Trumpists trying to destroy democracy from the inside

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ASPartOfMe
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30 May 2021, 8:31 am

Republicans who embraced Trump’s big lie run to become election officials

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Republicans who have embraced baseless claims about the 2020 election being stolen are now running to serve as the chief elections officials in several states, a move that could give them significant power over election processes.

The campaigns, first detailed by Politico last week, underscore a new focus to take control of election administration. Secretaries of state, who are elected to office in partisan contests that have long been overlooked, wield enormous power over election rules in their state, are responsible for overseeing election equipment, and are a key player in certifying – making official – election results.

Winning secretary of state offices across the country would give conspiracy theorists enormous power to wreak havoc in the 2024 presidential election, including potentially blocking candidates who win the most votes from taking office.

This is an indication of wanting, basically, to have a man inside who can undermine,” said Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections at Common Cause, a government watchdog group. “Clearly these are not people who believe in the rule of law. And people who run our government need to follow the rule of law. So it is concerning that they are running.”


GOP unveils final version of Texas elections bill, which includes more restrictions
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The final version of the sweeping GOP elections bill, negotiated in private by two Republican leaders from the House and Senate, was unveiled Saturday, setting up an intensely partisan showdown over a measure that now includes a longer list of new rules and restrictions.

Saturday evening, Senate Republicans overrode objections from Democrats and waived rules requiring a 24-hour delay before action could be taken on SB 7, setting up a debate and vote to begin after 10 p.m.

With GOP majorities in both houses, however, there is little doubt about the ultimate fate of floor votes on Senate Bill 7, a measure Republicans insisted is needed to bolster flagging faith in the election system but Democrats blasted as a transparent attempt to make it harder to vote, particularly for those who support their party.

Opponents are already preparing to challenge many of the bill's provisions in court.

Opponents of SB 7 said a newly added section would make it easier to overturn election results by showing that fraud changed the result by a preponderance of the evidence, meaning it was more likely than not, rather than proving that fraud changed the outcome.

Bolding=mine


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31 May 2021, 1:18 am

Preaching to the choir. I had one Facebook friend who had been an actual friend back in junior high (middle school), who had become a Marine, then a cop. In time, I had to unfriend him because he and the coven he had surrounded himself with were so impossibly dethatched from reality. Learning from him and other far right conservatives, I found they consider America a constitutional republic, but refuse to call it a democratic republic. They are up in arms about defending hate speech (thinking your neighbor has no right to tell you to shut your racist trap), but savor having mainstream media sources shut down. He also insisted the civil rights movement was run by charlatans climbing over their own people to get ahead, and insisting that the only legitimate laws are those good for "all Americans" - as if civil rights isn't. Then there's the defense of disenfranchising voters. The truly frightening thing is, these ideas are not held by just a tiny minority.


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02 Aug 2021, 8:31 am

Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.

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It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including by Antifa members who chatted about their sinister plot on a conference call. The evening’s program featured live appearances by Byrne and a local QAnon conspiracist, BabyQ, who claimed to be receiving messages from his future self. They were joined by the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the real perpetrators of 9/11 were space aliens.

But the event, for all its absurdities, had a dark surprise: “The Deep Rig” repeatedly quotes Doug Logan, the C.E.O. of Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company that consults with clients on software security. In a voice-over, Logan warns, “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.” He also suggests, without evidence, that members of the “deep state,” such as C.I.A. agents, have intentionally spread disinformation about the election. Although it wasn’t the first time that Logan had promoted what has come to be known as the Big Lie about the 2020 election—he had tweeted unsubstantiated claims that Trump had been victimized by voter fraud—the film offered stark confirmation of Logan’s entanglement in fringe conspiracies. Nevertheless, the president of the Arizona State Senate, Karen Fann, has put Logan’s company in charge of a “forensic audit”—an ongoing review of the state’s 2020 Presidential vote. It’s an unprecedented undertaking, with potentially explosive consequences for American democracy.

