Trump's Terrifically Stupid Return to Twitter

 

  Donald Trump. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

 

21 November 22

Two wealthy and self-involved men are seeking the attention they crave.

Quinta Jurecic / The Atlantic

Like the monster miraculously resuscitated to terrorize the heroes in a horror-movie sequel, Donald Trump is back.

No, I’m not talking about his November 15 announcement of his third campaign for president of the United States. Instead I have in mind something far more important: Twitter.

On the evening of November 17, Elon Musk—the richest man in the world and Twitter’s new owner—posted a poll asking users of the site whether he should “Reinstate former President Trump,” who was banned from the platform after his instigation of the insurrection on January 6. Musk’s followers voted in favor, though there’s no guarantee that the poll wasn’t manipulated by the same bots that Musk has spent the past several months railing against. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted, and Trump’s account was magicked back into existence.

This entire incident is terrifically stupid. The story revolves around the whims of two wealthy and self-involved men who enjoy nothing more than public attention. It is an enormous waste of everyone’s time, and I resent having to think about it.

During Trump’s 22-month “permanent suspension” from Twitter, the account was obscured from anyone who tried to look for it: Typing @realDonaldTrump into Twitter produced a blank gray screen that simply announced, “Account suspended.” Now, however, Trump’s old tweets are back, preserved like the citizens of Pompeii frozen amid the ashes of Mount Vesuvius. His most recent tweet dates to January 8, 2021, the day he was banned: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” If you want a reminder of what led Twitter to block him from its platform due to “the risk of further incitement of violence,” you can scroll through the former president’s other tweets from the day of the insurrection. (But not his tweets egging on the Capitol rioters’ rage against Vice President Mike Pence or calling the insurrectionists “great patriots”—he deleted those posts before the account’s deactivation.)

Musk, though, is clearly unconcerned about the risk of future violence. His decision, the childishness of its implementation aside, isn’t particularly surprising. In May, while Musk was still locked in a legal battle over his attempt to back out of purchasing Twitter, he called the site’s decision to ban Trump “foolish in the extreme” and suggested that he would reinstate the former president.

When Musk announced his decision, some Twitter users, predictably, freaked out. A number of people announced that they would be leaving the platform. Doom and gloom proliferated. Representative Liz Cheney of the January 6 committee posted a tweet of her own suggesting that Twitter users might be interested in watching the committee’s hearing documenting how Trump’s tweets contributed to the violence of the insurrection.

One person, though, has been notably quiet: Trump himself. He has not yet tweeted—and his contractual obligations to Truth Social, the platform created to act as Trump’s alternative online home during his Twitter ban, may actually limit what he can post to his newly revived account. In public remarks after Musk issued his poll, Trump said he didn’t “see any reason” to return to Twitter: “Truth Social has taken the place for a lot of people, and I don’t see them going back onto Twitter.”

That said, Truth Social is a far smaller platform than Twitter: Trump’s following there (4.6 million) is dwarfed by his following on Twitter (88 million). And Trump is not known for honoring his word. His return wouldn’t be surprising. A world with Trump back on Twitter, once more campaigning for office and newly able to broadcast his hatreds and destabilizing whims, is likely riskier than a world with Trump banned from Twitter. In a time of rising political violence, handing a megaphone back to this man is a dangerous thing.

But as David A. Graham wrote in The Atlantic when Musk first took over Twitter, there is no guarantee that the former president will be able to recapture the magic. The political situation has shifted. Most saliently, Trump is, well, no longer president. The unique power of his tweets always lay in the fact that he could reorient the direction of the U.S. government with his words alone. That power is no longer his—which is exactly the truth he attempted to undo when he sicced rioters on Congress on January 6.

There are a million lenses through which to understand Trump’s potential return to Twitter. Consider the ramifications for social-media platforms alone. What will happen to Trump’s suspended Facebook account? What might Trump’s sojourn at Truth Social show researchers about the impact of “deplatforming”—the banishing of toxic users from a social-media website? Truth Social runs on Mastodon, the decentralized social-media network that many Twitter users are now treating as a life raft. If Trump stays on Truth Social, and onetime Twitter aficionados flee to Mastodon, what could that signal about the growth of smaller, less-centralized networks as a possible future for social media?

