Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Bonapartism

Yes, it really was that bad. Mussolini-style rants, revenge fantasies and now murderous cult symbols. With music!

Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s kidnapping of dozens of migrants as a political stunt is disturbing. More troubling is the help he seems to have gotten from the Department of Homeland Security, a pro-MAGA federal agency that’s been quietly amassing vast powers.

Venezuelan migrants gather at a ferry terminal in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. (Carlin Stiehl for The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

There are a lot of questions to be asked about Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s disgraceful stunt last week, tricking, kidnapping, and stranding a group of migrants in Martha’s Vineyard. One of the most important is the role in the scheme played by officers with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

In the press so far, the episode has largely, and with good reason, been framed around the loathsome figure of DeSantis. The governor, having built his planned political ascent on pretending to be Donald Trump to the point of shamelessly copying his mannerisms, clearly saw this as a way to prove he could be just as cruelly racist as the former president, whose administration infamously stole migrant children from their parents and tried to rehouse them with American families. And sure enough, the lawsuit filed by the migrants names and details the actions of only DeSantis and his cronies.

But then what about the words of Boston immigration lawyer Rachel Self, who briefed the press about what had happened to the migrants after meeting with them? Self told reporters that DHS agents had processed the migrants before boarding the chartered planes that took them to Massachusetts, that they’d “listed falsified addresses on the migrants’ paperwork,” naming “random homeless shelters all across the country” as their mailing addresses even when told they had no homes in the United States, and that the agents told the migrants they must check in with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices closest to those addresses within only a few days. The fact that those shelters were, according to Self, as far afield as Washington and Florida suggests they were deliberately being set up to fail and be deported.

“There is no other reason to list as someone’s mailing address a homeless shelter in Tacoma, Washington, when they ship him to Massachusetts,” a clearly livid Self had said.

Self’s charges were backed up by Elizabeth Ricci, a Tallahassee immigration lawyer, who insisted to the Orlando Sentinel that ICE “likely conspired with the governor’s office to pull off the stunt.”

“It couldn’t have been done without their direct involvement,” Ricci alleged.

If this is true, it’s not only doubly scandalous, but critically important to know as authorities work to ensure some accountability, and to prevent this kind of thing from being tried again. Unlike ladder-climbing politicians like DeSantis, immigration officers are, at least in theory, meant to be neutral actors simply enforcing the law — not immigration hawks working with unscrupulous lowlifes to deliberately sabotage the applications of asylum seekers.

It would be yet one more data point hinting at an alarming politicization of the DHS bureaucracy, particularly its immigration divisions. Under Trump, agencies like ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) made headlines for spying on anti-Trump protesters and putting journalists, activists, and immigration attorneys through extra screening, as well as putting out menacing videos like this one that showed militarized CPB officers training to put down civil unrest, and calling for the arrest of politicians from sanctuary cities.

This has come at the same time as revelations that the agencies have quietly assumed vast domestic surveillance powers. For years, ICE has been partnering with the data brokers who trade in the wide variety of intimate information the private sector collects on hundreds of millions of Americans, from addresses, phone numbers, and Department of Motor Vehicles records, to the geolocation data our phones are constantly pinging out. Best of all for these agencies, they can do it without a warrant, since they’re merely customers paying to access data that’s commercially available to anyone. Just last year, we learned that border officials are collecting and storing the content from as many as ten thousand electronic devices each year.

Given all this, it’s especially vital we find out for sure if Self’s charges are correct, that DHS agents really did abuse their power to help an anti-immigration official carry out what she calls a “sadistic lie” to fraudulently deport a group of asylum seekers.

Sadly, it would not be surprising. DHS agents and officials have already been variously accused of similar deceit and abuse. Human Rights Watch last year documented accusations against DHS officials in Del Rio, Texas, that they told migrants they’d be flown elsewhere in the United States for processing before deporting them to their home countries. A congressman accused DHS of putting out misleading photos showing processing facilities with few unaccompanied minors, when they had really just moved them to tents next door that were operated by different agencies. Its agents have been repeatedly accused of falsifying asylum seekers’ testimonies to undermine their cases.

The fact that a power-hungry politician would jeopardize desperate people’s hopes for escaping violence so that he could appeal to cruelty and hatred is disgusting, but perhaps not so surprising. But if he was being helped by the government agents of a sprawling bureaucracy responsible for dispassionately enforcing immigration law, we need to know if it’s true, and how far up it goes — and to aggressively clean house of such elements.

image.jpg?id=29379410&width=1245&height=

A majority of Republican voters favor establishing a national religion in the United States of America, according to the results of a survey conducted by Politico and the University of Maryland that was published on Wednesday.

The poll contained two key questions.

The first asked respondents if they believed that the Constitution allows for an official state religion.

Forty-three percent of Republicans said yes and fifty-seven percent said no.

The second question was if those polled would “favor or oppose the United States officially declaring the United States to be a Christian nation?”

