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The progressive coalition Fight Back Table has been meeting to game out what happens if Joe Biden doesn’t win by a landslide. It’s not pretty.
Sam Stein
Politics Editor
Updated Sep. 08, 2020 11:22AM ET / Published Sep. 07, 2020 9:05PM ET
Last week, a coalition of leading progressive groups gathered on Zoom to begin organizing for what they envision as the post-Election Day political apocalypse scenario.
Put together by the Fight Back Table—an initiative launched after the 2016 election to get a constellation of lefty organizations to work more closely together—the meeting dealt with the operational demands expected if the November election ends without a clear outcome or with a Joe Biden win that Donald Trump refuses to recognize.
Sources familiar with the discussions described them as serious with a modestly panicked undertone. A smaller FBT session last fall had talked about post-election planning, but those discussions were tabled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was the first time they were bringing the matter to the 50-plus organizations that make up the coalition. To formalize the effort, they gave it a name: the “Democracy Defense Nerve Center.”
Over the course of two hours, participants broached the question of what the progressive political ecosystem can functionally do in a series of election scenarios. They began charting out what it would take to stand up a multi-state communications arm to fight disinformation, a training program for nonviolent civil disobedience, and the underpinnings of what one official described as “mass public unrest.” And they pored over a report from the Transition Integrity Project, a bipartisan group formed in 2019, that analyzed various election-season scenarios and made clear the type of ratfuckery, corruption, and chaos that potentially was ahead.
“The potential for violent conflict is high,” the report noted.
Within Fight Back Table, there is disagreement over how secretive they should be about these talks. Those on the side of keeping plans under wraps felt it would be wise not to advertise their prep work. Those in favor of discussing it openly thought there was utility in the public knowing how bad things could actually get.
The latter camp was bolstered in their belief by a white paper from Brooks’ Transition Integrity Project titled “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition.” The 22-page document—which Brooks summarized in The Washington Post and which was obtained by The Daily Beast—described four simulation exercises: a clear Biden win, a narrow Biden win, a murky result, and a Trump Electoral College win with popular vote loss. Those simulations were played out with 67 prominent public officials and academics role-playing on seven teams: the Trump campaign, the Biden campaign, Republican elected officials, Democratic elected officials, career federal government employees, the media, and the public.
In some simulations, the Trump team “succeeded in invoking the Insurrection Act and sending active duty military troops into U.S. cities to ‘restore order,’ ‘protect’ voting places, or confiscate ‘fraudulent’ ballots.” In others, the team “had Attorney General Bill Barr order the seizure of mail-in ballots to ensure that vote counting would stop.” Those running the simulations said there was “quite a bit of speculation that Trump might himself initiate a foreign crisis shortly after the election or during the transition, perhaps to change the media narrative.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-left-secretly-preps-for-violence-after-election-day
