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FBI headquarters in Washington D.C.
Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C.
This week the FBI came calling. They pulled a play from the old “red scare” McCarthy-era playbook—the old, “let’s accuse folks of un-American wrongdoing and bully people into submission” act.
Last week, the FBI visited the home of the Milwaukee County Elections Director Michelle Hawley. They didn’t email. They didn’t make an appointment to visit her at the Election Commission offices, or the FBI offices. They showed up unannounced at her house and left a business card. Why? Because it’s an intimidation tactic. They’re not following regular normal investigation procedures because they’ve been instructed to bring a circus—the same way they tried to dishonorably march a handcuffed Judge Dugan out of the courthouse. This is an attempt to erode the trust that the American public has in our institutions—our courts, our elections, our laws. And it’s orchestrated to coincide with the erosion of the Voting Rights Act and a return to racist gerrymandering.
Now this is nothing new. Racists and truth-deniers have done this for years with their anti-Black tropes, anti-youth narratives, and the ongoing War on the Poor. This time though, they’re continuing their work to discredit our elections. They’re trying to do this in Georgia and Arizona too. The plot is stale and tired, but people still buy into the concept and prop it up because it feeds their need to believe things that support their twisted views, or as Mayor Johnson put it, “alter reality.”
Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson said it well—“The 2020 Presidential Election was fair and transparent, and its results are accurate. This has been proven repeatedly over the last six years by the post-election canvass, the Presidential Election Recount, State court-based challenge, Federal court-based challenge, the forensic audit by the Wisconsin’s Legislative Audit Bureau, and two additional independent audits. Continuing to relitigate settled questions does not strengthen public confidence in elections but it undermines it.”
Lies and More Lies
So when we balance this against the social media jackals and bots regurgitating conspiracy theories and lies, we can see that this is just another effort to try to stroke the President’s ego and settle old scores. These actions and lawsuits are done to fuel their fire, and erode our democracy by telling us a lie, and trying to bully us into saying we believe it.
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We don’t believe it.
They can lie and try to intimidate us, but if this administration, and whatever government entity is being weaponized against the public this week, really cared about election security, they wouldn’t have cut millions of dollars from state and local election offices or the agencies that fight foreign election interference. In true Don Quixote fashion, the administration wants boxes of ballots from an election that happened over half a decade ago because they have mistaken windmills for giants.
We know that our state’s procedures for the 2020 Election were fair and secure. The Constitution is crystal clear on how this process works—states run elections—not an angry little man building ballrooms and statues of himself. The most important piece to center in the fight is that Milwaukee doesn’t lie down and roll over. The cost of surrendering in advance is that we jeopardize future elections … and that is exactly what they want. We won’t let it happen.
