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The 2022 election in Georgia is going to be lit. This piece by Tim Miller on Trumper Herschel Walker and his nascent campaign says it all. Trump seems to think he would be best suited to beat Raphael Warnock, but who knows? Maybe he could take on Governor Brian Kemp in a primary:

Ask any football fan about the worst trades in NFL history and the one player they will all mention is Herschel Walker.

Back in 1989 the Dallas Cowboys traded their star running back to the Minnesota Vikings for five players and six draft picks, an unprecedented haul that Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson later described as “the great train robbery.” The Cowboys used those picks to draft Hall of Famer Emmitt Smith and a bunch of other key cogs for the budding dynasty that would dominate the NFL for much of my childhood. For the Vikings on the other hand…well they haven’t been to the big game since 1977.

So you might say that being on the losing end of a swap is something Herschel knows a little bit about.

That’s going to be relevant experience for him, because 30 years after Jimmy J’s big heist, Herschel finds himself as a key player on the losing end of the political trade that turned Georgia—home to his alma mater and site of a potential run for either Senate or governor—into a blue state. In addition to being the answer to an NFL trivia question, Walker is now a card-carrying Trumper. And also a real-world celebrity. Or rather, as close to a “real-world celebrity” as exists in the jackleg MAGA world where Scott Baio and Kevin Sorbo are part of the A-list. Walker even has celebrity progeny: A son who is—I shit you not—a gay, anti-BLM, pro-Trump, TikTok sensation.

Walker currently lives in Texas, but is thought of as a Georgia candidate thanks to his heyday between the hedges. The Trump family wants revenge against Georgia’s Republican political establishment and see Walker as their prime recruit. And, God bless ‘em, the Republican consultant/media complex is getting on board, too.

Reading about Walker, you will see what the Trump family likes about him (spoiler: he’s a Trump suck up). What’s less clear is why Georgia Republicans would want to bring the Walker Texa(n)’s drama to the Peach State.

Miller describes Walker’s admission of having severe mental illness (“dissociative identity disorder” or D.I.D., which is colloquially known as “multiple personality disorder.”) which resulted in serious threats of violence to others and himself. He would play Russian Roulette in front of people.

After his book tour in 2008, Walker became a contestant on Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice reality show where he “finished” a gentleman’s 7th place—behind Joan and Melissa Rivers, but ahead of Khloe Kardashian. The judges felt like his orange chicken with a yogurt dessert was not suitable for the frozen food category. It probably says something that Walker’s self-described competitive streak did not seem to engender any bitterness towards the man who fired him in week nine of the show.

Walker then tried his hand at MMA where he was more successful, finishing 2-0 before determining that he was aging out of a young man’s game.

A few years after that Walker reconnected with Trump and began to show a real interest in politics.

Lucky us.

Walker’s political ideology is somewhat muddled, but the through line that connects it all is his willingness to partake in any conspiracy theory that bubbles up from the MAGA internet.

Some examples.

In October of 2020, many months after Obama began campaigning for Biden, Walker suggested that Obama had delayed doing so because he might be privy to unspecified information about “O’Biden’s son” and “he may have known about it, knew it wasn’t right. And, uh, who knows?”

Who does know?! Not Herschel.

He also proposed a complex theory in which the Communist Party of China funded the Black Lives Matter movement, which in turn funded the Democratic party.

“Why does it seem like I’m the only one that’s coming up with this? Just think about it,” he said.

[Chin Scratch Emoji]

Walker was, of course, early to the #StopTheSteal conspiracy, proposing in the weeks before the election that Biden had already admitted to fraud and suggesting that maybe Obama had cheated in his victories, too.

We heard @JoeBiden say they put together voter fraud and Joe stated that’s also what they did for @BarackObama. Did they cheat to get Obama elected? @FoxNews @CNN @realDonaldTrump @espn @LouDobbs @DonaldJTrumpJr @kayleighmcenany

— Herschel Walker (@HerschelWalker) October 26, 2020

After the election, Walker, like many other consumers of MAGA media, became increasingly unhinged and radicalized—I understand this might not seem possible. But in this he was egged on by his increasingly visible son, Christian.

To fully understand the extent to which Herschel has internalized the messaging from the dregs of the Parlerified pro-Trump internet, you have to understand his gay, 21-year-old son, Christian, who—prior to becoming a content creator extraordinaire—was a competitive cheerleader.

(I want to break the fourth wall and offer, as a personal aside, that it’s pretty cool for a guy like Herschel to be so supportive of his cheer-squad son. I hope other MAGA dads get some cheerspiration from him on this count. . .)

Christian went on to become a star of the online right during the 2020 campaign, garnering over 400,000 followers on TikTok and 125,000 on Twitter with his sassy, contrarian rants.

Among his first viral hits was a harangue against Joe Biden over the “you ain’t black” gaffe, which Christian marked with the hashtag #JoeBidenIsARacist.

By September he had inhabited all of the trolly bad faith attacks that were popular in pro-Trump internet circles but which you likely would have had no familiarity with if you weren’t an extremely online MAGA.

For instance, Christian crams all of the following conspiracies into one 35 second clip: “Jim Crow” Joe Biden is a “drug addict” because he is “refusing a drug test,” he was demanding breaks every 30 minutes to get his diaper changed or sniff a child backstage, and that his press secretary was talking in his ear during debates. He goes on to call Biden a dementia patient, an elderly patient (?), and an unstable man. Which is a little weird since (a) Joe Biden has never copped to playing Russian Roulette or putting a gun to his wife’s head and (b) presumably the Walkers would tell you that being mentally unstable should not be disqualifying for high office.

As the campaign wore on Christian dedicated his feed to insane anti-Biden rants, condemning Black Lives Matter, and insisting that marginalized communities should stop complaining and be more positive about their opportunities. Like he was. During this time he honed his messaging, became ensconced in the MAGA web, and saw his online follower count skyrocket. As Christian’s commitment to the bit solidified, so did his dad’s ability to communicate in TheDonaldeeze.

Like many of their compatriots, the Walkers were undeterred by Trump’s loss.

On November 21, Herschel claimed that some of our elected officials knew about the fantastical “Dominion fraud” and that, as a result, they might end up in jail. The next day Herschel sent two tweets about his faith in Sidney Powell, saying that doubters “will be shocked” when Powell “lays the SMACKDOWN.”

Later that day he announced that he was moving over to the greener pastures of Parler, @HerschelWalker34.

Oops.

In December the Walkers visited with Maria Bartiromo about the state of affairs. Herschel lamented that his son’s first time voting had been tainted by (imaginary) voter fraud and demanded that people go to jail for . . . whatever. He went on to say that punishing the “bad players” who committed the fraud was the “only way you can make this country free.” He then ranted about how Trump needs to stay in power to punish the people who “have done the bad things.”

