Robin Messing

Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell (Team Kraken) and various “reporters/analysts” in the right-wing media pushed wild, unfounded theories about Dominion Voting System and Smartmatic voting machines. They claimed, among other things, that their machines cancelled Trump votes or switched Trump votes to Biden, and that they used software originally developed under Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez to help him steal Venezuela’s election.

Here is the short version of Team Kraken's claims.

Here was Sidney Powell in Nov 2020, explaining how she was going to “release the kraken” and put everyone in jail with her new evidence of how Hugo Chavez stole the election from Trump. Sidney was just indicted. pic.twitter.com/3oI0qR7LjQ

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 15, 2023

Those trying to defend Trump's Big Lie will inevitably point to the movie 2000 Mules as evidence that PROVES there were thousands of people (known as mules) who illegally gathered ballots collected by leftist non-government organizations and then deposited them in multiple ballot boxes. This movie was produced by Dinesh D'Souza and revolves around claims by True the Vote leaders Gregg Phillips and Catherine Engelbrecht. They claim that geolocation data collected from millions of cell phones combined with video evidence proves their claim of massive ballot harvesting election fraud.

Here are eight reasons to laugh in the face of anyone who thinks 2000 Mules provides evidence of election fraud.

Donald Trump claims that investigating and indicting him is election interference. He's got that backwards. His running for office is an attempt to insulate himself from investigation and indictment. In other words, his campaign is prosecution interference. Note how early Trump declared his candidacy. There is no reason for him to have declared this early except to try to insulate himself from prosecution. It's not like he had to declare extra early to build name recognition. Trump declared his run for President on November 14, 2022—721 days before the November 5, 2024 primary.

Only four presidential candidates in the last 24 years have announced their run for president earlier than Donald Trump did.

Fox Corporation’s announcement of its settlement with Dominion Voting Systems is grossly inadequate. Note what they said in the announcement: “We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.” But most importantly, note what they didn’t say. They didn’t apologize. They didn’t even say “we agree with the Court’s rulings.” Nor did they admit any fault whatsoever. 

It is not that unusual for news organizations to make false statements either through mistake or lack of information. Reputable news organizations publish corrections when they make false statements. Those corrections specifically state what they got wrong and present more accurate information. They set the record straight. But this statement by Fox doesn’t even state WHAT they said that was false, (much less admit that their guests were lying to their audience.)

Someone who lived in a Fox bubble would have no idea how significant those false statements were. For all they knew, Fox could have said, “Dominion was used by 23 states in 2020”, whereas they were really used by 24. A Fox Bubbleboy would not know that the false statements made up the heart of Trump’s Big Lie. He would not know that the false statements were a driving factor behind the rampage on January 6. And notice that Fox did not state that they agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million. That key fact would have told Fox Bubbleboy that this was an important story and that the false statements about Dominion were serious and needed further explanation. And that’s a problem.

This post is going to be extremely disjointed--consider it a collection of data points with one overarching theme. Today's Republican Party knows that its policies are unpopular and that the only way they can stay in power is to destroy our democracy. The LAST thing they want is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Instead, many of them want our country to become a White Christo-nationalist one-party state where the Republicans maintain a permanent lock on power. In other words, they want our country to become a tyranny of the minority. A common talking point among those who want to destroy our democracy is to say "We're a republic, not a democracy." If you hear someone say that, then shove this column down their throat.

And now, without further ado, ten signs that Republicans want to destroy our democracy.

Whenever I tweet that we are in danger of losing our democracy I almost INEVEITBALY get a response from some Trumpanzee or Putinista saying "America is a republic. It is not a democracy." This pablum is intended to be Novocain for the brain. It is designed to confuse the issue and cause us to lose sight that the Founders wanted a government that represented the will of the people, and not the will of an autocrat. True, the Founders defined who "the people" were far too narrowly. That is why we have had to work to form a "more perfect union." But we must not lose sight of the aspirational goal that President Lincoln set forth in his Gettysburg Address--that we should have a "government of the people, by the people, for the people." 

Congressman Tom Reed announced last year that he would not be running for re-election because of a sexual assault allegation made against him. (See this story from last year for more information about the alleged sexual assault.) But we just received a surprise when Reed unexpectedly resigned early on May 10. We are now without a Congressman to represent our district. 

Our democracy is hanging by a thread. It has never been in more danger during my lifetime, and I'm an old geezer who can remember back to the Nixon Administration. And the source of democracy's jeopardy is Trump's Big Lie that the election was stolen from him. This lie motivated the January 6 insurrection and, just as importantly, it is motivating efforts to place acolytes of this lie in positions where they are the ones who decide how the votes will get counted in 2024.

A Trumpanzee clown was bitching about the Democrats and singing the praises of Donald Trump to me on Facebook. I noticed that his Facebook page had a picture of Ronald Reagan at the top. I was never a big fan of Reagan's. I often disagreed with him on policy, but I never questioned his patriotism. And I always thought he did what he thought was right for the country--no matter how misguided I thought his actions were. I never for a moment thought that he put his own personal interests above that of our country.

Over 60% of Arizona's population lives in Maricopa County. State Senate Republican leaders refused to accept that Biden had won the county by 45,000 votes, thus giving him a 10,00-vote victory statewide. Election results were audited twice with no evidence that there had been a significant error in the original count and no evidence of chicanery, but state Republican officials still refused to accept the results. They refused to accept the results, even though the Maricopa County Recorder and four of the five members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors (MCBS) were Republicans. The state Senate Republicans sued the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to force them to hand over their voting machines and ballots so that they could hire their own auditors to do a forensic analysis of the machines as well as a hand recount of all the votes. The State Senate won their lawsuit and the clown show officially known as the Arizona audit was off to the races.

I will discuss why we should view the audit as a clown show in more depth in another column. For now let's just say that it isn't just the Democrats who see it that way. The Maricopa County Republicans wrote a blistering letter on May 17 to the Arizona State Senate President, Karen Fann that made it clear that they thought the audit was a circus. Much of that letter is technical and will be of little interest to the average reader. I know few people will read the entire 13-page letter, so here are the highlights in their raging glory.