Local leader playing with fire

On Wednesday evening I wrote to Assemblyman John Salka asking whether he supported democratic governance or insurrection.

On Thursday morning I received a reply from Mr. Salka’s Community Relations Director who suggested that because it was such a hefty question and a nuanced topic, it would be best if I spoke with the assemblyman directly.

Although I agree that the question was hefty, I didn’t really see the nuance in the topic. A band of the president’s supporters had swarmed the Capitol to prevent the official confirmation of the legitimate election result. My question was in essence, “Do you think this is OK?” How much nuance was entailed in answering that?

Nonetheless, I appreciated the assemblyman’s willingness to talk with a random constituent, and we set up a time for yesterday afternoon.

My expectation was that Mr. Salka would make a clear and public statement about the legitimacy of President-elect Biden’s election as part of a clear and public denunciation of the insurrection that happened on Wednesday.

The short story is that he was not willing to do that.

He purports to believe that the election was stolen.

Regarding the insurrection, he doesn't want to be hasty with any public remarks before we really know  who was involved, because he heard that "antifa" or other leftists may have been involved.

The bulk of my long reply follows.

Dear Assemblyman Salka,

I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me yesterday.

I am disturbed, however, by how firmly you cling to hopes of narratives that will exonerate your political faction, in the absence of the least bit of substantive evidence for them.

Regarding your continued devotion to election conspiracies, I note your response in our exchange about affidavits, which you brought up as some of the evidence of wrongdoing. I pointed out that in some cases the affidavits were disregarded because the affiants hadn’t participated in observer-training sessions and therefore didn’t know that the behaviors they saw were absolutely routine.

This seemed like new information for you, but it gave you no pause. You learned that there was no substance in one of the things you thought discredited the election, and you didn’t reflect, you didn’t take a moment to ponder what other pieces of “evidence” might be equally worthless. You weren’t the least bit prepared to defend the position you were arguing. Nor did you care to. You abandoned that point and retreated to the platitude that we have no way of knowing what might be discovered eventually.

In other words, you have no evidence, and you don’t know of any evidence, but you’re still willing to question the integrity of the election.

In our call I mentioned Monday’s press conference by Gabriel Sterling, the elections manager for the state of Georgia, in which he systematically debunked President Trump’s baseless claims about the Georgia election. You can see it here. (And I made sure to find a clip with the awesome sign-language interpreter whom I mentioned.)

If you’ve got time to question the integrity of the election, you should be able to find 30 minutes to watch this. After you do, you should ask yourself the following questions:

1. Which statement or statements of Mr. Sterling are wrong?
2. If you think he made one or more wrong statements, what is your evidence that his is wrong?
3. Mr. Sterling is the elections manager for the state of Georgia. You are an assemblyman from the state of New York. Why do you think your information about Georgia’s elections is better than his?
4. Mr. Sterling is a Republican, working for a Republican secretary of state and a Republican governor. All three men say they support President Trump and wish he had won the election. They say the election result was a disappointment to them but that it was legitimate. You question whether it was, which implies that they are lying and covering up fraud that stole the election from their preferred candidate. What is their motivation to cover up this fraud?
5. If Mr. Sterling is correct and the Georgia election was legitimate, how likely is it that the claims of fraud in other states are similarly baseless?

And I have to reiterate a point I made in our call. Claims of significant election fraud have been rejected by:

• the election managers in all 50 states, Democrats and Republicans alike;
• judges around the country, appointed by various presidents, including President Trump (and while some cases have been dismissed for lack of standing, in other cases judges have actually examined the so-called evidence and dismissed it, for reasons ranging from the affiant ignorance of normal election procedure, as discussed above, to the affidavit being hearsay);
• Christopher Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (appointed by Mr. Trump into the newly created position, and then fired by President Trump days after Mr. Krebs declared the election had been secure);
• William Barr, the Attorney General of the United States (appointed by President Trump, but who resigned not long after announcing the absence of significant fraud).

