Air Date 9/17/2024

Full Notes Page

Download PDF

Audio-Synced Transcript

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast. It's not just the threat of the electoral college handing the presidency to the loser of the popular vote, nor the specter of a repeat of January 6th-like event hanging over the election; there's also copious lies and disinformation, including a new and improved Nazi-to-Republican talking point pipeline and fresh new intimidation and voter suppression tactic experiments underway in the laboratories of democracy. 

Sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today includes Alex Wagner Tonight, The Thom Hartmann Program, Democracy Docket, The Political Scene Podcast, Amicus, All In With Chris Hayes, Brian Taylor Cohen, and Jamelle Bouie. 

Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in four sections:

Section A: Intimidation, 

Section B: Interference, 

Section C: Lies, and 

Section D: Election [00:01:00] Integrity.

Ignore your lying eyes: Republicans attempt to overwrite living memory to rewrite history - Alex Wagner Tonight - Air Date 8-14-24

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: This campaign of rewriting recent history is built on a foundation of pernicious pillars. The first is a wholesale indifference toward reality. The second is the absence of shame. The third is the role of allies. And finally, there is the importance of repetition. It's such a clear breakdown of how this is happening. I guess I wonder, the motivation as you see it, is it purely to stay in power? Do you see something broader in their goals?

STEVE BENEN: A little of both, actually. I mean, I think clearly there is an electoral element to this. Clearly, Trump wants to regain power, and he thinks that the way to do that is to fool just enough people by rewriting recent history, hoping he can just overpower our memories into submission and convince them that he deserves a second term, despite his failures, despite his scandals, and so on.

But I also think that there is a larger concern related to democracy. I think that there are a lot of Americans right now [who] are concerned about the rising authoritarianism in the United States. That's a legitimate concern. I share that concern. But, with that in mind, we have to forget that as long as there have been [00:02:00] historical records, there have been authoritarians engaging in all kinds of tactics to rewrite history, to eliminate enemies, to cover up crimes and so on. And so it's unsettling at a minimum to see Donald Trump and his allies borrowing a page from those same playbooks. 

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Yeah. You use such important, such... first of all, I don't know whether it's a testament to Trump's tactic and their tactics and the Republican Party's tactics that I'd forgotten about how many important, like staggering examples there are of this. You talk about his, you know, cry that he was going to rebuild the wall or build the wall and have Mexico pay for it. And the fact that he contends that the wall has been built and Mexico has paid for it. You talk about Russia and Russian interference and the denial of that reality. What stands out to you as one of the more forgotten but most sort of pernicious and useful examples to focus on?

STEVE BENEN: You know, one that came up just today, as a matter of fact, I mean, it was timely and generous to help bolster my book, I think... 

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: You're welcome? 

STEVE BENEN: ...to see Donald Trump today, making the [00:03:00] case that his economy, the economy under his presidency was extraordinary. It was historic. It broke all the records. Human eyes have never seen an economy like Donald Trump's, except it's not true. Even if we exclude 2020 from the picture altogether—of course, when the economy was hit a recession that was related to COVID—even if we exclude that, for the first three years, the numbers are not nearly as good as the last three years of Obama era. And so really, the last three presidents, he ranks third when it comes to economic performance. And so the idea that somehow he was this economic genius and mastermind, if only we returned him to the White House, everything would be great in the economy: it's nonsense. 

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Well, and what's I think most disturbing about that is that as a sentiment that has, I mean, it is filtered from the, like, hardcore right-wing corners of MAGAland to the center of the American electorate, right? Even some Democrats believe that the economy shepherded under Republicans is better than under Democrats. 

STEVE BENEN: And I think that my book goes a long way in trying to set this record straight here, because [00:04:00] really when you look at the data, job growth actually went down in the first three years of Trump as compared to the last three years of Obama. And that is just lost to history because the history has been rewritten by pernicious figures who believe that people shouldn't know the truth. 

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: You make a real distinction between history, right?, which is always subject to argument and relitigation, and recent past. Can you talk a little bit about why it's more damaging to a democracy to try and rewrite recent past as opposed to this sort of broader debate that we tend to have about historical events?

STEVE BENEN: Right. I mean, clearly the Republican culture war is targeting all kinds of things from generations past, history before our lifetime. And that's an important element. And my heart goes out to the culture warriors who were involved in that fight. But going after recent history is so much more ambitious. It's telling you that you don't remember things that you saw. Your lying eyes should be just discounted and discredited altogether because you should replace those memories with the brute force rhetoric that Republicans prefer. And it's extraordinary. It takes our breath away. And it's also a classic [00:05:00] example of gaslighting. It's telling you that if you believe the truth, if you believe what actually happened, then somehow you're nuts. 

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Or you're a stooge of the liberal elite, the media, technology, whether it's AI-generated crowd sizes or whether it's Democrats rigging an election. It's 'the system is broken and it's rigged against you'.

To that end, JD Vance, right?, a clip from 2020 has surfaced wherein JD Vance is talking to a podcaster about his beliefs about women and their role. And on this podcast, he explains how his mother in law, Usha Vance's mother, left her job as a biologist to help raise their newborn son. And then the podcast host says, "That's the purpose of post-menopausal females". This is the clip. 

JD VANCE: It makes him a much better human being to have exposure to his grandparents... 

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, I don't know... 

JD VANCE: ...and the evidence on this, by the way, is like super clear. 

ERIC WEINSTEIN: That's the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female. 

JD VANCE: Yes. 

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: "Yes". Can we play? I don't know if we can... he literally says, "yes", [00:06:00] that is the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female, says the host, uh, Eric Weinstein. And then JD Vance says, "yes". This is not a good data point for JD Vance. The Vance campaign is, their response to it is, Steve, "the media is dishonestly putting words in JD 's mouth. Of course he does not agree with what the host said". 

STEVE BENEN: Well, you know, one of the lines I use in the book a lot is that Republicans want us to discard our lying eyes, discard your lying eyes. 

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Yeah. 

STEVE BENEN: Well, in this case, we're supposed to discard our lying ears, too? I mean, because the tape isn't lying here. We heard him say yes. We heard this ridiculous and offensive and insulting comment, which normal healthy people would say, No, I don't believe that. I completely reject that. And yet here we are.

Trump Admits He Lost 2020 Election?!? - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 9-5-24

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: There's this really interesting, uh, a couple of days ago, Trump did an interview with, uh, I think it was somebody on Fox News, but in any case, he did this interview where he basically admitted that he lost the 2020 election. He said, you know, 'we just lost by a little bit', or words to that [00:07:00] effect. And remember Nick Fuentes? Nick Fuentes is the, uh, Hitler-loving, racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic, Christian nationalist, fascist. He might be an incel, too. I don't know. But anyhow, he's got a podcast and he just went nuts on this yesterday. He said, Oh, I lost by a whisker. So, what was the point? What's the point of any of it? You lost in 2020. Seriously, what are we even doing anymore? Then you're a loser. You just lost. You lost to Joe Biden. He goes on to say Trump deserves to be charged by Jack Smith. He said 'that actually vindicates the DOJ charge against him because the charge is that he knew he lost, but he lied to defraud the people. So, why did we do Stop the Steal? Why January 6th? Why is anyone sitting in jail? Why did anything bad happen to anybody? Why did everyone get censored?' You know, he's really on a tear here. He says, 'why did everything bad that has happened to the people who were involved, why did that [00:08:00] need to happen if you're just going to walk it all back and say, Oh, I lost?'

And then he gets personal, Nick Fuentes. He said, 'it would have been good to know before 1,600 people got charged. It would have been good to know that before I had all my money frozen, before I was put on the no-fly list, before I got banned from everything, lost my banking and payment processing. Just feels like a big rip-off. It just goes to show what a tremendous betrayal Trump is. It's just like a callous, just a callous indifference to the sacrifices that his supporters made on his behalf'. Poor Nick.

How Pro-Trump Election Officials Could Refuse To Certify The 2024 Election - Democracy Docket - Air Date 8-15-24

SOPHIE FELDMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: What exactly is election certification? What is the purpose of this process? And can election officials simply refuse to participate in certifying election results? 

MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Of course they can't refuse to certify election results. It's literally like you had one job, right? Your one job was to take, if you're on the certification board --it's called different things, different places--but if you're on that certification board, your one job [00:09:00] are to take the results from the precincts, put them onto a document; make sure that there are no uncounted ballots like provisional ballots; that those get added into the total; that there's no--that if people have cured ballots, those get added into the total. And then you add up the numbers.

If we came up with a system today, do you know what we would call the certifiers of election? Microsoft Excel, right? This is an old process where people did this hand math, and it became part of the pageantry of our democracy. People congratulated themselves across the aisle on a job well done.

But what the Republicans are trying to do is to insert into that arithmetic process, their job is not to be players on the field. Their job is to be the scoreboard operator. Someone scores and they put it up on the scoreboard. But, they are trying to weaponize that to give Republicans an advantage.

But [00:10:00] here's, Sophie, what I'm going to tell them: it's not going to work. You've tried this before, you got sued, and you lost. And if you try it again, you're going to get sued and you're going to lose. 

SOPHIE FELDMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Mark, in one of your many pieces about this topic on Democracy Docket, you wrote the following: "From experience, we know two things about Donald Trump. He's completely transactional, and there was always another transaction. He didn't give a verbal seal of approval to the three Georgia state election board members simply to gain advantage in a single new rule." So what do you think is next year? What is Trump's larger goal with this whole election certification operation?

MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Yeah, look, I think that Donald Trump expects that he's going to win these states, by whatever means necessary. I think Donald Trump is happy to get a rule that gives some wiggle room here and there, but Donald Trump is after a result. He's not after a process. 

Donald Trump--this is where I think people underestimate him--he is not interested [00:11:00] in just rigging the rules, he is interested in rigging the outcomes. And until people accept that, they fail to understand just how far Donald Trump will go, and how much loyalty he will expect along the way. 

So, in 2020, he wanted the rules rigged before the election to make it harder to vote by mail in the middle of a pandemic. When that failed, he expected loyalty from people certifying election results in places like Wayne County, Michigan, and at the state board. And when that failed, when he was unable to tamper with that, he expected loyalty and having state legislatures disregard the will of the voters and simply try to pass their own electors. When that failed, he tried a fake elector scheme. When that failed, he tried to get the courts, including the US Supreme Court to intervene. And when that failed, Sophie, he instigated a violent insurrection in the nation's capital on January 6th. 

Donald Trump knows no bounds, and loyalty will get you [00:12:00] nowhere if you're a Republican with him. He expects absolute loyalty from Republicans and delivers none in return. 

So what is the next step for Donald Trump? He's going to want every rule rigged in his favor. When those fail, he's going to want the results rigged in his favor. When those fail, well, we know what happens next. 

SOPHIE FELDMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: On a practical level, if some county officials refuse to certify their jurisdiction's election results, what happens then? Can they just get away with it? What happens? 

MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: They get sued, and they lose. I mean, look, Democracy Docket covered this extensively in 2022. We saw Cochise County, Arizona, try not to certify their election results. And my law firm--

SOPHIE FELDMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: We have maybe 50 different news alerts on our website, just about Cochise County, Arizona. 

MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: The reason why Democracy Docket covered this so many times in Arizona with Cochise County is because this was a real threat to the outcome of the [00:13:00] elections in Arizona, right? If you don't certify Cochise County, how do you certify the Senate election in 2022? How do you certify the governor's election? The AG election? The Secretary of State election? All elections, by the way, won by Democrats, which may tell you some reason why Cochise County didn't want to certify. They got sued by my law firm and they lost. And then they got indicted by the state because they failed to do their minimum duty.

And my law firm, we had to sue a county in Pennsylvania, and we saw these efforts to refuse to certify around the country. That is what Republicans, I think, are planning for 2024. That is what the same outcome will be in 2024 that we saw in 2020 and 2022, if they try it. But, look, it's not to be taken lightly because it does have a disruptive effect on people's confidence in the outcomes, and it can delay things. And obviously, in presidential election years, the timetable for certification is much tighter, and so we all need to be prepared. 

What Does “Election Interference” Even Mean Anymore? - The Political Scene Podcast - Air Date 9-4-24

JON ALLSOP: [00:14:00] Clearly the kind of overwhelming narrative around election interference in 2016, I think was one of foreign interference, specifically on the part of Russia, right? And it was an umbrella term, I think, at least in popular discourse for all the things that Russia was doing or was alleged to have done from the hack and leak operation of Democratic campaign emails and people in Hillary Clinton's inner circle through to troll farms and fake news and the Internet Research Agency and all those terms that were lingua franca back then have become an artifact of that time, I guess.

It wasn't just limited to that, but I think that was how the idea crystallized, most commonly when people were talking about election interference. 

TYLER FOGGATT - HOST, THE POLITICAL SCENE PODCAST: And how would you say that, eight years later, that we are using the term election interference now? What are the ways in which you've seen it being invoked in reference to the upcoming presidential election?

JON ALLSOP: So I guess "we" depends on who you are, because there is a huge kind of [00:15:00] cleavage now between how it's used by Democrats and how it's used by Republicans. And again, I want to stress that kind of subjectivity has always been there. There's never been one unified meaning. And indeed, it's not a specific term of art, as it were.

TYLER FOGGATT - HOST, THE POLITICAL SCENE PODCAST: Let's split it up then. How would you say that Democrats have been using it? 

JON ALLSOP: Yeah, so I think it probably, again, mostly, not entirely, has to do this time with things that Trump himself has done, specifically, his efforts around the 2020 election to dispute the result, to refuse to accept the vote totals, the phone call to the Secretary of State in Georgia, the false slates of electors put forward by his allies, those sorts of things.

It's become shorthand, often, for the various criminal cases that he's faced more recently, both at the federal level and in Georgia, and also it should be said in Manhattan, the case in which he's already been convicted, that there's a debate about whether it's accurate to call that an election interference case or not. But, there are Democrats and liberals who firmly believe that it is about [00:16:00] election interference. This is the case where he was convicted of paying hush money to Stormy Daniels and then covering it up using fraudulent accounting devices. 

TYLER FOGGATT - HOST, THE POLITICAL SCENE PODCAST: And the argument was that it was election interference because it was keeping the American public away from information that could have influenced the election. So it was interference in the sense that they didn't have access to everything that they could have used to, basically, inform their votes. 

