The Governor shied away from questions about 2024 in this segment.
Gov. Ron DeSantis continued Monday to float ideas about where he might send undocumented immigrants if the federal government sent them to Florida.
The Governor made his threats on the “Ingraham Angle,” again asserting the state’s position that they should be sent to other places.
DeSantis is putting his money where his mouth is: his proposed budget includes an $8 million allocation for relocating the undocumented.
“Our view is that if they’re going to be dumping, we want to be able to facilitate transfer to places like Delaware. And so we have $8 million in my new budget to be able to do that,” DeSantis said.
This line about Delaware, the home state of President Joe Biden, has been used before.
“If you sent (them) to Delaware or Martha’s Vineyard, that border would be secured the next day,” DeSantis said last week in Jacksonville when unveiling a series of proposals designed to address undocumented immigrants being transferred to Florida.
During the interview, DeSantis sounded as if the flights were still going on, even though he had said weeks back that the migrant flights had ceased.
“Well, actually the Biden administration puts people on planes and flies them into Florida in the wee hours of the morning,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis denounced contractors who may have been part of the flights last spring and summer, saying that Biden’s border policies were “effectively a human smuggling operation.”
Among the proposals DeSantis is advancing is a prohibition of state business with those contractors, as well as potential restitution for money made shipping these people.
DeSantis avoided taking some of Ingraham’s bait.
He sidestepped a question framing his policy push as motivated by 2024 concerns, and also redirected a question about a Washington Post op-ed accusing him of “paving his path to the White House on the backs of vulnerable immigrant children.”
A reminder for those who say the real problem is "messaging": "On a highly distorted congressional map that is still taking shape, the [GOP] has added enough safe House districts to capture control of the chamber based on its redistricting edge alone." https://t.co/RwOamQmZye
Real loving god there buddy. I always wonder at people who buy expensive vehicles and then write or plaster them with stickers. I doubt the sanity of people like this. Hugs
Rivers is another right wing media cartoonist. I wonder why the right thinks the common decency of wearing a mask and social distancing to protect others around them is hell. Why vaccines paid for and approved by their tax dollars, used with very minuscule side effects world wide is too much to ask for saving lives. The lives they save could be theirs. After all this time and data, the objections now come down to stubborn I don’t want to because my tribe has said it is bad. They would rather believe a talk show host who is a high school drop out or whose bosses said in court no one should believe him rather than a certified immunologist with over 30 years in the practice of saving peoples lives. Hugs
The real economy is how money flows effecting peoples lives. It is not the stock market which is how much money the wealthy are gaining from the system. In the economy today there is a huge divide between the wealthy and the public. That divide is making it hard for the public to meet their daily needs. The Democrats are trying to fix and narrow that divide. But because the wealthy are so entrenched and own so much of the media along with a majority of the elected office holders it is a fight to get anything for the people, anything helps the public. The wealthy only care, their only interest is more for themselves. More than they can spend, more than the other wealthy for bragging rights. The public needs to know who is fighting for them, and who is fighting against them. As corporate owned media is not going to tell them, and bribed politicians are going to lie about the attempts to pass bills to help the public, it is up to us to share the true of what is happening with the people. Spread the news, to everyone, on every blog, at every meeting with others. Get the word out before it is too late. Hugs
At least Biden is actually trying to something to help the majority of Americans unlike the last administration who only wanted to help the wealthy 0.1%. Yet another phrase that the GQP has stolen from the language. Used to be “free stuff” was the crap that you got for signing up for a savings account or a web service. Now they intend it to mean “Democrats invested in infrastructure or the people”. Damn them to Hell. Hugs
And once again, the pathetically uneducated dropout Lisa Benson confirms how little she understands of any serious economic issue. New Deal Keynesian liberal market economics is NOT about expecting “FREE STUFF” any more than law enforcement, emergency first responders or “free” public schools — or even the military that costs far more than anything proposed — is “free stuff.” We all contribute and we all benefit. We want PUBLIC POLICY to address legitimate PUBLIC NEEDS, but has very specific proposals for how ALL OF US contribute, in a way that is fair for everyone. We all expect to pay our fair shares.
