Worried About Stolen Elections?
You should be.
Some of the same people who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election now have influential roles in our federal government. This is a big problem.
Temperamentally, I’m not an alarmist. But the reality is, sometimes alarming things happen and we need to take them seriously, and try to avert them.
Government officials and MAGA activists are preparing to disrupt, complicate, and undermine voting in this year’s midterm elections.
ProPublica reports,
Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms.
According to videos, photos and social media posts reviewed by ProPublica, the meeting’s participants included Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer charged with reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, the Department of Homeland Security official in charge of election integrity. The event was convened by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and attended by Cleta Mitchell, who directs the Election Integrity Network, a group that has spread false claims about election fraud and noncitizen voting.
Election experts say that the meeting reflects an intensifying push to persuade Trump to take unprecedented actions to affect the vote in November. Courts have largely blocked his efforts to reshape elections through an executive order, and legislation has stalled in Congress that would mandate strict voter ID requirements across the country.
My only dispute with the above is that Trump doesn’t need persuading. He’s the original instigator. He tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He’s the ringleader. He’s the persuader. In 2020, his own White House officials and Attorney General told him that all the claims related to election problems were false, yet he continued to push false claims anyway. And that continues even today as these false claims are being used to justify taking control of our elections. Unlike 2020, the White House is now staffed with sycophants willing to lie to in order to stay in Trump’s good graces.
There is a lot of chaos in the world right now. Federal law enforcement is in our cities, committing human rights abuses. We’re at war with Iran. AI might be taking our jobs. Government corruption is rampant. I’m sure many of us have outrage fatigue over all of it. But this is not the time to check out. It is our civic duty to remain engaged on this issue, because without free and fair elections, we no longer have a democracy.
What Else We’re Reading
More in Common: “Beyond MAGA: The War Against Wokeness”
A troubling trend has emerged throughout the second Trump presidency: episodes of right-leaning efforts to punish or silence liberal voices, as seen after the killing of Charlie Kirk. The anti-woke backlash risks hypocrisy by mirroring the moral absolutism that it seeks to oppose. The danger is a perpetual cycle in which each side claims to defend freedom while using cultural and political power to silence dissent and enforce conformity.
Americans face a stark choice between two futures. One path leads to a cycle of cultural combat where victory means silencing opponents rather than persuading them—an expectation that whoever holds power determines acceptable speech, belief, and expression. The alternative requires genuine commitment to principles that constrain everyone: defending free expression even when offensive, tolerating disagreement even when frustrating, and maintaining fair competition even when outcomes disappoint.
Crisis Magazine: “My Name Is Lazarus: How the Church and Chesterton Rescued Me From Racial Hatred”
My decision to attend the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was not a single, isolated act; rather, it was the culmination of years of poor choices. Although I was raised in a loving home, it was economically strained, and there was a part of me that understood that there was injustice in the poverty I saw around me. Yet, I did not have the language or moral formation to articulate what made it unjust.
I was not Catholic or religious at all. Both my parents were born Catholic but left the Faith. I was a “none” who was culturally Christian as a vague abstraction. I wanted justice, but I did not know what justice truly was. I enrolled at the University of Nevada, Reno, but I had no plan, no goal, and that absence of direction became the soil in which my radicalization took root.
Over the next two years, my warped sense of justice led me gradually into what can only be described as neo-Nazism, though I did not recognize it as such at the time. The nihilism I had in youth evolved into a zealous rage against the world. I never formally joined a neo-Nazi organization, nor did I desire to, but I increasingly embraced hateful ideas that I justified as necessary to protect what I perceived as my community: the white community.
Joe Carter: “Edgelords Won’t Inherit the Earth”
Somewhere right now, a young man is watching a 30-second clip of a Christian influencer calling a fellow pastor a coward on a live stream. The clip has 40,000 views. What he didn’t see is that his own pastor posted a thoughtful, Christ-centered reflection that same day. It got 14 likes.
This is the world we’ve built. And a particular kind of man is thriving in it.
You’ll find him on podcasts and in pulpits, but everything he does is for social media. He’s the man who has confused being provocative with being profound, who mistakes the ability to offend for the courage to lead. He is the edgelord. And he’s becoming the dominant model of masculinity for an entire generation of young men.
NYT: “Judges Grow Angry Over Trump Administration Violating Their Orders: At least 35 times since August, federal judges have ordered the administration to explain why it should not be punished for violating their orders in immigration cases.”
Those so-called “show cause” orders came from judges in California, Texas, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, West Virginia and Puerto Rico. They all arose from cases in which the government had detained immigrants who had been living in the United States for years after entering the country illegally.
They represent the culmination of weeks of frustration from the bench. Judges have castigated administration officials for testifying dishonestly, representing the law inaccurately, and above all, failing to comply promptly with their orders.
Experts said that judges appeared to be grappling with a key question: Could the violations of court orders be explained merely by the stress on the legal system caused by the recent flood of immigration cases? Or is there a more systematic effort by the government to defy the courts?
What We’re Watching
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