Day 29 – Trump Lost, Voter Suppression Won

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Do you know Greg Palast? 

He does investigative journalism. Every once in a while I get an email from him. The title of this screed is the headline from his latest missive. And here is his data:

Here are key numbers:

• 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls according to US Elections Assistance Commission data.
  
  
• By August of 2024, for the first time since 1946, self-proclaimed “vigilante” voter-fraud hunters challenged the rights of 317,886 voters. The NAACP of Georgia estimates that by Election Day, the challenges exceeded 200,000 in Georgia alone.
  
  
• No less than 2,121,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g. postage due).
  
  
• At least 585,000 ballots cast in-precinct were also disqualified.
  
  
• 1,216,000 “provisional” ballots were rejected, not counted.
  
  
• 3.24 million new registrations were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time to vote.

Here’s an example of voter suppression from Greg:

Let’s look at just one vote suppression operation in action.

In 2020, during the pandemic, America went postal. More than 43% of us voted by mail.

But it wasn’t easy. Harris County, Texas, home of Houston, tried to mail out ballots during the COVID epidemic on the grounds that voters shouldn’t die waiting in lines at polling stations. But then, the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton stopped this life-saving measure.

Why wouldn’t this GOP official let Houstonians vote safely? Maybe it’s because Houston has the largest number of Black voters of any city in America. Indeed, on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Paxton proudly stated, “Had we not done that [stopped Houston from sending out ballots], Donald Trump would’ve lost the election” in Texas. Texas!

Almost all the Republican held state legislatures have passed some form of voter suppression and a few Dem states as well.

Palast points out that there are other ways Republicans have titled elections in their favor. Take for instance  Brian Kemp’s bill in Georgia to get rid of 75% of the drop boxes in black communities. It seems to me that they also hired the same people who reject your health insurance claims to reject your voter application and or you mail in ballot.

So, did Harris lose? Or did Trump? Well, it depends on whether you let all the voters vote and whether you count all the ballots.

Moving on. Pete Hegsworth. We were watching last night’s Daily Show and there was Pete on a clip from Fox. He was in a dunk tank. His white shirt was soaking wet and I could see he had a large tattoo on his right chest. It’s an Iron Cross. Made famous in WWI on German soldiers and throughout WWII as an identifier on tanks and airplanes. Yikes! What is this guy into? This symbol was adopted by the Nazis and later bikers and also white supremacists. I looked up his tattoos and found out that his particular brand of Iron Cross is associated with The First Crusade and Christian Nationalists. Don’t I feel better? And he’s got a bunch of other tattoos with various religious meaning both Jewish and Christian. Also, he’s got some Founding Father stuff and some Roman stuff and an AK-47 a part of an American flag.

Here’s more on his tattoos:

https://www.aol.com/tattooed-secretary-defense-pete-hegseth-225007843.html

So to put it bluntly, this guy is hiding the fact that he’s part of a racist Christian nationalist cult. Combine that with the fact that he knows nothing about running a large organization and nothing about the Defense Department and – well – that’s what we’ve got.