We also expect the billionaires and corporate special interests who have been getting a free ride to pay their fair share. But for our money we don’t want to just blow up other countries to enrich “defense contractors” of the “military-industrial complex” that (Republican) Eisenhower warned us about; we want to get for our money the things that benefit all of us and INVEST in the resources and opportunities that generate economic returns that enrich us all. Not free stuff. The only reason the Republicans want our infrastructure to fail is so they can sell it to the highest bidder. Which will cost the working majority that commutes to work the most, as we would have to pay tolls and taxes everywhere we go. Hugs
Only AG would believe atheist’s have meltdowns over the origin of words. If you really want to drive “them” crazy, just wish them a Happy Festivus and watch their heads explode!!! Even if Holiday originated from Holy Day, that’s not its modern meaning. And besides, even if you intend it as Holy Day, that’s still more inclusive because every religion has some concept of Holiness. No one is telling you that you can’t say Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays is simply meant to show respect for those of us who DON’T celebrate Christmas. I have never understood the made up war on Christmas and anger on the right if people don’t use their exact phrasing. Isn’t this the freedom people? No vaccines and do what they want party? But forcing everyone to pay homage to a holiday that has borrowed every aspect of it from other faiths and pagan rites seems weird to me. Hugs
A relatively small but incredibly organized faction is working to turn the country into something resembling a theocracy
Madison Cawthorn, a Republican congressman from North Carolina. Photograph: Callaghan O’Hare/Reuters
The two genders: men and ‘earthen vessels’
Forget everything you ever thought you knew about pregnancy: a 26-year-old congressman, who will never be pregnant himself, has helpfully stepped in to explain the process to everyone. A fetus is just like a photograph, according to Madison Cawthorn, a right-wing congressman from North Carolina. During an anti-abortion speech on the House floor last week, Cawthorn proclaimed that having an abortion is like snatching a half-developed photograph of a sunset out of someone’s hand and ripping it to shreds. (You could almost see his brain working as he spoke: a photo develops … an embryo develops … wow, I am very smart!)
I’m afraid it gets worse. Having delivered this torturous analogy, Cawthorn (who has been accused of sexually harassing college classmates and once advised mothers, “if you are raising a young man, please raise them to be a monster”), then switched to religious rhetoric. “Eternal souls woven into earthen vessels sanctified by almighty God and endowed with the miracle of life are denied their birth,” Cawthorn declared grandly. Weirdly, a lot of women weren’t too keen on being described as “earthern vessels,” and Cawthorn’s remarks quickly caused online outrage.
Whenever women get upset about their rights being taken away by misogynistic extremists, you can always rely on a Reasonable Man™ to swoop in and explain how everyone’s overreacting. This incident was no exception: Grayson Quay argued in the Week that the women getting angry on the internet had misunderstood the biblical passages to which Cawthorn was alluding. “[I]t seems Cawthorn, a vocal evangelical Christian, was using ‘earthen vessels’ to refer not to the mother’s body, but to the body of the unborn baby,” Quay wrote. Even if that is what Cawthorn was referring to, it’s not much better is it? The separation of church and state is supposed to be a pillar of US democracy: we should all be alarmed by politicians who seem to think they are actually preachers.
Cawthorn, after all, isn’t the only high-profile figure who seems to be trying to advance a Christian nationalist agenda. Josh Hawley, a pro-Trump senator from Missouri, has spoken about the need to “take the lordship of Christ, that message, into the public realm and to seek the obedience of the nations – of our nation… to influence our society, and even more than that, to transform our society to reflect the gospel truth and lordship of Jesus Christ.”
And then, of course, there’s Michael Flynn, who served as Donald Trump’s first national security adviser in 2017. Last month Flynn made headlines by calling for the establishment of “one religion” in the US. “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion,” Flynn told a crowd in San Antonio. “One nation under God and one religion under God.”
