Historian and presidential biographer John Meacham has a new documentary podcast called Fate of Fact. The podcast’s producers describe it this way:
Throughout the course of five episodes in season one of this audio documentary, Pulitzer-Prize winning and best-selling historian, Jon Meacham and esteemed guests, will explore the question of how fear conquered truth, the history and origins of the strong grip misinformation and disinformation have on our politics, and how we got here today.
Meacham will trace the roots of America’s prevailing culture of polarization, with an emphasis on why the right has chosen to break with a governing consensus that, however imperfect, was once embodied by the figurative conversation between Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Fate of Fact offers a historically grounded perspective on the forces that led to the presidency of Donald Trump and the insurrection of January 6—an attack on the Capitol and on democracy as grave as any American moment since the Civil War.
The story of life is change, a reality that can be hard to embrace sometimes. Cycles of change, and life’s adaptation to change, are the animating force of nature, and the story of human history. The only constant in life, we learn, is constant change — and, as we also learn, constant resistance to change. Most human conflict has its origins in change and resistance to change.
I recall a racist teacher at my elementary school, snarling at some of the Black students who’d been bused into PS178 starting when I was in third grade. This nasty woman was a fifth grade teacher I would later butt heads with when I was in her class, but I barely knew her as I sat in the lunchroom that day. I had a front row seat, on the long lunch table bench, to her shameful performance shortly after the first Black students arrived in our quiet little public school on a hill.
She was on lunch duty, tasked with keeping order in the lunchroom. As a teacher years later I’d learn how odious this rotating duty was. It was a thankless job trying to keep a lid on childish energy during their lunch break, a work assignment, during what was usually your own lunch hour, requiring patience and humor — neither of which this woman had that day.
I vividly remember my disgust, as a boy, watching her mistreatment of a Black kid named Adrian, who was probably ten years old. For some reason, she was telling him over and over that he’d be on Welfare in a few years. I remember his face as he shot back that she’d be on Welfare, and her face. I didn’t know, at the time, that this snobbish woman was a racist, I barely understood what that was, but I know it very well now.
She was upset about a big change, I realize decades later, and being on the losing side of what she felt was a righteous war, and she was acting out like angry people often do. Her side had lost the long battle to keep PS178 segregated. There were two armed camps in the PTA, one stridently opposed to busing kids from other neighborhoods in to integrate the school as the Supreme Court had ordered a decade earlier (this group sometimes derided the other side as “Commies”), the other faction, the “Nigger-lovers,” (in the colorful phrase used in liberal NYC in the mid-sixties) put on a Brotherhood play called the Lonely Abelonian, shortly after the school was finally de-segregated when I was in third grade.
We went to school one evening to watch the play put on by our mothers in the school auditorium. They were dressed as various animals, in pairs (my mother hopped around in a tan kangaroo outfit with her fellow kangaroo, their big ears flapping, their long, sturdy tails slapping the stage, my classmate Rani’s mother crawled on her stomach in a snake outfit alongside her snake friend played by my mother’s best friend Arlene). When the solitary Abelonian tried to join, she was shunned by the other animals. I recall my mother and the other kangaroo, turning tail and hopping indignantly away when the Abelonian asked “will you be my friend?” In the end, of course, everyone discovered the Abelonian was a lot like them, and remembered how painful it is to be lonely, and they were all playful friends as the curtain fell.
The white kids in school, as far as I recall, didn’t need the lesson of this idealistic play. I don’t remember any tension between neighborhood kids and the new students who arrived on the E, F and G buses (though, it could be, as is my prerogative as someone not the object of racism, that I didn’t see it because it wasn’t directed at me). The presence of Black kids, and their parents, was only a major problem to people like that racist teacher.
They no doubt felt that their perfect little school (it had the highest test scores in Queens, NY, possibly all of New York City, at the time) was being ruined by the forced admission of Black kids from other, less desirable, neighborhoods (with worse schools, kind of proving the whole point of de-segregation…), with all that goes with being forced to associate with people you didn’t want to associate with.
We can go down the catalogue of change in human history, and there is always this tension between those welcoming, or at least adapting to, a given change and those dreading it and resisting it by any means necessary. There are changes large and small, eternally taking place and the challenge we humans always face is adapting to our constantly changing world.
Sekhnet and I are both assailed by sometimes severe joint pain when the humidity is on the rise. When I grimace and grunt walking up or down the stairs the night before thunderstorms, she reminds me “you’re old.” I am old, and while most aspects of aging are fine, some changes are unwelcome. I don’t like having to acknowledge the wisdom of Kurt Vonnegut’s “be kind to your knees, you’ll miss them when they’re gone.” I am also no fan of nocturia, or hematuria, for that matter.
I am constantly angry, for example, when confronted with corporate practices, routinized indignities, that are now ubiquitous in our Free Market. The people I complain to about having to wade through long recordings before you can elect to talk to a representative, the long waiting times on the phone, the constant advertising and blaring loops of muzak while you’re on hold, the endless reminders of how important my call is, and that I can get faster service on-line, and so forth … correctly regard me as a griping, cranky old bastard.
These people, I have to remind myself, never lived in a different world, have no concept that banks once paid interest to depositors, didn’t charge you a monthly fee to have an account, or every private business you deal with requiring your social security number (essential for collecting a debt against you), and an ironclad legal agreement not to sue them, no matter what, before you can do business with them.
