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The North Carolina Board of Elections finalized the primary election voting numbers this month. Political analysts are beginning to make sense of the data. BPR looks at the impact of unaffiliated voters in Western North Carolina:

About 20 percent of registered voters in North Carolina went to the polls for the primary election.

Thats a record high for midterms in a non-presidential year.

Depends on if you want to look at this as a glass half empty or a glass half full scenario.

Chris Cooper is chair of the public policy institute at Western Carolina University.

Its a higher turnout than it has been in the recent past but its not what wed like it to be, said Cooper.

The largest group of voters in North Carolina were unaffiliated - those who are not affiliated with any party. About 52,000 unaffiliated voters cast ballots in the 11th Congressional District which encompasses about 15 counties in Western North Carolina. Thats more than the number of Democratic or Republican votes. (About 41,000 and about 50,000 voters, respectively.)

That district had one of the most watched races in the country with a crowded primary against Republican incumbent Congressman Madison Cawthorn. The congressman has had a pattern of allegations including traffic violations, sexual assault and white supremacist sympathies.

In North Carolina, unaffiliated voters can choose to vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary. Across the state most chose Republican.

In the 11th congressional district on the Republican side, 40 percent of people who showed up were unaffiliated. That is the largest number in the state, said Cooper.

Cooper says that at the beginning of 2022 about 3,000 people switched from the Democratic party to unaffiliated. Over half of those voters cast their ballot in the Republican primary.

There is disagreement in the political science community over whether people are more likely to vote sincerely for someone who aligns with their values or vote strategically, explains Cooper.

It was a hard decision for a lot of people.

On primary election day, BPR talked with unaffiliated voter Curtis Collins in Jackson County. Collins said he thought about voting strategically against Congressman Madison Cawthorn.

I really kind of despise how we get whipped up into that game of voting to throw something instead of voting your conviction, said Collins.

Collins says he has voted for the Green Party in the past. The Green Party was on the ballot in 2018 but didnt meet minimum requirements in 2021 to continue to be included. Those over 9,000 voters were re-assigned to the unaffiliated party. This year, a Green Party candidate could be on the General Election Senate ticket. The candidates will be confirmed at the end of June.

Collins says he wishes there were more parties to vote for on the ballot. Part of his choice also came down to his vote in the Jackson County Sheriff's Office race.

It was a struggle to be like well do I want to get that Republican ballot to play that game. And I chose not to do that. I chose to vote for the person that I wanted to have the office, said Collins referring to NC-11.

The primary ballot rules can be confusing for voters. BPR spoke with person in North Asheville who showed up to vote for a friend running for Buncombe County district attorney.

The woman who did not wish to be identified said when she checked in she learned couldnt vote for her friend because she was registered under a different party.

I grew up Republican and Im a small business owner so, fiscally Im Republican, but socially I dont want to be affiliated with it anymorejust the whole abortion rights and the way things are going in the world today, she said.

While in the voting booth, she took time to cast votes in other races that, otherwise she wouldnt have turned out for.

I voted for mayor and whatever Madison Cawthorn is, I voted against him. I dont even know. Is he in the Congress? I dont know, she said.

For Cooper, it is clear that unaffiliated voters were a deciding factor in the NC-11 congressional race. He calls it a strategic two step. Remember those 3,000 Democratic who became unaffiliated?

[Senator] Chuck Edwards beat Madison Cawthorn by smaller than that number about 1,400 votes. So what that tells me is that sure most people are voting sincerely but there were probably a large enough number of people voting strategically to make a difference, said Cooper.

Edwards will now face Democratic candidate Jasmine Beach-Ferrara and Libertarian David Coatney in the general election in November.

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Unaffiliated voters had a big impact on the NC-11 Primary Election - Blue Ridge Public Radio

As a part of an ethnographic study on blockchain organizations, I recently attended two major conferences Dcentral Con and Consensus held back-to-back in Austin, Texas during a blistering heatwave. My collaborator, Johannes Lenhard, and I had conducted a handful of interviews with angel investors, founders, and venture capitalists, but wed yet to conduct any fieldwork to observe these types of operators in the wild. Dcentral, held at Austins Long Center for the Performing Arts, and Consensus, held at the Austin Convention Center and other venues throughout downtown, provided the perfect opportunity. The speaker and panel topics at both conferences varied widelyfrom non-fungible tokens (NFTs), to the metaverse, to decentralized finance (DeFi). At both conferences an underlying debate regarding the role of established institutions repeatedly bubbled to the surface. The differences between the two conferences themselves offered a stark contrast between those who envision a new frontier of crypto cowboys dismantling existing social and economic hierarchies and those who envision that same industry gaining traction and legitimacy through collaboration with regulators and the traditional financial (aka TradFi) sector.