I could go on and on: there are endless examples of influential leaders in the US calling for the creation of a “Christ-centered republic” and for the bible to influence policy. But while that rhetoric is alarming, it’s not as alarming as what’s been happening behind the scenes. In 2018 the researcher Frederick Clarkson exposed the existence of a Christian supremacist initiative called Project Blitz, that aimed to flood state legislatures with bills undermining the separation of Church and State. A 116-page strategy manual laid out the plan. 1) They’d smuggle Christianity into policy with covert strategies that gave the appearance they respected religious pluralism. “The playbooks advise legislators to cloak their religious mission in the guise of more secular intentions and they’ve renamed several bills to make them sound more appealing,” Clarkson reported. 2) They’d overwhelm state legislatures with so many bills that trying to fight them would be like a game of “whack-a-mole”. 3) They’d start with less controversial bills, such as those requiring or allowing the display of “In God We Trust” in public schools, and establish small victories first. Then they’d escalate.
Clarkson’s reporting on Project Blitz, and the various exposes that followed, forced the project’s organizers into stealth mode, but they haven’t disappeared. Far from it: radicalized Christian nationalism is a growing threat to American democracy, as a relatively small but incredibly organized faction working to turn the country into something resembling a theocracy. Indeed, if the insurrection on 6 January had gone ever so slightly differently, people like Flynn might be turning their dreams of “one nation under God” into a reality at this very moment.
BRINC, A RISING star among the many companies jockeying to sell drones to police, has a compelling founding mythology: In the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, its young founder decided to aid law enforcement agencies through the use of nonviolent robots. A company promotional video obtained by The Intercept, however, reveals a different vision: Selling stun gun-armed drones to attack migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
The company’s ascendant founder and CEO, Blake Resnick, recently appeared on Fox Business News to celebrate a venture capital coup: $25 million from Silicon Valley A-listers like Sam Altman, ex-LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner’s Next Play Ventures, and former acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan. The 21-year-old Resnick, a Thiel fellow and a new inductee to the prestigious Forbes “30 Under 30” list in the category of social impact, told Fox Business’s Stuart Varney that Brinc’s quadcopter drones are helping police defuse dangerous hostage situations on a near-daily basis. Resnick repeated his longtime claim that the company had been founded “in large part” as a lifesaving response to the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, an inspirational story that’s made its way into press coverage of the startup. With increased scrutiny paid to the moral and bodily harms posed by autonomous militarized robots, Brinc’s “Values & Ethics” webpage offers a salve, asserting a “duty to bring these technologies into the world responsibly” and a commitment to “never build technologies designed to hurt or kill.”
But a 2018 promotional video for an unreleased border security product shows that the startup’s original technological goals did involve hurting people. In the video, Resnick, standing at an unnamed stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, demonstrates how his company’s flying bots could be used to detect, track, interrogate, and ultimately physically attack would-be migrants. “This is one of the most desolate parts of our southern border,” a blazer-clad Resnick says in the video, standing beside a large metallic box adorned with solar panels. “Every year, over $100 billion of narcotics and half a million people flow through areas just like this one.” When the video was made, the Trump administration had begun investing in so-called virtual wall surveillance technologies to obviate the need for the physical wall that Donald Trump had promised during his presidential campaign, inking contracts with Brinc competitors like Anduril Industries (also linked to Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder behind the Thiel Fellowship). “There’s no wall here,” notes Resnick, “and it probably wouldn’t work anyway because of the rough terrain and eminent domain issues.” Luckily, “there is a solution,” says Resnick, gesturing to the metal chest.
Resnick would have been about 18 at the time the video was made.
In the video, Resnick calls that solution the “Wall of Drones,” in which the glinting boxes would be deployed across the border, each harboring a small robotic quadcopter with high-definition and thermal sensors, self-piloting abilities, human-detection software, and, crucially, a stun gun. Once Brinc’s border drone detected a “suspicious” person, it was to connect its sensors and built-in speaker with a Border Patrol agent, who would then remotely “interrogate” the “perpetrator.” In the video demonstration, a Latino actor referred to as “José” is walking in the middle of the desert when he is approached by the Brinc drone. José then refuses to show identification to the drone, points a gun at it, and walks away, whereupon the drone is depicted firing a Taser into his back and shooting an electrical current through him. José crumples into the dirt.