I think this president is going to bring law and order back to this country that’s the way we can get back to the country we used to be, the United States of America that believes in law and order and you got to send people to jail that have done the bad things. And I hate to say it, I don’t care where you’re from, whether you’re in Washington or whether you’re from the smallest town in the United States of America. If you’ve done something wrong, you need to go to jail and just know you’re going to get a knock at your door and I think that’s the only way you can solve this.

In the middle of Herschel demanding that the defeated president stay in power against the will of the people and jail his political enemies, Bartiromo interjected to compliment Christian on his Instagram posts raising awareness about the upcoming January 6 election certification. Christian and Bartiromo then agree that the election was “far from over.” (Reminder: At the time of this interview the election had been over for six weeks.)

Herschel and Christian continued to bang the drum about fraud all the way up through Insurrection Day. In one of the many…many…tweets Christian sent about election fraud in January, he declared that to get a fair vote in Georgia, someone should “throw Stacey Abrams a bucket of Popeyes fried chicken to distract her.”

On January 4, Herschel praised Lin Wood and said “America needs a total cleansing only Donald Trump can do with the help of TRUE PATRIOTS…Whatever it takes to get the job done.” Two days later when those true patriots went to the Capitol to get the job done, Herschel tweeted that they were “trojan horses.” Then he went dark on the platform for a month.

Sitting in sunny California, Christian was more clear-eyed about the patriots that he and his father had helped inspire.

https://twitter.com/ChristianWalk1r/status/1346894490536189959?s=20

Expect more of this?

Alrighty then.

There’s more at the link… oy vey.

Apparently, the Georgia MAGAs are over the moon at the prospect of Walker entering the race for either Senator or Governor and they seem to believe his winning the election is a slam dunk since he’s Black, a Trumper and a former football star which they think covers all the bases. And maybe it does. I honestly feel like I don’t know anything anymore.

William Saletan takes a look at the latest IC report on foreign interference in US elections — and who helped them and benefitted them.

Donald Trump was a tool in a long-running Russian campaign to weaken the United States. That’s been documented in Republican-led investigative reports, and now it has been updated with new evidence, thanks to the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of the 2020 election. The report, drafted by the CIA, the FBI, and several other agencies, was released in unclassified form on Tuesday, but it was presented in classified form on Jan. 7. In other words, it was compiled, written, and edited during Trump’s administration. It destroys his lies about the election, and it exposes him as a Russian asset.

The report debunks conspiracy theories, promoted by Trump and his lawyers, that hackers in other countries robbed him of victory. “We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to interfere in the 2020 US elections by altering any technical aspect of the voting process,” including “ballot casting, vote tabulation, or reporting results,” says the document.

[…]

As to Russia, the report leaves no doubt: In 2020, as in 2016, “President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations” to help Trump and hurt his Democratic opponent. For example, “Shortly after the 2018 midterm elections, Russian intelligence cyber actors attempted to hack organizations primarily affiliated with the Democratic Party.” Then, in late 2019, Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, “conducted a phishing campaign against subsidiaries of Burisma holdings, likely in an attempt to gather information related to President Biden’s family.” Throughout the 2020 election, agents “connected to the Russian Federal Security Service,” FSB, planted negative stories about Biden. Internet operatives working for the Kremlin, including the troll farm that had boosted Trump in 2016, continued to promote “Trump and his commentary, including repeating his political messaging.”

Attacks on Biden and his son, Hunter, were part of this operation. Through “US officials and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration,” the report says Russia’s intelligence services “repeatedly spread unsubstantiated or misleading claims about President Biden and his family’s alleged wrongdoing related to Ukraine.” In this way, Trump’s circle “laundered” the Russian-planted stories, which were then recirculated—and promoted by Russia’s online proxies—as American news.

One section of the report zeroes in on two Russian agents, Andriy Derkach and Konstantin Kilimnik, along with their associates. It says they met with and passed materials to people linked to the Trump administration to advocate for government investigations. Derkach peddled audio recordings that were edited to make Biden look corrupt, and he “worked to initiate legal proceedings in Ukraine and the US related to these allegations.” The report doesn’t name the Americans who collaborated with the Russian agents, but it’s easy to identify them from news reports. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, met with Derkach twice. Donald Trump Jr. promoted Derkach’s tapes. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, gave Kilimnik inside information on the campaign. Trump, in a 2019 phone call, pressed Ukraine’s president to open an investigation of Biden, as Derkach proposed. And congressional Republicans, led by Reps. Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes, parroted a Russian-planted narrative “to falsely blame Ukraine for interfering in the 2016 US presidential election.”

Trump also helped Putin discredit American democracy. That was a major goal of Russia’s 2016 and 2020 operations, the report explains: “Throughout the election, Russia’s online influence actors sought to amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of voter fraud.” Trump peddled the same fears. After the election, as “Russian online influence actors continued to promote narratives questioning the election results,” Trump duplicated that message. Russia’s agents also hyped “allegations of social media censorship,” as Trump did.

The IC assessment doesn’t address what Trump knew about the Russian influence campaign. But according to former officials who spoke last fall to the Washington Post and the New York Times, he was directly warned. In a December 2019 conversation, then–national security adviser Robert O’Brien told Trump that Giuliani had been “worked by Russian assets in Ukraine.” Trump shrugged and went on promoting the allegations Giuliani was feeding him. That makes Trump more than a Russian asset. It makes him, in technical terms, an agent of a foreign power.

And Trump wasn’t the only one:

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) this week released a declassified intelligence community assessment on foreign threats to our 2020 elections, and the top-line takeaway was important: Russia once again targeted our political system for the express purposes of giving Donald Trump power.

Indeed, as we discussed yesterday, Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin relied on the same cast of characters as their 2016 effort: the U.S. intelligence community specifically focused attention on Russian influence agent Konstantin Kilimnik who was responsible for trying to “denigrate” then-candidate Joe Biden in order to “benefit” Donald Trump’s re-election prospects.

But as important as these revelations are, they’re not the only lessons to be learned from the intelligence community’s findings. This week’s ODNI report also made clear that many leading Trump administration officials deliberately misled the public about foreign threats, especially related to alleged Chinese election interference.

I was also struck by multiple references in the intelligence community’s findings to a pro-Russian official by the name of Andriy Derkach. The Washington Post reported:

The intelligence community, for instance, assessed that Putin “had purview over” the activities of Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach, who played a prominent role in advancing the misleading narrative alleging corruption between Biden and Ukraine. [Rudy Giuliani] met with Derkach, whom the United States has sanctioned as an “active” Russian agent, in Ukraine and in the United States in 2019 and 2020 as Giuliani sought to release material that he thought would damage Biden. Last year, Derkach disclosed edited audio snippets of conversations Biden had as vice president with Ukrainian officials in an attempt to cast aspersions on him.