Change is inevitable, as is resistance to change, which emerges from terror about change and/or anger about changes for the worse. Look at what’s happened to the Republican Party, as it was steadily taken over by fabulously wealthy right-wing liberty lovers like Charles Koch and associates and turned into the extremist John Birch Society.
What was the premise of the John Birch Society? It was a group of wealthy right-wing freedom lovers fighting a vast conspiracy of godless Commies who were using the imagined grievances of American Blacks, and other disgruntled Americans, to drive a stake into the heart of American society and our cherished liberties. You can visit their website today, the John Birch Society (founded by Koch’s dad a few years after the scandalous Supreme Court decision that ruled segregated schools were inherently unequal, and therefore unconstitutional), they are peddling the same pile of reeking scats right now, in our giddy age of Alternative Fact.
What is the current premise of the modern Republican Party, its hope for regaining power? That an election their candidate lost by a substantial margin was stolen by fraud, somehow rigged in a way that avoided detection, left no evidence, fooled election officials of both parties, and defrauded the American public of the one-party state we actually want, need and deserve. 70% of Republicans believe this wild conspiracy theory about a massive, vicious betrayal of democracy, no so-called “proof” needed. Alternative facts, that’s all. Let’s agree to disagree, you cheating, thieving fucks.
I heard the term Limpieza de Sangre, purity of blood, for the first time today. It came into use during the dawn of propaganda, when the Pope was using the printing press, and outfits like the Jesuits, Defenders of the Faith, to propagate the One True Faith, against the mounting Protestant incursion into Christianity. The Spanish Inquisition had made it a capital offense not to believe in the teachings of the Son of God and many of the tortures we know today were developed to torture the truth out of godless people trying to save their lives by pretending to worship and adore Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, while secretly rejecting His love.
The doctrine of Limpieza de Sangre was designed to separate Catholics of pure blood, born into a long line of devoted believers, from those who had converted from Muslim or Jewish backgrounds, simply to escape torture and death. You understand, the blood itself must be pure for your faith to be pure, as Jesus never taught.
Change is eternal, but the techniques of reaction have certain constant features. Every regime that has ever set armies to murder enemies has first had to reduce those enemies, whether civilian or another army, into hated, dangerous insects, deadly, inhuman infecters of the life blood of the rest of us. So we have the long line of insane ideas like Purity of Blood, used to justify the spilling of impure or polluted blood.
In the former slave states, during the “Jim Crow” era, the amount of Negro blood in a person’s lineage determined his or her status under law. Never mind that almost every drop of the “white” blood in a “mixed race” person was the result of rape of the darker person owned by the lighter one. You know, if you teach a disgusting thing like that to children you should be ashamed of yourself– and fired from your job!
OK, OK, calm down…
You have Homer Plessy, a light-skinned, blond-haired octoroon (one of his eight great-grandparents was Black), on an interstate train down south, sitting in a car reserved for Whites Only. His blood, you understand, made him, according to the laws of Louisiana, where his offense took place, a Negro. Looked as white as Ronald Reagan, boys and girls, but the law’s the law.
Plessy was a Negro, somebody blew the whistle on him as he sat in the Whites Only car and he had to be ejected from that car and put into the less plush Coloreds Only car. Plessy made a small fuss, I believe, and was arrested. He’d been planted there, in 1892, by civil rights activists, as was the person who outed him to the authorities, to challenge segregation under federal law (hence the interstate train, one of the few 14th Amendment rights recognized by the Supreme Court was the right to travel freely from state to state, and there was, possibly, also the Commerce Clause– federal oversight of interstate commerce).
The federal case got up to the Supreme Court where segregation was upheld, in Plessy v. Ferguson, under the famous slogan of “Separate But Equal”. Check out the photographs of the segregated south, the water fountains and bathrooms of the respective races.
Also, consider: the southern racial blood laws were even stricter than the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws the Nazis promulgated decades later after studying the race laws of the states of the former Confederacy. Teach that in an American public school and you’re asking to be lynched, just sayin’…
Makes you think.
I think about the rash of police violence that has resulted in the killing of dozens of unarmed, mostly Black and brown, people just since the recently concluded trial of the murderer of George Floyd started. A long parade of victims, one as young as thirteen, shot dead or otherwise killed by police, leading to a series of scrupulously nonviolent protests in just about every case. Leading, in turn, to renewed urgency to pass a series of identical laws to redefine the term “riot”, making it harder for people to organize and participate in First Amendment protests without risking 15 years in prison for a newly created felony. Because, while the right to protest may be protected by the First Amendment, the “right to riot” may be forcefully prevented, and vigorously prosecuted under the criminal laws of the state.
It is, of course, no accident that these dozens of proposed anti-protest laws, like the 361 laws making it more difficult to vote, now being debated in 47 states, are more or less identical. They are drafted by the same highly partisan weasels, distributed to individual state legislators through outfits like ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. “Stand Your Ground” laws, for example, a law that allows citizens to shoot other citizens in the street if they are truly afraid for their lives, were drafted by ALEC.
The influential outfit, formerly known as the Conservative Caucus of State Legislators, was founded in 1973 to “counter the Environmental Protection Agency, wage, and price controls, and to respond to the defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election [1]. ” You know, to organize and fight progressive policies of any and all kinds in the interest of preventing meaningful change of the status quo.