Approximately 2.1 million Presidential votes were cast in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and accounts for most of the state’s population. In recent years, younger voters and people of color have turned the county’s electorate increasingly Democratic—a shift that helped Biden win the traditionally conservative state, by 10,457 votes. Since the election, the county has become a focus of ire for Trump and his supporters. By March, when Logan’s company was hired, the county had already undergone four election audits, all of which upheld the outcome. Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican and a former Trump ally, had certified Biden’s victory. But Trump’s core supporters were not assuaged.

The U.S. Department of Justice has warned that “private actors who have neither experience nor expertise in handling” ballots could face prosecution for failing to follow federal audit rules. Trump, meanwhile, has fixated on Arizona’s audit, describing it as a step toward his “reinstatement.” On July 24th, he appeared in Phoenix for a “Rally to Protect Our Elections,” and said, “I am not the one trying to undermine American democracy—I’m the one trying to save American democracy.” Predicting that the audit would vindicate him, he rambled angrily for nearly two hours about having been cheated, calling the election “a scam—the greatest crime in history.”

As the audit has unfolded, various violations of professional norms have been observed, including inspectors caught with pens whose ink matched what was used on ballots. One auditor turned out to have been an unsuccessful Republican candidate during the election. As I watched the proceedings, black-vested paid supervisors monitored the process, but their role was cloaked in secrecy. The audit is almost entirely privately funded, and a county judge in Arizona recently ordered the State Senate to disclose who is paying for it. Last week, Cyber Ninjas acknowledged having received $5.7 million in private donations, most of it from nonprofit groups led by Trump allies who live outside Arizona, including Byrne.

Arizona is hardly the only place where attacks on the electoral process are under way: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump’s claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in forty-nine states, eighteen of which have passed new voting laws in the past six months. Republican-dominated legislatures have also stripped secretaries of state and other independent election officials of their power. The chair of Arizona’s Republican Party, Kelli Ward, has referred to the state’s audit as a “domino,” and has expressed hope that it will inspire similar challenges elsewhere.

Ralph Neas has been involved in voting-rights battles since the nineteen-eighties, when, as a Republican, he served as the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He has overseen a study of the Arizona audit for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, and he told me that, though the audit is a “farce,” it may nonetheless have “extraordinary consequences.” He said, “The Maricopa County audit exposes exactly what the Big Lie is all about. If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos. That will enable new legislation. Millions of Americans could be disenfranchised, helping Donald Trump to be elected again in 2024. That’s the bottom line. Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything. It’s not so much about 2020—it’s about 2022 and 2024. This is a coördinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the Presidency.”

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared s**tless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”


Arizona’s secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, whose office has authority over the administration of elections, told me that the conspiracy-driven audit “looks so comical you have to laugh at it sometimes.” But Hobbs, a Democrat, who is running for governor, warned, “It’s dangerous. It’s feeding the kind of misinformation that led to the January 6th insurrection.” QAnon followers have been celebrating the audit as the beginning of a “Great Awakening” that will eject Biden from the White House. She noted, “I’ve gotten death threats. I’ve had armed protestors outside my house. Every day, there is a total barrage of social media to our office. We’ve had to route our phones to voice mail so that no one has to listen to it. It can be really traumatizing. I feel beaten up.” She added, “But I’m not going to cave to their tactics—because I think they’re laying the groundwork to steal the 2024 elections.”

Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has tracked the flow of dark money in American politics, told me that a “flotilla of front groups” once focussed on advancing such conservative causes as capturing the courts and opposing abortion have now “more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.”

One of the movement’s leaders is the Heritage Foundation, the prominent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. It has been working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (alec)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions. Among those deep in the fight is Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society, the legal organization known for its decades-long campaign to fill the courts with conservative judges. In February, 2020, the Judicial Education Project, a group tied to Leo, quietly rebranded itself as the Honest Elections Project, which subsequently filed briefs at the Supreme Court, and in numerous states, opposing mail-in ballots and other reforms that have made it easier for people to vote.

