"The Next Election May Be Our Last"
by Chris Hedges
"The Trump White House has put into place a series of mechanisms to fix or invalidate the midterm elections. Congress will not save us. The courts will not save us. Our only hope - should the election be rigged or stolen - is nationwide strikes. Our only hope is to cripple the machinery of commerce and government, although this militancy will be met with savage state repression. Otherwise, we are doomed. There will be no exit.
If the measures advocated by the Trump administration are implemented, emergency powers will be invoked to assert unprecedented federal control over voting. Federal agents will seize election materials. They have already seized ballots from previous elections. The U.S. Postal Service will only send ballots to those included on federally approved eligibility lists drawn from state voter rolls. These rolls, subject to citizenship checks, will deny election-mail services entirely in states that refuse the administration’s demands for voter data.
Trump-backed mid-decade gerrymandering has already dismantled Democratic-held districts and created new ones for the Republican. Federal ID and citizenship-document requirements will disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, including lower-income Americans who lack access to the required documents and married women whose current names do not match those on their citizenship records.
Federal troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - with $113.5 billion in additional funding allocated by Congress through September 2029 - will be deployed to or near polling stations which have a traditional Democratic Party majority. Those branded as “anti-capitalist” and “anti-Christian” or charged with belonging to antifa will be intimidated or blocked from voting.
The Republican majority in the House - regardless of the vote - will use its authority to certify election results to retain power, gaming the Electoral College and refusing to seat newly elected members of the opposition. Overseeing the massive election fraud will be loyalists seeded by the Trump administration across state and federal election offices.
Trump - who attempted to overturn the 2020 election results and said he would refuse to accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost - ruminates about defying the Constitution in order to serve a third term. He has also floated the idea of canceling the upcoming election, telling Reuters “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
When Volodymyr Zelensky - whose presidential term ended in May 2024 - informed Trump that elections would not be held in Ukraine because of the war, Trump responded, “So you’re saying, during the war you can’t have elections…So, let me just say, three and a half years from now, so you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”
Trump told The New York Times in January he regretted not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. Trump not only wants to abolish mail-in ballots – Democrats vote by mail in higher numbers than Republicans – but voting machines and tabulators which allow election boards to post results on election night. Trump laid the groundwork for federal interference in his national address in July on election fraud,, charging that the elections are dangerously exposed to “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference.” This assault has been decades in the making. It did not begin with Trump.
I warned about the Christian nationalist movement and its latent fascism in my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” These Christian fascists are enemies of the open society. They seek to disenfranchise huge segments of the public, demand the deregulation of industry and the elimination of all social services, including public education, public health programs and consumer protection. The only proper tasks for the federal government, they believe, are tax collection, war and domestic security. These goals are laid out in numbing technical detail in Project 2025.
Power - as in all dictatorships - is to be permanent. It will be configured to enrich the inner circle of Trump and his family, who have made at least $2.3 billion from their crypto currency ventures during Trump’s first year since returning to the presidency. The billionaire class and corporations will continue to pay little or no income tax. They will have no external restraints or oversight as they exploit the citizenry and pollute and poison the earth.
The rest of us, under constant state surveillance and denied legal redress, will be reduced to the status of serfs. Dissent will be criminalized. The media will be an echo chamber for the dictatorship. Education - from kindergarten to graduate school - will be indoctrination. Culture will be reduced to its lowest common denominator: sentimental kitsch. Christian tropes, iconography and symbols will be employed to sacralize white supremacy, capitalism, endless war and empire, while demonizing those on the margins of society.
Trump has already been handed absolute power. In 2024, the Supreme Court granted Trump immunity from prosecution for acts within his “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor charged that as a result of the court’s decision “[i]n every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
Trump and his supporters in Silicon Valley are acutely aware that the level of their corruption and disdain for democracy - unlike anything seen in U.S. history - makes them vulnerable if they lose power. They have no intention of allowing this to happen no matter how egregious the constitutional violations. They seek to extinguish the last vestiges of democracy. They believe, as PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel wrote in 2009, that “freedom and democracy” are not “compatible.”
Theil is sweeping up all our information gleaned from government tax, medical and law enforcement records. This information is being delivered to databases that can be exploited for state control and profit. Thiel and his coterie of technocratic billionaires are implementing the agenda he envisioned 16 years ago: to make technology an “alternative to politics.” “The populists get the MAGA anti-woke hymn book,” write Mark Medish and Joel McCleary in their “Dancing in the Dark” series in The Spectator on the upcoming elections:
The lords of the cloud get the contracts and the deregulation; the President gets the adulation, the money, tools to destroy his enemies, and dominance of all forms of media. Each of the partners believes it is cleverly using the others. All of them need the marriage to survive this November and to further consolidate power.
FBI agents seized original 2020 ballots, ballot images and voter rolls in Georgia. The Justice Department seized 2024 ballots from Michigan. And Chad Bianco, the Sheriff in Riverside County, California, as Medish and McCleary point out, in March “seized some 650,000 ballots on a complaint from a local ‘election integrity’ group that is organizing to replicate the maneuver in a half-dozen more counties this cycle.”
This is a foretaste, I expect, of the widespread seizures of ballots in November. Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) which are “pre-drafted emergency orders in case of an attack on the homeland,” await “only a decision and a signature to become operative law by necessity,” Medish and McCleary note, giving Trump unilateral power to suspend civil liberties in a domestic crisis.
First created under President Dwight Eisenhower, the secret directives have since been periodically revised and expanded under successive administrations. “At least fifty-six of these PEADs exist, by the last credible count,” Medish and McCleary continue. “None has ever been published, leaked, invoked, reviewed by Congress, or tested in any court. Their reported subject matter includes suspension of habeas corpus, martial law, censorship, the detention of citizens ‘considered dangerous,’ [and] the seizure of property.”
The feebleness of legislative and judicial branches of government, coupled with the transformation of federal agencies into appendages of the Trump White House - including the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security - make these institutions unreliable.
We can only save ourselves. This means shutting the country down. Millions of us must be prepared to take the streets or the iron doors of fascism will slam shut."
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