Sixty-one percent of Republicans said they would, while only thirty-nine percent said that they would not.

The First Amendment to the Constitution explicitly forbids such an action:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Politico nonetheless noted in its report that “appeals to Christian nationalism have a long tradition in American history, though they have usually operated on the fringes. But the increasingly mainstream appearance of this belief in GOP circles makes sense if you look at new public opinion surveys. Our new University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll suggests that declaring the United States a Christian nation is a message that could be broadly embraced by Republicans in the midterms and 2024 presidential race. But our findings also see limits to its appeal — and over the long-term, Christian nationalism could be a political loser.”

It added that “much of the support for declaring the U.S. a Christian nation comes from Republicans who identify themselves as Evangelical or born-again Christians: Seventy-eight percent of this group support the move compared to 48 percent of other Republicans. Among Democrats, a slight majority of those identifying themselves as Evangelical or born-again Christians also backed such a declaration (52 percent), compared to just 8 percent of other Democrats.”

Nixon’s former White House counsel John Dean predicts violence from supporters if Trump is federally prosecuted

image.jpg?id=31797369&width=1245&height=

After the U.S. Supreme Court announced its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and officially overturned Roe v. Wade after 49 years, Billie Joe Armstrong — long-time lead singer for the punk/alternative rock band Green Day — expressed his outrage by telling a crowd in London that he planned to renounce his U.S. citizenship and move to the U.K. The London crowd cheered with applause when Armstrong declared that he no longer wanted to live in “that miserable f*****g excuse for a country.”

Whether or not the 50-year-old Armstrong will actually follow through remains to be seen, but if he did apply for citizenship in another developed country, he would have a good shot at being accepted — as the Green Day frontman is incredibly wealthy. Immigration laws in the U.K., Canada, Continental Europe, Australia and other parts of the developed world can be notoriously difficult for U.S. citizens, but they are easier to navigate if one has a lot of money. And according to a report by Mother Jones’ Michael Mechanic, wealthy Americans who are worried about the United States’ future have been seriously pursuing their dual citizenship options.

Mechanic, in an article published by Mother Jones on September 21, reports that the United States’ “societal dysfunction has progressed to the point where many well-heeled Americans are looking for an escape hatch.”

“This is not a time of optimism in America,” Mechanic reports. “People are reeling from inflation, gun violence, partisan rancor, race-baiting, a ruthlessly divisive Supreme Court decision, the long tail of a pandemic, and the very real prospect of political violence. A significant majority of the public, polls suggest, thinks the nation is headed in a bad direction. Nearly three-quarters of the people NBC News polled in August said as much, and more than a third predicted that things would get worse over the next five years.”

Mechanic cites David Lesperance, a Canada-born attorney who now lives in Poland, as an example of someone who specializes in “arranging foreign citizenships for extraordinarily wealthy people, from athletes and celebrities to founders, investors, and corporate bigwigs with assets ranging from about $25 million to $20 billion.”

“Over the years, Lesperance — who now lives in Gdynia, Poland — has helped hundreds of ultra-high-net-worth Americans relinquish their U.S. citizenship, usually in order to escape the long arm of the IRS,” Mechanic explains. “The United States is the only country besides Somalia that imposes taxes based on citizenship, not residency. Other U.S. clients just want a contingency plan — a legal ‘go bag’ containing an extra passport or two — that a family might deploy if the taxman ever gets too aggressive.”

Mechanic goes on to report that Lesperance and a Massachusetts-based attorney he often works with, Melvin Warshaw, have recently been observing a new trend that Lesperance describes as “clients engaging us not for tax reasons, but rather, to have an alternative should the U.S. turn into MAGA America.”

One American who really did renounce her U.S. citizenship is rock/R&B icon Tina Turner, who speaks fluent German and now lives in Switzerland. But according to Warshaw, Americans who are looking at dual citizenship options for political reasons aren’t necessarily planning to give up their U.S. citizenship. Warshaw says of these Americans, “They’re saying, ‘I want options. I don’t mind paying high income tax. It’s just things are getting real hot in the kitchen, and I want the ability to bug out — to go somewhere else for a while, because I don’t know what’s going to happen in the 2022 election. And I have little kids. I want a safe place for them.’”

Mechanic notes that “recent developments, particularly the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, have fueled demand for dual citizenship even among the non-wealthy,” adding, “But securing one is pricey if you don’t have a relative who is a citizen elsewhere.”

According to Lesperance, affluent Americans who are looking into dual citizenship with other countries fear political violence, authoritarianism and instability in the U.S.

Lesperance told Mother Jones, “There’s a significant fear there. They look at the daily news, they see, ‘OK, (Supreme Court Justice Samuel) Alito said this (the Dobbs decision) only deals with abortion, and (Justice Clarence) Thomas goes on in his dissent to say, no, we’re winding up for this. We’re throwing it back to the states.’ And then, they see politicians talking about a nationwide ban on abortion.”

