Flop Sweat: ProPublica scandalized to learn that grassroots conservatives are...organizing bigly
Investigative reporters spend a great deal of time exposing malfeasance and violations of public trust. They alert the world to scandal and try to rouse the public.
But then there's ProPublica, the investigative outfit bankrolled by allies of George Soros.
It's got a doozy of a scandal to report and wants us all to be horrified. A breathless Twitter thread from ace investigative reporter Isaac Arnsdorf starts with this:
BREAKING: We found 1000s of Trump supporters taking over local GOP positions — an unprecedented grassroots groundswell devoted to Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen & Republicans need to stop that from happening again https://t.co/btjMNXvft3
— Isaac Arnsdorf (@iarnsdorf) September 2, 2021
He blames Steve Bannon and says it involves the dreaded QAnon. He goes into overdrive with this big scoop:
Bannon et al said Trump lost because “RINOs” sold him out. Their solution was for “deplorables” to take over the GOP from the bottom up, by taking over the lowest rung in the party organization: the precincts. pic.twitter.com/NfCezQ8dGb
— Isaac Arnsdorf (@iarnsdorf) September 2, 2021
As if that hasn't been on conservative-leaning bulletin boards for the last ten years. He might have checked back when Hillary Clinton was running for office. He might have taken a gander to guess why that sentiment led to President Trump getting elected in 2016. But nope, he's just discovered it now and is alerting the world to his scoop of the century.
It gets worse:
Most voters aren’t familiar with these precinct positions. But they have power over how elections are run: poll workers, board appointments, pressure on GOP officials. pic.twitter.com/NmLDycVMwq
— Isaac Arnsdorf (@iarnsdorf) September 2, 2021
But it wasn’t just people mouthing off online. People actually went out and got elected or appointed to precinct positions — thousands of them. As one county chair said, “Those podcasts actually paid off.” pic.twitter.com/Eo7W2nmOJu
— Isaac Arnsdorf (@iarnsdorf) September 2, 2021
Apparently, the discontented deplorables are getting out and organizing. That's normal in a democracy and has happened since America's founding. But apparently it's news to him. Contrary to the leftist myth that he must believe — that deplorables are all out there playing gun-gun and talking revolution (something the left has been promoting with the Jan. 6 Capitol fracas with FBI infiltrators directing the action), conservatives are not doing that at all — they are getting out to organize. Of course he's surprised.
But he tweets it as though it's a bad thing, something to recoil at, putting out everything but calls to stop them. What planet does he live on?
Instead of asking these Republicans what's going on, as many investigative reporters would, he decided to rely on data science and internet "activity" (too bad he didn't use the word "chatter") to surveil these dangerous Republicans who are (clutch pearls) "showing up" to organize:
We focused on politically competitive states. We looked for signs of activity in far-right media. Then we contacted 100s of party officials & activists to find out how many new people were showing up. All-star team @DougBockClark @AlexandraBerzon @AnjeanetteDamon @mrsimon22
— Isaac Arnsdorf (@iarnsdorf) September 2, 2021
He seems most horrified to find that the key motivator of all this GOP organizing has been election fraud, which he seems to consider an impossible fiction:
The new movement is built entirely around Trump’s insistence that the electoral system failed in 2020 & Republicans can’t let that happen again.
— Isaac Arnsdorf (@iarnsdorf) September 2, 2021
The central goal is not merely to win elections but to reshape their machinery.
Easy there, feller — there actually was election fraud. Apparently, he's never heard of it. It's heartening to Republicans, at least, to see that there is organizing going on and quite a few Republicans taking an interest in vote-counting, taking control of the offices that in 2020 had been in swing jurisdictions solely run by Democrats. Apparently, he thinks only Democrats should do it, but he can't bring himself to say that. He cites cases in Michigan, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Georgia, where some of the worst cases of fraud, leading to 2020's stolen election, took place, as if that were a bad thing. He howls that the Republican infiltrators are focused on audits and, he claims "voter restrictions," meaning "cheater restrictions," but that's another topic.
Then he quotes a string of shiftless RINOs who don't mind election fraud and who've since been given the boot:
“Being motivated by conspiracy theories is no way to go through life, and no way for us to build a high-functioning party,” said Kathy Petsas, an Arizona party official who screens precinct-level applicants. “That attitude can’t prevail.”
— Isaac Arnsdorf (@iarnsdorf) September 2, 2021
After that, he calls for the public to send him more "examples" of GOP grassroots organizing, hoping to "expose" it and put a stop to it.
It's obnoxious as hell and perfectly indicative of the apocryphal Pauline Kael–esque attitude of leftists who've never in their entire lives connected to a Republican.
But it's also something better. Every detail this ace investigative reporter throws out there to horrify the public is music to the ears of conservatives, who, yes, know there was election fraud and now are clearly mobilizing to stop it. That's actually a story if it could only be reported neutrally.
But this fellow can't. Based on the smell of his flop sweat, it's fun to see him panic.
Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.
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