January 6

Holocaust denier, neo-Nazi Fuentes dines with Trump

~ Michael Stevenson ~ 2 Comments

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

November 26, 2022

I hate to break up a holiday weekend with a political post, but I want to put down a marker for the record.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, November 22, former president Trump hosted the antisemitic artist Ye, also known as Kanye West, for dinner at a public table at Mar-a-Lago along with political operative Karen Giorno, who was the Trump campaign’s 2016 state director in Florida. Ye brought with him 24-year-old far-right white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Fuentes attended the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in its wake, he committed to moving the Republican Party farther to the right.

Fuentes has openly admired Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is currently making war on Russia’s neighbor Ukraine. A Holocaust denier, Fuentes is associated with America’s neo-Nazis.

In February 2020, Fuentes launched the America First Political Action Conference to compete from the right with the Conservative Political Action Conference. In May 2021, on a livestream, Fuentes said: “My job…is to keep pushing things further. We, because nobody else will, have to push the envelope. And we’re gonna get called names. We’re gonna get called racist, sexist, antisemitic, bigoted, whatever.… When the party is where we are two years later, we’re not gonna get the credit for the ideas that become popular. But that’s okay. That’s our job. We are the right-wing flank of the Republican Party. And if we didn’t exist, the Republican Party would be falling backwards all the time.”

Fuentes and his “America First” followers, called “Groypers” after a cartoon amphibian (I’m not kidding), backed Trump’s lies that he had actually won the 2020 election. At a rally shortly after the election, Fuentes told his followers to “storm every state capitol until Jan. 20, 2021, until President Trump is inaugurated for four more years.” Fuentes and Groypers were at the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, and at least seven of them have been charged with federal crimes for their association with that attack. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol subpoenaed Fuentes himself.

Accounts of the dinner suggest that Trump and Fuentes hit it off, with Trump allegedly saying, “I like this guy, he gets me,” after Fuentes urged Trump to speak freely off the cuff rather than reading teleprompters and trying to appear presidential as his handlers advise.

But Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2024 just days ago, and being seen publicly with far-right white supremacist Fuentes—in addition to Ye—indicates his embrace of the far right. His team told NBC’s Marc Caputo that the dinner was a “f**king nightmare.” Trump tried to distance himself from the meeting by saying he didn’t know who Fuentes was, and that he was just trying to help Ye out by giving the “seriously troubled” man advice, but observers noted that he did not distance himself from Fuentes’s positions.

Republican lawmakers have been silent about Trump’s apparent open embrace of the far right, illustrating the growing power of that far right in the Republican Party. Representatives Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have affiliated themselves with Fuentes, and while their appearances with him at the America First Political Action Conference last February drew condemnation from Republican leader Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), now McCarthy desperately needs the votes of far-right Republicans to make him speaker of the House. To get that support, he has been promising to deliver their wish list—including an investigation into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter—and appears willing to accept Fuentes and his followers into the party, exactly as Fuentes hoped.

Today, after the news of Trump’s dinner and the thundering silence that followed it, conservative anti-Trumper Bill Kristol tweeted: “Aren’t there five decent Republicans in the House who will announce they won’t vote for anyone for Speaker who doesn’t denounce their party’s current leader, Donald Trump, for consorting with the repulsive neo-Nazi Fuentes?”

So far, at least, the answer is no.

A good day for Democracy

~ Michael Stevenson ~ 1 Comment

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

November 9, 2022

Yesterday was a good day for democracy. Americans turned out to defend our principles from those who denied our right to choose our own leaders. There was little violence, the election appears to have gone smoothly, and there are few claims of “fraud.” As I write tonight, control of the House and Senate is still not clear, but some outlines are now visible. 

Usually, the party in power loses a significant number of congressional seats and state seats in the first midterm after it takes the presidency. Today, President Joe Biden spoke to reporters and noted that the Democrats had the best midterm elections for governors since 1986 and lost fewer House seats than they have in any Democratic president’s first midterm in 40 years. 

That this election—the results of which are still coming in as I write—is so close is an endorsement of the nation’s current path, despite the shock of inflation. As Biden said: “the overwhelming majority of the American people support the elements of my economic agenda—from rebuilding America’s roads and bridges; to lowering prescription drug costs; to a historic investment in tackling the climate crisis; to making sure that large corporations begin to pay their fair share in taxes.” 