It’s obviously not great that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer partnered with a Russian agent, directed by Putin, on an anti-Biden scheme while the Kremlin was working on helping keep the then-Republican president in power.

But Rudy Giuliani wasn’t necessarily Andriy Derkach’s only point of contact. In fact, his name may be familiar to regular readers.

It was last year, for example, when we learned that Derkach claimed he fed information to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who was searching for anti-Biden dirt ahead of last fall’s elections.

Asked last summer whether he’d possibly relied on information from pro-Kremlin Ukrainians, the Wisconsin Republican appeared reluctant to answer, saying only that he and the Senate committee he led “are getting information from a variety of sources.”

A month earlier, at a House Intelligence Committee meeting, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) pressed Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) — the panel’s top GOP member — on whether the Republican had received anti-Biden information from Derkach.

According to a transcript from the closed-door discussion, Nunes didn’t want to answer.

It was against this backdrop that Maloney spoke yesterday to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace and said, “[T]he fact is that [Russian operatives] were so comfortable using people like Devin Nunes that Andriy Derkach — a known Russian asset — sent information to Devin Nunes at the Intelligence Committee. We literally had the package receipt.”

Someone should ask them about this. It seems there’s a little loyalty problem throughout the Republican party.

But it doesn’t have to be exactly as HR1 is written.

Richard L. Hasen is one of the country’s most respected election law experts. He predicted exactly what Trump was going to do post election last May. He has some serious reservations about the “do-or-die” approach to H.R 1, the For the People Act that passed the House and for good reason — namely that it can’t pass the Senate as is.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t pass a voter protection bill. They really don’t have a choice. It has to be done:

Are Democrats in Congress and their good government allies going to blow it again on voting rights? It sure looks like they could — by portraying the 791-page For the People Act, or H.R. 1, as the only hope to save American democracy from a new wave of Republican voter suppression.

This mammoth bill has little chance of being enacted. But a more pinpointed law, including one restoring a key part of the Voting Rights Act, could make it out of the Senate to guarantee voting rights protections for all in the 2022 and 2024 elections.

In the wake of former president Donald Trump’s relentless false attacks on the integrity of the 2020 elections, Republican lawmakers throughout the country have proposed over 250 bills to make it harder for people to register and vote. Although the sponsors tout these bills as measures to deter fraud or promote voter confidence, the history of similar laws shows that they do neither. Laws requiring people to make copies of their driver’s license to prove their identities when voting absentee, for example, prevent no appreciable amount of fraud because there is not a lot of impersonation voter fraud overall. Nonetheless, some of these state laws are likely to pass, and some will probably survive court challenges, thanks to a Supreme Court that has proved to be less protective of voting rights over time. This means that many of the gains in voting rights in the fall, prompted partly by the coronavirus pandemic, may be rolled back by the next time Americans choose members of the House, the Senate and the White House.

But Congress does have broad powers in the Constitution to set election rules and combat these new efforts at voter suppression. To begin with, Article I, Section 4 gives Congress the power to “make or alter” any state voting rules applicable to presidential elections. Congress also has power to enforce constitutional amendments that promote voting rights, including the 14th (guaranteeing equal protection), 15th (barring race discrimination in voting), 19th (barring gender discrimination in voting), and 26th (barring age discrimination in voting). That gives it some power over the rules of purely state and local elections as well, as when Congress banned the use of literacy tests in the Voting Rights Act.

That means Congress likely has the power to do many, but not all, of the things H.R. 1 proposes. Some parts of it could well be found unconstitutional if it passed, such as a provision requiring states to reenfranchise all people convicted of felonies who are not currently serving time in a correctional institution. Courts could potentially find that provision interferes with states’ constitutional right to set qualifications for voters.

But potential unconstitutionality of some provisions is not the main problem with H.R. 1. Instead, the problem is that the bill contains a wish list of progressive proposals that make it unlikely to survive debate in the Senate. In addition to sensible provisions protecting voting rights, the bill also contains controversial rules on campaign financing, including the creation of a public financing program for congressional candidates, new ethics rules for the Supreme Court, and a requirement that most candidates for president and vice president publicly disclose their tax returns.

Not only is H.R. 1 unlikely to survive a filibuster led by Republican senators such as Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who has directed most of his opposition to the campaign finance aspects of H.R. 1; it is not clear it could even get 50 votes from the Senate’s Democrats and their independent allies. That makes it an unlikely vehicle for convincing Democrats to abandon the filibuster requirement for voting rights bills, as I and others have advocated. Why would Democrats such as Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), who say they want to keep the filibuster in place, vote to abolish it for a bill that might not even have majority support?

A narrower bill targeted at protecting voting rights more directly would appear to have a better chance of passage, by assuring that there are more than 50 senators — including perhaps some moderate Republicans — to support the bill. Such a narrower bill still might require blowing up the filibuster for voting rights reform, but that target seems much more achievable with a pinpointed proposal.

What would be in the new, narrower bill? There are many parts of H.R. 1 and of the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act that are worth copying or modifying, and at least some of these could attract moderate Republican support.

First, Congress could restore a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. In 2013, the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder killed the preclearance provision in Section 5 of the 1965 law that had required states with a history of discrimination in voting to get federal approval for changes in voting rules before they could make them. These states had to demonstrate that the proposed changes, such as cutbacks in days of early voting, would not make minority voters worse off. The court held in Shelby that the formula for determining which states needed to get advance clearance was outdated because it was not tied to current voting discrimination. Congress could reenact preclearance with a new coverage formula tied to current evidence of discrimination.

Second, Congress could require that states offer ample registration and voting opportunities to voters. For example, lawmakers could require that states offer online voting opportunities; 36 states already do, and when Texas was ordered to do so recently as part of litigation, half a million more people registered to vote. Congress could also require that states offer two weeks of some form of early voting — whether in-person, by mail or both — in all federal elections. It could even require that states offer no-excuse absentee balloting.

Third, Congress could require states to assure election security. Lawmakers could require states only to allow voting for federal elections on machines that produce a piece of paper that can be counted in a recount, assuring that the totals announced by voting machines can be verified by hand. Congress could also require states to have certain procedures in place to protect the integrity of voter registration databases and other pieces of critical election infrastructure. These requirements are important for both to assure that election results reflect the people’s will as well as to promote public confidence.

Finally, Congress could end partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts by requiring states to use bipartisan or nonpartisan commissions to draw the lines. Ending the scourge of partisanship in redistricting will not only assure that members of Congress are more representative of the will of the voters; it will also help to create the conditions where candidates appeal to the center and are less driven by partisanship.

