As the Trump team’s plans fall into place for mass detention of millions of undocumented immigrants—perhaps even naturalized citizens—and establishment of a concentration camp system, invocation of the Insurrection Act to mobilize the army for the round-ups has been broached. Sending National Guard troops from red states into blue states to carry out round-ups and put down protests—over the objections of governors who have refused to cooperate—could portend civil war. And despite the absurd fiction that Trump is an isolationist peacenik, the latest ominous appointment to his cabinet is Islamophobe GWOT ultra-hawk Sebastian Gorka as senior director for counterterrorism. There is still time to invoke the 14th Amendment to bar Trump from the presidency—just as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, indicted for leading a Trump-style attempted auto-golpe in 2022, has been barred from office. And just as the Congressional Black Caucus sought to bar Dubya Bush from office over considerably lesser matters on Jan. 6, 2001.
Finally, while it is widely dismissed as a conspiracy theory, growing voices of dissent claim evidence that the election was hacked in favor of Trump, in a Kremlin-instigated campaign that also included widespread bomb threats on polling places—for which there has been at least one indictment. Legal advocacy groups had been warning for months of an effort by the Trump team to hack the vote—in spite of all the precautions taken to isolate voting machines from the internet.
In Episode 253 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg continues to make the case for mass pressure to demand nullification of the election. A mass movement on the scale of that seen in the Republic of Georgia since a disputed election consolidated the rule of an authoritarian Russian-backed party last month is urgently mandated in the United States. There is a sense of deja vu to this: at this time of year eight years ago, as Trump prepared to take office, a massive and sustained protest campaign brought down the corrupt president of South Korea. This time around, there has been even less protest in response to Trump’s victory. The current quietism as the Trump team moves to establish a dictatorship—and a potentially pre-genocidal situation—is unacceptable.
We need to demand a halt to the presidential transition process, and #ElectoralNullification. Make the hashtag go viral!
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