Another newcomer to the cause is the Election Integrity Project California. And a group called FreedomWorks, which once concentrated on opposing government regulation, is now demanding expanded government regulation of voters, with a project called the National Election Protection Initiative.

These disparate nonprofits have one thing in common: they have all received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Based in Milwaukee, the private, tax-exempt organization has become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right. With an endowment of some eight hundred and fifty million dollars, the foundation funds a network of groups that have been stoking fear about election fraud, in some cases for years. Public records show that, since 2012, the foundation has spent some eighteen million dollars supporting eleven conservative groups involved in election issues.

According to some surveys, a third of Americans now believe that Biden was illegitimately elected, and nearly half of Trump supporters agree that Republican legislators should overturn the results in some states that Biden won. Jonathan Rauch, of the Brookings Institution, recently told The Economist, “We need to regard what’s happening now as epistemic warfare by some Americans on other Americans.”

Few people noticed at the time, but in that case, Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors. Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.”

An animating force behind the Bradley Foundation’s war on “election fraud” is Cleta Mitchell, a fiercely partisan Republican election lawyer, who joined the organization’s board of directors in 2012. Until recently, she was virtually unknown to most Americans. But, on January 3rd, the Washington Post exposed the contents of a private phone call, recorded the previous day, during which Trump threatened election officials in Georgia with a “criminal offense” unless they could “find” 11,780 more votes for him—just enough to alter the results. Also on the call was Mitchell, who challenged the officials to provide records proving that dead people hadn’t cast vote.

What explains, then, the hardening conviction among Republicans that the 2020 race was stolen? Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which invested deeply in expanding Democratic turnout in 2020, suggests that the two parties now have irreconcilable beliefs about whose votes are legitimate. “What blue-state people don’t understand about why the Big Lie works,” he said, is that it doesn’t actually require proof of fraud. “What animates it is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans.” This anti-democratic belief has been bolstered by a constellation of established institutions on the right: “white evangelical churches, legislators, media companies, nonprofits, and even now paramilitary groups.” Podhorzer noted, “Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”

In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, eliminating the Justice Department’s power to screen proposed changes to election procedures in states with discriminatory histories, one of which was Arizona. Terry Goddard, a former Arizona attorney general and a Democrat, told me that “the state has a history of voter suppression, especially against Native Americans.” Before Rehnquist became a Supreme Court Justice, in 1971, he lived in Arizona, where he was accused of administering literacy tests to voters of color.

Around this time, Mitchell became a director at the Bradley Foundation. Among the board members were George F. Will, the syndicated columnist, and Robert George, a Princeton political philosopher known for his defense of traditional Catholic values. By 2017, Will, who has been a critic of Trump, had stepped down from the Bradley board. But George has continued to serve as a director, even as the foundation has heavily funded groups promulgating the falsehood that election fraud is widespread in America, particularly in minority communities, and sowing doubt about the legitimacy of Biden’s win. The foundation, meanwhile, has given nearly three million dollars to programs that George established at Princeton.

It’s a surprisingly short leap from making accusations of voter fraud to calling for the nullification of a supposedly tainted election. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group funded by the Bradley Foundation, is leading the way. Based in Indiana, it has become a prolific source of litigation; in the past year alone, it has brought nine election-law cases in eight states. It has amassed some of the most visible lawyers obsessed with election fraud, including Mitchell, who is its chair and sits on its board.

One of the group’s directors is John Eastman, a former law professor at Chapman University, in California. On January 4, 2021, he visited the White House, where he spoke with Trump about ways to void the election. In a nod to the Independent Legislature Doctrine, Eastman and Trump tried to persuade Vice-President Mike Pence to halt the certification of the Electoral College vote, instead throwing the election to the state legislatures. Pence was not persuaded.

Two days later, Eastman spoke at Trump’s “Save America” rally in Washington, hours before the crowds ransacked the Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win.

