The pledge, a vestige of the McCarthy Red Scare era, is not mandatory, but has been signed by candidates for decades, including by Trump in 2020 and 2016.
Former President Donald Trump did not sign Illinois’ loyalty oath when filing his nomination papers to run in Illinois in 2024. The oath, which is not mandatory, pledges he will not advocate for the overthrow of the government. Here, Trump gestures after speaking at a campaign rally at Terrace View Event Center in Sioux Center, Iowa, Friday, Jan. 5, 2024. Andrew Harnik / Associated Press
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President Joe Biden’s campaign Saturday condemned Republican former President Donald Trump for sidestepping a decades-old, Illinois ballot-access tradition this past week in which candidates pledge against advocating for an overthrow of the government.
The Democrat’s campaign statement comes in response to a WBEZ/Chicago Sun-Times report published earlier Saturday that showed Trump did not voluntarily sign the state’s loyalty oath as part of his package of ballot-access paperwork submitted Thursday to the Illinois State Board of Elections.
That omission, coming just days before the third anniversary of the Jan. 6th insurrection for which Trump has been criminally charged, is a departure from his presidential candidacies of 2016 and 2020, when he affixed his signature to the oath both times.
“For the entirety of our nation’s history, presidents have put their hand on the Bible and sworn to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States – and Donald Trump can’t bring himself to sign a piece of paper saying he won’t attempt a coup to overthrow our government,” Biden campaign spokesman Michael Tyler said in a statement Saturday. “We know he’s deadly serious, because three years ago today he tried and failed to do exactly that.
“This is the same man who thinks American troops who died protecting the ideals outlined in the Constitution are suckers and losers – yet calls the convicted felons who violently assaulted and killed police officers on January 6th ‘hostages’. He can’t fathom putting anything – our country, our principles, or the wellbeing and safety of the American people – above his own quest for retribution and power,” Tyler said.
The Trump campaign responded Saturday to the Biden jab.
“President Trump will once again take the oath of office on January 20th, 2025, and will swear ‘to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said.
Under Illinois law, presidential candidates wanting to be on the state’s March 19th primary ballot had to turn in their nominating petitions to the State Board of Elections on Thursday or Friday, and the loyalty oath is a time-honored part of that process.
A WBEZ/Chicago Sun-Times analysis of those petitions found Biden and Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis both signed the oath — as did several lower-tier Trump acolytes in Illinois, but not Trump.
Trump’s omission has stumped some of his critics.
“Why wouldn’t he sign it?” asked former Republican U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who served on the House Jan. 6th select committee and said he signed the state loyalty oath in each of his six terms as congressman.
“Has he been advised maybe not to sign it because maybe there’s some legal exposures…given that oath, if he signed it, would be a violation of everything he actually did on Jan. 6th, 2021, and leading up to it?” Kinzinger said.
In part of the oath, candidates swear they are not communists nor affiliated with communist organizations. In the latter part of the oath, candidates attest that they “do not directly or indirectly teach or advocate the overthrow of the government of the United States or of this state or any unlawful change in the form of the governments thereof by force or any unlawful means.”
Signing it is entirely optional now after federal courts ruledit unconstitutional on free-speech grounds, but Illinois lawmakers left it in state law. Countless candidates, in flag-waving fashion, have signed it through the years even though it’s no longer compulsory.
It’s not clear why Trump chose not to sign the oath for the 2024 election cycle — a time when his nominating petitions are being challenged on grounds that he is allegedly disqualified to run by the 14th Amendment. That section of the Constitution bars insurrectionists from seeking public office.
Biden observed the Jan. 6th anniversary Friday with a blistering speech in which he characterized Trump as a mortal threat to democracy and described his conduct on Jan. 6th as “among the worst derelictions of duty by a president in American history.”
Trump was criminally charged last August by a federal grand jury for conspiracy and obstruction of justice. The charges were connected to his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election by spreading lies about election fraud and sending a crowd of supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6th, 2021 with directions to “fight like hell.”
The ensuing overrunning of the Capitol, as presidential results were being certified, was linked to seven deaths, attacks on more than 140 police officers and criminal charges against 1,265 people, including for assaulting peace officers with deadly weapons, entering restricted areas with weapons and obstructing an official government proceeding.
More than 700 of those charged have pleaded guilty and entered into plea agreements, while nearly 140 more were found guilty at contested trials, Justice Department data show.
At least 42 Illinoisans are among those charged with Jan. 6th-related offenses, and several have been convicted, the Chicago Sun-Times has reported.
A voting-rights organization called Free Speech for People, five Illinois voters, and two Chicago law firms are contesting Trump’s nominating petitions based on his conduct before and during the insurrection.
Challenges against Trump are pending in 15 other states, according to an organization tracking them, and his name has for now been struck from the ballot in two others — Colorado and Maine. The Supreme Court Friday chose to hear Trump’s appeal of the Colorado Supreme Court decision barring him from that state’s ballot. The case will be argued Feb. 8, the New York Times reported.
On Friday, a campaign spokeswoman for Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, a frequent Biden surrogate, belittled Trump for his campaign’s decision not to sign the oath.
“Pledging not to overthrow our democracy is a hard thing to do when you’ve already attempted it once,” Pritzker spokeswoman Christina Amestoy told WBEZ.
Trump’s main 2024 rival, Biden, signed the Illinois loyalty pledge this year and ahead of his 2020 run. And one of his GOP opponents, DeSantis, did so this year as well.
State election records show that Trump’s other GOP primary opponents, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, did not sign the state loyalty oath. Christie signed the document during his 2016 run for president.
Some of Trump’s Republican political allies in Illinois did sign the oath.
