Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Chatter among the CHUD class is rising rapidly the closer we get to November 8th.

 

Polling, social media studies and a rise in threats suggest that a growing number of Americans are anticipating, or even welcoming, the possibility of sustained political violence, researchers studying extremism say. What was once the subject of serious discussion only on the political periphery has migrated closer to the mainstream.

But while that trend is clear, there is far less agreement among experts about what it means.

Some elements of the far right view it literally: a call for an organized battle for control of the government. Others envision something akin to a drawn-out insurgency, punctuated with eruptions of political violence, such as the attack on the F.B.I.’s Cincinnati field office in August. A third group describes the country as entering a “cold” civil war, manifested by intractable polarization and mistrust, rather than a “hot” war with conflict.

“The question is what does ‘civil war’ look like and what does it mean,” said Elizabeth Neumann, assistant secretary for counterterrorism at the Homeland Security Department under Mr. Trump. “I did not anticipate, nor did anyone else as far as I know, how rapidly the violence would escalate.”

Ms. Neumann now works for Moonshot, a private security company that tracks extremism online. Moonshot found a 51 percent increase in “civil war” references on the most active pages on 4Chan, the fringe online message board, in the week after Mr. Biden’s Sept. 1 speech.

But talk of political violence is not relegated to anonymous online forums.

At a Trump rally in Michigan on Saturday night, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, said that “Democrats want Republicans dead,” adding that “Joe Biden has declared every freedom-loving American an enemy of the state.” At a recent fund-raiser, Michael T. Flynn, who briefly served as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, said that governors had the power to declare war and that “we’re probably going to see that.”

On Monday, federal prosecutors showed a jury in Washington an encrypted message that Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers armed extremist group, had sent his lieutenants two days after the 2020 presidential election: “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war.”

Experts say the steady patter of bellicose talk has helped normalize the expectation of political violence.

 

Eventually, I expect we'll be in a situation closer to the turn of the millennium, where we have attacks like the OKC bombing, Atlanta Park bombing, and the DC Sniper, only far more common and widespread. Democrats will be accused to election fraud, and they will be targeted for it.

It will get worse before the dawn, but the dawn will break. I have to believe that.

Im

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Senate Democratic candidates are ready to rumble in the last five weeks of the election cycle as third quarter fundraising numbers are in. Dems have the money to compete as John Fetterman and Raphael Warnock are showing, but Dems also have a big advantage across the board in races like Wisconsin.

 

Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes raised more than $20 million in the third quarter of 2022, according to details from the Wisconsin lieutenant governor’s campaign, dwarfing what he raised throughout his entire bid for Senate.

Barnes is aiming to unseat Sen. Ron Johnson, the Republican incumbent who is seeking a third term, in what has become one of the most closely watched Senate campaigns of the midterms. With an evenly divided Senate, every race this November could tilt the balance of power in the legislative body, but Barnes’ race against Johnson represents one of the best chances for Democrats to flip a Senate seat this cycle.

The race has been tight for months. A Marquette University Law School Poll, released in mid-September, found 49% of likely voters in Wisconsin supported Johnson, compared to 48% who backed Barnes – a statistical dead heat. But the poll was an improvement for Johnson: The same poll had found Barnes at 52% in August with the incumbent at 45%.

Barnes’ fundraising haul should help Democrats level the advertising playing field in the race after being outspent in September.

 

In Nevada, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto has raised more than $15 million for her tight race last quarter.

With just weeks left before Election Day, Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto will report raising more than $15 million between the beginning of July and the end of September leaving roughly $5 million cash on hand, her campaign announced Monday — another record in a record-breaking fundraising election cycle for Cortez Masto, and roughly double the $7.5 million she raised in the second quarter of 2022.

In a statement, her campaign touted individual donations from more than 170,000 contributors in the third quarter, with an average donation amount of $44. Her campaign did not immediately release quarterly spending figures, numbers that will likely remain unavailable until a federal filing deadline on Oct. 15.

It comes as Nevada’s U.S. Senate contest between Cortez Masto and her Republican opponent, former Attorney General Adam Laxalt, has become one of just a handful nationwide that could decide control of a U.S. Senate split 50-50 between the two major parties.

Cortez Masto, like many major Democratic candidates nationwide, has dominated the candidate-side fundraising race, raising more than three times as much as Laxalt — $30.1 million to $7.3 million, respectively — through the second quarter of 2022, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

As of Monday morning, Laxalt had yet to publicly announce his third-quarter fundraising. In the second quarter, he raised a little more than $2.8 million, less than half of Cortez Masto’s total.

 

In North Carolina, Democratic candidate Cheri Beasley raised more than $16 million in Q3 and has a real shot at retiring GOP Sen. Richard Burr's seat.

So given Democrats’ struggles to win federal races in the state, let’s run through a couple reasons why Beasley could be the first federal candidate in almost 15 years to win a statewide race — and why she could be yet another Democrat to narrowly lose a Senate race in North Carolina.