I know most Americans don’t care much for history, or a nuanced debate over every little damned thing. We are organized into tribes now, embracing the big picture emotion of our tribe and reflexively believing what the rest of our tribe believes. This tribalism has been wildly accelerated by “social media” which constantly and instantly buzzes updated, self-confirming opinion into our phones, and ads:
I get all this, it just makes me crazy, being constantly forced to hear idiotic arguments over fact-based things like which Big Lie is actually THE Big Lie — the one about the 2020 fake election results that has been supposedly proved in the courts, challenged, confirmed by recounts, by bipartisan certification, all faked — or the one the always truthful leader of the loyal 39% says is a Big Lie — that an election without “integrity” was free of widespread fraud, a lie peddled by the dangerous, radical, corrupt liars who are trying to destroy our great, unified nation by violence in the streets by claiming the stolen election was NOT stolen by these evil maniacs. You know, Communists like Mitt Romney.
Sekhnet and I found a wallet on the street the other night. I put the guy’s name and address into a search engine on my phone, and websites were eager to sell me his phone number, though I was not eager to pay the fee for what was, until monetized recently, free public information. 311 was no help, outside of suggesting we bring the wallet to the local police precinct. Sekhnet did exhaustive research when we got home, trying to contact the owner of the wallet, a 22 year-old — nada. The next day we drove over to his house, which was not far away, to give the kid back his wallet.
His house was located in a middle class neighborhood called St. Albans, which has long been home to financially successful Black Queens families. I recall as a boy going to visit a classmate whose father was an architect, they lived in a large house in St. Albans [1]. The daughter of the architect, Rani, had been recently admitted to my class, over the long, organized protests of local white racists. Our elementary school had been de-segregated two or three years earlier pursuant to the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling that all public schools must be racially integrated with “all deliberate speed” — which in the case of PS178Q was about a decade and a half.
Yesterday was a beautiful sunny spring day, everything in bloom, the lawns green under brilliant sunlight. We found the address. I went to ring the bell, Sekhnet went to talk to the man working on the edge of the property. When Sekhnet told the man why we were there he said he was the kid’s father. I approached and filled in a few details.
“Oh, his girlfriend lives over there,” the father said, when I told him where on the service road we’d found the wallet.
Before turning over the wallet Sekhnet asked a clever question. “What is your son’s middle initial?” The man looked confused, hesitated. “I’m not good with that kind of thing, I don’t even… see him, I don’t even know his name,” he pointed to his other son, who laughed, and told Sekhnet “N”.
We stood there a moment (the kid wasn’t home, didn’t even know his wallet was missing) exchanging wallet-related pleasantries as the father, his other son and a smiling young woman thanked us. I mentioned that I still felt the pain, from 15 years ago, of losing my wallet, knowing the security guard who’d definitely found it, and being unable to prove it or get the wallet or any of its contents back.
The father, a small, wiry man with a Jamaican accent and dark brown skin, a mechanic and owner of the shop where at least one of his sons worked with him, nodded and told me he’d found a wallet outside of his shop one time. When he went to return it he got no thanks, only suspicion, the people treated him like he’d stolen it, wanted to know how he got the wallet. I looked into his reddened eyes as he said “that’s the last time I return a wallet. I’m going to leave the next one on the ground.”
Sekhnet and I, being two respectable-looking white people (looks are deceiving, in my case), could drive up to a home, walk into the front yard, return a wallet and be thanked, with grateful smiles all around. This guy, a successful entrepreneur who was living the American Dream, with his fine home, his grown kids hanging around as he worked on the property on his day off, was treated as a suspect when he went to do a good deed. The understandable pain in his eyes as he told me the little story had to be addressed.
“No, you did the right thing, you should do the same thing next time, you just met up with some assholes,” I said. He nodded at the word assholes, which his accusers no doubt were, he may have repeated the word.
What troubled me afterwards was whether I should have modified “assholes” as “racist assholes?” It seemed to go without saying, even if the assholes he was returning the wallet to were “nonwhite”. The reality for this hardworking American taxpayer is that he is a hundred times more likely to be confronted by this kind of asshole than somebody like me, a shiftless daydreaming bum born with “white” skin and a free pass not to be profiled by racists, is.
Do we have widespread racist assumptions here in the land of the free and the home of the brave? Is the Pope Catholic? Do Donald Trump and Lindsey Graham bend the truth?
That night I read this excellent op-ed (below), which makes short work of the asshole argument that there is no racism built into our culture. “Nothing systemic,” insist brazen professional liars like South Carolina’s morally dextrous Lindsey Graham, senator from one of two states that had Black majority populations during the Confederacy (Mississippi was the other, Louisiana was close to 50/50 in the 1860 Census). Graham’s South Carolina colleague, the Republican party’s lone black senator (the Democrats currently have two, 4% of their caucus, Booker and Warnock, two of eleven Black senators from either party over the centuries) [2], made the same point, when he spoke to the nation to rebut Biden’s recent address to Congress.
“Red” states across the country are now in the process of mandating a curriculum for public school students that stresses the uniqueness, freedom and equality of America and its unity, and specifically disallows teaching “controversial” subjects, like slavery, in a way that makes us look bad, and ordinary, and not like an Exceptional Shining Nation on A Hill.This plays strongly to the right-wing base in the all-too familiar double down on demonstrable bullshit for which their recent master is so rightfully famous.
Trump’s Department of Education formed the 1776 Commission, to respond to, and refute, the documentation of America’s long history of racism contained in the 1619 Project published in the NY Times. The first slaves arrived here in 1619, a year before the famous Mayflower brought persecuted, intolerant English Puritans to Plymouth Rock.