State election records show U.S. Rep. Mary Miller and her husband, state Rep. Chris Miller, R-Hindsboro, both did for this election cycle.
Trump’s endorsement was pivotal in the congresswoman’s 2022 election win against Republican U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis.
Chris Miller attended Trump’s Save America Rally on Jan. 6th but said he did not enter the Capitol or participate in violence. Nonetheless, the Illinois House passed a resolution in March 2021 denouncing Chris Miller for having “participated and publicly promoted his role in a rally that led to a violent insurrection of the Capitol.”
The Millers’ Trump-endorsed ally, former GOP gubernatorial nominee and current congressional candidate Darren Bailey, also signed the loyalty oath. Now running to unseat fellow Republican Congressman Mike Bost in the March primary, Bailey signed the document in both 2022 and 2024, state records show.
On Friday, the Trump campaign observed the Jan. 6th anniversary with a litany of denouncements of Biden, accusing him of “attacking American democracy” and noting that some Jan. 6th criminal defendants “were prosecuted, convicted, or pleaded guilty to ‘parading’ which is simply an expression of political dissent.”
Kinzinger, though, told WBEZ Trump’s actions — he signed the loyalty oath before the insurrection, and didn’t now — should be interpreted literally by voters.
“What was the world like when he signed it in 2016 and when he signed it in 2020? Well, at that point, there had not been an attempted insurrection on the federal government,” Kinzinger said.
“The difference between the last two times he did it, and this time when he didn’t, is he has a track record of trying to overthrow the government,” Kinzinger said.
Dave McKinney covers Illinois government and politics for WBEZ and was the long-time Springfield bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times.
This is great. The video has such good information and facts. If hearing is not your thing, the CC is also spot on. He talks of how immigrants don’t commit as many crimes / violent crime as native citizens. He points out how a study in 18 countries showed how trickle down did not work, while the wealthy doubled their wealth during it. He points out while republicans keep you scared about harm to your kids, no kid has been killed at a drag queen brunch / story hour while due to the gun loving republican congress kids have been mowed down trying to learn how to read and kids need bulletproof backpacks. He tells how Biden democrats have brought such large economic benefits and expanded healthcare to so many and then tells how republicans voted against all of it then tried to take credit for it all. He also mentions how much the tRump kids took while working in the White House, while hunter did not work in the WH. Hugs. Scottie
Please read the quote below from the post on Ten Bear’s site. Then think of the things tRump and his supporters claim they plan to do. Hugs. Scottie
White Rose survivor Jürgen Wittenstein described what it was like to live in Hitler’s Germany: “The government – or rather, the party – controlled everything: the news media, arms, police, the armed forces, the judiciary system, communications, travel, all levels of education from kindergarten to universities, all cultural and religious institutions. Political indoctrination started at a very early age, and continued by means of the Hitler Youth with the ultimate goal of complete mind control. Children were exhorted in school to denounce even their own parents for derogatory remarks about Hitler or Nazi ideology.”
Clearly racism and bigotry. They even rescinded anti-discrimination policies. Why not discriminating is good, discrimination is bad. But we can thank tRump for making it safe for these … people to come out from under the rocks and openly push for white supremacy. Their goal is to push the LGBTQIA out of public view and remove any equality for black / brown people. Read the quote below and see if you can find the real truth he is saying.
Cook, in July, defended rescinding the anti-racism resolution, saying the board “doesn’t need to be in the business of dividing the community.”
Why would anti-racism divide the community unless a lot of the white community wants to be racist against the black community, and the whites feel targeted / put on by the resolution. Hugs. Scottie
O’FALLON, Mo. (AP) — A conservative-led Missouri school board has voted to drop elective courses on Black history and literature, five months after the same boardrescinded an anti-discrimination policyadopted in the aftermath of the killing ofGeorge Floyd.
The Francis Howell School Board voted 5-2 Thursday night to stop offering Black History and Black Literature, courses that had been offered at the district’s three high schools since 2021. A little over 100 students took the courses this semester in the predominantly white suburban area of St. Louis.
In July, the board revoked an anti-racism resolution and ordered copies removed from school buildings. The resolution was adopted in August 2020 amid the national turmoil after a police officer killed Floyd in Minneapolis.
The resolution pledged that the Francis Howell community would “speak firmly against any racism, discrimination, and senseless violence against people regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, immigration status, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or ability.”
The resolution and course offerings were targeted by five new members who have taken control of the board since being elected last year and in April, all with the backing of the conservative political action committee Francis Howell Families. All seven board members are white.
The PAC’s website expresses strong opposition to the courses, saying they involve principals of critical race theory, though many experts say the scholarly theory centered on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation’s institutions is not taught in K-12 schools.
The decision to drop the courses was met with protests outside the board meeting. Several parents and students chanted, “Let them learn!” Inside, speakers questioned the decision.
“You’ve certainly taught me to not underestimate how low you will go to show your disdain toward the Black and brown communities’ experiences and existence,” Harry Harris, a Black father, told the board.
Another speaker, Tom Ferri, urged the board to focus on bigger issues such as high turnover among teachers.
“Tapping into a diverse talent pipeline would be a great way to slow attrition, but what diverse staff wants to work in a district waging culture wars?” he asked.
Board Vice President Randy Cook Jr., who was elected in 2022, said the Francis Howell courses to which he and others objected used “Social Justice Standards” developed by the Southern Poverty Law Center with a bent toward activism.
“I do not object to teaching black history and black literature; but I do object to teaching black history and black literature through a social justice framework,” Cook said in an email on Friday. “I do not believe it is the public school’s responsibility to teach social justice and activism.”