But then Trump is saying that the trial itself is election interference because the Democrats are trying to lock him up as opposed to letting him run against the Democrat in the race. Is that how he's invoking it? 

JON ALLSOP: That's exactly right. So Trump has been really majoring on this phrase "election interference." Again, I'm not entirely sure when it started but it's very easy to trace it at least to April of last year around the time that he was first indicted in the New York case and then obviously in the other ones after that. He calls these cases "election interference" because, as you say, they're keeping him off the campaign trail, at least to some extent, because obviously they affect his ability to participate in the election. If he were to be sentenced [00:17:00] and to go to jail before the election, that would clearly have an influence on how the election plays out, if not on obviously his ability to stand in it, as Eugene Debs can attest.

This is something that he's used as a repeated talking point about those cases. Actually what was interesting is he's returned to Twitter, or X, as it's now called, quite recently and is now posting there again like it's 2016 all over again. But between Twitter banning him in the aftermath of the insurrection at the Capitol and him returning actively to use it recently, he tweeted I believe only one time, and it was last year after his mugshot was taken in Georgia and it was to post almost like a Microsoft Word document-type image of his mugshot with, in Times New Roman or a similar font, "election interference/ never surrender" in all caps. 

So Trump says a lot of things, but this is clearly something that is an actual talking point for him, rather than just parts of the normal word salad that comes out of his mouth.

He also, it's worth noting, has not only used this phrase to refer to the criminal cases against him, [00:18:00] he recently described it as election interference when he tweeted falsely that Kamala Harris--or I think put on Truth Social, actually--that Kamala Harris had been doctoring images of crowds using artificial intelligence. Clearly, this is not something that actually happened, but Trump described that as election interference. He's accused Google of election interference fairly recently. It's becoming an all-purpose catchphrase for him at the moment, I guess. 

TYLER FOGGATT - HOST, THE POLITICAL SCENE PODCAST: It's interesting, because Trump's catchphrases up until this point have included "fake news" and "rigged," which to me seem like they're in conversation with the phrase election interference. It's almost like election interference is the more scientific or formal way of talking about something being rigged. And I guess I'm wondering if you think that--that's if you see that as a strategy, or if there is really a distinction between the election interference and then fake news and rigged.

JON ALLSOP: There's always a tension in discussing Trump between things that appear to be masterful strategy and probably would be considered as such if we were talking about anyone who presented [00:19:00] as more considered and tactical, whether it's just something that he's saying because he truly believes it looks, he likes how it sounds on online or on TV or whatever.

But yeah, I think, I think it certainly appears to be, or at least it has the aesthetic of being a strategy, or at least a talking point. And it does, play into this much broader idea associated with him which is, I am the crusader against the deep state. I am the crusader against the people trying to stand in my way. They're trying to stop me. It really plays into that broader idea. 

I think there's also--and this was something I read and heard a couple of times while reporting the piece --there's this idea of I'm rubber, you're glue. Trump loves to, or at least has a habit of, turning accusations that are made against him back on the person who is making the accusation. I think you see something similar to that going on with him co-opting fake news. And I think initially that was an idea that disinformation was being propagated to help Trump win election. I think it's now much more associated as a phrase as something that Trump says to disparage accurate reporting often on him. 

[00:20:00] And with election interference, you know again, this is a shorthand that's been attached to the charges that he faces in New York and in Georgia and on the federal level. It's not written in, I don't think, to any of these statutes, the specific words "election interference." But Alvin Bragg, the DA in Manhattan, for example, has described it explicitly in those terms. So I guess in that sense also, it's not surprising to hear Trump now appropriate that language and turn it back on the people who are going after him in the courts.

Subvert the Election, But Make It Legal - Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - Air Date 9-7-24

DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: It seems that that is the through line of the book that you can't talk about voting as a political question, right?

Because it's a democracy question. And I think, I don't think I'm overstating this, I think the whole theme of the book is that this has been a two century battle. This is not new. About this really existential question of, are we going to be committed to democracy, or are we going to be committed to rule by white majorities who make good decisions in lieu of democracy because the masses don't know what they want?

And [00:21:00] that's been a fight from the founding. And as you say, this is baked into not just the debates that were had at the Constitutional Convention, but the products of the Constitutional Convention. This is how you end up with the Electoral College. It's how you end up with the Senate.

 I really want you to link up those debates, which as you say are shot through. Throughout history, it doesn't matter where you land on John Calhoun, it doesn't matter where you land. Those debates about, "Wait, we don't actually want to be a democracy when we talk about protecting minorities. The minorities we want to protect are the ones that the framers wanted to protect, which is wealthy, white, privileged elites." And so when Mike Lee says things like that now, that's got a long pedigree. In fact, that is the fight we've been having for over 200 years. 

ARI BERMAN: Exactly. I mean, there's been a 230 year debate about who should participate in [00:22:00] American democracy.

So the debates that we're having today go all the way back to the founding of the country. And there's this fundamental contradiction, which is that the Declaration of Independence lays out this very utopian rhetoric about democracy and political participation that says that democracy is based on the consent of the governed, which I think is still the best definition for democracy that we have today.

It says that all men are created equal, leave aside that women were not included in that, but that's still a very utopian idea at the time. And then you have the realities of the constitution that was created a decade later, in which most people were excluded. from participating in democracy, and the founders had some legitimate concerns.

They were concerned about anarchy and in the States, they were concerned about creating a strong republic. But the fact is that they were concerned first and foremost with protecting their own power and understanding that they were a distinct minority in society. They were a white male property [00:23:00] holding elite, many of them who were slaveholders, and they wanted to protect their own interests first and foremost.

And that is not the story of the founding that we're taught about in school if we're taught about it at all, right? And even now we're taught about this Hamiltonian version of American democracy where there are these geniuses in wigs who are rapping, right? And the fact is, You had a lot of great thinkers, but they wanted to protect their self interest.

And then even when they wanted to do more democratic things at the convention, they were essentially outvoted by these powerful minority factions. And again, not minorities as we tend to think of them, not women or African Americans or Native Americans, but these powerful minority factions where the small states get more power in the U. S. Senate, right? So each state gets the same level of representation regardless of population in the U. S. Senate, which then lays the groundwork for minority rule. James Madison says it at the time, this is going to lead to minority rule, but if [00:24:00] they don't adopt it, it's going to lead to the dissolution of the Constitution.

Same thing with the House of Representatives. It's the only Democratic elected part of the government. The slave states do the same kind of thing. They say, if you don't give us more representation through the three fifths clause, so we're going to treat African Americans as three fifths of a people, not for actual rights, just for purposes of representation, then we might leave the Union too.

And of course, we're not going to have the President be directly elected. We're going to have it be this electoral college system that factors in representation in Congress. So if the slave states have more power in the house, the small states have more power in the Senate, that means that those factions are going to have more power, not just to choose the President, but to choose the Supreme Court, right?

And we're still living with that system today. I think that's what people don't understand that. Yes, we have extended voting rights to a lot of people. We no longer have the three fifths clause. We still have the electoral college. It's still based on representation in the Senate, which is dramatically skewed in terms of who it [00:25:00] benefits, and we still have a Supreme Court that's a product of these two dysfunctional institutions and that creates a system where Trump has never won a majority of votes. Ever, in American politics. I think that's really important to understand. And while he was President, Senate Republicans never won a majority of votes either, but they were able to create a situation where they controlled the Presidency, they controlled the Senate, and they created a super majority on the Supreme Court.

And I think that's where the structural stuff bleeds into the tactical stuff we've been talking about, because it's a lot easier for voter suppression or elections aversion and those kind of anti democratic tactics succeed when it's already built on a fundamentally anti democratic system that violates the most basic notions of one person, one vote. 

And, to me, that is the biggest mistake that Democrats made [00:26:00] after 2020 was thinking that they could uphold democracy in a broken democratic system. If we don't reform the broken democratic system, you can pass all the well intentioned policies that you want, but it's going to be swallowed up by the anti democratic elements of the system, whether it's An anti democratic way of electing the president, an anti democratic way of electing the Senate, or a fundamentally anti democratic Supreme Court that will just keep striking down these policies over and over because they have no fear that there's going to be any accountability for their actions.

DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: I do want to stay for one more minute on the Supreme Court, Ari. I think you're saying two related, but different things, and I want to unpack them. On the one hand, what you're saying is, look, this is a Supreme Court for the first time in history, all but one of the conservative justices in the supermajority have been appointed by a President who lost the popular vote and then ratified by a Senate that represents a minority of [00:27:00] the people, right?

That's never happened. So this is fundamentally, structurally, anti democratic and not in the good way, right? Not in the way that when we talk about minority protecting Supreme Court. But then there's this other thing that you're saying implicitly, which I think is just incredibly important too, which is that that Supreme Court conservative supermajority has gone on to break voting in this country and to break it at both those two tiers we've talked about, which is at the state level, right?

Whether it's blessing gerrymandering, whether it's blessing voter ID, whatever it is, right? That the court has made it harder to vote, but then also. Shelby County, right? It's also, you know, Rucho. It's case after case after case in which, let's be very clear, partisans who worked on Bush v. Gore to break voting are now breaking it at a doctrinal level.

And those two things combined are the thing that makes this so lethal. It's a structural [00:28:00] problem that is compounded by that structural entity, making it harder and harder to vote. 

ARI BERMAN: That's right. I mean, there's this chilling anti democratic feedback loop where the anti democratic parts of the system reinforce each other.

And so you have an undemocratically constructed Supreme Court. And then that Supreme Court makes the country less democratic through things like gutting the Voting Rights Act and legalizing partisan gerrymandering or refusing to strike it down. That's what's so dangerous about this moment is you have the undemocratic parts of the system reinforcing each other.

And I think to me, the really scary part of the Supreme Court is not just, of course, how it's constructed, but what they're doing and the fact that they're doing things that are anti democratic, they're doing things that are anti majoritarian, radically at odds with public opinion on things like abortion and guns, for example.

And [00:29:00] then, the third thing, which I think is relatively new, and very scary, is just how open to authoritarianism outright they are, and how much they are acting themselves like they are above the law. The way that Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are acting, for example. That is also something that's relatively new.

You never had that in the 1950s or 19- Earl Warren was never flying a "Stop the Steal" flag outside of- there was always a belief that justices were somehow removed from the political process, and I feel like they are as close to the MAGA political process or as close to political process writ large as they've ever been, and so much more sympathetic to the authoritarian elements that we believed.

I mean, I don't know about you, Dahlia, but I think myself and a lot of people were thinking, "There's no way they're going to buy Trump's immunity argument. Like, that's crazy. It's going to be an [00:30:00] eight to one or seven to two decision. You're going to six to three at worst. You're going to get some angry dissents by Thomas and Alito." 

It's like, no! this is the opposite. They are full throated on this stuff. And that's what makes me nervous about, just to bring it back earlier about the whole contesting of the election, the faith that people have in the courts, I don't have that level of faith in a six to three conservative court, and I don't have that level of faith in courts where Donald Trump has made 230 appointees to the lower courts and where Republican governors have constructed state Supreme courts in places like Georgia and Arizona. I don't have that faith in the courts right now. I don't want it to go to the courts. I want it to be settled by the mechanisms of democracy that are accountable to the people, as opposed to the mechanisms of democracy that Republicans are using to do all the anti democratic shit that they can't accomplish with the normal political process.

‘Intimidation’: MAGA Texas AG orders raids on homes of Latino Democrats - All In with Chris Hayes - Air Date 8-29-24

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: It's basically [00:31:00] right out of the mid-20th Century descriptions of authoritarian life, particularly in America, as compared to 'America, land of the free', right? Here, your political activities are protected. You could vote for everyone. You can speak freely. There's not going to be the knock at the door. It's almost iconic, right? The state comes to do something to you in retribution if you cross them. And that's really what it looks like Paxton's doing in Texas. 

SHERRILYN IFILL: Yeah, Chris, I'm glad to be with you and I'm glad you're giving attention to this story because this is incredibly ominous. When you hear that woman, 87 years old, describing what happened to her, describing how she was surrounded by police officers, it's unconscionable and it is anti-democratic.

But I have to say this, Chris. This is a play that has happened before. This is something that Republicans did in Alabama, as you know, against, voters, folks who were helping folks [00:32:00] register to vote and helping elderly voters, Albert and Evelyn Turner. That time, Jeff sessions was the US Attorney and brought charges against them.

And what was so important to me in listening to your report just now, Chris, was hearing her say that she's afraid that it will interfere with them doing their work because what happened in Perry County, Alabama, when Sessions did what he did, was that it intimidated elderly voters from voting absentee, which is what they wanted to do.

In this case, this is LULAC, the oldest Latino advocacy organization in the country working to register voters, and this is an effort to frighten them from doing that critically important work, and the only upside of this, Chris, is this is how we know Texas is in play. We know that Texas is in play because they're starting to panic.

But we've got to get serious about this. I think a number of us have reached out to the Department of Justice. It's very, very serious indeed. 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: Yeah, and [00:33:00] your point there, just to stress for a second, because I want to sort of make two points. One is sort of the idea of, you know, these authoritarian states that are over there, right? This is our nightmare. But also the deep American tradition here, and as someone who is versed in this. Thuggish intimidation, whether through the courts, through local police, or just the thuggish violent mobs is the story of voter intimidation and anti-democratic rule in the United States through the years, particularly in the wake of the Civil War and Black liberation in the aftermath of it. And that is, at this point, to me, the sort of huge unifying element of the Trump Republican Party in this moment.

SHERRILYN IFILL: Yeah, I mean, he's pulling a thread that already existed. He didn't create it. And they are returning. We should also remember, Chris, that I think it was 2018 was the first election we had where the Republican Party was removed from a consent decree that had covered [00:34:00] it for 30 years for its activities in the 1980s engaged in its ballot security program.

So, sometimes, with all respect, I mean, Trump is a nightmare, but I want to be very clear that he did not create this, that this has been part of the playbook of the Republican Party that has had to be constrained by courts, by advocacy, by litigation and by the Justice Department. Trump has just re-upped something that exists in the playbook that we had hoped was put on the shelf.

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: Yeah, and I want to highlight a story out of Virginia where again, these sort of, I think you have a kind of combination of fusing of the old and the new, right? These sort of old tactics, but the kind of, the more toothsome menace, frankly, of the sort of Trump era version. 