Fully realized, the Wall of Drones would have entailed hundreds or thousands of these armed robots constantly searching for targets along the border, adding more weapons to an already highly militarized stretch of the Earth.
The artificial intelligence-powered hunting and tasing of a wandering migrant isn’t a scene that’s immediately easy to reconcile with Brinc’s corporate vow: “Be mindful of the implications of our work — we won’t build a dystopia.” Today the company is still engineering sophisticated security-oriented drones with an eye toward police, the Department of Homeland Security, and defense customers but without the weaponized variant shown off in the desert. Brinc’s current main offering to police and other first responders is the LEMUR S drone, which closely resembles the Wall of Drones unit but does not have a weapon installed. It’s described by the company as a “tactical tool that can help to de-escalate, reduce risk, and save lives.” The company also sells the BRINC BALL, a spherical cellphone-like device that can be tossed into dangerous situations by police to listen and communicate remotely.
The Blake Resnick of today, three years removed from his borderland demonstration, is contrite over having worked on the border system. He told The Intercept over email that the “video is immature, deeply regrettable and not at all representative of the direction I have taken the company in since.” He described the Wall of Drones system as a “prototype” that was “never fully developed, sold, or used operationally” and was discontinued in 2018 because it is “prone to disastrous misuse. … I agree that the technology as depicted is unethical and that is one of the reasons we created a set of Values and Ethics to guide our work,” he added, referring to the website section.
Resnick also said that “the video was faked” — the company “never built a drone with a functional taser.” The video, he said, used compressed gas to fire a Taser dart at the actor but “without actually putting high voltage through the wires.”
Still, the company did try to sell the system: Resnick noted that “BRINC had initial discussions with a very limited number of parties” about purchasing the Wall of Drones system, explaining that the idea was to build something cheaper than a border wall that would reduce “the risk of gunfights between law enforcement and armed traffickers attempting to cross into the United States.” But “nothing ever progressed” with the project, and Resnick repeated his claim that he was inspired by the Las Vegas shooting “to pivot away from these uses” to serving emergency responders, though work continued on the Wall of Drones into the year following the massacre. That pivot and the company values statement predated the startup’s first employee, revenue, product delivery, and fundraising, he said. Brinc, he said, is committed to not selling weaponized drones.
Despite Resnick’s change of heart and the company’s current unarmed tack, some who spoke to The Intercept say the fact that the technology was ever on the table raises serious concerns about the values, ambitions, and judgment of Brinc and its young CEO. And though Brinc’s founder says that he’s pivoted away from drones built to intercept and incapacitate migrants, the company’s original mission — selling flying robots to aid in state security — remains in place, situating the company in an ethically fraught new frontier of business. The company recently hired a “federal capture and strategy director,” previously employed by a defense contractor selling drones to U.S. Special Operations Command, suggesting an interest in military applications.
“He’s got this whole narrative about the shooting in Vegas, but the original idea was 100 percent to use drones to tase migrants,” a source with direct knowledge of Brinc told The Intercept. The source, who asked to remain anonymous to protect their livelihood, said that Resnick at the time showed little interest in drone “applications in the non-tasing immigrants business” even though there are “a million things you can use drones for that don’t involve electrocuting people.”
Referring to Brinc’s current emphasis on nonviolence and de-escalation, this person said, “They only made that up when they raised funds from real investors like Sam Altman. The company puts out a good front about rescuing people and doing no harm, but imagine what is said to cops behind closed doors?”
An actor depicting a migrant on the U.S.-Mexico border is struck with a stun gun, demonstrating the capabilities of Brinc’s “Wall of Drones” system.
Still: The Intercept
“Startups pivot all the time to where the money is,” this source added. “Google once said ‘don’t be evil.’ When the rubber hits the road, you’ve got paying customers, and those customers want things.”
A patent in Resnick’s name protecting an expanded version of the system from the video raises further questions about both his stated motivation for pivoting away from weaponized drones and about the potential for the company to use such technology in the future. Brinc provisionally applied for the patent in 2017 but formally applied in June 2018 — seven months after the Vegas shooting that Resnick said convinced him to switch to helping emergency responders. The patent was awarded to Brinc last year. The patent application, for “Drone Implemented Border Patrol,” states: “If a person is detected, an onboard facial recognition algorithm will attempt to identify the person. … In one embodiment, the facial recognition algorithm works by comparing captured facial features with the U.S. Department of State’s facial recognition database.”