District spokesperson Jennifer Jolls said in an email that new Black history and literature courses “could be redeveloped and brought to the Board for approval in the future.”
This semester, 60 students at the three schools combined enrolled in the Black History course, and 42 took Black Literature, the district said.
Francis Howell is among Missouri’s largest school districts, with 16,647 students, 7.7% of whom are Black. The district is on the far western edge of the St. Louis area, in St. Charles County.
The county’s dramatic growth has coincided with the equally dramatic population decline in St. Louis city. In 1960, St. Louis had 750,000 residents and St. Charles County had 53,000. St. Louis’ population is now 293,000, nearly evenly split between Black and white residents. St. Charles County has grown to about 415,000 residents, 6% of whom are Black.
Racial issues remain especially sensitive in the St. Louis region, more than nine years after a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri,fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brownduring a street confrontation. Officer Darren Wilson was not charged and the shooting led to months of often violent protests, becoming a catalyst for the national Black Lives Matter movement.
Cook, in July, defended rescinding the anti-racism resolution, saying the board “doesn’t need to be in the business of dividing the community.”
“We just need to stick to the business of educating students here and stay out of the national politics,” he said.
The district’s description of the Black Literature course says it focuses “on contemporary and multi-genre literary works of Black authors and will celebrate the dignity and identity of Black voices.”
For the Black History course, the description reads, “Students understand the present more thoroughly when they understand the roots of today’s world in light of their knowledge of the past. This Black History course tells the history of Blacks from the beginning Ancient Civilizations of Africa through the present day accomplishments and achievements of Black individuals today.”
School board elections across the U.S. have become intense political battlegrounds since 2020, when some groups began pushing back against policies aimed at stemming the spread of COVID-19.
PACs in many local districts have successfully elected candidates who promised to take action against teachings on race and sexuality, remove books deemed offensive and stop transgender-inclusive sports teams.
Never ceases to amaze me that a word generally understood to mean “not asleep,” “awake” is the worst epithet that Trump and his thugs can throw at progressives.
It just shows how entrenched they are in their dogma they are, that equality is so undesirable. They are incapable of considering anything that challenges their bigotry
I recall reading about a journalist who asked a bunch of Trump supporters what “woke” means to them. The replies were hysterical.
Half of them really didn’t have any idea what it means. The other half used the usual “commie, socialist, atheist, homo” description they use when describing anyone or anything they don’t like or don’t understand.
It was first used by white liberals to mean “I’m listening to women, black, hispanic, lgbt, etc. voices and hearing what they are saying.” How horrible. To acknowledge other people’s lived experiences and treat them with respect.
Yep, in the city of Saint Louis , in the gated private streets of 1904 Worlds Fair era mansions just north of the large city park where the Fair was held. Private streets are really private, they don’t allow (certain) non-residents to walk or drive there – the streets hire private security. I have lived about 2 blocks from idiot gun-toters’ house for over 30 years, in a neighborhood of pre-WWII high rise apartment buildings. 1904 World’s Fair is the one immortalized in the Judy Garland movie Meet Me in St. Louis. “Have yourself a merry little Christmas…”
Yes, it’s population boomed, growing more than four-fold in the ’50s. O’Fallon, MO, should not to be confused with O’Fallon, IL or the O’Fallon neighborhood in north St. Louis, all within the same metro and named after the same rail baron. The O’Fallon neighborhood was hard-hit by block-busting, white-flight, and subsequent red-lining. It’s to recent to be allowed to publish the individual household records to see how many moved from the O’Fallon neighborhood to what is now the largest, and exceedingly white, suburb of St. Louis.
Thanks to ten Bears for the link. This is a scary and important read, and people need to understand what will happen this time if tRump and his ilk get into power again. We must put small time bickering of age and other things aside until the threat posed by these people are gone. If we don’t stand together and vote for Biden and other democrats in large numbers or democracy goes away and the US becomes a hell of inequality, no rights, no personal freedoms, and required living as you are ordered to do so. The LGBTQIA will be illegal, as will other personal freedoms. Reading material and movies will have to be state sanctioned and follow party lines, like in China. Hugs. Scottie
If you thought it can’t happen here, I have an old Sinclair Lewis book to share with you…
If Trump is re-elected, he’d be America’s 47th president, so he’s named the plans for his second term “Agenda 47.” At best, it’s a dystopian nightmare: at worst it means ending our current system of American government; aligning the US with Russia and other autocratic nations; and the USA leading the charge against democracy and in favor of authoritarian, strong-man forms of government across the world.
Over at his website, Trump lays out the details of his governing agenda, complete with short videos promoting each of the steps he plans to take. They, and his many statements about future plans, include:
Criminalizing homosexuality
Part of Agenda 47, Trump says, is “finishing the job” he started as president between 2017 and 2021.
Just two hours after he and Pence were sworn into office, they removed all mention of LGBTQ+ issues from the White House website.
Two days later, his State Department deleted former Secretary of State John Kerry’s apology to the nation for the “Lavender Scare” government persecution of gays and lesbians during the McCarthy era 1950s and early 1960s. A month later, Trump’s Justice Department announced they’d no longer defend the civil rights of trans kids.
His Education and HUD offices both withdrew their court defenses of queer people, particularly students and those in homeless shelters, and his Secretary of State refused to mention to the Russian Foreign Minister the detention and brutal executions of gay men by Russian soldiers in Chechnya. On May 4, 2017 Trump signed an executive order letting the DOJ ignore claims of illegal discrimination against queer people and women throughout every single one of the nation’s federal agencies.
