90 Miles From Tyranny

Friday, September 11, 2020

The Left Is Setting The Stage For A Coup If Trump Wins

Under the guise of planning for right-wing violence if Trump loses, Democrats are gaming out how to steal the election if Trump wins.

It’s been hard to miss the steady drumbeat of articles and think-pieces over the past few months about Election Day war games and post-election planning underway on the left, rooted in obsessive fears that President Trump will refuse to accept an electoral loss, triggering a constitutional crisis and maybe even widespread civic unrest, all in a desperate attempt to cling to power.

“The Left Secretly Preps for MAGA Violence After Election Day,” reads a recent headline at The Daily Beast. “Is Trump Planning a Coup d’État?” asks another recent piece at The Nation. “Is America in the Early Stages of Armed Insurgency?” frets Slate. Similar pieces have run at the Washington Post (“The election will likely spark violence—and a constitutional crisis”), The Atlantic (“What might he do? What should Americans fear?”), Vox (“Imagine that… Donald Trump refuses to concede defeat”), The New Yorker (“Trump’s threats about rejecting the results come November are not idle”), and on and on.

The news hook for most of these articles is a series of elaborate election war games hosted in June by a newly formed organization called the Transition Integrity Project, touted by the media as a bipartisan group of experts consisting of former elected officials, high-level government staffers, consultants, and journalists like David Frum, who wrote the Atlantic piece referenced above.

In other words, the Transition Integrity Project is a cross-section of our elite ruling class. In its own executive summary of the war games, the group states it was founded “out of concern that the Trump Administration may seek to manipulate, ignore, undermine or disrupt the 2020 presidential election and transition process” — never mind the many ways Democrats in Congress and the executive bureaucracy, aided by the media, have been doing just that since before Trump won the 2016 election.

The exercise mimicked the kind of war games sometimes conducted for foreign policy crises, only this time the format was applied to the presidential election, with one team playing the Biden campaign and the other the Trump campaign. The outlandish outcome of these simulations—that in the event of a close election, Trump might “federalize the National Guard and take military control of state voting sites,” as Frum writes — tells us less about what is likely to happen in the real world and more about the mendacious worldview, toxic prejudices, and treasonous imaginings of the...

Mueller Team Members ‘Wiped’ Cellphones, DOJ Records Show

Data from more than 25 government-issued phones used by members of the special counsel’s team was wiped or deleted during the course of the Trump-Russia probe, according to Justice Department records released on Thursday.

Several prosecutors on the special counsel’s team claimed they accidentally wiped their devices by entering incorrect passwords too many times. Others said they intentionally deleted data from their phones.

Andrew Weissmann, a top deputy on the special counsel’s team, “wiped” his phone twice, according to the documents, which were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch.

Weissmann “entered password too many times and wiped his phone” on March 8, 2018, the Justice Department spreadsheet says. He claimed to have “accidentally wiped” his phone on Sept. 27, 2018.

“Data lost,” the spreadsheet reads.

A phone used by James Quarles, one of special counsel Robert Mueller’s closest aides, “wiped itself without intervention from him,” the Justice Department document says.

A phone used by prosecutor Greg Andres was wiped due to a forgotten password on May 30, 2018.

L. Rush Atkinson claimed to have accidentally wiped data from his phone two days later, on Nov. 29, 2018.

Two other users claimed their phones were accidentally scrubbed on Dec. 12, 2018 and Jan. 2, 2019.

The records cite numerous other incidents in which data from unidentified special counsel team members’ phones was erased because of...

Weather Underground Terrorist Bill Ayers Suggests the Civil War Has Already Begun

As violent and destructive antifa and Black Lives Matter riots continue to ravage American cities like Portland and Kenosha, a self-described communist who plotted to blow up the U.S. Capitol in the 1970s suggested that America’s second Civil War has already started.

“Am I the only one, or do you feel eerily that we’re living in Kansas, 1859, and that tensions are boiling over, but only years later will people say, ‘Yes, the Civil War began there and then?'” Ayers posted on Facebook.

While Ayers’ Facebook account is not verified, Ayers posted the same statement on his website, BillAyers.org.

Ayers, who co-founded the Weather Underground in 1969, took part in the bombings of the New York City Police Department headquarters in 1970, the U.S. Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972. Since the FBI used illegal tactics against the Weather Underground and the New Left, the government dropped key charges against the Weather Underground and Bill Ayers.

After his radical career, he settled into academia, where he taught at the University of Illinois. When he retired in 2010, the university denied him emeritus status. The university’s board chair, Christopher G. Kennedy (son of assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy), condemned Ayers for dedicating a book “to the man who murdered my father.” Kennedy referred to a 1974 book Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, which Ayers wrote with other Weather Underground members and which the authors dedicated to many revolutionaries, including the man who assassinated Robert F. Kennedy. Ayers denied dedicating a book to the assassin and suggested that right-wing bloggers started a rumor to that effect.

As for Ayers’ “eery” feeling, he was referring to Bleeding Kansas, a lesser-known precursor to the American Civil War.

In the decade leading up to the Civil War, Southern Democrats fought to extend slavery north and west. The Founders had forged a grand bargain to allow the evil institution of slavery but restrict its spread. In 1820, Congress drew a line, saying that any state north of the line would enter the Union as free while states that entered below the line could have slavery. Yet Southerners started defending slavery as a positive good and arguing for “popular sovereignty,” the notion that white landowners in states north of the 1820 line would vote on whether the state would be slave or free. Abraham Lincoln grew to prominence by opposing this notion.

The South held tremendous sway in the federal government. In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, opening up Kansas and Nebraska to “popular sovereignty.” Pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers rushed into Kansas, seeking to tip the balance toward their side. The settlers fought and killed one another in a prelude to the Civil War known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

With the benefit of hindsight, Americans see “Bleeding Kansas” as a precursor to — if not the very first tremors of — the Civil War. In one sense, the Civil War had a “soft opening” in 1854, before the main event in...