By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, March 25,
2024
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:
My name is Michelle Klann, and I’m
here today to put you on public notice and to inform you that you are not our
elected officials. None of you have never signed an oath to the Republic of
Arizona. Instead, you have signed an oath of office to a foreign corporation
which means this is an act insurrection. You do not have a proper bond carrying
surety for your actions to we the people. Due to all the voter fraud, you have
never been formally voted in. Acting as if you have any authority over the
people is a direct act of treason. Today we, the body sovereign are presenting
you each a notice of liability and opportunity to cure. The fine is $1.75
million per claim and there are 12 signatures which means you are each
personally liable for $21 million. If you do not resign in 3 days you
will be presented with a writ quo warrento , an a waiver of tort. If you
do not rebut these truths and you remain in office, We will be notifying the
military, and your act of treason will be grounds for an immediate military tribunal.
I don’t need to tell you the penalties for treason. We the body sovereign,
hereby command you to resign within three days or else face the consequence.
I’m also here today to hand you this jump drive, which contains a 5000 page
document notifying you of all the dangers of the Covid vaccine and the poison
in the water to name a few. These are high crimes and acts against humanity. If
you cover up high crimes, you will be held guilty for committing acts against
humanity. Therefore I hereby command you to send a public broadcast to every
resident in Maricopa county notifying them of these dangers within the next
three days or you will be in direct violation and derelict of your supposed of
duty, making you even more accountable for your actions. Notice to agent is
notice to principal. You have been formally served on record.
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:
Most Latinos are not rootless,
illegal transients—burdens on the society—as some citizens may think, but a
force for American progress.
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:
The first admiral of the Navy,
David Farragut (“Damn the torpedoes, Full speed ahead!”), whose commanding
statue dominates Farragut Square only steps from the White House, was Hispanic.
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:
Early adopters drove the surge in
sales of Teslas and other all-electric hits such as the Ford Mustang Mach-E.
But demand has slowed in recent months. Ford said in December that it would cut
production of its highly touted F-150 Lightning pickup—the electric version of
the best-selling vehicle line in America—by half.
E.V.s are still the
fastest-growing segment of the American car market, but many consumers remain
reluctant to walk away from their gas guzzlers. Electric vehicles generally
remain more expensive than their conventional counterparts, and there are fewer
models to choose from, as well as fewer S.U.V.s and pickup trucks, the most
popular categories in the country.
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.
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.
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