So, Republicans have a goal now of identifying 5,000 volunteers to serve as poll watchers for every precinct during all 45 days of voting in Virginia. National Party Chairman Michael Whatley says volunteers are thoroughly trained about the mechanics of how poll watching should happen. When asked about concerns Republicans might try to block certification, [00:35:00] he says Republicans won't have issues with certification if he says "the election is free, accurate, secure, and transparent". What do you make of that? 

SHERRILYN IFILL: Well, again, for some time, organizations like True the Vote, right-wing organizations, have been engaged in this process of attempting to kind of develop an army to challenge folks at the polls. This particular training was co-sponsored by the Trump Campaign. So, one thing that's different about it is that it's not only the Republican Party, it's also the Trump Campaign that's engaged in this training.

And again, this is about intimidation, and we're seeing this around the country, too. Remember Georgia's voter suppression law now allows for unlimited challenges. You can challenge anybody, any voter can challenge anybody who they think is not a legitimate voter. So, the purpose of this is to muck up the gears, is to intimidate people, is to... I mean, you know, the Virginia, trainer said, "If you see something, then something's wrong", and you have to do something [00:36:00] about it.

So, this is the idea that every single person is deputized to tell that something is wrong. And all you have to do is think about Rudy Giuliani accusing Shaye Moss and her mom, you know, of exchanging flash drives when they were exchanging ginger mints, you know? 

So, but this is what they want is to create some plausible way of suggesting that the election was stolen or that there was some fraud.

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: Yeah, and I'll just say, as a last point, and I imagine you agree with this, the solution to that is to refuse to be intimidated, is to organize and to go out and to not let them intimidate folks as much as is possible. 

SHERRILYN IFILL: Well, this is where the Nebraska case is a little bit different, because in the case of Nebraska, it's formerly incarcerated people who had their vote restored to them by a 2005 law that was expanded in 2024 and the state AG instructed—all of the [00:37:00] county officials decided that both of those laws were unconstitutional and instructed county officials to stop registering formerly incarcerated folks to vote. That case was heard in the Nebraska Supreme Court yesterday, and we'll see what happens. 

And Chris, just last thing, you'll remember, Nebraska is one of the few states, in fact, one of two states, that splits their electoral votes by congressional district. And that's why this is so important, because of that second congressional district near Omaha, where Biden won in 2020, Trump won in 2016, where every vote literally counts. So, if people think Nebraska is not a swing state, and that it has something to do with the national election, it does.

Republicans caught in BOMBSHELL lie - Brian Tyler Cohen - Air Date 9-9-24

 

 

BRIAN TYLER COHEN: [BRIAN TYLER COHEN] If you've had the misfortune of logging on the internet today, you might have seen something about Haitian migrants eating pets, including dogs, cats, and ducks. So, I took a look at some of the most trusted voices on the right, and we've got future Pulitzer Prize winning account EndWokeness, who posted, "Springfield is a small [00:38:00] town in Ohio. Four years ago they had 60, 000 residents. Under Harris and Biden, 20, 000 Haitian immigrants were shipped to the town. Now ducks and pets are disappearing". And they include this very trustworthy screenshot from Facebook.com, which reads, "Warning to all about our beloved pets and those around us. My neighbor informed me that her daughter's friend had lost her cat. She checked pages, kennels, asked around, etc. One day she came home from work. As soon as she stepped out of the car, looked towards the neighbor's house, where Haitians live, and saw her cat hanging from a branch like you'd do a deer for butchering and they were carving it up to eat. I've been told they are doing this to dogs, they have been doing it at Snyder Park with the ducks and geese, as I was told that last bit by rangers and police. Please keep a close eye on those animals". He then posted a photo of a random Black man. Only, small problem, the Springfield News Sun reported today that the Springfield Police announced that they've received zero reports related to pets being stolen and eaten, and reaching out to the police might just be a priority if this was actually happening.

There was, however, a [00:39:00] woman named Alexis Farrell in Canton, Ohio, 175 miles away, who reportedly ate a cat and was arrested. I watched the footage of her arrest and, first of all, I don't recommend doing that. Second, this woman is clearly abusing some horrific drugs, which was made clear by the footage and by those calling the police. And third, there is no indication that she's an immigrant. In fact, even a family member of hers called the police, on her, and that person was clearly American. I also called the Stark County jail in Ohio to confirm her nationality, but they weren't releasing any further information at this time, but there has been zero reporting that this woman is from Haiti.

So, I have no reason to believe that this is confirmation of the bogus story that's pervading the right. And when I say pervading, that may actually be an understatement, because this disinformation was already posted by Charlie Kirk, who wrote, "save our pets, secure our borders". Elon Musk, to the surprise of exactly no one, responded, "apparently people's pet cats are being eaten". Elon then went a step further, because why not perpetuate some more disinformation, as he's known to do, in response to this [00:40:00] video. 

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: [VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS] That is why, also, starting with our administration, we gave TPS, Temporary Protected Status, to Haitian migrants, 55, 000. And then more recently we extended Temporary Protected Status to over 100, 000 Haitian migrants for that very reason, that they need support, they need protection.

[BRIAN TYLER COHEN] To 

BRIAN TYLER COHEN: which Elon wrote, "vote for Kamala if you want this to happen to your neighborhood". The Republican U. S. Senate nominee for Ohio running against Sherrod Brown wrote, "Kamala Harris and Sherrod Brown are responsible for flooding Springfield, Ohio with thousands of illegal Haitians who are sucking up social services and even reportedly killing and eating pets. We need to deport illegals, not invite them to wreak havoc on our communities". Known Russian disinformation peddler Benny Johnson wrote, "Thousands of Haitian migrants terrorize Ohio, eat family, pets, dogs and cats, and ducks". Ted Cruz weighed in with a photo of kittens with the caption, "Please vote for Trump so Haitian immigrants don't eat us". Trump's deranged speechwriter and advisor [00:41:00] Stephen Miller wrote, "In this century, America can either explore space, land on Mars, and lift our citizens to the highest standard of living the world has ever known, or you can vote for Kamala and import illegals who steal and eat household pets". Trump's own running mate weighed in, writing, "Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio. Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country. Where's our border czar?" 

In other words, effectively the entire right-wing media ecosystem has shared a story that is based on some random, unsubstantiated Facebook post, all because they're just that desperate to gin up some spooky story about immigrants and Kamala Harris. The potential next vice president of the United States even perpetuated this lie because there is no scruples, there is no integrity, there is no adherence to the truth on the right. They will say or do anything if it will help them politically. They will lie to the very people gullible enough to trust them, turning their [00:42:00] closest supporters into abject fools. But hey, if it means they can scare grandma and grandpa, then I guess it's worth it, huh? 

And by the way, to that point, let's look at just how dangerous Haitian immigrants actually are. And this is according to the Cato Institute, which is on no planet some liberal outlet. But even Cato says that the incarceration rate for illegal Haitians is 918 per 100, 000, while the incarceration rate for all native born Americans is 1, 477 per 100, 000, which, to be clear, is 46.6 percent lower for Haitians than actual native born Americans. Legal Haitian immigrants also have an incarceration rate that's 26% lower than all legal immigrants, which again is lower than the incarceration rate for native born Americans by a massive degree. So, if Republicans are actually worried about crime, maybe they wanna worry about the people committing it in exponentially higher rates, unless, of course, American crime is fine by them, because it's White people doing it.

And therein lies the real issue. Republicans aren't actually worried about crime because if they [00:43:00] were, they would be worried about it when anyone does it, not just non-White people. But they only focus on migrant crime or immigrant crime because that helps them perpetuate a political narrative. They can find anecdotal instances of crime, or even non-existent anecdotal instances of crime, like Haitian immigrants eating their dogs and cats for dinner, and use that to scare their largely older White base into thinking that it's not even safe to go outside in Joe Biden-Kamala Harris's America. Of course, it's all based on a completely imaginary story, cooked up in their imaginations, but the rubes who listen to Republicans don't know that. They just think that their tabby cats are going to get eaten because Ted Cruz shared a stupid meme on Twitter.

And by the way, If you're wondering why I advocate relentlessly for a strong left-wing media ecosystem, one that doesn't just try to beat back disinformation but actually goes on the offense, it's because this is what happens when the right is able to control the narrative. And then on the left, we're left swatting back disinformation that inevitably some people are going to believe. This is what they do. Again, [00:44:00] lying isn't a bug, it is a feature. It is what they're there to do. Why they exist. They do it for money, and influence, and power. Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and others just got caught accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars to perpetuate Russian propaganda only days ago, thanks to a DOJ indictment. And they don't care. They got paid.

this is also ominous foreboding for what these people will do in office - b-boy bouibaisse - Air Date 9-13-24

 

JAMELLE BOUIE - HOST, B-BOY BOUIBAISSE: So on the one hand, I think that the "they're eating the dogs, are eating the cats, eat the cat, eat the cat" meme is very funny. I think it's hilarious. But I also find myself worried that people aren't taking seriously enough what Trump and Vance are doing here. What they're doing is called a blood libel. It is smearing a group of people with the accusation that they are killing, you know, in the case of Jews in medieval Europe, killing children, in the case of Haitian [00:45:00] immigrants in 2024 United States, killing pets and eating them, using them for some malign purpose. And the purpose and the point of a blood libel is to incite violence. There's no other point to it. There's no other reason to do it. The point of it is to incite violence, to drive people to commit violence against others out of fear, anger, and hatred. And JD Vance, who got the ball rolling with this on Monday, Donald Trump, who broadcasted it to 67 million people on Tuesday, Trump and Vance who have doubled down on it on Wednesday and Thursday, what they are doing is trying to incite violence against Haitian immigrants in Springfield and really Haitian immigrants anywhere. And really anyone who people might think is a Haitian immigrant. That's the whole thing about these libels, about these smears, is that the people who they are targeted towards, the people who they want to incite are not going to make any particular distinctions. They're going to go after [00:46:00] whoever they think fits the bill, whether that's Haitian immigrants, whether that's immigrants from Mexico or South America, whether that's someone who is brown-skinned or Black, dark-skinned or Black and who is just assumed to be an immigrant. It's a dangerous and ugly stuff. And the memes are funny and I don't want to rain on anyone's parade about the memes and having their fun. But I think it's important to say that Trump and minions are trying to start a race riot. It's what they're trying to do. And I always say I don't want to get into any media criticism, but I don't even think that the coverage of this from the national press, which has been pretty decent, is really getting at the core of what's happening: an open attempt to incite the kind of violence that destroys communities and that leads to people losing their [00:47:00] lives. That's what they're doing. It's very ugly, it's reprehensible, and I think you should recognize that.

Note from the Editor on what puts democracies at risk

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with Alex Wagner Tonight explaining that election lies are all about power. The Thom Hartmann Program looked at the moment Trump admitted to losing the 2020 election. Democracy Docket explained the plan for Trump-supporting election officials to refuse to certify votes. The Political Scene podcast discussed election interference. Amicus described how our election system was designed to be anti-democratic. All in with Chris Hayes reported on the intimidation and voter suppression tactics being used in Texas. Brian Tyler Cohen explained the latest Nazi lie to be amplified by Trump and company. And Jamelle Bouie described the depth of the danger of these kinds of lies targeted at immigrant communities. 

And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dives section. But first, a reminder [00:48:00] that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes featuring the production crew here discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often trying to make each other laugh in the process. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Members also get chapter markers in the show, but I'll note that anyone, depending on the app you use to listen, may be able to use the time codes that are in the show notes to jump around the show, similar to chapter markers. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. 

Now, before we continue on to the Deeper Dives half of the show, I thought it worthwhile to take a big step back and understand at its very core what [00:49:00] makes democracy work for humans? Like, not just for Americans, or not just under our system. What makes the idea of democracy work for humans, as well as what can make it break? 

The New Yorker magazine has an article, "Democracy needs the loser", and the writer is an expert in contested elections in deeply divided democracies all around the world. They point out that it is "a rich field with experts who have analyzed enormous amounts of data. We know the ways in which an election loss can spark violence, and we know what risk factors make unrest more likely". 

And so we'll start with the factors that keep democracy going in a healthy way. " The first rule is that. In order to accept defeat, citizens need hope. Hope, the belief that every election will not be the last, is the glue that binds citizens to the democratic process. It drives them to vote, to run for office, and to care that the [00:50:00] system survives. When people in parties believe that they can win in the future, they are more likely to accept temporary setbacks". So demonstrating the alternate route, just one example, "In Northern Ireland, many Irish Catholics eventually backed to the IRA and its violent methods when they became convinced that Protestants using gerrymandering, voter suppression, and London's military support would always win". And the article provides other examples as well, but there are other factors. So, I'm going to skip to that. " We know what political conditions make populations vulnerable to losing hope. Majoritarian systems with strong presidents, such as Nigeria's, create a winner-takes-all dynamic in which the party that wins the most votes assumes all or nearly all the power. And conversely, "In a parliamentary system, power is often shared by different parties, making cooperation essential. Majoritarian-style [00:51:00] systems are more dangerous. Losing an election may leave significant portions of the electorate without representation, reduce incentives for inter-party collaboration, and allow the winning side to impose its agenda on the losers". 

Of course, it's not just being a winner-take-all presidential system that puts a country at risk. We have had basically that system for a long time. There have to be other factors involved before things get dangerous. " Elections are particularly dangerous in democracies whose institutions are weak or under attack. If citizens believe those in power can manipulate the outcome of an election, then some will come to believe that violence and even war may be justified". Now, luckily, you know, only people with no real understanding of how our elections work could be tricked into believing that they're easily hackable and, you know, how many people like that could there possibly be? "Demagogues and would-be dictators anticipating a potential loss can groom their supporters [00:52:00] to reject the results using claims of fraud and calls for retribution". Well, shit. Um, continuing... "it's now impossible to ignore that America has all the characteristics of a country at risk. We have the exact type of political system—presidential winner-takes-all—that is most vulnerable, various democratic norms are being degraded by gerrymandering and voter suppression, and long-harmful features of our political system—the electoral college, corporate money, lifetime appointments for judges—show little sign of reform. We also have a candidate for president who is actively sowing mistrust in the upcoming election". 

