobbyists from conservative “dark money” groups, and vigilantes willing to take covert action to find proof of election crimes showed up for a two-day forum to present on such topics as “Election Machine Vulnerabilities,” “Voter Roll Maintenance,” and “Ballot Harvesting.”
[…]
Because the session was an invite-only event, actual election administrators and legitimate voting rights groups such as the League of Women Voters were shut out of the proceedings. So, for two days, Kansas legislators were treated to hours and hours of conspiracy theory propaganda.
The effort is small-scale. The movement has largely subsided save for the hard core (corps?).
Presenters were the usual assortment of self-described “experts” common on the left and right fringes. Where New Agers once had crop circle researchers, the far right has election conspiracy hobbyists. The similarities are striking. The potential damage is not.
“But there is some vocal shrinking minority of folks who are throwing a lot of energy at this stuff still,” says Daniel Griffith, the senior director of policy at Secure Democracy USA. “In pretty much every state, you have at least a couple legislators who will entertain their ideas and introduce bills. I don’t think it’s going away.”
“We do know there’s multistate orgs that are coordinating these efforts and providing ideas to the folks,” said Griffith.
Mark Cook—an IT worker who has been a featured guest on MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s show Lindell TV to promote the theory that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the 2020 election—also appeared at the event. He has the distinction of having actually participated in potential crimes related to voting.
Cook has previously been accused of helping an elections clerk smuggle data out of voting machines in an effort to try to find evidence of hacking. It doesn’t matter that his scheme ended up implicating him in potential crimes rather than exposing others; he sticks to his belief that the 2020 election was stolen. “Think about that: What does dominion mean?” Cook said at the Kansas session, referring to Dominion Voting Systems. “They want to have dominion over us. We need to open our eyes.”
“Open your eyes!” says the woman in the Kayak ad, too. Do your research!
Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, also spoke about “an interdependent network” of individuals who are pushing these ideas at the state level. “Those who come testify are often the same people who are driving those strategies,” she said.
The efforts to keep this conspiracy alive may be diffuse, but they reach all the way to the top of the Republican Party, including the failed Republican legislator who now wants to be Speaker of the House.
The following is a recording of Jim Jordan addressing a closed meeting of the House Republican Conference on January 5, 2021—one day before Congress was to certify the 2020 election.
— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) October 18, 2023
This is why Jim Jordan should never be Speaker. pic.twitter.com/PEimudCL3D
Aaron Blake reported on Monday, that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) “has yet to get a bill signed into law since being elected in 2006.” But promoting conspiracy theories and conspiring (allegedly) to overturn a presidential election? He’s hell at that. (Listen to the audio.)
There are early signs that a few Republicans in the House find Jordan’s candidacy a bridge too far. Most people who run for these offices have overactive egos. The upside is that the less-crazy want to leave some kind of official legacy. With Jordan in the driver’s seat, they’ll have none.
“Those gas stove hearing aren’t going to hold themselves,” quips Molly Jong Fast.
The legacy MAGA Republicans dream of is turning this country into an autocracy with Donald Trump or someone like him at the top, even if it takes verbal harrassment, “credible death threats and a barrage of threatening calls” to get there.
“Jordan’s rise, like Trump’s own commanding lead in the 2024 GOP presidential race, provides more evidence that for the first time since the Civil War, the dominant faction in one of America’s two major parties is no longer committed to the principles of democracy as the U.S. has known them,” writes Ron Brownstein in The Atlantic. “That means the nation now faces the possibility of sustained threats to the tradition of free and fair elections, with Trump’s own antidemocratic tendencies not only tolerated but amplified by his allies across the party.”
Open your eyes, indeed.
If Antifa is anti-fascist, is the new Republican brand Antide?