Texas Republicans Seem Panicked. Wonder Why!

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OK let’s talk about Republicans in Texas and elsewhere freaking out about the election and all the unethical (and likely criminal) things they’re doing in response!

A defining feature of the tantrum this country (and much of the world) is enduring from white conservative MAGA-type Christians over their loss of cultural influence and political power — i.e. the main subject of this newsletter — is that it gets louder and louder as their numbers decrease. It gets more hysterical. More unhinged. They’re willing to commit more and more evil acts, and more brazenly, as their panic grows with each passing day.

Unfortunately, because pretty much nobody who aspires to or achieves power in that movement is a good person — no, I mean it, they’ve driven out everybody who isn’t vile, hateful, un-American garbage — that means that as their numbers go down, we’re likely to see more and more outright criminal behavior from them.

We saw it on January 6, 2021, when Donald Trump incited a terrorist attack against the United States Capitol and Congress, as part of his months-long coup to overthrow the government, because his whiny ass couldn’t handle losing a free and fair election.

And we see it in the attempted coup that’s now beginning for 2024, as they scream — in August! Lord, what losers — that there has already been a fraudulent conspiracy to steal an election that has not yet happened.

Have you heard what these motherfuckers are doing in Texas right now?

To catch you up, here are a couple headlines:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is a vile piece of shit. He’s been under securities fraud indictment for-fucking-ever, yet he’s been so far able to slither out of facing those charges. Texas Republicans tried to impeach him last year, he’s such a corrupt son of a bitch, but they couldn’t get there at the last minute, ¡Sorpresa!

Meanwhile, Texas Governor Greg Abbott is some sick, evil garbage. We could write a book on that, but one of our personal recent favorites is his crusade to place people-slicing buoys in the middle of the Rio Grande, to deter migrant people from crossing, lest they get sliced up.

Right now, those two guys seem very panicky about November.

Paxton has ordered raids on 13 homes, Latino voting rights activists and at least one candidate, stealing their computers and phones, based on nonexistent allegations of voter fraud. (Paxton, you will remember, spearheaded easily the stupidest lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election for Donald Trump, which was even laughed out of Trump’s Supreme Court.)

One of his raids was against Cecilia Castellano, who is running for a state House seat. Another was against an 87-year-old retired teacher and abuela named Lidia Martinez. She’s been involved in Latino civil rights for 35 years, per the New York Times.

Here’s a video from an outraged state Senator Roland Gutierrez, imploring Latino voters to stay pissed off about what Paxton is doing here and calling Paxton the crook he is:

Do you want to see Paxton’s evidence against these Latino voting rights activists? Well, he’s not going to show it to you because fuck you, he doesn’t have any. (A hearing has been scheduled where he’s been ordered to produce some.) He’s just trying the put the fear of God into Latino voters, like some scene out of Birth Of A Nation after emancipation. This is an yearslong crusade for Paxton, lying to stop people from voting (for Democrats) under the thinnest of pretenses that he’s “protecting” the sanctity of the vote.

He’s even been lying and saying Joe Biden has been sending “signals” to cartels to help him steal the election. He’s that vile.

Meanwhile, Abbott is out there bragging that he’s deleted a million people from the voter rolls, including thousands of non-citizens who have voted. Would you like to see their names and hear about the cases against them? Again, fuck you. Greg Abbott did not say you can ask questions or hold him accountable for proving the bullshit that comes out of his mouth. He’s a white conservative Texan, that’s all the proof you need.

As Kuo notes, this is indeed fascist shit. This is Russian, Hungarian, mafia shit. It should be criminally punished, and maybe someday it will be.

And yeah, yeah, yeah, YEP, we know that white conservative Christian fascist men — in whichever political party they’ve been members of at the time — have been working to suppress the votes of everybody they view as inferior to them for … *checks notes* … all of American history.

But one does wonder what’s got them shitting their pants so hard at this particular moment.

As my Wonkette colleague Marcie Jones pointed out this week, those polls in Texas — both in Ted Cruz’s Senate re-election race and also Harris v. Trump — are starting to get surprisingly tight. Texas is the perpetually sisyphean challenge for Democrats, and we never know when the day might come when somebody might actually turn it blue, in a Senate race or in the presidential. We’ve gotten used to not getting our hopes up.

