Giving Permission to Political Violence

From the Wanderland on The Dispatch

Maricopa County is where you go to catch congenital syphilis and up on the latest shenanigans from the Trump cult.

About the latter: A mob shouting about “revolution” and such stormed a meeting of the board of supervisors in late February, with the elected county officials having to be escorted from the venue by security guards backed up by sheriff’s deputies. I probably don’t have to tell you this was a Trumpist mob, and not one full of would-be Jacobins, Antifa, Greta Thunberg followers, or “defund the police!” types.

“I’m here today to put you on public notice and I’m here to inform you that you are not our elected officials,” one of the leaders, bearing the possible aptronym Michelle Klann, declared. “None of you have ever signed an oath of office to the Republic of Arizona, instead you’ve signed an oath of office to a foreign corporation, which means this is an act of insurrection. … Due to all the voter fraud, you have never been formally voted in. Acting as if you are authority over the people is a direct act of treason.” Klann is the founder of a pro-Trump organization, and there were the usual MAGA hats and Trumpist regalia in the mob. Klann really got cooking in her statement: “Your act of treason will be grounds for an immediate military tribunal. We do not need to tell you the penalties for treason.”

That’s quite a two-step, from “all the voter fraud” to firing squads.

If you close your eyes, you can see, and possibly smell, the scene. And to be clear: In referencing “penalties for treason,” Klann was talking about murdering those county officials. That’s how cowards threaten violence against their perceived enemies—not forthrightly and honestly, but with an “I’m just sayin’,” a moral fig leaf. It is contemptible.

Klann is associated with something called the Peoples [sic] Operation Restoration, the website of which is graced by an image of Donald Trump in 18th-century military garb, seated atop a white charger. And what is this Peoples [sic] Operation Restoration? Funny you should ask! “The Peoples [sic] Operation Restoration is the mechanism by which the coordinated strategy, planning, and specific objectives are delivered to the army of light comprised of millions of individuals worldwide.” Click one or two links deep and you’re into recommendations for “lightworkers.” (Remember when Barack Obama was a lightworker? Those were the days.) These right-wing crackpots use the turgid and bombastic prose of 20th-century communists (“the mechanism by which the coordinated strategy, planning, and specific objectives are delivered”) but their views are ultimately theological: army of light, etc.

I keep telling everybody this is a cult, and the members of said cult keep telling everybody it is a cult. One of these days, people are going to believe one of us. This is the beating heart of the Republican Party in 2024—kooks and cultists who greet Donald Trump as a messiah.

Would you like to see Klann’s full statement, published later on social media? Of course you would. Here it is:

That is how you build a permission structure for political violence. First, you undermine the legitimacy of institutions as the right has been doing with election procedures and the left has been doing with (among other targets) the Supreme Court and police departments. Next, you come up with some explicit rationale for violence: that you and your fellow partisans are merely meting out penalties for treason or enforcing revolutionary justice, that we are facing some life-or-death crisis (political, religious, ecological) that necessitates setting aside ordinary rules and norms, that the other side is about to strike and that your only hope is to strike preemptively, etc. And, finally, you need a precipitating event. The left’s favorite kind of precipitating event has long been acts of racial violence: the assassination Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the acquittal of the LAPD officers charged in the 1991 Rodney King beating, the killing of George Floyd. An element of the right—a non-trivial element—is currently working itself up for violence on the pretext that the upcoming presidential election is going to be stolen from Donald Trump. Trump himself, who insists the last election was stolen from him, already is talking up the inevitability of fraud in November.

As a practical campaign matter, talk of electoral fraud is difficult to work with. It tends to depress turnout—as Republicans learned to their dismay when Trump cost them the Senate in 2021 with his temper tantrum in Georgia—because it makes it look like you are expecting to lose and that your vote doesn’t matter because it won’t really count. Trump, very likely acting on the advice of somebody a good deal less stupid than he, has begun rolling out the slogan “Too Big To Rig,” encouraging the Trump faithful to turn out in spite of the fact that our elections are, according to his considered analysis, illegitimate. This is, of course, a very Trumpian approach, very heads-I-win/tails-you-lose: If he loses, he has a built-in excuse to spare his fragile psyche; if he wins—then he wins, and nobody is going to bother very much about how he was saying, just the day before yesterday, that the elections were fixed.

