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A week before the ninth anniversary of her sons murder, Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.) discovered that Republicans had radically redrawn her district to oust her from Congress.

A political novice, McBath had became a leading gun control advocate after her 17-year-old son, Jordan Davis, was shot by a white man in 2012 in an altercation over the volume of rap music he was playing. She went on to stage one of the biggest electoral upsets in Georgias recent history when, in 2018, she became the first Black person to represent the states 6th District, Newt Gingrichs home turf for 20 years. Her victory exemplified Democraticinroads in formerly red states like Georgia and the new powerbeing exercised by communities of color in the rapidly diversifying South. But those gains are quickly being erased by the GOP through a toxic combination of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and election subversion that together pose a mortal threat to free and fair elections.

Georgia is a microcosm of the extreme tactics Republicans are using across the country to entrench power in advance of the midterms. What can appear as a series of seemingly disconnected state-level skirmishes is in fact part of an insidious national strategy that goes far beyond previous efforts to suppress and undermine Democratic influence. Fueled by the Big Lie, this effort picks up where last years insurrection left off by putting in place the pieces to steal future elections by systematically taking over every aspect of the voting process.

Over the course of 2021, 19 states passed 34 laws making it harder to votethe greatest rollback of voting access since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those changes include more than a dozen GOP-controlled states passing new provisions to interfere with impartial election administration, while Trump and his allies aggressively recruit Stop the Stealinspired candidates to take over key election positions like secretary of state offices and local election boards in major battleground states.

What were seeing is a multifaceted, multilevel attack on American democracy, says Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State.

McBaths district is a striking case in point: Under a new redistricting map crafted by Georgia Republicans, her diverse suburban Atlanta seatwhere moderate white voters joined an influx of Black, Latino, and Asian American residents to elect herwould now stretch all the way to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, with Republicans adding three deeply red and predominantly white countiesForsyth, Dawson, and Cherokeewhere Donald Trump won 70 percent of the vote. (Forsyth is infamous for forcing its more than 1,000 Black residents toleave after a Black man was lynched in 1912.) Her district would go from one that favored Biden by 11 points to one that Trump would have won by 15, one of the most drastic transformations of any district in the country.

After the map passed the legislature on November 22, McBath decided to run in a neighboring district, held by Democratic Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux, that absorbed some of the most Democratic parts of McBaths old district. I refuse to let [Georgia Gov.] Brian Kemp, the NRA, and the Republican Party keep me from fighting, McBath told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in announcing her candidacy. But even if she wins a messy primary against Bourdeaux, Democrats will have lost a House seat in 2022 in a state that is trending blue, and communities of color will have less political representationeven though they account for all of the states population growth over the past decade. Moreover, because of the new redistricting maps, Republicans are set to control nine of 14 congressional districts in a state where Democrats won the presidency and two Senate seats in 2020.

A similar outcome is being replicated in other key battlegrounds, like Ohio, North Carolina, and Texas, where Republican legislatures passed redistricting maps that will hand their party between 65 and 80 percent of US House seats in states where Biden narrowed the GOPs 2016 advantage. Though Democrats are faring slightly better in the redistricting process overall compared with the last decade, these extreme maps in GOP-controlled swing states, combined with Bidens sagging approval ratings, will likely help Republicans pick up enough seats to retake the US Housein 2022 and lock indominance of state legislaturesfor the next 10 years.

And make no mistake, if Republicans prevail in rigging the 2022 election, theyll be even more emboldened in 2024, especially if Trump is on the ballot. The lies of a stolen election propagated by Trumpand exploited by Republican lawmakers who know betterare now being used to lay the groundwork to sabotage elections for real. Their endgame? President Joe Biden asked rhetorically during a major speech in Atlanta on January 11. To turn the will of the voters into a mere suggestionsomething states can respect or ignore. This isnt just about the normal ebb and flow of partisan politics; its a test of whether a party that is deadly serious about ending American democracy as we know it will regain control of ostensibly democratic institutions.

The insurrection, the gerrymandering, the voter suppression, the attacks on professional election officialsall of this puts our democracy at risk to a degree we have not seen since the Civil War, former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder told me recently. Thats how serious this is.