These are the people whose jobs it is to oversee and investigate these things. Of course it’s possible all of them are wrong, but to challenge them without evidence is to invite anarchy. If each of us is free to create and act upon our own reality outside the legitimate channels of authority, judgement, and decision-making, it is impossible for democratic government to function. And as I said on the phone, by lodging evidence-free doubts about the legitimacy of President-elect Biden, you deny the basis of your own legitimacy in office.

Moving on, you entertain the possibility that Wednesday’s attempted coup was instigated by antifa or others opposed to the president, despite the fact that, with numerous individuals having been identified, several of them are well known figures in Q-Anon and one (so far) is a Republican state legislator while not a single person has been identified with any connection to opposition to President Trump.

The man who sat at Speaker Pelosi’s desk has been identified; not anti-Trump.

The woman who was shot and killed forcing her way through a door left a large social-media footprint; not anti-Trump.

When we find out who set up the noose outside the building, or who it was climbing through the Senate chamber with a sidearm and a fist full of zip-tie handcuffs, will you honestly be surprised to learn these were not “antifa,” nor anybody else but people following the president’s call to “be strong” and to give Republican Senators and Representatives their spines?

The FBI now says there’s no evidence of antifa involvement.

In the unlikely case that some anti-Trump instigators are eventually found, how many do you think there will be?

And what is your story about how otherwise well-intentioned supporters of the president got goaded into storming our seat of government, beating a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher, stealing electronic devices, damaging the building, and smearing feces?

Did antifa somehow trick Lonnie Coffman into loading his vehicle with a handgun, an assault rifle, ammunition, and materials to create Molotov cocktails?

Was it antifa that used mind-control to force Cleveland Meredith into making interstate threats against Speaker Pelosi?

Did antifa hijack the social-media accounts of Trump supporters before the coup and make them share their plans for occupying the Capitol?

The day after the insurrection, we’re only exaggerating a little to say that half of Parler was people blaming the coup attempt on leftist infiltrators, while the other half was conservatives celebrating their own participation in the assault.

You say that the attack on the Capitol was abhorrent to you and that the people involved should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. President Trump, according to his own words, doesn’t seem to agree with you about it being abhorrent. During the insurrection he first called on his supporters to “remain peaceful,” but he didn’t tell them to leave. When he did finally call on them to go home, he also said, “We love you. You’re very special.” How are you better informed about who carried out this assault than the very president of the United States of America?

Your hypothesis seems to be that antifa didn’t stop at planning and leading this coup d’etat staffed by numerous Proud Boys, Q-Anon enthusiasts, and a sprinkling of Republican state legislators. They were so audacious as to maneuver the president himself into praising it.

Did I get that right?

You said you were looking at various sources of news—“not just Fox, of course,” in your own words. I’d like you to watch this report by Chris Hayes from MSNBC. After you do, you should ask yourself similar questions as after watching Mr. Sterling:

1. Are there specific statements in Mr. Hayes’ report that are inaccurate?
2. If you think some things that Mr. Hayes says are inaccurate, what is your evidence that those things are inaccurate?

An obvious question is what right I have to tell you how to spend your time, and here’s the answer to that. You are questioning the legitimacy of an election, without evidence, and now that this doubt-mongering has resulted in a violent insurrection, you’re trying to shift the blame, again without evidence, from supporters of President Trump onto “leftists” or “antifa.” If your allegations about the election are wrong, then you are threatening our continued existence as a democratic republic. An hour of your precious time confronting the evidence against your claims is literally the least I could ask of an elected representative who is thinking of supporting sedition.

Here’s the obvious truth of the situation: the president you support lost a fair election, and it wasn’t close. In the aftermath of that loss, his supporters planned and tried to carry out a violent insurrection to prevent the final certification of the election result, overturning the will of the clear majority. Even before the violence broke out, 140 members of Congress pledged to try overturning that clear majority by means that are non-violent but also anti-democratic. Even after the violence, most of those elected representatives stuck to their rhetorical guns and tried to nullify the results of an election.

We need you to stop adding your bit of kindling to the flame that threatens to engulf us. We need you to step up and speak out in defense of democratic governance.

A follow-up letter from Monday, January 11th is here.