The patent specifies that the onboard stun gun is a Taser X26, a powerful, discontinued electroshock weapon associated with “higher cardiac risk than other models,” according to a 2017 Reuters investigation. But a stun gun was only one of many possible options. Other potential anti-migrant armaments described in the patent include pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, rubber buckshot, plastic bullets, beanbag rounds, sponge grenades, an “electromagnetic weapon, laser weapon, microwave weapon, particle beam weapon, sonic weapon and/or plasma weapon,” along with “a sonic approach to incapacitate a target.”
Migrant and civil liberties advocates decried the technology demonstrated in the video.
“The Biden administration and Congress must not contract with companies like Brinc,” said Mitra Ebadolahi, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties, after reviewing the video. “Doing so promotes profits over people and does nothing to further human safety or security.” Ebadolah added that the Wall of Drones system is “particularly horrifying when one considers potential targets: unaccompanied children, pregnant people, and asylum-seekers searching for safety.”
She echoed the source’s concerns about a pivot back to weaponized drones, stating: “In an unregulated market, tech executives follow the money, and they engineer their products for buyers that promise large profits and little scrutiny. The most attractive government contracts are with our most over-funded and under-scrutinized agencies: law enforcement.”
Jacinta Gonzalez of Mijente, a Latino advocacy and migrant rights group, described the Wall of Drones video as “absolutely horrifying” in an interview with The Intercept. “It’s terrifying to think that this is not just an awful idea that someone brings up in a brainstorming session, but [Brinc has] gone so far as to make the video,” which she says is illustrative of “how blurry the line has become between war zones and a militarized border. You can tell very clearly that these companies are getting their inspiration from the killer drones that are used in other parts of the world.”
Gonzalez said that she was disturbed by the scenario depicted in the video, which she described as a “racist fantasy” and not representative of the true humanitarian problems along the border. “If there was a drone flying over, they would most likely be finding families and people who are going through a very difficult health crisis. … They would be confronting folks that might not be speaking English.” Forcing the average southern border migrant into an interrogation with a robot designed to electrocute them “just makes a dangerous journey all the more violent, all the more likely to result in death or harm.”
Gonzalez shared skepticism over how Brinc’s current pledge to not help build a robotic police dystopia might fare in the longer term: “You cannot trust a company that is even putting ideas like this out into the world.” Avoiding a future in which the southern border is patrolled by armed flying robots “not only requires commitments from this company to say that they won’t produce this type of drone, but it also requires local police departments, and ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and Border Patrol to all proactively say, ‘This is not the type of technology that we want to invest in, we would absolutely never implement something like this.’”
On DAY SIX of not eating, hunger striker Georgia is really feeling the effects – she’s feeling weak, and our doctors are monitoring her vital signs as she approaches a week without food. pic.twitter.com/Q2xkMA2oML
— Arizona Youth Hunger Strike for Democracy (@AZ4Democracy) December 12, 2021
Sorry but the above hunger strike is stupid and makes hunger strikes look bad. The fact is Sinema doesn’t care and wont care if these protestors die. She has made that clear. She cares only about herself, her future. and her money. Her money! She cares about what her donors pay her to care about. She is shamelessly bought and legally bribed.
