772 search results for ""voter fraud""

And he said: “Son, this world is rough
And if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough
And I knew I wouldn’t be there to help ya along
So I give ya that name and I said goodbye
I knew you’d have to get tough or die
And it’s the name that helped to make you strong

Shel Silverstein – “A Boy Named Sue”

Donald Trump — the obese, pampered, bad-boy heir, unindicted co-conspirator — uttered strongly so many times that someone eventually will count them. The American right’s obsession with strength/weakness and with guns as a form of male enhancement is so palpable as to be comic if it were not so deadly.

It is why “A Boy Named Sue” has been the unofficial anthem of the conservative movement since Johnny Cash first played it to a roomful of convicts. It celebrates violence as the appropriate response to insecurity and physical strength as the definition of manhood.

And it’s the name that helped to make you strong. Not a good man. Not a good husband, or a good father, or a good citizen. But strongly, huh?

The song struck a chord with the guests at San Quentin, as did Donald Trump with conservatives across the country. Their obsessions with him and with guns and with suppressing the votes of non-white neighbors broadcast their insecurities to the world. Like that dream about showing up at work or school without pants. Where would you carry your gun?

More than twice as many Americans have already died from gun violence in 2021 than servicemembers died in Afghanistan in nearly twenty years.

Turning freedom into a worship word is another revelatory obsession.

“The ‘liberty’ promised by the Declaration of Independence is interfering with the ‘life’ and the ‘pursuit of happiness’ in ways the Founding Fathers could never have imagined,” writes Zachary B. Wolf for CNN. “Given the choice, with help from conservative courts and Second Amendment true believers, the country is choosing personal freedom over public safety, giving some of its people a feeling of liberty, but also causing many people to die in the process.”

But strongly, huh?

There have been 45 mass shootings in the US in the past month. But most gun deaths won’t be in mass shootings. More have died this year by suicide, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive. More than twice as many Americans have already died from gun violence in 2021 than servicemembers died in Afghanistan in nearly twenty years.

The war over guns is a domestic one, Wolf writes, one in which the insecure demand neighbors “who didn’t volunteer for duty” make themselves human sacrifices.

Democracy itself is on the altar now, dressed, trussed, and prepared for ritual burning by people threatened by their perceived loss of power. They tried to light the fire once already on Jan. 6.

As Colbert I. King sees it:

It is an existential threat to an essential right of U.S. citizenship — the freedom to vote in open elections.

Staring us in the face are 361 restrictive bills by mostly Republican state legislatures across the country that, at bottom, aim to curb voter participation. The supposed rationale for the open assault on voting rights is the baseless charge of voter fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election leveled by the defeated president, Donald Trump, and echoed by his flock of followers.

Threatened, Republicans are, at having to share power, and at having lost Georgia’s 2020 electoral votes and two Senate seats to the strength of Black voter turnout.

As the Rev. Jesse Jackson put it back in 1981 when confronted with resistance to court-ordered busing, “It ain’t the bus, it’s us.”

Republicans see voter suppression (and more guns) as the appropriate response to their gnawing insecurities.

And in fealty to Trump, their improbable embodiment of strongly, the insecure conservative makes neighbors “who didn’t volunteer for duty” human sacrifices to COVID-19.

Greg Sargent writes that 45 percent of Republicans do not plan to get vaccinated. Because freedom:

But what’s surprising is how easily this “populism” melded with a much more conventional and ideologically rigid anti-statism, congealing in college-dorm-level notions of individual liberty and the mass shunning of collective action in response to a major public health crisis, contributing to extraordinarily terrible consequences.

As Will Wilkinson aptly puts it, this ideology has devolved to the point where “tens of millions of Republicans feel entitled to behave as if there were no pandemic,” something that has hardened into a “foundational principle.”

And for untold numbers of voters, it’s backslid to little more than a marker of tribal loyalty to the disgraced failure who did so much to make it all possible. We can only hope the damage will be limited going forward. But as Watts suggests in his lament, it’s hard to be optimistic.

Not a good person. Not a good spouse, or a good parent, or a good citizen. But strongly.

This devolution of a major U.S. political party into a personality cult for the insecure threatens to pull down the temple of democracy in supplication to an earthly deity, much the way Jeff Sharlet found in The Family’s philosophy of “Jesus plus nothing”:

“A covenant,” Doug answered. The congressman half-smiled, as if caught between confessing his ignorance and pretending he knew what Doug was talking about. “Like the Mafia,” Doug clarified. “Look at the strength of their bonds.” He made a fist and held it before Tiahrt’s face. Tiahrt nodded, squinting. “See, for them it’s honor,” Doug said. “For us, it’s Jesus.”

Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their “brothers”: “Look at Hitler,” he said. “Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Bin Laden.” The Family, of course, possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the “total Jesus” of a brotherhood in Christ.

“That’s what you get with a covenant,” said Coe. “Jesus plus nothing.”

Trump has stepped in, plus nothing, for the strongmen The Family admires.

The New York Times is publishing a podcast series entitled “The Improvement Association” by “This American Life” reporter Zoe Chace. The series examines the backstory to the Republican absentee ballot fraud in Bladen County, North Carolina that when exposed caused the state Board of Elections to overturn the 2018 congressional election in NC-9.

Chapter 2 looks at Republican allegations that the Black-run Bladen Improvement PAC has been cheating for years. Chace found no evidence for this in observing multiple elections since. What “evidence” Republicans in the area showed her was more a collection of suspicions and unsubstantiated allegations. But it might be voter fraud, could be, possibly, etc.

Essentially, Bladen Republicans were indifferent to Black voters organizing until Black candidates (including a Black sheriff) began winning elections in the rural county. Republican allegations that followed of Democrats cheating sound familiar here on the opposite end of the state. It is a pattern Hullabaloo readers will recognize from national Republican politics: elections are only legitimate if Republicans win.

---

Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!

