Trumpty Dumpty Hasn't Had A Great Fall
But while fending off numerous lawsuits in multiple states, some important groundwork is being laid
Reviewing what’s occurring to some of the ex-king’s horses and men lately
Oct 30- Stephen Miller, former senior aide to the strange ex-president, creator of the family breakup policies for immigrants seeking asylum and opportunity at our southern border, is back at it again. As a principal founder at America First Legal, which cannot directly advocate FOR any candidate, his group has radio and TV ads circulating in Georgia that accuse Biden, Democrats and Progressives for alleged racism against white people in allocating different services and benefits to the general public.
For the TV ad, the audio:
”When did racism against white people become okay?” it begins. “Joe Biden put white people last in line for covid relief funds.”
”Kamala Harris said disaster aid should go to non-white citizens first.”
”Liberal politicians block access to medicine based on skin color.”
”Progressive corporations, airlines, universities: all openly discriminate against white Americans.”
”Racism is always wrong. The left’s anti-white bigotry must stop. We are all entitled to equal treatment under law. America First Legal paid for this ad.”
The visuals for each claim made:
Daily Wire headline (5/12/2021): “Biden’s restaurant relief program excludes white male owners.”
Daily Wire headline (9/30/2021): “Kamala: Non-white citizens first.”
Wall Street Journal (1/7/22) quoted passage displayed: “Whites may not be eligible for antibodies and antivirals, while non-whites are.”
Cited Reuters, Washington Times, Free Beacon (dates unclear but appear to be sometime in 2021 and 2022): ”Progressives discriminating against white Americans”
Print appears: “STOP LEFT-WING RACISM. END ANTI-WHITE BIGOTRY.”
All of the 21 people (actors) seen in the ad are white.
As to the sources cited with headlines or quotes displayed, from Wikipedia: The Daily Wire was conceived by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, who both worked for TruthRevolt, a news website that was formerly funded by the David Horowitz Freedom Center.[12] After the duo secured several million dollars in seed funding from the billionaire petroleum industry brothers Dan and Farris Wilks, The Daily Wire was launched in 2015.[12][13][10] Initially, The Daily Wire was supported mostly by advertisements.[1] Farris Wilks, a fracking billionaire,[14] manages Bentkey Ventures, LLC (formerly Forward Publishing, LLC), which publishes The Daily Wire.[10] The company's headquarters were in Los Angeles, California.[15] In September 2020, Shapiro announced that The Daily Wire headquarters would move to Nashville, Tennessee.
The Wall Street Journal is owned by well known conservative billionaire, Rupert Murdoch.
From Wikipedia: The Washington Times was founded on May 17, 1982, by Unification movement leader Sun Myung Moon and owned until 2010 by News World Communications, an international media conglomerate founded by Moon. It is currently owned by Operations Holdings, which is a part of the Unification movement.[9][10]
Throughout its history, The Washington Times has been known for its conservative political stance,[3][4][5][6] supporting the policies of Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump.[11][12] Reagan was also a daily reader of The Washington Times.[13] It has published many widely shared columns which reject the scientific consensus on multiple environmental issues.[14][15][16][17][18][19] It has drawn controversy by publishing racist content, including conspiracy theories about U.S. President Barack Obama[20][21] and by supporting neo-Confederate historical revisionism.[22]
And Reuters is the only publication cited that isn’t right wing, but it’s not clear which publication is being quoted in the ‘Progressive corporations’ quote displayed. The other publications have all previously been tied to white nationalism with media critics adding charges of incendiary and misleading rhetoric.
The ad provides no context for any of the claims made nor direct quotes of anyone at all.
Watch the ad here:
As noted, Miller’s past includes creating xenophobic policies and speeches for Trump. His new corporation was founded by Miller and Gene Hamilton.
Its Board includes Mark Meadows, Matthew Whitaker, Russ Vought, Ed Corrigan, and Wesley Denton.
Miller, Hamilton, Whitaker and Corrigan all worked for Senator Jeff Sessions(AL) early in their careers. Corrigan interned for the late Senator Jesse Helms(NC) before that and also for former Senator DeMint(SC) who was considered the most powerful Tea Party officeholder in the country. DeMint opposed same sex marriage and proclaimed that gays and single moms shouldn’t be allowed to teach in public schools. Helms, DeMint and Sessions have all been charged with racist policies and pronouncements in their Senate careers.
Denton, Vought & Corrigan have also been key members of the conservative Heritage Foundation. And DeMint started the Conservative Partnership Institute which includes Meadows, Denton, and Corrigan as members.
So the ad promotes white fear to advance white nationalism, with most sources cited part of an echo chamber of the same people, all of them Trump supporters and several of them Trump staff or appointees. Most honed their influence skills in media or lobbying so are quite adept at propaganda.
And the Conservative Partnership Institute also has Cleta Mitchell as a Senior Fellow. From her profile there:
She is one of the founders and is Chairman of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, the only conservative public interest law firm devoted solely to election integrity. Cleta was one of the key attorneys who fought back against the Obama IRS during the targeting of tea party groups. She was a volunteer attorney for the 2020 Trump legal team in Georgia.
The NY Times, 11/2/2022:
At least three dozen lawyers and law firms that advanced Donald J. Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election are now working for Republican candidates, parties and other groups, filing lawsuits and other complaints that could lay the groundwork for challenging the results of midterm elections, according to a New York Times analysis of campaign finance records and legal filings.
Though the 2020 legal push failed, with just one victory out of more than 60 lawsuits, scores of lawyers behind it have continued to work on election litigation.
That includes partners at large law firms like Consovoy McCarthy and Snell & Wilmer, which filed challenges shortly after Mr. Trump’s defeat and dropped them within weeks. But it also includes lawyers who for months argued cases based on groundless allegations and dubious legal theories, giving Mr. Trump’s false claims a veneer of legitimacy and propelling a swirl of misinformation about elections.