More than a year before the 2020 election, Cleta Mitchell and her allies sensed political peril for Trump and began reviewing strategies to help keep him in office. According to a leaked video of an address that she gave in May, 2019, to the Council for National Policy, a secretive conservative society, she warned that Democrats were successfully registering what she sarcastically referred to as “the disenfranchised.” She continued, “They know that if they target certain communities and they can get them registered and get them to the polls, then those groups . . . will vote ninety per cent, ninety-five per cent for Democrats.”

One possible countermove was for conservative state legislators to reëngineer the way the Electoral College has worked for more than a hundred years, in essence by invoking the Independent Legislature Doctrine. The Constitution gives states the authority to choose their Presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late nineteenth century, states have delegated that authority to the popular vote. But, arguably, the Constitution permits state legislatures to take this authority back. Legislators could argue that an election had been compromised by irregularities or fraud, forcing them to intervene.

In August, 2019, e-mails show, Mitchell co-chaired a high-level working group with Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative from Phoenix. Among the topics slated for discussion was the Electoral College.

At the same time, another version of the Independent Legislature Doctrine argument was being mounted in Pennsylvania, by the Honest Elections Project, the group tied to Leonard Leo, of the Federalist Society. Local Republicans had challenged a state-court ruling that adjusted voting procedures during the pandemic. The Honest Elections Project filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the Pennsylvania court had usurped the legislature’s authority to oversee elections. The effort didn’t succeed, but Richard Hasen, the election-law professor, regards such arguments as “powder kegs” that threaten American democracy.

On November 12th, Biden was declared the winner in Maricopa County. Soon after, a Republican member of the county’s Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, was picking up takeout food for his family when the board’s chairman—one of four Republicans on the five-person board—called to warn him to be careful going home. Ninety angry people had gathered outside the chairman’s house, and Gates’s place could be next. “We’d all been doxed,” Gates told me. He and his wife are the legal guardians of a teen-ager whose father, a Ugandan, was nearly killed by henchmen for Idi Amin. “It’s chilling to see the parallels,” Gates told me. “You’d never think there were any parallels to a strongman autocracy in Africa.” Gates considers himself a political-science nerd, but, he said, “I had no concept that we were heading where we were heading.”

Over breakfast in June, in Phoenix, he apologized for his eyes welling up with tears as he described his efforts to stand up to his own party’s mob. He said that he and the other county supervisors had been “feeling great” about how well their administration of the election had gone despite the pandemic. But, as the final ballots were counted and Trump fell behind, Maricopa County became the focal point of conspiracy theorists. “Alex Jones and those guys start coming out here, and they’re protesting outside of our election center as the counting is going on,” he said. He could hear people screaming, and what sounded like a drum: “It was Lollapalooza for the alt-right—it was crazy.” He started getting calls and e-mails saying, “You guys need to stop the steal.” Gates told me, “I’d wonder, Is this a real person?” But some angry messages came from people he knew. They said they’d never support him again. “People thought I was failing them,” Gates said. “I have been called a traitor so many times in the last six months.”

Gates says that Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate’s president, confided to him that she knew there was “nothing to” the fraud charges. (She didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Nevertheless, she buckled under the political pressure and authorized a subpoena of the county’s ballots, for the “forensic audit.”

Gates said that after he received death threats he fled with his family to an Airbnb. At one point, the sheriff sent two deputies to guard Gates’s home overnight. Trump supporters, Gates said, “are basically asking Republican leaders to bow before the altar of the Big Lie—‘You’re willing to do it? O.K., great. You’re not? You’re a rino. You’re a Commie. You are not a Republican.’ It’s been incredibly effective, really, when you think about where we’ve come from January 6th.”