A more tightly drawn measure along these lines is likely to get more support than the sprawling H.R. 1. It would reverse many of the new suppressive laws that could be enacted by Republican legislatures, but it wouldn’t reach further into other issues that could pull apart majority support in the Senate.

Some Democrats and progressives, though, are pushing H.R. 1, seeing this as the only opportunity for change in this generation. Soon Democrats might lose control of one or both houses of Congress, which would mean H.R. 1 or other voting reform no longer have a chance of passing.

In 2006, I and others testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Congress needed to change the coverage formula of the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act because without a change, the Supreme Court could strike the measure down as exceeding congressional power. But Congress and good government groups decided to roll the dice, believing the Supreme Court would never strike down a crown jewel of the civil rights movement. The gamble did not pay off, and Shelby County has made things far worse.

We are at a similar moment now. H.R. 1 is unlikely to make it out of the Senate. It should be swapped out for a measure more directly targeted at the voter suppression to come that could actually be signed by President Biden and upheld in full by the courts.

Holding out for a perfect bill, in the end, will just prevent enactment of a good one. At the moment, it seems more likely that nothing will become law before the 2022 elections than that H.R. 1 will. And then Democrats will look back at yet another missed opportunity to protect voters.

I hope he’s wrong and that the Senate sees the necessity of passing the most important items in the bill as he outlines. They will no doubt regret it if they don’t.

But the pressure is going to be immense to pass HR1 exactly as written and I worry that he’s right.

Dave Roberts says he’s already mad about how the media is going to report the voting rights debate and he’s right. I am too:

I’m already dreading how the democracy reform debate will play into the media’s worst both-sides tendencies.

Viewed through the lens of partisan politics, it just looks like both parties fighting for policies that will get them more votes. That’s the “savvy” take.

In reality, voter fraud, of the kind Republicans claim to be addressing with their wave of state-level voter-suppression bills, is a myth. In this debate, the GOP is acting purely for partisan interest, against the public interest. Meanwhile the flaws Dems mean to address with HR1, DC statehood, etc., *really are* problems. They really do distort the fairness of the system. In this debate, the Dems are acting simultaneously for partisan interest & for the public interest. That just breaks “savvy” brains.

So you can look at this through a partisan lens, in which case, “both sides.” Or you can look at this through a substantive policy lens, in which case *Dems clearly have the better of the case*. Dems are, in this debate, correct — supported by evidence & basic American values.

US political media types are gripped by the bizarre (often sub rosa, rarely articulated) belief that if they judge one of the sides superior on the merits, they are thereby “taking sides” in the partisan struggle. Oh noes, bias!

It will just be much, much easier — socially, professionally, psychologically — for political journalists to do the “both sides, partisan squabbling” thing & stay away from the merits. All the dysfunctional media incentives point that direction. So here I am, pre-pissed!

Originally tweeted by David Roberts (@drvolts) on March 8, 2021.

It’s clear that the media hasn’t learned much about how they contribute to the degradation of democracy with this “both-sides” style of reporting. It’s become critical.

Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter today:

All across the country, Republican legislatures are working to steal every future election through a bevy of new voter suppression laws. As Stacey Abrams tweeted yesterday:

This week, there is a coordinated attack on voting rights. GOP-led legislatures in GA, AZ & NH are pushing dozens of bills to make it harder for people of color & young people to vote. We voted in Nov & instead of listening, they are trying to shut us out of the process.

This is — of course — not a coincidence, but Democrats will be defending Senate seats in Georgia, Arizona, and New Hampshire. These new voter suppression laws could very well hand the Republicans the Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024. We are in the middle of a full-scale war for the future of Democracy, and Republicans currently have the upper hand.

THREAD: Today, Georgia's GOP-led Senate will vote on #SB241, which would END no-excuse vote by mail. In 2020 alone, over 1.3 MILLION Georgians chose to vote by mail – now, in response to historic turnout, Republicans are trying to restrict OUR voting access. #gapol pic.twitter.com/PUJ1si6J3p

— Fair Fight (@fairfightaction) March 8, 2021

The Republican response to losing the House, Senate, and White House over the last four years is not to reevaluate their strategy or broaden their appeal. They are doubling down on stopping Black, Brown, and young people from voting. Fox News reported that:

Heritage Action for America, a conservative nonprofit tied to the right-leaning think tank The Heritage Foundation, on Monday will announce that it plans to spend at least $10 million on efforts to tighten election security laws in eight key swing states.

This is an emergency and it requires all hands on deck. And we’re going to have to work hard to ensure that the media doesn’t turn this into a typical he said/ she said issue.

.

Many of Trump’s establishment henchmen are still trying to convince their gullible cult members that January 6th wasn’t the insurrectionist assault on the capitol to overturn the election for Dear Leader we all know it was.

And they’ve got some conspiracy theories to sell them:

GOP lawmakers are desperately trying to deflect blame away from Donald Trump and themselves.

Sure, the attack on the Capitol was bad, but did you hear about the attack on the White House last year?

The supposed siege of the president’s residence is the latest Republican deflection from the events of Jan. 6, when a pro-Donald Trump mob stirred up by Republican lies about voter fraud ransacked the U.S. Capitol.

Some Republicans, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), have admitted what actually happened.

“They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president,” McConnell said in February. “They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth ― because he was angry he’d lost an election.”

But others are compiling a growing list of distractions, excuses and alternate theories of the day’s events, hoping that as time passes, the public forgets what actually went on. Here are some of the ways Republicans are trying to deflect blame:

The Rioters Were Just A Group Of Random People, Not United By Anything

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said this week that the fact that “these extremist groups are not monolithic” ran counter to the Democratic “narrative” about what happened at the Capitol.

“I’ve heard some of these folks described as white supremacists, domestic terrorists, insurrectionist, rioters, seditionist, anarchist, the list goes on and on,” Cornyn said at a Tuesday hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Cornyn was upset that Democrats “wanted to create a narrative about white supremacists, but clearly that is part of the problem but it’s not a monolithic group,” he told HuffPost after the hearing. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) had said the rioters “might as well have” been wearing Ku Klux Klan robes.

“I don’t think there was any single reason why people were here,” Cornyn said.

Wray testified that many had militia ties and some were white supremacists, but there’s no doubt they were all Trump supporters trying to overthrow the election. Indeed, they had just marched from a “Stop the Steal” rally featuring Trump, who told them to go to the Capitol and stop lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential election.

“They were here for a variety of reasons,” Cornyn insisted.

Nancy Pelosi Is To Blame

An increasingly common theme is blaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

“I think Nancy Pelosi will have a lot of questions to answer about what she knew leading up to the riot on Jan. 6,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said on Fox News last month.

Four GOP House members also wrote Pelosi a letter, claiming that “many important questions about your responsibility for the security of the Capitol remain unanswered.” And Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said Pelosi was using the riot as an excuse to consolidate her power.

