Marv, Fair points, and I'll give some ground first. The first recourse of any movement here is to hold the police and courts to the right of assembly. I don't hold that against No Kings. If my post read as saying the organizers would tell people to stay home from threatened polling sites, I overstated it. I have no evidence of that either.
But look at what your evidence describes. The AP operation, Indivisible's seventeen scenarios, and the Sunrise organizer are all about Election Day at the polling place: armed federal officers, ICE, and the Guard at the door. That is the visible threat, and I expect you're right that it would bring out a Minneapolis-scale response. Crowds form well around a spectacle. I was talking about something else. Certification is the county canvass, two or three weeks after the vote, usually in a small room on a weekday afternoon. Nobody in uniform shows up. In 2020 the Wayne County canvassers in Michigan deadlocked for a few hours before certifying. In 2022 Cochise County in Arizona refused to certify by the deadline and had to be ordered to by a court. Neither case produced a crowd. The courts held both times. My argument is that a strategy built on the court's holding a third time is a bet, and I'd prefer the bet had a floor under it. Your decentralization point supports me more than you mean it to. If No Kings can't steer its supporters, it also can't gather them in front of a county auditor's office on a Tuesday in late November, when the national story has moved on and the vote count looks settled. Spontaneity is good at reacting to what everyone can see. It is bad at watching a procedure nobody is looking at. That is why I said committees, at the county level, built now: people who know when the canvass meets, who sit on the board, and what a stall looks like before it becomes a refusal. Then there's who runs it. Ten thousand volunteers recruited by Democratic state parties answer to party lawyers and to a party whose stake is in the result. That is legitimate, and I don't sneer at it. But it is a different thing from a committee accountable to a union local or a DSA chapter, which can decide on its own when a legal remedy has run out and what comes next. The coalition's commitment to lawful, de-escalated action is harmless on Election Day with cameras present. It matters more in the gap after the courts rule if they rule badly or slowly. I don't know exactly what that committee does in that gap. I do know it can't decide anything if it doesn't exist. As for open carry, no. Nothing I've proposed involves arms, and I'd rather not argue with a position I haven't taken. Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43539): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43539 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/121405050/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
