Thread by @DavidPepper

THREAD/VIDEO

Day 6: Laboratories of Autocracy

A candidate mused about Ohio nullifying it’s membership in the nation.

Then runs for office only miles from where Ulysses Grant was born and raised.

And?

Watch to find out what happens:

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He’s not the only one

All around Ohio, extremists are getting “elected” to statehouse seats through a system of rigged, gerrymandered districts

Then they occupy important positions of power in the General assembly where they can do damage

Examples?

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amazon.com/Laboratories-A…

Ohio has a state Senator who believes public education is “socialism”…he chairs the Senate education committee

We have a Senator who asked at a hearing if the “colored population” was more susceptible to COVID because they “do not wash their hands as well as other groups”

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He now chairs the Ohio senate’s health committee. (He was handed that role AFTER his comments)

We have a state house member who’s convinced that hedge funds are buying up newspapers to run negative stories about the coal industry….he chairs the House’s Energy Committee

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I could go on. But won’t. You can read more in the book.

Bottom line: there is a generation of statehouse majorities in Ohio and elsewhere who have essentially come to power through a system that can hardly be called a democracy. They are guaranteed re-election, so long as

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…they remain as extreme as possible.

And I’m not talking about a few dozen officials out of 99 seats. I’m talking about majorities or supermajorities of people who rise and remain in power without real engagement in the democratic process.

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To put it in terms to really horrify you, think about the members of Congress who now were thought to have been part of planning Jan. 6–Boebert, Gosar, MTG, etc….

Now imagine hundreds of them.

But they aren’t on the outside plotting how to take over…they’re the ones…

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…in office….in the majority….passing laws in states across the country.

America still hasn’t come to terms with how warped things become when an entire generation of “elected” officials feels no accountability whatsoever to the voters. When their own rise to…

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…power has essentially been removed from a democratic process. (some may have won a single primary of a few thousand votes once…then that’s it).

It has put into power people with extreme views on issue after issue, whose strongest incentive is to be even more extreme…

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And the one thing they know is that a system of real elections and robust democracy would quickly usher them out of power.

First, because many aren’t actually good candidates. They’ve never needed to be, or have hardly ever campaigned.

Second, because all the things….

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…they’ve done to succeed in a world of rigged districts & no democracy would guarantee that they would LOSE in a world of fair districts and robust democracy:

They’re too extreme;

Their public outcomes are abysmal;

Some are corrupt.

That’s not how you win elections

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But here’s the problem….once in statehouses, these extremists are also the same people who write the rules of our elections, and (for the most part) draw district lines every decade.

Knowing how they got to power and what would end that power, they have every incentive…

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to keep real democracy from coming to their states. It’s actually the biggest risk they face

And that’s exactly why we see these attacks on democracy happening all around the country today. And we now face a SECOND generation of majorities in power without l real democracy.

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And because these officials also have a major role to play in national elections, they pose a risk to the democracy of our entire country.

We don’t have much time to end this dangerous downward spiral. We need to wake people up, then engage.

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I try to lay out a path forward in my book. I hope you’ll consider taking a number of the steps I suggest.

Either way, be sure you’re up to speed, helping others do the same, and then engaging any way you can.

END

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