Marc Elias of Democracy Docket is Democrats’ most prominent election protection attorney, He issued another “On the Docket” email today. Subject line: Republican “Army” Expands State Strategy. Here is just some of what else is percolating in the states:

In the States: Republicans’ 50-State Strategy

There’s a lot to keep track of in the world of voting rights this week. Corporations are feeling the pressure to weigh in on suppressive legislation. Republicans are planning ahead—proposing legislation to make voting harder, and recruiting for their Election Day activities around bills that have yet to pass. Plus, redistricting is coming up, in what will be a much-litigated process to establish the landscape for the 2022 elections (we will have your guide to all things redistricting, coming soon). Here are some key highlights from the states this week:

Texas: Republicans in Harris County are preparing a poll watching “army” to intimidate Black and brown voters and gin up unfounded allegations of voter fraud. In a leaked video obtained by the watchdog group Common Cause, Texas Republicans are heard laying out their recruitment plan for a 10,000-member “Election Integrity Brigade.” They’re recruiting suburban conservatives from mostly white areas of the Lone Star state to flood Black and brown precincts of Harris County with partisan poll watchers—who, under recently-proposed Republican legislation, would be empowered to film voters they suspect of fraudulent behavior and send those videos to the Secretary of State. The potential for voter intimidation and harassment here is virtually unlimited, and the Republican Party knows it: they’re asking for volunteers with “confidence and courage” to come to Harris County and film the “voter fraud” they know isn’t happening. Why such courage would be needed for honest, good-faith poll watching is up to you to infer. You can watch the video for yourself here. 

New Hampshire: The introduction of cameras at polling places is not limited to Texas. In New Hampshire, new voter ID laws that have passed the Republican-led state house would require voters who register on Election Day and do not have an accepted photo ID to have their photos taken at their polling location; the bill, HB 523, would also eliminate previous religious exemptions for voter ID requirements. Another piece of legislation, HB 292, would add additional ID requirements for voters requesting an absentee ballot be sent to a different address than the one on file with their county clerk. This provision clearly targets highly-mobile college students, who have been a key focus of Republican voter suppression in the Granite State. New Hampshire has one of the highest student populations as a share of their total electorate, and HB 292 is just one of many attacks on their access to the ballot this year. The two voter suppression bills now move to the state senate for consideration.

Ohio: The Buckeye State holds an honorable title at the moment: it is one of only three states that is not currently considering voter suppression legislation. That will soon change—it was reported this week that the state Republican leadership plan to introduce their first voter suppression bills of 2021 soon. We don’t have a draft of the legislation yet, but it will include banning drop boxes except in emergencies, as well as taking aim at other voting reforms that were the center of debate during the 2020 election. Also under consideration: eliminating early voting on the day before Election Day, and moving up the deadline for absentee ballot requests. Democrats in Ohio have been proactive about battling these restrictions; last year, they sued the Secretary of State to allow counties to set up multiple drop boxes, and Democratic legislators have proposed a bill to establish at least one permanent drop box per county. But the legislation has no Republican sponsors and has not been put on the committee schedule by Republican leadership. We’ll keep you informed as new voter suppression legislation in Ohio gets introduced. 

Attendees at an event here in Trump National Doral this weekend are attempting to re-write the history of January 6th.

One asks, "what is so terrible about conspiracy theories anyway?"

New reporting today on @CNNnewsroom w/@Acosta. pic.twitter.com/MTPkBYCTWP

— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) April 10, 2021

She is intensely frustrating. It would have taken everything in me not to scream in her face that the problem with conspiracy theories is that they are lies and in the case of QAnon defamatory disgusting lies which are turning people into stupid, violent robots — you idiot.

Sadly, she represents the majority of Republicans:

Three months after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try to overturn his November election loss, about half of Republicans believe the siege was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists “trying to make Trump look bad,” a new Reuters/Ipsos poll has found.

Six in 10 Republicans also believe the false claim put out by Trump that November’s presidential election “was stolen” from him due to widespread voter fraud, and the same proportion of Republicans think he should run again in 2024, the March 30-31 poll showed.

Since the Capitol attack, Trump, many of his allies within the Republican Party and right-wing media personalities have publicly painted a picture of the day’s events jarringly at odds with reality.

Hundreds of Trump’s supporters, mobilized by the former president’s false claims of a stolen election, climbed walls of the Capitol building and smashed windows to gain entry while lawmakers were inside voting to certify President Joe Biden’s election victory. The rioters – many of them sporting Trump campaign gear and waving flags – also included known white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Trump said the rioters posed “zero threat.” Other prominent Republicans, such as Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, have publicly doubted whether Trump supporters were behind the riot.

There are a few Republicans pushing back but they are the fringe. That woman who asks why conspiracy theories are a problem is the mainstream.

Republican Rep. Peter Meijer has a warning for his party: He fears baseless conspiracy theories like QAnon will destroy the GOP from within if Republicans don’t decisively and unequivocally condemn the false and dangerous beliefs and take action to stop their spread.”

The fact that a significant plurality, if not potentially a majority, of our voters have been deceived into this creation of an alternate reality could very well be an existential threat to the party,” Meijer, who was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump for inciting the deadly attack at the US Capitol, told CNN in an interview.

Frequently described as a virtual cult, QAnonis a sprawling far-right conspiracy theory that promotes the absurd and false claim that Trump has been locked in a battle against a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles made up of prominent Democratic politicians and liberal celebrities. Members of the violent pro-Trump mob that stormedthe Capitol had ties to QAnon, and the conspiracy theory has made its way from online message boards into the political mainstream in recent years.”

When we say QAnon, you have the sort of extreme forms, but you also just have this softer, gradual undermining of any shared, collective sense of truth,” Meijer said. The Michigan freshman believes conspiracy theories fuel “incredibly unrealistic and unachievable expectations” and “a cycle of disillusionment and alienation” that could lead conservative voters to sit out elections or, in a worst-case scenario, turn to political violence, like what happened on January 6.