And yet Bernie fully backed up Biden’s run for president. Clyburn stopped Bernie by convincing more people to vote for Joe. That’s part of democracy. What about putting up candidates with a bit of personality and bite instead of the bland non-entities who raise the most money? Hugs
As a reminder: pretrial release conditions — which, after all, are imposed on people who are presumed innocent — are designed to protect the public and prevent flight, not to be punitive. https://t.co/AqTn1feVcB
I can't find anything that sampled data from the past decade (unless you count Media Matters which doesn't peer review). But everything before that, yes. This collects links to studies that came up in searches but several went back to MM studyhttps://t.co/52CU7LWYL7
This is the danger I mentioned before. Disbelieving the person being discriminated against being the default position of authorities. The idea that it is best to assume everyone who claims to have been discriminated against or assaulted due to racism / bigotry is lying or making it up. That is a scary place to be in for the disadvantaged. Hugs
Have right wing cartoonist seen the job numbers? Biden adds 943k jobs — more jobs in a single month than Trump netted during his ENTIRE TERM. Are you glad Biden is President?” Nearly a million jobs added for the month. Then the wall street Journal published: “Biden went on to say, “We have now created over 3 million jobs since I took office, more jobs than have ever been created in the first five months of any presidency in modern history, thanks to the incredible work of the entire team.”” 3 million jobs added. Even coming out of Covid slow down and with a continuing Covid presence that is great. Hugs
I seen a slew of these misleading right wing media cartoons that said Santa was anti-vaccine and Santa wouldn’t visit any where there was a vaccine requirement. What a crock. These people do not speak for the mythical character, the spirit of Christmas is not deterred by virus or vaccine for virus. This is a mind control scare job attempt. It is disgusting. Hugs
Same old mislabeled trope. Time to give it a rest. The only ones voting to defund the police have been Republicans. The people that really just wanted reform did not think through the defund slogan. If you need a long explanation for what you really mean about something, it’s best to reword it. I some places if you’re not white, police will search your car during a traffic stop and take your money for “evidence” of suspected drug activity. No receipt given even when requested. Going to the station doesn’t help with the sudden amnesia of what happened to your cash or drug charges, at least until the next “random* traffic stop. Yeah, the police fund themselves just fine. it is helpful to understand the frustration that spawned that unhelpful slogan. In many if not most black neighborhoods, they actually would be safer with no police at all. Why? The police do not stop gang violence or even try in many cases. Rather, they harass, arrest, shake down, and kill black people who are doing nothing wrong. In a daily basis. For them, this cartoon is laughable. They truly feel that if the police went away, they would be safer. Whatever happened to making police more liable for murder. Guess nothing will change and more black/People of colour will continue to die or be bullied.
For the rest of us, we believe that police forces around the country have forgotten they are our employees. They are supposed to be here to protect and serve, yet too often they protect and serve only the richest and best connected. They throw their power around far too much, they protect their own even when they are bad apples. The entire policing system in this country needs a complete overhaul. Funds need to be directed toward mental health, and trained mental health professionals need to be the first responders in mental health crises. The whole system of using cops as revenue collectors (ie., speeding tickets) is also abhorrent to cops and citizens alike. Policing CAN be a positive for ALL Americans, but today it is being used as a wedge issue to divide Americans and keep far too many innocent people living in fear while not stopping the guilty from committing crimes — or even bringing them to justice. Hugs
“I believe QAnon has a lot in common with doomsday cults and in the past, doomsday cults turned violent. I was not surprised when the FBI said that ‘digital soldiers’ could turn to violence, nor was I surprised by the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6. I think it’s inevitable that more real-world violence will occur in future. Eventually, Anons will get tired of waiting for the Storm. Then, they will take the bringing of the martial law into their own hands,” he wrote. What is left is a more decentralized movement, with an ever growing range of beliefs, united by a shared culture of distrust toward institutions and a do-it-yourself approach to conspiracy theories.”
Today on Meet the press another Republican office holder refused to say Biden won the election. He kept skirting it by saying stuff about election integrity and voters feeling the election was secure. But wouldn’t admit there was no court that found mass fraud, and that Biden was fairly elected. This is a huge problem. Hugs
2020 truthers are ringing doorbells in a bizarre attempt to prove Donald Trump won the election that he actually lost.
Kelly Weill
Reporter
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
Election vigilantes are knocking on doors, filming homeowners, and interrogating them on their 2020 votes. But at least some of these pro-Trump groups say they’ve started screening out volunteers with “pedophilic leanings.”
More than a year after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, his diehard fans remain convinced that he is still the rightful president, even though their claims are flimsier than they were in December 2020. Repeated election reviews, including those by pro-Trump conspiracy theorists, have upheld President Joe Biden’s victory. So now, election denialists are pitching themselves into voter “canvassing,” a tactic that involves ringing doorbells and asking people how they voted.