Dcentral was populated by scrappy developers of emerging protocols, avid gamers, and advocates for edgy decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), such as Treat DAO, which allows adult content creators to sell NSFW (i.e., not safe for work) NFTs. Attendees at Dcentral sported promotional t-shirts and sneakers, and a few even showed up in Comic Con style garb, flaunting flowing white togas and head-to-toe blue body paint. Over the course of Dcentral, many speakers and attendees crafted passionate arguments around common libertarian talking pointsself sovereignty, individualism, opposition to the Federal Reserve, and skepticism about government oversight more broadly. Yet governments were not the only institutions drawing the ire of the Dcentral crowd. Speakers and attendees alike took aim at corporate actors from traditional finance systems as well as venture capital (VC) firms and accredited investors.

Perhaps the most acerbic critique of institutionalization in the crypto sector was issued by Stefan Rust, founder and CEO of Laguna. Wearing a white cowboy hat, he opened his presentation [see 3:19] with a criticism of protocols that impose undesirable middlemen between the user and their intended transactions:

This is what we want to avoid. We invited these institutions into our ecosystem and we now have layers, on layers, on layers that have been created in order to take a decentralized peer-to-peer electronic cash ecosystem to fit a traditional, TradFi world, the system that weve been fighting so hard since 2008 to combat []. Do we want this? I dont know. I didnt sign up to get into crypto and Bitcoin and a peer-to-peer electronic cash system for multiple layers of multiple middlemen and multiple fees

In his view, increasing involvement of institutional actors could lead to SSDD. That is, same shit, different day, which according to Rust, is exactly what the ecosystem should be dismantling.

Consensus, held directly after Dcentral, had an entirely different feel. In contrast to the casual dress of Dcentral, many attendees at Consensus wore conservative silk dresses, high heel pumps, or well-tailored suits, despite temperatures that topped 100 degrees just outside the conference center doors. In a panel aptly entitled, Wall Street Suits Meet Hoodies, Ryan VanGrack, a former advisor at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), opened with a comment about how he felt uncomfortably informal in his crisp button-down shirt, slacks, and pristine gray sneakers. According to one marketer at a well-known technology company, the cost of hosting a booth on the exhibit floor was in the neighborhood of 75K. This was not the ragtag gang of artists and emerging protocols from Dcentral; these people were established crypto players who saw the pathway to revolution as running straight through the front door of institutions rather than by burning them to the ground.

Like Dcentral, speakers and panelists at Consensus called for the reform of the financial industry, often similarly drawing from libertarian values and arguments; however, unlike Dcentral, many at Consensus emphasized that regulation of the crypto industry is not only warranted, but necessary to expand its scope and market adoption. According to them, the lack of regulation has imposed an artificial ceiling on what the crypto sector can achieve because retail investors, would-be protocol founders, and institutional players are still waiting on the sidelines for regulatory clarity. This position was not merely abstract rhetoric. Current and former government actors such as Rostin Behnam, Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as well as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Cynthia Lummis, and Pat Toomey, participated in panels. These panels focused on the role of regulation in the crypto ecosystem, such as measures that preserve innovation while also preventing catastrophic failures such as the recent collapse of Terra, which financially decimated many retail investors.

At Consensus, advocates of institutionalization were no less enthusiastic in their endorsement of the mission of crypto and web3 than the anti-institutionalists at Dcentral. In other words, they too were true believers, just with a different theory of change. On Friday night I was invited to attend an event hosted by Pantera Capital, a top-tier crypto VC fund. I mentioned to one of the other attendees that I had attended Dcentral. His face pulled into a grimace. Why the look of disgust? I asked. He clarified that while disgust was too strong of a word, he felt that events like Dcentral delegitimize what the industry seeks to accomplish. Rather than being the true embodiment of the web3 ethos, he felt these crypto cowboys and their antagonistic rhetoric risked undermining the very efforts that were likely to have the biggest impact.