The argument is that Pelosi wanted all this to happen ― or, at the very least, she looked the other way on the potential for violence. In other words, Republicans think she didn’t take seriously a mob of pro-Trump supporters who despised her and, in at least one case, wanted her dead.

The GOP has continued to push the theory that Pelosi stood in the way of police requests for additional assistance, even though then-House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving has repeatedly shot down that suggestion.

It Was Antifa

The likes of Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) wasted no time blaming the supposedly fearsome anti-fascist group known as “antifa” for the attack, based on a false story that was almost immediately retracted.

But this outrageously untrue claim will not die. Trump’s lawyers even uttered it on the Senate floor during his impeachment trial, when they claimed “a leader of antifa” had been arrested for infiltrating the building.

It may seem ridiculous, but a significant number of Republican voters believe the Capitol attack was an antifa operation, according to several polls. A majority of Republicans said in a January survey they believed it was antifa, as did 58% of Trump voters in a February survey.

It Was Fake Trump Supporters

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) claimed during a Senate hearing last week that the crowd marching toward the Capitol at Trump’s direction was a peaceable bunch, and that the riot had been carried out by “provocateurs” and “fake Trump supporters.”

“Many of the marchers were families with small children; many were elderly, overweight, or just plain tired or frail — traits not typically attributed to the riot-prone,” Johnson said, reading from a delusional piece published in The Federalist, a far-right website. “A very few didn’t share the jovial, friendly, earnest demeanor of the great majority. Some obviously didn’t fit in.”

The FBI director testified this week that there is no evidence of antifa involvement in the attack, and no evidence that there were fake Trump supporters. Some of the pro-Trump rioters charged in the attack have even complained about antifa getting credit.

HuffPost asked Johnson on Thursday whether he himself believed the statements he read aloud during the hearing, since they’d been written by someone else.

“He witnessed it. He wrote down what he witnessed,” Johnson said. “We need to assemble a bunch of eyewitness accounts to determine what all happened from different perspectives, different vantage points.”

HuffPost reporters witnessed the attack on the Capitol from both the inside and outside and saw only Trump supporters.

“They ― they might have been Trump provocateurs, OK?” Johnson said.

The Mob Wasn’t Even That Dangerous

Five people died in the Jan. 6 riot, including one police officer. Another 140 officers were injured, suffering cracked ribs, concussions, loss of part of a finger, burns and a mild heart attack. Two officers involved in the response that day later died from suicide. The pro-Trump mob smashed officers with flagpoles, pipes, bats, metal barriers and doors in order to push past them and break into the Capitol.

Yet according to some Republicans, this crowd wasn’t dangerous at all.

“If it was armed, it would have been a bloodbath,” said Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), who said Democrats were trying to make it seem like “there’s a bunch of people running around in the woods with Army fatigues on the weekends, and they’re going to take over the country, and that’s just nonsense.”

“This didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me,” Johnson said in a radio interview last month.

“I mean ‘armed,’ when you hear ‘armed,’ don’t you think of firearms? Here’s the questions I would have liked to ask. How many firearms were confiscated? How many shots were fired? I’m only aware of one and I’ll defend that law enforcement officer for taking that shot. It was a tragedy, OK? But I think there was only one,” he added.

Authorities actually confiscated a range of weapons from that day, including an assault rifle, a crossbow, Molotov cocktails, stun guns, knives and brass knuckles. Since they weren’t searching attendees for weapons, there likely were far more.

Black Lives Matter Attacked The White House First

Many Republicans who condemned the violence at the Capitol broadened their condemnation to include violence against police officers in 2020.

But Republicans have begun to suggest a more direct false equivalence, decrying an “attack on the White House” by Black Lives Matters protesters last summer.

“Sixty-seven Secret Service officers were injured during a three-day siege on the White House, which caused then-President Trump to be brought into a secure bunker,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Tuesday.

At a separate hearing on Wednesday, Hawley also brought up “the attack on the White House where 60 Secret Service officers were injured, the president had to be evacuated into a bunker.”

Most people may remember the “siege on the White House” as a protest against police brutality near the White House. (Officers wound up tear-gassing protesters so the president could pose for photos holding a Bible in front of a church that had been damaged.)

The Secret Service said more than 60 officers were injured as protesters threw objects and scuffled with officers, 11 of whom received hospital treatment for non-life-threatening injuries.

But they weren’t trying to storm the White House.

“No individuals crossed the White House Fence and no Secret Service protectees were ever in any danger,” the Secret Service said in May.

Trump subsequently said he was only “inspecting” the bunker.

‘Everybody’ Is Responsible

In January, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack. A week later, however, he said he didn’t actually believe Trump had “provoked” the mob of his supporters.

And in an interview that aired a day later, McCarthy found a way to both blame Trump for the riot while not really blaming him at all.

“I also think everybody across this country has some responsibility,” he said.

McCarthy later tried to clarify his remarks, insisting he wasn’t necessarily saying everyone in the country was responsible for Trump’s supporters attacking the Capitol, but rather that “it is incumbent upon every person in America to help lower the temperature of our political discourse.”

Trump wasn’t the only one inciting the Insurrection:

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) on Thursday night released an absolutely massive report compiling the social media posts of every Republican who voted to object to the counting of certain states’ Electoral College votes on Jan. 6.

Then-President Donald Trump had hyped that Jan. 6 congressional objection effort as his last real hope of stealing a second term, and on the morning of Jan. 6, he urged the thousands of supporters that he’d summoned to Washington, D.C. to march on the Capitol and provide some “courage” to the members of Congress voting inside.

Many of those members spent weeks spreading what Democrats have begun calling the “big lie” — the false claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and that Joe Biden was not the rightfully elected president. Lofgren’s report, documenting over 1,900 pages of tweets, creates a detailed record of the effort to justify overturning an election. Here are some takeaways:

The Lofgren review of social media posts — it’s more like a PDF database, organized alphabetically by member — makes one thing clear: A small handful of congressmen and women made much of the social media noise from November through January.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) appears to have been the most prolific. The Trump die-hard, who recently spoke at a political conference organized by the white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes, takes up a full 176 pages of the 1,900 page report. Reps. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Billy Long (R-LA) aren’t far behind, taking up around 120 pages each. Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) tweets take up 94 pages.

The posts from these loyalists offer a real-time view of the Trumpian strategy. Brooks, for example, shifts over time from complaints about “en masse” mail-in voting, to his own dubious claims about voting machines, to assertions about votes from an “illegal alien block” and people other than “eligible American citizens.” On the morning of Jan. 6, Brooks said from the rally stage in front of the White House that patriots ought to start “taking down names and kicking ass.” But in the middle of the attack, he’d already begun shifting blame for the riot: “Rumor: ANTIFA fascists in backwards MAGA hats” he tweeted at 2:20 p.m., the start of a lie that persists today.

