Trump / Fascists to Cancel Voting Rights

 Panic within the Trump White House over their impending demise in the 2026 midterms has reached a fever pitch and they are now pulling out every stop to try to save themselves. 

Last week it was announced that President Trump ordered the US Postal Service to stop mail in voting for every state that does not provide the White House with the state’s list of registered voters. The ban is now moving forward.  However, the fact that they want these voter lists should scare you even more than the cancellation of mail in voting.  The White House is trying to compile these lists so that (1) they can challenge the ballots of every Democrat and ensure their votes don’t count. And (2) so that in the event of civil unrest and or the suspension of habeas corpus, the Department of Homeland Security will have a list of where all registered Democrats live.

The NAACP is challenging the order but unfortunately due to MAGA’s capture of the US Supreme Court, they have us dead to rights.  The US Supreme Court has become the harbinger of American fascism. They must be stopped before they transform our nation into an unrecognizable hellscape.   Though it may be too late to stop the Supreme Court from banning mail in voting, it is not too late to stop the rulings that await in the not so distant future: a national abortion ban, greenlights for mass detentions of Democratic activists and mass killings of undocumented migrants, and so much more.  Terrifyingly, this conservative majority on this court could last until 2065, more than enough time for the far-right to carry out their most depraved desires. That is unless Democrats take unprecedented action to seize the court.  The moment Democrats reclaim power in DC, Democrats can and must move to pack the court with liberal justices to reclaim a majority on the court. We did it under FDR and we can do it again.  Defend our Courts is preparing for exactly this moment. There will be some who claim we need to follow precedent and wait until 2065 to reclaim the majority. It’s on us to steamroll them and ensure everyone does their part to take back this court.  +++++++++++++ This case and others reveal why we will need to use aggressive aactions by States to defend our democracy.  States can act and can resist.  Trump plans to sabotage the midterms, so we're going to need a plan to stop him. As soon as he took office again, Trump started signaling that he intends to interfere with the midterms. There are too many examples to cover everything, so here are some of the lowlights from just the last year: March 2025: An executive order trying to unilaterally overhaul election administration. July 2025: Ordered Texas to gerrymander five new Republican House seats. August 2025: An executive order to "get rid of" mail-in ballots ahead of the midterms. January 2026: Told the House GOP "they should cancel the election.”He regretted not seizing the voting machines after 2020, and then later that month he sent goons to raid Fulton County's election hub. February 2026: Said Republicans should "nationalize" elections. The next day Steve Bannon said, "You're damn right we're gonna have ICE surround the polls come November," and urged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. March 2026: Issues an executive order to create state-by-state citizen lists and orders USPS to deliver mail ballots only to federally approved names. Installed election denier Dan Bishop to run DOJ's "election-integrity" efforts. April 2026: Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act, paving the way for racial gerrymanders in former Confederate states. Trump team threatens to force blue states to redraw their own maps.  June 2026: Raided the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a voter-registration nonprofit. Even as he meets resistance from the courts and some blue states, he's clearly not backing down. So what's our plan? We need to get into election protection formation -- let’s talk about how. For the last 75 weeks or so, Leah and I have hosted What's the Plan, our live Q&A with the Indivisible movement. It’s a unique space: thousands of people from across the country and the world, together every week, working through the strategy and tactics of organizing against fascism. When we’re at our best, we’re cutting through the noise, demystifying some process or institution, and focusing on what we all can actually do. If Indivisibles are going to plan together for how we organize in defense of the midterms, the place to have that conversation is What’s the Plan. We don’t want to shortchange the big topic, so this week we’re trying something a bit different.

Where Are America's Leaders?

Why Do Fascists Fear Teachers ?

Why Do Fascists Fear Teachers? :  Randi Weingarten 

Because We Want Kids to Think—and Read—for Themselves

When he was still a student at Morehouse College, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an essay in the student newspaper titled “The Purpose of Education.”⁵ He argued that education has two main purposes: “the one is utility and the other is culture.” Education helps students develop concrete skills and tools and learn how to use them to achieve their goals in life. But that second purpose King wrote about? That purpose is really democracy. “To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.”