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) agreed with Biden on the Fox News Channel tonight, but for him it was a complaint: “Why did Democrats do better than expected? Because they have governed as liberals.” And people appear to like a government that works on their behalf.

Voters appear to have been far more motivated to protect abortion rights than many pundits thought. In Michigan, California, and Vermont, voters amended their state constitutions to protect abortion rights. In Kentucky, voters rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have restricted abortion rights. 

Former president Trump and his loyalists had a bad day. Trump endorsed more than 330 candidates in yesterday’s races, including a number of high-profile people he had urged to run. They were extremist candidates whose key attraction was that they backed Trump’s allegations that President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from him, and he remained bullish on their chances until the end, telling a host for NewsNation: “I think if they win, I should get all the credit. If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.” 

But when many of Trump’s candidates lost yesterday, former supporters did indeed blame Trump. Former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro tweeted: “Trump picked bad candidates, spent almost no money on his hand-picked candidates, and then proceeded to crap on the Republicans who lost and didn’t sufficiently bend the knee. This will have 2024 impact.” 

It is not at all clear that the election results will, in fact, end Trump’s political career, but they do open up the possibility that Republican leaders will not be unhappy to see him moved offstage, particularly by events they can blame on opponents—events like indictments. In any case, Trump’s status as the party’s undisputed kingmaker is no longer secure. 

This seems likely to bring the Republican Party’s simmering civil war into the open. Yesterday, Trump warned Florida governor Ron DeSantis not to run for president, hinting that he would tell reporters dirt about DeSantis if the governor did announce. (“I would tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering—I know more about him than anybody—other than, perhaps, his wife,” Trump said.)

But DeSantis came out of yesterday’s elections with a second term as Florida governor and looking strong indeed. He fared well with Hispanic voters and won his state with about 60% of the vote (it should not be overlooked that his new election security police clearly intimidated voters). If, in fact, the Republicans do end up taking control of the House of Representatives, presumptive speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) will have a delicate dance between MAGA Republicans who back Trump and those trying to move beyond Trump while keeping his voters. 

But the biggest winner yesterday was democracy. 

More than half of the Republican candidates on ballots were election deniers and either would not say that they would honor election results going forward or openly said they would not. That position appears to have hurt their chances of winning their elections. While some election deniers won their elections, more lost.

Most notably, the story in Michigan was that of democracy, as Democrats won control of the state legislature for the first time since 1984. Governor Gretchen Whitmer was heavily targeted by former president Trump and made abortion rights central to her reelection. Both factors appeared to have helped her win, hold onto a Democratic attorney general and secretary of state, and flip both chambers of the legislature.

There is a larger story here. For decades the Republicans who controlled the Michigan legislature had drawn heavily gerrymandered districts, the most recent so extreme that in 2019, federal judges called them a “political gerrymander of historical proportions.” Voters amended the state constitution to require an independent, nonpartisan panel of 13 citizens to redraw the maps. While political competitiveness was not central to the criteria they used, it was the result. 

Michigan Republicans have challenged that new map through the courts, but on Monday the Supreme Court dismissed their appeal. The outcome of yesterday’s elections suggests that what scholars have been saying for years is true: Republicans have won by gaming the system.

The importance of that partisan gerrymandering—and the importance of today’s Supreme Court in upholding that gerrymandering—showed up yesterday in the cases of four states in which Republican lawmakers simply refused to change maps that state courts had determined were illegal. In Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Ohio, heavily gerrymandered maps stayed in place despite state court decisions that they were unconstitutional. 

Those four states make up almost 10% of the seats in the House of Representatives. According to congressional redistricting specialist David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, those illegal maps were likely to hand five to seven seats to the Republicans that they would not have won without them. At the same time, Florida governor Ron DeSantis put in place heavily gerrymandered districts—so extreme that the Republican legislature balked—that were expected to turn four seats Republican and create a House delegation more than 70% Republican from a state that Trump won with just over half the vote in 2020. 