Ultimately, though, I find something absurd and even insulting about having to consider these questions at all. You are reading this, and I am writing it, because a very rich man who desperately wants people to pay attention to him posted an easily rigged poll on the website he’d just bought for $44 billion. The answers to many of the questions I have just posed will depend on the fancies of another rich man who desperately wants people to pay attention to him. There’s an indignity to having one’s attention jerked around this way.

Demanding that people simply ignore these bumbling titans is too simplistic: Their flailing has a tendency to wreck the world that the rest of us live in. But we can at least be more discerning in what kind of attention we pay them, and why. Throughout the Trump administration, journalists struggled to provide the public with crucial information without simply amplifying Trump’s absurdities or giving him the attention he so craved. The press was not entirely successful, but recent news coverage of Trump’s 2024 run suggests that journalists have learned some lessons. In their stories on Trump’s presidential announcement, for example, The Washington Post and NPR chose not to focus on his latest provocations, instead highlighting Trump’s role in the insurrection and the threat he poses to democracy.

If Trump rejoins Twitter, the press must hold on to this approach rather than reverting to the breathless, substance-free coverage that often took hold during Trump’s time in office. And because journalists learned the hard way how—and how not—to cover Trump, they should apply some of those lessons to the public discussion about Musk as well. He cannot, unfortunately, be tuned out entirely. (I can attest to this: I muted Musk on Twitter in a fit of pique more than a year ago, but it turns out that all this does nowadays is make it extremely difficult to follow what’s happening on the platform.) But we can refuse to allow him to entirely reshape the scope of our attention.

For journalists, that means thinking more critically about how to cover Musk, perhaps widening the aperture to consider not just the man himself but the larger forces that made his Twitter takeover possible, and the effects of his actions on the broader world. 

For the average Twitter user, that might simply mean not panicking too much about Musk’s decision to reinstate Trump just yet. There will be plenty of time to do that if, and when, Twitter’s most notorious poster reopens the bird app. And if it does come to that, you can always find me on Mastodon.

"Return with us now to those thrilling days of yore..."

Will New Special Counsel Bring Trump to Justice?

20 November 22readersupportednews.org

The task for Merrick Garland—and now Jack Smith—is to ignore political considerations and resolve the investigations as speedily and equitably as possible.

David Rohde / The New Yorker 

Late on Friday afternoon, Attorney General Merrick Garland made an announcement that in an earlier era of American politics might have elicited bipartisan praise. Citing “extraordinary circumstances,” Garland appointed Jack Smith, a veteran federal prosecutor, as a special counsel to take over investigations into former President Donald Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection and his alleged mishandling of classified documents. Garland’s announcement, and the Republican reaction to it, demonstrated how rapidly, deeply, and thoroughly Trump has exposed the gaping holes in the post-Watergate norms designed to insure that no American President is above the law.

Standing before a row of American and Justice Department flags, Garland read prepared remarks in his signature humdrum monotone. Flanked by three senior Justice Department officials, he said, “The Department of Justice has long recognized that in certain extraordinary cases it is in the public interest to appoint a special prosecutor to independently manage an investigation and prosecution.”

Garland, a former federal judge who still speaks and acts like one, was referring to past criminal inquiries—the Teapot Dome scandal, Watergate—for which the department appointed independent prosecutors to oversee cases against political figures. The goal, theoretically, is to reassure the public that prosecutions—or the lack thereof—do not hinge on the political beliefs or connections of the person under scrutiny. The aim is to uphold a four-word ideal, dating back to Athenian democracy, engraved on courthouses across the United States: “Equal Justice Under Law.”

In this case, the circumstances are extraordinary. Trump, whose supporters, at his urging, stormed the Capitol to prevent Joe Biden from taking power, announced last week that he would be running again for President. And Biden has indicated that he, too, plans to run. Appointing a special counsel, Garland argued, “underscores the department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters.” He’s understating. To have the current President’s appointees criminally prosecuting the former President while they both run for the Oval Office is unprecedented. No such moment has existed before in U.S. history.

The announcement was the latest volley in a high-stakes struggle between Garland and Trump. It began when the Attorney General sent F.B.I. agents to retrieve hundreds of classified documents from Mar-a-Lago. Trump responded by comparing the Justice Department to the Gestapo. The Justice Department then made public the search warrant detailing the scores of top-secret documents that Trump had been hoarding. As Trump paints Garland—and anyone else who challenges him—as part of a corrupt Washington cabal, silence is not an option. Garland is trying to convince Americans that the judicial system is a place where fact, probity, and, most of all, nonpartisan public service still exist.