I write this with some hesitation: I wouldn’t want to be working at a voting site in November—and, if Trump is much behind in the polls (which themselves will be denounced as fraudulent if Trump lags), then those who are working at polling stations or in election offices would do well to take serious security precautions. Portland and New York City may riot afterward if Trump wins, but those cranks in Maricopa County—and others like them around the country, many of whom are prominent in local Republican politics—are laying the groundwork for pre-election violence.

If you think I am overstating the role of these people in the GOP, consider that Marjorie Taylor Greene was, only a few years ago, one of these cranks, thirsting after Facebook clicks, claiming that the Parkland massacre never happened and that those dead children and grieving parents were “crisis actors,” a claim clung to by such figures as American Greatness writer Julie Kelly. You can find Greene in Congress and Kelly on Fox News—which doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the direction of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, but tells you a great deal.

Like most durable conspiracy theories, the rigged election stuff intersects, if only a little, with the truth. Did social media companies unfairly and irresponsibly try to suppress the New York Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s shenanigans? Yes. Does that mean Mark Zuckerberg “rigged the election” for Joe Biden? No. The most serious criticism of the 2020 election, in my view, involves the non-legislative change to mail-in ballot rules in Pennsylvania. But even the most alarming reading of that situation does not give any weight to the broader claims that the 2020 presidential election was secured for Joe Biden by fraudulent means, that this was undertaken by corrupt voting-machine companies in league with … was it Venezuelan intelligence operatives? I think it was.

If you’ve spent much time around people suffering from partisan dementia, you’ll know the style of argument: Begin with False Claim A, and when the falsehood of A is asserted by an interlocutor, then move on to True or Plausible Sub-Claim B, which does not establish the truth of False Claim A but which could be read to support a more vague general claim (such as media unfairness) to which False Claim A speaks. Move on through claims of varying degrees of falsity in the hopes of prevailing by means of exhaustion. If you can figure out a way to make a heap of money while doing that, then congratulations, you are Sean Hannity.

The amount of voting fraud in the United States is not zero. From time to time, political operatives are arrested, tried, and convicted of voting fraud. Sometimes, that takes the form of stuffing ballot boxes and other old-fashioned measures; sometimes, it takes grotesque and ugly forms such as attempting to farm votes from mentally disabled patients in assisted-living facilities; sometimes, it takes exactly the form rightist critics often insist it does, exploiting the lack of oversight in mail-in ballots to cast votes in the name of people who are not actually engaged in voting themselves. There are votes from ineligible voters, voters who vote in multiple jurisdictions, etc. All of that is a matter of public record, established to the high standards of evidence demanded by our criminal justice system.

From this, two things might reasonably be concluded: 1) The people engaged in this criminal activity—which can and does result in jail time—must expect it to produce meaningful results; and 2) The voting fraud we have detected isn’t the only voting fraud there is. While there is no good way to estimate how much undetected fraud is at play, we can reasonably assume that it is not zero. That does not mean, however, that we can assume it is widespread, systematic, and effectively changing the results of major elections—much less presidential elections.

Voting fraud seems most likely to produce real results in smaller elections, and that is where we have most often seen it detected: in obscure primaries and in local elections. Throwing a presidential election is a very different matter. Assume, arguendo, that every vote cast in the 2020 presidential election in Florida was legitimate. In order for Biden to have stolen the state from Trump, he would have had to fraudulently close a gap of 371,686 votes. In Georgia, the closest 2020 state, Trump would have needed nearly 12,000 votes to have stolen the election from Biden. As a practical matter, that isn’t an easy thing to do—as Donald Trump found out when he tried to strongarm state election authorities into corruptly throwing the election to him.