The 1776 Commission produced a draft of its democracy-embracing patriotic curriculum, right before Trump reluctantly allowed a peaceful transition of power after the rigged stolen election, and released the report on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, for good measure (in your face, Black racists!). The report strikes back forcefully at the Civil Rights bullies that tyrannize the persecuted, beleaguered “whites” of MAGA nation.
The short report could have been written by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos herself, it was so detailed, so vague, so idiotic and clueless a denial of reality. Biden immediately disbanded the “commission” and removed the report, a piece of white supremacist propaganda citing the New Testament as its ultimate source of authority, and America’s moral strength, from the government website.
Here is just a piece of its inspirational message:
“The principles of equality and consent mean that all are equal before the law. No one is above the law, and no one is privileged to ignore the law, just as no one is outside the law in terms of its protection.”
A principle we saw demonstrated over and over during the presidency of Donald J. Trump.
Last Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina added himself to the long list of Republicans who have denied the existence of systemic racism in this country. Graham said on “Fox News Sunday” that “our systems are not racist. America’s not a racist country.”
Graham argued that the country can’t be racist because both Barack Obama and Kamala Harris had been elected and somehow, their overcoming racial hurdles proves the absence of racial hurdles. His view seems to be that the exceptions somehow negated the rule.
In the rebuttal to President Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress, the other senator from South Carolina, Tim Scott, the lone Black Republican in the Senate, parroted Graham and became an apologist for these denials of racism, saying too that the country wasn’t racist. He argued that people are “making money and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made any progress at all, by doubling down on the divisions we’ve worked so hard to heal.”
Scott’s argument seems to leave open the possibility that America may have been a racist country but that it has matured out of it, that it has graduated into egalitarianism.
I personally don’t make much of Scott’s ability to reason. This is the same man who said in March that “woke supremacy,” whatever that is, “is as bad as white supremacy.” There is no world in which recent efforts at enlightenment can be equated to enslavement, lynching and mass incarceration. None.
It seems to me that the disingenuousness on the question of racism is largely a question of language. The question turns on another question: “What, to you, is America?” Is America the people who now inhabit the land, divorced from its systems and its history? Or, is the meaning of America inclusive of those systems and history?
When people say that America is a racist country, they don’t necessarily mean that all or even most Americans are consciously racist. However, it is important to remember that nearly half the country just voted for a full-on racist in Donald Trump, and they did so by either denying his racism, becoming apologists for it, or applauding it. What do you call a country thus composed?
Historically, however, there is no question that the country was founded by racists and white supremacists, and that much of the early wealth of this country was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, and much of the early expansion came at the expense of the massacre of the land’s Indigenous people and broken treaties with them.
Eight of the first 10 presidents personally enslaved Africans. In 1856, the chief justice of the United States wrote in the infamous ruling on the Dred Scott case that Black people “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
The country went on to fight a Civil War over whether some states could maintain slavery as they wished. Even some of the people arguing for, and fighting for, an end to slavery had expressed their white supremacist beliefs.
Abraham Lincoln said during his famous debates against Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 that among white people and Black ones “there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man.”
Some will concede the historical point and insist on the progress point, arguing that was then and this is now, that racism simply doesn’t exist now as it did then. I would agree. American racism has evolved and become less blunt, but it has not become less effective. The knife has simply been sharpened. Now systems do the work that once required the overt actions of masses of individual racists.
So, what does it mean for a system to be racist? Does the appellation depend on the system in question being openly, explicitly racist from top to bottom, or simply that there is some degree of measurable bias embedded in those systems? I assert the latter.
America is not the same country it was, but neither is it the country it purports to be. On some level this is a tension between American idealism and American realism, between an aspiration and a current condition.
And the precise way we phrase the statement makes all the difference: America’s systems — like its criminal justice, education and medical systems — have a pro-white/anti-Black bias, and an extraordinary portion of America denies or defends those biases.
As Mark Twain once put it: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
Being imprecise or undecided with our language on this subject contributes to the murkiness — and to the myth that the question of whether America is racist is difficult to answer and therefore the subject of genuine debate among honest intellectuals.
Saying that America is racist is not a radical statement. If that requires a longer explanation or definition, so be it. The fact, in the end, is not altered.
[1]
The visit was memorable because it was the first time I heard a wah-wah guitar (on a Temptations track, Cloud Nine or Runaway Child) — which excited me greatly– and the first time I saw girls dancing in a way that also filled me with excitement, though I wasn’t sure exactly why. My classmate’s little brother and I kept smiling at each other and replaying the record, to keep them dancing.
[2]
And check out African-American P.B.S. Pinchback, who would have made an even 12 all-time Black Senators, elected by Louisiana in 1873, but denied his seat, as these things happen.It should be noted, the current Senate has the all-time record for Black Senators at one time, with three.
Because, I perhaps foolishly, still believe that the facts are important for any intelligent discussion or debate, I’m going to try to pull together any publicly available information I find that could help the, eh, controversial January 6 Commission that Congressional Republicans are so dead set against, because, you know, the recent Party of Trump attempt to subvert democracy and forcefully impose a one-party cult of personality government is over.
It might be a different story, of course, if Trump was still insisting the 2020 election had been stolen from him, or if his party was changing election laws in numerous states to impose new hurdles to voters towards continued minority rule, or criminalizing many instances of the right of assembly, redefining “riot” to make a felony of various exercises of the first Amendment Right of Americans to peacefully dissent without infringement by the government.