Mechanic reports, “They are concerned, roughly in this order, Lesperance says, about the state of American democracy —

voter suppression, rejection of election outcomes, MAGA subversion — the outlawing of abortion and what the (Supreme) Court may do next, and the specter of domestic terrorism and mass shooting events. They aren’t necessarily liberal. One client, a billionaire hedge-funder who would call himself a Reagan Republican, Lesperance says, just didn’t want his little kids to have to deal with the trauma of active shooter drills at school…. The new clients also include ‘a bunch’ of former high-level government officials who served under Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush.”

Lesperance told Mother Jones, “Remember, to a MAGA, you’re a RINO if you served for W….. (They) really got freaked out, not only by Dobbs, but also, by Trump’s announcement that he’s gonna get rid of the civil service and replace it with loyal flunkies.”

Lesperance stressed that these clients — both liberals and non-MAGA conservatives — haven’t necessarily given up on the U.S., but they are looking for a possible escape route if things turn really ugly.

Lesperance told Mother Jones “They’re sitting there saying, ‘I have a giant target on my back. So, yes, I’m gonna vote. Yes, I’m gonna join organizations and fund organizations to get voter registration. I’ll call that fire prevention, but I’m also gonna get fire insurance. And you know, depending on the outcome in the midterms, and what outcome comes in the general, I want to be able to bug out — and I want to take my family.’”

Trump nods to QAnon with a song, while Carlson valorizes violence against teachers and LGBTQ allies for “grooming”

The Trump/MAGA 2022 blitzkrieg cited by President Joe Biden and so many others is for sure a multipronged attack with a clear goal — to obliterate democracy itself.

It’s now been two years since Steve Bannon vowed to “take over elections” and overthrow the “Deep State” — a government run by elected officials and civil servants dedicated to serving the public.

The oft-indicted Bannon instead has summoned a fascistic base that’s “hit the ground running,” demanding an iron fisted bureaucracy run by party loyalists bowing to Donald Trump’s every command. This reality is apparent in Bannon’s “precinct strategy,” in which he is pushing right-wing activists into positions of power at election boards and poll worker outposts throughout the U.S., where they can directly impact who can vote and how those votes are counted.

The dictatorial game plan embraces a wider range of attacks on our core institutions and democratic assumptions than even the president might imagine.

And there’s only one way to beat it: grassroots organizing from the progressive left.

Let’s count the ways the right wing is attacking democracy:

On January 6, 2021, the Trump/Bannon minions made clear that their “Stop the Steal” mob loves violence and sees outright murder as a legitimate way to trash an electoral outcome they can’t handle. “Just understand this: All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” Bannon said on his “War Room” podcast the night before. “It’s going to be moving. It’s going to be quick.” Also: “We’re converging on a point of attack,” he said in a different January 5 rant. “It’s coming to a head tomorrow.”
Gerrymandered MAGA state legislatures are now trashing the most directly democratic feature of American governance, the popular referendum, making it clear the public will means nothing to their “Christian” view of how we all must live.
The people of Florida twice voted to let people formerly convicted of felonies to vote. But following 20 arrests made in August by his new “Office of Election Crimes and Security,” Gov. Ron DeSantis has made it clear he will prevent eligible citizens (virtually all of them Black) from casting ballots, even after the state assured them they could vote, as per the mandate of the public referenda.
Ohio Republicans have shredded two state-wide referenda mandating un-gerrymandered districts while defying the state supreme court, which ordered the legislature to produce fair maps that conformed to the demands of the voters to be used in the upcoming 2020 midterms. With blatant contempt for the law and the will of the people, they’ve instead imposed maps on this fall’s election that are likely to unfairly sway a number of congressional seats while preserving a fascist supermajority in the state legislature. Similar things are happening in North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Texas, Arizona and elsewhere.
Multiple red states are also defying referenda on abortion, voting rights, and other core democracy issues, clearly signaling that the people’s mandates mean nothing to them.
GOP gerrymandering was enshrined in the 2010 elections, which were bought by the Koch Brothers and ignored by Obama Democrats, who failed to fight back. Thus far-right legislatures have metastasized throughout states that used to belong to the Confederacy, the “heartland,” Arizona, and elsewhere. These red legislatures are now spreading anti-democracy statutes aimed at enshrining dictatorial state-based regimes.
According to the Brennan Center, dozens of those legislatures have enacted scores of restrictions denying the right to vote and to have those votes counted, especially if cast by young citizens of color.
Those dictates include Georgia’s ban on giving food and water to people waiting in line to vote, as well as widespread attacks on the ability of people of youth and color to get ballots, to vote at all, to have access to drop boxes, to vote by mail, and many other simple mechanisms that make democracy work.
As Election Day approaches, legions of election-denying acolytes of Bannon and Trump are filling local election board posts that will let them intimidate eligible citizens and deny ballots to those they may not like. According to the Brennan Center, election workers have been facing death threats, “doxing” (publicization of their home addresses aimed to fuel harassment), outright violence and forced removals from their positions as part of an overall right-wing campaign to fulfill Bannon’s call to “take over elections.”
By severely restricting poll access, eliminating early voting, erasing voting stations and overall making it far harder for working people to vote, the MAGA autocrats impose de facto poll taxes on those who cannot afford to spend whole days waiting to cast a ballot… often only to face a Bannonite bully waiting to pitch it in a waste basket.
MAGA bullies have weaponized the death threat — in person, by phone, in writing — to terrorize election officials, school board members, teachers, FBI agents, district attorneys (and their families), destroying vital nodes of election protection.
By guaranteeing endless voting station foul-ups and needless delays, Bannonite poll workers now have the dangerous ability to impose impossibly long waits on citizens vulnerable to discrimination and disenfranchisement, especially as armed militias threaten them as they wait in long lines… where they will also be denied food and water.
In the now-pending Moore v. Harper case, the rightist U.S. Supreme Court could well seek to use the bogus “Independent Legislature Theory” to let gerrymandered MAGA/Trump democracy-hating state legislatures seize control of the Electoral College and usurp the public’s right to choose the next president.
Moore would enshrine for 2024 the Trump strategy of flooding Congress with fake state electors chosen by gerrymandered legislators to make Trump, DeSantis, or someone like them dictator for life, no matter who the voting public actually chooses.
The 2022 and 2024 elections will also be swarmed with fake “recounts” like those in Arizona in the 2020 election, challenging any pro-democracy outcomes MAGA forces dislike.

