Coop Scoop 9/27 The What Is To Be Done Edition

The Coop Scoop: The What Is To Be Done Edition

September 27-28
Issue# 36

Russian-born writer Masha Gessen warns in her new book, Surviving Autocracy, that the first rule in resisting a rising authoritarian is to believe what he says.

Donald Trump has clearly put his intentions on the table by preparing the country to reject in advance any election outcome in which he is not the winner. As his poll numbers stagnate, eight to ten points behind Joe Biden, with early voting already underway, he struggles desperately to fabricate an anti-matter narrative that “the ballots” – meaning the mail-in ballots—are de facto fraudulent.

It’s an absurd and baseless argument that would in ordinary times just be ignored. These are hardly ordinary times and we have seen Trump and his echo chamber alt-media already be successful in giving some stickiness to equally crazy and unhinged narratives from birtherism to dangerous immigrant caravans, to New York being an “anarchist jurisdiction” to beginning to mainstream the pedo-cannibalistic theories pushed by the mentally ill who have joined QAnon.

We have to take Trump’s threat of tying to block any transition seriously. He has his lackey Interior Minister Bill Barr putting his weight behind such a soft coup, and he has an unknown number of Republican Rotary Club Yokels sitting in state legislatures more than ready to manufacture alternative elector slates just in case the electoral college isn’t anti-democratic enough in itself. This subversive strategy was finely detailed last week in Barton Gellman’s long and chilling piece in the Atlantic detailing all the under the radar maneuvers planned to nullify the election. (All related and mentioned links in this essay are to be found at the bottom of the newsletter).

Trump, in plain view, and in collaboration with a now totally unprincipled, reckless and Quisling-led Republican Party [sic] has packed the Supreme Court, bulldozing his extreme right wing nominee Judge Barrett to be seated in time to hear the repeal Obamacare case just days after the election and – most ominously—to be firmly seated on the bench for when Trump hopes to get his coming defeat overturned by the high court (another Quisling vector).