All but one member of GOP House leadership (Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney from Wyoming) voted to overturn the election: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Republican Policy Committee Chair Gary Palmer (R-AL)

Lofgren’s compilation included a McCarthy tweet that promoted a clip of his Fox Business interview on November 4, when Joe Biden was beginning to emerge as the winner. McCarthy declares in the clip: “We’re going to have to fight because we want to make sure every legal vote is counted.”

That soundbite — ”every legal vote needs to be counted” — and demands for “transparency” became the codewords employed by the House minority leader and Scalise in their attempts to legitimize Trump’s lies about election fraud. Their language indicates how they were careful not to lean too much into Trump’s more outlandish claims; they never explicitly accuse Democrats of stealing the presidential election (though McCarthy did accuse them of trying to steal the razor-thin race in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District). Rather, their tweets show them trying to chip away at the legitimacy of the election in more subtle ways, by raising supposedly “serious” questions “about election integrity” and baseless claims that “millions” of ballots are “ripe for voter fraud.”

(Lofgren’s compilation did not include posts from Palmer. The methodology notes that a lawmaker may not be listed if they didn’t post relevant content in the study’s set time frame.)

For weeks after Election Day, Republicans following Donald Trump’s lead amped up the rhetoric as his options for a legal victory dwindled. As the vote-counting continued and the reality of Biden’s lead became clear, the violent rhetoric only grew.

On Nov. 6, for example, Gaetz tweeted “I’ll fight on the floor of the House of Representatives to stop the Electoral College from being certified.”

Gosar quote-tweeted him and commented, “Where do I sign up?”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene frequently tweeted about the need to “fight” the election results. On Dec. 19, when Trump first announced a “wild” protest in Washington, D.C. for Jan. 6, Greene tweeted “I’m planning a little something on January 6th as well, @realDonaldTrump.” She tweeted the #FightForTrump hashtag the following day, before boosting details of the Jan. 6 protest as it came together. “I need a massive grassroots army behind me to STOP THE STEAL,” she wrote a week before the rally. The day prior to the rally, she referred to “OUR 1776 MOMENT” in an interview with Newsmax.

Even on clean-up duty after weeks of false and inflammatory claims, some Republicans used the prospect of violence as a lever: Brooks, on Jan. 7, wrote that when citizens lose faith in the system, they have “three bad options”: Emigrating, submitting, or fighting back with violence. “We don’t ever want citizens in America feeling they have been forced into the aforesaid box, with 3 bad options,” he wrote.

The conservative media’s role in amplifying Trump’s bogus claims about the election has already been well-established.

However, this study highlighted the extent to which the ex-president’s foot soldiers in the House used pro-Trump outlets like Fox and Newsmax as a bullhorn in their crusade to overturn the election and then to do damage control as they tried to shift blame away from themselves and Trump for the insurrection. When they weren’t posting clips of themselves ranting to Lou Dobbs and other sympathetic pro-Trump media cranks, they were sharing bogus articles from fringe websites like the Epoch Times or Town Hall to boost their false claims.

One example of this was when Gaetz and Greene shared a Washington Times article that falsely claimed that facial recognition technology found that members of antifa were part of the mob that stormed the Capitol. The Times was forced to issue a correction after the tech company stated that their article was “outright false” and that their software had actually caught two neo-Nazis, with no evidence of antifa being present.

The existence of the mammoth document is notable in the first place, and marks a major step from Lofgren in creating a social media record for any investigations that may be coming down the pike. On her website, the congresswoman noted that she participated, either as a staffer or as a member of Congress, in all four modern presidential impeachment hearings, in addition to congressional removal proceedings for other government officials including former federal Judge G. Thomas Porteous, Jr. and former Rep. James Traficant. Lofgren is today the chair of the Committee on House Administration.

In light of that experience, Lofgren wrote, colleagues have asked her for guidance on what can be done about other members’ of Congress “involvement in the January 6th attempt to overthrow the lawful government of the United States.” Lofgren cited some potential avenues of accountability, including expulsion from Congress for violating the 14th Amendment’s provisions related to insurrection, congressional punishment for disorderly behavior and even potential criminal investigation.

Disciplinary action, the congresswoman wrote, “is a matter not only of the Constitution and law, but also of fact.” To establish those facts, Lofgren said, she asked her staff to take a “quick look” at social media posts from members who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The 1,900-page document is an attempt to compile statements that may be part of Congress’ future responsibilities.

I’m still hopeful there will be a commission that will investigate everything that happened but I’m afraid there will be no accountability for Republican members of congress for what they did. They are backed by their voters and that is not likely to change, unfortunately. But time will pass and there needs to be a record. This is a good start.

The Party of Trump is split on whether to drop all pretense and just admit it does not believe in democracy and wants to go full-on authoritarian on the European model, as Digby notes today at Salon.

As we saw Tuesday at the Supreme Court in reference to an Arizona law that disqualifies ballots cast out of precinct, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked the Arizona GOP’s lawyer, “What’s the interest of the Arizona RNC here in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?”

“Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” Carvin replied. “Politics is a zero-sum game.”

You have to commend him for joining Paul Weyrich and other Republicans in telling the truth about GOP vote suppression.

In key voting rights case, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asks GOP lawyer Michael Carvin “what’s the interest” to Republicans in keeping voting restrictions in Arizona.

Carvin: “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero-sum game.” pic.twitter.com/In7GULkSUb

— The Recount (@therecount) March 2, 2021

Many others in the party will out of habit still solemnly insist their primary concern is for election integrity or ballot security or restoring voters’ confidence in elections, confidence the GOP has spent decades systematically undermining with groundless charges of widespread, undetected voter fraud.

I still recall when remember when their comlaint was “uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.“

"Election integrity" is the GOP's new code word for massive voter suppression

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) March 3, 2021

While a few will drop the integrity act, the rest will continue to play along. But we know how this game is played.

In this game, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If we haven’t uncovered aliens disguised as humans voting in our elections, that’s not proof it isn’t happening. What (they claim) it proves is we have failed in our duty to enact the kind of common-sense election security measures Real Americans™ demand to prevent aliens disguised as humans from voting in our elections.

And they’re just the guys to do it.

This piece by Ben Jacobs in New York magazine observing that CPAC shows the Republican Party has finally morphed into a European-style far-right party is sharp. Whatever attachment it had to libertarianism or traditional conservatism it might have once had has now been consumed by white nationalism. Even by its own racist standards, it’s different.

Each day began with the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem and countless speakers professed their love of country. Instead, it marked the further transition of the American right away from its libertarian roots to a more European model of populist politics. Government no longer was the enemy, but instead a tool to combat threats like big tech and “cancel culture.”