At the conference, panelists and attendees referred to Terra as the elephant in the room. But it struck me that personal wealth and its tension with the crypto vision was a much bigger and far less acknowledged elephant. Possibly the only speaker to directly and unambiguously call attention to this was Assistant Professor of Law Rohan Grey. In a panel entitled Who Should be Allowed to Issue Digital Dollars, Grey noted that as the resident pet skeptic he would act as a rare detractor to the self-congratulatory industry love-fest or circle jerk that would unfold at Consensus. Establishing common ground with the crypto community, he noted that he too supported efforts to resist Big Brother as well as Wall Street and Silicon Valley. But then he offered a withering critique of crypto industry actors, especially those with ties to the established financial sector:

We should be very clear about the difference between private, for-profit actors providing public goods for their own material benefit and actual public goods. So, who are the people who want to issue digital dollars if not the government? Were talking about licensed limited liability companies backed by venture capitalists, many of whom are standard Wall Street actors. Were talking about people with a fiduciary responsibility to a particular group of shareholders. Were talking about decisions being made on behalf of the public by private individuals who are there only because of their capacity to hold wealth initially, and those actors will then be lobbying for laws favorable to themselves in government and creating the same revolving door that weve seen with Wall Street for decades.

The idea that private sector actors who made their fortunes in the traditional financial sector could serve as the vanguard of a financial revolution certainly merits scrutiny. Yet, even if somewhat dubious, it is at least possible that these actors, having seen from the inside the corruption and ill-effects of existing financial institutions, could leverage their insight to import better, more democratic values into an emerging crypto financial system. Along these lines, one man I chatted with at an after party said it was his experience witnessing what he felt were morally reprehensible, exploitative lending policies while working at a bank that ultimately pushed him to adopt the crypto vision. Still, more than a little skepticism is warranted given that institutional or even anti-institutional actors stand to materially benefit from greater adoption of crypto and its associated technologies, a point that Grey himself underscored.

Following such skepticism, a cynical take is that people will always behave in alignment with their own incentives, even when doing so causes harm to others. I have heard people espouse exactly this sentiment when excoriating scams, NFT rug pulls, or even failed DeFi applications. Yet such a bleak view of humanity is overly simplistic given the body of empirical data about human prosocial behavior (e.g., Fehr, Fischbacher & Kosfeld, 2005). People can and often do behave in ways that are altruistic or in the service of others, even at a cost to themselves. Many advocates both for and against institutionalization of the web3 and cryptocurrency sector are likely motivated by a sincere desire to benefit their fellow man. But intentions arent the only thing that matters. The positive and negative real-world impacts of blockchain applications both direct and indirect are critical. Whether this increasingly institutionalized sector will spark a real revolution or further entrench SSDD remains to be seen.

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Dcentral vs. Consensus: Are institutions frens or enemies of crypto? - Freedom to Tinker

While the freezes were bad news for Bitcoin investors that are already suffering a historic downturn, they also expose a contradiction at the heart of the cryptocurrency world.

For all the industrys promises of decentralising finance, those who have exchanged their cash for crypto have done little more than put their faith in one financial gatekeeper over another.

Binance and Celsius customers savings were no more free for being in Bitcoin. They were still subject to the whims of an intermediary with the power to shut its doors and cut off users, just as they would be with a bank.

The key difference is that if a cryptocurrency company goes bust, there is no regulation protecting deposits.

Yes, Bitcoin technically operates independently of any institution or country, governed only by computer code and the network of miners that maintain it. This is why, strictly, it can never be regulated. You can download your bitcoin on to a hard drive and truly own it.

But most people dont: it is not worth the hassle or the risk. Instead, they store their cryptocurrencies in an online exchange where it can be easily withdrawn and liquidated.

Convenience wins over idealism, and as the current crop of Silicon Valley monopolies has shown, consumers drift towards centralisation.

Once it sits in an exchange where it can be converted, Bitcoin must interact with the rest of the financial system, making it subject to regulation.

Coinbase, one of the worlds biggest exchanges, deals with hundreds of law enforcement requests a week. Those operating in Britain are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Criminals are finding it increasingly difficult to convert stolen crypto into cash, because it is often seized when it enters an exchange.

As cryptocurrency companies come under closer scrutiny, they will start looking less representative of the libertarian ideal on which Bitcoin was founded and more like the ageing banks it was meant to replace.

At that point, we might start to wonder where its value comes from. If a couple of companies have the power to crash the entire market, Bitcoin does not look so free after all.

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The crypto crash proves it Bitcoin's libertarian dream is over - The Telegraph

With the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Federalist Society appears poised for a triumph. This organization of conservative and libertarian lawyers and law professors and students turns 40 this year.

