Episoder
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Note: I’m out this morning with a very in-depth look at Mother Jones at how election deniers took over Georgia in the last four years. That story has gone live as I am typing this, and I’m incredibly proud of it so I hope you take the time to read it. It’s the culmination of three years’ worth of non-stop work covering the election denial movement in Georgia and elsewhere. It wouldn’t be possible without your support.
If you want to continue that support, you can help me power through these final days before the election with a paid subscription that costs as little as $5 a month or a one-time contribution to our Doom Coffee Fund. Strap in, because things are about to get heavy.
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A man at my early voting location yesterday was wearing a shirt that said something like, “If you don’t love this country move somewhere else.” It was a way to wear a Trump shirt without wearing a Trump shirt. Some of the former president’s supporters have broken the law by wearing Trump paraphernalia. In Florida, a Trump supporter was arrested for brandishing a machete, apparently at voters who support Vice President Kamala Harris.
Meanwhile, Republican officials in some states have moved to block the Justice Department from deploying election monitors to ensure that poll workers and voters aren’t harassed or intimidated — by either side. What is becoming more clear by the day is that the American right feels they are entitled to win this election, and feel that if they need to harass or intimidate those who don’t support Trump in order to achieve that goal, they’re willing to do it. In Indiana, a former Republican congressional candidate was arrested for stealing sample ballots in a failed attempt to claim fraud was occurring there.
The madness won’t end on Election Day if Kamala Harris wins. The two months that follow will be chaos. Subscribe below to stay on top of it all.
Across the country, election workers are under threat, Mike Wendling of the BBC News reported recently. On today’s episode of the American Doom podcast, I talk to Mike about his reporting and what he learned by speaking with election officials who are under threat by Trump supporters who believe the former president’s lies about elections.
In other news, you can read my Rolling Stone dive into the election denial officials of Pennsylvania. At least 33 pro-Trump election deniers work as local election officials in the Keystone State, I reported on Tuesday. Also for your reading pleasure (or displeasure), you can read check out the Mother Jones piece I mentioned above. Many, many thanks to my editor, Daniel Schulman and my co-author, Ari Berman, for their work on this story. You can view Ari’s relentless coverage of voting and elections for Mother Jones here.
All for now.
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Yo. Today I’m in Luke O’Neill’s Hell World with a reflection on the election denier madness I’ve seen over the last four years. You can read it here and support Luke’s work by subscribing to his killer newsletter. Fun fact: I’ve been writing for Luke off and on longer than any other publication I’ve written for. The Internet can still be fun!
Also just a reminder that tomorrow night I’ll be hosting a live chat for the presidential debate. This live chat will be for paid subscribers only and I’ll be discussing election matters that come up in the debate. You can subscribe to American Doom for as little as $5 a month and join us tomorrow. Should be fun. We’ve also set up a new option for those who want to give a one-time contribution — the Doom Coffee Fund. Both subscriptions and one-time contributions are through a secure payment system and go to help fund operations here at American Doom. It’s just myself and a colleague doing enough investigative journalism here to garner mentions in the New York Times, the New Republic, on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show and elsewhere, in addition to a slew of press appearances based on our stories.
Now, on to today’s podcast. I’m pleased to be joined today by Max Flugrath of Fair Fight. Max has been instrumental in helping Georgians understand the issues affecting elections here and how they can ensure that they’re properly registered to vote even as Republicans carry out legally dubious voter purges throughout the state. Recently, Fair Fight launched PeachVote.com, which features the lovely little chatbot, Peaches, who can help you with all your voter registration questions and needs.
Today, Max and I discuss all the recent controversy at the Georgia State Election Board as well as the growing issue of voter purges and accompanying lawsuits backed by Republicans.
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Today, I’m pleased to share a conversation on that I had recently with DeRay McKesson, one of the young civil rights leaders who was on the ground in Ferguson in the wake of Michael Brown’s death. Since then, DeRay has gone on to become a best-selling author and political force for racial justice among many of his other successes. While we’ve disagreed on some things over the years — primarily what constitutes a justifiable use of fatal force by law enforcement — but one thing that we do agree on is that the issue of police violence remains a concerning one for Black Americans. One needs to look no further than the recent murder of Sonya Massey to confirm that. Ten years after “Hands up, don’t shoot” became the rallying cry of Ferguson, Massey had her own hands up when she was shot in the face by a sheriff’s deputy in Illinois who has now been indicted for murder. Instead of saying “don’t shoot,” Massey said, “I’m sorry.”