This political shift was most notable in what was not mentioned onstage. While the House of Representatives was passing a $1.9 trillion COVID bill that would, if enacted, be the most expensive piece of legislation in American history, there was little discussion of it or the national debt or a host of other former right wing bugaboos. When speaking onstage about the legislation, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was riled that spending in the legislation was misdirected in his view. He didn’t criticize the underlying cost but instead “waste” — like what he termed “a Silicon Valley subway,” a provision to extend a mass transit line from San Francisco through to San Jose.A nightly newsletter for the best of New YorkSIGN UP FOR ONE GREAT STORY

Instead, the focus was on the type of culture-war red meat that had been a staple of Trumpism. There were strident warnings about Marxism and Black Lives Matter, hardline stances set out on immigration and the rise of China and newfound zeal to combat and regulate social-media companies.
Politicians took turns touting their willingness to take on the left as they all tried to tap into the “but he fights” ethos that fueled Trump’s rise.

This is not to say that libertarian tendencies disappeared. The mandate that all attendees at the event wear masks provoked ire among some attendees and required prominent signs and a reminder onstage. Speaker after speaker celebrated that they were in Florida, a state with relatively lax restrictions in place due to the coronavirus. Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, heralded her state’s approach to COVID, saying proudly that she “never mandated masks” or “ordered a single business or church to close” to loud applause. More than 1 in 500 South Dakotans have died of COVID-19 in the past year and the state has the second highest rate of cases in the country. But as COVID restrictions have become a culture war battleground and mask-wearing a political signal almost as potent as a hybrid Subaru or a pair of cowboys, these attitudes seemed to be as much about “owning the libs” as libertarianism.

Another sign of the Europeanization of the American conservatism was the growing presence of the international far right at the conference — and even the looming specter of white nationalism. There were recorded video messages from Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, as well as hard-right politicians in Spain and Croatia.
During breaks in the conference, a video from “samurai futurologist” Gemki Fuji repeatedly played proclaiming Trump to be “a real American samurai” while a right-wing South Korean politician claimed his country saw left-wing voter fraud too.

Perhaps most unsettling was the appearance of Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona on Saturday. Gosar, a hard right-wing backbencher who touted false claims of voter fraud before the assault on the Capitol on January 6, appeared on a panel on immigration less than 12 hours after appearing at a parallel but separate white-nationalist event sponsored by those who found CPAC full of squishy sellouts.

At that gathering, the six-term Arizona Republican’s speech was followed by remarks from a Holocaust denier who said America needed to protect its “white demographic core” and called the attack on the Capitol “awesome.” While onstage at CPAC, Gosar’s first remarks, without prompting, were “I want to tell you, I denounce . . . white racism” before shifting to the topic at hand.

Gosar is still an outlier at CPAC, but the annual event traditionally follows where conservative activists lead it, and the “new nationalism” of politicians like Josh Hawley has clearly replaced what Florida governor Ron DeSantis derided as “the failed Republican Establishment of yesteryear.” The party of Lincoln is looking more and more like the party of Le Pen.

They still use “libertarianism” as a cover for acting like jackasses. They scream “freedom” and blather on about liberty whenever they want to avoid being responsible and decent. The adolescent mind is often attracted to libertarianism and most of these people are suffering from arrested development.

But this article is correct. If you want to see exactly where the party is going, watch Tucker Carlson. He’s obviously studied Hungary’s right wing “populist” leader Viktor Orban.

I’ve written a bit about this over the past couple of years. I wrote this one after the El Paso mass shooting in 2019:

Since the massacre last weekend some people on the right have been saying the shooter couldn’t really be considered a person of the right because he criticized corporations and had concerns about the environment. They must not have been paying attention to Tucker Carlson. Of all the Fox News personalities who harp on immigration, he is the one with the most sophisticated white nationalist ideology. His ideas fall much more in line with the new strain of right-wing “populism” of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon than David Duke (although the latter is a big fan.)

In a nutshell, they see anti-corporatism and environmentalism as necessary to save Western civilization, not because corporations are sucking the life from working people and killing the planet but because corporations and climate change are creating conditions that make brown and back people migrate to countries with predominantly white populations. And among the “ecofascist” alt-right and the neo-Nazis, environmentalism is based upon reverence for “the land of your people” which explains the Charlottesville marchers chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil.” Carlson hasn’t gone that far but these people are all walking in the same direction.

At the recent National Conservatism Conference, Carlson gave the keynote speech in which he made it clear that he believes the future of the Republican Party lies in adopting his right-wing populist agenda as a way to gain support for anti-immigration policies. He’s quite clever about it. He rails against the corporations for kowtowing to leftist advocacy:

Somewhere in the late 1990s, corporate America realized this. They learned that if they did the bidding of the left on social issues, they would get a pass on everything else. They could freeze wages. They could destroy the environment. They could strangle free speech. They can eliminate privacy. In general, they could make public life much worse.

And his agenda to have women leave the workforce and stay home to have more children is presented as an anti-corporate, big-government benefit proposed by Elizabeth Warren to allow women to throw off the yoke of corporate tyranny. In reality, it’s yet another Orbán policy designed to boost the native population so that immigrant labor is no longer necessary. We know this because Carlson has said as much:

[Y]ou are saying our low birthrates are a justification for immigration. I’m saying our low birthrates are a tragedy that say something awful about the economy and the selfish stupidity of our leaders. I’m not demonizing anybody. I’m not against the immigrants. I’m just, I’m for the Americans. Nobody cares about them. It’s like, shut up, you’re dying, we’re gonna replace you.

There have been no confirmed reports that the El Paso killer ever watched Fox News. Most young people don’t. And there is plenty of access to this extremist ideology online. But had he tuned in on any given night to Tucker Carlson’s show he could have heard all of the ideas he said in his screed were motivation for his deadly acts. Carlson has been mainstreaming that killer’s ideology for years now. 

Update: Josh Hawley is the most perfect realization of this strain in US politics.

I just thought I’d remind you that this wasn’t some ancient history, even though it feels like it, especially if you’re watching the CPACers ramble about the Big Lie without mentioning that it led to on January 6th.

Republicans have continued to embrace the myth of a stolen election at the annual rightwing conclave of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), underscoring how the party continues to sustain the baseless idea months after Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 race and the deadly assault on the Capitol.

This year’s gathering of some of the party’s most fervent supporters has a staggering seven sessions focused on voter fraud and election-related issues. Several have inflammatory titles. “Other culprits, why judges and media refuse to look at the evidence,” was the name of one panel discussion on Friday. “The left pulled the strings, covered it up, and even admits it,” was another. “Failed states (GA, PA, NV, oh my!)” is the title of another scheduled for this weekend.‘

Several speakers on Friday repeated debunked falsehoods about the election. Deroy Murdock, a Fox News contributor, repeated the lie that there were “mysterious late-night ballot dumps” that swung the election for Joe Biden and that there were vehicles with out-of-state license plates unloading ballots in the early hours of the election. Both of those claims have been debunked.

