The "Hired Goons" stage.

As a general rule, "vote for our guy or we'll
fucking end you" is probably a sign that you
should reevaluate your political leanings.

I guess what I'm saying is that you might be voting for the wrong people if they're doing shit like hiring cops to intimidate voters. I say this because this. It's a story from the Star Tribune, a Minnesota paper-ok, news site because news papers aren't really at thing anymore. Anyway, it's about how the Minneapolis police union is hiring retired police to watch the polls in "problem areas" around the city. To watch the polls on behalf of the Trump campaign. Yup, we're now at the "hired goons" stage of collapsing democracy.

Nobody likes lockdo-and are they going to
shoot the virus? What's even their plan here?

This request came from William Willingham, an attorney for the Trump Campaign. He's asking Bob Kroll, president of the Minneapolis police union to recruit "poll challengers" and is careful to say that they shouldn't carry weapons or look intimidating but I mean, they're going to. Look intimidating and carry weapons I mean. Like, we're talking about a bunch of ex-cops staring down voters in a state where Trump fans circled the state house waving guns out their pickup truck windows (again with the pickups) because they didn't like the COVID lockdown. 

Pictured: the President violating
Federal regulation 2635.702.
Not pictured: consequences.

Of course they're going to carry weapons and Willingham is just going to say "Well, I told them not to. Whatta you gonna do?" It's the Trump era MO: do a crime, reap the benefit of said crime and then accuse anyone who calls you out on it of politicizing something. And I get that unions routinely endorse political candidates. That's normal. Hiring people to intimidate voters is not. In fact, it's against state and federal law, although, c'mon, when has that stopped the GOP? 

Hey, and what do you suppose Willingham means when he says "problem areas" or "rough neighborhoods?" Because, I mean, in the infinite universes suggested by our admittedly limited understanding of quantum mechanics, there is no world, no parallel reality in which this doesn't refer to neighborhoods expected to lean Democratic. Not one.

Above: a rough neighborhood.

(source: William Willingham,

attorney for the Trump campaign)