On that list are Cleta Mitchell and John Eastman, two lawyers who helped devise Mr. Trump’s legal strategy in 2020 and are now mobilizing activists to hunt for evidence of fraud in the midterm count.
UCLA Law professor Rick Hasen, who’s run the Election Law blog for the past two decades, was quoted in New York Magazine about Cleta Mitchell:
“It really makes me sad to see what happened to Cleta Mitchell,” said Rick Hasen, a legal scholar at UCLA who served on an election-law committee with Mitchell through the American Law Institute that was dedicated to the proper resolution of disputed election results. “Trump wasn’t able to get top-tier conservative election lawyers to represent him and for good reason: because he has no serious argument. I don’t know whether Cleta really believes this stuff or she doesn’t, and I don’t know which is worse, but there are no other lawyers of her caliber that are doing this.”
New York Magazine continued: “Some people who know Mitchell think she is playing a kind of double game. “We can’t have this situation where all of our voters think that who the next president is gets decided by George Soros and the head of the World Economic Forum,” said Dustin Stockton, a former Mitchell client and someone who later became one of the organizers of the Ellipse rally before the January 6 riot. “She is too smart for this. She knows that the election wasn’t stolen. I think she is just trying to get all the MAGA people to volunteer as poll watchers so they don’t think the election was stolen either and they come back and start voting again.”
AHA! A new part of the propaganda campaign comes to light…
Simply put, it’s a Get Out The Vote Drive. In part.
Getting people to show up for a midterm election is always a challenge. 18-to-30 year olds mostly show up on presidential election years, as well as poor and working class voters.
The GOP strategy for next Tuesday is four-fold:
1) Keep all the conspiracy theorists, election deniers and white nationalists engaged by poll watching and filing legal challenges. They’ll also be voting. Without the ongoing Trump claims of 2020 fraud, many wouldn’t show up to vote.
2) Most of the challenges will likely be dismissed by judges, just as they were in 2020. But any small example of fraud or ballot counting error can be magnified to maintain the perception of extreme fraud, ensuring even more attention on the 2024 race.
3) The challenges will also slow down reporting of the vote outcomes next week. Close races may require recounts. And every delay increases the perception that fraud is occurring even if little or no actual evidence exists. Big cities and suburbs take longer to count and many of those areas vote very Democratic. So most of the later tallies will favor Democrats, increasing the perception among Republicans of a rigged election.
4) The poll watching and legal challenges also are practice for the 2024 elections. If the GOP captures one or more Secretary of State positions in any swing state next week, those challenges could lead to hokey investigations and decisions that could void popular vote totals then. An actual rigged presidential election could occur for the first time since 2000.
Another unusual occurrence this time is how much money is being poured into these midterm campaigns by billionaires. Through September 30, these are the top 20 biggest spenders, putting up nearly 3/4s of the billionaire donations.
Note that Peter Thiel is especially interested in Arizona and Ohio. Ken Griffin is partly focused on Pennsylvania and a couple of guys display an interest in Wisconsin.
And yes, Soros looks like the big kahuna of spenders but he typically drops a lot more onto issues (like decriminalizing drugs) than candidates. In that top 20, there’s about $411 million being spent by Republicans versus $232 million spent by Democrats.
Most of the GOP donors want to avoid being taxed more, or better, they want to gain more tax cuts. Peter Thiel has professional cohorts he’s mentored running in Ohio (J.D. Vance) and Arizona (Blake Masters) and has given each at least $10 million.
This list also misses several other billionaire notables. There’s Phil Knight (Nike) investing many millions into Oregon races, trying to buy a GOP governorship and at least a House of Representative district long held by the retiring (D) Peter deFazio.
And where is Rebekah Mercer and her sister? Nobody’s gonna convince me that their toes are not on the election scale someplace. SCOTUS decisions over the past dozen years have made it much easier for big donors to remain hidden. Don’t be surprised if October donations change that top 20 considerably, as well.
Big Money, Big Propaganda, and Big Hatred of Others has been a toxic but standard mix for the GOP for years since their presidential candidates have only won more than 50% of the popular vote once in the past 34 years.
One main difference now is the longtime conservative dominated SCOTUS has enabled the ultra-wealthy to buy more ads, hire more influencers and gain more officeholders who’ll serve their interests first and foremost.
The other is the ongoing promotion of violence by the very strange ex-President and his Brown Neck minions ready and willing to eliminate the votes of We The Most People because fascism can be very very profitable to the greed mongering few.
The thing is, it’s pretty clear what the early aims of the GOP legislative agenda include: outlawing abortion, demonizing LGBTQ people, pulling every trick in the book they can think of to keep Arizona and Texas from turning blue (the REAL reason they’re now shipping border crossers to blue states so they won’t vote for Democrats in a decade once they become citizens). As a longtime amateur political history analyst I calculated 18 years ago that Texas could go blue in 2024 and will go blue in 2028 because of the demographic shifts caused by birthrates, sunbelt migration from the north and normal immigration patterns from the south.
They won’t be able to ship them out fast enough though, so their Plan B - instead of representing more interests of Latino voters - is to go straight to fascism.
That’s MY conspiracy theory and I’m keeping it. But feel free to advance it with others.
They also want Social Security and Medicare gone, starting with privatization that they can make bank on.
And here’s the thing. The thing that happens in every fascist or autocratic dictator-led country that I’ve studied: abortion is just the start of the war on women. Misogyny scales up quickly if our electoral democracy goes away. Bodily autonomy will be the first right of many lost. Upticks in sexual and physical abuses will also be seen.
Unless Democrats win enough key races to stop it next week.