'The lie of democracy' - Welcome to American Doom

To new subscribers and old friends, welcome to my corner of this strange country.

An insurrectionist who was at the Capitol on January 6 emailed me yesterday to clarify remarks he made about the “lie of democracy” in my recent Rolling Stone story that details how election deniers have attempted to subvert democracy by refusing to certify election results. I wanted to know exactly what he meant by the comment — whether he meant that we were living under a sort of fake democracy, being lied to that we were actually free, or that democracy itself was a lie. He never really clarified which of those two definitions was the one he preferred, although he did say that the “lie of Democracy” stems from the fact that the federal government is even remotely involved in Americans’ lives. 

All representation in government should come locally, Couy Griffin told me. “The Federal Government should not be legislating over the people,” he added, and “should only be worried about our own border” while “any legislation should come from local governments.”

This makes sense coming from Griffin, who is the first person since the Civil War to have been removed from office under the insurrection clause of the constitution — a decision that was upheld yesterday when the Supreme Court decided not to hear Griffin’s appeal. “For the SCOTUS to allow activist judges [...] to remove elected officials is a very dangerous legal precedent to set,” Griffin said when I asked him about the court’s decision. “This is the greatest threat to our Republic that we’ve seen yet and it’s a disgrace on every front.” 

Funny, because what the Supreme Court essentially decided in not hearing Griffin’s appeal of a prior court’s ruling is that Griffin himself is a threat to the republic, a threat so serious that he has been barred from public office where he could legislate over the people in his area of New Mexico. You see, the thing about people like Griffin is, for all their talk of freedom from tyranny, they envision an America in which only people like Griffin count, where only people like Griffin get their way.

Griffin has been barred from being able to enact government policy over his fellow Americans because he openly participated in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election. But he is far from alone. As I’ve detailed over the past four years, Griffin is joined by hundreds of local election officials and thousands of men and women in positions of power across the country in his beliefs in lies about the 2020 election. Griffin, like many of those officials, used his position of power to enact policies based on those beliefs. Simply put: he used his position in government to try to overturn an election he didn’t believe in. He was and is the definition of an insurrectionist. 

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Much has been made since 2020 about threats to democracy. Newsrooms have staffed teams to track these threats and the people who embody them. Journalists have connected the dots between members of Congress, right-wing influencers and celebrities, and average Americans who participated in the attack at the Capitol on January 6. Those dots have often led all the way up to the Trump White House, which was wholly complicit if not actively engaged in the attempted insurrection that day. But many of these (very important) journalistic endeavors have focused from the top down: what did Trump know and when did he know it? Who in Congress was involved in plans to try to overturn the election? And what have these people in the highest positions of power in this country been doing to subvert democracy in the years since? While these questions are crucial to understanding the attempt to overturn the will of the people in 2020 — and guard against future efforts from what can be best described as an authoritarian insurgency — they often fail to get to the core issue that many less-prominent Americans in our own communities are engaged in this ongoing insurrection. This has been the focus of my reporting over the last four years, and the work of exposing these men and women is not going away any time soon. 

For those of you who are new to American Doom, my investigations of election deniers and other insurrectionists is the primary focus here, but that’s just a part of what I cover. American Doom is the embodiment of my life’s work in journalism — the distillation and continued chronicling of the dark side of the American experiment. That work began in my hometown of Peoria, Illinois, where I worked for a newspaper that is now mostly dead, covering crime. I covered unrest in Ferguson followed by police shootings across the country as well as other major news events like Micah Johnson’s rampage in Dallas — where, oddly enough, I met my wife — and the Las Vegas massacre. In Texas, I spent a lot of time at the border writing about the struggles of migrants. Since moving to Georgia I’ve covered the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, which was the last time I wrote one of these “welcome to my world” pieces. Since then I’ve mainly focused on elections and threats to democracy, along with Black land loss, which is where that photo above comes from: a county commissioner here in Georgia who didn’t like my questions (that’s me holding the green hat) about the conflict of interest between her job as a realtor and her position as a legislator who was responsible for changes to zoning law that threaten a historic and perhaps doomed slave descendant community on Sapelo Island.

American Doom is a place for me to share the findings of these investigations and more, as well as observations from my travels, where my eye is constantly drawn to the dark, weird, absurd, troubling, and occasionally hopeful aspects of American life. These themes and concepts are also the focus of my first book, If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened, which will be published next year by the University of Georgia Press. For those of you who have been around for a while and are wondering why I’m re-explaining what I do and what American Doom is all about, you can view my appearance on Rachel Maddow’s show last night, in which I discussed the Republican election officials who have refused to certify election results in recent years, the subject of my latest Rolling Stone story.

Since re-launching this newsletter as American Doom last month, I’ve been overwhelmed by the kindness and support of my readers. In the coming weeks and months, I’m rolling out a podcast to serve as a companion to the written pieces you see here. Upcoming posts include more exclusive findings about election deniers in positions of power around the country, as well as ongoing news and analysis of all the things that doom us in this pivotal election year.

As my former colleague at the Peoria Journal Star used to say, “stay tuned.”

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P.S. If you’ve chosen a free subscription to American Doom, you have access to this entire post as well as the occasional free post here. However, most of my pieces on American Doom are behind a paywall. I’m an independent journalist and my independence is helped along by paid subscribers to this newsletter. If you appreciate this work, please consider a paid subscription for as low as $5 a month.