The targeting of McBath is not an isolated incident. Its a stark illustration of the GOPs nationwide playbook for undermining voting rights, with Georgia at ground zero of this battle. Georgia was an epicenter of the Trump campaigns efforts to overturn the 2020 election, with the defeated president famously telling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find 11,780 votes to nullify Bidens victory. Raffensperger refused, despite threats against him and his family, but Trumps Big Lie persuaded Georgia Republicans to pass a sweeping voter-suppression law last March that set the bar for restrictive voting legislation that proliferated across GOP-controlled states.

At the heart of Trumpism is the fear of a majority-minority future where white power no longer dominates. So its no coincidence that this battle is being fought hardest in the state where Black voters who vote overwhelmingly Democratic have the most to gain or lose. Along with McBath, Sen. Raphael Warnock is running for reelection in 2022 and Stacey Abrams is mounting a second bid for governor. But the voters supporting them first need to overcome more than a dozen provisions designed to reduce their access to the ballot, including a reduction in the number of drop boxes in metro Atlanta from 97 to 23, new voter-ID requirements for mail-in ballots, a far lower bar for rejecting ballots cast in the wrong precinct, less time to request and return mail ballots, a prohibition on election officials sending out mail-in ballot applications to all voters, and even a ban on giving voters food or water while theyre waiting in line.

These policies are already having an impactduring local elections in November, the number of rejected absentee-ballot applications rose from less than 1 percent in 2020 to 4 percent, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,a troubling indicator of how easy it would be to tilt the outcome in a state decided by just over 11,000 votes in 2020.

LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Atlanta-based voting rights group Black Voters Matter Fund, calls the Georgia law a death by a thousand cuts that has the potential to change the results of the election. But the scariest part of the process, she says, is what theyre doing with the election boards.

Thats right: The newestand potentially most dangerousanti-democratic threat are new laws designed to give Trump-backed election deniers unprecedented control over how elections are run and how votes are counted.

After Raffensperger defended the integrity of the 2020 election, Republicans removed himand all his successorsas chair and voting member of the state election board, which oversees voting rules and election certification, and gave the GOP-controlled legislature the power to appoint the boards chair, allowing them to control a majority of the members.

The reconstituted state board, in turn, has extraordinary power to take over up to four county election boards that it views as underperforming or where local officials (read: fellow Republicans) have lodged complaints. In other words, partisan election officials appointed by and beholden to the heavily gerrymandered Republican legislature could control election operations in Democratic strongholds like Atlantas Fulton County, where the Trump campaign spread lies about suitcases of ballots being counted on election night after GOP poll monitors left. The state board has already appointed a panel, led by Republicans, which immediately began a performance review of Fulton County requested by Republicans in the legislaturethe first step toward a possible takeover.

Meanwhile, in at least eight Georgia counties, Republicans have already changed the composition of local election boardswhich not only certify elections but determine things like the number of polling places and ballot drop boxes, as well as voting hoursby ousting Democratic members and replacing them with Republicans. Not just any Republicans, of course, but those who claim the election was stolen. (In Lincoln County, the recently reconfigured election board recently proposed closing six of the countys seven polling sites.)

This radicalization of previously evenhanded bodies will affect not just who oversees elections, but whose votes are counted. During the January 2021 Senate runoffs, the right-wing group True the Votechallenged the eligibilityof hundreds of thousands of voters who it claimed had moved. Only a few dozen votes were ultimately thrown out, but now Georgias new law explicitly allows an unlimited number of voters to be challenged and requires local election boards to hear these challenges within 10 days or face sanctions from the state election board. Based on these challenges, local boards could then decline to certify election results or disqualify enough voters to swing a close electionexactly the gambit Trump tried to pull off in 2020.

More than just reducing turnout, theyre stacking the deck to actually manipulate the results, Brown says. Thats very scary to me.

Thats not all. Precisely because they certified the 2020 election results, Raffensperger and Gov. Kemp are now facing Trump-endorsed primary challengers, raising the prospect that Georgias top executive and top election official heading into 2024 could be Big Lie champions predisposed to helping steal a future election for Trump or another Republican candidate.