Smith, Garland’s appointee for special counsel, is now a part of that effort. “Throughout his career, Jack Smith has built a reputation as an impartial and determined prosecutor, who leads teams with energy and focus to follow the facts wherever they lead,” Garland said. A former federal prosecutor who has worked with Smith told me that she agreed, praising Smith for his professionalism and neutrality. “He’s great,” she said.

A graduate of the State University of New York at Oneonta and Harvard Law School, Smith has never before been appointed to office by any political official. After working as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn and Long Island, he headed the Justice Department’s office of public integrity, which prosecuted Republican and Democratic officials, including the former Democratic senator and Vice-Presidential nominee John Edwards for violating campaign-finance laws. (Edwards was acquitted.) Smith currently works as the chief prosecutor of a special court based in The Hague that investigates war crimes in Kosovo.

Immediately after Garland’s announcement, Trump went on the attack. At a dinner event at Mar-a-Lago, he said, “The corrupt and highly political Justice Department just appointed a super-radical-left, super-special counsel.” He dismissed the ongoing investigations as part of the “never-ending witch hunt” and, true to form, pointed a finger elsewhere. “If they are going to investigate me, they have to investigate all of these other Presidents—and they have to start it right now,” he said, claiming that Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden should all be prosecuted. “We’re living in a very corrupt country right now—never had anything like it,” he said. “Our elections are rigged, tainted, and bad.”

Some former prosecutors criticized Garland’s appointment of Smith, warning that it would delay the Trump investigations and potentially allow him to campaign for President without being held accountable. It could also establish a precedent that anyone under investigation who declares that they are running for political office merits the appointment of a special counsel to their case. Others disagreed, saying that Smith’s appointment would speed up the investigation because he will be unhindered by Justice Department bureaucracy.

In an interview last year, the Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, a longtime opponent of Trump’s, told me, “We need to win this struggle politically.” For Democrats, last week’s midterm elections, in which many Trump-endorsed candidates lost their races, again demonstrated that defeating Trump at the ballot box is possible without a criminal indictment. Two impeachments and multiple probes of his business practices have suggested that exposing wrongdoing by Trump isn’t enough alone to politically discredit him. And as my colleague Amy Davidson Sorkin has noted, even if Trump were convicted, he would still be able to run for President.

Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, told me that Garland’s painstaking efforts to show that the Justice Department is politically neutral are unlikely to sway the views of Trump supporters in an era of deep political polarization. But those efforts could influence independents and moderates who declined to support Trump-backed election deniers in the midterms. Garland’s—and now Smith’s—task will be to ignore political considerations and resolve the investigations as speedily and equitably as possible. Whether the appointment of a special counsel, or a potential criminal trial, undermines or aids Trump may not be known until the 2024 Republican Presidential primaries. “It partly comes down to issues that have nothing to do with Garland,” Somin said. “It could come down to how much momentum [Ron] DeSantis or another Republican candidate generates against Trump.” Wall-to-wall press coverage of a Trump trial could be the best thing to happen to his campaign.

"A consummation devoutly to be wished."

The GOP reckoning at hand is long overdue. Naturally, Republicans will still manage to fail.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) address reporters outside the White House after their Oval Office meeting with President Joe Biden on May 12, 2021 in Washington, DC.

Kerry Eleveld

Daily Kos Staff

Wednesday November 16, 2022 · 2:36 PM MST

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Donald Trump kicked off his 2024 presidential bid with such a low-energy harangue of a speech that attendees streamed toward the blocked exits while even Fox News eventually pulled coverage.

When Trump first ran for president in 2016, he promised his roaring hordes they were "going to win so much ... you may even get tired of winning. You're going to say, please, please it's too much winning. We can't take it anymore."

We can't take it anymore is the only part of Trump’s statement that has stood the test of time after he helped Republicans stack up a towering wall of literally "historic" losses over the last three election cycles.

Trump's string of defeats proved so brutal that when he finally announced his long-anticipated comeback candidacy, he found it necessary to blame American voters for his extended stay in Loserdom.