How deeply far-right conspiracy theories take hold within the Republican Party, and what the party does to either embrace or reject them, will have major consequences for the future of the GOP and American politics.Meijer is far from the only Republican in Congress disturbed by the rise of QAnon, but he is one of a rare few willing to publicly and repeatedly denounce it.

Republicans who speak out risk a backlash, and many would rather dismiss, downplay or ignore the issue. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, famously signaled outright support for the conspiracy theory before she was elected to office, though she has recently attempted to distance herself from it.CNN reached out to the offices of more than a dozen GOP members of Congress to request interviews for this story, and only two agreed to participate.

The lonely voices within the GOP who continue to take a stand must now grapple with what it would take for the party to turn away from conspiracy theories.

Kinzinger hopes that whatever the outcome in the special election, his endorsement will show like-minded Republicans they’re not alone and encourage others to run for office on a similar platform.”I think what’s important is that people see there are people out there that support you, that will back you if you do the right thing,” he said. “It’s a long-term battle for the soul of the party.”

The Illinois congressman describes the danger he believes QAnon poses in stark terms, saying he’s concerned its corrosive impact threatens to pull apart the very fabric of American democracy.”

Do I think there’s going to be a civil war? No. Do I rule it out? No. Do I think it’s a concern, do I think it’s something we have to be worried about? Yeah,” he said.Former GOP Rep. Denver Riggleman of Virginia is outspoken in his opposition to QAnon, and he believes that is part of the reason he was voted out of office.

While serving in Congress, Riggleman co-sponsored a bipartisan resolution condemning QAnon that passed in the House overwhelmingly, though seventeen Republicans voted in opposition and 34 didn’t vote at all. But he thinks most Republican lawmakers “want to have it both ways” when it comes to the issue of conspiracy theories.

The former congressman said Republicans frequently try to make it look like they’re standing up for principle, while at the same time “winking and nodding” at conspiracy theories in an effort to get more votes.It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how widespread belief in QAnon is in the Republican Party. According to the Pew Research Center, roughly a quarter of Republicans who know about QAnon view its supporters favorably, though nearly half of Republicans say they know nothing at all about the conspiracy theory.

Riggleman believes a major problem right now is that there’s a strong “contingent of GOP voters who have completely lost themselves in the rabbit hole of conspiracies, disinformation and grievance politics,” and most Republican lawmakers “want to get re-elected so they would rather have people like me shut the hell up, even though they know I’m right.”

“It’s almost like we’re facts-based pariahs that are trying to sort of rein in this insanity that’s gone on,” he said.

.[…]

As the GOP charts a path forward after Trump lost the White House, Kinzinger said he does not want to see Republicans push voting laws based on false claims of widespread election fraud.”The narrative is almost we have to tighten our election system so that the next election isn’t stolen again, and that is garbage,” he said. […]

Meijer is concerned that embracing conspiracy theories like QAnon could make it harder for the GOP to recalibrate and rebuild after losing the White House and being in the minority in both chambers.”I think it’s all part of this broader trend of blame casting,” the congressman said. “In the case of QAnon, it’s well, why am I in the position I’m in? Well, it’s because others are holding me down. Why did we lose this election? Well, it wasn’t because our candidate wasn’t the best or had made mistakes, it was because it was stolen. It’s these ways of distancing oneself from responsibility and accountability.”

There is a rot at the center of the GOP and the party has decayed rapidly.

This Colbert segment is right on the money…

McConnell’s shamelessness is a thing to behold.

This piece by Joshua Green explains how the Repubicans came to be in this mess:

Like so much else in American politics, the corporate backlash to Republican-led voter-suppression bills in Georgia and Texas is a direct consequence of Donald Trump’s presidency—in this case, the manner in which it ended.

Companies from Coca-Cola Co. to Delta Air Lines Inc. to Microsoft Corp. and dozens of others have condemned a wave of new voting restrictions pushed by Republicans to limit or ban absentee voting, mail voting, drop boxes, and even providing water to people standing in line to cast their ballot.

The sudden blitz of voting restrictions has an unmistakable purpose: A report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School found that “the cumulative effect of so many targeted bills will reduce access to the ballot box for Black voters.” By making it harder to vote, Republican lawmakers are responding to Trump’s false claim that he lost the presidential election due to minority voter fraud, and they’re carrying on Trump’s efforts—this time proactively—to limit votes in minority-heavy areas from being counted.

The Republican attack is blatant enough that it has forced corporate America, under boycott threats from consumers and pressure from Black executives, to respond. “There is no middle ground here,” Kenneth Chenault, the Black former chief executive officer of American Express Co., told the New York Times. “You either are for more people voting, or you want to suppress the vote.”

That stark binary choice led Major League Baseball to announce it was moving July’s All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver, with Commissioner Rob Manfred stating, “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.” Delta CEO Ed Bastian, whose company is based in Atlanta, blasted Georgia’s restrictions as “based on a lie” and designed to “make it harder for many Georgians, particularly those in our Black and Brown communities, to exercise their right to vote.” Fort Worth-based American Airlines Group Inc. issued a statement criticizing a Texas bill with similar curbs on voting access that just cleared the state’s senate: “At American, we believe we should break down barriers to diversity, equity and inclusion in our society—not create them.”

Rather than try to assuage its corporate donors, Republicans have threatened companies by vowing to impose punitive taxes in retaliation for the criticism. “Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned on April 5. “Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex.” Republicans in the Georgia House of Representatives attempted to punish Delta by voting to end a $35 million tax break for jet fuel; the state senate adjourned on April 1 without taking up the bill.

This latest blowup between Republicans and big business could be a harbinger of something that until recently was all but unthinkable: a divorce between the GOP and corporate America. Such a split already appears to be under way in Georgia, where Republican House Speaker David Ralston justified his caucus’s effort to punish Delta, one of his state’s largest employers, by saying, “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand.”