For starters, Beasley, who already has experience running and winning a statewide race in North Carolina, has so far maintained a significant financial edge over Budd. Her impressive fundraising skills have allowed her to spend over $10 million on TV ads, according to The Cook Political Report, which cited data from AdImpact. That’s in contrast to nearly $2 million from Budd, according to the outlet.

Beasley is also hoping that the state’s demographics will work in her favor. She hasn’t been shy in admitting that she hopes she can gin up support among Black voters, who make up about 22 percent of the citizen voting-age population. And if Beasley wins, she’d become the state’s first Black U.S. senator.

“The Democratic Party has been trying hard to put forward candidates who reflect the diversity of the country,” said Whitney Manzo, a professor of political science at North Carolina’s Meredith College. “And I think the party is banking on [Beasley] appealing to voters of color, with the hope that she will energize voters in the same way that Barack Obama did in 2008.”

The increased salience of abortion access following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization might also give Beasley a lift — something that other Democrats in competitive states are similarly hoping for.

 

And in Ohio, Rep. Tim Ryan has raised more than $17 million in the last three months.

 

Democrat Tim Ryan’s campaign reported raising $17.2 million in the third quarter — nearly doubling what was raised in the prior quarter and once again breaking a fundraising record for a U.S. Senate candidate in Ohio.

The Howland resident previously had set the record for most money in a quarter between April and June with $9,133,487 and before that, had the old record with $4,111,765 in the year’s first quarter.

Ryan, a 10-term congressman, is facing Republican J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist and author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” in the general election. Most polls have the race as a statistical tie.

The $17.2 million between July and September is almost as much as the $21,773,132 Ryan raised for the entire campaign before the third quarter.

The $17.2 million includes 105,455 new donors in the third quarter, according to his campaign, and more than 95 percent of the donations were $100 or less. The average online donation was $39.57, the campaign stated.

Ryan is spending money almost as fast as he is raising it with much of it going toward advertising.

His campaign said he had just over $1.5 million in his campaign fund as of Sept. 30, the last day of the third quarter filing period.

Ryan ended the second quarter on June 30 with $3,567,175 in his campaign fund.

 

If Dems fail to keep the Senate, it's not because they didn't spend money on their campaign ads targeting the GOP. They are ready to go.

 

They just need us.

 

Vote like your country depends on it.

The Big Lie, Con't

The Big Lie won't stop until Republicans start going to jail for breaching of election security, fraudulent elector conspiracy charges, and meddling with voting machines and data. In Michigan at least, we could finally be close to the beginning of this.

 

A Michigan township official who promotes false conspiracy theories of a rigged 2020 election could face criminal charges related to two voting-system security breaches, according to previously unreported records and legal experts.

A state police detective recommended that the Michigan attorney general consider unspecified charges amid a months-long probe into one breach related to the Republican clerk’s handling of a vote tabulator, according to a June email from the detective to state and local officials. Reuters obtained the email through a public-records request.

The clerk, Stephanie Scott, oversaw voting in rural Adams Township until the state last year revoked her authority over elections. Scott has publicly embraced baseless claims that the 2020 election was rigged against former U.S. President Donald Trump and has posted online about the QAnon conspiracy theory.

In a second breach of the township’s voting system, the clerk gave a file containing confidential voter data to an information-technology expert who is a suspect in other alleged Michigan election-security violations. The expert, Benjamin Cotton, worked with voter-fraud conspiracists seeking unauthorized access to election systems in other states, according to court records reviewed by Reuters. The incident has not been previously reported.

Scott denies any wrongdoing. The attorney general and state police declined to comment on the allegations against the clerk.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, the top election official in this battleground state, stripped Scott of her authority over elections last year after the clerk refused to perform regular maintenance and accuracy testing on voting equipment. Scott believed, incorrectly, that the process would erase 2020 election data, which she believed might contain fraud evidence.

Scott’s actions are part of a national effort by public officials and others seeking evidence of Trump's false stolen-election claims. The allegations against Scott have parallels to the high-profile case of Tina Peters, the clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, who enjoys cult-hero status in the election-conspiracy movement and faces felony charges related to similar voting-system breaches.

Scott’s case illustrates what some election-security experts describe as a growing insider threat from officials tasked with safeguarding American democracy. Reuters has documented 18 incidents nationally, 12 of them in Michigan, in which public officials and others are accused of breaching or attempting to breach election systems. Such violations can expose confidential voter information and enable election-tampering by revealing security protocols.

"The insider threat question is what keeps many people up at night,” said Matthew Weil, executive director of the Democracy Program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank.

If charged, Scott would become the second elected clerk nationally to face criminal prosecution related to a security breach following the November 2020 election. The Mesa County district attorney accuses Peters of helping an unauthorized person make copies of her voting machine hard drives. She has pleaded not guilty to 10 criminal counts, including seven felonies, and is set to go to trial in March.

Both Peters and Scott have insisted they had a duty to investigate fraud allegations. Peters did not respond to a request for comment.

 

The bigger problem remains that multiple Republican election officials and candidates for election offices like Secretary of State in multiple states continue to lie about the 2020 election and are vowing if elected to make sure no Democrat in their jurisdiction wins ever again.

We have to stop them, and we need your vote to help.