"The citizens of our country have not yet realized the full extent and gravity of the pain our nation is going through. And the total effect of the suffering is just starting to take hold,” he said. “They don’t quite feel it yet, but they will very soon. I have no doubt that by 2024 it will sadly be much worse, and they will see much more clearly what happened and what is happening to our country, and the voting will be very different."

Let's just say it wasn’t exactly Howard Dean's “I have a scream” speech after coming third in the Iowa caucuses in 2004. No exuberance, no more promised winning—just a dark foretelling of the exact American carnage Trump had promised to end during his 2017 inaugural address. Trump never fixes anything—never improves or inspires. His one true superpower is willing misery into existence and then feasting on it like he’s at America's last supper.

In 2016, just enough Americans decided to join Trump's misery-fest to elevate him to the highest office in the land, but a majority of voters have been stiff-arming him ever since.

But not the Republican Party. In early 2021, after Trump completed the hat trick of delivering the House, the White House, and the Senate to Democrats, GOP leadership could have defected. Sure, it would have divided the party for a time and might have been somewhat painful at the polls. But instead of choosing to abandon the Trump train and reclaim the conservative mantle, Republican leaders decided they weren't tired enough of the losing. Not even a deadly coup attempt that endangered their lives could steel GOP congressional leaders to make the break.

So here they are. House and Senate Minority Leaders Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell have both managed to survive initial leadership votes, but they will both face another comeuppance early next year.

If they'd had enough spine to take the hit in 2021 after Trump engineered the worst homegrown terrorist attack on the American government in history, neither of them would be in this vise. But instead, Trump is pushing in on them from one side while American voters are closing from the other. If they stand with a majority of voters (but not a majority of their base), the very real possibility exists that Trump gathers up all his marbles and forms a third party. But if they stand with Trump, Republicans stand to alienate a small-but-critical slice of their base that no longer recognizes the monstrosity they have helped Trump create. People like former Arizona Republican Lisa Ghelfi, featured in the lede of a Wall Street Journal article entitled, "Why Independent Voters broke for Democrats in the Midterms.”

Lisa Ghelfi, a 58-year-old registered Republican in Arizona, voted for Donald Trump for president two years ago but has grown tired of his election-fraud claims. It is the main reason she voted for Democrats for governor, senator, secretary of state and attorney general this fall and plans to change her registration to independent.

Ghelfi, a semiretired attorney, still voted downticket for some Republicans who weren't election deniers.

But "not allowing the election to be settled, it’s very divisive,” she explained, saying she couldn't rationalize voting for any top-of-the-ticket Republican, all of whom embraced Trump's baseless lies about the “stolen” election.

Whatever Republicans do now, it's bound to be both unpopular and painful. And they are just as sure to make the worst possible choice because they have proven time and again they don't have the fortitude to do anything other than take the path of least resistance.

"Bang, I'm dead - and I'm taking down the whole damn GOP with me."

McCarthy hands the detonator to the bomb-throwers

Lord, help us.

Joan McCarter

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday November 17, 2022 · 8:39 AM MST

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Republicans have been promising for weeks that if they took the House of Representatives, it would be payback time for Democrats. Sure, they had a big show around releasing their “Commitment to America” to attempt to show that they had some kind of intent to act like real responsible adults put in charge of a nation, but it was all show and no substance.

Now they have their teeny-tiny majority, they’re doing exactly what they said they’d do: seek revenge on Democrats for winning and doing popular stuff. This was the first public statement from the House GOP after securing their gerrymandered, tiny majority.

That’s previewing the first official press conference where Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and James Comer of Kentucky, the incoming chairs of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees respectively, announce their ridiculous probes into Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son. They gave a preview—where else—on Sean Hannity’s show Wednesday. “We are going to make it very clear that this is now an investigation of President Biden,” Comer told Hannity. Because bogus investigations have worked out so well for them.

It is of course not just Biden, but also Anthony Fauci who is retiring this year. Jordan’s “FBI & DOJ politicization” allegations include his 1,050 page “report,” 1,000 pages of which are copies of the letters they’ve sent to the Biden administration. (This includes 470 pages that are all the same five-page letter sent to U.S. Attorneys.) There’s also Afghanistan and the border and, of course, impeachment investigations from Biden on down.

Speaking of investigations, The New York Times reports: “In a closed-door meeting of Republicans on Monday, right-wing lawmakers including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia extracted a promise that their leaders would investigate Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Justice Department for their treatment of defendants jailed in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.”

