Are Republicans Ready To Respond To Post-Election Chaos?

One of the best ways to know what Democrats are up to is to simply check how they’re smearing their opponents. Who is really “destroying democracy” if not those who support mass censorship, surveillance, and the jailing of reporters and others over speech crimes? Who really colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election? Who ended the United States’ lifelong tradition of peaceful transition of power by spying on and sabotaging the governance of the opposition-party president elected after Barack Obama?

So it’s extremely ominous to see a drumbeat of claims from corporate media and other Democrats throughout the 2024 election cycle that Republican supporters will engage in post-election violence. A Google News search immediately turns up endless headlines like these: “Could the 2024 election normalize political violence?” asks NPR. “Ahead of Election Day, officials prepare for protests and possible violence,” says USA Today.

These are not just claims but also plans for post-election violence. The Cyberstructure and Information Security Agency has been training state and federal officials on election violence scenarios all year, says Politico. As revealed in the Murthy v. Biden litigation and open records obtained by reporter Matt Taibbi, CISA is effectively an election interference agency. It interferes in elections by “switchboarding” censorship demands from government officials to social media monopolies. Without free speech, elections are not free.

After Sen. Rand Paul asked about CISA and other national security agencies participating in a 2024 election day “cybersecurity” event in Atlanta, Georgia, CISA insisted it wasn’t involved. In a public letter, Paul said the event in the swing state with a long history of election challenges was slated to include “a four-hour ‘Critical Infrastructure Tabletop’ led by CISA staff” and was hosted by U.S. military entities.

In its election violence trainings across the country, CISA “provides tabletop exercises on scenarios including a protest that turns violent, an active shooter at a polling place or even a covert extremist discovered in an election office.” The FBI has also participated in such exercises with election officials nationwide that include preparing for “civil disobedience,” says USA Today.

Alexander Vindman — who helped orchestrate the first impeachment of Trump based on false information — ran a post-election exercise recorded in the January documentary “War Game.” It included the National Guard and other military members “turn[ing] their weapons on their comrades,” mounting “casualties,” and deploying the U.S. military against American civilians, according to Slate. Former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, retired Gen. Wesley Clark, and former U.S. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp participated in the simulation.

A nonprofit organization run by a former Homeland Security official named Miles Taylor, who infamously proclaimed himself part of the bureaucratic “resistance” working to overturn Donald Trump’s previous election win, has run 2024 “war game” scenarios with media, government, and big tech officials predicting election “chaos.” NBC News says that “a coalition of nonprofits and good-government groups are planning to organize a bipartisan, countrywide network of former officials, technology specialists and others to help local authorities detect deepfakes in real time and respond with accurate information.”

Another gathering this year, organized by a fellow at the leftist Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, planned responses to “violence at election time.” The NPR article about this group of anonymous “civil society groups focused on democracy and violence mitigation work” notes that “Common Defense, a national, progressive, grassroots organization of 40,000 veterans … is assembling Quick Reaction Forces, or QRFs, to show up unarmed and in plainclothes.” This vigilante group of military-trained people is “monitor[ing] extremist activity in swing states around the election” for their potential response.

These weren’t the only planning exercises run by leftists pregaming post-election chaos to their advantage. Yet another aimed at “former government officials” and veterans was conducted earlier this year and reported in The Atlantic. Similar exercises were conducted by leftist groups in 2020, perhaps most notoriously by the Transition Integrity Project.

Molly Ball’s infamous 2021 Time magazine article chronicled a massive set of leftist election planning exercises that included readying text messages to mobilize hundreds of George Floyd riot groups to “stop the coup they feared.” Earlier this year, Rolling Stone reported on similar election “superstructure” efforts from Democrats for 2024.

“These warnings fall under the category of ‘pre-bunking,’ a practice in which authorities try to inoculate against badthink by seeding the public with possible bad news in advance of an election, a storm response, a new vaccine policy, etc,” says Taibbi. He wants to know: “For what bad news are we really being prepared?”

Filling the airwaves with these assertions accomplishes three things. First, it implicitly threatens election violence by forefronting it in Americans’ minds as state and federal election agencies very visibly spend lots of time, money, PR, and security theater on it.

Two, this all makes election violence more likely because agitated people are more likely to act out. Three, it also enables post-election violence among the left and reduces attempts to stop it among the right because everyone is by now aware that leftists get away with riots and righties are sent to prison for misdemeanors.

So this information effort conditions Americans to expect election violence and enables it on behalf of Democrats as one of their many contingency plans to secure the White House this year. Given all this, it’s no surprise that 76 percent of registered voters surveyed in an October Associated Press poll are at least somewhat concerned about post-election violence.

While corporate media and other Democrats project their readied election violence onto their opponents, the truth is that they are the primary source of election violence. As Julie Kelly notes, Democrat-allied rioters trashed cities across the United States after Trump’s first election. Ball notes the left planned to deploy George Floyd rioters after the 2020 election if Democrats didn’t get the results they wanted. Rioters engulfed the Republican National Convention this year just days after the first of two assassination attempts on Trump.

Republican electeds better have an intelligent plan for post-election chaos that must start with not accepting any information operations run through corporate media. If any agitation occurs among any group that isn’t obviously allied with Democrats, it will certainly be pinned on Republicans and their voters and used to justify increasing the deployment of counterterrorism tools against half of Americans.

We know this because it’s already happening. For Pete’s sake, Democrats even tried to claim the two Trump shooters were possibly Trump supporters! And The New York Times is running op-eds essentially defending a color revolution!

Just like in 2020, swing states that formerly could count ballots by the end of Election Day are now telegraphing that it might take them days to produce a final total. This kind of lengthy counting scenario enables color-revolution-like pressure such as rioters and military intervention at vote-counting locations, Electoral College certification, and the presidential inauguration, just to name a few. With public discussion controlled by the White House via the censorship-industrial complex, how would Americans even know what was happening? (Thank God for X and Truth Social!)

Leftist activists say that even Trump declaring victory on election night — a long-established American tradition only broken in 2020 — constitutes an incitement to violence and could be “disinformation.” It would not be surprising if any Trump remarks about victory on election night are already pre-censored, with myriad election officials and media companies prepped to declare it “disinformation” like they did with the Hunter Biden laptop operation that single-handedly tipped the election to Joe Biden in 2020.

Democrats have publicly demonstrated they are well-prepared to work all post-election scenarios in their favor, including deploying street thugs and the U.S. military. It happened in 2020. Top military officials were prepped to do nothing Trump asked for, even stopping riots, that year. That’s partly why the Jan. 6, 2021, protests got out of hand.

What is the point of Republicans occupying public office if they haven’t prepared for these kinds of existential threats to what’s left of our republic? Believing claims from Democrats and their media megaphones long ago became utterly disqualifying.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her new book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.