What I'm Reading: 5 Articles Revealing How Democracy Is Under Attack in the U.S.
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Living With The Far-Right Insurgency In Idaho
They’ve accomplished this, in part, by targeting their opponents with frightening cruelty and harassment, embracing a strategy called “confrontational politics,” which has helped drive more moderate officials across the state to resign or retire.
Authored by a former California state senator and gun rights fundamentalist named H.L. Richardson, “Confrontational Politics” is essentially a how-to guide for a Christian nationalist insurgency in the United States. “There can be no compromises with the Left,” Richardson writes. “We are ideologically at opposite ends of the spectrum with no arbitration possible. Either they win or we do. They will run the government or we will. That’s the only choice open to either of us. They know it — shouldn’t we?”
Richardson prescribes an aggressive style of politics that’s always, always on the offensive, that is constantly attacking its opponents, provoking them, screaming over them, and wearing them down. Never apologize. Exploit “hot button issues” that inspire “deep emotion” and “moral righteousness” to gain followers.
[This reminds me of what we’ve seen in Bucks County, as well as statewide across Pennsylvania. And thanks Paul D. for dropping this in my inbox.]
READ: https://tinyurl.com/2p8c8hyb
‘It’s going to be an army’: Tapes reveal GOP plan to contest elections
Placing operatives as poll workers and building a "hotline" to friendly attorneys are among the strategies to be deployed in Michigan and other swing states. Nick Penniman, founder and CEO of the election watchdog group Issue One, said the strategy is designed to “create massive failure of certification” in Democratic precincts to justify intervention by GOP-controlled state legislatures to “throw the choosing of electors to state legislatures.”
READ: https://tinyurl.com/yzt7hd6c
The Long Game of White-Power Activists Isn’t Just About Violence
The long game of white-power activists isn’t just to terrorize and intimidate nonwhites: As “The Camp of the Saints” shows, these activists fear apocalyptic extinction if they don’t take up arms. The American equivalent, “The Turner Diaries,” imagines what it would be like to establish a white-dominated world through race war and genocide.
READ: https://tinyurl.com/2p8bstmy
Immigration officials created network that can spy on majority of Americans, report says
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has crafted a sophisticated surveillance dragnet designed to spy on most people living in the United States, without the need for warrants and many times circumventing state privacy laws, such as those in California, according to a two-year investigation released Tuesday by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology.
READ: https://tinyurl.com/4czshkwk
Right-Wing Families Bankroll Most Extreme GOP Candidates Nationwide
Many of the country’s wealthiest GOP megadonors are betting heavily on the 2022 campaigns of some of the most extreme right-wing politicians in the United States, as evidenced by a Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) analysis of state and federal campaign finance data. Most of these families gave to four or more politicians affiliated with conspiracy theories and white nationalist groups, the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen,” and/or the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
READ: https://tinyurl.com/mvtew37k