 So, I want to draw your attention to another fantastic article written by Barton Gelman published by The Atlantic titled, Trump's Next Coup Has Already Begun, January 6th Was Practice. Donald Trump's GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election. Now, this is a very lengthy article, so I want you to read the full thing because it gives you a lot of necessary context that's needed to truly grapple with the gravity of the situation here. And before you dismiss this as liberal fearmongering and liberal drivel, understand that what he is pointing to is concrete steps that Republican controlled states are taking to quite literally steal the election away from the Democrats, to subvert the will of their own voters, to have the ability to send electors to the electoral college who will vote based on how they want it to go, not based on what their voters choose. And look, it might not affect the election in 2024, perhaps. Trump runs again any wins. But if it doesn't affect 2024, it might affect 2028 or 2032. And you have to understand that what they're doing is they are laying the groundwork for an eventual coup. And if we don't stop them now while we still have time, then we're watching our democracy die and we're just letting it happen. And you can't allow that to happen. Now, it's complicated. There's a lot of things at play here, but really, Gellman points to two main things to be concerned with. So let's get to the article. Again, this is just the tip of the iceberg because the full article is very long, but these few paragraphs kind of give you a little bit of insight into what Gellman is talking about here. He writes, for more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party's national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft, elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump's crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refuse to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the big live. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters. Trump is successfully shaping the narrative of the insurrection and the only political ecosystem that matters to him. The immediate shock of the event, which briefly led some senior Republicans to break with him, has given way to a near-unanimous embrace, virtually no one a year ago, certainly not I, predicted that Trump could compel the whole party's genuine flexion to the big lie and the recasting of insurgents as martyrs. Today, the few GOP dissenters are being cast out. Two down, eight to go, Trump bloated at the retirement announcement of Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of the 10 House Republicans to vote for his second impeachment. Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire. Tens of millions of Americans perceive their world through black clouds of his smoke. His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House and are losing their country to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed for its cause. So we're going to stop there. Again, we're only scratching the surface. I would highly encourage you to read the article in its entirety because there's a lot of things that he goes through that really shows you how serious the situation is. And see, in 2020, as scary as that was, you can tell that the coup attempt was incredibly disorganized. Donald Trump didn't really know what he was doing, but they are learning from 2020. Unlike Democrats, Democrats are not taking time to actually correct the flaws in our democracy. They're letting it stand. Whereas Donald Trump and his cronies in GOP controlled states are being very meticulous in the way that they are changing their systems. So overall, Gilman points to two main ways that the next coup could be successful. The first is by changing the makeup of the modern GOP. Anyone who was against the big lie, what is Trump doing now? He's coming out and endorsing against people who denounced his big lie, didn't support him. He's doing this in Georgia. He's endorsing David Perdue over Brian Kemp. As notoriously bad as Brian Kemp is, he literally signed Jim Crow 2.0 into law this year to suppress the votes of people. Donald Trump doesn't support him because he's not playing into the big lie. And he's doing this also in Arizona. So Trump is really waging a war on anyone who did not feed into the big lie. Second of all, again, this was referenced before, these state legislatures are giving themselves the power to overturn elections. And they're not doing this in the same way. It varies from state to state. In some states, they're taking control of elections out of the hands of local county officials, and they're putting it into the hands of legislators, rather than allowing the state attorneys general to have the authority and say over elections and audits and whatnot, the legislatures are taking control so they can unilaterally overturn the will of voters. So they can choose who to send to the electoral college. Now, it's broad. It's hard to understand. It's complex, which is why I think a lot of people are tuning out. But if you tune out, if you don't pay attention, if you don't take this seriously, then democracy is going to die, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. Now, you might think if it is the case that Trump runs again, it doesn't even matter. He won't need to steal the election because he's going to win legitimately. But the reason why we have to talk about this now and why it's not too early to talk about something like this is because we're running out of time to fix these fucking issues. We're running out of time. We have less than a year to actually make meaningful electoral changes that would prevent a coup, to put in place safeguards that stop a coup from happening. But Democrats are not doing that, even though groups in red states are practically begging Democrats to take action after multiple GOP-controlled legislatures have passed laws designed to suppress voter turnout, including voter roll purges of eligible voters, polling place closures, new restrictions on vote by mail, reduced early voting days, and bans on food and water distribution voting lines. This is all laid out in an article by Jake Johnson of Common Dreams, but they're doing voter suppression to make sure that they win. But as the fails say for them, if they don't win, if they can't gerrymander the way to victory and suppress enough votes, then they are giving themselves more power to steal elections. If you don't take this seriously, then you don't value democracy. And so many Democrats are sitting on their asses in Congress right now, refusing to abolish the filibuster, effectively choosing the filibuster over democracy in the United States. This is very serious. The threat to democracy is real, and it's never been greater than it is right now. And even if Donald Trump isn't successful in 2024, even if he goes away, what the GOP is doing right now is paving the way for a future electoral theft, the likes of which we've never seen in this country. And if Democrats don't use this limited window of time to act, they are complicit here. They are complicit in the demise of our democracy. And again, I think it's worth noting that in other countries where democracy has fallen to authoritarian strongmen, one of the things, one of the ingredients to democracy's demise was a weak liberal opposition. Erdogan in Turkey had a very weak liberal opposition and it's happened before. Liberals in Brazil were weak in the lead up to Bolsonaro's victory. And in the United States, I mean, we see how the Democratic Party is incapable of responding to the needs of the moment. Democracy is on the cusp of death and they're not taking this threat seriously. I mean, I don't think people understand this. You can't put the cat back in the bag once it's out of the bag, right? If you don't stop this, if you don't save democracy by even passing meager reforms, you don't get it back. So, you know, this is something that I want more people to pay attention to. This is not liberal hysteria. This is not Trump derangement syndrome. This is a serious threat to our democracy that goes beyond Donald Trump. It speaks to the rising authoritarianism of the modern GOP and they're absolutely blamed disregard for democracy itself, which is a threat that we have to take seriously. And unfortunately we're running out of time to actually meaningfully address it. So we're basically watching in slow motion democracy die before our very eyes. And that's incredibly sad. But I mean, you've been warned. Let's just, let's try to prevent it. Let's try to put pressure on Democrats to do something. But it seems like they just don't wanna take this seriously. If they were going to take this seriously, it would have been the first thing that they did when they took power earlier this year, but they're not. So I have to imagine they're just, they're not up to the task and they're going to allow the Republican Party before our eyes to just kill democracy. Do yourself a favor and click the join button on YouTube to become a member. Cause Mike's doing a great job getting to watch his videos before everyone else is tremendous. Many people are saying this. Join today, folks. You won't regret it.