Gaming the system sets up a structural problem for democracy, of course, but also for the party in power. In safe districts, candidates don’t have to worry about attracting voters from the other party and so worry only about being challenged by those more extreme than they are in the primaries (which are always dominated by the most fervent partisans). The party becomes more and more extreme and can stay in power only by continuing to manipulate the system.

Eventually, though, they become so extreme they lose even members of their own party, as the Republican Party has done since Trump took it over. A new influx of voters—as we saw last night—can win elections, and then they will demand that the playing field be leveled back to fairness. Jack Lobel of Voters of Tomorrow, which is mobilizing Gen Z voters, told NPR’s Rachel Martin today: “The far right is trying to attack us, they’re trying to restrict our rights, and they’re trying to take us back in time. [Young people] want to go forward….” 

Lobel mentioned abortion rights, economic rights, and building a better future, and he noted that the Democratic Party has stepped up for Gen Z. Certainly, organizers like strategy director of Voters of Tomorrow Victor Shi have been pounding the pavement to turn out their people. 

Exit polls from last night show voters in the 18–29 age bracket making up about 12–13% of the vote and preferring Democrats by much larger margins than any other group: as much as 70%. In 25-year-old Maxwell Frost (D-FL), elected last night, Gen Z has its first member of Congress.

150 years ago Susan B. Anthony led a group of women to the polls. Today, the fight continues

~ Michael Stevenson ~ Leave a comment

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

November 5, 2022

One hundred and fifty years ago today, American women turned out to vote in the presidential election, exercising their right to have a say in their government by choosing either Democratic candidate Horace Greeley or Republican incumbent Ulysses S. Grant.

Except they didn’t have that right explicitly. They were claiming it.

After the Civil War, lawmakers discussed what a newly reconstructed nation would look like and who would get to decide its parameters. Women who had worked for the survival of the United States government, given their sons and husbands to it, invested their money in it, nursed and sometimes fought for it, believed they had demonstrated their right to have a say in it. When Congress began to discuss the Fourteenth Amendment, overturning the 1857 Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court denying that Black Americans could be citizens and protecting Black Americans from racially discriminatory laws in the South, suffragists demanded that their citizenship be included in that constitutional amendment.

Instead, the Fourteenth Amendment included the word “male” in the Constitution for the first time. The amendment specified that it protected the right of men—not women—to vote with its attempt to pressure states into allowing Black male suffrage by threatening to reduce congressional representation for any state that kept a significant number of men from the polls. It provided that “when the right to vote…is denied to any of the male inhabitants of [a] state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States…, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced [proportionally].”

Outraged that they had been excluded, suffragists set their sights on the Fifteenth Amendment, protecting the right to vote. But when Congress passed it and sent it off to the states for ratification in 1870, the amendment said nothing about women’s suffrage. Indeed, it distinctly avoiding the word “sex” when it established that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Fed up with trying to gain their rights through lawmakers, in 1872, suffragists took matters into their own hands. They decided to vote in the presidential election, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment recognized their citizenship by virtue of its first section, which said: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” They were born in the United States, they pointed out, and therefore, according to the Fourteenth Amendment, were citizens.

In Rochester, New York, suffragist Susan B. Anthony led a group of women to the polls in November and successfully cast her vote for Grant. But Anthony was already famous for her long career as a reformer, making her a perfect figure for officials to use as an example. Three weeks after the election, authorities arrested her for voter fraud. She could not testify at her own trial and the judge wrote his opinion before it began, directing the jury to find her guilty. Anthony was fined $100 but refused to pay it, instead going on a speaking tour of New York in which she declared: “This government is not…a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex….”

Anthony’s case grabbed headlines, but it was the story of Virginia Minor that would change the next hundred years of our history. Minor was a suffragist in St. Louis, Missouri. She and her husband, Francis, had been instrumental in developing and publicizing the idea that women had the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment and that they should force that issue in 1872 by showing up at the polls.

On October 15, 1872, Minor had tried to register to vote in her St. Louis district, but the registrar, Reese Happersett, refused to enroll her on the grounds that she was female. Virginia’s husband sued—as a married woman she had no standing to sue on her own account—and the case wound its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On March 29, 1875, the court handed down the Minor v. Happersett decision.

“There is no doubt that women may be citizens,” it said, but it went on to say that citizenship did not necessarily convey the right to vote. “[T]he constitutions and laws of the several States which commit that important trust to men alone are not necessarily void,” it wrote.

