There was record turnout in Georgia’s primary elections yesterday.
Record. Turnout.
The New York Post goes easy on the left, headlining their story “Georgia sees record early voter turnout despite Dems’ carping over new election law.”
Carping? Carping?
Here’s a Fox News montage of leftists “carping” about the law while it was still a bill. If you didn’t click through to watch, it’s a series of news personalities, celebrities, and “experts” decrying the Georgia election law as a new Jim Crow, as “a party cheating at the polls,” as “voter suppression,” and even as “the end of democracy.”
The end of democracy!
To call that kind of rabid hysteria “carping” is like calling the second world war “unpleasant.” And that video only scratches the surface of the kind of feverish and apocalyptic shrieking the law engendered while it was being debated and then passed.
You may recall that Ole Puddinhead—that daft old dope who happens to president of the United States—called the Georgia election law “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”
He called it “Jim Crow on steroids.”
He called it “Jim Crow 2.0.”
He called it insidious. An atrocity. He said it was about “voter suppression” and “election subversion.” He called it a threat to democracy and an assault on the Constitution. He said that under the new law, people in line couldn’t be provided with food or water—an absolute lie. And he threw in the racist and completely unsubstantiated claim that minority voters are “less likely to have IDs.”
The daft old dotard even said that compared to Jim Crow, the Georgia voting law was “Jim Eagle.”
He thundered and blustered about it repeatedly. It’s not who we are! It’s a disgrace! It’s un-American! He was practically barking, snarling his fury into the cameras.
The full force of the GLOB played right along, amplifying the apocalyptic messages coming out of the Oval Office.
Remember all the boycotts? How Major League Baseball moved their All-Star Game from Atlanta to Colorado as a protest against the atrocious law? Remember the CEOs of Delta and Coca-Cola expressing their contempt for the people of Georgia? The businesses threatening to pull entirely out of the state? The Georgia travel bans imposed on state employees by Democrat-controlled states?
Remember all the shrieking harpies of the left crying out in chorus against the vicious, suppressive, racist law in Georgia?
Here in Denmark, even taxpayer-funded DR ran a headline saying that the passage of the law was “like putting the fox in charge of the hen-house.”
(I wrote in depth about that article, and if you go back to that post you’ll see I provide chapter and verse on the absurdity of the claims being made about the bill.)
The Post is usually pretty good (and their headlines are often hilarious), but “carping?” Seriously?
Give every screaming leftist nutjob every benefit of every doubt, and for them to have been even vaguely, partially, kind of right we’d expect to have seen at least a slight dip in the voting numbers. Virtually all of them called it “voter suppression,” after all: what kind of voter suppression produces a record number of voters?
But there’s no point giving them any benefit of any doubts.
They weren’t worried about voter suppression or election subversion: they were worried about election integrity. Occam’s Razor, baby: if you oppose election reform so vehemently, and with such provocative language, on the basis of its being suppressive, and in practice it turns to have promoted voter participation, then we’re left with two possibilities: either you were wildly mistaken in your assumptions and owe us all an apology, or you were just blowing smoke all along. And in that case, if you opposed the bill not for the fraudulent reasons you were screaming about but because you feared its impact would have consequences contrary to your interests, it’s reasonable for us to wonder just what those interests were.
Why might someone oppose election integrity and transparency? It’s a stumper.
I’m willing to forgive people for getting things wrong, because we’re all people and “getting things wrong” is one of the defining traits of our species.
I’m even willing to forgive people for blowing a little smoke, metaphorically speaking, because I understand the role emotions play in electoral politics. It’s entirely understandable that politicians and politically-invested commentators are going to want to fire up their supporters with a little hyperbole.
But the GLOB didn’t get the Georgia election law wrong. Nor was the kind of divisive racial rhetoric they employed mere hyperbole. It was vicious, dishonest, hateful, horrible stuff, all of it—and it was all done knowingly and for political gain.
By the “uniter” Joe Biden and his party of charm-school drop-outs.
By all the good people on “the right side of history.”
Do you think they might apologize, reflect on their error, and promise to do better next time? After all, their incendiary language might well have incited actual race wars: they did their damnedest to persuade anyone who would listen that Republicans wanted to strip people of their rights based on the color of their skin. That is, after all, what the Jim Crow laws did—the Jim Crow laws that were developed, written, passed, and enforced by Democrats who were chagrined by the Republican emancipation of their black slaves.
Of course they’re not going to apologize, or reflect, or do better next time.
In fact, the success of the Georgia primaries is itself a new threat to democracy:
He stopped Donald Trump’s attempt to cheat. Now comes the revenge. It can be catastrophic for American democracy
Mikkel Danielsen, Berlingske.dk, May 25
The lede is jaw-dropping:
The state of Georgia has to elect a new secretary of state, and that kind of choice tends to be indifferent. But not this time. For the election is a cornerstone of the grandiose plan that Donald Trump’s people have laid: They want to take control of the American electoral system.