MAGA attempts to kill democracy are a backlash against demographic trends that could spell disaster for Republicans down the road if the mechanisms of U.S. democracy are left intact.

The big-picture reality is that all these desperate MAGA attempts to kill democracy are a backlash against demographic trends that could spell disaster for Republicans down the road if the mechanisms of U.S. democracy are left intact.

The Supreme Court overturn of Roe v. Wade — which gave a sudden rush of power to gerrymandered legislatures — has mobilized the nation’s voting majority in ways that have already overwhelmed right-wing constituencies in Kansas and numerous once-conservative congressional districts.

More than half the U.S. electorate is female. So is the voting public born after 1981. Our diverse multiracial LGBTQ-friendly Millennial/Zoomer constituency is so deeply attached to democracy that in 2020 it voted more than 3-2 to oust Trump. Based on Pew Research findings, among others, the numbers in 2022 and 2024 are projected to be even more progressive.

The rise of the Millennial/Zoomers is accompanied by a drastic drop in right-wing Evangelism and a “Christian” faith rooted in racial bigotry, sexual puritanism and Orwellian malaise.

Bannon and his MAGA minions are well aware that the rise of a diverse, tolerant and increasingly progressive voting constituency in this country means their hate-based movement is doomed.

Trump’s 2020 losing margin was in fact the third largest for any incumbent in U.S. history (behind only Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter). The January 6 hearings, the flood of crony indictments, even Ukraine’s stunning resistance, all portend a deeply human revulsion against the kinds of dictatorial regimes made all too real by the likes of Trump and Putin.

But the lead-up to 2022 also makes clear that corporate Democratic “business as usual” will not be sufficient to stop an armed, multilayered, anti-democratic coup.

So, what will?

On January 5, 2021 — the day before the Capital coup attempt — progressive democracy scored one of U.S. history’s most improbable electoral victories.

Guided by the Atlanta NAACP’s Ray McClendon and the computerized strategizing of Andrea Miller’s Center for Common Ground, grassroots campaigners in Georgia — mostly operating outside the Democratic Party — elected to the U.S. Senate the Black preacher Raphael Warnock and a young Jewish filmmaker named Jon Ossof.

The corporate Democrats’ ongoing attacks against young progressive candidates have underscored their aversion to necessary change, even in the face of overt fascism.

The earth-shattering dual runoff victories gave the Democrats their vital 50-50 Upper House tie.

But it would not have happened had the corporate party run its usual media-based campaign without the massive grassroots upheaval coordinated by Miller and McClendon. By all accounts, decisive turnouts in Democratic strongholds of youth and color made the difference.

Steve Bannon is well aware of all that. As evidenced by his “War Room” podcasts, he has been consistently demanding door-to-door “relational campaigning,” for establishing party storefronts in key right-wing strongholds, for a “boots-on-the-ground” takeover of the electoral apparatus, starting with poll workers, election board officials, secretaries of state.

The corporate Democrats’ ongoing attacks against young progressive candidates have underscored their aversion to necessary change, even in the face of overt fascism. Millions of donor dollars still sink into endless TV advertising that does less and less to shape electoral outcomes.

Despite a wave of angry activism among Millennial/Zoomers demanding the party move left, there’s little evidence its corporate gerontocracy is ready to embrace the generational wave that must happen if the Bannonites are to be defeated.

The Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade has aroused an army of angry American women and trans people.