Yet contrary to progressive perceptions, the societys function has not been solely, or even primarily, to roll back abortion and other elements of the sexual revolution. If you look at the full scope of its activities, you will notice that a far more important mission has been to mount an economic revolution of its own, on behalf of corporations and other powerful market actors.

The Federalist Society has become a judicial pipeline of the Republican Party, helping to supply numerous nominees to the federal bench. In the progressive imagination, the society is a secretive cabal of theocrats and cultural reactionaries. In reality, it is best understood as a professional-development club for what the writer Michael Lind calls libertarians in robes who shift power from working-class voters to overclass judges.

The society was largely one of many institutions nurtured by the right wing of the American donor class to roll back the legal and material achievements of U.S. workers dating back to the New Deal and to elevate economic deregulation to high moral and constitutional principle. In tandem, other right-of-center institutions emerged to solidify Americas status abroad as a hegemon guarding the rule of global capital against rival claimants for organizing world order.

None of this is news to leftist critics of 20th-century conservatism. But a growing number of dissidents within conservatism view these legacy institutions not just the Federalist Society but also the Heritage Foundation, National Review Institute and others as ultimately hostile to core commitments that ought to inform the right. These would include cultivation of republican and personal virtue that rests on common prosperity and, yes, a measure of material equality; robust social-democratic support, especially for working families, who shouldnt have to choose between paying their bills and having children; and modesty about Washingtons role in foreign affairs.

Yet the institutions of Conservatism Inc. persist in advancing a pro-business agenda despite opposition from the large populist-right segment of the Republican rank and file. While the G.O.P. has never been a workers party, many of its voters are. Yet Conservatism Inc. refuses to embrace a multiethnic, working-class ethos.

Having seen the workings of institutional conservatism firsthand for several decades, we believe that the best way to understand the contemporary conservative intellectual movement is by examining the material interests that underwrite its workings and shape its mission. Those material interests arent all perfectly in agreement with one another, which is why the organizations in question dont always play nice together. There are disagreements at the margins. But the North Star of all is rule by large corporate and financial power, and support for militarism and cultural aggression abroad.

The Federalist Society itself offers the best illustration of the misguided development of movement conservatism. Hot-button social questions are sometimes fiercely contested among those with ties to the society. For instance, it was Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch who in 2020 led a majority of the court in ruling that sexual orientation and gender identity apply to the 1964 Civil Rights Acts definition of sex. And Edward Whelan, an originalist stalwart, countered arguments in favor of constitutional protection of fetal personhood the likely next stage in the anti-abortion battle if or when Roe falls.

Where the society has been supremely effective and far more united is in the realm of political economy. In the same decades of progressive ascendancy on cultural issues, society-certified judges on the federal bench pushed through a raft of decisions aimed at thwarting collective action by workers and government action against monopolies.

Over the past several decades, society heroes like Justice Antonin Scalia upended decades of settled law and clear congressional intent to expand the use of commercial arbitration to employment and consumer contexts. This was despite the manifest imbalance in power between the parties agreeing to arbitrate their disputes.

The conservative legal scholar Robert Bork proposed reforms to U.S. antitrust law by arguing that it should focus on consumer welfare, often understood to mean lower prices, even if monopoly power means a less competitive economy lorded over by a few giant companies.

The Federalist Society is not the only conservative institution to pursue a similar, pro-corporate agenda. Others, like the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute and National Review Institute, also receive large sums from wealthy individuals and trusts and have similarly too often equated conservatism with a neoliberal, imperial agenda.

What does this tell us about whether the right can really be realigned with the working class? There are a number of smaller right-of-center institutions trying meaningfully to adapt, but Conservatism Inc. at best pays only lip service to working-class concerns. The largest institutions are still dedicated to inventing, often from whole cloth, as the Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich revolutionaries also did, a version of movement conservatism that holds at bay authentic American traditions that run counter to corporate interests.

In the republican tradition, the political economy must be embedded, with state intervention as needed, within a moral order. Yet the longstanding American tradition that fretted over compromises to civic virtue and democratic self-rule demanded by unchecked financial power and imperial expansion has very little institutional expression in todays Conservatism Inc.

In his farewell address, in 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower warned his compatriots about just this threat: the rise of a military-industrial complex that shuts out the primacy of public order and the common good to secure the economic commitments of corporate entities. This is what the conservative movement became, the jackals of Mammon. And it is what threatens the common good of the nation.

Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of the journal Compact. Patrick Deneen is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. Chad Pecknold is an associate professor of systematic theology at the Catholic University of America.