Mikkelsen isn’t fucking around: in rehashing the 2020 election, he breathlessly observes of the “more than 30 governors, state ministers and election officials in the US states” that Trump contacted:
The president tried to pressure them to overturn election results or declare votes invalid.
But like Raffensperger, the vast majority refused to follow Trump’s calls for fraud.
They averted a coup attempt.
Got that?
Trump was calling on them to commit fraud, and in refusing to follow the Dread Tyrant’s marching orders they averted his heinous coup attempt.
Double-checking votes, which is what Trump was asking them to do, is not committing fraud.
And asking officials to double-check election result is not attempting a coup.
But according to Mikkel Fucking Danielsen, these are just givens to be thrown out without any evidence beyond the hysterical claims of the same garbage people who insisted that the Georgia election law—the one that resulted in a record-breaking number of mail-in ballots being cast long before Danielsen’s article was published—was an act of voter suppression as heinous as making blacks go to separate schools, eat at separate restaurants, drink from separate water fountains, ride on the back of the bus, and so on. You know: all the stuff the Democrats did to blacks with their Jim Crow laws.
No, wait: the Georgia election law was not just as heinous: it was more heinous! It was all that on steroids.
Pardon my French, but fuck these people. Every last one of them.
In any case, as far as Mikkel F. Danielsen is concerned, what’s past is prologue: the Dread Tyrant and his arch minions are now plotting the wholesale theft of American democracy.
(Spoiler alert: Trump’s preferred guys lost in Georgia, so Mikkel Danielsen can get up from his fainting couch.)
U.S. election experts fear the party could use the midterm elections to build a machinery of secretaries of state, state politicians, and election officials who could steal an election.
“It’s definitely a scenario that Donald Trump can be installed as president in 2024 without actually winning the election,” Timothy Snyder, a historian and professor at Yale University, told MSNBC.
“It will be in line with everything he has said in 2016 and 2020. It is not something that can just happen. I already think it’s underway, and the question is whether we acknowledge it quickly enough for us to slow it down. “
This year’s midterm elections are not just about ideological differences.
It’s also about who picks up the phone the next time Trump calls and lacks votes.
What the fuck is wrong with you, Berlingske?
A left wing guy says fever-swamp left wing stuff to an openly partisan left wing network, and you pass it along as “analysis?” The idea that “Donald Trump can be installed as president in 2024 without actually winning the election”?
What the hell is wrong with you? Installed as president? Do you not see how insane anyone would have to be to think such a plan had any chance at all of resulting in anything but a genuine civil war?
And yet, hold on… wait a second… Snyder’s notion sounds familiar: the idea that you could kind of work behind the scenes to set things up in a way to ensure you got the election results you wanted…
Ah! Got it! I remember, now: Molly Ball’s “Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Rigged the 2020 Election.” (The actual title says “Saved” instead of “Rigged,” and the word of choice in the article itself is “fortified,” but that’s only because the GLOB are masters of verbal prestidigitation.)
Remember that? I wrote a lengthy post about it in February 2021, and even predicted that Ball’s article would have “consequences that will horrify anyone cheering these (avowed) conspiracists on.”
Molly Ball had the balls to brag about “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information” leading up to the 2020 election.
“They were not rigging the election,” Ball adds immediately, “they were fortifying it.”
As the priest said to the sinner, “You ain’t confessin’—you braggin’!”
So when Mikkel F. Danielsen’s “U.S. election experts” claim to “fear the (Republican) party could use the midterm elections to build a machinery” that “could steal an election,” they’re only saying what they already know to be true—because they did it themselves in 2020 and they’re terrified Republicans got wise to it (maybe thanks to Molly Ball’s insane braggadocio) and have decided to try a little fortification of their own.
That Boomerang Principle sure is a bitch.
Mikkel F. Danielsen knows all this. He surely read the Molly Ball piece. He watched a president, an entire political party, and everyone supporting them claim that a voting reform law was the biggest threat to democracy since the days of Democrats attacking blacks with dogs and firehoses… and you’ve seen for yourself that, on the contrary, it boosted voter participation.
But he can’t put two and two together. Or more likely he can, but he won’t.
And now the same damn people are telling him that Donald Trump is secretly plotting to overthrow the American political system and get himself installed as president… and he’s like, “OMG! That’s terrifying!”
What’s fascinating in a morbid and grotesque way is Danielsen’s habit of assuming that Democrats can always be trusted but Republicans never can be… because Democrats say so.
“Democrats always tell the truth and Republicans always lie. I know this for a fact because it’s what the Democrats told me and they’re Democrats so it must be true.”
Mikkel F. Danielsen: not just journalism, but journalism on steroids!