In the past, corporations worked hard to avoid being dragged into political disputes for fear of drawing a partisan backlash. But Trump’s racially divisive presidency made a stance of corporate neutrality all but impossible. His frequent attacks on Blacks and Latinos and use of racist tropes forced corporations to take sides or endure brand-destroying boycotts and social media campaigns for not speaking out. Last summer’s racial justice protests following George Floyd’s death showed that public expectations for expressions of companies’ moral values now extend beyond just controversies created by Trump.

Although Trump dragged corporate America into the political arena, his presidency showed that companies may not have as much to fear from taking public positions on cultural and policy issues as they once imagined—especially not those involving race.

Nike Inc.’s decision to feature Colin Kaepernick in an ad campaign, after Trump criticized the former National Football League quarterback for kneeling to protest police violence, outraged many Republicans. But a conservative boycott campaign did nothing to hurt Nike’s bottom line, despite Trump’s claim that the company was “getting absolutely killed with anger and boycotts.” Since debuting the Kaepernick ad in September 2018, Nike’s stock price has almost doubled.

Car rental companies including Avis Budget Group Inc., Hertz Global Holdings Inc., and Enterprise Rent-a-Car Co. faced boycotts from pro-Trump Republicans after ending discounts for members of the National Rifle Association following the gun massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in 2018. That pressure campaign soon fizzled out.

In the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, dozens of companies including Marriott International Inc., AT&T Inc., and Airbnb Inc. halted contributions from their political action committees to the 147 Republican politicians who refused to certify the presidential election results. None faced meaningful blowback. Neither have the organizations that severed ties to Trump’s personal business, including PGA of America and Shopify Inc.

That’s a big reason why Trump’s latest call to boycott MLB, Coke, and Delta over their reaction to the new voter-suppression push rings so hollow and hasn’t prevented dozens of companies from speaking out. Even as Texas Governor Greg Abbott fell in line with Trump’s edict and protested MLB’s action by refusing to throw out the first pitch at the Texas Rangers’ home opener on April 5, the game itself was a sellout.

But an even bigger reason is that the interests of corporate America and the Republican Party began to diverge under Trump’s racialized style of politics. The GOP has sacrificed its traditional pro-business suburban supporters to become ever more reliant on a shrinking pool of older White voters. Its grip on power depends on limiting the votes of people who fall outside that category, including young people and minorities. Georgia is an object lesson in the limits of this approach—Joe Biden won the state and Democrats carried both U.S. Senate seats—and also how Republicans intend to overcome it.

In the 1960s, Atlanta lured corporations to relocate there by billing itself as “The City Too Busy to Hate,” a business-friendly paradise of low taxes and weak labor unions. Georgia became reliably red. But today’s Republican message doesn’t hold nearly the same appeal. The consumers that companies covet most and the employees they’re keenest to hire are the same young people and minorities that Trump and other Republicans routinely demonize. The civic dysfunction that Trump ushered in has even altered the adversarial relationship between labor and business. On Election Day, the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a striking joint statement calling on all Americans to respect the results “of a free and fair election”—a message directed at Trump and his party.

As the current battles in Georgia, Texas, Iowa, and other states show, Republican politicians are loath to do that. But many companies are increasingly leery of this new approach—and more and more willing to speak up and say so.
 

As the GOP completes its devolution into a strictly white, nationalist party with nothing more on its agenda than opposing the Democratic coalition, it makes sense that its business patrons would back off. The Trump cult isn’t their customer base and anyway, Trumpers have shown they don’t see Trump’s boycotts as MAGA requirements. They have other ways of showing their loyalty to the team — big Trump flags, red hats, violent insurrection. They see no need to give up diet coke and baseball.

Three months ago today.https://t.co/F1HeEWnk1m pic.twitter.com/C4dFOeCShA

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) April 6, 2021

They’re still with him:

THREE MONTHS AFTER A mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election that he lost – an event that resulted in five deaths and a sprawling FBI manhunt – roughly half of Republicans believe it was instead a non-violent protest or the work of left-wing activists trying to make him look bad.

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll underscores the staying power of the former president in the GOP, his control over the Republican Party, and the effectiveness of the false and misleading messaging campaigns he and his political allies have waged in the wake of the attacks.

[…]

“Right from the start, it was zero threat,” Trump said last month on Fox News. “Look, they went in – they shouldn’t have done it – some of them went in, and they’re hugging and kissing the police and the guards, you know? They had great relationships. A lot of the people were waved in, and then they walked in, and they walked out.”

His narrative is bolstered by Republicans in the House and Senate, like Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who has clung to a revisionist history of the attack on the Capitol and repeatedly claimed, including at a Senate hearing, that the insurrection was the work of “fake Trump protesters.”

As it stands, federal prosecutors have criminally charged more than 200 rioters, including many who identify themselves as Trump supporters and who have documented ties to far-right extremist groups. There is no substantial evidence, federal prosecutors have said, that left-wing or anti-fascist activists provoked or posed as Trump supporters during the riot.

Yet the Reuters/Ipsos poll, which was conducted March 30-31, shows the messaging campaign of Trump and his supporters is working: While 59% of all Americans say Trump bears some responsibility for the attack, only 3 in 10 Republicans agree.

Moreover, the poll found that 6 in 10 Republicans believe Trump’s claim that November’s presidential election “was stolen” due to widespread voter fraud, and 6 in 10 Republicans also think he should run again in 2024.

In addition, the Reuters/Ipsos poll also found that Trump remains the most popular figure within the GOP, with 8 in 10 Republicans continuing to hold a favorable impression of him – a finding that gives some credence to the idea that the former president has been at least somewhat successful in painting himself as the victim.

People who believe January 6th was a peaceful protest and that anyone who committed violence were antifa are either liars or morons or both. I’m sorry, but they are.

What Republican leaders object to is accepting Americans they consider inferiors as equals. (And they relish calling liberals elitists.) Those attitudes are a matter of heads and hearts so long as they don’t act on them, although those attitudes underly subtle and not so subtle discriminatory systems.