Now, you know, years ago, I started saying that I believe in making radical reforms to some of the structures of our government, like many of those just listed in that paragraph. But the point was actually to de-radicalize [00:53:00] the nature of our politics. It may seem radical to call for major reform of institutions that are hundreds of years old, but if you can see in real time the damage they're causing and predict with a relatively simple logic where the current systems will take us on their current trajectory, then major reforms start to look anything but radical. Frankly, the same goes for climate change, but yeah, that for another day, 

Looking at societal level phenomenon with sufficient data is a really fascinating thing. Though we cannot look into the minds of any individual or predict their actions, it's much easier to predict how large groups of people or subsections of them will react to a given stimuli in a given set of circumstances. And it actually reminds me of epidemiology. I've been watching a show recently that is portraying the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and the [00:54:00] way that the data scientists who specialize in the field were able to predict with great accuracy how the pandemic would play out, given the data that they had, is very similar to the predictions of violence to come when a destabilized society holds an election and the right collection of detrimental factors are in place. Back to the article, "What would violence look like if Trump loses? It would likely start with protests against the election results, which could turn into riots far-right militias may join in. They would not begin by attacking Democratic voters. Instead they would first target those they perceive to be traitors within their own party, Republicans who are deemed too moderate, those who have reached across party lines, refused to support MAGA, or who have enacted laws with which these extremists disagree. This is what happened in Nigeria in 2011. Buhari's most ardent supporters didn't start by killing Christians who happened to [00:55:00] live in the north. They attacked groups seen to be collaborating with the federal government, police, party officials. 

And just one small example from our last attempted coup, it says, "Rioters chanted 'hang Mike Pence' for his role in refusing to certify the election of Trump". Now, to be fair. They also shouted 'where's Nancy?'. So, you know, equal opportunity insurrectionists. But when it comes to everyday folks who may find themselves in the line of fire, no surprises here. "Extremists would likely then target minorities living in red and purple states, attempting to marginalize supposed interlopers in their communities. When people feel insecure, they seek to cleanse their communities of those they deem a potential threat. If the White Christian males who make up the core of the MAGA base no longer have the votes to control the federal government, then they will ensure that they have the votes to control many of the red and purple states in which they [00:56:00] live". 

Now, interestingly, it goes on to point out that the most violence can actually be expected in states with a fairly equal balance of White and non-White Americans. It says, " Experts have found that some of the most volatile countries are the ones whose societies are divided into two relatively large groups, Some of the greatest racial tension in the United States has occurred in places where the White and non-White populations were relatively even. This included several former Confederate states during Reconstruction, after Black people were given the right to vote and hold office, as well as cities such as Birmingham, Memphis, Cleveland, Gary, and Newark, which experienced bursts of violence as they became minority White starting in the 1960s. It is the mixed cities, states and regions just like Kaduna in Nigeria, where the declining side feels most threatened". 

Now, that last line—"where the declining side feels most threatened"—it [00:57:00] reminds me of the article that I was sharing in the last episode on a very different topic, "The advancement of cyber warfare". In that case, the writer turns to game theory to sketch out likely scenarios. One of the biggest takeaways was that when one side feels that they have an advantage, but that their advantage is slipping away, that is when they are most likely to commit to a first strike against their perceived enemy. And the article predicts based on the theory of generally equally split populations, being the most susceptible to violence, that "In the United States today, this means that places like Georgia, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona could become hotspots of violence". 

Now, I will leave you with some hope though. It's more long-term hope than short-term, but we'll take what we can get. It says. " One reason to maintain hope is that numerous places in America have already completed the demographic shift, with White majorities becoming [00:58:00] minorities. California, for example, began to embrace its diversity as its minority population amassed enough support to wield political power. The state shed its reputation for anti-immigrant activism to become a forward-thinking model for policies on inclusion. And, in many cities that elected Black mayors for the first time, tensions declined. When it became clear that non-White leadership would not hurt Whites, White fear of a Black mayor in Los Angeles, greatly diminished after Tom Bradley's highly successful 20 year tenure". Which, of course, brings us to the place where we spend So much of our time on the left exerting so much of our effort: trying to convince terrified White people to chill the fuck out. Stop being so scared. It'll be fine.

SECTION A: INTIMIDATION

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics. Next up, Section A: [00:59:00] Intimidation. Followed by Section B: Interference, Section C: Lies, and Section D: Election Integrity.

Meet the county official debunking & dismantling Elon Musk's election lies - AYMAN - Air Date 9-9-24

 

AYMAN MOHYELDIN - HOST, AYMAN: Stephen Richer is the Maricopa County Recorder in charge of maintaining voter files for more than 2. 6 million active registered voters. And in this position, he's had to fend off attacks from some of Trump's most unhinged allies, including failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate, Carrie Lake, who baselessly accused him of sabotage that led to her loss against Governor Katie Hobbs. And Shelby Bush, chair of the state's delegation to the Republican convention, who said this.

SHELBY BUSCH: But if Stephen Richer walked in this room, I would lynch him. 

AYMAN MOHYELDIN - HOST, AYMAN: His most recent adversary, ex owner and infamous Trump suck up Elon Musk. Back in April, Musk reposted a totally false claim that more than 200, 000 illegal immigrants had registered to vote in Arizona. Richer took Musk to task, politely eviscerating him with facts on his [01:00:00] own platform, pointing out that there is zero validity to his suggestion.

Then in July, Musk continued his voter fraud obsession, posting electronic voting machines and anything mailed in is too risky. We should mandate paper ballots and in person voting only. Once again, Richard responded, this time with a more than generous offer to give Musk a tour of the Maricopa County election facility to show him the security steps that are already in place.

He even offered to take recommendations from Musk afterwards, writing, Would be pretty neat to put one of the world's best entrepreneurial brains onto election administration. Probably more productive than just social media analysis. And then finally, just this past week, more trolling from Musk who asked on X, Arizona is refusing to remove illegals from voter rolls?

Referencing a baseless lawsuit filed by Stephen Miller's MAGA law firm against all 15 Arizona counties. Once again, and by this point, he has the patience of a saint. Richard responded. [01:01:00] Hi, Elon. This is a lawsuit. You're very familiar with them. Lawsuits can allege anything. An has not been proven. He went on to explain that more than 50 lawsuits alleging voter fraud have been filed against him and his office since he took the job, and they have not lost anything.

A single one Maricopa County recorder, Steven Richard joins me now. A pretty impressive record. I have to say with all the victories that you've managed and I have to give you mad props for being, for having this stamina to respond to all of these people. But, but it really speaks to a Testament. So I think to a lot of the people who work in this country on the front lines of protecting our democracy, but I want to get you, I want to get to the lawsuit first.

I got to ask what made you want to take on Elon Musk in this way? 

STEPHEN RICHER: Well, it was just flabbergasting. that he would just take as complete truth, a lawsuit that had been filed by a very partisan, very politically motivated group [01:02:00] that has lost many lawsuits in the past without even bothering to look at our response or any of the things that we post to social media.

And so ordinarily I would say that's not problematic, but when it comes from an account that has 2 bazillion followers and some people take it as gospel. 

AYMAN MOHYELDIN - HOST, AYMAN: So tell us a little bit about the lawsuit that's been launched against you by America First Legal. Why is your county, along with these 14 other counties in Arizona, being sued?

Why are they so obsessed with you and Arizona? 

STEPHEN RICHER: Well, I think they're obsessed with Arizona because Arizona is a battleground state, and Arizona was the locus of so many of the allegations that there was a stolen election in 2020. Now, I'm sure that they would say, Well, Arizona is a border state. And so we have a particular interest in maintaining the integrity of the process.

Well, fortunately, and something that must fails to note. Arizona is one of few states in the country that has a documented proof of citizenship law [01:03:00] in order to be able to vote a full ballot. So while Arizona, according to Musk, is way behind every other state and is refusing to do these basic securities, we're actually ahead of most states.

And the numbers that were cited in Musk's post were just wildly inaccurate. So aside from that, I guess it was a productive week. 

AYMAN MOHYELDIN - HOST, AYMAN: Yeah, I mean, you bring up such a good point. I'm so glad that you kind of just dismantle it like the way that you just did, and it raises the point that, I mean, it's one thing for Republicans to be spreading these voter fraud lies, but when you're one of the richest men in the world and you have a platform, as you said, hundreds of millions of followers, Elon Musk platforming these conspiracy theories, not to mention the attacks from people like Stephen Miller, it actually is not just about the disinformation.

I mean, what kind of danger does this put you and your colleagues? Well, 

STEPHEN RICHER: I don't remember whether it was Spider Man or George W Bush who said with great power comes great responsibility. But I [01:04:00] think there's some truth to that. And when people like Mr Musk Post on Twitter or speak to various news outlets and it's just filled with innuendo or filled with lies or filled with inaccurate information.

Then it's offices like mine. and the 150 full time employees that are in my office who see the downstream effects of that. And I will tell you that while some downstream effects take the form of, hey, I'd like to know more about what Mr. Musk is posting. Some take a very ugly and very violent form. And I'm just here to say to those leaders and people like Mr.

Musk, Please be a little more judicious. Please do a little more information on the front end so that we don't have to witness this ugliness and these attacks on our institutions on the backend. 

AYMAN MOHYELDIN - HOST, AYMAN: And I want to talk to you more broadly about the attacks, because as I mentioned, uh, you're a Republican. You famously have stood up against Trump's election lies.

And for that, you have become a target in the [01:05:00] MAGA world. In 2021, he accused you of deleting files from the 2020 election. We played that clip of Shelby Bush. The Maricopa County Republican Party vice chair saying that she'd lynch you, an act of political violence, a threat. Tell us what it's been like for you as a Republican becoming a major MAGA target.

STEPHEN RICHER: It's disappointing, it's disillusioning, it's bizarre. I would say I line up with traditional conservative values on at least, you know, 18 out of 20 items. But the reality is, is that the facts, the truth, the law was never on the side of the people who want to allege mass fraud in our electoral system, was never on the side of the people who want to say that the 2020 election was stolen.

And you said at the outset, very kindly, thank you, that my office has faced more than 50 lawsuits and that we've won all those. And it's not because we're brilliant or [01:06:00] we went to, you know, I went to University of Chicago, which I like to think is the best law school, but it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the Facts and the law being on our side, and it's really just that simple.

And I have been stubborn in pointing out those facts. And for that, it has, of course, provoked much ire, and it is just saddening to see what it's become.

Confederate Voter Intimidation 2.0: The GOP's Dark Strategy for Winning - Thom Hartmann Program 8-27-24

 

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: The Republican Attorney General of Texas sent armed police officers after black voters in their 80s to intimidate, threaten, and destroy them financially by forcing them to hire lawyers to defend themselves, even though they're perfectly legal voters.

It's a manifestation of the new unofficial Republican slogan, If you can't win on the issues, cheat. And if cheating doesn't get you over the top, intimidate. As is the case with so many bad Republican ideas, you know, like outlawing labor unions, ending welfare programs, banning [01:07:00] abortion, gutting women's voting and economic rights, etc.

This one started during the failure of the reconstruction in the 1870s. White supremacists had taken over the federal government and in the states, black voters were routinely threatened with violence and imprisonment when they tried to vote. You know, we thought those days were over, but in August of 2022, three months before he would face voters for reelection, Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis reprised the neoconfederate federate strategy of using the levers of official state power to intimidate black voters.

Voters to Santa's put together a special police force to go after so called voter fraud, and they executed a number of arrest warrants against black voters who'd been told by various state officials that they could vote even though they had a felony conviction. They all believed they were eligible, and apparently most were.

There was absolutely no effort to commit voter fraud involved. Here's the side story here. With a 64 percent margin of victory, [01:08:00] Florida's voters had approved a ballot measure in the 2018 election, giving voting rights back to the roughly 20 percent of Florida black citizens. 1. 5 million potential voters who'd had a felony conviction.

The Republican controlled state legislature then, quietly, essentially overturned the ballot measure in 2020, although many black voters never got the memo. With cameras rolling, around 20 black former felon voters were arrested for illegal voting and paraded before the media in shackles. As a result, many black voters that November concluded showing up at the polls just wasn't worth the risk.

As the Palm Beach Daily News noted shortly after the 2022 election, quote, in 2018, before the new voting laws were enacted, the state had a 63 percent turnout among registered voters in the midterms. This year, turnout dropped to 54%. DeSantis brutal intimidation strategy was so effective at suppressing the black vote in Florida [01:09:00] that year that he even won Miami Dade County, which had been a Democratic stronghold since 2002, and Palm Beach County, which had not voted Republican since 1986.

But what starts in Florida rarely stays in Florida, particularly if it helps a white Republican administration stay in power in a state with a large minority population. Now, the notoriously corrupt Republican Attorney General of Texas, desperate to hang on to his party's majority in this 2024 election, has picked up on DeSantis strategy of intimidating minority voters in August to keep them away from the November polls.

After putting two million people on the suspense list, forcing those mostly urban voters into provisional ballots, which won't be counted unless they take time off work to show up at a county office to confirm their identities in the week after the election. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is now sending police officers into Hispanic neighborhoods to kick in doors.

[01:10:00] In 2021, Paxton bragged a right-wing hate purveyor and now imprisoned criminal Steve Bannon that he'd successfully prevented Harris County, home to Houston and its 2. 4 million mostly Democratic voters, from voting by mail in 2020, thus keeping Republicans in charge of the state. That's right, the Texas Attorney General bragged that Republicans only held power in Texas as a result of voter suppression.

And added that if voter suppression were to end, Republicans would never again seize power in that state. His effort forced the few willing brave souls among Houston's citizens, fully 14. 5 percent of the entire state's registered voters, to navigate crowded polling places in person during a deadly pandemic before vaccines were available.

If we'd lost Harris County by allowing people to vote, Paxton crowed, Harris County mail in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2. 5 million. And we were able to stop every one [01:11:00] of them. Had we not done that, we would have been one of those battleground states and Donald Trump would have lost the election.

 After purging millions of Texas voters, most from big cities, off the voting rolls over the past few years, putting 2 million on the suspense list, and then preventing Houstonians from voting by mail in 2020, Paxson's newest trick to keep the GOP in charge of Texas is a naked rip off of DeSantis minority voter intimidation strategy.

One of the members of LULAC Texas, the League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the oldest Latino voting and civil rights groups in the country, retired school teacher, 87 year old Lidia Martinez, had publicly spoken out against Paxton when he forbade Texans from getting mail in ballots in 2020.