According to the Supreme Court, state governments, elected by white men, could discriminate against their citizens so long as that discrimination was not on the grounds of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

The next year, white supremacists would take control of the South with the argument that Black men should not vote because they were poor and would vote for lawmakers who would promise roads, schools, and hospitals that could only be paid for with tax levies on white men. Such rules accumulated until in 1890, Mississippi codified this state-based system by putting into place a new constitution that limited voting to white men by imposing education requirements to be judged by white officials, lack of criminal record, and proof of tax paying. Soon, state constitutions across the country limited voting with all sorts of requirements that cut Black people out on grounds other than race.

In 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provided that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” overruled Minor v. Happersett on the issue of women’s suffrage. But the Supreme Court continued to use its guidelines for other restrictions until the 1960s, upholding literacy tests, poll taxes, and other rules designed to keep Black people from voting.

Finally, in 1966, almost 100 years after Virginia Minor sued, the Supreme Court decided that voting was a fundamental right protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

And 50 years later—and 150 years after Anthony cast her vote—those of us who have not been cut out of the right to vote by one or another of the measures states are now imposing on their voters can exercise that right, and determine what our nation will look like, once again.

The aim of those attacking our elections is to discredit our democracy

~ Michael Stevenson ~ Leave a comment

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

October 28, 2022

At about 2:30 am, police in San Francisco responding to a call discovered that an assailant had broken into the San Francisco home of House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and attacked her husband, 82-year-old Paul Pelosi, with a hammer, shouting, “Where’s Nancy?” The attacker apparently tried to tie Mr. Pelosi up “until Nancy got home” and told police he was “waiting for Nancy.”

Mr. Pelosi suffered a fractured skull and serious injuries to his right arm and his hands. He underwent surgery today. He is expected to recover.

Speaker Pelosi was in Washington, D.C., at the time. The House speaker is the third-ranking officer of our government, second in line to succeed the president. An attack on her is an attack on our fundamental government structure.

Those who knew the alleged attacker, 42-year-old David DePape, say his behavior has been concerning. His Facebook page featured conspiracy theories common on right-wing media, saying Covid vaccines were deadly; that George Floyd, the Minneapolis man murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin, actually died of a drug overdose; that the 2020 election was stolen; and the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol was a “FARCE.” He reposted a number of videos by Mike Lindell, the Trump loyalist and chief executive officer of the MyPillow company, lying that the 2020 election was stolen.

Matthew Gertz of Media Matters reviewed DePape’s blog and found it “a standard case of right-wing online radicalization. QAnon, Great Reset, Pizzagate, Gamergate and all there, along with M[en’s] R[ights] A[ctivist]/misogyny, hatred of Blacks/Jews/trans people/’groomers,’ and anti-vax conspiracy theories.”

According to Harry Litman, the legal affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times, DePape has been booked so far only on state crimes, including attempted homicide and elder abuse. According to Joyce White Vance at Civil Discourse, evidence that he went after Mr. Pelosi in order to intimidate Speaker Pelosi or stop her from performing her official duties would constitute a federal crime.

The attack on Mr. Pelosi comes after right-wing figures have so often advocated violence against the House speaker that the rioters on January 6 roamed the U.S. Capitol calling for her in the singsong cadences of a horror movie. Before she ran for Congress, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said Pelosi was a “traitor” and told her listeners that treason is “a crime punishable by death,” and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) once “joked” about hitting Speaker Pelosi with the speaker’s gavel if he becomes speaker himself, prompting laughter from his audience.

Whipping up supporters against a perceived enemy to create a statistical probability of an attack without advocating a specific event is known as “stochastic terrorism.” Without using that phrase, Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) explained it today: “[W]hen you convince people that politicians are rigging elections, drink babies blood, etc, you will get violence. This must be rejected.”

Right-wing media channels immediately spun the home invasion and attack into Republican talking points, saying that “crime hits everybody” and that “this can happen anywhere, crime is random and that’s why it’s such a significant part of this election story.” Some tried to pin the attack on President Joe Biden, blaming him for not healing the country’s divisions; Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin said of Pelosi and her husband: “There’s no room for violence anywhere, but we’re going to send her back to be with him in California.” Aaron Rupar of Public Notice called out how few Republicans publicly condemned the attack and how many tried to pin the blame for it on Democrats.