But voting? Sharing political power with people they consider inferiors? Oh, hell no!

This whole hubbub over Georgia’s voting restrictions? It’s about power shifting away from those who have more to those who have less. Georgia Republicans are not the only ones wetting their pants over the prospect of sharing power. Check out Texas:

Senate Bill 7 passed with support from all 18 Republican state senators and opposition from all 13 Democrats. The bill limits extended early voting hours, bans drive-thru voting and forbids local election officials from encouraging voters to submit vote-by-mail applications.

If signed into law, the bill would likely impact Texas’ largest cities where voters have often faced long lines during recent elections. Some of the state’s largest counties expanded early voting hours and created drive-thru polling locations to allow more people to vote in the 2020 elections.

That’s a bridge too far.

Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project, expressed concerns about the effect SB 7 may have on voter turnout.

“Texas has, typically, one of the lowest turnout rates in the country to the extent that there are people that think that that’s a problem and think that there should be more participation.” Henson said. “This legislation works in the opposite direction of solving that problem.”

Many Texas Republicans believe the bigger problem is voter fraud. Supporters believe the bill will stop people from cheating in elections.

In their fevered minds.

We use race too easily as a simplfying assumption to explain such behavior as erecting barriers to voting. But it is also about power. Who has it. Who doesn’t. Who is the alpha. Who are the rest. Money is shorthand for it. So is race. Those in power mean to keep it.

Some truths are not self-evident at all. Studies confirm that the more one has, the less likely one is to accept them. The more one has, the more likely one is to be “self-oriented and more willing to behave unethically” in one’s self-interest, researcher Paul Piff tells Michael Mechanic in The Atlantic:  

Political scientists such as Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens have found notable differences in the policy preferences of affluent versus middle-class Americans, not only on purely economic matters like taxation but also on public-education funding, racial equity, and environmental protections, all of which the rich have been significantly less likely to support. This matters because of the influence the rich have over government officials. In one study, Gilens, now a professor at UCLA, combed through thousands of public survey responses and discovered that, on issues where the views of wealthy voters diverged significantly from those of the rest of the populace, the policies ultimately put in place “strongly” reflected the desires of the most affluent respondents—the top-earning 10 percent. Those policies, the study concluded, bore “virtually no relationship to the preferences” of poorer Americans.

Wealthy people are less likely than poor ones, in lab settings at least, to relate to the suffering of others. When people experience compassion, it turns out, our hearts actually slow down. In 2012, Piff’s then-colleagues Michael Kraus and Jennifer Stellar hooked volunteers up to ECG machines and showed them two short videos: a “neutral” video of a woman explaining how to construct a patio wall and a “compassion” video of children receiving chemotherapy treatments for cancer. Relative to the wealthier participants, the poorer ones not only reported feeling greater compassion for the kids but also exhibited a significantly larger slowdown in heart rate from one video to the next.

If affluent people are less moved by the suffering of others, they should be less likely to help those in need, and this too seems to be true both in the lab and outside it. While wealthy families donate significantly more money to charity on average than poor families do, they tend to give away a smaller share of their income. “As wealth goes up, the stinginess seems to increase,” Piff said.

And the tendency toward being a royalist, to put it bluntly.

The psychologists Kraus and Keltner have found that people who rank themselves at the top of the social scale are significantly more likely to endorse essentialism, the notion that group characteristics are immutable and biologically determined—precisely the sort of beliefs used to justify the mistreatment of low-status groups such as immigrants and ethnic minorities. Countless studies, Kraus writes, point to an upper-class tendency toward “self-preservation.” That is, people who view themselves as superior in education, occupation, and assets are inclined to protect their group’s status at the expense of groups they deem less deserving: “These findings should call into question any beliefs in noblesse oblige—elevated rank does not appear to obligate wealthy individuals to do good for the benefit of society.”

A layperson perusing the literature on wealth and behavior might conclude that wealthy people are assholes, but that’s not really fair. “When I’m talking about these findings, it can just sound like flat-out rich-bashing, which I’m not interested in doing,” Piff said. One can be extraordinarily rich and not exhibit these patterns, or be quite poor and exhibit them. The effects that he and his colleagues describe are “small to medium,” and they are averages.

But they are real. Even toward the bottom of the social order.

We are in the end animals. So status, pecking order? It’s part of the wiring. It runs deep.

There is an emerging narrative that the changes to the Georgia voting laws aren’t really that bad and Democrats are being hysterical for cynical political purposes. It’s not true. There are some very, very disturbing components of the new laws that should make anyone who cares about democracy shutter.

The New York Times reports:

Go page by page through Georgia’s new voting law, and one takeaway stands above all others: The Republican legislature and governor have made a breathtaking assertion of partisan power in elections, making absentee voting harder and creating restrictions and complications in the wake of narrow losses to Democrats.

The New York Times has examined and annotated the law, identifying 16 provisions that hamper the right to vote for some Georgians or strip power from state and local elections officials and give it to legislators.

Republicans passed and signed the 98-page voting law last week following the first Democratic victories in presidential and Senate elections in Georgia in a generation. President Biden won the state by just 11,779 votes out of nearly five million cast. The new law will, in particular, curtail ballot access for voters in booming urban and suburban counties, home to many Democrats. Another provision makes it a crime to offer water to voters waiting in lines, which tend to be longer in densely populated communities.

Below is The Times’s analysis of the law, including the specific provisions and some struck-through language from the state’s previous voting legislation.

Voters will now have less time to request absentee ballots.

There are strict new ID requirements for absentee ballots.

It’s now illegal for election officials to mail out absentee ballot applications to all voters.

Drop boxes still exist … but barely.

Mobile voting centers (think an R.V. where you can vote) are essentially banned.

Early voting is expanded in a lot of small counties, but probably not in more populous ones.

Offering food or water to voters waiting in line now risks misdemeanor charges.

If you go to the wrong polling place, it will be (even) harder to vote.

If election problems arise, a common occurrence, it is now more difficult to extend voting hours.

