Autocrats R Us

Republicans are not going to make the same mistake twice

How eager are you to get arrested in Washington D.C.?  Are you prepared to be thrown in jail for an extended period? Do you have the phone number in your pocket of a good lawyer – and I mean a good lawyer – you could call in an emergency?

Is your passport up to date?  Do you have a visa to travel to some friendly country such as Ireland or France or even the Bahamas?  Do you have a nest-egg put away you could readily access from overseas?  Have you thought of a way you could make a living once you get where you’re going?

Are you prepared, in other words, to live in exile?

I ask these questions because I’ve been watching what’s happening with Belarus, which on Sunday used a Mig-29 to order a Ryanair flight over its territory to land so they could arrest a dissident political leader and journalist who had been living in exile.

You want to know who else is watching what’s going on in Belarus right now?  Donald Trump and his minions in the Republican Party.  They’re studying what the dictator Alexander Lukashenko is doing so they can be ready to do the American version of the same thing. 

This isn’t some sort of slide on the part of your Faithful Correspondent into a fit of paranoia and madness.  These are the kinds of real questions we have to be contemplating as we look toward the next presidential “election” in 2024.  I put the word “election” in quotes because I don’t think it’s going to be an electoral contest any of us will be able to recognize.

Donald Trump and his poodles in the Republican Party are not going to make the same mistake twice.  They’re not going to lose another election for the top office in the land.  Right now they are busy fixing the election systems in states all around the country so they can control the outcomes of the next presidential election in those states.  Right now they are making plans for what they will do in the Congress on January 6, 2025.  They’re not going to make the mistake of going into the certification of the ballots of the Electoral College without controlling both the House and the Senate.  They’re busting their asses so Little Poodle Kevin McCarthy will be Speaker of the House and Big Poodle Mitch McConnell will be Majority Leader of the Senate.  When the time comes they will file objections to the Electoral Ballots of states that Donald Trump or his approved successor loses in 2024, and they will throw the election into the House of Representatives where they will be prepared to overturn the results of both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote and appoint the next president of the United States.

You want to know what Lukashenko did today as the European Union and the United States banned flights from his country to the countries of the free world?  He doubled down, that’s what he did.  He signed new laws cracking down on dissent in his country.  According to a story this afternoon in the New York Times, Lukashenko “placed bans on publishing unauthorized public opinion polls, on livestreaming unauthorized protests, and even on posting links to ‘banned’ information.”  Protest leaders had used platforms such as NEXTA on the social media platform Telegram to organize protests against the election.  Henceforth, that will be illegal in the country of Belarus.

You want to know where the leaders of those protests against Lukashenko’s completely bogus “reelection” are living?  They’re living in exile in countries like Lithuania and Poland like protest leader and journalist Roman Protasevich, who was a resident of Lithuania until he was arrested on Sunday when Lukashenko ordered the downing of the Ryanair flight he was on and arrested him in the Belarus capital of Minsk. 

Think of that for a moment.  Lukashenko out-and-out stole the Belarus presidential election of 2020, declaring himself the victor with a flatly bogus 80 percent of the vote.  In a country of about nine and a half million, hundreds of thousands took to the streets in protest.  Lukashenko put down the protests with violence and arrests sending protest leaders and even the winner of the election into exile.  Protasevich was already in exile, having left his country the previous year because Lukashenko had put him on a list as a “terrorist” and issued threats to arrest and jail him.  Lukashenko was so frightened of the 26 year old journalist who had been continuing to lead the opposition from exile that he put a fucking Mig-29 in the air and ordered a Ryanair flight carrying more than 120 international travelers, including some American citizens, to land on Belurusian soil, where Protasevich was arrested by the Belarus KGB. 

That’s why I posed the series of questions at the beginning of this article.  Lukashenko was not playing around when he used armed military aircraft to bring down a civilian airliner flying at twenty or thirty thousand feet above his country.  And our own homegrown autocrat Donald Trump and his army of lunatic followers aren’t playing around either. 

They’re doing exactly what Lukashenko just did in his country when he passed laws outlawing dissent today.  The first thing autocrats do is figure out how to seize power.  They are passing laws in states around the country basically outlawing the political dissent of voting for the opposition political party, the Democratic Party.  They are preparing to put their own people in charge of the next presidential election in their states.  They’re not satisfied with controlling state elections through officials such as secretaries of state.  No, they’re changing the laws so that the Republican controlled state legislatures are in charge of elections.  And they are empowering legislative bodies to conduct bogus “recounts” such as the one currently going on in Arizona on behalf of the state senate, controlled by Republican politicians. 

We can see them doing this because they are doing it out in the open.  I have written repeatedly about the 361 voter suppression bills currently making their way through Republican controlled state legislatures.  Do you think these bills are just political playthings being passed because those Republicans in those states are bored and looking for something to do?  No, it is a coordinated effort being run by the Republican Party from Washington D.C. using the offices of their puppet “think tank,” the Heritage Foundation, to write the legislation for the Republicans in state governments to pass.

The second thing autocrats do after they figure out how to seize power is figure out how to suppress dissent.  If you achieve your power with popular support, you don’t have to worry about dissent.  But Republicans are not bothering with trying to be popular anymore.  They are a minority party, and almost none of the positions they are taking on political issues are popular.  Lowering taxes on the rich isn’t popular.  Being against spending money on infrastructure isn’t popular.  Not even their opposition to immigration is popular.  But they don’t care.  That’s why the next thing they’re going to do is figure out how to deal with the dissent that is inevitable after they steal the next election.

And now I’m going to ask you a final question:  have you thought about what you’re going to do in November of 2024 if Joe Biden wins the presidential election popular vote and is awarded the “win” of the Electoral College vote by the networks, and yet we are able to see right out in the open what Republicans are doing to take the election away through so-called constitutional means and award the “win” to Donald Trump or his appointed successor?  How far will we be willing to go in dissent?

Republicans are fools and they are knaves, but they are deadly serious.  How serious are we?