The hearings for the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 are entering their third week, showing just how close democracy came to ending in America. But we’re not out of the weeds yet. Far from it, as even Bill Maher has noted. On Sunday night’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the host looked at some of the extreme MAGA candidates that have arisen thanks to Donald Trump, who are far nuttier than even the guy who occasionally accidentally blurts out the truth.
Oliver started with the architect of Trump’s brazen plan to overturn the election: John Eastman, his legal adviser at the time of the failed insurrection. “Eastman was the one who devised the theory that Mike Pence could single-handedly negate the election results,” Oliver said. “The idea that a single person could decide the presidency is completely against the ideals of this country, which is why the Constitution starts with ‘We the people’ and not ‘Mike.’”
He then turned to the more than 100 GOP primary winners in this year’s midterm elections who have embraced Trump’s “Big Lie.” Alarmingly, many of them are running for secretary of state, which would give them undue influence in how elections are carried out. One of them is Jim Marchant, who’s running for that position in Nevada and who declared that his state’s voters “have not elected anybody since 2006 — they’ve been installed by the deep state cabal.” When asked to elaborate on who, exactly, is electing politicians, he replied, “I don’t know, actually. I think it’s a global thing. The people in power want to maintain their power.”
“Wow. The people of Nevada have not legitimately elected anybody since 2006?” Oliver said. “That is a pretty bold claim—especially coming from the guy who himself was elected to the state assembly there in 2016.”
Marchant, Oliver pointed out, is part of a group known as the America First Secretary of State Coalition, who seek to gain control of the election process. Among them is New Mexico candidate Audrey Trujillo, who’s said “a lot of people, whether we can prove it or not, feel that this election was stolen.”
Then there’s Kristana Karamo, a proud anti-vaxxer and candidate for secretary of state in Michigan, who believes the Democratic party “has totally been overtaken by a satanic agenda.” She’s also against premarital sex, saying that that opens “a door for us to get to the point where we have people who want to normalize pedophilia.”
“These are just three of the worrying candidates for secretary of state around the country,” Oliver concluded. “There are many, many others, which should frankly give everyone pause, because the Jan. 6 committee is reminding everybody just how close we came to democracy basically collapsing. It was a handful of people in the right position choosing to do the right thing that saved us from a constitutional crisis. But there are multiple candidates running for consequential positions right now on the platform of basically, ‘Let’s do the coup again, but better next time.’”
(Via The Daily Beast)