With 16 Michigan Republicans now indicted for multiple felonies in a scam to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 Presidential election, GOP activists were aggressively defensive last week in the Donald Trump fortress of Macomb County.
Unlike at other Republican gatherings this year in the Great Lakes State, they weren’t fighting among themselves. Instead, they met on a balmy night in their shopping plaza storefront headquarters in Clinton Township to denounce their common enemies.
“No crime has been committed,” claimed Mark Forton, the 76-year-old county chairman. “The crime is this woman who is a socialist Democrat. And they are out to destroy the opposition. There are 16 people who are being unjustly, not just prosecuted, but persecuted.”
He spoke primarily of Michigan Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel (who indicted the fake electors for forgery); and in general about President Joe Biden who, Forton added, is a decrepit, old man who is part of a socialist/Marxist/globalist plot to dominate the Earth.
After hosting a news conference and then running a regular meeting, Forton sat for an expanded interview with Metro Times about Nessel’s indictments.
The AG has alleged that the 16 fake Republican electors — think of them as the “Cheat Sixteen” — presented themselves on paper as legitimate and tried to illegally swing Michigan’s 16 electoral votes from Biden (who won by 50.6% of the vote) to Trump.
He claimed Democrats like Nessel, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, and the Democratic-controlled Legislature in the state capital are all conspiring against both the Constitution and capitalism.
“Every Constitutional right is being violated in Lansing,” Forton said, citing the First Amendment for free speech and the Second for guns. “It’s all about socialism. Michigan is targeted to be a socialist state. It is already.”
He said laws pending in the state capital would discourage frank discussions of sex so that “If you disapprove of this transgender lunacy, it’s a felony,” referring to misinformation spreading online about House Bill 4474, which would expand Michigan’s hate crime law to include protections for LGBTQ+ people.
He defined what he said his enemies want and how they expect their victims to accept it.
“The New World Order is globalism, which is socialism, which is communism,” Forton said. “You and I will own nothing and we will be happy. If that’s not Marxism, I don’t know what the hell is. We’re going to own nothing and I guarantee we’re not going to be happy.”
He certainly was not happy about Biden.
“That lame old man, that filthy, left-wing dog,” the Macomb Republican leader said of the President. “He can’t talk. He literally can’t talk. The guy don’t know where he’s at half the time.”
Although Biden won Michigan in 2020, Trump won Macomb County with 53.4% of the vote. In 2016, Macomb voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton by 53.6%. Forton said Trump would win the county again in 2024 and, like Trump, he contended that Biden prevailed in 2020 only by cheating.
“Donald Trump is the president of the United States,” he claimed. “It was a coup. They’ve got so much evidence it’s sickening.”
Although Forton spoke fighting words, his demeanor was calm and composed compared to scenes at other Republican gatherings this year in Michigan. Consider, for instance, the fight earlier this month outside a county meeting at a hotel in Clare.
As one Michigan Republican said of another, “He kicked me in my balls as soon as I opened the door.”
As reported by the Detroit News, the alleged combatants were James Chapman of Wayne County (the alleged kicker, who was excluded from the meeting at a hotel in Clare) and Mark DeYoung (the alleged victim of the kick who is Clare County’s Republican Chair).
Chapman began the confrontation by repeatedly jiggling the knob to the locked door in the meeting room, it was reported. He alleged that DeYoung opened it and said “I’ll kick your ass” and swung at him; DeYoung alleged someone had provoked him through a window in the door with a finger gesture.
Democrats have taken advantage of Republican infighting and of public revulsion toward the Trump era to swing the state today from red to blue.
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A slightly less violent incident occurred at the same hotel this spring when two Republican women exchanged harsh words and menacing body language in the hotel bar.
According to Bridge (and to the video recording Bridge posted online), Kalamazoo County Chair Kelly Sackett and Macomb County GOP Secretary Melissa Pehlis quarreled about the new administration of state chair Kristina Karamo, who has said she believes demonic possession can be sexually transmitted.
Might demon rum have triggered the bar fight? Pehlis, on video, shouts several times in a mocking tone of voice “By the power vested in me!” and appears to stalk Sackett about the room as others try to intervene.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Sackett advises Pehlis, who declines.
Then, Bridge reported, “Sackett appeared to knock a cigarette and phone from the hand of Pehlis, who responded by thrusting an open hand at Sackett’s head.”
In the video, a man shouts, “Now, we got a problem!”
Of course, he could have been referring to his radical party at the county, state, and national level. In Michigan in particular, Democrats have taken advantage of Republican infighting and of public revulsion toward the Trump era to swing the state today from red to blue.
In a recent profile of Whitmer in the New Yorker, author Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: “What’s happening in the Midwest, one of Whitmer’s advisers told me, is a ‘Tea Party in reverse.’”
As a result, Michigan’s female leaders have become high-profile party representatives for progressive causes. After Nessel indicted the fake electors, it was not Nessel who explained it on “The Last Word” with Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC.
Instead, it was Benson. Over her left shoulder was a wall poster of a superhero who looked a lot like Whitmer (but turned out to be Wonder Woman). It was Benson’s office that suspended Shelby Township Clerk (and Macomb Republican) Stanley Grot from election activities because he is one of the 16 indicted.
Perhaps the progressive backlash in play now is the result of a decade in which the state has been menaced by armed “militias” patrolling the Capitol building and plotting to kidnap and kill the governor.
Although the New Yorker piece centered on Whitmer, it quoted discouraged Republicans like Susy Avery, a fund-raiser in Hillsdale County, the home of Hillsdale College, a center of right-wing, Christian nationalism allied with the Republican Party.
“This time in Michigan politics is unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” she said. “It’s very challenging.”
But the well-reported story also quotes Angela Witwer, a Democratic member of the Legislature from Eaton County who now chairs the House Appropriations Committee and still sees vestiges of right-wing backlash that began more than a decade ago with the Tea Party’s angry reaction to the election of America’s first Black president, Barack Obama (who, notably, won Macomb County in 2012 and 2008).
She told Wallace-Wells that her district includes “a ton of farms and little tiny villages that are hanging out Confederate flags everywhere. ‘Fuck Biden’ flags are everywhere.”
When she decided to run for the first time in 2018, she said, she considered both parties for affiliation.
But she chose the Democrats, she said, because they were better organized.
“Also,” she added, “they aren’t crazy.”
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