Stoking fears about fraud and advocating for stricter voting rules has become commonplace among Republicans in recent years, but in the wake of Trump’s presidency – and his loss to Biden – it has become a common rallying cry in the party. Even so, some observers said the focus on fanning the flames of the conspiracy theory at CPAC was still alarming.

“One program on lessons learned from voting in 2020 is appropriate to restore trust for half of America, but not seven!” said Eric Johnson, a former Republican lawmaker in Georgia who advised Kelly Loeffler’s US Senate campaign.

“Donald Trump convinced his base – a majority of Republicans, if polls are to be believed – that the election was stolen. Though the CPAC organizers likely know it’s false, they’re using this as a wedge issue to excite the base and sell more tickets,” said Nick Pasternak, who recently left the Republican party after working on several GOP campaigns.

He added: “CPAC’s willingness to make the election lie such a big issue this year is a concerning symbol of what many in the party think – and what they’ll do.”

Even though dozens of judges across the country, including several appointed by Donald Trump, rejected claims of fraud after the election, Murdock and other speakers at CPAC accused judges of being unwilling to examine evidence of fraud.

Hans von Spakovsky, a well-known conservative who has agitated for more restrictive voting policies for years, claimed that judges were reluctant to look at evidence because they feared they would be attacked. “When it becomes an extraordinary election contest, one with national implications and one in which they risk being attacked by one of the political parties, the news media, their reluctance gets even greater,” he said.

Pressed whether judges were afraid to look at the evidence, Von Spakovsky added: “I think in some cases that is true, in other cases they might have had valid procedural grounds, but it sure didn’t look like it to me.”

Asked how much evidence of fraud there was now, Murdock falsely said: “It may be shredded by now.”

Jesse Binnall, an attorney who represented the Trump campaign in Nevada, complained about the short deadline lawyers had to put together a case after the election and claimed judges were pressured by media reporting that noted voter fraud was not a widespread problem. “Right or wrong, they never tried to dig into the facts about voter fraud,” he said. “Our legs were cut off before we even walked into the courthouse.”

Litigants in American courts have to meet procedural thresholds to advance their case, something that prevents courts from having to hear frivolous claims. Again and again, Trump and his allies failed to convince courts that they cleared those bars.

“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption,” Matthew Braun, a federal judge in Pennsylvania, wrote in December as he tossed out an effort from Trump and his allies to block certification of the election results there. “Instead, this court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations … unsupported by the evidence.”Advertisement

The comments at CPAC underscore how Republicans continue to stoke uncertainty about the election. Even after judges and Republican and Democratic elected officials alike repeatedly examined allegations of wrongdoing and did not find fraud, they continue to insist that there is unexamined evidence.

State legislatures across the country are pushing new restrictions on voting, and there are at least 253 pending bills to restrict voting across the United States, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice.

In his remarks on Friday, Von Spakovsky expressed support for efforts to restrict voting by mail, and said HR1, the bill pending in Congress that would require automatic and same-day registration among other reforms, was “the most anti-democratic bill I’ve ever seen during my 20 years in Washington”.

Jay Williams, a Republican strategist in Georgia, said the focus on elections was a way to gin up support among the party’s faithful base, which remains largely loyal to Trump and his allies.

“I would not equate ‘the party’ with CPAC so I wouldn’t put much stock in it from that perspective,” he said. “CPAC exists to make money and so it’s no surprise to me the organizers have jumped on to this issue as a way to drive engagement of their target market.”

Nah. Voting rights restrictions are their Holy Grail. White Supremacists have been doing this Black men were granted the right to vote in the 19th century and Trump’s GOP is full of them. His Big Lie provided them with a new excuse for doing more of it and they are already suing it to try to roll back voting in 43 states. Hans von Spakovsky has devoted his life to this project. He couldn’t be more thrilled.

It’s going to be a doozy. But aren’t they all…

The schedule for this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference is yet more evidence that much of the conservative movement remains deeply committed to the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump.That lie continues to be a widespread belief among Republican voters.It continues to be endorsed or at least humored by some Republican candidates seeking the support of those voters in party primaries.It is fueling Republican state legislators’ attempts to impose hurdles to voting.

And the CPAC agenda suggests it is about to be given another big public push at one of the most prominent gatherings on the conservative calendar — which will feature not only speeches from Trump and son Donald Trump Jr. but seven separate panels or addresses under the title “protecting elections.”

These have not been set up as benign, educational discussions among experts. Rather, the sessions in Orlando appear designed to allow right-wing partisans to promote some of the same complaints Trump made in the highly dishonest January 6 rally speech that immediately preceded a mob of his supporters’ attack on the Capitol.

.One of the seven discussion subtitles is “Failed States (PA, GA, NV, oh my!)” (Those states held free and fair elections that happened to be won by Joe Biden.) Another subtitle is “Other Culprits: Why Judges & Media Refused to Look at the Evidence.” (As journalists and judges have noted, there is no good evidence of widespread voter fraud or election malfeasance in 2020.) A third subtitle is “They Told Ya So: The Signs Were Always There.” (This panel features lawyer Hans von Spakovsky, who, in fact, has previously said false things about voter fraud.) A fourth subtitle: “The Left Pulled the Strings, Covered It Up, and Even Admits It.” (We’re not yet sure exactly what this means, but there was no left-wing election conspiracy.)

The speakers on the “protecting elections” panels include Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks and Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin, both of whom, in the weeks leading up to the Capitol attack, echoed the lie that the election was stolen; Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Kelly, who has uttered baseless fraud claims and unsuccessfully tried to get Pennsylvania’s results invalidated in court; and Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who joined Trump on the January 2 phone call during which Trump asked Georgia’s top elections official to “find” him enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory in the state.

CPAC has long featured a hodgepodge of speakers, from anti-abortion activists to anti-tax activists to conservative celebrities. Since Trump took office in 2017, though, it has highlighted distinctly Trumpian themes and voices. This year’s agenda — which also includes discussions on some of Trump’s favorite campaign subjects, from “Big Tech” to “The Angry Mob and Violence in our Streets” — is a testament to the former president’s grip on the party even after he was voted out of office.It helps him, of course, that much of the party doesn’t believe he was truly voted out of office. And CPAC seems to be trying its best to cement the conspiracy myth into party orthodoxy.

It’s tempting to rail about this as yet another sign that the GOP has descended into insanity. But the truth is, CPAC’s always been batshit and Trump’s triumphant return is just part for the course. The fact is that CPAC was Trumpists before Trump was.