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Opinion | The Federalist Society Has Helped Create a Corporate-Friendly Court That Hurts U.S. Workers - The New York Times

Once a month, the local Republican Party of Dane County, Wisconsin gathers for an evening event called Pints and Politics. Tonights gathering is taking place on a June night at a small public park with a pavilion in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, one of several cities besides Madison in the heavily Democratic county. Some years back I was banned from the groups events for having written an accurate public account of one of them, but all has since been forgiven, and now I am as welcome as anyone.

Tonights lineup of speakers features seven candidates, including state representative and gubernatorial contender Tim Ramthun, who will be speaking last. The event organizer is Rolf Lindgren, a local libertarian of my long acquaintance. We talk soon after I arrive. He calls Donald Trump the most libertarian president weve had . . . ever: He got rid of the reviled Section 215. (Remember Michael Moore yelling about the Patriot Act?) He didnt start any new wars. He presided over a large drop in the number of federal prisoners. He banned the shackling of pregnant women in prison. And so on. Lindgrens priorities speak well of him.

About 50 people mill about, and even though they were invited to bring or cook food, hardly anyone is eatingor even drinking, which is unusual in Wisconsin. Scott Grabins, the local party chair, starts things off at 6 p.m.

We have an opportunity here, he tells the gathering. We have that . . . red wave coming. All you have to do is go down to the gas station. Rim shot, please.

Grabins is one of the ten Wisconsin Republicans who met in secret on Dec. 14, 2020after Trump lost Wisconsin by nearly 21,000 votesto sign an official-looking document purporting to declare Trump the winner on the authority of the states Republican electors. (At the same timein the same state capitol buildingthe states real electors were holding an official ceremony to authorize the states votes for Biden.) Republicans attempted the ruse in several states with the goal of giving Vice President Mike Pence an excuse to throw the election to Trump, which he declined to do. Two of Wisconsins actual electors recently filed suit against the pretend ones in the hope that doing so would prevent the losing side from attempting to subvert election outcomes in this manner in the future.

Notwithstanding the pending lawsuit against him, Grabins is jazzed tonight about the role that local Republicans will play in key races. Dane County has the third-largest number of Republicans in the state of Wisconsin, he says. We will determine who the next governor is, who the next attorney general is, who the state treasurer is, the secretary of state. We will determine whether Senator [Ron] Johnson goes back to the Senate.

He might be right. While Dane County is heavily Democraticin the 2020 election, Joe Biden beat Trump 77 percent to 22 percentthe level of enthusiasm that the people at this gathering can bring to bear on behalf of Republican candidates in the August 9 primary could prove pivotal in the November election.

Another speaker, candidate for state treasurer John Leiber, notes that the upcoming elections represent the GOPs best chance in half a century to clinch total control of Wisconsin state governmentnot just both houses of the legislature, but the offices of governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, state treasurer, and secretary of state. Its a distinct possibility.

In fact, what happens in this falls elections in Wisconsin could sway the outcome of the next presidential election, should Republicans regain the governors office and seize control of the states electoral apparatus. That is their stated intent. All anyone has to do is listen.

Early in the program, Lindgren points out to the audience me and journalist Dylan Brogan, playfully reminding everyone present that whatever they say might end up in the news.

The speakers are not noticeably inhibited.

Andrew McKinney, a candidate for state assembly and Sun Prairie School District employee, explains that Democrats conned him into running as a Democrat in a previous race and have since made him keep his mouth shut. No more: McKinney shares that when the HR director at a nonprofit he worked for pressed him to give his pronouns, the ones he gave her were motherfucker and motherfuckers.

Another speakerMatt Sande, legislative director of Pro-Life Wisconsincalls the likely repeal of Roe v. Wade a great first step, adding that his group will then work to remove the exception for saving the life of the mother from the 1849 Wisconsin anti-abortion law that could go back into effect if Roe is overturned. This is a spiritual battle, he says, urging people to just pray they stick to this [leaked draft] Alito decision.

Secretary of state candidate Jay Schroeder, who came close to beating the longtime incumbent, Democrat Doug La Follette, in 2018 and is now one of three Republicans vying for the chance to oppose him in November, tells the gathering that the person holding this office has to sign a sheet of paper to certify the states electors in the presidential election. Had he had this power in 2020, I would not have signed it. (Its not clear whether this would make the document invalid. La Follette, who signed it in 2020, tells me in an email that he doesnt know.)