He got his revenge this past week. At six in the morning, according to the New York Times, nine officers, some with guns, showed up at her home after having broken down a door to raid the home of Manuel [01:12:00] Medina, the chair of the Tejano Democrats. Martinez asked who was at the door, and as the Times noted, The officers then pushed open the door and invaded her home.

Quote, Mrs. Martinez said that the officers told her they came because she had filled out a report saying that older residents were not getting mail ballots. Yes, I did, she told them. For 35 years, Mrs. Martinez has been a member of LULAC, the civil rights group helping Latino residents stay engaged in politics.

Much of her work has included instructing older residents and veterans on how to fill out voter registration cards. Two of the agents went to her bedroom and searched everywhere. For My underwear, my nightgown, everything. They went through everything, Ms. Martinez recalled. They took her laptop, phone, planner, and some documents.

All across the state, apparently, police were raiding the homes of Hispanic voters. The LULAC, Gabriel Rosales, who was on my radio TV program yesterday, told me and the It's pure intimidation.

Elon Musk is Trying to Rig the Election - ethan is online - Air Date 9-6-24

 

ETHAN CASE - HOST, ETHANISONLINE: [01:13:00] It is a fact about the United States of America that billionaires love getting their greedy, grubby little hands all over our national elections. This just in, breaking news, Fox News Alert. The wealthiest business owners of America have historically influenced our elections and our politics in general, consistently to the fatal detriment of the working class.

Elon Musk might try really hard to seem like a regular guy, but he's still so rich it will for sure send him to hell. That's not even counting any of the things he's actually done. Just being that rich, God doesn't want you. Jesus said that, and I'm not even joking. Elon Musk, the world's favorite failure, has officially started a political super PAC exclusively to bankroll the Trump 2024 re election campaign.

ELON MUSK: What I have done is I've, I have created A pack, a super pack, whatever you want to call it. Yeah. Which, uh, You know, it's something called the America Pack. 

ETHAN CASE - HOST, ETHANISONLINE: This follows a pattern of more and more Silicon Valley billionaires [01:14:00] and big tech interests falling in line with Donald Trump and supporting him for 2024.

Doesn't seem good to me. But as far as Elon goes, we've had some, you know, funny election misinformation from his stupid AI chatbot. A disorganized, phone sex call that, for some reason, we were all allowed to listen to. 

DONALD TRUMP: Congratulations, because I see you broke every record in the book with, uh, so many millions of people, and it's an honor.

We view that as an honor. And then, uh, you do want silencing of certain voices. And 

ETHAN CASE - HOST, ETHANISONLINE: consistent suppression of information Elon finds politically inconvenient, he's doing the most he can to make sure that Trump returns to the White House. Which, for a billionaire, can have serious consequences. Why would you, as an electric car manufacturer, want to elect the candidate that might hurt your business?

Well, 5. 5 trillion dollars in tax cuts, that's it. Someone wasted a lot of money to be the admin and most addicted user of the worst website in the world. Someone did that. In fact, just [01:15:00] recently, the Washington Post released an analysis of Twitter's fidelity reports and the eight largest investors in the company and just how much they've lost.

Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. Gone. For the Everything app. So needless to say, that tax cut, Probably sounds pretty great to someone like Elon Musk who can just make money. I don't know vanish gone everything at but it also probably Appeals to any big tech CEO that's run their company at a loss for the past 10 years to undercut competition and maintain monopolies They're probably gonna like the idea of 5. 5 trillion dollars in free money. I think they'd want it regardless But they're desperate for it, and Elon is a great example. So, if you don't know, a PAC is a Political Action Committee. It's an organization that works to lobby the government for a specific interest. And there are a lot of different PACs for different purposes.

But a Super PAC is a PAC that's allowed to be openly run by corporations, and are also allowed to donate unlimited amounts of money to political candidates. Everyone else has to play by, you know, election rules. Super PACs get a pass. [01:16:00] Elon Musk's Super PAC is called America PAC, which I keep shortening in my head to AmeriPAC, which is a different PAC.

America PAC was founded shortly after the Washington Post reported insider information that Elon Musk was planning to donate around 45 million dollars a month. This would have been among the largest individual donations across the political aisle this election. And before you know it, Elon said, No, actually, I'm not doing that.

I'm doing something else. And while Musk's name is nowhere directly on the Super PAC, he has claimed to have created it, and is apparently funding it with lower level donations. Only he knows when any of that will happen. Fuckin shit means. AmericaPAC seems to be bankrolling a lot of different aspects of the Trump campaign, but it seems to be mainly focused on campaign events, advertisement, and canvassing.

The SuperPAC itself is being funded by venture capital, big tech, as well as capitalist billionaire entrepreneurs like the Winklevoss twins and Antonio Gracias. And millionaire entrepreneurs, like Joe Lonsdale. AmericaPAC is also seemingly being run by ex Ron DeSantis campaign a aides, which is a really funny [01:17:00] reminder that Elon Musk initially supported Ron DeSantis for president.

For president. I just want everyone to make that clear. Elon Musk thought Ron DeSantis would be a good president. They should've nominated him, they should've done it. It would've been so funny. So far, it seems like AmericaPAC has spent 44. 8 million in total. 11. 9 million against Harris, 8. 8 million against Biden, and 24 million for Trump.

According to OpenSecrets. The AmericaPAC website is bare bones. So, not a lot of information there, but there is an AmericaPak YouTube channel, which is not the same YouTube channel that the website links to, but the channel I found has multiple videos, including multiple versions of the same video. Who did they hire to run any of this?

So let's take a look at where this money is actually going. What do the ads look like? If the website looks like this, what else are they doing?

DONALD TRUMP: Republicans must make a plan. Register and vote. We've got to elect Republicans, and we're gonna do it. We're gonna have the greatest victory in the history of our country. Thank you very much. God bless you. 

ETHAN CASE - HOST, ETHANISONLINE: I don't know what that [01:18:00] nasty yellow tie is, but it's cursed, and he shouldn't wear it. Absentee voting is voting by mail.

I thought he didn't like any of that stuff. What the hell? That's how elections get stolen. We know this. So those are the ads that they YouTube to not seemingly a lot of success. It's just an attempt to get people, specifically in battleground states, to register to vote and vote for Donald Trump. But AmericaPAC also financed a blitz of ads on Facebook.

And these ads would take you to a different version of the AmericaPAC website that now doesn't exist anymore. That's why the website looks like that now. Because originally, you would register to vote on the website. But according to CNBC reporting and testing, depending on what zip code you entered and whether or not you were in a battleground state, the website would give you different forms.

If you weren't in a battleground state, it would direct you to your state's voter registration form. But if you were in a battleground state, they presented this form that says start here. Will direct you to the right place to register to vote in your state. Now this is sneaky [01:19:00] because this isn't a voter registration form.

It might say at the top in really big letters, voter registration, but this is actually the first step before they help you. Except they never followed up on that step and instead stole the information that people entered. And this was part of a massive ad campaign directly in the wake of the Trump shooting.

So yeah, I think that's like, super illegal. I'm not a lawyer, but I think that's super illegal. I don't think you can have a webpage that says voter registration in giant text that isn't a voter registration page and then not help people register to vote. AmericaPAC paid for 900, 000 worth of these ads, mostly in battleground states.

In March of 2024, the Federal Election Commission passed a decision allowing Super PACs and campaigns to coordinate ground operations, allowing Super PACs to openly share data with the presidential campaign. And I think that's exactly what they're doing. But yeah, they don't have those ads anymore currently, and they scrubbed the webpage, so I'm sure it's fine.

It's fine. No one will notice. Facebook ads aren't the only way AmericaPAC was trying to collect people's data. [01:20:00] They also launched on the ground canvassing operations, which is another way of manually data harvesting. But, unfortunately for the Trump campaign and for AmericaPAC, their canvassing operations haven't exactly gone according to plan.

They hired a vendor called Infield Strategies to help them with on the ground efforts and spent 15 million dollars by the time they decided to abruptly cut ties. Literally stranding campaign staff across the country, and that's hilarious. I mean, that's just funny. If you're volunteering on the ground door knocking for Donald Trump, you kind of deserve that.

You should think about what you're doing. God is mad at you. And so it seems that AmericaPAC wants to restructure their canvassing operations internally, even though they already hired somebody to help them and spent 15 million dollars on that. But I can't help to understand the multi dimensional machinations of the world's smartest business genius.

He's too smart for any of what he does or says to make sense or happen ever. I personally think. The entire purpose of America PAC is Elon Musk angling for a cabinet position in the potential Trump administration. And Trump has seemed pretty [01:21:00] open to the idea. After picking JD Vance, I guess he has to go with literally anyone he can get to get people excited about his campaign again.

Even a guy who was polling at 2. 8%. 

JD VANCE: You weren't ever on Jeffrey Epstein's jet, were you? 

ETHAN CASE - HOST, ETHANISONLINE: Uh, I was on Jeffrey Epstein's jet two times. Get him on board. Let's see what happens. It reeks of desperation. And that kind of desperation, combined with the kind of power Elon Musk already has, and the kind of power Trump is seeking, is a recipe for disaster.

SECTION B: INTERFEREANCE

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Iinterference.

NAR Watch Ep 4: They Are Already Stealing the Election - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 8-19-24

 

DR. MATTHEW TAYLOR: The Courage Tour is led by Lance Wallnau, who we talked about quite a bit in Charismatic Revival Fury, one of the major NAR Apostles.

In fact, I would argue that Wallnau is the most effective spiritual propagandist for Donald Trump. I mean, he's the one who has been driving a lot of these messages that evangelicals have picked up on and have become very [01:22:00] mainstream. And, and he's, he's partnered up with an evangelist named Mario Morillo.

If anybody's ever seen the lamentably terrible show, uh, Flashpoint, Morillo used to be a panelist on there with Wallnail. And so the, the whole thing presents itself as a revival tour. Right? So I went to the stop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. And then there's a big megachurch and they've got a giant white tent set up on the lawn of the megachurch and it's presented as a revival and come in here preaching and come and be renewed in your spirituality.

And so the, but it's, it's a whole day event. Um, and what's fascinating is that the first 45 minutes or so really lived up to the advertising. And so it starts off with. charismatic worship and people dancing with flags and Lance Wall now gets up and invites people if they've never been filled with the spirit, which is kind of Pentecostal charismatic speak for spoke speaking in tongues.

If you've never been filled with the spirit, you need to come forward and we're going to pray over you. And so they [01:23:00] have a time of like ministering to people and people are getting slain in the spirit and falling over backwards. And if you've ever been to a charismatic revival, that's what it feels like for the first 45 minutes.

And then the rest of the day, they pivot straight into electioneering, messaging about Donald Trump, conspiracy theories. And so it's very patently clear that the veneer of the whole thing is this revival, but the reality of it is a voter mobilization election. Oriented scheme. And, and I, when I say scheme, I really mean scheme there.

This is very clearly coordinated with the America first policy institute, which is a think tank that was created after the Trump administration that Trump administration officials went into and are leading is really kind of going to be part of the seabed for, People who will be employed in a second Trump administration.

So this is very, uh, in close coordination. This is the, the, [01:24:00] the, the revival tour is targeted only at the swing States. They're only doing stops in the seven swing States. And it's obviously oriented around this political messaging and mobilizing people, Trump. In fact, at one point in the day, Lance Walnoe said, if by the end of today, We don't have every person on the set and there are about 2, 000 people there under the tent and another 50, 000 people watching online live with this.

But if, if we don't have every person here signed up and ready and to volunteer to be an election watcher, a poll watcher, the people who show up to observe the counting of the votes or an election worker, the people who are doing the counting of the votes or people who are mobilizing votes, and this is very implicitly for Donald Trump.

Then we have failed in our, in our goals. So clearly this is not about saving souls. This is not about renewal and getting people filled with the spirit. This is about the election and the [01:25:00] whole day was premised on a denial of the reality of the truth of the 2020 election. In fact, at one point, as he's pivoting away from this worship time into this more political messaging time, Lance will know, says, January 6th was not an insurrection.

It was a vote. It was an election fraud intervention. This is a man who was there, a man who I have argued was one of the most influential Christian leaders mobilizing people for January 6th. And he was outright denying the truth about January 6th, denying the truth about the 2020 election. And so this whole thing is, is, is geared up as this very targeted, very savvy voter mobilization effort made that in, in like hand in glove coordination with the apparatus of the Trump campaign.

BRADLEY ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: So a couple follow up questions for you here. Uh, first of all, I saw you tweet out that quote, and that's just an. It's a chilling quote. Uh, just [01:26:00] chilling. And I, I actually made the mistake of reading it before bed one night. Uh, I couldn't sleep the couple things I want to follow up on real quick. I think people who've paid attention to the courage tour may remember that there was talks of, um, Charlie Kirk getting involved with, with our folks.

Um, would you update us on that? Did that ever happen? Um, whether it was with lands or with Dutch sheets, um, There were, there were kind of rumblings about the Courage Tour involving the TPUSA apparatus. Uh, whatever happened with that? 

DR. MATTHEW TAYLOR: Uh, TPUSA had a table there. They were, they, they had staffers there. They were recruiting people for their various programs.

There were a number of, um, Christian political organizations that, um, were there, um, very much signing people up. Help with different campaign endeavors and, and trying to get people mobilized. So yeah, TPUSA was there, the funding of this tour is, is [01:27:00] opaque. And, and I would be very interested if anyone could dig up exactly how, um, they are getting funding because, um, at one point they do, uh, an offering collection.

And that's it. They didn't charge anyone. I signed up for the thing. They didn't charge me anything. You just, you just show up. So I'm guessing they're getting some pretty heavy outside funding, whether that's coming through TPUSA. There's this whole, we can't even get into it, but there's this whole fundraising scheme, major donor scheme that is targeted towards charismatic donors.

That's coordinated through the council for national policy called Ziklag that Lance Walno has been very involved in. That is, Ziklag is all about focusing on the 2024 election and even quote election fraud, which is how. Um, things are often framed on the far right, uh, in terms of election denial. Um, and so I, I'm guessing there's, could be some Ziklag money flown in here, but it's very clear that there's these, this is a sponsored event.

This is not [01:28:00] just kind of happening out of the organic resources of the, the church that's hosting it, or the people who are attending. There, there are people bankrolling this whole thing. 