In September, 2017, Trump’s Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, officially ended that agency’s Title IX guidance requiring schools to do something about sexual harassment, including sexual violence, against women and LGBTQ+ kids. In response to a question from the media about the change in policy and gay men, Trump said that his Vice President “wants to hang them all.”
In January of 2018, Trump rolled out the “Division of Conscience and Religious Freedom” at HHS, which would backstop people who wanted to use the excuse of “deeply held religious beliefs” to justify explicit discrimination against queer people and women, or to simply to make life difficult for government agencies.
All of this is just the beginning. The Human Rights Campaign has documented page after page of anti-queer policies put into effect by Trump that will be resurrected and put on steroids in a second term.
Destroy academic freedom and gut our public schools
In the Agenda 47 section of his website, Trump explains how he’s going to use our schools and colleges to indoctrinate young Americans in rightwing ideology. He explicitly says:
“When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics. We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all.”
Any colleges that continue to teach “under the guise of [racial] equity will not only have their endowment taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.”
In other words, just like Viktor Orbán did in Hungary and Putin did in Russia, he’s going to bankrupt the nation’s schools and colleges if they continue to teach the true history of America and promote egalitarian values. As Trump notes at his website:
“[W]e are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all.”
Gut the EPA, OSHA, CPSB, IRS, the Labor Department, and other federal agencies that keep our air clean, our water pure, and protect average Americans from predation by the morbidly rich and their corporations
Back in the 1970s, Richard Nixon said he was going to use “impoundment” to strip funding from agencies his donors didn’t like, claiming that, even though Congress had appropriated budgets for them, he could, as head of the Executive Branch, simply “impound” the money and refuse to spend it. His plan to remake the federal government was interrupted by Watergate.
In 1974, Democrats in Congress got together and passed legislation outlawing this and Jerry Ford signed it into law. But Trump’s lawyers apparently think they can get it overturned through their appointees on the courts or even, if they can take both branches of Congress, through new legislation. As Trump says on his website:
“I will use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings.”
Since the fossil fuel companies, banks, refineries, anti-union big employers, and their billionaires who fund the GOP hate all of these agencies, it’ll be a bonanza for them.
Not so much for working people, retirees, and those of us concerned about a livable future environment for our kids and grandkids, though.
Destroy the media and the truth
First, he wants to make it illegal for the federal government’s security services to notify social media platforms about Russian disinformation and other foreign efforts to swing elections, since nearly 100% of those efforts are coming from authoritarian countries in support of Trump and against democracy.
“I will ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as “mis-” or “dis-information,” Trump proclaims on his Agenda 47 website.
He also wants to force social media to carry his buddy Putin’s trolls’ lies and attempts to pit Americans against each other, and limit the companies’ ability to label or block lies and propaganda. As Trump puts it:
“I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk revising Section 230 to get big online platforms out of censorship business.”
In Hungary, one way Viktor Orbán got rid of actual news media and replaced the ownership of all the nation’s major radio and TV networks, websites, and newspapers was by changing the libel laws so that public figures (like Orbán himself) could sue for libel when they thought they were treated unfairly.
They then sued company after company, commentator after commentator, reporter after reporter, into bankruptcy.
Orbán’s rightwing buddies could buy the media properties out of bankruptcy which is why now virtually all the media in Hungary is like Fox “News,” broadcasting suck-ups to Orbán and criticism of “liberals,” immigrants, and gays 24/7.
Trump wants to do the same here in the US.
When Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury came out with some unflattering characterizations of Trump in it, the then-president said:
“We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts. And if somebody says something that’s totally false and knowingly false, that the person that has been abused, defamed, libeled, will have meaningful recourse.”
Simply reporting on what Trump’s up to could bring lawsuits that would bankrupt even the Times or the Post, and, like in Hungary and Russia, pretty much end the existence of a free and independent press in America.
Turning America into a vigilante police state
Trump has promised to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists who tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House (and whose actions led to the death of four police officers), and put into place a national “stop and frisk” law that upends the 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
It would also — like Duterte in the Philippines who executed over 10,000 people during his reign of terror — authorize the federal government to immediately execute anybody convicted of trafficking in drugs without further due process or appeals.
Republicans in Texas have already pioneered using vigilantes to hunt down women who’ve had abortions and the people who’ve helped them. Expect these vigilante-enforced laws to spread across the country with a second Trump administration, with groups like the Proud Boys and III Percenters becoming the modern-day equivalent of the old west’s 19th century bounty hunters.
In a flashback to Hitler’s “work camps” that preceded the death camps by five years, Trump’s also proposed building concentration camps around the country to house “millions” of undocumented aliens and his political enemies. As he noted in a speech on Veterans’ Day this year:
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” adding that Russia isn’t a problem. Instead, he said, “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”
Presumably that means people like me and you, who would oppose his fascist agenda.
Corrupting the federal government
Way back in 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau thought he’d properly bribed President James Garfield by giving the president, during an in-person visit in the White House, a speech he’d written for Garfield to use. Garfield was polite but didn’t offer Guiteau a federal speechwriter’s job, which provoked a murderous rage: shortly thereafter, Guiteau met Garfield’s train and shot him twice, killing him.
The explicit and institutionalized practice of exchanging gifts and personal loyalty for federal jobs dated back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), arguably the second-most depraved president in American history behind Trump (which is probably why Trump hung his picture in the Oval Office; Jackson’s favorite nickname for himself — given him by the Cherokee he slaughtered — was “The Indian Killer”).
Jackson had elevated the practice of bribing the president — himself, at the time — to get federal jobs into an art-form: it was called the “spoils” or patronage system and was insanely corrupt. It was also, by Garfield’s presidency in 1881, routine.
