Democrat Tom Cool is running for Secretary of State to save the integrity of your vote from election denier Monae Johnson. And the best advice the SDGOP spin blog can give is to tell Johnson to stop talking to the press:
Who is running Monae Johnson’s campaign? Because at this point, I question whether they lack any campaign intelligence whatsoever. Tom Cool has long been known as just an awful a placeholder candidate for Democrats, losing in his last 5 or so times at bat. But Monae Johnson’s stumbles have given his people a rare something to grab on to in a Constitutional race.
I’ve read at least two interviews since the infamous KELOland ‘election denier’ interview.. and all the interviewers want to talk about is whether she’s an election denier. So Monae is forced to address the question again, and again, and again, keeping the media cycle on the hit against her alive with life it might not have otherwise.
With a week to go, the smart thing to do would be for Monae to quit doing interviews. The only publicity she’s getting from those is not helping her. The damage is done, so she needs to quit giving the story daily CPR.
If she would do that, she can probably ride the GOP wave of the election through to the finish line [Pat Powers, “Dem SOS Candidate Tom Cool Has New Commercial, Directly Slamming GOP SOS Candidate Monae Johnson as Election Denier. Monae Needs to Quit Running Against Herself,” Dakota War College, 2022.11.02].
For the record, the reporters who have interviewed Johnson and Cool have asked the candidates questions about several issues besides what should be the non-issue of who won the 2020 election. It’s not the media that forces Johnson to address a question the likes of which has never arisen in past campaigns; it’s Johnson herself who forces every good journalist and concerned voter to do a double take and say, “Wait, really? Dozens of courts have affirmed the results of the 2020 election and declared accusations of widespread fraud baseless, and you, Monae, still don’t acknowledge the legitimacy of President Biden’s election and thus perpetuate the lie that motivated the January 6 insurrection?”
The proper remedy for Johnson is not to go silent. The proper remedy is for the woman who wants to manage South Dakota’s elections to stop giving aid and comfort to America’s most dangerous lie. All Johnson has to say, just like Tom Cool says with remarkable ease and zero obfuscation or rhetorical contortions, is “The 2020 election was legit,” and Tom Cool’s biggest campaign issue goes away.
But the SDGOP spin blog behaves like entire party for which it spins, unable to acknowledge a simple fact that undermines the angry, deceitful, and violent foment that keeps the Grand Old White Party alive in a changing America. Instead of telling his party’s errant candidate to right the ship by telling the truth, Powers instead leaves her deceit unchallenged and recommends she just cover it up.
They (GOP) seem to just not be able to help themselves. Lust, whether for sex or in their case for power is the over-riding, uncontrolled factor here for the Republican party. Having won the popular vote (the hearts/minds of America) only 2 times out of 9 presidential elections drives them crazy. “Winning” for party is what’s important to them-not “winning” to help society at large…….
With the establishment Republicans, it was always this way. They wanted the extreme folks to vote Republican and shut up. Now the extremists run the party, taking “establishment” money and turning it into conspiracy theory government. The “establishment” likes to think Noem is “establishment,” but back 30 years ago, she would have been counted as a nutcase. I mean, really, Hillsdale running public schools? That would have been cuckoo stuff for 1990s Republicans. Now it’s what passes for Noem governance.
Monae Johnson is a typical Republican candidate this election cycle. Wedded to Trump and spouting the big lie is their attempt to solidify the Party. If successful, it does not bode well for South Dakota.
COST should be COAST?
Pray that a jilted Steve Barnett has a come to Jesus moment and his god delivers the implications of a Trump worshipper running South Dakota’s election outcomes.
Ominos Dominos.
My Father has all the dominoes.
Looks like Monae took Powers’ advice: https://www.mitchellrepublic.com/news/south-dakota/tom-cool-hopes-to-leverage-monae-johnsons-election-integrity-focus-become-sds-top-election-official
Headline: Tom Cool hopes to leverage Monae Johnson’s ‘election integrity’ focus, become SD’s top election official
Excerpt: “Johnson did not respond to a request for an interview from Forum News Service.”
Johnson and her election deniers are a clear and present danger to the US.
“The most frequent question I get asked following my book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them is whether a civil war could happen again in the US. Skeptics argue that America’s government is too powerful for anyone to challenge. Others argue that secession will never happen because our country is no longer cleanly divided along geographic lines. Still others simply cannot believe that Americans would start killing one another. These beliefs, however, are based on the mistaken idea that a second civil war would look like the first. It will not.
If a second civil war breaks out in the US, it will be a guerrilla war fought by multiple small militias spread around the country. Their targets will be civilians – mainly minority groups, opposition leaders and federal employees. Judges will be assassinated, Democrats and moderate Republicans will be jailed on bogus charges, black churches and synagogues bombed, pedestrians picked off by snipers in city streets, and federal agents threatened with death should they enforce federal law. The goal will be to reduce the strength of the federal government and those who support it, while also intimidating minority groups and political opponents into submission. [Add: they will especially target journalists and media outlets that are either critical or refuse to parrot their propaganda.]”
“We know this because far-right groups such as the Proud Boys have told us how they plan to execute a civil war. They call this type of war “leaderless resistance” and are influenced by a plan in The Turner Diaries (1978), a fictitious account of a future US civil war. Written by William Pierce, founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, it offers a playbook for how a group of fringe activists can use mass terror attacks to “awaken” other white people to their cause, eventually destroying the federal government. The book advocates attacking the Capitol building, setting up a gallows to hang politicians, lawyers, newscasters and teachers who are so-called “race traitors”, and bombing FBI headquarters.
Pages of The Turner Diaries were found in Timothy McVeigh’s truck after he attacked a federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Patrick Crusius, the alleged El Paso Walmart gunman, and John Timothy Earnest, the accused shooter at a synagogue in Poway, California, echoed the book’s ideas in their manifestos. A member of the Proud Boys can be seen on video during the insurrection on 6 January 2021 telling a journalist to read The Turner Diaries.”
“Election-related violence generally takes place when the following four factors are present: a highly competitive election that can shift power; partisan division based on identity; winner-takes-all two-party election systems in which political identities are polarised; and an unwillingness to punish violence on the part of the dominant group. All four are present in America now, and will be more amplified in 2024.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/06/how-close-is-the-us-to-civil-war-barbara-f-walter-stephen-march-christopher-parker
The unwillingness to arrest and prosecute trump and his leading acolytes, and the unwillingness to regulate the lies in social media. Johnson is a symptom that South Dakota can do without.