Stop the steal!
I just want to find 11,780 votes.
All across the country,
Trump-endorsed election conspiracy theorists
are now running to oversee those elections?
We’re only 22 days away from
the most consequential election in our history.
This November, American voters will go to the polls
for the country’s midterm elections.
The balance of power on Capitol Hill is at stake.
It’s the first major ballot since the January 6 insurrection
and Donald Trump's efforts to undermine the vote in 2020,
making it crucial for restoring belief in the electoral system
and trying to heal some of the violent polarization
tearing America apart.
There’s probably about 300 Proud Boys.
They’re marching eastbound.
But there’s a problem.
Far-right activists and members of violent militias
that are now standing for office themselves.
They're going to try to take away our gun rights, freedom of religion,
parental rights, and more,
and further violate the Constitution in unimaginable ways.
This is how a shocking number of candidates in the 2022 midterms
have links to far-right groups,
how this is becoming a battle for the soul of the Republican Party
and potentially a threat to the norms
of American democracy itself.
Make no mistake, there is a civil war going on right now
in the Republican Party.
[DECADE OF HATE]
The key moment in this transformation of the far right
is probably the events of January 6.
The attempted insurrection was not actually as isolated an incident
as it's often portrayed.
There had been at least 39 instances of confrontations
between the authorities and armed militias
at government facilities in the previous year
and literally thousands of other far-right gatherings
and demonstrations throughout Donald Trump’s term in office—
often prominently featuring guns.
A group of armed Trump supporters
gathered outside the FBI office in Phoenix, Arizona.
This is what happened when the talking stopped,
when the far-right Proud Boys squared off against Antifa
and other counter-protesters.
But after people began being prosecuted for the insurrection—
and trying to overthrow the American government,
generating a fair bit of negative press—
people on the far right started to look for new ways
to seize power from the inside.
What are they hiding?
People with links to militias and extremist groups
switching from their traditional anti-government posture
and either standing as independents
or infiltrating the Republican Party
and becoming official GOP candidates.
And according to Q—
again, I don’t have any proof of this—
many in our government are actively worshipping Satan.
These groups have been ...
they’ve been out there for a while, right.
And they operated primarily on the fringe of society.
I think what Donald Trump has done is to invite them in.
And clearly, if you look at what happened around January 6,
it was almost like kind of an open invitation
to come to Washington and make trouble.
You may remember Charlottesville
and the march there that led to violence.
I think, for the first time,
they felt, in some ways, that they were needed.
The way that Trump talked about the threats coming from the other side
and the integrity of America
and all of those things being at risk,
and oftentimes in militaristic terms.
Mark Finchem for Secretary of State.
Mark Finchem will follow the law.
Mark Finchem is running to become Arizona's secretary of state.
So you were at the Capitol on the 6th?
Yeah.
Along with a whole bunch of other people.
But he was also a member of the Oath Keepers,
a violent militia who are one of the key extremist groups
implicated in the January 6 insurrection.
Finchem’s not alone.
Leaked emails have revealed that at least 28 elected officials
have links to the Oath Keepers.
Meanwhile, members of the extremist group the Proud Boys,
also heavily implicated in the January 6 riots,
had taken up positions in key Republican Party local offices,
such as in Miami, Florida,
to try and steer the future of the party from the inside.
One investigation showed that over 20% of Republican state legislators
belong to at least one far-right Facebook group,
and that doesn't include networks on platforms like Gab,
Parler, and Telegram,
where many extremist groups primarily operate.
Social media amplify all of those extremist positions.
But also social media are particularly suited
to creating and spreading conspiracy theories.
We’ve already seen, and seen in other ways, from al Qaeda to ISIS,
that you can use the social media presence
to create a group of extremists.
Donald Trump may have been an accelerant.
He remains the cult leader.
But if he disappeared tomorrow,
most of these pathologies remain.
One illustration of the strategy of extremism from the inside
can be seen in the sheer number of Republican political ads
that openly feature guns and scenes of violence.
I’m going to Washington to stop the Pelosi agenda,
and you’re not going to silence me.
More than 100 Republican Party campaign ads have foregrounded guns
or implicit threats of violence against political opponents.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband violently assaulted
in their San Francisco home early this morning.
This after police say an intruder broke into their home overnight
and attacked with a hammer.
This individual went to the alt-right,
far-right-type ideology that we’ve seen—
talking QAnon, talking Pizzagate—
and then just a lot of very antisemitic postings.
What’s interesting is that the threats
are often against other Republicans.
Join the MAGA crew.
Get a RINO hunting permit.
There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit,
and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.
Extremist factions within the party,
aligned with Donald Trump’s MAGA movement,
accused traditional Republicans of being RINOs,
or Republicans In Name Only.
For decades, we've had ads where rhetorical violence was implied.