After Guiteau failed to gain his “spoil” or “patronage” from Garfield and killed him, President Chester Arthur oversaw the writing and passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883.
It separated all those government jobs from the administration in power, turning federal workers from patrons of the president into permanent bureaucrats, whose first loyalty was to the nation instead of the guy who happened to be in the White House at any particular time.
It also explicitly outlawed bribing the president for a job. The goal, which it accomplished and has held for 140 years, was to end corruption in the bureaucratic branches of the federal government.
Donald Trump wants to functionally end the Civil Service system and replace the top levels of the nation’s 2.7 million federal workers with people loyal exclusively to himself.
He tried to do this in the last months of his presidency through an October 21, 2020 executive order, Schedule F, (which Biden reversed on his first day in office) that reclassified those workers out of their Civil Service jobs and into political appointee positions, doing the same work but now entirely dependent on the good will of the president to keep their jobs.
The next Republican administration will almost certainly put Schedule F back into force, reestablishing the 1829 spoils system for the federal government, and ending any possibility that people in the government will push back against Trump the way they did during his presidency.
Making the nation’s police into Trump’s private enforcers
The Department of Justice was established by President Ulysses S. Grant after the Civil War, in part to enforce federal laws protecting the rights of people who’d recently been freed from slavery.
After Richard Nixon tried to use it against his enemies (and his Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to prison for his efforts), Congress in 1978 passed the Ethics in Government Act which put a wall of separation between the DOJ and the White House.
Trump has explicitly proclaimed his intention to tear that wall down and go farther than Nixon ever imagined in using our armed investigative services for personal revenge and harassment of people he perceives as his enemies.
He wants the nation’s premiere police agencies to become his own personal enforcers, and has already said they will be hunting down “liberals,” Black Lives Matter protest participants, and Joe Biden, his family, and members of his administration.
He wants to imprison them, as well as the prosecutors and judges who have been participating in the effort to hold him to account for the crimes he committed over the past 7 years.
This politicization of law enforcement has been a first-order and primary feature of every authoritarian or totalitarian regime that’s risen to power over the past few hundred years, worldwide. It’s always one of the first things fascist leaders do when they seize power.
“Freedom cities”
In an apparent attempt to portray himself as a visionary like JFK, with his promise to send men to the moon and bring them back safely, Trump is promising to build “freedom cities” in his second term. The main feature he’s discussed is that people will get around in them in “flying cars.”
While it’s being portrayed as a goofy stunt designed to make him seem like an imaginative idealist, in fact there has been a movement among rightwing billionaires for some time to create cities that they basically run as little feudal fiefdoms, the same way the morbidly rich run their companies and their football teams.
Some libertarian billionaires assert that the only reason there’s never been a successful libertarian nation in the history of the world is because true libertarianism — government doing nothing but running the police, army, and courts and everything else left to private charity and business owners — “has never been tried.”
The ”freedom cities” could be a new libertarian experiment, or they may be the 21st century version of the old “company town,” where nobody has rights or protection of the law but is subject to the whims of the local billionaire owner. A group backed by Silicon Valley billionaires has already put forward what appears to be a plan to build a new city in California that they may or may not envision running along these lines. The group has so far purchased more than 53,000 acres of land, an area larger than the entire city of Beaumont, Texas, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Ending democracy across Europe and the world
Trump is also promising that he’ll end the brutal attacks against Ukraine on “day one” by simply turning the country over to his good friend, Vladimir Putin.
For the first time since World War II, this would legitimize a nation attacking another nation simply to seize their land, resources, and people.
It would greenlight China to do the same with Taiwan, and encourage every other tinpot dictator in the world to grab nearby territory that he wants. It would encourage war, and could very easily lead to a world war.
Abandoning Ukraine like this, along with Trump’s oft-stated preference to leave or end NATO and stop support for the UN, would lead the autocracies of the world — particularly Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and North Korea — to destroy the democracies in their sphere of influence, replacing those democracies with strongman autocracies.
The democratic experiment on this planet is only 250 years old, more or less, and this would signal a return to the way the world had been ruled for the 7,000 years prior to that: by kings, popes, mullahs, strongman warlords, and the morbidly rich.
Between Agenda 47 and Project 2025, Donald Trump and the rightwing billionaires who own the GOP have big plans for this nation, regardless of which Republican takes the White House next. They’re dead serious and far more well-funded than any of the groups that fight for and advocate democracy.
If you thought it can’t happen here, I have an old Sinclair Lewis book to share with you.
Triple check your voter registration, especially if you live in a Red state where the voter purges have already begun, and make sure everybody you know is registered vote.
Thank you for reading The Hartmann Report. This post is public so feel free to share it.
In an email to reporters, a spokesperson for Comer claimed that the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating Biden, had obtained bank records revealing that Hunter Biden’s law firm, Owasco PC, which had received payments from Chinese-state-linked companies and other foreign companies in the past, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden.
The email claimed the payments “are part of a pattern revealing Joe Biden knew about, participated in and benefited from his family’s influence-peddling schemes.”
The three payments of $1,380 that occurred in September, October and November 2018 — nearly two years after Biden had left the vice presidency — were actually for a 2018 Ford Raptor truck Joe Biden had purchased that Hunter Biden was using, according to an email verified by a Washington Post forensic analysis.
