Slow motion failed coup update #7. I don’t think it’s going to work, except to raise money, continue to delude millions of Trump supporters and and give the MyPillow guy new places to advertise. I hope you haven’t been paying attention because you need this break but it is worth noting some of the events of the past few weeks.
I’m sure everyone is aware of the bizarre 46 minute barrage of disinformation disseminated in Trump’s super low energy Facebook video. No you don’t need to watch it, there are no bombshells, just a continued rehash of the same debunked conspiracy theories we’ve heard for weeks. But wait, it was 46 minutes, and Biden will be the 46th President. Mmmmhhh. What’s more interesting is that 4 states held all day election hearings recently and are threatening to hold more until the truth is out there®. In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia republican legislatures held sham “hearings” where they allowed dozens of “witnesses” to air delusional, contrived and misguided allegations of fraud. Guliani was at three of these.
Dozens of Republican legislatures in each of these states called the election into question and repeated the same conspiracies that failed in over 40 court cases. Even though no one was sworn in and Democrats were mostly kept from asking any questions Republican lawmaker after Republican lawmaker kept saying that this “testimony” needed to be heard from these “witnesses”. That’s what’s so endlessly insane about these people. They’re lawmakers, they know what a witness is and what testimony is composed of, they’re just doing this to continue to fool their constituents into believing that the election was stolen because basically that’s all they have left now, a delusional base that they need to feed conspiracy theories to.
The rooms were filled with hundreds of Trump supporters who are cheering and gasping alternatively at every crazed moment of standing up to the Democrat conspiracy or innuendo of wrongdoing. Dozens of “witnesses” claimed to see shadowy figures doctoring ballots, mysterious vans, unidentified thugs not allowing them into buildings, being harassed and shouted down when asking questions, flash drives, secretive employees of nefarious tech companies, at one point an entire area was cleared by claiming that there was a dangerous nerve gas leaked by a train crash near Devils Tower. Oh wait that last one was actually from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
In any case it’s hard to tell which of these people are lying and which are delusional. I mean Gulianni is both right but the rest, who are they? Many definitely seem as though they are producers of their own delusion. A phenomena that’s known to happen to cult members. Their stories are colored with weirdly elaborate details that are right out of trash pulp novels. A common thread is that they all feel as though they were harassed, assaulted or pushed away and not heard. Many claim to be in some sort of official capacity, but it’s unclear how, and without any cross examination all of their claims are mostly left unquestioned. Many showed up with affidavits that were already rejected in recent court cases.
Some are definitely Republican agitators, like Gary Feldman in Pennsylvania, who was temporarily kept from a polling place because he went to the wrong ward, but was eventually let in. A produced for effect video of him being turned away has 4 million views on twitter and was widely reported. The fact that he was later let in somehow escaped his “testimony”. Gary Feldman happens to be well known in Pennsylvania for promoting rumors that members of the New Black Panthers were patrolling polling stations and harassing Republican voters in 2008, a racist conspiracy theory that circulated for much of the Obama administration. Many were local radio hosts, podcasters, long time low level Republican this or thats. So if you had to ask are they lying or are they crazy, the answer would generally be both.
So none of this will change the outcome of the election and the attempted coup has failed. Although I expect that Trump will try a couple of more things before the end. But this army of Republican lawmakers?!? Really? How many top Republicans have said Trump lost yet? Less than two dozen Senate and House members as of a report from yesterday, I already knew the answer, I actually wasn’t really asking you, if anyone is still reading that is. We can’t just keep this apparatus in place with this combination of propaganda media and the Republican’s, funded by oligarchs, conspiring to keep enough people deluded so that they can deconstruct our already battered democracy. If we don’t do something their next trick might just succeed.