BRADLEY ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Ziklag, there's concerns about Ziklag that Ziklag is breaking campaign laws, uh, and, and that if you, yeah, anyway, we don't, as you said, we, we probably don't have time to go into Zik, friends, just stop for a minute.

Ziklag's a real thing. We're not making it up. So if you think there's a 

DR. MATTHEW TAYLOR: ProPublica article about it that just came out, I think last month or the month before, go, go and read it, excellent journalism and deep dive into it. 

BRADLEY ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Yeah, this is not like the New Zima or, uh, some weird alcoholic beverage, uh, this is not like the children or the teenagers are calling vaping.

No. Ziklag is like a real thing and, uh, for some reason it's called Ziklag. Um, anyway. I can tell you why if you want. Please, please, please do. I'll be honest, I cannot remember why. So go ahead. 

DR. MATTHEW TAYLOR: So this is, it's actually a fascinating backstory. It's not [01:29:00] mentioned in the article about it. But the, the back, Ziklag is a city in ancient Israel.

That's right. Yeah, it's kind of a city, as I recall, kind of on the border between Philistia and Israel. And so the Philistines, it kind of goes back and forth between the Philistines and the Israelites in biblical narrative. And at one point, many of the David and his men, their wives and families are kidnapped and taken.

From Ziklag. And so they come, David and his men come and fight a battle to bring back, to steal back their families. And so, the way, the reason it's called Ziklag is there's a claim, they are stealing our families away from us. They, right, the left, the liberals are stealing. Our civilization and our families away from us.

And we need to go back and fight a battle to bring it back. So it is a, it is a militant vision of, um, using major donor funding channeled directly into election denialism and mobilization around 

BRADLEY ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: [01:30:00] Donald Trump.

Missouri Supreme Court SURPRISES US ALL, Keeps Abortion Rights on the Ballot in November! - Brittany Page - Air Date 9-10-24

 

BRITTANY PAGE - HOST, BRITTANY PAGE: You remember all that, we're sending the issue of abortion back to the states stuff? Well, we have more evidence that's a lie, and it's not what Republicans want. They want abortion banned, period. And somehow this story also involves Rush Limbaugh's cousin, who's a judge. So buckle in. As we know, after Roe was overturned, states across the country moved to either restrict or protect Access to abortion, activists across the country jumped into action to get abortion on the ballot so that voters could have a say in whether they wanted to protect the right to abortion in their state.

And reading briefly from KFF on the results of these efforts, quote, since the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, overturning Roe v. Wade, voters in six states have weighed in on constitutional amendments regarding abortion and the side favoring access to abortion prevailed in every state. In four of these states, California, Michigan, [01:31:00] Ohio, and Vermont, measures amending the state constitution to protect the right to abortion were approved by voters.

And in the other two states, Kentucky and Kansas, measures seeking to curtail the right to abortion failed. In 2024, up to 10 states may have abortion measures on their ballot, seeking to either affirm that the state constitution protects the right to abortion, or that nothing in the constitution confers such a right.

And one of those up to 10 states with abortion on the ballot this year? Missouri. And it's a state with an extreme ban on abortions. Abortions are banned in almost all circumstances. In an organization there, Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, they worked to get 380, 000 signatures on a petition to get Amendment 3 on the ballot in November.

Amendment 3 would give Missourians a voice, a say, in whether the current abortion ban is what they want. Reading from the Missouri Independent, Amendment 3 would [01:32:00] establish the constitutional right to an abortion, up until fetal viability, and grant constitutional protections to other reproductive health care, including birth control.

It would also protect those who assist in abortion from prosecution. And this quote, if amendment three is ultimately on the November 5th ballot and wins by a simple majority. Missouri could be the first state to overturn an abortion ban. So this is big, and Republicans are scared. And it's strange because, again, Republicans, they love to send the issue back to the states, right?

They love freedom and self governance, right? Like JD always says, JD Vance, California will have a different law from Ohio, right? No. Their election interference on this issue has been a long time in the making, but it was sent into overdrive on Friday when, here it is, Rush Limbaugh's cousin, Missouri Judge Christopher Limbaugh, quote, ruled [01:33:00] against an abortion rights ballot measure in the state.

agreeing with a lawsuit that alleged the petition violated state law by failing to provide voters with a list of Missouri laws that would be repealed directly or by implication should it pass. So the claim here being basically that Rush Limbaugh's cousin doesn't feel voters were properly informed during the signature gathering process for the petition that amendment three would overturn the total abortion ban in the States.

And what the further implications for that would be. But the thing is, there are no further implications. This is about, this is about abortion. And Republicans do not want people voting on abortion because they know what they're going to get. So they went even further with Republican Secretary of State in Missouri, Jay Ashcroft, releasing this letter, decertifying Amendment 3 from appearing on the ballot.

He wrote, quote, please be advised that the Secretary of [01:34:00] State's office has rejected the above-referenced petition I, administratively certified Amendment three for inclusion on the ballot. On the backdrop of serious concerns about whether the proposed petition satisfies the legal requirements for adequate notice to the public.

On further review, in light of the circuit court's judgment, Rush Limbaugh's cousin, I have determined the petition is deficient. Therefore, this office has decertified the petition for the November 5th, 2024 ballot. Just one month ago, he certified it to appear on the ballot. Now, he's decertifying it. Just one day before Missouri's deadline to print the ballots, to finalize the ballots.

It's no longer listed on the Secretary of State's website as appearing on the November ballot. But ultimately the issue is with Missouri's Supreme Court, who again is meeting the morning of Tuesday, September 10th. This morning to make a decision just hours [01:35:00] before the deadline to finalize ballots for November, which is also today, Tuesday, September 10th.

Do you see this desperation? Do you see these games? Do you see this interference in democracy? Republicans want to sidestep democracy. They do not want you to have a say. If they did, they would be expanding voting rights, making it easier to vote, and ensure that the work of voters who collect almost 400, 000 signatures is protected and that voters have a say.

But they're afraid. Because they know the numbers are not on their side. They know the vast majority of voters in Missouri do not want the current abortion ban, which doesn't even offer exceptions for rape or incest, where nearly all abortions are banned.

Texas Attorney General Paxton Sues To Block Voter Registration Efforts - Democracy Docket - Air Date 9-11-24

 

SOPHIE FELDMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Taxes ensued two of Texas's most populous counties. Bexar [01:36:00] County and Travis County, which are home to San Antonio and Austin, respectively, for their voter registration efforts.

The Republican official first sued Bexar County last week after the County Commissioner's Court voted 3 1 to hire a third party vendor, Civic Government Solutions, or CGS, for 392, 700 to print and send out 210, 000 voter registration applications to residents who are eligible but not yet registered.

According to the complaint in Travis County, the contract tasks CGS with identifying any current Travis County resident that is 18 years of age, a U. S. citizen, and not already registered to vote. Paxton's lawsuit alleges that Bexar County is violating state law by sending voter registration forms to residents unsolicited.

In a press release, the state claims that sending these forms could allow felons and noncitizens to register and ended with it is more important than ever that we maintain the integrity of our voter rolls and ensure only eligible voters decide our elections during a [01:37:00] public meeting at the Bexar County Commissioner's Court.

Several members of the county also echoed these claims, saying that this third party vendor is a partisan organization based on comments that CGS's CEO made on a podcast. The plan to send these registration forms will cause immense amounts of voter fraud and will illegally add non citizens to the rolls and disapproved of using taxpayer money for this purpose.

COUNCIL SPEAKER 1: A highly partisan group and they have no safeguards built in their um, purchase order to prevent non citizens. In the illegal aliens, which we know have come across the border in millions from receiving voter applications. 

COUNCIL SPEAKER 2: That we uphold, not just the election integrity, but protect the taxpayer funds that were not meant for partisan issues would be a very different story if all of a sudden we had one side of the political spectrum being considered to go out there and harvest, um, election, um, uh, Transcription by CastingWords [01:38:00] 

SOPHIE FELDMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Let's first make one thing clear.

Just because someone was sent a voter registration application does not mean they will be allowed to register and vote. At the meeting, Bexar County Election Administrator Jacqueline Callanan testified that every voter registration application goes through numerous steps at both the local level and state level.

And the state level scrutinizing every aspect of the application to ensure the integrity of the application and the eligibility of the voter. 

JAQUELYNN CALLANEN: I want you to understand when we receive a voter registration card, our office processes that card, and we're required to send it up to the secretary of state and they are the ones that check the data.

They check for SSN, they check for TDL, they check birth dates, and they check citizenship. If they pass all of those, they send it back to us with a voter unique identifier, that voter registration number. We [01:39:00] cannot assign a voter registration number until it has gone through all of those checks and balances.

SOPHIE FELDMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Caledon expressed concern over the proposal, not because it would facilitate fraud in any way, but that the process of verifying and approving voter registration applications has so many steps that she fears it will be burdensome on election officials to carry out so many requests in a short period of time since Texas's registration deadline this year is October 7th.

JAQUELYNN CALLANEN: Or my ask for you is if you go forward with this, I would like you to also authorize staff money to pay the staff money for postage as we have to reach out to these people again and again. 

SOPHIE FELDMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Nevertheless, Paxton's lawsuit asked the court for an emergency ruling to block Bexar County from Giving a partisan organization in violation of state and local procurement procedures, hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to mail unsolicited voter registration applications to an untold number of Bexar County residents, regardless of whether those residents have requested such [01:40:00] an application or are even eligible to vote.

Defendants actions will create confusion, facilitate fraud, undermine confidence and elections and are illegal acts because they exceeded statutory authority. Days after filing the lawsuit in Bexar County, Paxton's office sued Travis County to block a similar registration effort. Travis County's plan, which was passed last month, involves hiring the same group, CGS, to identify eligible voters who aren't registered yet.

Similar to the Bexar County lawsuit, alleges that this plan will create confusion, facilitate fraud, undermine confidence and elections, and that the county doesn't have the legal authority to use taxpayer money for this purpose. In a statement to Democracy Docket, a spokesperson for Travis County said, It's disappointing that any statewide elected official would prefer to so distrust and discourage participation in the electoral process.

Travis County is committed to encouraging voter participation, and we are proud of our outreach efforts that achieve higher voter registration numbers. Paxton has also sent a letter to Harris County, home to [01:41:00] Houston, threatening legal action if officials approve a similar voter registration effort. Just weeks before Paxton filed these lawsuits targeting voter registration, his office raided the homes of several Latino civil rights activists on the false premise of investigating 

voter fraud.

MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: In the pantheon of despicable people, I mean, Texas has got a lot in the running. I mean, you've got Ted Cruz, who, you know, might be the most despised member of the United States Senate. You've got, you've got Greg Abbott, who could be the worst governor in the state, but I have to say, pound for pound, the worst statewide elected official in the state of Texas is definitely Ken Paxton, the Attorney General, who is no friend of democracy and Who is office launched these raids against civil civil rights workers and volunteers and activists who are doing nothing wrong.

They are simply trying to register people to vote. I mean, 1 of them, according to news reports was an 87 year old woman. Who who has been registering people to vote and [01:42:00] that is who they are targeting in the state of Texas. That is how Ken Paxton is running his office in the state of Texas. It is an 

SOPHIE FELDMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: absolute disgrace around the same time that these raids were taking place.

Texas is Republican Governor Greg Abbott announced that the state has removed over 1 million people from the voter rolls after Republican lawmakers passed a massive voter suppression law years ago. As we discussed in a previous video, this was likely mostly just routine list maintenance, but instead of focusing on the huge number of new voters that Texas has registered in the past few years, Abbott decided to issue a press release boasting the number of voters that his administration had 

removed.

MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: And this is the tragedy of our democracy today, because here you have a Republican governor. Of one of the fastest growing states in the country, one of the most diverse electorates in the, in the country who is celebrating. The fact that they have removed a million people and not celebrating how many people they have added to the rolls.

[01:43:00] And you have to ask yourself, why is that? Why wouldn't Greg Abbott want to celebrate the, the, the good news, which is the growing, the growth of Texas, the growing expanded electorate in Texas. And the answer is because the voters who are registering in Texas are not his voters. voters. They are younger than, than the average voter in Texas.

They are more likely to be Hispanic and Latino than the average voter in Texas. They are likely as a whole to be, uh, uh, uh, diverse voters or minority voters rather than white voters. This is the tragedy of the Republican party of Texas is, and we've seen this in redistricting where, you know, For the last two cycles, you have seen the addition of congressional districts in Texas and almost entirely based on the growth of the Latino population.

Yet, you have Republicans who continue to gerrymander and gerrymander and gerrymander. It should be a national scandal on the front page of every [01:44:00] news outlet right now. What is happening in the state of Texas between Greg Abbott's announcement and taking pride in, as you say, what is likely a lot of routine maintenance, but he wants to seem like he is purging voters.

And then you have Ken Paxton actually engaged in activity that should shock any decent person's conscious that 70 days or so before an election, this is how the AG is conducting itself. This is how they are spending taxpayer money in Texas.

RNC Targets Swing States in New Lawsuits - Democracy Docket - Air Date 9-9-24

 

PAIGE MOSKOWITZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: In the past few weeks, the RNC has filed three new lawsuits, two in North Carolina, one in Michigan. Before we get into the details of these lawsuits, why are Republicans targeting those states?

MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Because they're swing states, right? We know why they're challenging these states. Why are they filing so many lawsuits in in Arizona? Why are they? Why are they changing the rules of the game for certification in Georgia? Why are they out of their mind nervous that the [01:45:00] Pennsylvania Supreme Court may uphold a recent decision to count undated and misdated ballots?

Why do they keep attacking? Voting in Wisconsin because these are all swing states, right? Nevada Why do we see the republicans file lawsuits in nevada? Because because all of these states are the states in which the presidential election are going to be decided so when you look at um, michigan, and when you look at north carolina, you are See 2 states that are critical to the path for victory in Michigan in Michigan.

It is, you know, 1 of the blue wall states along with Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that if Kamala Harris wins those 3 states, she's the next president United States. Uh, you can take that to the bank and in North Carolina. Where all of a sudden Donald Trump is playing defense. And let me tell you this, if Kamala Harris wins North Carolina, it is game [01:46:00] set match.

We're talking about a landslide, uh, electoral college victory. And Donald Trump is trying to stave that off in a state that is quickly closing against him. 