As House Republicans move toward a floor vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry against President Biden, House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has again mischaracterized evidence of payments from Hunter Biden to his father. https://t.co/H5qd8Z2Slm
Chair Comer is digging up old public reporting, distorting the facts, and presenting it as "breaking news." As a private citizen, Joe Biden made car payments for his son, who paid him back—it's right here in the NY Post.https://t.co/Xv0E71358qpic.twitter.com/QzdjxcjnLg
In what might just be a new record, House Republicans were able to parade around their latest proof of President Joe Biden’s purported corruption for all of a few hours on Monday before it was unceremoniously debunked. https://t.co/xiWZzum3Qp
Hunter Biden’s business entity, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden. The bank records don't lie.
Owasco PC received payments from Chinese-state linked companies & other shady entities. Joe Biden knew & benefitted from his family's business schemes. pic.twitter.com/MfvtA4yEZU
Gotta give FOX and the other bigot spigots something to spew, folks are getting tired of panda sex. And they sure as hell don’t want to hear the truth about the Zieglers.
Though common for fascist movements – the “enemy” is both savvy and incompetent, so it must be destroyed before it destroys those listening to the fascist leaders, and is weak enough to be destroyed if enough ‘patriots’ rise up together.
A spokesperson for the Oversight Committee used the fact that the payments came from one of Hunter Biden’s accounts that also included money from a Chinese energy conglomerate to suggest something more nefarious than they have so far proved.
“There is now a pattern of members of the Biden family using their bank accounts that have been funded by Chinese and other foreign entities to send money to Joe Biden,” the spokesperson said. “Based on witness testimony, Joe Biden knew and participated in his family’s influence-peddling schemes. The checks and payments we’ve uncovered reveal Joe Biden benefited from them.”
Comer has consistently oversold or misrepresented the committee’s investigative findings as he has argued to initiate impeachment proceedings. Last month, Comer trumpeted a $200,000 loan repayment Joe Biden received from his brother James Biden. Comer sought to paint the personal check in nefarious terms, alleging without evidence that it showed that Joe Biden had indirectly received payments from his family’s foreign business dealings.
When presented with a bank record of the wire payment that showed the $200,000 payment to James Biden had originated from the president’s attorney trust account, Comer baselessly accused the law firm representing Joe Biden of money laundering.
And, still, to call that “oversold and misrepresented” is such a mild description of what they are doing. They are lying and contorting to make a nefarious and unfounded case, but media and journalists are largely unwilling to clear about that. They shouldn’t be. Like so much else in reporting about politics, they are playing with journalistic malpractice under the guise of factual and ethical reporting (which it is not).
As usual, I can’t decide if he’s a moron that morons follow, or if he’s savvy and playing the moron to get the morons to follow. Probably shades of both, along with a hefty dose of confirmation bias and sunk cost fallacy pushing him along.
All they had on Obama was him being born in Hawaii and with only his mother being a citizen which somehow made his eligibility be president suspect, which of course it wasn’t at all. But that really is the best they could come up with.
I look forward to Comer’s inevitable destruction focusing upon his white whale. The more noise he makes, the more he draws attention to himself, and his inevitable failure to actually find anything of merit. If anything, his attempts to spotlight crimes on the Bidens seem to shine that same spotlight on his own dubious financial affairs, corruption & immorality.
Is it just me, or does most of the “evidence” the impeachment brigade bring forth sound like a family caring for each other, with hands extended for help as needed which are paid back in turn? I mean.. that honestly sounds kind of sweet, really.
As is often said, it’s all about projection with them. I think he sounds confident because his shady financial stuff likely is extremely shady and likely illegal, so he assumes that Biden’s must be as well. His brain probably can’t process the fact that it appears benign to anyone not assuming it to be crimes like he would be doing with those kinds of transactions.
The 2 billion was a side deal between Jared and the Saudis. Wild guess it was payment for the enemies list for MbS. Who knows how much else they made. AG Letitia James knows, no doubt.
Republicans know they are unpopular with the majority, they know their policies they push for are not wanted by the majority. They are a minority that wants to rule, to force everyone to live as they dictate. So since they can not get the majority of votes, they try to stop others from voting. Yes how much love do they have for democracy if they only want their side to be able to vote? Also again it is fundmentlist Christians driving this, saying it is what god wants them to do blocking other people from their right o vote. One lady brag she alone filed over 500 challenges. And who pays for the time that state officals have to spend checking, the mail to the people regestered to vote, and all the rest? You and I , the tax payers. Hugs. Scottie
BY MICHAEL KAPLAN, SHEENA SAMU, MAJOR GARRETT
/ CBS NEWS
Voters eligible to cast ballots are already being swept up in a grassroots effort to purge the nation’s registration rolls ahead of the 2024 presidential election, a CBS News investigation has found.
Fueled by doubts about the 2020 election, an army of conservative activists is poring over state voter lists, looking for registration errors that can be used to file what are known as voter challenges — questioning the registrations of thousands of Americans.
The undertaking, which includes the involvement of a lawyer tied to former President Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, tends to affect minority or younger voters who may be statistically more likely to vote Democrat, according to local election officials.
“It’s young voters, it’s people of color, and it’s people that are unhoused,” said Karli Swift, chair of the election board in DeKalb County, Georgia. “Those are generally the types of people that end up in voter challenges.”
One of those hit with challenges was James McWhorter, who received a letter at the barbershop he manages in the middle of October from DeKalb County informing him that someone had challenged his voter status. The challenger, a woman named Gail Lee, argued McWhorter improperly registered to vote at a commercial address and snapped photos of his barbershop, which is located inside an Atlanta-area Kroger supermarket, as evidence.
“I didn’t know Gail Lee from a can of paint,” McWhorter told CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett.