So, according to reasonable Republican legislators there’s really no point, you see, in allowing nosy, partisan investigators in to look into the lead-up and execution of the MAGA riot that resulted in a violent breach of the Capitol, though admittedly 140 police officers were injured defending the Capitol and five died, of natural causes (trampling, heart attack and so on) in the course of the March for Trump that got a little too exuberant.
Even on January 6th (as the reporting below shows) we had a wealth of information about the lead up to the riot, the urging by Trump for patriots to attend the Stop the Steal rally, and the fiery speeches immediately before that incited the riot. We saw much of the violence on television, on January 6 and the days that followed. Much of the violence was so ugly and upsetting that YouTube requires viewers to swear they are adults before they can view it online.
The January 6 Commission would answer tricky questions like why federal forces were not immediately called in by Trump appointees to stop the riot, particularly once the mob attacked police, breached security and was inside the Capitol.
The riot, everyone knows, was set into motion by the constantly repeated Trump lie about massive voter fraud (he made the same claim when he won in 2016), and the infuriating idea that radical Democrats had stolen the presidency from the exemplar of all that is great in America. Here are two Republicans making their points very succinctly:
Republicans now urge bipartisanship and moving forward, and, for some reason, oppose any investigation into how close we came to a mass casualty event during the insurrection of January 6, 2021. As the recent Vice News video history of the riot shows, the pro-Trump crowd outside the Capitol as rioters overran police was HUGE.If all, or even 25% of them, had been hopped up enough to invade the Capitol, is it unlikely that Pence or Pelosi would have escaped alive. The riot would have likely killed many, many more.
The striking thing is how much solid information about this insurrection was out there in public, before, during and immediately after the MAGA riot. The second striking thing is how effective right wing propaganda has been since the riot in minimizing the seriousness of the far-right’s violent assault on democracy.
NOTE: all facts and quotations in this post are from January 3 and January 5, 2021 reporting from WUSA9, the Washington, D.C. CBS affiliate.I also refer you to two other reports, from right after the riot on January 6:
Highlights and analysis: Trump commits to ‘orderly transition’ after mob storms Capitol: Lawmakers were evacuated during the counting of Electoral College votes after supporters descended on the Capitol at Trump’s urging.
Trump Told Crowd ‘You Will Never Take Back Our Country With Weakness’: As Congress prepared to certify the victory of his successor, President Trump railed against the election and helped set in motion hours of violence.
This struck me, in light of the criminalization of First Amendment assembly (punishable as a felony with a 15 year prison sentence) enacted by Florida, and ready to be signed into law in other states:
Restricted vehicular traffic only allowed in the First Amendment Activity Zone for the January 6 ‘March for Trump’ rally
Presumably the organizers of the rally didn’t want any kind of Heather Heyer situation with people angrily driving cars into pro-Trump demonstrators, as is now permissible under several Republican state “anti-terrorism” laws, like Florida’s, that immunize drivers against presumably justifiable road rage (against demonstrators who are not white patriots).
The ‘March for Trump’ rally will not officially be a march for Trump
We kept hearing about the permit that Women for American Autocracy obtained for the march to the Capitol, making it perfectly legal. Here are a few details for the January 6 Commission to look into:
The March For Trump rally organized by the conservative women group, Women For America First, on Wednesday, Jan. 6 on the Ellipse Grounds is projecting about 5,000 Trump supporters to make their way to the nation’s capital…
…The March For Trump rally will not be an organized march from the Ellipse, according to the permit approved by the Department of Interior. The organization stated in the permit that some participants may leave their rally to attend other rallies at the United States Capitol to hear the results of Congressional certification of the Electoral College count.
*Note: In accordance with the event permit approved and released by the Department of Interior, this event is not a march from the location of the rally.
As was openly and honestly stated in the permit that “some participants may leave their rally to attend OTHER rallies at the United States Capitol” such as the heavily armed (though not ‘fire-armed’) riot, for example.
We also note, surprisingly, that permission on the Public Gathering Permit for the First Amendment Rally at the Ellipse extended from 6:30 a.m. Saturday January 2 to 8 pm Friday, January 8th (see graphic below). Hell of a First Amendment Rally there, Brownie!
The President will address the March for Trump rally
The president tweeted Tuesday evening that he would be speaking at the Save America Rally on the Ellipse at 11 a.m.
Several pre-event rallies took place Tuesday, and DC Police said two arrests were made during the first day of demonstrations (as of the afternoon). Charges included carrying a pistol and rifle without a license, possession of high capacity feeding device, unregistered ammunition and firearms, no permit while driving an unauthorized van and possession of illegal fireworks
Attendees rallying on Wednesday are holding the first amendment rally, “to demand transparency and protect election integrity” on the same day Congress is set to officially approve the 2020 election results. This event comes after President Trump warned via Twitter that there would be a “very big” and “wild” protest on Jan. 6 after he refuses to concede due to unfounded allegations of election fraud.
I will be speaking at the SAVE AMERICA RALLY tomorrow on the Ellipse at 11AM Eastern. Arrive early — doors open at 7AM Eastern. BIG CROWDS! pic.twitter.com/k4blXESc0c
One of the former president’s last tweets before being permanently banned from the social media platform.His long, inspired speech to the fired up crowd on January 6 is worth a close read/listen by the January 6 Commission. He used the word “peace” once, proving he never meant to incite anything other than peace when he used the words “fight,” “fight like hell,” “stolen from you,” and “bullshit [election]” to great cheers from the crowd.