PAIGE MOSKOWITZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: And it's not just the presidential election in North Carolina. There is a tightly contested governor's race this fall. Michigan has a major Senate race.

So it's not just the White House on the line here. It is also Congress. It is also the governor's mansion, Mark. But let's start talking about these North Carolina cases. They have filed two of, Republicans have filed two of them. Both of them having to do with voter registration and the voter rolls. 

MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Yeah, so both were filed in Wake County, which is the county for the suit of government.

It's where Raleigh, uh, is. Um, and the first one of these claims that there are non citizens on the voter rolls, uh, that, uh, that need to be removed. They are claiming that, uh, that, uh, the North Carolina State Board of Election has not enforced a rule that has to do with, uh, [01:47:00] People being called for jury duty duty, and when they are excused for being a not not a citizen, they need to be removed from the roles.

The State Board of Elections says the RNC doesn't know what the hell they're talking about and has this wrong. My money is that the State Board of Elections is right because the RNC usually doesn't know what it's talking about and is wrong. And also the RNC likes to demagogue on this issue that involves virtually no voters.

The 2nd lawsuit actually involves potentially a lot of voters, right? It is challenging essentially 225, 000 voter registrations. And what it is claiming is that prior to December of last year. Um, that North Carolina used an application form that did not inform voters that that a driver's license or Social Security number was required.

They claim that, um, that the state processed 225, 000 voter registration applications without collecting [01:48:00] this information and. As you might imagine, their remedy is essentially to purge 225, 000 otherwise lawful voters because of what they say was a screw up in the form by the state. Right? So they're not claiming this stuff.

Voters did anything wrong here. They're claiming the state did something wrong here again. This is going to be hotly contested on the facts, but it says a whole lot about the Republican National Committee that in the first case, they want to demagogue an issue that involves almost no, no voters. And in the second where they don't really have anything to claim negatively about the voters, they just want to kick people off the rolls.

Kudos for the DNC for intervening in that second lawsuit. Uh, my law firm has, uh, represent some plaintiffs who are intervening in the first lawsuit. Uh, uh, and we will see where those two cases go. 

PAIGE MOSKOWITZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Mark, and what's also interesting about these cases is that Republicans have chosen to file their lawsuits in state court as opposed to federal court.

What's your take on that? 

MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Yeah. So they filed these cases in state court, [01:49:00] um, because the state, uh, courts have flipped at the state Supreme court level have flipped from a majority, um, uh, Democrat to a majority Republican. And, and, and I use those terms, those party identifiers on purpose because, um, North Carolina Republicans in the state legislature mandated a few years ago that, uh, state Supreme Court justices run for election on in partisan elections.

Previously, they had been nonpartisan elections. And in, you know, one of these head scratching moments, other than for sure, yeah. politics, the Republicans forced the justices to run with partisan identifiers. So it is now a 5 2 Republican court, and it has proved itself to be pretty hostile to voting rights in the rulings it's had so far.

So, you know, they have filed these cases in Wake County, which actually has a very reasonable set of trial judges. So I don't expect they're going to get very far at the trial court level in these [01:50:00] cases. But I think they filed them in state court because they, they're going to try to quickly get these cases, uh, run up the flagpole to the state Supreme court, where they think that given the partisan advantage they have, um, on, on the bench, they may be able to get some, some, um, purchase, uh, in these cases there.

PAIGE MOSKOWITZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: The RNC in their own lawsuits has been saying that these problems have existed for a while now in North Carolina. Why are they suing now? Why file the lawsuit in August 2024, two months before a major general election, when by their own standards, these problems have allegedly existed for months, if not years?

MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Yeah. So, uh, you know, Judge Moskowitz I hope you asked that question of them, right? Because, because, I mean, you know, all we ever hear about from Republicans and by, from a conservative U. S. Supreme Court is the so called Purcell principle, or the idea that like, you don't, you can't wait until, you know, right before an election to bring election litigation because it can [01:51:00] affect, you know, how, how, How voters, what their expectations are.

It can make it harder for the administration of elections.

SECTION C: LIES

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Next up, Section C: Lies.

WATCH: Actual Nazi Who Started Racist Haitian Rumors - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 9-12-24

 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: There may be people out there who do not spend all their time online looking at what, let's say, the right-wing lunacy is in the darkest, creepiest corners of the internet, or for that matter, what the Republican vice presidential nominee is tweeting about multiple times. There was a video of a woman stopped by the police who had killed the cat.

That video is not from Springfield, Ohio. It turns out from, uh, from Canton, Ohio, two and a half hours away. The woman, as far as, uh, I can tell is not of Haitian descent. She is definitely not a Haitian immigrant because she has been voting for over [01:52:00] six years. And the Haitian immigrants who have been brought in to Springfield have been done so under the temporary status, uh, protected status program, which is a function of all the, uh, the, the political and, um, uh, the political disaster situation in Haiti and also the massive The, um, uh, natural disasters and so all of it was sort of made up, but it wasn't made up by, uh, Donald Trump.

It wasn't made up by JD Vance. It wasn't even made up by Charlie Kirk. We have video of the guy who made it up. Here it is. This guy is, his name, uh, is. Nathaniel, and he is the first person who seems to have brought it up in the city of Springfield, uh, Ohio, and he is at a city commission meeting talking about Haitian migrants.

[01:53:00] Nathaniel is a, um, uh, a fairly well dressed young man who also happens to be a member of the neo Nazi group Blood Pride. Oh. 

NAZI: Nathaniel of Blood Pride. I was at the head of the Anti Haitian Immigration March earlier this month. I'm sure the Honorable Mr. Rob Rue recognizes me, considering he supposedly knew of our action before we even arrived.

NEO-NAZI: First of all, I would like to dispel the myth that you knew of our march and intentionally had no reaction or made no forewarning about it as a preventative measure. You had no more idea than the police officers or Haitians. And it's frankly insulting to our organization to make such a claim. Second, I've come to bring a word of warning.[01:54:00] 

Stop what you're doing before it's too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in. And with it, public frustration and anger. Based on the comments tonight, I'm sure I don't need to tell you that. These people didn't ask for this. And they deserve better than to have to put up with violent, unruly outsiders.

so much. You're done. That's all. Thank you so much. Not really thank you, but 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Boom. Um, that's the guy it's, uh, attributed to, apparently, for, uh, helping, uh, Stoke, if not, uh, develop this, uh, this, this meme. Um, and it, now, to be fair, that was, uh, what was it, in August, I think, uh, the, uh, late August. So it took, you know, a full two weeks before, uh, Donald Trump was announcing it on the national stage.

By Elon Musk. [01:55:00] Uh. 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And immigration is supposed to be the issue where he can, like, I don't know, at least run up the numbers. That's his best polling issue in the economy, too, but she's closing in on that. He could, he, he went to the most unhinged place that he possibly could after getting in, like, taking the bait on the crowd size and then not addressing her, her attack at all.

And, putting forward the most insane conspiracy theory that anyone has ever heard in their lives that was funneled in from a neo nazi group. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And to be fair also, 4chan apparently, there was a lot of promotion of this on 4chan, which is also, you know, not terribly surprising, but you sort of want your president, or would be president, to have enough people around him And him himself to have the sense to like, maybe not push this.

But the point is, this is what his people want. JD Vance is not out there because he's [01:56:00] concerned about the pets in Springfield, Ohio. He's not like, you know, some type of like, uh, you know, uh, ASPCA, uh, zealot who is afraid of what's going on with the pets there. He is pushing it to his people because this is what they believe is going to drive.

This is what is a big part of it, and this moron, Donald Trump, was stupid enough to remind people of, of that, like of the sheer, sort of like, hatred of immigrants, and again, these immigrants are here legally, these immigrants are not undocumented. They are here legally, they are refugees, and on top of which, and I don't know why this needs to be said, but, but it's helpful.

[01:57:00] They are, um, great additions to the community.

From Russia With Money; Cheney endorses Harris; GOP voter purge in NC - The BradCast w/ Brad Friedman - Air Date 9-5-24

 

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, BRADCAST: This news, which broke on Wednesday, underscores directly what I have been trying to warn so many of our listeners about for so long, particularly many of our liberal listeners who have been conned by this stuff coming from Russia and the right, but being sold to them as, uh, you know, some sort of liberal point of view.

It isn't. You're being conned and duped by both people who know better and some people who do not. So, because of that, I need to sort of at least wave at it here momentarily, Desi Doyen. 

DESI DOYEN: Yes, I know. 

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, BRADCAST: If only because it is so blatant and so gross, and even includes people that we know. [01:58:00] And that we used to work with, Dez.

DESI DOYEN: I know. 

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, BRADCAST: So. 

DESI DOYEN: It's weird. 

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, BRADCAST: The Department of Justice on Wednesday seized dozens of Kremlin run websites and charged two state media employees in its most sweeping effort. To push back against what it says are Russian attempts to spread disinformation ahead of the november presidential election according to AP the measures which in addition to indictments also include sanctions and visa restrictions represented a U.

S. government effort just weeks before the november election to disrupt a persistent threat from russia That American officials have long warned has the potential to sow discord and create confusion among voters. One of the criminal cases disclosed by the Justice Department accuses two employees of R.

T. A Russian state media company of covertly funding [01:59:00] a Tennessee based content creation company with nearly 10 million to publish English language videos on social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube with messages in English. In favor of the Russian government's interests and agenda, including about the war in Ukraine.

The nearly 2, 000 videos posted by the company have gotten more than 16 million views on YouTube alone, according to prosecutors, and I actually think that's low balling it. The, uh, two defendants here, Konstantin Kalishnikov and Elena Afanasyeva are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The Justice Department says the company did not disclose, this media company in Tennessee, did not disclose that it was actually funded by RT. [02:00:00] The Russian media outlet and that neither it nor its founders registered as required by law as an agent of a foreign principal under the so called Foreign Agent Registration Act or FARA.

If RT, which, uh, used to be called Russia Today, now it's just called RT. If, uh, RT was a legitimate media source, and many, yes, even on the left, seem to think that they are, well, then why would they secretly fund a supposed news site in the U. S., secretly base it in Tennessee, Kremlin propaganda on their, uh, Uh, for example, their war against Ukraine and so much more.

Why would they do that in secret? If they were a legitimate media outlet, say what you wish about RT. But if the facts of this indictment indictment are true, it does [02:01:00] suggest they are not an actual media outlet. Or at least not a real one. Moreover, why would they hire American social media influencers on the right to launder those messages for them?

Though the indictment does not name the company in question, it describes it as a Tennessee based content creation firm with six commentators and with a website identifying itself as quote, a network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western. political and cultural issues. For the record, uh, because I didn't really know what it meant, heterodox is defined as, quote, not conforming with accepted or orthodox standards or beliefs.

You know, as many both on the right And on the far left describe themselves these days. At least when their beliefs happen to be in direct contradiction with actual [02:02:00] independently verifiable facts and evidence to the contrary of whatever their belief may be. In any event, that description exactly matches A company called Tenet Media, which is an online company that hosts videos made by very well known right-wing Republican social media influencers like Tim Poole, Benny Johnson, David Rubin, And I should note that, uh, Dave Rubin used to call himself a progressive back when, uh, Desi and I, but mostly Desi, worked with him over on the, on the Young Turks.

DESI DOYEN: Yes. 

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, BRADCAST: Where he was a co host along with you for a while. 

DESI DOYEN: Yes, yes, it's true. 

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, BRADCAST: And, of course, before he took his hard right turn, Once, apparently, I guess it became clear that, you know, the right, and now Russia, apparently pay much better than folks on the U. S. progressive left. 

DESI DOYEN: Yes, it was a remarkable and [02:03:00] fast 

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, BRADCAST: transformation.

It was, wasn't it? 

DESI DOYEN: It was. 

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, BRADCAST: He was a big lefty, now he's a hard right-winger. Funny what, uh, hundreds of thousands of dollars will do because they were highly paid, these people. Millions of dollars, in fact, for producing, you know, a video or two each month. Like, a hundred thousand dollars or more for a single video.

Wherein, uh, these folks would say exactly what it was that Russia was doing. Wanted them to say remember without disclosing that they had anything to do with russia It would be one thing if they said hey here we are in a russian media outlet and here's what I believe but uh They would repeat this stuff Not say that has anything to do with russia And then of course in hopes that others would then repeat that propaganda on both the right and the left and so discord Among the american public stuff like stuff like this Here's, here's right-winger, right-wing [02:04:00] influencer, Tim Poole.

A guy who is frequently cited and, and retweeted by no one less than Donald Trump and Elon Musk, et cetera, in one of those videos. This is psychotic. 

TIM POOL: Ukraine is the enemy of this country. Ukraine is our enemy being funded by the Democrats. I will stress again, one of the greatest enemies of our nation right now is Ukraine.

Ukraine is the greatest threat to this nation and to the world. We should rescind all funding and financing, pull out all military support, and we should apologize to Russia. 

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, BRADCAST: So, I'm sure Tim Poole just happens to feel that way. You were, when you recorded that video, you said he was actually reading from something?

Yes, 

DESI DOYEN: you could clearly see that he was reading from something. 

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, BRADCAST: Anyway, uh, does that sound familiar? What he was saying there? Of course it does, because you have either heard folks on the right repeating that exact nonsense, or you have heard folks [02:05:00] who have fallen for it as well on the far left. Even, I suspect, on some of the stations that air the broadcasts, which, uh, repeating the same, yes, literally Kremlin funded propaganda.

So I'm hoping, and I'm praying, that broadcast listeners have not been duped enough to fall for it, or if they have, hopefully I'm able to help, I don't know, just a few of you understand how you are being played by these people.

SECTION D: ELECTION INTEGRITY

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section D: Election Integrity.

How the National Popular Vote could change presidential elections Part 1 - Democracy Works - Air Date 9-2-24

 

CANDIS WATTS SMITH - HOST, DEMOCRACY WORKS: I think this is a good time to think about why we have the system. Is it possible to change? Is it necessary for change? And what, you know, what are the what? What is the potential, the possibilities and the perils?

