Die-ins had a pretty dramatic impact during the AIDS crisis…
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Yeah; the GOP can rig the election a bit — between gerrymandering, structural bias and working the refs, their fuckery is probably worth a couple million votes. But if everyone stops believing that the election result is the end of the story, that’s the whole ball game; that’s worth all the votes.
The whole reason Turmp wants to undermine confidence in the election process is that he can’t rig it anywhere near as much as he’d need to. If he could guarantee the result in advance – like Putin can – then he’d be effusive in his praise for the system.
The way to get rid of Turmp is to vote him out. If by some miracle that happens, do you want to have spent the previous three months agreeing that elections can’t be trusted and the real election begins in the courts on November 4th? Because that is a self-fulfilling wish.
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Coup? Hell, I’m still worried that he’ll legitimately win the election. Americans didn’t suddenly get smarter over the past four years, on either side. Trumpers will still vote for him, nonvoters will still ignore politics altogether or claim that both sides are the same, the Democratic party will still be ignoring actual progressives, rolling over at every opportunity to cooperate with Trump as though he’s ever acted in good faith, and then baffled as to why people aren’t giving them the support they think they’ve earned. If you think that 200,000 completely avoidable deaths, unconcealed fascist tactics and the absolute breakdown of every value and institution that Americans supposedly hold sacred are enough to motivate more people to fill in a bubble on a piece of paper, you’ve got a much more positive view of the average citizen than I do. And I really hope you’re right, because the Americans in your view might actually be able to fight a coup if it got to that point.
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Beware the October Surprise. Some national tragedy / attack provokes emergency / martial law proclamation. Troops are deployed to urban centers to quell unrest. Communications are censored. Dissidents are placed in protective custody. Order is maintained. Order. Zero tolerance. Order.
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I am still thinking the October surprise will come out of the bogus “investigation” Barr is running into Burisma/Biden/election meddling that will result in indictment of Biden. That would be perfect. 
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What’s adding to my consternation is that the Republicans are described as “assuring voters” that they’re still support a peaceful transition, but at best it’s been implicit criticism, and at worse it was Lindsey Graham’s non-assurance (emphasis mine):
"I promise you as a Republican, if the Supreme Court decides that Joe Biden wins, I will accept the result. The court will decide, and if Republicans lose, we’ll accept the result.”
He’s not going to accept the outcome of the election, he’s only going to accept what the Republican-packed Supreme Court will decide. He’s doubling down on Trump’s position, and we’re supposed to be reassured by this? I mean, Jesus Christ.
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“He’s trying to scare us” is becoming the counter narrative.
Last night’s Colbert show:
“Trump Wants To Undermine Your Faith In The Election So You Don’t Vote Him Out”
“What Trump really wants to do is undermine your faith in the election . . . the point is, we vote he goes. We need to bury him under mountain of votes.”
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That is true. It’s not that the republican party is now the party of trump, it’s that it’s always been the party of trump underneath, and I’ve come to the conclusion it’s not that the [mostly rural] Republicans have swung far to the right into fascism, but that the average “republican” has always been far over there, more than happy to vote in a Nazi at the first opportunity, and the only difference now is that the “saner heads” in the party, that once knew they had to live in the same world as the progressives and the more liberal urbanites, and thus needed to stay more to the center of politics to continue to have enough votes to maintain in office, no longer care a whit about any voter who is not a die-hard fascist, because they’ve managed to gerry-mander, and voter-suppress progressives and centrists enough that their votes aren’t needed to keep their position. Instead, they now only have to worry about being primaried by neo-nazis, so go out of their way to keep them happy.
However, there still are more progressives and centrists who are not not fans of trump then there are trumpists. (heck McCains wife publicly announced she was going to vote for the guy who helped beat her husband a couple elections ago). The problem is, the non-trumpists tend to be concentrated in the more populated urban areas, which means that schennigans (such as dismantling mail sorting machines to prevent absentee ballots from arriving on time, or sending thugs with ARs to scare voters away for the poles) only need to happen in a limited number of urban locations to prevent the non-trumpists from having their votes counted. (conveniently identifed by Bill Bar as “Anarchist zones” that will need to be suppressed). So, the voter suppression danger is real, and it’s high. A few fires or riots in a handful of poling places in certain cities can block millions of non-trump votes from being counted.
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Air is leaking out of that GoP float toy.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/23/gop-senators-anti-biden-report-420362
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It really looks like he’s not willing to risk it at all.
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I’m sorry but can you outline even one possible way to stop Trump’s SCOTUS nomination. This isn’t “capitulation” or “bailing out”. There is no legal way to stop McConnell short of assassination.
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Never mind whether he can pull off a second victory, however illegitimate, the more concerning thing is how he gets his ‘12 more years’ - so, for 2024 President Ivanka, VP, Donald? He’s a big Putin fan and that’s exactly how he got round the limitations by being PM to puppet Medvedev’s presidency.
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If he pulls it off despite actually losing the election, then he just stays in, making up some BS excuse about how his first term needs a do-over. If he loses the election, yet still manages to stay in office, the fix is in.
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Are there? Almost half of the U.S. population doesn’t vote in presidential elections. Some of that is voter suppression or other valid reasons, but that leaves an awful lot of people who are perfectly happy with the way things are- they may not be rabid Trump supporters, but their inaction is a tacit endorsement of America’s slow (well, pretty damn quick now) decay over the decades. People who can’t be bothered to cast a vote to prevent someone like Trump from coming into power can hardly be called progressive or even centrist. Trump may not have a majority of voters, but he’s got plenty of non-voters who will ensure that even slight election tampering will be enough for him to steal a victory. These fascist-lite go-alongs could absolutely bury Trump under an avalanche of votes too large to be denied, if they weren’t complicit.
Another good one:
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I mean, I really do hope that’s the case, but also we should be not assuming it’s the case, that he’s actually weak. It’s probably more dangerous to underestimate the problem than to overestimate it and be prepared to do what we need to do in order to preserve our democracy. I think part of the problem in Weimar Germany was that no one took the Nazis and Hitler seriously until he was firmly in power and by then it was too late. The fact that he is actually taking measures to ensure his second term, even with a loss, should be concerning to us and we should take it seriously rather than as a con.
So, I don’t know. I’m worried and we all should be. I would very much like to be wrong.
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Oh, don’t get me wrong.
Trump is going to pull all sorts of shit.
But he’s ANNOUNCING that shit early in order to A) test the waters to see if he can get away with it, B) demoralize and dismay people.
We need to PULL ALL THE FOOKING STOPS and do we needs to be done to (PRIOROTY ONE) get out enough voters to win the election, up and down the ticket, vote the GOP into the Outer Darkness and irrelevance; and to prepare for the legal chicanery and demagoguery bullshit.
Get your protest signs ready. Contact your local Indivisible chapter and ask how you can help organize.
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I certainly agree we should be aware and responsive to whatever he tries to pull! We’re in violent agreement there!
But I don’t want to downplay the threat he poses here, either. I’m afraid some will take that to mean that it will be okay, without us doing anything about it, as opposed to it will be okay if we take effective action!
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Which is just a repeat of last time…
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