Former GOP Sen. David Perdue (who lost a January 2021 runoff election to Democrat Jon Ossoff) announced in December hed challenge Kemp. Perdue has insisted he would not have certified the 2020 election; instead, he would have called a special session of the legislature to enable Republicans to appoint pro-Trump presidential electors to nullify the will of Georgia voters. Just days after announcing his candidacy, Perdue filed a Trump-like lawsuit falsely claiming that thousands of unlawfully marked absentee ballots were counted in Fulton County in November 2020.

Raffensperger, meanwhile, is being challenged by GOP Rep. Jody Hice, who voted to reject presidential electors from Pennsylvania and Arizona after the insurrection, signed on to a lawsuit by the state of Texas asking the Supreme Court to throw out election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and has said he was not convinced at all, not for one second, that Joe Biden won the state of Georgia.

Hice is not an outlier. More than 160 Republican candidates whove amplified the Big Lie are running for statewide positions with authority over how elections are run. Thats akin to giving a robber a key to the bank, says Colorados Griswold. Many more election deniers are running for local positions like poll worker and election judge. And Republicans are not coy about their intentions. We are going to take over the election apparatus, former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, an architect of this strategy, said on his podcast in late December, calling for the overthrow of county election clerks.

If hijacking election administration fails, extreme gerrymandering makes it more likely that Republican legislators in increasingly safe districts, insulated from public accountability, will decide to overturn the will of their states voters in presidential contests.

After new redistricting maps were passed in states like Georgia and Texas last year, the number of competitive congressional and state legislative seats plunged. In Texas, the number of safe GOP House districts will increase from 17 to 23, according to the Cook Political Report, while the number of competitive districts will fall from 12 to just one. Despite being one of the most competitive states in 2020, Georgia will have almost no swing districts in the state legislature and no competitive congressional districtsthe closest GOP-held House seat has an 8-point Republican advantage. (Democrats and voting rights groups have filed suit against these maps.)

That means that GOP legislators not only can ignore the views of a majority of voters, but in deep-red districts theyll be chiefly concerned with primary challenges, accelerating the partys radicalization against democracy. Theyre going to have more Marjorie Taylor Greenes in their caucus, says Michael Li, an expert on redistricting at the Brennan Center for Justice.

This is how Trumps end goal for January 6 becomes far more likely in 2024: If Republicans take back the House through aggressive gerrymandering, theyll not only derail Bidens agenda, but theyll be much more inclined to reject the results of a contested presidential election if a Democrat wins. Sixty-five percent of House Republicans refused to certify the election results in 2020 just hours after the insurrection, and that caucus will become even more radical after 2022.

The people who dont want to certify free and fair elections, predicts Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), will regain control of the federal government. They will make it harder for representative government to ever exist moving forward.

While Republicans have been hellbent on subverting American democracy, Democrats have been slow to properly defend it.

Biden didnt give a major speech about voting rights until July in Philadelphia. By then, 18 states had already passed laws making it harder to vote and Texas Democrats had fled to DC in a Hail Mary effort to block a sweeping voter-suppression law. Though Biden deemed the assault on free and fair elections to be the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War, for the better part of a year his administration did not treat this threat to democracy as an existential emergency. Biden called passage of voting rights legislation a national imperative, but never mentioned the filibuster that was blocking such legislation or laid out a plan to overcome it.

Indeed, a remarkable asymmetry in tactics has defined this fight. While Republicans have made the hostile takeover of the countrys election system their central organizing principle, the Biden administration prioritized economic legislation over voting rights, going so far as to list the passage of the infrastructure bill as the first item in a fact sheet touting the steps it had taken to restore and strengthen American democracy ahead of a global democracy summit in December. Biden believed that passing popular pieces of legislation would prove democracy works and restore the publics faith in the democratic process, but the administrations focus on economic policyand its pursuit of bipartisanshipfailed to blunt the growing radicalization of the GOP.

GOP-controlled states have passed new voter-suppression laws, gerrymandered maps, and election-subversion bills through simple majority, party-line votes. Yet recalcitrant centrist Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) have insisted that any federal legislation stopping such measures requires a bipartisan supermajority, portraying the filibuster not as an impediment to protecting democracy, but as integral to its functioning.