Where we have seen evidence of real voting fraud, the numbers have been relatively small: a few dozen votes in a utility board election in Texas, a modest number of votes cast by a corrupt Philadelphia judge of elections (of course!) who “stuffed the ballot box by literally standing in a voting booth and voting over and over, as fast as he could,” etc. In Texas, which has been aggressive about prosecuting election fraud, a report from the attorney general’s office covering a 17-year period reported prosecutions of 154 people on a total of 534 charges, the majority of which (310) were mail-in ballot fraud charges; 189 were for illegal voting, and 159 were for voting fraud carried out by those “assisting” voters. Another 500 charges were pending prosecution. That’s not nothing. (The cases, as you might expect, vary in quality.) Texas is not generally well-served by its venal and eternally troubled attorney general, but his office is right to take these matters seriously and to prioritize their prosecution as a matter of civic hygiene.

But none of this is the stuff out of which stolen presidential elections are made. Pretending otherwise is simply creating a pretext for political violence to which the crackpots who today dominate the Republican Party already are predisposed. And at the top of the Republican Party is a man who celebrates the January 6 riot and calls those convicted on related crimes “hostages.” And why wouldn’t he? The riot was a sideshow, but it was a necessary part of Trump’s broader attempt to stage a coup d’état by nullifying the election of Joe Biden and illegitimately holding on to power himself. His apologists protest that Trump attempted to do this through litigation and other legal means, which is partly true and entirely irrelevant: The list of similar coups that came packaged in some sort of legal wrapper or adorned with constitutional embroidery is long and includes the putsches that brought to power such figures as Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet, Rafael Trujillo, and other practitioners of caudillismo.

No, the combination of street violence with putative legal sanction is a very old one. That this republic was made to depend on the very flexible backbone of such a creature as Mike Pence is a sobering thought. If Trump should manage to maneuver a contingent election into the House, does anybody seriously think that the invertebrate speaker of that chamber would do anything other than his master’s bidding? The constitutional forms might be satisfied, but it would be no less a coup for that. And it is likely that any such electoral drama would be complemented by street violence, as it was on January 6, 2021. That is the shape such coups take. Octavian’s seizure of extraconstitutional powers—beginning his transformation from Octavian to Augustus—was ratified by the Roman senate. That did not make him any less of a tyrant, or his assumed powers any less illegitimate.

The kooks in Arizona are only following the script that was written for them by Trump himself: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” Those are Trump’s words, verbatim. He wasn’t talking about Chinese automotive imports.

They aren’t making any secret about any of this.

Words About Words

One of my least favorite Trumpisms is his cowardly way of framing B.S. declarations: “Some people are saying,” “Many people are saying,” that sort of thing. Of course, he is not the only person who does that. From Marie Arana, writing in the New York Times:

Does anybody really think that most Latinos are rootless? That most Latinos are transients? That most Latinos are illegal? Find me one person who actually thinks that. I want to meet him.

Ain’t nobody thinks that. What Arana is engaged in is a sophomoric rhetorical way of not dealing with the fact that some Latino immigrants—and some Chinese immigrants and Irish immigrants and Iraqi immigrants—are illegal.

Arana continues with a favorite of mine:

Farragut certainly had a Latin background, in that his father, George Farragut (born Jordi Farragut Mesquida) came from a Mediterranean archipelago once occupied by the Roman army and later incorporated into what is now Spain. There are four main Balearic Islands, and Farragut père came from the smaller of the two that once had been most prominent: Menorca, the larger being Mallorca (the cognates are obvious: back to our earlier minor/major discussion); the other two are Formentera and—probably the most famous today—Ibiza. (And maybe you think you know how Ibiza is “really” pronounced, with a kind of cultivated lisp—but don’t be too sure.) This raises the question: Is Hispania “Hispanic”?

Hispanic most commonly refers to people of Spanish-speaking Latin American background. There are, of course, lots of Latin Americans who do not come from Spanish-speaking backgrounds. Commonly spoken languages in Latin America include Portuguese, Quechua, and English. Official languages in Latin American countries range from Hindustani and Dutch.