Over at NBC News, Scott Wong says: “McCarthy and other leaders will have their hands full as they try to keep their wafer-thin majority united and corral conservative bomb throwers who are clamoring to shut down the government and impeach President Joe Biden and his top allies.”

News flash: McCarthy and the other leaders are the bomb-throwers.

Oh, and that bit about taking the debt ceiling hostage to force Social Security and Medicare cuts? They mean that, too. Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, the top Republican on the Budget Committee, told Wong, “As it relates to the debt ceiling, Americans rightly expect that their elected officials will use every tool we have to fix whatever crises the country faces—whether it’s the spike in prices, an unsecured border, rising debt, you name it.

“Republicans will use every tool we have to bring relief to Americans and put the country back on the right track.”

They mean it. Which means it is imperative that Democrats use this lame duck session to keep them away from the most dangerous weapons.

Are you ready for the Jim Jordan Clown Show?

Cartoon: The Big Lie, updated

Nick Anderson for Daily Kos

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Wednesday November 16, 2022 · 3:59 PM MST

 

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ALDOUS J. PENNYFARTHING: U.S. Intelligence says Russia delayed Kherson withdrawal to give Party of Putin a leg up in the midterms

 

Remember this photo where European leaders look grimly at an arriving Putin as the Donald eagerly welcomes him with a silly grin.

Aldous J Pennyfarthing

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Tuesday November 15, 2022 · 4:25 PM MST

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Somewhere along the line, the Party of Lincoln became something else entirely—something dark, unaccountably moist, and circus peanut-sinister. 

Not only is it no longer the Party of Lincoln, it’s not even the Party of Reagan anymore. Or even of Dan Quayle. Or Kevin Sorbo, for that matter. No, it’s the Party of Putin—full stop. And as such, its members have increasingly relied on the same cursed monkey paw that’s kept Donald Trump twisted up in a savage Underoo wedgie lo these many years.

Yes, Russia helped Trump get elected in 2016. And they tried again in 2020. Everyone other than Trump and his yet-to-be-betrayed cronies now acknowledges this—including, a little more than a week ago, a close ally of Vladimir Putin. 

Russia also knows what’s bad for democracy is good for Putin-style autocracy, so they were rooting hard last week for Republicans to ride a red wave to Washington—and eventually to Moscow for another weirdly timed July 4 treason-palooza. In fact, the GOP’s midterm fate was important enough to Putin and his murder mice that they put off some fairly momentous decisions until after the election was over.

According to CNN:

The US has intelligence that Russia may have delayed announcing its withdrawal from the Ukrainian city of Kherson in part to avoid giving the Biden administration a political win ahead of the midterm elections, according to four people familiar with the intelligence.

Senior Russian officials discussed the US midterms as a factor during deliberations about the withdrawal announcement, one person familiar with the intelligence said. Waiting until after the US election was always a “pre-planned condition” of Russia’s withdrawal from Kherson, a second person familiar with the intelligence told CNN.

Since Republicans represented Putin’s last, best hope for his simpering twit brigade, which for months has struggled mightily against the underdog Ukrainian army, the midterm results must have been a big disappointment to the Kremlin.

For his part, President Joe Biden found the timing of Russia’s announcement convenient, to say the least. “I find it interesting they waited until after the election to make that judgement, which we knew for some time they were going to be doing, and it’s evidence of the fact that they have some real problems—the Russian military,” Biden said at a press conference the day after the election.

Meanwhile, writing in The Daily Beast, the redoubtable Russian media monitor Julia Davis noted that Russian state television seemed taken aback by the Democrats’ midterm success:

This plan to discredit the U.S. elections and convince the Republicans that the mighty Kremlin hand covertly helped push them to victory had backfired. On Wednesday, state TV propagandists were scratching their heads about the wave that turned out to be but a trickle. During the broadcast of 60 Minutes, host Olga Skabeeva asked an expert: “How are our guys in America?” Political scientist Vladimir Kornilov clarified with a chuckle: “Our Republicans.”

Dmitry Abzalov, Director of the Center for Strategic Communications, noted that the outcome was much different than the predictions: “Even the Democrats predicted the red wave that will mow everything down, but it turned out to be quite modest.” Political scientist Vladimir Kornilov said, “The worst fears of the Democrats are now behind them. They easily won the states they were most concerned about.”