Its a situation that evokes theend of Reconstruction. Back then, insurrectionist Democrats (then the party of white supremacy) used every means necessaryincluding violence and vote-riggingto retake control of the state and federal governments, while accommodationist Republicans (then the party of civil rights) appealed to bipartisan unity, touted economic legislation, and supported the filibuster to block voting rights legislation, leading to nearly a century of Jim Crow.

Finally, in the past couple of weeks, Democrats have made a last-ditch push to protect voting rights, with Biden saying he supports exempting voting rights bills from the filibuster, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) pressing hard to change the Senate rules to overcome GOP obstruction, setting up a showdown on the filibuster by Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Today Im making it clear: to protect our democracy, I support changing the Senate rules, whichever way they need to be changed, to prevent a minority of senators from blocking action on voting rights, Biden said during his speech in Atlanta this week. When it comes to protecting majority rule in America, the majority should rule in the United States Senate. If Democrats do manage to persuade Manchin and Sinemapretty unlikelyto quickly approve approve new bills banning partisan gerrymandering and expanding voting access, such as the Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, it will go a long way toward stopping GOP efforts to undermine democracy. But time is running out for it to have much impact on the midterms.

Most key battleground states have already passed new redistricting maps that courts could be reluctant to alter in the thick of an election yearand, though many states quickly expanded voting options during the pandemic in 2020, it takes time to properly implement pro-voter policies like online and automatic registration. As Li notes, Congress is in danger of losing the 2022 election cycle to anti-democratic forces.

Republicans who falsely maintain that the election was stolen say they are extremely motivated to vote in 2022, with the Big Lie functioning as a new Lost Cause movement, similar to how embittered Southerners used the death of the Confederacy as a rallying cry to fuel the backlash to Reconstruction. At the same time, the blockage of voting rights legislation is demoralizing the Democratic basewhich views democracy protection as a pressing priorityand threatening to depress turnout, making it easier for Republicans to prevail in the midterms and advance their assault on democracy.

For months, voting rights advocates and scholars of democracy have issued hair-on-fire warnings about the danger that the GOPs death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy poses to the very foundation of representative democracy. The American experiment is at risk, Holder says. This is not hyperbole. And by 2024 the damage may have already been done. The members of Congress, governors, secretaries of state, attorneys general, state legislators, and local officials elected this November will determine to a large extent whether there will be fair elections for years to come.

Here is the original post:
The Coming Coup: How Republicans Are Laying the Groundwork to Steal Future Elections Mother Jones - Mother Jones

New Year 2022 marks the beginning of the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Humanity is in the midst of the greatest crisis since the two world wars of the first half of the 20th century. The death toll stands, officially, at approximately 5.5 million. But if the calculation of fatalities is measured by excess deathsan increase in expected mortality that is, in all probability, caused by circumstances associated with the pandemicthe total number of COVID-19 victims is approximately 19 million. Within the United States, close to 850,000 people have died. This number includes one out of every 100 Americans over the age of 65.

The horrific death toll cannot be understood only in terms of the biological transmission of a viral pathogen. The science underlying the pandemic is understood very well by biologists, epidemiologists, and virologists. Experts in the sphere of public health, drawing on more than a century of experience, know what must be done to end a pandemic and save lives.

But the application of scientific knowledge and the efforts of conscientious public health experts have been sabotaged by the ruthless prioritization of the economic and political interests that have determined the response of capitalist governments throughout the world to the pandemic.

Within weeks of the discovery of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, scientists and public health officials understood that the world confronted a threat of potentially catastrophic dimensions. In a complex and intensely interconnected global community, the coronavirus would spread rapidly throughout the world, infect billions, and make seriously ill and even kill tens of millions of people unless emergency measures were taken to stop viral transmission. It was necessary to implement a Zero-COVID strategy directed toward the elimination and ultimate eradication of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

In China, New Zealand, and a few other primarily Asian-Pacific countries, effective health measures were put in place. The number of infections quickly plunged, and the number of deaths were held to low double-digit or even single-digit figures.