Defined narrowly, people from Spain would not be Hispanic for the same reason opium is not an opioid, the letter “U” is not hyoid, Latin is not Latinate and is not a Romance language, etc. (Ladin, on the other hand, is a Romance language.) Some adjectives specify a thing derived from x in a way that includes x, and some specify a thing derived from x in a way that excludes x. It can get a little tricky saying which is which and why. Ice is water, but water isn’t ice—English is subtle, weird, and inconsistent. Another way of thinking about that is that “Hispanic” describes people who have a connection to the Spanish language and who are not residents of Spain. One could also define “Hispanic” as meaning all people of Spanish-speaking background everywhere in the world, including Spain, but that seems to me a less useful term.

But I’m pretty sure my old friend Kathryn Jean Lopez is not Hispanic, and I’m 100 percent sure she isn’t Latinx—which I can’t help but think should be pronounced “la-Tinks.” Tinks, but no tinks. Gabriel García Márquez? Hispanic. Miguel de Cervantes? Spanish.

On the other hand: There are lots of Hispanic people who feel connected to Spain, to its culture, its traditions, and its heroes. If Hispanic people want to claim Admiral Farragut, a Tennessee gentleman of half-Balearic extraction, as one of their own—who am I to gainsay them?

On that subject: Adm. Farragut’s first rank in the Navy—this makes me wince—was “boy.” That’s the rank he had when he joined in 1810.

He was born in 1801.

He served in the War of 1812 at the age of 11.

Economics for English Majors

Biden: The majority of new cars sold in the United States must be electric by 2032.

Market: C’mon, man.

From the New York Times:

There is a way forward for a healthy EV industry, but the powers that be in Washington and elsewhere have to let markets sort this stuff out. Trying to strong-arm consumers into buying cars they don’t want is going to end in failure—a national version of the Hertz EV fiasco.

I am generally pro-EV, and if I lived in some place such as the D.C. metro area or Harris County or Southern California—places where you have to drive a lot, but rarely drive any distance in a day that would tax the range of a decent EV—then a Tesla or an electrified Mercedes or a Nissan Leaf might be pretty attractive. And that is where we ought to expect to see EV usage continue to grow. This isn’t exactly a niche market—the majority of U.S. drivers could easily rely on an EV on a typical driving day—but it is a market in which we should expect EV adoption to be slow, gradual, and incomplete. Because even if an EV serves your needs 99 days out of 100, that leaves several days a year in which your expensive new EV doesn’t serve your driving needs. There’s a reason Toyota has been making a killing with its plug-in hybrids, which are basically EVs most of the time and gas-powered economy cars when they have to be. But the ideologues reject plug-in hybrids for the same reason they reject replacing coal-fired power with natural gas as a matter of climate policy: They don’t care about lowering emissions—they care about moral purity.

Elsewhere

You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto, here.

You can buy my other books here.

You can see my New York Post columns here.

Please subscribe to The Dispatch if you haven’t.

You can check out “How the World Works,” a series of interviews on work I’m doing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, here.

In Closing

The British are very proud of their National Health Service. Princess Kate—to whom I wish the very best—is being treated at a private hospital, the same one where many other royals have sought treatment instead of relying on the NHS. (It is called the London Clinic, and other famous patients included John F. Kennedy and Augusto Pinochet.)

Not much of an inspiring motto: “The NHS: Good Enough for Commoners.”
When market-oriented reformers talk about school choice, health-care choice, etc., bear in mind that the rich and the powerful already have choices. The Clintons and the Obamas didn’t send their children to D.C.-area public schools. About 40 percent of Chicago public school teachers send their own children to private schools—but they will fight like hell against programs that make it easier for poor people to do the same.

Read more at The Dispatch

The Dispatch is a new digital media company providing engaged citizens with fact-based reporting and commentary, informed by conservative principles. Sign up for free.