“The function of education,” Dr. King went on, “is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.” Critical thinking is vital to accurately understanding societal problems that need to be solved and, together with our civic peers, engaging, analyzing, and innovating as we constantly renew and reinvent our democracy. Critical thinking is the most important muscle in the exercise of democracy. No wonder fascists want to weaken it.

Democracy is being deeply, substantively engaged in the problems and solutions of our society. Which means critical thinking and education are absolutely essential to and intertwined with the practice of democracy. When we think critically, we have our own ideas and opinions, but we simultaneously scrutinize them, weighing other facts and ideas to be as rational as possible. We listen to and really wrestle with ideas and opinions that conflict with our own. And we engage earnestly with people who may think differently from us, exchanging facts and opinions, not taunts and smears.

“Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint,” writes historian Heather Cox Richardson in her book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.⁶ Fascist leaders may campaign for our votes, but modern democracies more often fall because of autocratic candidates who work within the system to dismantle it, rather than because of coups or military takeovers. Prominent authoritarianism historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains that fascist and authoritarian leaders want to “damage or destroy democracy.”⁷ Democracy is people power. But fascists want one leader or a small group of elites to have all the power.

The problem for fascists, then, is that a public with strong critical-thinking muscles is more likely to strengthen democracy and resist authoritarianism. Scholars who study democracy worldwide are incredibly clear on this point: “On the whole, higher levels of education are associated with stronger democracies—a country with an educated populace is more likely to become or remain a democracy.”⁸ Looking at data from Latin American elections, researchers Amy Erica Smith and Mollie J. Cohen found that “The more education you have, the less likely you are to vote for an authoritarian.”⁹ In fact, some global scholars have gone as far as to suggest that “education causes democracy.”¹⁰

So is the opposite true? Yes, history has shown us that. For instance, in 2017, the Financial Times found that among Dutch voters, having attained less education was the greatest predictor of support for the country’s anti-immigrant, far-right political party.¹¹ And after winning a primary election during the 2016 election, Donald Trump bragged how well he did with certain demographics, saying, “We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”¹² This may or may not have been just another sloppy aside from Trump, but it does reflect a deeper truth. Donald Trump was able to rise to power, yes, because of his keen political instincts and charisma, but also because he routinely says things he thinks voters want to hear, whether he can actually do anything about them or not.

Authoritarians actively attack truth, knowledge, and critical thinking because an uninformed public is easier to control. Degrading public education and critical-thinking skills may only prime more Americans to not recognize disinformation and misinformation and take authoritarian leaders like Trump at their word. Psychologist Bob Altemeyer studied personality traits that make people more receptive to authoritarian leaders. In his 2006 book The Authoritarians, Altemeyer documented his “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” scale, writing:

The authoritarian follower makes himself vulnerable to malevolent manipulation by chucking out critical thinking and prudence as the price for maintaining his beliefs. He’s an “easy mark,” custom-built to be snookered. And the very last thing an authoritarian leader wants is for his followers to start using their heads, to start thinking critically and independently about things.¹³

In other words, those inclined to support authoritarianism exhibit a general avoidance of or allergy to critical thinking. And authoritarians like it that way.

 

 See Also;  Choosing Democracy: A Practical Guide to Multicultural Education.  4th. edition.  201o. Allyn and Bacon.  by Duane Campbell  Used copies on the web very low priced. 

https://www.aft.org/ae/fall2025/weingarten_book?

We are not giving up on American Democracy

We're Not Giving Up On This Democracy

In times of moral crisis, true faith offers courage to stand for what's right

   

 https://open.substack.com/pub/ourmoralmoment/p/were-not-giving-up-on-this-democracy?

 

“These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”

-Thomas Paine

December 23, 1776.  

First They Came for the Socialists

 First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

 

This quote is attributed to the prominent German pastor Martin Niemöller. It is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a poem. 

After World War II, Niemöller openly spoke about his own early complicity in Nazism and his eventual change of heart. His powerful words about guilt and responsibility still resonate today.

 

On our blog.

https://www.dsanorthstar.org/blog/first-they-came-for-the-socialists

 

 

 

Trump and Nazis