But the most powerful capitalist governments, first and foremost those in the US and Western Europe, rejected this scientifically rational and humane course of action.

For two years, that which should be the fundamental aim of public health policiesthe protection of human lifehas been consciously and criminally subordinated to corporate profit and personal wealth accumulation by mega-millionaires and billionaires. Government policies have been focused not on driving the death toll down but on driving share prices on the stock exchange higher.

Malignant self-interest has interacted with national chauvinism. The fight against the pandemic requires a global strategy. But a toxic alliance of imperialist and corporate interests opposed a scientifically guided global response. Safe and effective vaccines should be made quickly and freely available to every person on the planet. Yet, the giant pharmaceutical companies defense of their profits stands in the way.

Nearly 70 years ago, the virologist Jonas Salkwho played a central role in the development of the polio vaccine in the early 1950swas asked on nationwide television if he owned the patent. Salk replied, There is no patent. Can you patent the sun?

The pharmaceutical industry has long since made impossible such expressions of public health altruism. Everything has a priceespecially the right to medical care. Having converted urgently required medications and vaccinations into private property, it holds billions of lives for ransom.

The global pandemic has exposed, as no other event in modern history, the failure of the capitalist system and the irreconcilable conflict between the grotesquely rich ruling elite and the overwhelming mass of the worlds population.

The pandemic will not be stopped only through medical measures. The struggle to end the pandemic has assumed the form of a struggle between classes.

The capitalist class has viewed the pandemic, first and foremost, as an opportunity to increase its wealth. Share values on Wall Street stand at record levels. The policies that the ruling class has implemented during the last two years have resulted in the colossal enrichment of an infinitesimal fraction of the worlds population. Those same policies have led to millions of deaths.

Having gorged themselves for the past two years, the corporate-financial elite and the governments they control are determined that the feasting will continue. Despite the emergence of the more infectious Omicron variant, governments are demanding that children be sent into schools and workers stay on their jobs.

Sending kids into infected classrooms is not about education. It is about providing corporations with a workforce, without which corporate revenues and profits cannot be generated. But in demanding that teachers report to schools and workers remain on the job, the capitalists are acknowledging that the working class is indispensable to the functioning of society.

All pretense of stopping the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 has been abandoned. A chasm has opened between media propaganda and observable reality. The Omicron variant is blessed by the corporate media with the words mild and less severe. The schools are declared to be the safest places to be, where children are, as if by magic, protected against infections. But on January 10, it was reported that 141,000 Americans are in the hospital with COVID-19 and that more than 580,000 children under 18 were infected with the virus last week alone. Record numbers of children are being hospitalized due to the supposedly mild Omicron variant. Over 1,000 children have already been killed by COVID-19 in the US, a figure that will rise dramatically in the coming weeks due to the Omicron surge.

But the slogan of the day, repeated endlessly by the media, is that society must learn to live with COVID. What does this mean? Since Christmas Day, little more than two weeks ago, more than 20,000 Americans died of the virus. These victims could not live with the virus. But the government and media continue to normalize death and suffering, to elevate what the recently inaugurated New York City Mayor Eric Adams calls the financial ecosystem over the wellbeing of humanity.

This is the outlook of a social class that is hurtling toward barbarism. There is no limit on the number of deaths that capitalist governments are prepared to tolerate. Committed to the policy of herd immunitythe uncontrolled spread of the virus throughout the populationgovernments are carrying out a ghoulish experiment on the working people of their countries. As British Prime Minister Boris Johnson infamously stated, Let the bodies pile high.

The working class is now beginning to take up the fight against this inhuman indifference to human life. This is the significance of the struggle of teachers, who are refusing to conduct classes under conditions that place the lives of children and their families at risk. Broader sections of the working class and student youth are joining this fight.

But the development of a powerful mass movement against the pandemic requires a political, social and historical perspective: that is, a clear understanding among workers of who they are fighting against and what they are fighting for.

The World Socialist Web Site published by the International Committee of the Fourth International and its affiliated Socialist Equality parties throughout the worldis the indispensable and decisive weapon in the fight for this perspective.