Late yesterday, Twitter’s board completed the $44 billion sale of the company to billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Musk has promised to be an advocate for free speech and to reopen the platform to those previously banned for spreading racist content or disinformation—including former president Trump—but his actual purchase of the site might complicate that position.

In the technology magazine The Verge, editor Nilay Patel wrote, “Welcome to hell, Elon.” The problems with Twitter, Patel wrote, “are not engineering problems. They are political problems.” The site itself is valuable only because of its users, he points out, and trying to regulate how people behave is “historically a miserable experience.”

Patel notes that to attract advertising revenue, Musk will have to protect advertisers’ brands, which means banning “racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total a**holes.” And that content moderation, of course, will infuriate the right-wing cheerleaders who “are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.” And that’s even before Twitter has to take on the speech laws of other countries.

Musk clearly understands this tension. Trying to reassure advertisers before the sale, he tweeted: “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” Car manufacturer General Motors has temporarily stopped running ads on Twitter until its direction becomes clearer.

Today, racist and antisemitic content rose sharply as users appeared to be testing the limits of the platform under Musk. The Network Contagion Research Institute, which studies disinformation on social media, noted that posters on the anonymous website 4chan have been encouraging users to spread racist and derogatory slurs on Twitter. The Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, which focuses on civil rights law, backed this observation up today when it noted that on October 27, an anonymous post on 4chan, which users immediately spread to extremist Telegram channels, told followers how to increase antisemitic content on Twitter.

In the first 12 hours after Musk acquired the site, the use of the n-word increased nearly 500%.

After a few high-profile accounts appeared to have been reinstated, this afternoon, Musk tweeted that he is creating a council to figure out a content moderation policy, and that no major content decisions or reinstatements will happen until it creates a policy. At the very least, this should protect Twitter from becoming associated with new accounts promoting violence before the midterm elections.

And that is a concern. Today, the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, National Counterterrorism Center, and U.S. Capitol Police warned of violent extremism surrounding the upcoming midterm elections, including attacks on “candidates running for public office, elected officials, election workers, political rallies, political party representatives, racial and religious minorities, or perceived ideological opponents.”

The aim of those attacking our elections is to discredit our democracy.

White Declaration of Independence

~ Michael Stevenson ~ 1 Comment

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

October 16, 2022

In an interview this morning with CNN’s Dana Bash, Arizona Republican nominee for governor Kari Lake refused to say that she would accept the results of the upcoming election– unless she wins. Former president Trump said the same in 2020, and now more than half of the Republican nominees in the midterm elections have refused to say that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election because, they allege, there was voter fraud. This position is an astonishing rejection of the whole premise on which this nation was founded: that voters have the right to choose their leaders.

That right was established in the Declaration of Independence separating the 13 British colonies on the North American continent from allegiance to King George III. That Declaration rejected the idea of social hierarchies in which some men were better than others and should rule their inferiors. Instead, it set out a new principle of government, establishing that “all men are created equal” and that governments derive “their just power from the consent of the governed.”

Republicans’ rejection of the idea that voters have the right to choose their leaders is not a new phenomenon. It is part and parcel of Republican governance since the 1980s, when it became clear to Republican leaders that their “supply-side economics,” a program designed to put more money into the hands of those at the top of the economy, was not actually popular with voters, who recognized that cutting taxes and services did not, in fact, result in more tax revenue and rising standards of living. They threatened to throw the Republicans out of office and put back in place the Democrats’ policies of using the government to build the economy from the bottom up.

So, to protect President Ronald Reagan’s second round of tax cuts in 1986, Republicans began to talk of cutting down Democratic voting through a “ballot integrity” initiative, estimating that their plans could “eliminate at least 60–80,000 folks from the rolls” in Louisiana. “If it’s a close race…, this could keep the Black vote down considerably,” a regional director of the Republican National Committee wrote.

