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#1: No, “they” cannot control the weather. #2: Yes, American elections are safe and secure, and voter fraud is almost non-existent. But claims to the contrary are rampant online and from the mouths of Donald Trump and JD Vance, and will increase in meretriciousness and frequency over the next two weeks, as they try to undermine Americans’ trust in the voting process.
In a town hall in Pennsylvania last Thursday, Elon Musk claimed that voting machines rig elections, and that suspect Dominion voting machines are now being used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County, Arizona. Dominion immediately responded, pointing out that they don’t operate in Pennsylvania, and that the vast majority of jurisdictions use paper ballots as back-ups, anyway. Maricopa County officials stated that the voting machines in the 2020 election were accurate, and a hand count after the election “found zero variances between the hand count results and the Dominion tabulation equipment.” Dominion also reminded Musk that they won a defamation suit against Fox News concerning the 2020 election, collecting a landmark settlement of $787 million from the network, and were prepared to defend their company name again if they are defamed again.1
The Brennan Center for Justice has said that 98% of all votes cast in the 2024 election will be backed-up with paper ballots. The claims of voting machine irregularities have all been debunked. Yet, they continue.
There is a growing movement among county officials in eight states (Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia) to refuse to certify the election results. Undocumented immigrants will be accused of voting, even though there is no evidence of that. Republican lawyers are launching “message suits” that have no chance of being successful, but they are meant to lay a groundwork for later challenges.
The 2024 election is already the most litigated in history, two weeks out. Most of what I hear is that the legal system is prepared for this and will prevail, as it did in 2020. But it’s likely to be a rough ride to the end.
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John Kelly went on the record to Michael Schmidt at the Times on October 22, about the fitness of Donald Trump to be President of the United States.2 The former four-star Marine general was the Secretary of Homeland Security under Trump after he was elected and then became Trump’s Chief of Staff in July 2017, charged with trying to bring order to the utter chaos of the Trump White House.
General Kelly said Trump’s recent comments about using the military against his political rivals, that Trump called “the enemy within,” were so dangerous that he felt a responsibility to speak out, as one of the top officials who spent the most time with President Trump behind closed doors when he was in the White House.
First, Kelly confirmed his previous statements that Trump had expressed his contempt for disabled veterans and said Americans who were wounded, captured, or killed in action fighting for the US were “losers and suckers.” Kelly knew that this was meant to include his own son Robert, a Marine killed in 2010 while fighting in Afghanistan.
Asked for a definition of fascism, Kelly said,
It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy. Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators—he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.
Kelly described explaining to Trump over and over again that top government officials like himself had taken an oath to the Constitution and the rule of law, and would always place that oath above loyalty to a single person holding the office. Kelly said Trump pressed him about this, many times, and couldn’t believe or accept it.
Trump told Kelly repeatedly that “Hitler did some good things,” and that he wished he had generals like Hitler’s generals, who would do whatever the Führer wanted. Another former Marine general, James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who resigned as Trump’s Secretary of Defense in December 2018 in protest against Trump’s policies in Syria, spoke out against Trump at length in the summer of 2020. And General Mark Milley, who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, told Bob Woodward: “[Trump] is the most dangerous person to this country. . . . A fascist to the core.”
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To reality-based conservatives: you will be all alone in the voting booth, with your vote and the Constitution. Nobody needs to know what you do in there, so you can vote your conscience. You know that Trump is not a conservative and will not uphold conservative values if he gets into power again. And this time, he will not have men like Kelly, Mattis, and Milley to rein him in and tell him no. You know that he will be a catastrophe for America, and for the world. Vote your conscience.
1. Olivia Rubin, “Elon Musk Pushes False Conspiracies About Voting Machines During Swing State Town Hall,” ABC News, October 18, 2024.
2. Michael S. Schmidt, “As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator,” The New York Times, October 22, 2024.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.