2022 marks the beginning of the twenty-fifth year of daily publication of the WSWS. It has, during these many years, established itself as the authoritative and uncompromising voice of socialism and international working-class solidarity.

For the past two years, the World Socialist Web Site has reported on and analyzed the nature and significance of the pandemic. It has explained both the science and the politics of the pandemic. Since it posted its first article reporting the emergence of the new coronavirus on January 24, 2020, the World Socialist Web Site has posted more than 4,000 articles on the pandemic.

From the earliest stages of the crisis, the WSWS insisted that the pandemic could be stopped only through the implementation of a global strategy. On March 6, 2020, when the global death toll was less than 3,500 and total deaths in the United States were still under 20, the WSWS warned:

Without emergency intervention, there is a danger that this pandemic will spread uncontrollably throughout the population and cause a staggering loss of life.

This social catastrophe must be prevented. All sections of the working class, youth and students must demand that governments take emergency action to stop the spread of the virus and provide the necessary care for all those who are infected by the disease. This requires a massive reallocation of social resources.

The principle that must guide the response is that the needs of society overrule the interests of profit. Capitalist calculations of share values and profits must not be allowed to limit, undermine, or prevent the combatting of the disease.

There is no political party or publication whose record compares to that of the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site. The warnings of the WSWS, as well as the policies it advances, have been vindicated.

But the work of the WSWS has not been limited to reporting and warning. All our efforts have been directed toward laying the foundation for action by the working class to bring about the end of the pandemic.

During the past year, the WSWS has made significant advances in the organization and political direction of the struggles of the working class.

The call issued on May 1, 2021 for the establishment of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees vastly strengthened the struggle of workers in a series of major industrial strikes that developed in the months that followed.

The international webinars organized by the WSWS in August and October 2021 made a major contribution toward the building of a global movement of the working class, allied with the most principled scientists and public health professionals, for the elimination and eradication of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The WSWSs Global Workers Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic, launched in November, is gathering evidence to expose the criminal responsibility of the capitalist system for the massive scale of deaths.

The World Socialist Web Site is determined to continue and expand its work in the New Year.

The growing movement of the working class presents us with both opportunities and challenges. Among those challenges is the raising of resources.

This is why I urge you to make the largest possible donation to the World Socialist Web Site today. Your ongoing financial support is critically necessary not only to continue the work of the WSWS, but to vastly expand our reach to the millions of workers and young people throughout the world who are searching for an alternative to this inhuman, grotesquely unequal, militaristic and morally bankrupt society.

But in addition to asking for funds, I urge you to draw the necessary conclusion from the experience of the past two years: make the conscious decision to fight for a socialist future, to put an end to the pandemic, to capitalist exploitation and inequality, to war and fascism. Make the decision to join and build the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Get involved in the fight for socialism

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A New Year's appeal from the World Socialist Web Site - World Socialist Web Site - WSWS

When Deborah Lipstadt was nominated last summer to lead an expanded State Department office as an ambassador to monitor and confront antisemitism abroad, the appointment appeared ready to sail through. Professor Lipstadt is a renowned scholar of the Holocaust, the author of six books, and an expert on contemporary antisemitism in all its shapes and forms.

Its mind-blowing that she has not been confirmed, says Pamela Nadell, Director of the Jewish Studies Program at American University. I thought fighting anti-Semitism was the one issue that wasnt partisan.

Lipstadt is one of hundreds of Biden appointees to Senate-confirmed positions languishing in a GOP-imposed limbothe worst partisan blockade ever, according to the non-partisan Partnership for Public Service. Republican foot-dragging on Lipstadt is thought to stem from a tweet she sent in March of 2020 countering GOP Senator Ron Johnsons assertion that if the Jan. 6 rioters had been Antifa or Black Lives Matter backers instead of Trump supporters who love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, he would have felt more threatened.

Lipstadt tweeted, This is white supremacy/nationalism. Pure and simple.

That may be what Idaho Senator James Rischthe ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, where Lipstadts nomination is stalledwas referring to when he told Jewish Insider last week that he was concerned about her past tweets critical of Republican lawmakers. He told the Jerusalem Post that theres nothing nefarious in the delay, that we do go back and look at everything thats been said and done by the nominee to make sure were doing the right thing. Its still a work in progress.

