Heeding Steve Bannon’s Call, Election Deniers Organize to Seize Control of the GOP — and Reshape America’s Elections
by Isaac Arnsdorf, Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon, and Anjeanette Damon
September 2, 2021
https://www.propublica.org/article/heed ... -elections
Extract:
(ProPublica) When the (January 6, 2021) insurrection failed, Bannon continued his campaign for his former boss by other means. On his “War Room” podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action,” Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.
The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”
Precinct officers are the worker bees of political parties, typically responsible for routine tasks like making phone calls or knocking on doors. But collectively, they can influence how elections are run. In some states, they have a say in choosing poll workers, and in others they help pick members of boards that oversee elections.
After Bannon’s endorsement, the “precinct strategy” rocketed across far-right media. Viral posts promoting the plan racked up millions of views on pro-Trump websites, talk radio, fringe social networks and message boards, and programs aligned with the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local GOP headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers. They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.
caltrek's comment: It should be noted that the fascist nature of this threat does not lie so much in the method of infiltrating the Republican party. The left has its own version of that in regards to the Democratic party. The danger stems from the idea animating these activities - the Big Lie that the election was stolen from Trump. Meaning that the only results that will be accepted as legitimate are when the far right candidates and initiatives win. All other results will be considered fraudulent. Actual evidence will be rendered irrelevant.
Here is a review of the
ProPublica article that showed up in
Alternet:
https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/trump-fascist-purge/
Don't mourn, organize.
-Joe Hill