With a mix of changes to vote-counting, high-turnout elections will probably mean a long wait for results.

Election officials can no longer accept third-party funding (a measure that nods to right-wing conspiracy theories).

With an eye toward voter fraud, the state attorney general will manage an election hotline.

The Republican-controlled legislature has more control over the State Election Board.

The secretary of state is removed as a voting member of the State Election Board.

The G.O.P.-led legislature is empowered to suspend county election officials.

Runoff elections will happen faster — and could become harder to manage.

They have devolved the oversight of elections to GOP partisan players in the state legislature. There is only one reason for that. And I think you know what that is.

Another Republican state uses the excuse of Donald Trump’s Big Lie to suppress votes. They have to do it, you see. Republicans who believe Trump’s Big Lie have “lost faith” in the system and the only way to restore it is to make sure that Democrats can’t win elections. Perfectly understandable.

The Texas Senate in the early morning hours Thursday passed a package of election bills that would put new restrictions on voting in the state.

The final version of the Senate Bill 7 is not yet online for review, but the original bill banned overnight early voting hours and drive-thru early voting, while restricting how election officials handle mail voting.

The bill underwent hours of debate and “scores” of proposed amendments before passage, according to the bill’s author, Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes.

“This bill is about making it easy to vote and hard to cheat,” he said in a social media video posted after 3 a.m. in Austin.

The bill now heads to the Texas House of Representatives, which is considering its own omnibus package of restrictions, House Bill 6, later Thursday. 

The Texas legislature leads the nation in restrictive voting bills, according to the Brennan Center for Justice; 49 bills have been introduced to add restrictions on access to the ballot box.

Advocates have slammed the Senate bill as unnecessary and a major threat to voting rights.

“SB 7 is the most dangerous threat to voting rights we’ve seen in years,” Joaquin Gonzalez, an attorney with Texas Civil Rights Project, said in a statement. “The biggest threats to election integrity are codified racist attacks on voters, unequal access to the polls, and harassment by partisan poll watchers who would seek to disrupt safe and fair elections.”

In an interview with NBC News last month, Hughes said that the 2020 election increased interest in legislation Texas lawmakers were already keen on passing.

“This was already in process, but then the 2020 election was so in the national spotlight, and so many people have questions, so many people have concerns,” he told NBC News last week. “I would say that has raised the profile of the issue.”

These people don’t even try to hide the fact that they simply don’t want people voting. The only thing that could justify all these actions would be proof of systematic voter fraud as a result of expanded opportunities to vote. There is none. So we know why they are doing this: to suppress the vote of Democrats and pander to Donald Trump and his ignorant cult.

This Fresh Air interview with Elizabeth Neumann about the new convergence of various white supremacy factions is well worth listening to. Donald Trump may have divided the country but he managed to bring these violent extremists together:

TERRY GROSS: She sees a connection between many people on the far right and Christian nationalism, which teaches that America is not only a Christian nation, it’s God’s chosen nation. As a Christian, she finds this very disturbing. Elizabeth Neumann has more than 20 years’ experience in homeland security, dating back to when she served on George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Council. She initially joined Trump’s Department of Homeland Security in 2017 as then Secretary John Kelly’s deputy chief of staff. She’s now co-director of the Republican Accountability Project, which was founded to push back against the lies and conspiracy theories about voter fraud and claims that the 2020 election was rigged, and to hold accountable elected leaders who have supported those claims and tried to overturn a legitimate election.

Elizabeth Neumann, welcome to FRESH AIR. I want to start with the January 6 insurrection. In a lot of ways, it did not succeed. It didn’t succeed in overturning the election. It didn’t return Donald Trump to the presidency. Over 300 people have been charged by the Justice Department. Some of the Q followers were disillusioned that the prophecy about Trump remaining president didn’t come true. So in that sense, the insurrection was a failure. Are there ways in which it was a success for the far right?

ELIZABETH NEUMANN: Thanks for having me, Terry. And unfortunately, yes, it was viewed as a success for white supremacists, for anti-government extremists and, quite frankly, probably, many of our enemies overseas. They saw it as a success in that we have such societal discord that we can’t seem to find, even post-January 6, the ability to come together on a basic thing like a commission to study domestic terrorism in our country and what happened on January 6. So we are very fractured as a nation at this point, very polarized. And that plays into our enemies’ hands.

So while the guard rails held up and the presidential transition happened on January 20, there is damage to our democracy that persists today, including the fact that you see so many Republicans at the state level and at the national level spending so much time and energy on voter suppression, because a sizable portion of the Republican Party, the Republican voters, believe that the election was stolen from them. That is not healthy. We are in a very precarious place in our country.

GROSS: Are there ways that January 6 empowered the right-wing groups, the hate groups, the white supremacist groups, the militias?

NEUMANN: Yes. In particular, if you look at white supremacists, they have this ideology behind them. And not every white supremacist holds to this. But going back 40, 50 years to the ’80s when the white supremacist movement kind of consolidated and came to the conclusion that they were no longer going to be able to establish or achieve their aims through the government, they realized that they needed to make the government their enemy. And they basically declared war on the government and stated that their aim was to overthrow the U.S. government, to establish a white nation. So when you see the Capitol being attacked, which is this symbol of our seat of government, it has this rallying effect for a white supremacist who holds to this ideology that, eventually, there’s going to be this massive war. And the U.S. government’s going to be overthrown. And they’re going to be able to establish this white nation.

So it’s not like they destroyed the Capitol. It’s not like they disrupted the transition of power. But it was seen as kind of almost the starting point, perhaps, of the civil war that they have believed in their mythology was going to come at some point, a race war. And so you see on online chat rooms that you have groups using this as a recruitment tactic, that it’s finally happening, if – you know, there’s going to be this race war, that we’re finally going to be able to achieve our aim of ridding the country of all of these people we don’t think should be here, establishing our own country. And any time you have, for an extremist group or a terrorist group, something that symbolic, it affects and helps them with their recruitment, with their morale. So these – certainly, on the white supremacist side, we see an emboldening effect for those groups.