I hope American voters—who surprised many observers with their determination to defend our democracy and their own hard-earned rights against the rising forces of fascism—will take note of who’s on the GOP’s side these days: namely, the diabolically evil Vladimir Putin and the off-brand Bond villain Elon Musk, among others. Indeed, birds of a feather flock together, and what we have here are a bunch of amoral, stumbling-drunk emus. 

Luckily, America saw through them. This time. Let’s hope that by 2024 Putin is rigging cockroach races in a gulag instead of fucking with the lives, livelihoods, and well-being of millions of free people.

Putey pulls the Donald's strings - still.

MAGA melts down over Kari Lake’s loss and ‘red tsunami’ failure, vows revenge in the aftermath

 

Now that Kari Lake's army of fervent election denialists have lost all their battleground-state elections, they seem to have turned to their routine claims of theft, their traditional search for scapegoats, and plotting revenge.

David Neiwert

Daily Kos Staff

Tuesday November 15, 2022 · 3:18 PM MST

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MAGA fanatics are nothing if not predictable. Almost from the moment that Democrat Katie Hobbs was declared the winner of the Arizona governor’s race, the army of election denialists lined up behind loser Kari Lake—their last possible hope for taking control of the voting apparatus in a battleground state—donned their well-worn tinfoil hats, and howled an all-too-familiar cry: It was stolen! Voter fraud! Democrats are cheating.

Lake herself remained mostly mum about the outcome, other than tweeting her skepticism, doubtless to set up her looming lawsuit and ongoing denialist campaign: “Arizonans know BS when they see it.” Steve Bannon, the onetime Trump adviser who campaigned with Lake, claimed that elections were being manipulated by the Chinese communists in collusion with the Biden administration. And the “MyPillow” guy, Mike Lindell, ranted at length about “computer manipulation.” Another ex-Trump adviser, Boris Epshteyn, lamented that Lake’s opponents were “stealing this election from MAGA, stealing it from the American people.”

It's unclear how Lake will be able to claim that the election was stolen, considering that she and everyone else monitored the ballots closely. On Nov. 11, she had tweeted: “Rest assured that I have the brightest & best attorneys in the Nation, right here on the ground in Arizona. Every ballot has eyes on it.”

She also retweeted a post from notorious white-nationalist propagandist Jack Posobiec, who himself was retweeting a story from a dubious source—the far-right site Post Millennial—claiming that “Maricopa election officials launched PAC in 2021 to stop MAGA candidates.” Lake remarked: “Shouldn't Election Officials be impartial? The guys running the Election have made it their mission to defeat America First Republicans. Unbelievable.”

Bannon was particularly strident and conspiratorial, not to mention intent on revenge. He opened his “War Room” podcast on Monday with a recitation of the House investigations being planned by Republicans over the next two years, including a look into Hunter Biden’s laptop, which he claimed showed corruption of President Biden by China’s Communist Party.

He warned Attorney General Merrick Garland: “We’re coming for you.” And he claimed the House investigations are “gonna go after, hard, the infiltration—and that means traitors. Yes, let me be blunt, traitors. People that have betrayed this nation to an existential threat to the American people and an existential threat to the Chinese people.”

Bannon also hosted prominent election denialists Greg Phillips and Catherine Engelbrecht—both freshly out of jail, where they had been held on contempt charges for refusing to identify a supposed “FBI informant” who plays a key role in a lawsuit against them—of True the Vote, the election-denialist outfit that forged an alliance with the far-right “constitutional sheriffs” movement to organize ballot-box watches in the election.

Speaking with Bannon, both of them agreed with the host that Chinese communists were behind the “election theft.” Phillips said, “They are not only a threat, they are the threat—they’re the threat to freedom, the threat to everything we all stand for.” He and Engelbrecht spouted conspiracy theories about the Arizona election being stolen: “The fraud has been institutionalized,” she claimed.

At the end, Phillips asserted: “You have Katie Hobbs who—depending on where this thing goes, may be certifying her own stolen election.” Engelbrecht chimed in: “We have to stop the certification.” Bannon agreed: “Yes, we have to stop the certification. No doubt.”

Later in the episode, former Trump strategic adviser Boris Epshteyn asserted that “we do not have an election system in this country,” and said “we’re not gonna accept” the election outcome.