But people are extremely pissed off, especially since Dobbs, in a state with some of the most disgusting and dangerous abortion bans in the country.

And Democrats just keep overperforming polls, ever since Dobbs, sometimes wildly.

And honestly, Republicans are pretty much loathed in Texas in general, regardless of whether you can see it over the voter suppression.

Could this be the year Democrats are angry enough and turn out enough to beat even Ken Paxton’s most passionate attempts to preserve white supremacist Republican power?

At Public Notice, Liz Dye writes this week about how in Georgia, a bona fide official swing state, Republicans have already started their crusade to stop the (imaginary) steal in November. Guess they and the Texans are seeing the same polls we’re seeing. (And probably internals that look even worse.)

The state election board has just given power to elections officials in counties to pause or just say no to election results, so they can make a “reasonable inquiry” into them. What’s reasonable? Haha, who knows! (As Rachel Maddow explained recently in the New York Times, this will almost surely go to court, since it runs afoul of already established Georgia law.) And they just keep approving new rules allowing them to delay, delay, delay.

Part of what’s happening here is that many Republicans are so far up their own asses they can’t even remember that they literally invented the shit they’re now fighting. Which, of course, is pretty much the story of Republicans in general these days. They’re so far up their own asses that they don’t realize their entire worldview is imaginary.

Check out these tweets from Joel Berry, the head knee-slapper at known funny website The Babylon Bee:

They take bullshit like this as received gospel truth, that they are a secret silent majority, that most people think like them, that Democrats are “ballot harvesting at Skid Row and filling out mail-in ballots for apathetic, uninformed citizens.” Whatever helps your peen finish the job, Joel.

Jeff Tiedrich has a good piece this week on “how the Wingnut Grievance Bubble turns Republicans into sad losers” who believe literally anything you tell them that feeds into their professional victim complex.

So of course, pig trash racists like Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott take it as obvious truth that Hispanics in Texas are perpetuating voter fraud. Or at least they expect their supporters to take it as obvious truth.

It doesn’t really matter whether those at the top truly believe their delusions. What matters is that their response is to terrorize voters and criminalize voting, punishing anyone who won’t co-sign their microdick Christian fascist fantasies about what America should look like.

This is what they’re doing now. Watch what they do when trying to steal elections on the margins isn’t an option anymore. (Rick Perlstein and extremism expert David Neiwert happen to have an excellent discussion about that at The American Prospect this week. It applies to this election, too, because if you haven’t noticed, it’s getting harder for them to credibly steal elections every cycle.)

There will be more coup attempts. Take it to the bank. There will also be violence, to some degree, from white conservative Christians and MAGA, as their tantrum cries itself out for however many decades that takes.

Remember: they wouldn’t be working this hard to cheat if they thought they had a solid chance of legitimately winning elections going forward, in general.

But also remember:

Before Joe Biden stepped aside, Republicans thought they might have a fluke situation on their hands, where the majority of the electorate was too demoralized to vote for a candidate relentlessly portrayed as too feeble and old to be president, and Trump could squeak by, maybe even with the legitimacy of a popular vote win. But they didn’t actually think the tide of history had turned in their direction.

Now, with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the driver’s seat, they’re certain the tide of history is telling them to fuck off.

We have all the enthusiasm. Remember that piece I had two weeks ago about how all the Trump signs have disappeared from the Trump country of southern Missouri? Go read the comments from our own readership, about how this is a phenomenon all y’all have been noticing all over the place. Go look at all the latest swing state polls. Look at where all the polls are moving.

Note how pathetic Trump looks, as he trots out absolute dead ends of humanity like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, to try to make it look like there’s momentum on their side, like they’re doing exciting things.

Then note all the things Heather Cox Richardson wrote of the other night — not only the polling, but a 150 percent increase in voter registrations for Hispanic women, double for Black women. Democratic registration in general up 50 percent. Meanwhile, weirdo creep Trump is trying to sell some new NFT trading cards as he melts down over his new freshened-up, immunity-free, SCOTUS-proof indictment from Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Yeah, we see why Republican criminals and fascists in Texas are panicked, and also in Georgia, and also everywhere else.

People love underdogs, but they fuckin’ hate losers.

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