He added, it shouldnt be read by anyone to be an indication of a problem with her, a problem with the issue, or anything else. Asked if he had received a letter from 20 Jewish organizations urging Lipstadts confirmation as the next Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, Risch said, Yes, thats impressive and persuasive.

But hes also said that The nominee has left an extensive trail of materials that were in the process of reviewing.

Lipstadt, 74, is a recognized authority on antisemitism, its history, rhetoric, language and symbols. Her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, prompted a lawsuit from author and Holocaust denier David Irving under British libel laws that Lipstadt won after a lengthy trial in London. The 2016 movie, Denial, starring Rachel Weisz as Lipstadt, recreates the event.

Since 1993, Lipstadt has been the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. Ive known her for years, decades, says Pamela Nadell at American University. There is no scholar in the United States who knows more about contemporary anti-Semitism than she does. Her nomination should have gone through six months ago. When she was announced, my immediate reaction was slam dunk! I was just stunned she didnt sail through.

Lipstadt was an expert witness at last years trial in Charlottesville of the white supremacists who marched with tiki torches in the 2017 Unite the Right rally. She testified that she saw a great deal of overt antisemitism and adulation of the Third Reich in the evidence presented at the trial. She described at length the replacement theory to destroy white national societies that she saw in an overwhelming fashion in Charlottesville, where the marchers chanted, Jews will not replace us. She described the Charlottesville march as a call to battle.

Roberta Kaplan, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told the Daily Beast, I certainly never put on an expert witness that the other side barely had the nerve to cross-examine. If you were in that courtroom, the power of her testimony and the cogency was so stark, it cast a pall over the courtroom. And the jurors, you could tell from the look on their faces even with masks on they were hanging on her every word. Some of them learned something. She got them to understand what the Holocaust was and how it was connected to the event in Charlottesville.

The jury declared $25 million in damages be paid by the rally organizers, self-identified white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Kaplan, who is based in New York, said she thought the trial would be all about racism, that people from rural areas dont even know any Jews. Instead, When you see what they say to each other, 85 to 90 percent of it is about the Jews.

Why are the Republicans blocking her? Kaplan asks, clearly puzzled. Youd think theyd want an ambassador who could express these views in as clear, cogent and compelling a way as possible. All you had to do was sit in that courtroom.

Senate Republicans are on trial as to whether they can see past one senators pique to confirm a scholar who understands history and is not afraid to call out those who dare repeat it. The best you can say about the GOPs stalling on Lipstadt is that shes not alone. The Senate has confirmed 355 (out of 644) Biden executive level appointees. At this point in George W. Bushs term, the number was 505 (out of 677), and for Barack Obama, it was 450 (out of 653). (Trump only nominated 555 in the same time frame, and he had a Republican Senate, so his stats are not comparable.)

Part of the logjam is an increase in Senate-confirmed positions because they signal more status. If confirmed, Lipstadt will have an ambassadorial rank, unlike her predecessors in the role. The GOP is also doing what it can to slow down the Senate, says Lorna DeJonge Schulman, vice president for research at the Partnership for Public Service.

In the past, a senator with a hold would seek to get something out of it. Now, holding up the nominee, not allowing the Senate to go forward, seems to be the goal.

With Lipstadt, its a goal that could prove costly in ways the GOP may not have expected.

Originally posted here:
Republicans Won't Confirm This Renowned Holocaust Scholar. Here's Why. - The Daily Beast

Glenn Beck warns the West will go away by 2030 in an interview with Tucker Carlson on Tuesday.GLENN BECK: This is the most important topic of my career, and I think this is the most important topic in the world today.

The Great Reset is not a conspiracy theory, it is something that the Davos people have put together along with the World Economic Forum, and it is running rampant through every Western capital and every Western country. It is, I just read this, tomorrow morning at 9:30 A.M., the Washington state COVID detainment emergency, they are going to have a state board of health discussing from 9:30 to 3:30 tomorrow, 'allowing local health officers to use law enforcement to force an emergency order in involuntarily detaining a person or group of persons, families to be isolated in a quarantine facility following their refusal to comply with request medical examinations, treatment, counseling, and vaccination.'