But the nights most extraordinary speaker on the issue of election security is Jefferson E. Davis, chair of an ad hoc committee on voter integrity. Davis directs his attention to me and fellow reporter Brogan, hoping to end up in the news. He points to his car, a black Saab parked on the street. That car, he announces, is full of receipts and data that he would share afterward with the two of us to show how the election was stolen in Wisconsin.

If you think Joe Biden won the state of Wisconsin by 20,682 votes, if you think hes the sitting president . . . then Im the starting quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, he tells the gathering. Davis is not the Packers starting quarterback.

While a smooth speaker with plenty of ready-to-hand figures and percentages, Davis doesnt have much in the way of evidence to share with the larger group. He claims that Democrats visited tens of thousands of nursing home residents on election day to steal as many of their votes, their dignity, and their identity as possible. They also connived to send out as many absentee-ballot request forms as they could, even to people who didnt ask to receive them. Theyre gonna do it again in 2022, he warns.

Davis is immediately followed by Orville Seymer, a longtime conservative activist, who circulates a handout outlining an exciting new idea for Republican electoral success: Make a list of people you know, look up their voting history on the Wisconsin Elections Commissions website, and request that they be sent absentee ballot request forms; then swoop in to do everything for them except sign it. Youve just doubled your vote, and youve done it completely legally, he notes, correctly.

At last, the floor goes to the candidate Lindgren introduces as Radical Tim Ramthun. Ramthun gives a long, rambling talk that rotates like an elliptical around an idea he puts this way: When election integrity doesnt happen, and nefarious acts and illegal acts result in [the] wrong people being in seats, youve got problems like we have now in our society. Its a big deal.

Ramthun is vying for the GOPs gubernatorial nomination against former Lieutenant Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and businessmen Kevin Nicholson and Tim Michels. He tells the group he spoke with Trump for seven minutes and 45 seconds in December (He said, Youre my kind of guy.) and again at Mar-a-Lago in April, after which he heard from others that he would be getting Trumps nod. Instead, in May, Trump endorsed Michels. Ramthun is still scratching his head: I heard Reince Preibus was involved. Moneys probably involved.

Ramthun also recounts his clashes with Robin Vos, the Republican who is speaker of the Wisconsin assembly. At Trumps instigation, Voslaunched a probe into the 2020 election result that had already survived a recount and a state supreme court ruling. The probe that has thus far cost taxpayers nearly $900,000 and uncovered no fraudexcept the unsupportable claims made by those conducting it. After Ramthun falsely accused Republicans of signing a pact with Hillary Clinton to authorize voting dropboxes, Vos stripped him of his sole staff member. Radical Tim assures the gathering that he is undaunted.

People continue just to tell me, Well, Tim, youre a conspiracy theorist or Its not constitutional. The only word that comes to mind for me is ignorance. The facts, he says, continue to pour out: You cant dispute the data. The geospatial ping data qualifies [as] fact. Period.

Ramthun at one point refers to the Democrat-orchestrated riot that happened on January 6thYes, I said it that way; write that down, he notes to me and Broganbut he doesnt elaborate on the claim. So, at the end of his talk, I raise my hand and ask Ramthun to explain what he meant. Here is what he says:

In my opinion, I am aware of seven states that were coming to that certification event on January 6th to object to it. It is my opinion that Democrat leadership knew of that and did not want the objection to happen. The seven states were the swing states, including Nevada and New Mexico, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. So the reason I said it is because the plan is clear: They were going to object to the certification on January 6th on the floor, and every state was going to have to vote independent. It was going to string it out and be a big deal and it was going to be chaotic for the side that wanted it donethey wanted to rubber stamp it, they didnt want that, so lets cause a deflection. Lets create something, and well just make it happen automatic and no one will know better, because theyll be focused on the other thing that happenedwhich, by the way, worked very well. My opinion.

Who needs congressional hearings when you can have the events of January 6th explained as clearly as this?

By the way, at no point during the event does anyone concerned about election integrity mention Grabinss participation in an actual plot to subvert the 2020 election result.

As the event concludes, Jefferson Davis tries to follow through on his offer to show me and Brogan the receipts and other evidence hes keeping in his Saab that the states 2020 election was stolen. Its late, the Brewers are playing, and Im hungryas is everyone else who came to this cookout but didnt eat, I imagineso I leave. Later, Brogan texts a photo of Davis with some of the papers and offers this disappointing report: guy talked to me for 40 mins, pulled out a bunch of binders with spreadsheets but finally admitted nothing he showed was proof, but thats coming.

I can hardly wait.

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Fear and Loathing in Dane County - The Bulwark