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It was a rumor. Let’s start with that. I don’t think it was done nefariously. I think the people who said it that day and in the days that followed truly believed it. It’s what they had been told, after all. Somewhere along the line — somewhere in this game of telephone that people like me try to get to the bottom of — maybe there was a lie. Maybe someone lied. Or, they just got things mixed up in the heat of the moment. They got it mixed up because someone they knew had died and his body was baking on the asphalt in the middle of the street with blood leaking from a bullet wound in his head.
The rumor was that Michael Brown had his hands up on this very day, 10 years ago today, in Ferguson, Missouri. He had his hands up and he said, “Don’t shoot,” the people said. That’s what started it all. Mike Brown, a kid no one had ever heard of, had his hands up and was saying “Don’t shoot” when a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri shot and killed him on August 9, 2014. That’s where it begins. Or at least, that’s where it begins in a sense. Ferguson was a domino. There have been many more over the years.
“Hands up don’t shoot” is the beginning of a lot of things. As I sit here this morning, though, the thing that strikes me the most is that the falsehood of “Hands up, don’t shoot” is the beginning of our current political moment. No matter the event, no matter the truth of what happened on any given day, each side can claim their own version. Ferguson and Black Americans were rightfully incensed over the claim that Brown had had his hands up and was saying “don’t shoot.” But when it turned out not be true, much of white America — themselves already incensed and afraid after watching Ferguson burn —dismissed the entire movement for racial justice that Ferguson birthed.
White America took that mentality — these people lied about what happened, denigrated a good cop, and then burned their own town and they’ll do it to our’s next — and ran with it. They ran with it right into the waiting arms of Donald Trump, the “law and order” candidate. Then they kept running with it.
The truth can be complicated. The first thing you often hear about a news event like Ferguson is a chaotic and murky version of the actual truth. But white America would not forgive this falsehood of Ferguson. Already driven by racial anger at what it saw, white America took the idea that they were being lied to by people who were, in their view, anti-American, and began to apply to everything that has happened since. The impeachments of Donald Trump — fake, based on lies. The 2020 election. Lies, again. Stolen from them. George Floyd — he died because of a fentanyl overdose, not the knee on his neck.
In a way, it’s a shame that “Hand up, don’t shoot” turned out not to be true. If it had been, we might not be exactly where we are today. But something tells me that white America would have found another reason to drag us to our current state. There’s always a reason, it seems, for many Americans to want to usher us toward authoritarianism and backwards toward a past rooted in white supremacy.
I say this not because this is what I learned at some leftist Ivy League university. The education I’ve received that has led me to this conclusion has come from witnessing the events of the last 10 years with my own eyes. I’ve learned how and why we’ve ended up here by being on the streets of places like Ferguson and witnessing the aftermath firsthand. My education has been history itself.
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P.S. Thank you and welcome to all our new subscribers. At some point soon I hope to have time to write a little something about who I am, where I come from and what I’ve been doing over the course of my career. But for now, there’s too much work to do. So, the following will have to suffice for the moment. Here’s some stuff of mine you can read if you want to get to know me a little better. If you want to help support my work, you can subscribe to American Doom for as little as $5 a month. Paid subscribers can fill out this form and get a nice American Doom 2024 sticker to let everyone driving behind you know how cool and in-the-know you are. This publication, newsletter, whatever you want to call it, is just me and a colleague, so every little bit helps. I’m an independent journalist and your support helps keep it that way.
* Wrigley Is a Temple, and Last Night Cubs Fans Went to Pray - Esquire
* Why Vegas is Already Gone - Medium
* Why I Love This City Where Americans Aren’t Always Welcome, a Love Letter to Juárez - Heated Mag
* Remembering the Life of Julián Cardona, The Bard of the Borderlands - Inside Hook
* The trauma inside all of us - American Doom
* Welcome to American Doom - American Doom
* To the unsung heroes out there, and to glimmers of hope - American Doom
* Something has been lost - American Doom
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Today on the American Doom podcast I’m speaking with Katie Paul of the Tech Transparency Project (TTP). Katie has been looking into militia groups online over the past four years, and she’s found a lot of right-wing clamoring for political violence — some of which has ramped up in recent months as platforms like Facebook have taken their hands off the reins of content moderation.