But millions of pro-choice voters now marching toward the polls could be stopped in their tracks if the Bannonite take-over of the voting apparatus is not neutralized.

And the victories in those two Georgia Senate races aren’t likely to repeat unless the Democrats embrace the grassroots campaigning that opens the only sure route to saving our democracy.

Yesli Vega celebrates her Republican primary win for the Seventh Congressional District in Woodbridge, Virginia, on June 21. | Nathan Howard/Getty Images

If there’s a red wave in 2022, it will be powered by Latina candidates.

Part of The power and potential of Latino voters, from The Highlight, Vox’s home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

Anna Paulina Luna is ready for people to get to know the “new GOP.”

Luna, 33, is an Air Force veteran, political activist, and likely future Congress member representing Florida’s 13th District, a seat that got safer for Republicans in the latest round of redistricting. She’s also a granddaughter of Mexican immigrants and one of a record 43 Republican Latina candidates who ran for House seats this year, 17 of whom have won their primaries so far.

“I think that the new GOP that exists is not your stereotype of what it used to be,” she tells Vox. “We’ve had to really push back against this narrative that Republicans are just older white males, which to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that. However, it’s false. I mean, we’re so diverse.”

The “new GOP” Luna references doesn’t sound all that different in its policy goals from the one of years past. But if she and other members of her cohort win, the party will certainly look different. Currently, just 16 percent of House Republicans are women, while 9 percent are people of color. Should Luna and other Latina GOP candidates win this year, it would mark major progress for Republican efforts to broaden the party’s slate of lawmakers — and appeal to voters — an existential issue in a country that’s poised to be majority-minority by 2050.

Other Latina candidates vying for competitive seats include former Sen. Ted Cruz staffer Cassy Garcia in Texas’s 28th, former Happy Valley Mayor Lori Chavez-DeRemer in Oregon’s Fifth, and Prince William County official Yesli Vega in Virginia’s Seventh.

There are two big factors driving the surge in Republican Latina candidates this year, says Olivia Perez-Cubas of Winning for Women, a group dedicated to electing Republican women.

“There’s also growing frustration in the Hispanic community that Democrats no longer reflect their values”

“There has been a concerted effort on the right to focus on the Hispanic and Latino community, and to recruit more diverse candidates who are reflective of their district,” she tells Vox. “There’s also growing frustration in the Hispanic community that Democrats no longer reflect their values, and we’re seeing more candidates willing to run because of it.”

Both factors contributed to Luna’s candidacy. She was formally brought into GOP politics after being recruited to lead Hispanic engagement for Turning Point USA, a right-wing advocacy group. And she feels the Democratic Party hasn’t spoken to her views, particularly on border security or the economy.

Luna and other candidates also say that Democratic missteps — including poor outreach and first lady Jill Biden’s comments comparing the Latino community to “breakfast tacos” — have shown just how out of touch its leaders are with Latino voters.

“I think the pandering that they’ve done to how they’ve treated us, you know, we’re not stupid, and they don’t own our vote,” she says.

A long game pays off for Republicans

The GOP has been laying the foundation to become more diverse since 2012 — and it’s accelerated these efforts since last cycle.

After losing the presidential election in 2012 — when candidate Mitt Romney won just 30 percent of Latino voters — the Republican National Committee commissioned a postmortem report. It concluded the RNC needed to “make certain that we are actively engaging women and minorities in our efforts” when it came to candidate recruitment and that “we need to strengthen our farm team to ensure that we are competitive in up-ballot elections in the future when the electorate will be considerably more diverse.”

The idea was that electing a more representative pool of officials to state and local office could help Republicans reach a broader base of voters, and establish a deep bench for federal seats down the line.

That RNC report boosted efforts like the Republican State Leadership Committee’s “Future Majority Project,” which is dedicated to identifying and backing women and people of color for Republican seats at the state level. The project had some success including wins by 43 of 240 recruits in 2014, and some participants — like now-Rep. Young Kim (R-CA), going on to higher office.

In 2020, Trump’s share of Latino voters grew by 8 percentage points compared to 2016

Such progress looked likely to be squandered in 2016, when Donald Trump entered the Republican primary and trounced the competition on a message that seemed tailor-made to put off Hispanic voters: He infamously described some immigrants from Mexico as “rapists,” questioned a federal judge’s ability to fairly make decisions because he is Mexican American, and pledged harsh border enforcement and a wall along the US border with Mexico.

Despite Trump’s xenophobic and racist rhetoric, his campaign invested in connecting with more religious Latino voters, and ended up seeing numbers consistent with Romney’s.

All the while, Republicans at the state and federal levels continued to work on efforts like the ones recommended in the 2013 report. As chair of House Republican recruitment in 2018, Rep. Elise Stefanik focused on bringing on more women, Hispanic, and African American candidates, who she described as often more effective than white, male candidates in swing districts. And in 2021, the RSLC established the “Right Leaders Network,” which is dedicated to providing mentorship and training for women and candidates of color.