The president, in advertising the January 6 ‘March for Trump’ had tweeted “Be there, will be wild.” [1] For once Mr. Trump was telling the truth.
Speakers advertised for the Ellipse rally prior to the unofficial ‘March for Trump’ included Roger Stone and Diamond and Silk
Stone, architect of the 2000 “Brooks Brothers Riot” in Florida during the Bush/Gore recount, pardoned by Trump for felonies including lying to Mueller’s investigators, was apparently already down by the Capitol on January 6, with a contingent of Proud Boy Oath Keeper Bugaloos who provided personal security for the convicted felon and self-proclaimed “Political Dirty Trickster”. Members of the white supremacist militia who were Stone’s body guards in DC on January 5th and 6th are under indictment for violent actions during the MAGA riot.
Speakers at the Ellipse for the “March for Trump” rally (what I was originally looking for when I found the WUSA9 piece):
Congressman Mo Brooks (R-Alabama), 25 year-old Madison Cawthorn (R- N. Carolina), Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, campaign fundraiser/Don’s girlfriend Kimberly “The best … is … YET… to COME!!!” Guilfoyle and Eric’s wife, Lara, former campaign adviser Katrina Pierson; personal lawyer Rudy “Trial By Combat” Giuliani; “Women for America First” head Amy Kremer; law professor and conspiracy theorist John Eastman; former Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones, who announced from the stage that he was becoming a Republican. and, the star of the show, Donald John Trump himself.source
Pardoned felons Mike “Lock her UP!” Flynn and Roger “I never met Paul Manafort” Stone, as far as I recall, gave stirring speeches to whip up the crowd at a rally the night before the ‘March for Trump’ that was not, officially, a march.
D.C. Police were on alert, and sought National Guard assistance for January 6, 2021 in expectation of further violence.
MPD reached out to D.C. National Guard to assist D.C. officers with crowd management and traffic control, MPD Police Chief Contee said during a Monday news conference. He said this will allow District officers to focus on individuals that may instigate or agitate violence in the city.
Firearms will not be allowed in the city, Contee said. The department has already posted signs across the city.
“We will not allow people to incite violence or intimidate our residence and cause destruction in our city. We are asking residents to avoid confrontations with people that may incite a fight,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said. “So we are asking people to avoid the areas.”
As a smirking Roger Stone might quip “I got your non-States’ Rights right here, Muriel Bowser”. Because D.C. is not a state, it had no authority to mobilize the D.C. National Guard. The March for Trump rioters attacked and overran the Capitol Police, broke into the Capitol and the MAGA riot raged unchecked by federal authorities for more than three hours.
The long delay of the National Guard’s intervention, after the riot was raging, was recently pooh-poohed by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley who concluded there was nothing deliberate about the three hour delay in mobilizing troops that were waiting less than 20 minutes away from the Capitol. The January 6 Commission should make the general repeat his credulity-straining claim under oath, and back it up with some kind of factual basis for his “opinion”.
As rioters ran amok inside, after the breach and before federal intervention, as bands roamed the halls of the Capitol taunting those they threatened to execute, frantic calls to Trump from Republicans locked down in the Capitol were not put through to him. The president was reportedly transfixed by the live television feed of the riot, admiring his handiwork. When House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy finally got through to him, eye witnesses say, the following tense exchange took place, as reported by the ultraliberal Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal:
“He’s getting reports of what is happening. He did not accept people doing this type of the behavior. I know he’s getting reports as well. I wanted to give him a first-hand report,” Mr. McCarthy told Fox News on Jan. 6.
But Mr. Trump initially claimed the protesters were linked to antifa, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R., Wash.) said in a statement Friday night, referring to the loose network of antiracist, antifascist protesters.
When Mr. McCarthy pushed back, saying that the protesters were Trump supporters, Mr. Trump fired back, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” Ms. Herrera Beutler said in her statement, recounting the the conversation as described to her by Mr. McCarthy.
The call got heated and at one point, Mr. McCarthy angrily retorted, “Who the f—- do you think you’re talking to?” according to a person familiar with the discussion.
Mr. McCarthy’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the aftermath of the call, Mr. McCarthy wrestled with whether Mr. Trump was fit for office. He asked some GOP lawmakers whether he should press Mr. Trump to resign, according to someone familiar with the discussions.
One week after the riot, when the House voted to impeach Mr. Trump, Mr. McCarthy said Mr. Trump bore responsibility for the events of Jan. 6.
“The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack by mob rioters,” Mr. McCarthy said in a speech on the House floor, although he voted against impeaching [the vindictive, all-powerful party leader].
Of course, Trump and McCarthy worked things out a few days later during McCarthy’s visit to Mar-a-largo. McCarthy’s current position is that he and Trump, who he now claims knew nothing about the riot while it was going on — until his call– had a private conversation that is nobody’s business. And, as we continue to hear from Republicans like Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, those rioters probably were antifa, just posing as thousands of Trump supporters. You understand, like the actual outcome of the possibly rigged and jiggered 2020 election, we’ll never know!
As you can plainly see, there is nothing whatsoever to see here.
part of the MAGA crowd as Capitol was being stormedsource
If you click on the link above, and scroll to 22:28 in the video, you will be as alarmed (or happily excited, if you love Trump) as I was when a MAGA rally participant, who had climbed a scaffolding outside the Capitol during the breach, panned to show the enormous crowd of Trump supporters who had rallied to “Stop the Steal”. Maybe Trump wasn’t lying when he said there were over 100,000 at the Ellipse and dared the lying media to show the size of the crowd, which I’d read was about 5,000, the number the permit for the First Amendment Rally cited.