CHRIS BEEM - HOST, DEMOCRACY WORKS: The only thing I would add is, you know, [02:06:00] in 1787, to my democracy was a very scary concept, and what came out of the Constitution was a fairly radical document in terms of how much power it gave to people, to the, you know, as a as a democracy. However, there are plenty of ways in. Which the framers worked to bracket or to ameliorate the power of the of the people to directly rule. And a lot of the things that you you talked about, I mean the Senate having not just six year terms. But what's the word I'm looking for, indirectly? Well, every two years you had a third Senate. So even if you had this kind of, you know, rabid movement by the by the populace, to vote all the bums out, they could [02:07:00] only vote out a third of the Senate. So that's one thing, and then you had indirect election of the Senate by the state legislatures. So I mean all the power. And then, of course, you had the electoral college too, but all of this power, ultimately was in the hands of the people, right? The people could determine who was in the state legislature, and thereby determine who was in the Senate, but the but the idea was that if you kept that, you made it harder to sustain any kind of crazy notion that got into the into the into the body politic, you could control it, and so you would have less danger associated with democracy. And electoral college is probably, well, first of all, it's one of the few remaining right. We have expanded the franchise. We've got we have direct election of senators, but we still have this really [02:08:00] weird thing called the Electoral College, and it was designed to take the power out of the hands of the the people and put it in the hands of this elite group, right in Federalist 68 I did not know that, but I looked it up, since they Hamilton wrote, and Hamilton was by far the most elitist of the founders, the sense of the people should be part of the process, but would be taken as an advisement by the Electoral College. And the electoral college was going to be composed of quote, men most capable of analyzing the qualities needed for the supreme office, educated and discerning gentlemen who would meet under circumstances favorable to deliberation there. I don't think there are any good reasons outside of, you know, partisan advantage to argue for the Electoral College, right? I mean, [02:09:00] you could argue for set of procedures in which the states had, you know, some kind of standing in terms of their votes, but the idea that this is going to electors who are only elected for this decision, and yet they can't. The states can make their they force them to vote for the for the candidate who won their popular vote. It's there's just a step here that A is anti democratic and B was never, has never operated the way it was supposed to. I mean that it was never this, uh, what Hamilton says it was, what Hamilton said it was supposed to be, which is this, you know, separate group of wise white property holding men who are going to make this decision on behalf [02:10:00] of the body politic, that has never been.

The Georgia Election Laboratory - What Next | Daily News and Analysis - Air Date 8-26-24

 

MARY HARRS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: Want to look back at the accusations of election fraud in Georgia, Biden narrowly won that state in 2020, and it became the center of false claims of voter fraud. Could you just take us back and remind listeners how the 2020 election played out there? 

SAM GRINGLAS: In 2020, Georgia had not gone blue in a presidential election since 1992, uh, when Bill Clinton was on the ballot, so this was a really big shift when Joe Biden, uh, won the electoral votes here, and that spurred it.

Many voters, uh, in certain segments of the Republican Party who were supporters of then President Donald Trump to assert that there had been widespread election fraud, and a lot of those claims were spurred by, uh, the then President himself. Famously, he [02:11:00] made a phone call to Georgia's Republican Secretary of State, Brett Raffensperger, asking him to find 11, 780 votes, the number of votes he would have needed to top Biden in Georgia.

And there were Many examples of activities like this from, uh, Trump and also from many of his allies. So many so that it ultimately led, uh, to a DA here in Fulton County, uh, launching a criminal investigation and asking a grand jury for indictments. And, you know, Those actions, uh, at the end of 2020 continue to shape politics today.

Uh, splits in the Republican party are still very much fueled, uh, by how people came down in those moments, uh, after 2020. 

MARY HARRS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: Yeah, and it's worth reminding people that two election workers brought A successful defamation suit against Rudy Giuliani after he falsely accused them of fraud. 

SAM GRINGLAS: That's right. And these were just two regular people who signed up to do their civic duty [02:12:00] to work in election and faced an onslaught, a torrent of harassment and threats when they were called out by, um, top officials, uh, connected to former president.

Trump. And, you know, this is something that when I've talked to election workers here, potential election workers here, something that's giving them, you know, maybe some trepidation about working election, but also fueling their, their willingness to, to serve. 

MARY HARRS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: Yeah. I mean, one of the election workers, Ruby Freeman said she faced death threats and had people coming to her house.

She had to sell her home and was living out of her car, I think for a certain amount of time. 

SAM GRINGLAS: Yeah, um, Ruby Friedman and Shea Moss, uh, mother daughter, uh, these two election workers testified in front of Congress during the January 6th committee hearings. 

RUBY FREEDMAN: There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the President of the United [02:13:00] States to target you?

The President of the United States is supposed to represent every American, not to target one. But he targeted me. 

SAM GRINGLAS: The testimony that they gave was so visceral and I think really helped people, um, around the country, uh, see this, the stakes of this conversation and the effects on, on regular people, not just politicians.

MARY HARRS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: Immediately after 2020, Georgia's laws began to change. In 2021, Georgia Republicans passed the Election Integrity Act. You might remember that as the bill that banned handing out food or water to voters in line at polling sites. It also did things like decrease the window for requesting mail in ballots, increase ID requirements, and limit the number of ballot drop boxes.

SAM GRINGLAS: So it was kind of a grab bag. Um, some elements, uh, did make voting more accessible, um, such as requiring weekend voting in some places that didn't [02:14:00] previously have it. But many of the rules did make the process more restrictive, uh, when it comes to absentee ballots, to drop boxes, and, you know, This rule has been cited by Democrats, uh, like Stacey Abrams, the former gubernatorial nominee, as an example of Republicans moving, uh, to restrict the, the votes of Georgia's diversifying, growing, uh, population.

And, you know, the results of it, um, is something that we're still trying to understand, uh, we 2022 election cycle under these rules, but this will be the first presidential election cycle where we'll really get a better sense of how they're going to play out. 

MARY HARRS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: Voting rights groups and experts have criticized the changes as basically being attempts at voter suppression.

You know, who did these changes impact the most? 

SAM GRINGLAS: So let me just take a specific element of this law that I think helps illustrate what we're talking about [02:15:00] here. In 2022, in the lead up to the midterm elections, I worked on an investigation that looked at the provision related to the availability of ballot drop boxes, which have been a frequent target for false claims of widespread fraud in the process.

And while this Law codified, um, that counties have to have these drop boxes. It did restrict how many, uh, counties could have based on, on their population size. And we did find that the restrictions affected urban and suburban communities more than rural communities. And these urban and suburban communities tended to have more voters of color.

However, we did see that this didn't necessarily result in wholesale disenfranchisement of Populations of voters. People adjusted. They found new ways to cast their ballot, but we do see people having to maybe jump through additional hoops to cast their ballots. In March, I was at a roller skating rink in Atlanta, and I talked to one [02:16:00] voter.

I think it was her first time going to the polls, and there was a problem with her being able to cast her ballot, and she said it really discouraged her and made her feel like it wasn't worth trying again. 

MARY HARRS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: So the state legislature passed this pretty massive bill in 2021. How have they continued to raise issues of election security?

SAM GRINGLAS: Every cycle, there has been another round of proposals, uh, to change Georgia election law, whether it's related to how election offices are funded, uh, with outside grants to using voting machines. Uh, there's a lot of pushback to electronic voting machines that continues to crop up, um, continued efforts to restrict drop boxes, you know, not all of these pass.

Um, But there are always proposals every election cycle. And I don't see that going away after this cycle. 

MARY HARRS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: And there was just a law that went into effect earlier this summer, right? About voting rules and removing people from the voter rolls. 

SAM GRINGLAS: This is [02:17:00] a rule. That I followed really closely this past legislative session, and, you know, for a while, any individual can challenge an unlimited number of voters to challenge their eligibility in their county.

This has been in place for a while, but a proposal came up in the legislature this year. That put specific reasons into the code that would allow a challenge to be sustained. Republicans said that this was putting guardrails on these challenges. Democrats worried that codifying these rules into law would result in more of them in them being sustained more regularly in recent cycles.

We've seen tens of thousands of challenges to the eligibility of voters. Most of them end up being tossed out. Um, but they do sometimes trip up voters and, uh, overwhelm election offices who are already really busy keeping up, uh, with all of the other things on their plate. 

How the National Popular Vote could change presidential elections Part 2 - Democracy Works - Air Date 9-2-24

 

ALYSSA CASS: [02:18:00] the reason I came to this issue is because I'm someone who believes in politics, and believes in politics ability to improve law, to improve lives, but, but I need to be joined by by other Americans who feel the same. And I think that there is nothing more we could do, nothing bigger we could do to enhance our democracy, improve our elections, and restore faith in the system. Then, to get to a principle that I think we all that everyone can agree on of one person, one vote, this is a this isn't a pipe dream. It's not a academic wish list. It is something that's imminently achievable. It's been, it's been imminently achievable. So I'm here because I really believe in the issue I care about politics, and there's no better way to improve, to improve our democracy than through a national popular vote.

PAT ROSENSTIEL: The president of [02:19:00] national popular vote approached me in 2007 as a Republican. I was I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to be liking this idea very much. So I had them send me their one pager in their book, which is about 800 pages, made the mistake of reading the book. Everything I thought they were doing was kind of wrong. You know, I'm a Reagan baby, so trust but verify is a real thing, but that means trust but verify. My own instincts, not trust but verify what you're telling me. So I read the book came out the other side as a what I would consider an original intent guy. I like the fact that they were using the United States Constitution to move the presidential election to a national popular vote for president. I certainly knew that when we were running for president, or when candidates that I supported were running for president or worked with or around, you know, they were polling in just 18 states, which means, you know, [02:20:00] two thirds of the voters, we didn't even care what they had to say. And so I was interested in the national popular vote for president, so every voter in every state would be politically relevant in every presidential election as a Republican trap behind the blue wall in Minnesota, you know, look, we're the only state that voted for Walter Mondale. You know, I felt like I should be courted in presidential elections, or at least have an equal voice and them to a battleground state voters, and frankly, I feel the same way about a liberal in Oklahoma City.

JENNA SPINELLE - HOST, DEMOCRACY WORKS: Yeah, that's great. And I want to come back to some of the political ramifications that that both of you mentioned, but let's just walk through some of the nuts and bolts of how this process works. You mentioned 18 States have signed on to this compact so far, I guess first, if you could explain for listeners who might not be familiar with what an interstate compact is, and then those states that have already signed on, what exactly have they [02:21:00] agreed to do.

ALYSSA CASS: I'm happy to kick it off the national popular vote. Interstate Compact is an agreement. Meant among states to award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. You know, with the compact, the candidate winning the national popular vote would always be awarded at least the 270 electoral votes necessary to become president. In other words, the compact would ensure that the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes would win the office, just like other elections in our country. And some important things to know about the about the national popular vote Interstate Compact is that it preserves the electoral college. It's fully allowed by the US Constitution without an amendment, making this a really achievable reform, as I said, it ensures a popular vote winner becomes President every time. It injects [02:22:00] the fundamental principle of one person, one vote into our presidential elections. It resembles interstate compacts on other issues. This is a structure that's familiar to our system, and it would go into effect when passed by states containing, you know that majority of electoral votes,

PAT ROSENSTIEL: Yeah, and just to put a fine point on that, the 18 states you asked, what's different for them right now? Nothing's different for them right now, but they're 18 states with 209 electoral votes, right? And so when states with 61 more electoral votes join those states, it then triggers and becomes effective for the presidential election. And to the idea that this isn't a science project, you know what I mean? Anybody who knows anything about election reform, when you can get 18 states to agree on anything must be a pretty good idea and a pretty popular idea. That's true of the national popular vote interstate compact. You know, 67% of the American people want a national popular [02:23:00] vote for president. But I would also point out that we've passed in one chamber or the other, a house or the senate in eight states with 78 more electoral votes, more than the electoral votes required. So I can tell you that national popular vote, the interstate compact, is not a Republican or Democrat idea. It's not a partisan issue. Frankly, it's for anybody who believes that every voter in every state should be politically relevant. And I think it's for any voter who thinks we can have a better politics in this country, if the principle of one person, one vote applies to presidential elections, last thing I'll say about interstate compacts. Every state's in dozens of these things. These aren't experiments. I think the one that most people know the most about is Powerball. Right? That's an interstate compact where people go buy a lottery ticket. The states get the resources, but what holds that all together is called an interstate compact. So what those are is contracts amongst the states, or agreements amongst the states, and they're absolutely enforceable. [02:24:00] They're older than the Republic, and they're not exotic things in American government.

JENNA SPINELLE - HOST, DEMOCRACY WORKS: Alyssa, you mentioned that the national popular vote maintains the Electoral College. I wonder if, if one of you could speak a little bit more to that, like, Why? Why keep it around? Is this just a more convenient way to go, as opposed to trying to do I don't know if it would be a constitutional amendment or, you know, whatever the the procedure would be to eliminate the Electoral College.

PAT ROSENSTIEL: I'll take this first, which is, it's not a matter of convenience. I mean, anybody who thinks this reforms convenient should follow me around in my shoes for a day. You know, the bottom line is, it takes time to change, and should take time to change. The reason the interstate compacts the way to go is because it's allowed under the United States Constitution. Any of your political science listeners you know can open up their pocket copy of the Constitution and read article two, section one, it says each State [02:25:00] shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct a number of electors. Okay, so different states have used different methods to award their electors right. Maine and Nebraska do it by congressional district when they change their statute. Didn't require a constitutional amendment. So what we do is we use the power as it exists within the constitution to have a national popular vote election, which is what people want. There's no reason to amend the Constitution if the power exists to do it within the Constitution. And you know, the bottom line is, we don't change a city charter to fill a pothole, right? The city has the power to fill a pothole, so let's just use what's in the system. Now, I will say, you know, anybody who's like, Oh, I'm for a national popular vote for president, but think we should have a constitutional amendment. They're part of the problem. You know what I mean? Because we need a national popular vote for president. [02:26:00] There's one way we're going to get one. There's one way that's been vetted, you know, by 18 states and has. Bipartisan support that way, is the plan at national popular vote.com so if you do want a presidential election system where every voter in every state is relevant, where the candidate with the most votes is guaranteed the presidency, get on board, because this is the way it's going to get done. 

Credits

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at (202) 999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from AYMAN, The Thom Hartmann Program, ethan is online, Brittany Page, Straight White American Jesus, Democracy Docket, The Majority [02:27:00] Report, The BradCast, Democracy Works, and What Next. Further details are in the show notes. 

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our Transcriptionist Quartet—Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew—for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with the link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion. 

So, coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay, and this has [02:28:00] been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.