If You Do Not Vote, The Terrorists Will Win

Good news for the Democrats is that Republicans are growing increasingly frantic and desperate. And dangerous.

by Justin Rosario

There are now three weeks to the election and things are going pretty damn well for the Democrats. People are lining up to vote early, Democratic mail-in ballots are flooding into states all around the country and significantly outnumbering Republican ballots, and Joe Biden is still either tied or up in all of the battleground states, in some cases up by quite a bit.

Even better, Biden is doing so well, he’s competitive in states that Republicans take for granted so the GOP is being forced to spend money to defend states like, I kid you not, Texas. This drains money from other states Trump desperately needs to win even as the Trump campaign cuts spending in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. That’s on top of pulling ads in Iowa, Ohio, and New Hampshire.

As I explained in my last article, there’s a decent amount of good news. The problem with good news for the Democrats is that Republicans are growing increasingly frantic and desperate. And dangerous.

If You Can’t Win, Cheat

By now, we all know this has been the Republican Party’s mantra for at least half a century. Ever since candidate Nixon conspired to keep the Vietnam War going for another 5 years at the cost of another 22,000 American lives and who knows how many Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, Republicans have cheated in every presidential election. 2020 is no different.

Georgia Republicans have limited polling places so much that even early voting lines are over ten hours long. The Texas GOP got Republican judges to agree that removing drop boxes for mail-in ballots is, I absolutely kid you not, expanding the right to vote because there are more days to drive up to a few hundred miles away to that one drop box. Are they not merciful?

I promise you, these same Republican judges will not refer back to this ruling when they cut early voting by up to three weeks next year. 

Not all of the right’s scams are working out as intended. Longtime con artists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman engaged in a favorite Republican tactic of using robocalls to spread disinformation. Republicans have been doing this (and more) for decades. They either “inform” likely democratic voters of the wrong date or location to cast their vote or tell them that voting will lead to the police or creditors tracking them down.

Wohl and Burkman used the latter, falsely telling mostly minority voters that voting by mail would put them in a “public database” used by the police and credit card companies. Also, it would be used to force them to be vaccinated against their will, a nice touch to whip up some anti-vaccine hysteria ahead of the Covid-19 vaccine push early next year.

Inexplicably, the Dynamic Duo of Derp put their names on the robocall so they’re in a lot of trouble. But the damage is already done.

More recently, someone “accidentally” cut a fiber optic cable that just happened to shut down voter registration in Virginia. Not just part of Virginia but the entire state. Something similar happened in Florida, also on the last day of registration. Funny how that keeps happening.

And none of this compares to the domestic terrorism brewing in many parts of the country.

They Desperately Want To Water The Tree Of Fascism 

If you haven’t heard by now, a group of thirteen white nationalist terrorists were planning on kidnapping and murdering Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. And let’s not kid ourselves, they would have likely raped her first given extreme misogyny is a core value of right wing extremists. They also planned to kidnap and murder Virginia Governer Ralph Northam. Presumably he would not have been sexually assaulted before his death, but that’s not a given either.

A different story that’s not getting nearly as much attention is a company looking to terrorize the entire city of Minneapolis:

A private security company is recruiting former U.S. military Special Operations personnel to guard polling sites in Minnesota on Election Day, an effort the chairman of the company said is intended to prevent left-wing activists from disrupting the election but that the state attorney general warned would amount to voter intimidation and violate the law.

The recruiting effort is being done by Atlas Aegis, a private security company based in Tennessee that was formed last year and is run by U.S. military veterans, including people with Special Operations experience, according to its website.

Funny story. Back in July, I predicted that if Trump were to continue to use his new secret police against civilian populations, he would find an excuse to deploy them on election day to states that are mostly carried by a single city. I suggested New York and Illinois but wouldn’t you know it? Minnesota is one of those states, too!

Atlas Aegis didn’t say specifically where they were planning on sending this “large contingent” of heavily armed security forces to in Minnesota, but, really, where else would they go? The suburbs or rural areas that went to Trump in 2016? Or Minneapolis that went overwhelmingly to Hillary and tipped the state blue?

Having a few dozen armed vehicles “patrolling” the streets and hundreds of unidentified men with large weapons “protecting” polling stations would be guaranteed to keep people home. Maybe just enough for Trump to win. After all, he only lost Minnesota by 40,000 votes in 2016 and Trump voters know the armed terrorists aren’t there to threaten them.

A step down from this is the “Army for Trump”, the mob of white nationalists eager to cosplay as “poll watchers.” Their real job, of course, is to chase people away and to shut down polling stations by any means necessary. To a fascist, democracy is the enemy.

Make A Plan

The Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, Patriot Prayer, and all of the other terrorist groups enabled by Trump and the GOP will be out between now and the election doing everything they can to keep you from voting. The closer it gets to the election, the more out of control and violent they will become, egged on by an increasingly desperate and unhinged Trump.

You cannot, for one second, forget that a loss for Trump means his personal and financial ruin and almost certain jail time. To avoid that, he is looking to incite violence on a scale we have not seen since the Civil War. The Republican base is primed for fascism and fascism is fundamentally linked to the violent repression of political and social opposition.

That means you need a plan. No, you shouldn’t need one to go vote but these are not normal times. If you are planning to vote in person or to drop off a mail-in ballot, make sure you go early and have the time to go back in case a mob of Trump’s Brownshirts are there, making it unsafe.

Bring a friend, or a few friends, because there is safety in numbers. If you know someone who is worried, be an escort if you’re able, or be the support for each other. 

Whatever you do, do not back down because if they take away your vote, they’ve won and that can’t happen. Too many people have fought and died for this country. I’m not just talking about the soldiers who fought against the slavers and traitors of the Confederacy or the genocidal monsters of the Third Reich. I’m talking about the women who were beaten and murdered for daring to demand the right to vote. The Black Americans who were arrested and tortured and lynched by the same kind of people that march in the streets today screaming for blood. 

A lot of people paid a steep price for our right to vote and these terrorists want very much to use fear and violence to take away our voice. That can only happen if we allow it.

Are you going to allow it?

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