De Kalb County voter and barbershop owner James McWhorter talks with Major Garrett.CBS NEWS
Since the two had never met, there was no way for Lee to know that McWhorter had registered to vote at the shop’s address in 2008 because he was homeless at the time. A veteran of the Gulf War, he was still trying to get back on his feet after years of struggling with PTSD and alcoholism.
“My friends, my family never knew I was displaced, never knew I was homeless,” McWhorter said, adding he would return to the barbershop after it closed and sleep in his chair and wash his clothes at a24-hour laundromat nearby.
Nevertheless, the letter made it clear that McWhorter’s voter registration could be canceled if he didn’t take action.
“I had to put on my glasses just to make sure it said what it was saying,” said McWhorter, who is no longer homeless but has kept a mailing address for two decades at the shop he now manages. “I was taken aback. I really was. Why would someone challenge my vote?”
McWhorter, 55, is among the latest group of Georgia citizens targeted by an effort to purge the nation’s voter rolls ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Georgia became ground zero for the movement after Republicans in the state pushed through a law in 2021 allowing citizens to file an unlimited number of challenges against fellow voters within their own county. In the two years since the law passed, a CBS News investigation found more than 80,000 challenges have been filed against Georgia voters — many of them by a loose network of about a dozen conservative activists.
The movement is not limited to Georgia. CBS News obtained video and transcripts from 11 separate sessions this year in which activists are seen strategizing how best to deploy voter challenges across the country.
For example, public records reveal a local Republican Party activist in Virginia who attended a March strategy session, then filed a slate of 43 voter challenges in August, ahead of the November election. Activists have also recently filed challenges in Washington state and Michigan, where a public records request revealed a GOP official conducted a “field investigation,” going to dozens of homes to check if voters were registered to the correct address.
Conservative activist Gail Lee is interviewed by Major Garrett.CBS NEWS
In an interview, Lee said she’s filed about 500 challenges and says her work is a non-partisan effort to highlight and correct errors in the voter roll. She said she believes those inaccuracies may present an opportunity for fraud, enabling someone to cast a ballot who isn’t legally able to vote.
CBS News’ analysis found across Georgia at least 12,000 challenges – about 15%– have been upheld and resulted in the removal of voters from the rolls, but local election officials say the challenges identify administrative errors and technical violations, not evidence of fraud.
“I think that unfortunately many members of our community have taken misinformation to heart and they truly believe there is fraud in the system, which is just not true,” Swift said, adding the issues the challenges are identifying shouldn’t deprive someone of their right to vote.
Swift said her staff has spent hundreds of hours dealing with challenges she says are meritless. In Georgia, counties are required to attempt to contact challenged voters in advance of an administration hearing that will determine whether they are removed from the rolls.
File: Karli Swift, chair of the election board in DeKalb County, Georgia.
Despite the tens of thousands of challenges across Georgia, it’s rare for someone who is challenged to actually appear at the hearing to defend his or her registration. CBS News attended a recent hearing in Forsyth County where none of the 236 voters who had their registrations challenged showed up.
The Republican-leaning election board voted to uphold 135 of the challenges, canceling the registrations of individuals who are likely unaware they’re being struck from the rolls. On Election Day, removed voters may still cast a provisional ballot, and these votes would only count if the removed voters prove their eligibility to the county within three days.
“Trying to put your foot on someone else’s neck”
McWhorter said he did not realize the letter gave him the option of resolving his voter status over email, and believed he needed to attend his hearing. Last month, he arrived at the county election office ready to defend his right to vote and found himself face to face with Lee.
“For you to challenge me, you have that right as a citizen of DeKalb County, but I served [in the military] to give you that right,” McWhorter told Lee. “I paid taxes here for 20 years, even though I was homeless.”
After the hearing, McWhorter updated his address, but said he believed Lee had been trying to disenfranchise him.
“It was hurtful that she would do something like that,” McWhorter said. “You’re trying to put your foot on someone else’s neck.”
Responding to that claim, Lee said the challenge to McWhorter’s registration was “not exactly a heavy foot,” since all he had to do was contact the election office to update his address.
Asked whether she could see how Black voters like McWhorter might feel threatened by her work, Lee, who is white, denied race played a role.
“I would think they would want their vote protected too, because someone who doesn’t belong on the rolls would take away their vote,” she said.
While McWhorter acknowledged Lee is exercising her right under the law, he believes her motives were malicious.
“What God wants me to do”
Lee said she decided to become more politically active after former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, a race she still believes Trump won. Convinced that rigged voting machines and bloated voter rolls helped deliver Mr. Biden the presidency — though officials found no such evidence — she attended an election integrity conference in Atlanta last year.
According to Lee, a nonprofit called the Conservative Partnership Institute participated in the conference. The group’s staffers include former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, who spoke at the conference’s luncheon, and GOP lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who aided Trump’s effort to overturn the election in Georgia. (Trump, Meadows and more than a dozen others are now facing criminal charges for their efforts.The former president, his White House chief of staff and most of the other co-defendants have pleaded not guilty, though four have reached plea deals.)
Eager to find a way to volunteer, Lee says she began filing challenges after a chance encounter during a bathroom break at the conference with a woman who was doing similar work in another Atlanta-area county.
“The woman who spoke from Gwinnett was there …and I said, ‘I’m interested in the voter rolls,'” Lee said. “She emailed me back a list of people in DeKalb County, and I began investigating the addresses.”
Now Lee is one of scores of volunteers who scours the rolls, looking for voters registered at P.O. boxes, those who appear in the rolls multiple times, or those who list birthdays so old that the voter may be deceased. She then compiles a dossier on each challenged voter and sends it to the county election board.