Ahead of 2020, Trump and the Republican National Committee made key investments in wooing Latino voters as well, including opening up field offices in predominantly Latino areas. This cycle, the RNC has set up more than 30 community centers including at least a dozen focused on Hispanic voters. These centers serve as key locations for campaign events and voter registration, as well as other social gatherings, according to RNC spokesperson Danielle Alvarez.

Ben Gray/AP
Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel speaks to a packed room at the opening of the RNC’s new Hispanic Community Center in Suwanee, Georgia, on June 29.

Such investments appeared to pay off in 2020; Trump’s share of Latino voters grew by 8 percentage points compared to 2016, according to data from Catalist, a Democratic firm. And several places saw rightward shifts: Zapata County in South Texas flipped from previously voting Democratic to voting for Trump, while multiple counties in that region and in South Florida shifted right, with Joe Biden winning by much smaller margins than former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton did. Florida Reps. Maria Salazar and Carlos Gimenez, both of whom had support from Republican leadership, flipped Democrat-held districts.

Of the 14 Democratic-held House seats that Republicans flipped last cycle, 13 of those were won by a candidate that was either a woman or person of color, the Christian Science Monitor reported. Additionally, Republicans more than doubled the number of women in their House caucus, from 13 to 29.

That meant Republicans narrowed Democrats’ control of the House to a super-slim margin, a feat they chalked up to the strength of candidates in swing districts. Essentially, one big lesson Republicans took from 2020 was that diverse candidates can provide electoral advantages.

“We learned that we could overperform in new kinds of districts by recruiting compelling candidates with interesting stories and different profiles that reflect the districts they are trying to represent,” says Calvin Moore, a spokesperson for the Congressional Leadership Fund, a political action committee endorsed by House Republican leadership.

One big lesson Republicans took from 2020 was that diverse candidates can provide electoral advantages

In practice, that has led the GOP, and notable outside groups, to put more resources behind a wide range of candidates.

“For minority candidates who are not in the political industry whatsoever, it can be really intimidating to jump in and run for office if you have the passion, but you don’t have the infrastructure to do that,” says Lorna Romero, an Arizona-based Republican strategist who previously served as a communications director for John McCain’s 2016 Senate campaign.

Such efforts have significant support from the most powerful Republicans.

“I think that Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, the Republican leadership, has been the most receptive leadership group on these issues, of making sure … we’re recruiting good candidates in every part of the country,” says Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), a founder of the Hispanic Leadership Trust, a political action committee started in May that’s dedicated to supporting Hispanic and Latino candidates. For example, McCarthy has personally backed Juan Ciscomani, a former adviser for Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, while party leaders advocated for Chavez-DeRemer to run in Oregon.

Other candidates — like Luna, Vega, and Garcia — have been elevated as part of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s Young Guns program, which highlights strong campaigns to donors and provides national exposure.

“They’re very much encouraging all candidates from different walks of life to step up to the plate,” Luna told Vox.

Brett Carlsen/Getty Images
Anna Paulina Luna, right, speaks with conservative commentator Candace Owens during a taping of her show in Nashville, Tennessee, on January 4.

The mentoring and attention provided by initiatives like the Young Guns program and Right Leaders Network have helped candidates build out their infrastructure, but so has money from a slew of political action committees.

In addition to the Hispanic Leadership Trust, there’s been an explosion of PACs dedicated to funding Republican women candidates as well as minority candidates. Both Stefanik’s Elevate PAC and Winning for Women were started to bolster the number of women in the GOP conference. Catalyst PAC was also founded by Republican strategists Larissa Martinez and Rina Shah in 2019 to promote candidates who are underrepresented in the Republican Party including people of color and LGBTQ candidates.

Together, these PACs — as well as the Congressional Leadership Fund — have spent heavily to boost Latina candidates. For instance, CLF spent $164,000 on ads to support Monica De La Cruz in Texas’s 15th District and $200,000 to support Mayra Flores in Texas’s 34th District during their primaries.

This influx of money and infrastructure make the process of running for office more feasible for candidates who were previously reluctant to take it on.

This influx of money and infrastructure make the process of running for office more feasible

Those candidates — including at least 17 Latina candidates who’ve won House primaries this year — span the GOP’s ideological spectrum. Some, like Flores, are more conservative and have backed hardline immigration policies much like Trump’s. Others, including lawyer and former radio host Yuripzy Morgan, in Maryland’s safely Democratic Third District, are closer to the center and more focused on pocketbook issues.

“I know it is a bit of a dirty word in politics. But you know what, the majority of Americans are moderate, I am moderate. And I’m not afraid to say it,” Morgan tells Vox.

Multiple Republicans emphasized the importance of backing candidates with “authenticity” and connections to their communities. Among those running in Texas, for example, Monica De La Cruz is a small business owner, Flores is a respiratory care therapist who worked with Covid-19 patients, and Garcia is a former congressional staffer. Some, including Luna and Vega, also have experience in the military or law enforcement; Flores and Irene Armandariz-Jackson, a real estate agent and anti-abortion activist running in Texas’s 16th District, are married to partners who’ve worked as border patrol agents.