While Justice Department officials were fending off conspiracy theories being spread by tax-exempt charities in Washington, the pressure was even more acute on local officials in Phoenix. Trump tweeted relentlessly about the audit. He “clearly has had a fascination with this issue, because he thinks it’s the key to his reinstatement,” Gates told me. “It’s not about Arizona. We’re literally pawns in this. This is a national effort to delegitimize the election system.” Gates predicted that, if “Arizona can question this, and show that Trump won,” the game will move on to Colorado, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia, all of which have sent Republican delegations to observe Arizona’s audit. Noting that both QAnon followers and his own state’s Republican Party chair had referred to “dominoes” in connection with the audit, Gates said, “We know what that game is, and how it works.”

It would be tempting for Gates, a lifetime Republican with political ambitions, to blame only Trump for his party’s anti-democratic turn. But he has few such illusions. What’s really going on, he believes, is a reactionary backlash against Obama: “I’ve thought about it a lot. I believe the election of President Obama frightened a lot of Americans.” Gates argues that the fear isn’t entirely about race. He thinks it’s also about cosmopolitanism, secularism, and other contemporary values that make white conservatives uncomfortable. But in the end, he said, “the diversification of America is frightening to a lot of people in my party.”

Gates believes that his party’s reaction may backfire. Polls show that, although the Arizona audit is wildly popular among Republican voters in the state, it alienates independents, who constitute approximately a third of the state’s electorate—and whose support is necessary for statewide candidates to win.

For now, though, conservative groups seem to be doubling down on their investments in election-fraud alarmism. In the next two years, Heritage Action plans to spend twenty-four million dollars mobilizing supporters and lobbyists who will promote “election integrity,” starting in eight battleground states, including Arizona.

Bolding=mine

I would like to thank Jane Mayer for her time and effort and risk put into this investigation. Until this article I thought of the Heritage Foundation as what used to be called conservatism. This article disabused me of that notion. The Heritage Foundation is all in on Trumpism now. Whether they were always there as the article implied or they got there via slippery slope does not matter now. Same is true for most of what we call the Republican Party, Conservatism and Libertarianism.

Warning Whataboutism ahead:
Thanks to Ms. Mayer’s work Independent Legislative Doctrine joins Critical Race Theory in ASPartOfMe’s s**t list as existential threats to traditional American goals. Like with the latter whatever good intentions if any they were conceived as do not matter at this point. At least with the current purveyors of Critical Race Theory be it BLM praising the Castro Regime, talking about how they are trained Marxists or Kendi proposing a Department of Anti Racism with powers to overrule other departments are open about their illiberalism. Trumpism is doing all of this under the guise of being “Patriots”. This is the most toxic use of what George Orwell described as doublethink in my American lifetime and I have seen a lot.

What I expect to follow to my Whataboutism is more Whataboutism, how ridiculous of me to compare the two. I will leave it to historians picking on the ruins of the American experiment to figure out what movement was more important. IMHO which one is worse is less important then they are both co-occurring and feeding off one another.


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Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 02 Aug 2021, 10:01 am, edited 2 times in total.

Fnord
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02 Aug 2021, 8:48 am

Contrary to what many observers have suggested, Donald Trump's attack force that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was not really a "mob".  At its core was a group of terrorists who wanted to kill members of Congress they deemed to be Trump's enemies, with the goal of nullifying the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Call them the "Vanilla ISIS".

Trump and his allies came closer to overthrowing democracy than many among the country's political class (and the public at large) would like to accept.  The danger has not ended; the Republican coup attempt is ongoing.


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02 Aug 2021, 7:29 pm

I mean they can either change their platform to be appealing to more of the electorate so they can actually do that thing where they win elections, or they can undermine democracy through voter suppression, minoritarian obstructionism, and claiming any election they lose is fraudulent.

They can't risk losing their rabid base by pivoting to the center, so they just double down on their unpopular platform and try to suppress voters who don't like their platform.
The GOP stopped liking democracy when they realized their ideas couldn't win them electoral majorities.


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02 Aug 2021, 10:34 pm

Fnord wrote:
Call them the "Vanilla ISIS".

Love it.
- Vanilla will never be the same :lol:



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02 Aug 2021, 10:38 pm

Of course they do, what else is new...


