If you spot some of Trump’s “Poll Watchers” with their guns at polling places, text GUNSDOWN to 91990
You will receive information on a national voter protection hotline (866-OUR-VOTE) operated by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. Appropriate reports will be passed on to law enforcement and election officials, and voters will have the opportunity, if they feel safe doing so, to share photos of voter intimidation on social media.
There has already been an incident in Virginia. A Guy In A Trump Shirt Carried A Gun Outside Of A Virginia Polling Place. Authorities Say That’s Fine.
Note this comment, “Voters will have the opportunity, if they feel safe doing so, to share photos of voter intimidation on social media.”
Compare to how the right-wing acted when they have video of a New Black Panthers member with a night stick in 2008.
The right-wing didn’t hesitate to put up the videos, they also sent a reporter to the location to get more video and have a confrontation because that makes good TV. (Why is it a black man with a night stick so scary and a white man with a gun is not? I can’t quiet put my finger on it. )
Will Fox News do the same kind of story about voter intimidation when it is white men with a gun? No.
But the mainstream media will cover it. We will see them go thought all the same steps they did in that Huffington Post article.
COURTESY ERIKA M COTTI A man carrying a weapon outside of Loudoun County Registrars Office in Leesburg, Virginia.
- Was it legal? Yes.
- What did the authorities do? Nothing.
They checked with election officials, “They said that there’s nothing they could do, that he was well within his rights to be carrying his weapon,” said Judy Brown, Loudoun County registrar.
The Huffington Post called Republican party officials to see if they had a problem with this. (Would they disavow it and condemn it? Nope.)
Estrada said he doesn’t want to specifically ban his volunteers from carrying weapons.
“It’s a free country,” Estrada said. “I’m a NRA life member myself. So long as no laws are being broken, I’m not going to tell someone they can’t. But I’ve told all of our volunteers that we’re here for our candidates, we don’t want us to become the story.”
- Was the person who was voting intimidated? Yes, but she is a politically active person (she was quoted in the Washington Post!) so that allows people to dismiss her concerns. (The Huffington post writer noted that the man who promoted the New Black Panther video is now an operative working for Trump about election issues. )
Why did the Republican push that New Black Panther story so hard? Because the modus operandi of the right-wing is to find an example of a few people on the left doing things that the RIGHT does all the time. It’s their “man bites dog” story method and it’s pushed up to the MSM so they can use as an example for their “both sides do it” stories.
Democrats should push this incident in Virginia hard with a goal in mind. We need bills created to make carrying guns around polling places illegal in all states before the next election. Now is the time to gather evidence to show that gun carrying at polling places is blatant intimidation. (I’ll expect the right to brag that nobody was shot. Good! That doesn’t mean people weren’t intimidated.)
Trump is going to go on about the rigged election for years and his people will be passing laws behind the scenes to make rigging them EASIER (because that is what they do, just like the NRA gets laws passed to make getting guns easier and carry them in more places behind the scenes.)
The story ends with the line:
Friday’s incident in Loudoun County, involving a white Republican, seems pretty unlikely to attract the same type of attention.
Eight years ago, not everyone had a video camera in their pocket and a way to gather and then distribute the footage to millions. Now we do. If we want something to “get attention” we need to realize that the so-called liberal media is not going to do it for us. We need to. Social media is one way.
We also need to understand the continuing amplifying affect the right-wing media has within its own world. They will keep pushing their stories into the MSM. But what works for the right, when it comes to pushing stories, doesn’t work the same for the left.
The “so-called liberal media” isn’t going to give us the same kind of treatment they give to the right. Partly because when the right is busted lying, THEY DON’T CARE. If news broken by the left is on a real issue you can expect the MSM will apply rules on how they cover our stories that they don’t apply to the right. We need to be prepared.
This election there might be photos, videos and footage of men with guns at polling places. The stories will be accompanied by quotes about how it’s “perfectly legal.” But that doesn’t mean it has to stay that way.