GROSS: Which of the groups want to see a race war and want to see, like, a civil war that leads to a white nation?

NEUMANN: So that particular strain is going to be in your white supremacist group, so neo-Nazis and other groups that borrow their mythology largely from Germany and Nordic countries. What you also see, though, is there’s this other movement called the boogaloo boys. You may have heard of them as well. They also believe in a coming civil war. They also subscribe to an ideology of accelerationism, which a white supremacist might also ascribe to. That concept is that we are going to commit certain acts to accelerate societal collapse, to encourage the oncoming of a civil war. So it’s not just a belief that someday there will be a civil war, as if you’re being prophetic and you have awareness of something happening in the future. The accelerationism is it is my job to help bring it about.

So boogaloo boy believes in civil war. And it may also have a white supremacist viewpoint, might believe it’s a race war, but not necessarily. There are a lot of boogaloo boys who just believe that there’s a coming civil war and it has nothing to do, at least at a witting level, with race. So the – (laughter) one of the hard things in studying extremism, especially today, is that increasingly, we have these groups kind of morphing. An individual may have multiple ideologies that they have cobbled together to form almost their own version of an ideology. And so you might easily have a white supremacist who is also a boogaloo boy. You also see that the melding between the white supremacist groups and the anti-government extremist groups, there tends to be a lot of overlap there.

But you could find somebody easily – you could find a militia or a member of a militia who hates racism, who hates white supremacy. They are just about the right to bear arms and be able to exercise protection for their neighborhood through a militia. So it’s really hard to categorize with broad brush strokes. And part of the reason that, perhaps, we haven’t been able to take domestic terrorism as seriously as we should have is because of that decentralized lack of organization to many of these groups. I mean, you often see infighting between supposed leaders of these groups. And it can give this false sense that they don’t have their act together, they’re not actually that dangerous because they’re always fighting with one another. And they can’t even agree on the issues that they stand for.

GROSS: Well, did January 6 and the insurrection have the effect of bringing these groups together and creating a previously un-existing alliance?

NEUMANN: Definitely did. In fact, that’s one of the biggest concerns that we had is (laughter) you had groups that maybe wouldn’t have interconnected before, have an in-person, in-real-life experience, which during a pandemic is kind of rare to begin with, where they’re meeting people. So that networking effect can be very powerful. Not only did they meet in person, they’re having an experience that for them it had a lot of adrenaline, a lot of euphoria. It bonds you. It’s like being in the foxhole together in war. It bonds you in a way that just meeting on the street would not bond you.

So there is a concern then on the other side of January 6, you have groups interconnected in a way that they weren’t before. We heard in the news on Wednesday that prosecutors have found interconnection between Oath Keepers and Proud Boys and Three Percenters. I think we’re going to see more of this to come as the investigation unfurls. But the knowledge that they had been coordinating in the weeks up to January 6 is rather significant. These are not groups that necessarily share the same ideology. They shared a common purpose clearly and showing up on January six. And what has been revealed so far is basically coordination to be able to attack what they expected to be antifa showing up on January six. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s any more coordination specific to the capital, though, in the messaging traffic that was released, they were talking about an insurrection.

So there clearly was this understanding in the weeks prior to January 6 that something that they labeled an insurrection was going to happen on January 6 and that they needed to coordinate to be able – to achieve that common purpose. That is rather concerning in that heretofore most of these groups kind of kept to themselves. And so, again, it’s – something about January 6 definitely shifted the makeup and the threat that we were facing. It used to be small groups. And we were predominantly worried about the white supremacist groups because historically they have been the most lethal in their violence.

But the other major problem with January 6 is so far of those indicted about, 85 to 90% – the numbers will change depending on, you know, who gets indicted next – but it’s somewhere in that 85 to 90% of the individuals indicted are unaffiliated. That means they’re not Proud Boys. They’re not neo-Nazis. They’re not Oath Keepers. They are just people that are passionate about Donald Trump. They are MAGA. To have that many unaffiliated people doing what happened on January 6 – and clearly, they were led by people that were more coordinated, more organized – they crossed into acts of terrorism by what they did to the Capitol on January 6.

That’s really concerning to most extremist researchers because it demonstrates we’re kind of in a very different threat environment. It’s not just these organized groups. It’s that we have mass violence justified for political purposes. It’s rather stunning, actually, the more the data comes out about who actually crossed the threshold into the Capitol.

GROSS: Are you saying that when Trump was president, he was able to accomplish the kinds of things that these disparate groups, the Proud Boys, the white supremacist groups, the Three Percenters, all the accelerationists (ph), what they were not able to accomplish?

NEUMANN: That’s a great way to frame it. Yes.

There’s a lot more and it’s well worth listening to the whole thing. Perhaps this is just one of the regular paroxysms of racist, right wing activity that doesn’t necessarily lead to major outbreaks of organized violence. But something feels different about this. I hope I’m wrong.

Here are the new articles off wingnut faith.

Because I am a masochist, I subjected myself to a cavalcade of crazy yesterday. I watched / listened to much of the seven hours of a nutso livestream from Regent University masquerading as an academic forum on “election integrity.”

Enough falsehoods were spewed by the speakers sponsored by Pat Robertson’s school yesterday to merit two-dozen rebuttal articles—but in the interest of time, I’ll just give you some broad strokes.

First, I would like to note that the emcee of the event was former Republican congresswoman, failed presidential candidate, and dean (!) of the Robertson School of Government, Michele Bachmann.

This is a woman who, after election day last year, asked God to #StopTheSteal in a prayer. I am not kidding:

Her opening statement yesterday was . . . really quite something. Do our votes even count anymore? she wondered. Did the pilgrims give us Biblical principles that are no longer being followed today? What about the elites and their pursuit of continued power? Is cancel culture coming after people who question the results of the 2020 election? (Brad Raffensperger, don’t answer that.)

