Killing Democracy

That's what's left of the Republican Party; it's the party that wants to kill democracy. Or what's left of it in any case. The charitable way to describe them is to say they're the party of "owning the libs", but I'm not feeling that charitable today...

Lots of people have warned about the demise of American democracy in the run-up to, during and after the 2020 general elections, and right now, just before the 2022 midterms, the situation has only deteriorated; more than half of the Republican candidates openly question or outright deny the 2020 election results. Not only that, they've publicly taken the stance that they'll deny any future election results where they don't win. They've truly become Trump's party, as this is the exact same strategy used by him in both elections he participated in. In 2016, when he won against Hillary Clinton, he complained that his win wasn't big enough as he falsely claimed that hundreds of thousands illegal immigrants' votes were counted. Never mind that illegal immigrants can't even vote; he set in motion the Big Lie that would serve him down the road, and millions of Americans believe him.

Before the 2020 elections even started Trump already began to cast doubts about the legitimacy of those elections, and he specifically targeted the mail-in votes as he knew that his base would vote in-person, and the Democrats would, out of concerns over the pandemic, would vote by mail. It was reported on extensively beforehand that when the votes would be counted, the Republicans would enjoy an early lead, as the in-person votes would be counted first. This initial "red wave" was predicted by everyone who had even the slightest of insights into these special pandemic-induced election-mechanics. What's more, the fact that mail-in votes were counted later in most states was because of Republican-proposed laws and regulations. They knew what would happen, they knew that when the mail-in votes were counted, the Democrat vote would suddenly explode. Everyone knew it. Accept the millions who fell for the Big Lie.

And now the Trump-appointed GOP candidates are doing it all over again. "Either we win, or the vote is fixed", "we win or it's fraud". "We're going to cheat either way", that's their message, and their base are conditioned to not question this blatantly authoritarian and fascist stance. "I'm always frank and earnest with women; in New York I'm Frank, in Chicago I'm Ernest." That immortal quip comes from Samuel L. Jackson at the end of the 1996 movie "The Long Kiss Goodnight", and it's the Republican way of being "frank and earnest". They're blatantly honest about the ways they're going to fuck democracy up. Several Republican state officials have started to make preparations to deny hundreds of thousands of Americans their vote. One way is to push, through the courts, for not counting mail-in votes that don't have a date on an external envelope. That's even when the votes have been received on time of course. Several lawsuits are now ongoing against this push, stating correctly that denying votes on such technicalities is anti-constitutional and anti-democratic. They've done this in the 2022 Pennsylvania primary election:

They said in a filing that a ballot envelope’s handwritten date “is not necessary for any purpose, does not remedy any mischief and does not advance any other objective,” and that “allowing just three county boards to exclude votes that all other county boards have included in their returns creates impermissible discrepancies in the administration of Pennsylvania’s 2022 primary election.”
_{source: AP}

But Trump has packed the courts, not just the SCOTUS, so we'll see what comes from it. One thing's for sure; the GOP has nothing to offer for the working class people of America, and they know it. This is why they're whining about Critical Race Theory, child mutilation because of gender-affirming healthcare, child-grooming LGBTQ+ people, pornographic children's books in school-libraries, kitty-litter-boxes for furries, and every other culture-war indignation they can think of. They're for nothing, just against anything that faintly reeks of progressivism. As a consequence, American democracy is all but dead. I'm not an American, but it's going to be interesting to see if Americans let these criminals win. I fear the worst, not only because historically speaking the party in power usually loses the midterms, but because this time we may see the actual end of democracy in the land of the brave, home of the free...

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