Nothing to see here. No reason to investigate anything but Black Lives Matter and the radical left antifa, which is short for anti-fascist– unAmerican! No reason to think this was a serious attempt, by an unhinged maniac, on behalf of his fellow right wing billionaires, to overturn a legitimate high-turnout election by violence and install himself as an authoritarian who would certainly have invoked martial law to settle the matter of who rules this land, once and for all. Nothing to investigate!
Outside of the striking fact that even the pugnaciously partisan Bill Barr tendered his resignation prior to this scheduled, well-planned attempt to violently block the peaceful transfer of power.
Some charitably saw Barr’s resignation as related to Trump finally crossing a moral, ethical and constitutional line by refusing to accept the results of the election that Barr’s DOJ had certified as fair, after repeatedly sowing doubts about the fairness of the election and launching numerous investigations to support that doubt. I saw Barr’s well-timed skitter away from Trump as a strictly practical move to avoid potential prosecution as a key part of a conspiracy to commit insurrection.
The latest polls have the ex-president’s popularity among Republicans at 44%, though 69% believe, for unknown reasons, that the election was stolen from him. Most Republicans, of course, oppose the formation of a January 6 Commission. Why wouldn’t they? Joe Manchin himself probably opposes it. After all, how can you have bipartisan cooperation in the Senate if you accuse the other party of supporting a violent insurrection just because they held things up in the Senate on January 6, calling for a commission to investigate a possibly rigged, stolen election?
America’s greatest winner
[1]WUSA9’s January 3, 2021 reporting begins:
WASHINGTON — Trump supporters are planning a rally on Jan. 6, the same day Congress is set to officially approve the 2020 election results, according to a flyer on the Trump March website.
The organization’s website said they plan to “demand transparency and protect the election integrity” after President Trump warned via Twitter that there would be a “very big” and “wild” protest on Jan. 6 after he refuses to concede due to unfounded allegations of election fraud.
When you say this to an angry crowd that’s been whipped into a frenzy about their lives being stolen from them by sick, dangerous enemies, it makes perfect sense.
Vice News compiled a visual timeline of January 6 in a recent video piece they describe this way:
This treatment of the insurrection recreates the attack moment by moment, tracking the protesters mounting agitation and rage, and some rioters breaking into various fronts of the U.S. Capitol, eventually marching the Confederate flag into the building and occupying the halls of Congress.
It also reveals the diverse and competing ideologies that coalesced on Jan. 6: angry Trump voters marched alongside sovereign citizens, Three Percenters, Proud Boys, and Christian Nationalists. Some rioters demonstrated solidarity with the police as others brutally assaulted officers.
The film highlights moments within the mayhem that add to the complexity of our understanding of the attack. It enables viewers to feel what it was like to be drawn into participating in this event.
In this 45-minute film we see how the false narrative of electoral fraud that was stated and restated by former President Donald Trump led thousands of Americans to attack their own Capitol, and the unprecedented violence that left hundreds injured, five dead, and a shaken democracy.
The piece starts with cellphone video of a plane full of enthusiastic Trump supporters en route to D.C. from Tampa. All of the video is from public broadcasts and footage shot by demonstrators and others on the ground before, and during, the January 6 MAGA riot at the Capitol. When I clicked on it on my phone the other night, YouTube gave me this warning.
Kind of an ambiguous statement, I thought. Confirm that some audiences found this inappropriate or offensive?
“Inappropriate” to “some audiences”– like very soft core child pornography lite, tastefully shot and without nudity, a Ku Klux Klan video purporting to lay out the truth about America’s race problem?
“Offensive” — like a video convincing the credulously angry that America is in the grips of a vast cabal of Satanist Democrat [sic] cannibal pedophiles who drink the adrenalized blood of the children they torture and terrify before slaughtering?
I think YouTube could have better chosen its warning. Perhaps: this video contains upsetting images of explicit violence and instances of very coarse fucking language.
The all-purpose, nonjudgemental YouTube warning was made a tiny bit more explicit today, covering the blacked out video screen on my computer and offering me a reasonable choice to click on:
Less than a half hour later (since I did the screen capture above) YouTube changed the designation and warning. If you verify that you’re over 18 you can click on the video below, which I recommend watching at 1.5 speed (you won’t miss anything), if you have the stomach to proceed beyond the first minute or two.
I’m about 13 minutes in, so far (watching at 1.5 speed), and have no doubt that this documentation is all that’s needed to establish the urgent need for a January 6 Commission.
We don’t even need the additional damning, un-contradicted facts raised at Trump’s second impeachment, the $50,000,000 in ad buys to promote the false and incendiary message that Biden stole the 2020 election, the $3,500,000 in dark money to organize and promote the March for Trump to Stop the Steal that led, inexorably, to the riot. Just watch the video with your eyes and ears open. It’s like watching the slow killing of George Floyd.
Nothing controversial about the need for a January 6 Commission, my fellow cucktards, unless you stand to be prosecuted for your role in it, or your party’s electoral chances could be hurt by a report outlining the vast scope of the GOP’s unified, historically unique (and ongoing) attempt to block the peaceful transition of power in our fragile experiment in democracy, after a fair, historically high participation election their candidate lost by an indisputable margin.