This seems to target, like, citizens.
This election has become as much about what it means to be Republican
as it is about who gains power in Congress.
The Republican Party has gone from being a traditional political party,
a party that would look to solve problems in the country,
abide by the norms of governance,
and often had a fairly wide range of viewpoints expressed in it,
to where it is now much closer to a cult than it is to a party.
And what characterizes a cult
is that the fear of being shunned or excommunicated,
of being treated as an apostate,
is an overwhelming one.
We must be very clear-eyed about the threat we face
and about what is required to defeat it.
I have said since January 6
that I will do whatever it takes to ensure Donald Trump
is never again anywhere near the Oval Office.
And I mean it.
One of the most concerning dynamics in this
is that several of the extremist-aligned candidates,
like Mark Finchem in Arizona,
are running for positions
that monitor and control elections themselves.
It’s not right that hundreds of thousands of votes
are allowed to be considered as lawful votes
when we know they’re illegal.
Ladies and gentlemen, we know it, and they know it ...
Donald Trump won.
A key article of faith amongst the GOP’s new extremist wing
has been to support Donald Trump’s false claims
that the 2020 election was stolen.
In true MAGA spirit,
politicians who fail to echo this conspiracist fantasy
have been driven out by local party offices and membership,
which have fallen under extremist control.
If these candidates win in November,
it casts serious concerns about how future elections may be carried out.
One of our analytical websites, FiveThirtyEight.com,
has looked at candidates for the House of Representatives
in the elections upcoming.
A hundred and twenty-six who have, they say,
a 95% plus chance of winning ...
are election deniers.
These are people who are likely to be elected.
And if the Republicans win a majority in the House—
the majority is 218—
you don’t have to be a math genius to realize that
significantly more than a majority of the Republicans
who would be running the House of Representatives
are extremist conspiracy theorists.
American democracy is under attack because ...
the defeated former president of the United States
refuses to accept the results of the 2020 election.
Extremism in the modern Republican Party is nothing new.
Ever since the election of Barack Obama in 2008,
the Tea Party were promoting a far-right economic agenda
while flirting with racism
and the violent fringes of the militia movement.
So many Tea Party Americans who are standing up
and saying “Enough is enough.”
And we’re going to take this government back
and put it back on the side of we the people.
It’s a pretty simple message.
What’s shocking is how these extreme positions have shifted
to become the mainstream stance of large sections of the party.
For instance, in 2010, Sharron Angle,
the Republican Senate candidate in Nevada,
proposed shutting down the likes of Social Security
and abolishing the Department of Education.
And I don’t think that the Department of Education
is one of those essential involvements
of the federal government.
This was considered an ultra-extreme position,
and she lost the election.
But flash forward to 2022,
and virtually identical plans
were being put forward by serving senators
and Donald Trump’s own education secretary.
I frankly don’t think
the Department of Education should exist.
And that would get rid of a lot of the—
Did that play well?
To see how these dynamics can translate directly into policies
that can profoundly affect people’s lives,
one only has to look at how
the Christian nationalist edge of this movement
has driven a decades-long push to take away women’s abortion rights.
I think Christian nationalism has very deep roots in the US.
It’s almost entirely a white phenomenon.
It is fundamentally anti-democratic
in the sense that to a Christian nationalist,
there are true Americans.
Those are the Christian nationalists,
the white Christians.
And then there are the other Americans.
And then I do think it has this tolerance of violence,
really sharp lines about what’s right and what’s wrong.
And you start to think like that,
and then it becomes the case that the ends justify the means.
Because it is not Joe Biden that rules this country.
Jesus Christ is the king of everything in this world!
In the run-up to the 2022 elections,
there’s even some evidence that, in a few cases,
Democrats have financially supported more extreme candidates
in Republican primaries,
believing that they would be easier to beat in the general election.
This is Republican State Senator Doug Mastriano.
He’s the Republican who’s ahead in the polls for governor.
He wants to outlaw abortion.
I think it’s blood money.
I mean, it is complete negligence to put money after candidates
that could conceivably win.
The most urgent question in all this is whether this is a matter of
a relatively small but noisy group of extremists
who have hijacked the Republican Party apparatus
or whether it represents a broader shift
in the beliefs of right-wing voters.
And the only way we’ll know the answer to that question
is with the election results themselves.
Like many people thought, in both 2016 and 2020,
that what's on the ballot is the soul of America.
And when people feel that way on both the right and the left,
then it gets to be pretty heated, pretty ugly.
And the losers, if they think they got cheated,
who knows where we go from there.
If Trump’s hand-picked MAGA candidates
do well this November,
the party looks likely to continue its drift into extremism.
But if they fail to deliver, there may yet be hope
that the GOP could return to looking more like a political party
and less like an unhinged far-right cult.
The only thing that’s certain is that this election matters.