Several candidates are running in swing districts, where Republicans hope they will be more appealing to independent and moderate voters. In 2022, at least 10 of the most competitive battleground House districts — the ones that have been listed as toss-ups by Cook Political Report as of early September — have Republican challengers that are either women or people of color. The GOP has a good chance of retaking the House this fall, and it’s counting on candidates like De La Cruz, Garcia, and Chavez-DeRemer to make that happen.

Brandon Bell/Getty Images
US Rep. Mayra Flores, second from right, speaks on a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas, on August 5.

Republicans are likely looking beyond 2022 with their recruitment efforts as well.

The party’s ability to connect with different minority groups is becoming more critical as the country becomes increasingly more diverse: In 2000, Hispanic voters made up 7 percent of the US electorate. In 2018, they comprised 13 percent. According to a US Census projection, the US population will be majority-minority by 2045.

“The math just doesn’t add up for Republicans in places like Texas if they can’t bring people of color to their side. This is a last ditch effort to hold onto power without actually changing their policies,” argues Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the executive director of progressive advocacy group NextGen America and founder of Jolt, an organization dedicated to mobilizing Latino voters in Texas.

Republicans believe Democrats are giving them a big opportunity

Republicans see a major opening with Latino voters both because of the support they’ve already received, and their belief that Democrats are neither doing sufficient outreach nor speaking to the top concerns that voters have.

“We often hear … minority voters feel like Democrats are taking their vote for granted,” the RNC’s Alvarez tells Vox. Strategists within the Democratic Party, too, have repeatedly warned the party that they needed to get involved in voter outreach earlier in the campaign cycle, rather than doing so just ahead of Election Day.

While Democrats are preparing to run campaigns centered on abortion access, their climate achievements, canceling student loan debt, and their success in lowering the cost of certain prescription drugs, Republicans argue voters — including Latino voters — are more worried about energy costs, education, and public safety. Many GOP candidates say that voters in their district are most concerned about the same issue: the economy.

“This inflation affects everyone,” says Armendariz-Jackson, who is running in Texas’s 16th. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Black, brown, or white. We’re all hurting.”

Woke Democrats think Hispanics are tacos. Unfortunately for them, we’re voters.

Help me beat Joe Biden’s “Latinx” puppet.

Buy your shirt ➡️ https://t.co/gpDmOVxUj2 pic.twitter.com/8cNdYvol5B

— Cassy Garcia for Congress (@CasandraLGarcia) July 12, 2022

Republicans believe focusing on the economy will pay particular dividends with Latino voters because it’s also a way to talk about shared values, says Geraldo Cadava, a Northwestern University political scientist and author of the book The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of An American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump.

“I think Latino conservatives are doubling down on free enterprise, they are still preaching a prosperity gospel, that wealth creation is the specialty of the Republican Party,” he tells Vox.

Broadly, Republicans feel Democrats still treat the group as a monolith, and have been using Jill Biden’s “breakfast taco” gaffe to sell Latino voters on that idea. Garcia’s campaign, for example, is selling a line of merch that reads “unique as a taco.”

“I think Democrats have … put us in a box where if we’re Latino we’re supposed to be Democrats, we’re supposed to want illegal immigration,” says Armendariz-Jackson. “And that couldn’t be further from the truth, especially those who have immigrated to the United States legally.”

What will representation deliver?

Latina candidates Vox spoke with were clear about why they felt the Republican Party was a good fit for them. But the rise of Latina Republican candidates has prompted debate about what such representation means when Republicans have promoted xenophobic rhetoric and harmful policies directed at Latino people.

Some Republicans argue that Trump’s racist remarks aren’t offensive to Latino voters, and that they’ve been taken out of context. “You have many Latino conservatives flatly denying that Trump was saying anything racist against their community as a whole because they say that he was talking about a very specific group of immigrants who had broken the law by entering the country without papers,” says Cadava.

Strategists and candidates note, too, that the GOP is bigger than Trump’s particular views. It’s a dynamic that reflects an ongoing tension in the party, which has tried to make its tent a little bigger, while being dominated by Trump and other leaders who espouse racist and xenophobic viewpoints.

Despite Trump’s past rhetoric, the party is successfully diversifying. And that has led to the rise of candidates who are able to deliver Trump’s talking points in bold new ways. Because Latino candidates share certain aspects of their identity with the voters they’re speaking to, they can sometimes be more effective messengers for Republican ideas than white men.

“If you put Donald Trump and Mayra Flores side by side, they are largely saying the same thing”

“If you put Donald Trump and Mayra Flores side by side, they are largely saying the same thing,” said Cadava. “But for Latinos, hearing that same message from Mayra Flores would be more compelling to them than from Trump.”