“I believe it’s what God wants me to do,” Lee said. “He knows what’s right and what’s wrong and there’s things that need to be fixed in the voter rolls.”
These are all tasks that are already handled by Georgia election officials, said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican whose office is charged with maintaining the state’s voter rolls.
Raffensperger told CBS News the assumption that the system is riddled with fraud is not valid. He said his office, unlike citizen challengers, typically has access to driver’s license and Social Security data that is more up to date.
“We have objective voter rolls,” said Raffensperger. “They’re clean, they’re accurate. We’re doing voter list maintenance every month.”
“They’re registering homeless folks there”
One of the people driving the push for grassroots activists to scrub voter rolls is a medical entrepreneur named John “Rick” Richards, who promotes a new software product that he described as a “Betty Crocker cookbook approach” that would expedite the challenge process.
Richards helped organize online video demonstrations throughout the spring and summer to train activists, including Lee, who attended one in June. In all, hundreds of volunteers nationwide have listened to how they could soon use the software, called EagleAI NETwork, to scan publicly available databases to identify “irregularities” with voter registrations and flag them to county officials.
The existence of EagleAI was first reported by the Atlanta Journal Constitution. In company pitch documents CBS News obtained through a public records request, Richards billed the product as “Voter Integrity Software” that will “enable citizens to audit, validate and offer suggestions to improve the integrity of their state’s voter roster.”
Richards declined an interview, but in a statement said EagleAI “only presents data” to county officials who ultimately decide whether to remove voters, and that its users are “volunteering to provide assistance to county election officials.” On Friday, Columbia County, outside of Augusta, Georgia, which is heavily Republican, became the first local government in the country to adopt the software to help maintain its voter rolls.
Some of the Eagle AI video sessions, including the one Lee attended, were hosted by Mitchell, who, since the 2020 election has been leading a growing network of conservative activists that claims to be investigating theories and uncovering what they believe is proof of fraud in the administration of U.S. elections. Dozens of investigations into the 2020 election have failed to turn up any evidence of fraud, including in Georgia where three recounts confirmed Trump’s loss.
Mitchell also declined an interview, but in a series of emails refuted the characterization that those in her organization are “election deniers,” She described them as “patriots … who woke up after 2020 and realized what had happened to their election systems and are doing their best to work hard to remedy various aspects of the problems.”
The video sessions obtained by CBS News raise questions about who exactly the software and its users are targeting. In one session in March, Richards demonstrated how the software can accelerate a mass challenge against homeless voters registering at a church.
“It’s a Presbyterian church,” Richards explained in the video, which was provided to CBS News by the progressive watchdog group Documented and independently verified. “They have an outreach mission. They’re registering homeless folks there. Of course, nobody knows whether they’re actually voting or not. So that’s an issue.”
Richards told the audience of volunteers that it might normally take a long time to file a challenge report on 2,224 people. But not with his software, he said.
“All I gotta do is hit that button right there and it brings them all up,” he said. “And I hit this button right here, and it creates all those challenge forms at one time.”
Challenged over typos
CBS News found other instances of challenges that led eligible voters to have their right to vote questioned. Two days after he left the hospital following surgery for colon cancer, Christopher Ramsey received a letter from Fulton County alerting him his voter registration had been challenged due to a typo in his address, which Ramsey had previously tried to correct. Despite a compromised immune system and a warning from his doctor, Ramsey drove 30 miles to the county’s election board office and waited hours to defend his right to vote.
“I felt firmly that I have my right to vote, and I was going to defend it,” Ramsey, a former kindergarten teacher, told CBS News.
Ramsey said he was one of 4,000 voters challenged that day, but only a few dozen showed up to defend themselves.
“This made me lose confidence in their system,” said Ramsey, who first shared his story with ProPublica. “What about all the people who couldn’t show up for themselves?”
Lakendra Graham was also challenged for registering at an invalid address. Graham’s address changed in 2019, after Atlanta renamed a number of streets that previously honored the Confederacy. Ms. Graham had lived on Confederate Court, before the city changed it to Trestletree Court.
“It was on the news that the street names changed, so that’s something small you could have looked at to see I’m still there,” said Graham at a Fulton County hearing last March. “Nothing’s changed, my information hasn’t changed.”
This past June, Courtney Scott had to wait more than four hours to testify before the board of elections after she was challenged over a clerical error in her street name. Scott lives on Azalee Hester Wharton Way NW, but the voter roll her challenger found was missing “Hester” in the address.
“I couldn’t believe I could lose my voting rights that easily,” Scott told CBS News. “If I was charged with anything, the burden of proof should be on them, but the burden was on me, by a letter, to be able to vote.”
A federal court in Georgia is currently hearing a lawsuit over the legality of mass voter challenges and whether the practice amounts to voter intimidation, and Raffenperger said he’s looking to the outcome for guidance.
“I think that we’ll have to take a look at what the remedy will be from the court system,” said Raffensperger, adding that he did not believe the practice disenfranchises voters in Georgia. “It’s never been easier to vote. We are, we believe, the model for what election integrity and election accessibility should look like throughout the entire country.”
Since having his vote challenged, McWhorter said he has decided to be more politically active. The master barber said that will start with a simple message for his customers: “Go vote.”
Ten Bears has a great point. It is clear that there are “democrats” who are starting third party runs and are pushing for anyone but Biden campaigns. These people claim they are afraid Biden will lose, but rather than work to shore up Biden’s support, they are working hard to give the republicans ammunition to attack Biden with. So what is their real motive? Hugs. Scottie
What just happened in #Michigan is a testament to what can happen all over the country if we choose to elect leaders who actually care about the people. Be inspired.
Scottie's Playtime 