Dec 8, 2020
Arizona GOP asks for blood oath via tweet [Opinion]
The Arizona Republican Party has come fully unhinged, now directly asking voters if they’re willing to die for their cult leader’s bogus election fraud claims.
Judging by this screengrab, at least 2,304 of them are quite possibly open to the idea.
The Arizona Republican Party sent out the disturbing “stop the steal” re-tweet from their verified Twitter account in the later hours of Dec. 7, and the tweet was still visible as of noon on Dec. 8.
The person running the account used Twitter’s quote-tweet feature to signal boost a supporter’s dark pledge and pose the chilling question to followers, as seen above.
Incidentally, Dec. 8 is so-called safe harbor day for US election results — put simply, the date by which legal matters and official concerns must be resolved and states must certify their results in order to guarantee they are accepted by Congress. (You can find a much more detailed explainer of the significance of the day here.)
Individual states not having things fully wrapped up by safe harbor day (or having new, insane things like the Texas AG’s batshit lawsuit drop suddenly, day-of) does not automatically indicate cause for alarm, but let’s be real: every moment since November 3 has contained significant cause for alarm at varying levels. And the Arizona Republican Party tweet asking voters if they’re willing to die isn’t just another beep. It’s a goddamn foghorn.
They can idealize it however they want — and they probably will — but this one is problematic, too:
And this one:
An analysis of Trump’s rally in Valdosta, Georgia Saturday night, linked here, accurately predicted a likely increase in threats and violent acts following his dog-whistle calls for “courage.”
Indeed, less than 24 hours after the outgoing POTUS invited his supporters to “do the right thing,” armed militia showed up at the home of Michigan Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson.
Now, the AZ GOP is putting out what sure sound like not just calls to action, but calls to arms. It has been well-established: when Trump and Team Treason issue a thinly-veiled order, there is a certain (dangerous) degree of follow-through that can be expected.
Not Just Noise
Fact: Trump’s rhetoric sometimes results in basement-dwelling neckbeards and overly-militarized Neanderthal-holdovers indulging whatever the very opposite of the better angels of their natures are — to confirm this, we need only ask Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer.
Back in October 2020, the FBI arrested more than a dozen individuals accused of plotting to case Gov. Whitmer‘s vacation home to kidnap and try her. Yes, try her. As in: holding a bullshit made-up tribunal, appointing themselves as combination judge-jury-potential executioners, and rendering a verdict.
All of this, mere LARP-ing formality anyway, and the penalty for her likely guilty verdict would have been — you guessed it— death. If the whole plot wasn’t so serious, so dangerous, so insidious… it’d just be so incredibly boring. Boring, and dumb.
Dumb Can Be Dangerous
Ironically, or perhaps simply par for the current contemptible course, Arizona and Michigan have both seen their state legislatures shuttered following news of Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani’s positive COVID-19 test results on Sunday.
Giuliani and his traveling carnival of chaos blew through both states recently to continue the farcical attempts by the Trump administration to overthrow a legal election and toss out more than 150M legally cast votes.
In addition to their sideshow directly threatening democracy itself, Giuliani and his co-chair/personal flatulence-analyst, Jenna Ellis, have also managed to expose (and likely infect) an untold, non-zero number of persons to the coronavirus after they reportedly finally — almost inevitably — contracted it themselves.
As a result, entire segments of state governments now have to be shut down for deep clean and quarantines. Days before his positive result, Giuliani sat next to a witness he brought to the now-infamous Michigan hearings.
The witness arrived to the indoor event, where other people would be present, wearing a mask like a decent human being. Naturally, despite the witness being behind a powerful microphone, Giuliani casually suggested she take. her. thin. paper. mask. off. to make herself heard.
(Video here if you can’t believe this shit, either.)
It appears from the clip the witness ultimately leaves her mask on, but Giuliani tried his level best — and if she doesn’t end up infected, welp, she has only herself to thank!
This is a death cult, and the death is absolutely spreading.
This is the America we are leaving to history books. This is what 74M of us chose for a variety of reasons — most that seem to in fact defy all reason, and this is what 81M more of us repudiated.
Today, the Arizona Republican Party is asking voters if they’re willing to die to defend a defeated, demented despot in his quest to throw our votes out. The Texas AG is suing other states for legally certifying their own election results in an obvious, literal beg-your-pardon stunt.
Ted Cruz is even willing to step away from his favorite knockoff-RedTube sites long enough to give oral arguments before the Supreme Court to help his fallen party suppress the wishes of American voters. Speaking of diseases, Giuliani is clearly willing to infect the entire country with COVID-19 before accepting the legitimate results of the 2020 election.
So, what fresh hell will tomorrow bring?
“Courage,” Coups, and Coded Language
Americans interested in defending their vote must be every bit as serious as Republicans are clear in their motivations and intentions. This is not a game. This is not a joke. This is a hostile takeover. This is a coup.
Note I didn’t pad that last word with a comforting “attempted.“ Sorry, I’d love to. But I can’t.
Frankly, it’s still too early to know for certain that’s what this will be. Anyone telling you different is selling you something. We will only know if this cut off at “attempted coup” once this stage — the attempt itself, the one, uh, currently in progress— is over, whatever that looks like.
We will only know we’ve survived once we have.
For his part, the outgoing President is still falsely claiming he won the 2020 election. It’s almost admirable that in addition to boasting their own crack-pot conspiracist candidates and firing off the eyebrow-raising missives of the past 24 hours, the AZ GOP had time to immediately retweet the bossman’s mad delusions Tuesday morning:
(And when I say admirable, I mean: I admire the AZ GOP in their dedication to assuring our collective mutual destruction in service to their own deeply-corrupt political ambitions and 401(k) performance much in the way a fatal snakebite victim might momentarily admire the perverse beauty in the movement of the snake’s bellyscales as it slithers away, a mindless, primitive machine, unbothered by what it had just done — the kill undeserved, the snake not even feasting, simply inflicting misery and carrying on. For all its simplicity, it is a stunningly effective, deadly force of nature. So is hivemind.)
Trump also “went off the rails into crazy town” at an in-person ‘vaccine summit’ the White House held Tuesday, CNN’s Jake Tapper reported on-air the same day.
“We’re gonna have to see who the next administration is, because we won in swing states,” Trump lied, seemingly mixing words together just for the fun of it. He continued arranging the English language in such a way that it lost nearly all meaning, “Hopefully the next administration is the Trump administration, because you can’t steal hundreds of thousands of votes. You can’t have fraud and deception and all of the things that they did.”
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” — George Orwell, “1984,” published June 8, 1949.
“Just remember what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” — Trump, July 24, 2018.
Apparently, though, if you’re the president (or an official state chapter of one of our major political parties), you can publicly incite violence and participate in widespread election interference, all because you lost. That’s fine. NBD.
Except it is though. Turkish journalist Zeynep Tufekci REALLY wants us to understand that, because they’ve seen it before and they’re concerned we’re underestimating certain things for lack of having seen them firsthand before.
(Hmm… why would anyone worry that for us?)
“Let’s see if they have the courage to do what everybody in this country knows is right,” the one-term president remarked, knowing exactly what he was doing as he did it.
And there’s that word again: courage. This space clearly identified this specific buzzword as merely the outgoing admin’s latest dog-whistle blown right out loud, probably to be heard repeatedly in the coming weeks, and perhaps turning out to be the most dangerous one yet.
The last 48 hours have proven this prediction is not partisan, it’s not alarmist, and it’s not taking long.
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