David Clements: The Evangelist of Election Refusal
Published by The Lawfare Institute in Cooperation With
In the final moments of the training exercise, dozens of people surrounded a woman who was shouting about defective voting machines.
They were shielding her from a sheriff’s deputy—or, rather, a man assigned to play the role of a sheriff’s deputy—who was trying to evict her from the faux event.
The trainees had been instructed that American elections are rigged and that they are battling a “spiritual war” against election fraud. They had been told that they could resist “tyranny” by showing up en masse to pressure local officials to withhold certification of voting machines or election results.
And at this climactic moment, at the direction of a former business law professor named David Clements, they were role-playing large-scale civil disobedience at a local elections meeting, crowding around a fellow comrade-in-arms to physically block law enforcement from removing her from a public meeting at which she was filibustering.
Later, Clements assured trainees that this is the only way to fight back: “You have to create a righteous, sober-minded, well-spoken, articulate mob, if you will, because that’s the only thing that will work short of where we’re headed, which is a kinetic civil war—if we don’t get this resolved peacefully.”