Her work is a troubling signifier of bad times to come, something that readers of this newsletter are very familiar with. In one video Katie shared with American Doom, what looks like hundreds of armed men gathered for a field training exercise. The caption for the video reads “Now is the time to join a MF’n Militia. Not a political party.” And just in case you were at all unclear on the group’s intent, the video further proclaims that “We came into this world screaming covered in blood and will be leaving the same way. No Retreat No Surrender.”
So that’s what some right-wing Americans are doing in preparation for November’s election. Luckily, folks like Paul are doing the crucial work of raising alarm about groups like the ones she tracks for TTP. We can only hope that law enforcement is doing the same.
In this episode of the American Doom podcast, Katie and I discuss what the groups she’s tracking want, what they’re planning to do if they don’t get it, and just how many of them there are who make their presence known online. It’s impossible to know the true number of Americans who are planning for political violence if they don’t get their way in November, but Katie is just about the only person I know trying to figure that out.
Listen to this episode of the American Doom podcast here, or on Apple or Spotify podcasts, and subscribe to our newsletter for as little as $5 a month to support our work exposing election deniers, right-wing extremists and other threats to democracy.
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My guest today on the American Doom podcast is Steven Monacelli, a writer and journalist in Texas who focuses on right-wing extremism there. Steven and I first met in May of 2021 when I travelled back to Dallas — where I lived for a couple of years while covering immigration and the border — to attend a QAnon conference. The event was actually called, quite ridiculously, the “For God & Country Patriot Roundup” and was held in a sad county fair-looking barn-turned event center on the edge of Dallas’ ever-depressing commercial district.
The event gained infamy when disgraced general and election denial movement leader Mike Flynn said he liked the idea of a Myanmar-style coup in the United States. Video I took of the comments went briefly viral, and Flynn’s reputation was further degraded into the dregs of American political life, where he now spends all of his time grifting on conspiracies in the name of Donald Trump.
Then, as now, Steven was covering far-right extremism in Texas. He’s something of an expert on the matter, and you can keep up here with Steven’s prolific work at the many publications he writes for, and follow him on Twitter — until he gets permanently banned for his ball-busting reporting on Elon Musk.
In this episode of the American Doom podcast, Steven and I discuss some of the bizarre Christian nationalist groups looking to further infiltrate all levels of government in order to impose their vision of a biblical nation upon all the rest of us. Not that there’s anything wrong with the idea of a Godly government or anything, I just don’t think a lot of parts of the Bible should be taken literally — and many of the folks Steven writes about absolutely do. They include a group touting itself as the “Remnant Alliance,” which is part of broader right-wing efforts to take over school board and, you know, ban books, for Christianity on people, oppress minorities and LGBTQ students, etc.
Listen to this episode of the American Doom podcast here, or on Apple or Spotify podcasts, and subscribe to our newsletter for as little as $5 a month to support our work exposing election deniers, right-wing extremists and other threats to democracy.
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Dalton Mattus was arrested a little more than two weeks ago for possessing a pair of handmade pipe bombs. Police found more at his home. What hasn’t been reported in the local press is that Mattus posted prolifically about every right-wing, anti-government conspiracy imaginable. He is a symbol both of the online radicalization toward right-wing extremism that pervades the United States, and the threats of violence that right-wing extremists pose. In this episode of the American Doom podcast, I discuss Mattus’ case with Bree Zender, my partner here at AD, who helped research Mattus’ posting for our collaboration with Rolling Stone. You can watch a video of our discussion below.
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Last week I wrote about the wars to come, in which I describe what I think will be the natural — and possibly violent! — right-wing reaction to recent campus protests. That prediction, if you want to call it that, is based on my experience covering unrest over the last decade. Throughout much of that time, I was in conflict scenarios writing and reporting for my longtime editor, Justin Miller. Much of that work came when Miller was an editor at the Daily Beast. Now, he’s at New York magazine, where he’s recently dusted off his pen for a piece he actually wrote and didn’t just edit. I say just edit, because for all our years together, I still don’t really understand what editors do. Kidding. Miller has made my work better since our very first story together, back on the tear gas-choked street in Ferguson. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
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It’s a big day here at American Doom, where I’m excited to share the first episode of the podcast version of this newsletter. Today, I’m speaking with my old pal Alex Wroblewski, a photojournalist who I first worked with back in 2014. We did a story together for VICE back then, and since then have crossed paths at protests and riots across the country. He’ll be covering Trump’s rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday, so I wanted to catch up with him on some of the madness of this election cycle.
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