Voters say it’s weird. Trump fans say it’s their next hope at overturning the election.
“This lie that the election was rigged has already done a great deal of damage and continues to do damage in a number of different ways,” Sean Morales-Doyle, acting director of the Brennan Center For Justice’s Democracy Program, told The Daily Beast. “Going around door to door and continuing to spread this misinformation can only do more harm.”
Until late September, election “audits” were the far right’s great hope for reinstalling Trump. Then their favorite audit—a chaotic, Republican-led, conspiracy-fueled review of Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 results—revealed that Biden had in fact received more votes than Trump.
Following that flop, Trump fans searched for reasons why pro-Biden votes were actually suspect. They latched onto a “canvassing” report, released by a failed GOP candidate earlier that month, that purported to show hundreds of thousands of suspicious votes or voter registrations. In fact, as Arizona journalists and officials quickly noted, the report cited virtually no evidence for its claims. The initial report’s one specific example (voters supposedly registered to a vacant lot) was soon debunked, with experts noting that the site was a legitimate home with three occupants.
Still, with audits losing popularity, some prominent election denialists have championed canvasses as the next best thing.
“Given the enemy’s intentional acts to sabotage the audits, I am told that the best course of action is canvassing,” QAnon-friendly attorney Lin Wood posted on Telegram late last month. He cautioned that some of the people whose homes canvassers visited might be enemies trying to trick them.
“But the questions asked in the canvassing process are important and the enemy may try to mislead you,” Wood wrote. (He doubled down on the canvassing-over-audits message several days later.)
Some of the shift toward canvasses, previously noted by Trapezoid of Discovery, appears driven by recent schisms in the far right. Wood, and several Telegram-based canvassing promoters, are currently on the outs with other fringe figures like former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who helped fund the Maricopa County audit.
And outside Maricopa County, audit efforts have stalled, due to lack of participation from elected officials, who have to sign off on the costly and controversial reviews. Canvassing, which requires nothing more than a team of dedicated door-knockers, has fewer barriers.
In some states, it’s been underway for months.
In August, Pennsylvania residents reported visits from members of Audit The Vote Pennsylvania, a right-wing group that has tried for months to spearhead an Arizona-style audit of Pennsylvania’s election. During those visits, self-identified “election integrity” teams reportedly asked locals about their 2020 votes, prompting some of those residents to lodge complaints with local government officials.
Some of those officials described the tactic as an attempt to harass voters. “This is 100% voter intimidation and attempts to suppress voters in the future,” Chad Baker, chair of York County, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party, told the York Daily Record in August.
ATVPA has previously disavowed calls to violence that stemmed from those audit efforts. “The commissioners in Tioga County are receiving death threats,” an ATVPA leader wrote on Telegram this summer. (Tioga County was one of the group’s targeted areas of supposed election malfeasance.) “We never ever would condone violence and we would never advocate for that.”
The group has hit some canvassing barriers. In October, a moderator on the group’s Telegram expressed frustration that, when they tried questioning people at a nursing home, they were only able to speak with two residents. But during a late-September call-in to a conservative radio show, ATVPA founder Toni Shuppe claimed her group was canvassing “on the ground in 20 counties” claiming they had found issues with voting registrations and records. “We easily have enough anomalies to reverse the election,” Shuppe said.
The day after Shuppe’s comments, voters in Nebraska reported getting door-knocks, too. Matt Longley, a registered Democrat in Omaha told The Daily Beast that three women knocked on his door in September to ask questions about how the household voted. The women asked who lived in the house and how many occupants had voted in 2020.
“They reiterated, several times, that they did not want or need to know who [we] voted for,” Longley said. “They were asking for how I voted (by mail) and were interested to know if I thought my vote was actually counted (I did). I told them that there was a website that one could go to confirm receipt of their vote. I got a look at one of their clipboards and saw an e-mail address that ended in ‘nebraskaguardians.com’. I thought it was odd and it was pretty obvious what kind of agenda they had, but they did seem nice enough, and they seemed oddly insistent that they not know who I voted for.”