This is an internment camp. Washington state has done it before, they haven't obviously learned their lesson from World War II. This again is all about total and complete control. I was wrong. For a long time, I thought this was about socialism. It is not. It is a brand of fascism. In socialism and communism, the state and the people own everything, that's not what's coming. If you want to understand why our corporations are saying that they have to have these teach white people how bad they are, why they're condemning the United States, but not China because China is the new global model, and all of it is in here with 50 pages of fine print footnotes.

Do not go online and just search unless it's an original source because there is a lot of bad information out. This must get out to every person I believe in the Western world. This is not an American problem, this is the entire West going away by 2030, and I think the next, they just war-gamed -- the World Economic Forum just war-gamed that next economic collapse. I think that's coming in the next couple of years, I could be wrong, I usually am on timing, but when that happens, it is lights out. It is over. They will control your food, your water, your work, your education, your banking, your money, gasoline. France is just now paying a rate increase for their electricity of 45 percent because of the Great Reset. They are shutting down their nuclear power plants, and it's going to cost 45% increase in energy.

They are going to bankrupt the entire West and only the elites are going to be able to have money, the food they want, the jobs they want, et cetera, et cetera. We will be left in the dust. We must educate ourselves right now.

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Glenn Beck: I Was Wrong That COVID Pandemic Was About Socialism, It Is About Total Control And Fascism - RealClearPolitics

A Republican congressional candidate has been removed from his seat on a suburban school board after he was accused of violating his oath of office by suing the district and state officials over the mask mandate in schools.

The Oak Lawn High School District 229 board voted Wednesday night to remove Rob Cruz from the panel. Cruz, an Oak Lawn resident who's running for the 6th House District seat now held by Democrat Sean Casten of Downers Grove, was elected to the school board last year.

In an email Thursday, Cruz said he is disappointed by the board's actions and expressed concern that it didn't follow proper procedure -- although he acknowledged not knowing what the proper procedure might be.

As of Thursday morning, Cruz's name and photo had been removed from the Web page for the District 229 board.

Cruz had come under fire by his peers on the board and District 229 administrators for filing a lawsuit against Gov. J.B. Pritzker and state schools Superintendent Carmen Ayala in August over the state's mask order. The suit, filed in Cook County circuit court, noted Cruz was acting "in his official capacity as a Member of the Oak Lawn Community High School District 229 School Board."

Under state law, school board members cannot take action on their own or on behalf of the board or district. The school board has formally said it doesn't support litigation against Pritzker or Ayala and that District 229 will follow directives from the state.

The first lawsuit was dismissed. Cruz filed a second lawsuit in early September that added District 229 as a defendant. That case, filed in Sangamon County, has cost the district more than $25,000 to defend, documents indicate.

The second suit also violated a state law that states board members should protect their districts from lawsuits, District 229 officials said. The lawsuit created a conflict of interest for Cruz, too, officials alleged.

The second lawsuit was dismissed as well, officials said.

Additionally, officials said Cruz violated state law and board policy by speaking about government overreach at a Lyons Township High School District 204 board meeting in November, at which he identified himself as a District 229 board member despite not being previously authorized to speak on the board's behalf.

District 229 officials also accused Cruz of violating his oath and the board's code of conduct by using his status as a board member to promote his congressional campaign in a December news release.

The school board voted 6-1 to remove Cruz by declaring a vacancy on the panel. Cruz cast the lone dissenting vote. It'll be up to the board to appoint a successor.

Cruz is one of three GOP candidates running for Casten's congressional seat. The newly redrawn 6th District includes much of the western and southwestern suburbs.

The other Republicans in the contest are Orland Park Mayor Keith Pekau and first-time candidate Niki Conforti of Glen Ellyn.

Casten is seeking reelection. Democratic U.S. Rep. Marie Newman of La Grange, who now serves the 3rd District, also is running for the 6th District post.

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Republican candidate for 6th Congressional seat removed from school board after suing over mask mandate - Daily Herald