You better believe that if the Democrats were losing, you know, come out winning and then lose five days later, they wouldn’t be accepting it, and Republicans and MAGA cannot be accepting it. What is happening in Arizona is a complete and utter and total travesty. Kari Lake won that election. Hear me loud and hear me clear. Kari Lake won that election. I know Arizona like the back of my hand and there’s no way on God’s green earth that Katie Hobbs was elected to be governor of that gorgeous Grand Canyon state.

Kari Lake won. Democrats in cahoots with media, with establishment Republicans … you are the ones stealing this election from MAGA, stealing it from the American people.”

Epshteyn added, “We’ve got to be fighting, we cannot be accepting the rigging and stealing of American elections. We’ve been talking about it for two years.”

Another prominent leader in the election-denialist movement, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, melted down in an hour-long rant on his “Lindell Report” podcast Monday that followed most of the same lines of argument: The election was stolen through “computer manipulation,” all at the behest of Chinese communists who are secretly controlling our system with the collusion of Democrats.

“How did these all get taken?” Lindell demanded to know. “Why wasn’t there a red wave? You can only have one answer: computer manipulation.”

Claiming a Gateway Pundit story as evidence, he told his audience that “they’re trying to steal this from Kari Lake like they have all the other races,” claiming that Mehmet Oz and Doug Mastriano actually won their elections in Pennsylvania as well.

“Those are called deviations from norms, and they’re impossible,” Lindell claimed. “This is computers!” He later added: “If the machines and the computers aren’t gone, we lose our country forever. I don’t know how else to say it.

“And who is this that we lose it to? The Uni-Party! The Uni-Party, remember that. The CCP! China! The deep state and the globalists. … This was an attack by China. I don’t see how you can put it any other way.”

The ground has been laid for Lake to contest her electoral loss. Similarly, Republican candidate Joe Kent, who narrowly lost his election to Congress in Washington state’s 3^rd District to Maria Gluesenkamp Perez, has been holding out hope that he can mount a comeback in his race. He refuses to concede.

Kent dismissed the multiple calls in his race by mainstream media, calling them “irrelevant” and “another narrative designed to stop voters from ballot curing & to force me to concede.” He also posted a video saying he would not concede “until every legal vote is counted.” He’s calling on his followers to check and cure their ballots if any of them were rejected.

While this kind of election denialism is deeply problematic—it is, after all, a direct attack on public confidence in the integrity of the democratic system in the United States—and its continuing spread is worrisome for obvious reasons, the Tuesday election outcome in fact was very encouraging for people fighting to defend democracy, even beyond the failures of the denialists to elect a single person to a key battleground-state position despite having a deep and formidable roster.

It was also manifest that election denialism is a losing game. “If you tell people that voting is hard, or voter fraud is rampant, or elections are rigged, it doesn’t make people more likely to participate,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told The New York Times. “Why would you want to play a game you thought was rigged?”

Similarly, Lake’s strategy of encouraging voters to hang on to their ballots until Election Day as a way to prevent fraud backfired badly, since it meant she missed out on early voting. “We would have never, ever thought about telling people to hold onto their ballots,” said Wes Gullett, a Republican strategist. “The only reason to do that is to build this narrative about ‘foul play’ and keep that narrative going, but any time you encourage people not to vote immediately, you lose the opportunity to get that vote in the bank.”

This is why election denialism badly cost Republicans in the midterms. “Some election deniers won,” The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake reported, “but the hard-liners almost always ran behind their fellow Republicans and lost in places where the electorate was the most competitive.”

Unfortunately, logic and reason have little effect in blunting the authoritarian fever that has seized the Republican Party. The hopes among centrists that it has broken are almost certainly futile. But the majority’s affirmation is cause for hope.

“This was a threat we’d never faced before in this country. We’d never faced a threat of secretaries of state refusing to certify a result that they didn’t like. We can now say with certainty that this movement was rejected by the American people in this election,” Trey Grayson III, a former Republican election official in Kentucky, told The Guardian.

“In every swing state those deniers lost elections, as well as in many other races across the country. This was a clear message that Americans believe in free and fair elections.”

If ever evil were personified: A pox on your nose, Steve Bannon.  Soon those will be hoosegow bars. I, for one, can't wait to see Stevarino in an orange jumpsuit.