The Nebraska Guardians appear to be a group that promotes conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and the 2020 election online. Although the group did not return a request for comment, it appears linked to the “Voter Accuracy Project,” a group that was reported to be knocking on doors in early October. (The Guardians’ Telegram profile now calls itself “Nebraska State Canvassing” and promotes VAP materials.) Omaha’s 6News reported that the canvassers were not visiting homes across the city—only in “specific neighborhoods.”
Some of those efforts are part of larger interstate networks.
A Salt Lake City Tribune report this week revealed internal documents for a group called the “Utah Voter Verification Project,” which is connected to the Colorado-based election denial group “U.S. Election Integrity Project.”
Although the UVVP maintains a low online profile and could not be reached for comment, residents of Hurricane, Utah, recently told local officials that members of the group had been visiting homes and filming encounters. The group’s training manual “highly recommend[s]” that canvassers “record audio and/or video of activity (cell phone, body cam, ect.).”
Those recordings are legal. Utah is a one-party consent state, meaning that a person can film another without the subject’s permission. “We can record anyone without telling them. We don’t need permission,” one UVVP trainer said, according to the Tribune.
The UVVP training manual makes multiple references to the U.S. Election Integrity Project. UVVP volunteers who sign the training manual agree to give all their data to the project. The manual also indicates that the UVVP runs its communications through the project’s group chat (on a platform called Basecamp) and that the project conducts background checks on UVVP applicants. The USEIP did not return a request for comment.
The U.S. Election Integrity Project is one of the best-connected canvassing groups, with ties to the “three-percenter” militia movement and Sherronna Bishop, a former campaign manager for Rep. Lauren Boebert. But by its own admission, the group has previously had issues with its background checks.
Its training manual describes an old vetting process, stating that “this process was in place for many months, until we learned (roundaboutly) that there were a couple of people in our group, who were volunteering for our events, who had a criminal history of sexual misconduct.”
The group says it will no longer disclose its protocol for background checks, which it appears to conduct for UVVP applicants. “It’s unfortunate that we must check volunteers for pedophilic leanings, but welcome to 2021,” the manual reads.
The project continued its Colorado home visits through November, but indicated that it hoped to release a report on its findings soon, the Colorado Times Recorder reported. Other groups, like Pennsylvania’s ATVPA have announced that they will unveil their own canvassing reports soon.
Morales-Doyle, of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Project, said the broader threat of canvassing efforts is not intimidating individual voters at their doorsteps, but inspiring policies that chip away at fair elections.
“What’s most frightening to me is not that it’s a rallying cry for people to go out and vote for a certain candidate, but that it’s a rallying cry for actions that undermine democracy,” he said.
“This is the lie that justified a wave of passages of restrictive voting laws across the country, the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations. This is the lie that motivated people to go attack the Capitol on Jan. 6.”
On The Meeting House website, Cavey expands on his views of same-sex marriage, telling his followers that the church “holds to a traditional view of marriage as designed by God to unite a man and a woman in a covenant union of love.”
And once again, the pathetically uneducated dropout Lisa Benson confirms how little she understands of any serious economic issue. New Deal Keynesian liberal market economics is NOT about expecting “FREE STUFF” any more than law enforcement, emergency first responders or “free” public schools — or even the military that costs far more than anything proposed — is “free stuff.” We all contribute and we all benefit. We want PUBLIC POLICY to address legitimate PUBLIC NEEDS, but has very specific proposals for how ALL OF US contribute, in a way that is fair for everyone. We all expect to pay our fair shares.
We also expect the billionaires and corporate special interests who have been getting a free ride to pay their fair share. But for our money we don’t want to just blow up other countries to enrich “defense contractors” of the “military-industrial complex” that (Republican) Eisenhower warned us about; we want to get for our money the things that benefit all of us and INVEST in the resources and opportunities that generate economic returns that enrich us all. Not free stuff. The only reason the Republicans want our infrastructure to fail is so they can sell it to the highest bidder. Which will cost the working majority that commutes to work the most, as we would have to pay tolls and taxes everywhere we go. Hugs