Already I knew it was going to be a long day.

After Bachmann spoke, there was an opening prayer offered by Eric Metaxas—the Trumpist childrens’ book author, supposed Bonhoeffer scholar, and alleged sucker-punch-assault perpetrator. Surprisingly, as he offered up a prayer to “Father God,” there was nary a MyPillow promo code to be seen. Praise be.Eric Metaxas

After Metaxas came Dr. Ben Carson, the former neurosurgeon and former housing and urban development secretary. In his Teddy Ruxpin tone, Carson insinuated that the media never talks about election fraud. Don’t tell the right-wing media.

Next up was John Fund, who was the ghostwriter for Rush Limbaugh’s first book, spent many years at the Wall Street Journal, and now writes for National Review. Much of Fund’s writing, including two books, has focused on voting, elections, and concerns about fraud. Yesterday, he said that the voting-reform bill H.R. 1 was the “single worst” piece of legislation he’s seen in his forty years of commenting on American politics. As hyperbolic as that may seem, it is at least slightly toned down from what Fund said about H.R. 1 at CPAC last month: There he called it “the worst bill that’s of a non-fiscal nature that has ever been introduced in Congress.” Worse than the Sedition Act? The Indian Removal Act? The Fugitive Slave Act? Prohibition? The act backing up FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans? To say nothing of the countless horrible bills that were introduced but never passed.

Fund yesterday also had some fun ‘2016 whataboutism’ to justify 2020 truthers because there was a poll where a certain percentage of Democrats thought that Trump stole the 2016 election. Which is true: Every election, some percentage of Americans, more often on the losing side in the election, doubt the validity of the results. And in 2016, recall that the first news reports of Russian interference in the 2016 election emerged just a few days after the election. But comparing that small, lingering resentment in 2016 to what happened after the 2020 election, when a false belief in massive electoral fraud became a defining feature of the Republican party, and when the defeated president pushed that lie and instigated an insurrectionist mob at the Capitol, is risible.

Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft spoke yesterday, too, telling anyone who would listen that he would file a lawsuit and tell the feds to “pound sand” if H.R. 1 were to become law. Ashcroft apparently has a fetish for in-person voting, which comes across as a bit unseemly for an attorney, much less an elected official who oversees elections. In the Q&A, Ashcroft, Fund, and the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky were referred to as the “three smartest people on the planet.”

Whoever made that reference (I think it was Bachmann) needs to get out more.

Next up were Jim Hoft and his twin brother, Joe. You probably don’t know who these guys are unless you’re extremely online, but Jim runs a blog that, according to Joe, gets “670 million hits” a day. Which seems totally legit. (Anybody who knows anything about how web traffic works knows that “hits” is a useless figure.)

Joe and Jim had an Abbott and Costello routine going, where they went through some of the claims of fraud posted on their website—like the supposed incident in which a van with an out-of-state license plate brought ballots into Pennsylvania, thereby throwing the election—all of which have been thoroughly debunked. It tells you a lot about Regent—none of it good—that Jim Hoft, a raving conspiracy theorist, would be given prime billing at a conference like this.

But it gets worse.

Peter Navarro, a left-wing gadfly who got a job in the Trump administration because he hates free trade, has an election “report” and he and the others want to tell you about it. Navarro seems to believe that the Democrats, of which he was one until Trump descended from that brass escalator in his gaudy highrise, “stole just enough votes to win.” Odd strategy. Perhaps losing seats in the House was just cover?

Navarro went on and on about “fake ballots” and “fake fire alarms” to prove his case, but let one thing be known: Graphic design is Peter Navarro’s passion:

Navarro, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, talked about election turnout that supposedly was “above 100 percent” and claimed “this election was stolen.” He also name-dropped his buddies Steve Bannon; Raheem Kassam, an alt-right British journalist; and John Solomon, a discredited propagandist.

Then came Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state who ran the post-2016 election-fraud investigation that then-President Trump concocted—an investigation that failed to find any evidence of widespread fraud—and then ran for a Senate seat last year and lost in the primary to Roger Marshall.

Despite tech issues, Kobach, now a private citizen, was able to make clear his views that voter ID doesn’t necessarily stop voter fraud, and that we need signature verification at a level that might make a bank-fraud analyst blush.

The moral of the story? Voting should be harder than it is. For good measure, Kobach also attacked the ACLU.

I tuned out for a bit to put my kids to bed, but came back to find on my screen Mark Steyn, the Canadian commentator better known for his cat crooning than any expertise in the intricacies of election integrity, sharing such gems as this: “The minute you’re driving it [the ballot] around, it becomes less secure.”Mark Steyn

Also, Steyn suggested, without reference to any—what are they called again? oh yeah—facts that widespread mail-in voting and voting via digital machines that count your vote “enable fraud” and that judges have the ability to “amend an election,” whatever that means.

Many of the panelists brought up (you guessed it) GEORGE SOROS. I didn’t count how many times this bogeyman’s name was invoked, but if you had been playing a drinking game while watching yesterday’s livestream with the sole rule of having another shot every time someone said “Soros,” you’d soon have been under the table. Which, come to think of it, might have been the best way to experience this travesty.

The event’s organizers saved the “best” for last: David Clements, a professor at New Mexico State University. Clements staged a talent show of absurd MAGA whataboutism that made all the day’s other participants, even the Hofts, look cautious by comparison. Judges? Cowards. Why not jury trials? Do I even understand basic legal concepts? Probably not. Sidney Powell? She’s the “gold standard.” Why not have an eight-month-long mock trial? She’s so brave. We should rally around her.David Clements

The ballots brought in from a rented truck with out-of-state license plates? ALL THE HALLMARKS OF ARTIFICIAL MARKING. President Biden? The “fraud in chief.”

Michele—excuse me, Dean—Bachmann closed off the circus by saying “I don’t think we’ve heard the real story yet.” That may have been the truest thing said all day—just not in the way she meant it.