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02 Aug 2021, 10:59 pm

Sweetleaf wrote:
Of course they do, what else is new...

Seems a replay of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria - burned by early Christians



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03 Aug 2021, 1:13 am

Harry Haller wrote:
Sweetleaf wrote:
Of course they do, what else is new...

Seems a replay of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria - burned by early Christians


Uh... I thought Julius Caesar, who had lived and died before Christ, had burned the library of Alexandria.


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03 Aug 2021, 1:41 am

Kraichgauer wrote:
Harry Haller wrote:
Sweetleaf wrote:
Of course they do, what else is new...

Seems a replay of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria - burned by early Christians


Uh... I thought Julius Caesar, who had lived and died before Christ, had burned the library of Alexandria.


There's a movie starring Rachel Wiesz called Hypatia which actually documents how christians burned the library.



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03 Aug 2021, 1:42 am

Fnord wrote:
The danger has not ended; the Republican coup attempt is ongoing.


QAnon is growing among republicans faster than the COVID virus



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03 Aug 2021, 2:22 am

cyberdad wrote:
Kraichgauer wrote:
Harry Haller wrote:
Sweetleaf wrote:
Of course they do, what else is new...

Seems a replay of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria - burned by early Christians


Uh... I thought Julius Caesar, who had lived and died before Christ, had burned the library of Alexandria.


There's a movie starring Rachel Wiesz called Hypatia which actually documents how christians burned the library.


Well, okay, Caesar burned the original library where tons of invaluable knowledge had been lost.
I do know the story of Hypatia, and how Christian fanatics had scraped flesh from her bones with sea shells, for daring to be an intellectual.


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03 Aug 2021, 3:53 am

Kraichgauer wrote:
cyberdad wrote:
Kraichgauer wrote:
Harry Haller wrote:
Sweetleaf wrote:
Of course they do, what else is new...

Seems a replay of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria - burned by early Christians


Uh... I thought Julius Caesar, who had lived and died before Christ, had burned the library of Alexandria.


There's a movie starring Rachel Wiesz called Hypatia which actually documents how christians burned the library.


Well, okay, Caesar burned the original library where tons of invaluable knowledge had been lost.
I do know the story of Hypatia, and how Christian fanatics had scraped flesh from her bones with sea shells, for daring to be an intellectual.


Yes I think the library was burned a few times. Caesar destroyed all the old kingdom records. Subsequently each time new scrolls were deposited in the library until finally at the time of Hypatia the christians literally took over the library burned any last remaining scrolls (including Hypatia's astronomical theories of the elliptical orbit of planets) and converted the library into a place of christian worship, True story.



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03 Aug 2021, 4:09 am

^^^
:cry:


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03 Aug 2021, 10:42 am

They're too late. It was destroyed decades ago.


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Location: Melbourne, Australia

03 Aug 2021, 11:07 am

Sounds like it's simply the pendulum swinging counter to an earlier Democrat attempt at similar actions:

Quote:
The Secretary of State Project, also known as the SoS Project, was an independent 527 political organization founded in July 2006 for the purpose of advancing "election protection" measures. Members believed that the only way in which to accomplish such a goal was to devote all efforts and resources toward helping get Democrats elected to the offices of Secretary of State in selected swing, or battleground, states, specifically those whose margin of victory in the 2004 presidential election contest was 120,000 votes or less.

Quote:
But rather then push for reform so that the offices of the Secretaries of State reflected a level of neutrality, perhaps making it so holders of those positions were elected on a nonpartisan basis, they instead sought to implement an aggressive agenda exactly the same in nearly every respect that they had just accused Republicans of performing. Through the strategic process of placing specific candidates, ones that met a certain liberal or progressive criteria set down by the organization, in positions of power that oversaw and administered state elections, the Democratic Party would be "better positioned than in the previous elections to advance traditional Democratic interests," particularly when it came to the administration of election laws.

Source: https://ballotpedia.org/Secretary_of_State_Project