Critics of the GOP’s effort to expand its Latino base argue its central problem is that the Republican platform does little to center the needs of Latino voters.

“Republicans have done a great job showing off their Latina candidates, but they’ve done a terrible job addressing the actual concerns of the Latino community,” says Maria Teresa Kumar, president and CEO of Voto Latino, a group dedicated to turning out Latino voters, in a statement. Republicans have opposed policies like the Affordable Care Act and a $15 minimum wage, both of which would disproportionately benefit Latinos.

But Republicans — including the party’s Latina candidates — say such points of view are shortsighted and narrow-minded. Most of all, they say, arguments like Kumar’s miss the genuine connection that Republican messaging has for a segment for voters.

“That’s kind of offensive that just because you’re of a certain descent, you need to vote a certain way. And if you don’t vote that way, you’re not representing your community,” says Romero, the Republican strategist. “That’s one of the things that upsets me most.”

Kenneth McCallion battled Trump in court — and says Merrick Garland has “overwhelming evidence” for conviction

Hitler studied and learned from the United States. From Indian Reservations to Anti-Miscegenation laws, the U.S. provided a roadmap to Concentration Camps.

Hitler’s American Model by Yale Law School professor James Whitman is a 220-page bombshell. It should be required reading in every high school. It tells the story of how German attorneys studied U.S. law, culture and history to develop the legal underpinnings of German fascism.

There is only one hero in this book, Louis B. Brodsky, a Jewish Manhattan magistrate. On September 6, 1935, he ordered the release of five anti-fascist rioters who had been among a U.S. crowd of a thousand who tore down a swastika flag on the German liner SS Bremen. A lowly judge who usually dealt with bail hearings and night court, Brodsky wrote a fiery opinion calling Nazism “a revolt against civilization” and the swastika flag a “black flag of piracy.”

A diplomatic crisis ensued. The U.S. State Department sent a note of regret to Berlin that “the German national emblem” had not been respected.” Hitler, seizing on the incident, announced that the swastika flag and Blood and Citizenship Laws would be adopted at the “Party Rally of Freedom” nine days later.

Known as the Nuremburg Laws, these statutes focused on citizenship, and sex and reproduction. The attorneys drafting them were determined to establish a regime founded on definitive racial categories and to prevent mixed marriages between Jews and “Aryans.”

Hitler’s American Model

In the 1930’s, they found plenty of legal precedents in the U.S. Thirty states had anti-miscegenation laws. In fact, the U.S. stood at the forefront in the creation of de jure and de facto second-class citizenship for Black people, Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, Puerto Ricans and other people of color and ethnic groups. And it was admired in Germany as an innovative world leader in “Nordic,” white supremacy and conquest.

Reading Whitman’s book one learns that Hitler was sitting in prison and dictating Mein Kampf to Rudolph Hess when Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924. The act laid out preferences for Northern Europeans, restrictions on people from Southern and Eastern Europe, and bans on everyone else. Hitler praised this development: “The racially pure and still unmixed German has risen to become the master of the American continent and will remain so as long as he does not fall victim to racial pollution,” he wrote.

Harry Laughlin, an influential American eugenicist who served as an expert advisor to Congress on immigration, praised the 1924 law as a political breakthrough in the adoption of “scientific” racism. He was not alone. During the 1930s, U.S. lawyer Madison Grant promoted the sterilization of people with mental and physical disabilities while engaging in a friendly back and forth with German eugenicists dedicated to creating the “master race.” A grotesque German law which authorized killing “useless eaters” — the incurably ill, elderly people and people with various physical and mental conditions — was the handiwork of these despicable eugenicists.

Whitman writes that the Jim Crow South and segregation drew Nazi legal experts’ interest, but after debating the pros and cons, they concluded that merely separating Jews and Gentiles would not work because of the extraordinary economic power of the Jewish community (which they were eager to get their hands on).

Instead they zeroed in on western expansion and the genocide of Native Americans as a model for their own ambition to conquer Eastern Europe, subjugate its citizens and force all Jews onto “reservations” (which in practice became concentration camps).

As early as 1928, Hitler was making speeches glorifying the way Americans had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.”

Surprisingly, German attorneys believed that the U.S. went too far in making “one-drop of blood” (or one Black ancestor) the legal standard for defining who is African American. Under Nuremburg law, it took three Jewish grandparents to qualify as a Jew. And ultimately, they decided against criminalizing miscegenation.

But if you still think fascism is “un-American,” read this book. It’s as American as apple pie and now, forced motherhood.

Crossposted from Freedom Socialist Party

Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Bonapartism

Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s kidnapping of dozens of migrants as a political stunt is disturbing. More troubling is the help he seems to have gotten from the Department of Homeland Security, a pro-MAGA federal agency that’s been quietly amassing vast powers.

A long game pays off for Republicans

Republicans believe Democrats are giving them a big opportunity

What will representation deliver?

Log in with your credentials

Forgot your details?