When Democrats countered by expanding voting through the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, more commonly known as the Motor Voter Act, a New York Times writer said Republicans saw the law “as special efforts to enroll core Democratic constituencies in welfare and jobless-benefits offices.” While Democrats thought it was important to enfranchise “poor people…people who can’t afford cars, people who can’t afford nice houses,” Republicans, led by then–House minority whip Newt Gingrich of Georgia, predicted “a wave of fraudulent voting by illegal immigrants.”

From there it was a short step to insisting that Republicans lost elections not because their ideas were unpopular, but because Democrats cheated. In 1994, losing candidates charged, without evidence, that Democrats won elections with “voter fraud.” In California, for example, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s opponent, who had spent $28 million of his own money on the race but lost by about 160,000 votes, said on “Larry King Live” that “frankly, the fraud is overwhelming” and that once he found evidence, he would share it to demand “a new election.” That evidence never materialized, but in February 1995 the losing candidate finally made a statement saying he would stop litigating despite “massive deficiencies in the California election system,” in the interest of “a thorough bipartisan investigation and solutions to those problems.”

In 1996, House and Senate Republicans each launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, with Gingrich, by then House speaker, telling reporters: ‘“We now have proof of a sufficient number of noncitizens voting that it may well have affected at least one election for Congress,” although the House Oversight Committee said the evidence did not support his allegations.

In the Senate, after a 10-month investigation, the Republican-dominated Rules Committee voted 16 to 0 to dismiss accusations of voter fraud in the election of Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu that cost her $500,000 in legal fees and the committee $250,000. Her opponent, whose supporters wore small socks on their lapels with the words “Don’t Get Cold Feet. Sock It To Voter Fraud,” still refused to concede, saying that “the Senate has become so partisan it has become difficult to get to the truth.”

There was nothing to the cases, but keeping them in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that voter fraud was a serious issue and that Democrats were winning elections thanks to illegal, usually immigrant, voters. Amplified by the new talk radio hosts and, by the mid-1990s, the Fox News Channel, Republicans increasingly argued that Democrats were owned by “special interests” who were corrupting the system, pushing what they called “socialism”—that is, legislation that provided a basic social safety net and regulated business—on “real” Americans who, they insisted, wanted rugged individualism. If Democrats really were un-American, it only made sense to keep such dangerous voters from the polls.

In 1998, the Florida legislature passed a law to “maintain” the state’s voter lists, using a private company to purge the voter files of names believed to belong to convicted felons, dead people, duplicates, and so on. The law placed the burden of staying on the voter lists on individuals, who had to justify their right to be on them. The law purged up to 100,000 legitimate Florida voters, most of them Black voters presumed to vote Democratic, before the 2000 election, in which Republican candidate George W. Bush won the state by 537 votes, giving him the Electoral College although he lost the popular vote.

Voting restrictions had begun, but they really took off after the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision gutted the provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requiring preclearance from the federal government before states with a history of racial discrimination changed their election laws. Now, less than a decade later, Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been open about suppressing Democratic votes, easing voting restrictions for three reliably Republican counties devastated by Hurricane Ian but refusing to adjust the restrictions in hard-hit, Democratic-leaning Orange County.

Open attacks on Democrats in the lead-up to this year’s midterms justify that voter suppression. Last week, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) suggested that Black Americans are criminals who “want to take over what you got,” and Republican candidates are running ads showing mug shots of Black men. Today, Trump chided American Jews for not sufficiently appreciating him; he warned them to “get their act together…[b]efore it’s too late.” Republican lawmakers have left those racist and antisemitic statements unchallenged.

Those attacks also justify ignoring Democratic election victories, for if Democratic voters are undermining the country, it only makes sense that their choices should be ignored. This argument was exactly how reactionary white Democrats justified the 1898 coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, when they overthrew a legitimately elected government of white Populists and Black Republicans. Issuing a “White Declaration of Independence,” they claimed “the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95 percent of the property” were taking over because those elected were not fit to run a government. Like the Wilmington plotters, Trump supporters insisted they were defending the nation from a “stolen” election when they attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to cancel the results of the 2020 Democratic victory.

It was not so very long ago that historians taught the Wilmington coup as a shocking anomaly in our democratic system, but now, 124 years after it happened, it is current again. Modern-day Republicans appear to reject not only the idea they could lose an election fairly, but also the fundamental principle, established in the Declaration of Independence, that all Americans have a right to consent to their government.