“Indisputable” of course, now being in contentious dispute … by influential lawmakers and right-wing media pundits, men and women of unimpeachable honor and love of country.Check them out:
To speed it up, click the settings wheel, bottom right, and change playback speed. You’ll thank me for it.
[1]
From that article:
This film also reflects the years of groundwork laid by Trump and his staffers that ultimately culminated in the insurrection. In 2015 on the campaign trail, he falsely claimed that elections are rigged and the only way he could lose would be through systemic voter fraud. He said it again in 2016 when he won. He repeated it throughout his presidency. And he claimed fraud again—and again, and again—when he lost.
“All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing,” Trump said during his January 6 speech.
“We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with: We will stop the steal.”
I must point out two things — the incredible restraint of the peaceful Black protesters at the scenes of several police killings of unarmed Black citizens SINCE Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murder in an incident Minneapolis police originally headlined “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.”
The restraint of the Black community seems superhuman to me, at a time when we have a seemingly decent man as the president and now daily police killings of unarmed civilians, disproportionately Black and brown, that police departments in many cases immediately justify in public relations campaigns and do their best to cover up.
The other thing to note is that the Department of Justice was specifically created to bring justice to the victims of racism. It was established pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment that extended the constitutional freedoms of the Bill of Rights to every person born in America, all citizens.
The DOJ was tasked with supervising the states, particularly the former slave states that had taken up arms against the US government, to ensure that former slaves (soon to be victims of a hundred years of variations on the Black Codes, lynching and deprivation of basic rights under “Separate but Equal”) had the constitutional protections of the federal government.
The Supreme Court stepped in, within a few years, to effectively nullify the Fourteenth Amendment, putting it into a judicially induced coma that lasted for almost a century. A political compromise that settled the close 1876 presidential election resulted in the end of Bayonet Rule (federal enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment) and the return of Home Rule, by white supremacist “Redeemers,” the former Confederate leaders.
During that long century of unpunished terrorism there was no federal protection against racist or otherwise oppressive state action, what became known as civil rights violations. Enforcement of all laws was at the discretion of each of the United States, as though the constitution had never been amended by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Nowadays, after a century of blood, activism, organizing and court victories against white supremacist terrorism and racially discriminatory practices across the nation, the Fourteenth Amendment is back. Citizens, since the mid-nineteen sixties, can go to federal court to seek redress of grievances against their state under the constitution, as intended in 1868 when the amendment was added to ensure the rights of citizenship to a new class of citizens..
The Department of Justice, we see, changes, sometimes radically, with every administration. Regard for the spirit and letter of laws enforcing equality of citizens comes and goes with the strong opinions of the Executive.
Trump’s Department of Justice abdicated all federal responsibility for overseeing even overtly racist police departments. Recall the grim determination of Trump’s first Attorney General (followed by his evil second A.G.) to keep American policing strictly in local hands. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (Trump’s first senate supporter, a man deemed too racist to be appointed to the federal bench, imagine that) insisted “it is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies.” The diminutive racist:
made clear he believed policing should be left to local and state law enforcement bodies, no matter how brutally they treated black and other minority citizens supposedly under their protection.
Bagpiper Bill Barr, Trump’s provocative, partisan culture warrior gunsel, who replaced the “weak” and “disloyal” Sessions as Attorney General, agreed 100% and was even more proactive in his partisan and race-baiting attacks. Antifa and Black Lives Matter, he insisted, are the problem (also mail-in ballots were an “obvious” invitation to massive voter fraud), not heavily armed white militias exercising their protected First and Second Amendment rights to resist the tyranny of pandemic precautions, or local and federal police simply doing their best to keep the peace, doing their difficult, thankless jobs in a nation overrun by savage, vicious, terrorist haters.
It should be noted that the fat, pugnacious fuck resigned before the actual insurrectionist “poop” hit the fan in the weeks leading up to Biden’s inauguration. Barr may be enraged at disrespectful liberals, atheists, humanists and so on, but he’s not going to prison behind that rage.
Barr consistently did major damage for his master, spun whatever Trump wanted as perfectly legal and proper and justifiable, using legal quibbles like “material lie” to exonerate Trump allies who’d lied under oath to protect their boss. Other times, Barr was right in your face.
Remember his December 3, 2019 speech at the Department of Justice when he pointedly reminded Black people that if they want police protection, (Barr at his deniable best– he never singled out Black communities by name!), they’d better start respecting and obeying [1] the police.
Today, the American people have to focus on something else, which is the sacrifice and the service that is given by our law enforcement officers. And they have to start showing, more than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves. And if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.
“Nice little family you got there, shame if anything happened to ’em.”[2]
It is encouraging to have a Justice Department that is now looking into what appears to be a pattern and practice of corrupt and selective prosecutions by the Executive branch under America’s Greatest Winner President, Donald J. Trump, and his smugly bullying gunsel Mr. Barr.
We learn from the recent execution of search warrants against another of Trump’s personal lawyers, that Barr kept a lid on the investigation into Rudy Giuliani’s mad attempts to make money and keep the far right in power by spreading Russian propaganda leading up to the election and meddling in every other possible way. After all, Barr must have reasoned, what’s really the big deal about helping the president in an arguably shady effort Trump wasn’t even convicted for when a politically motivated impeachment was brought against him? More to the point, investigating an ally of the president was absolutely and completely within Barr’s discretion, as top US law enforcement official.
It’s not like Mueller got the truth out of Manafort or Stone in time to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Trump campaign had been in an actual criminal conspiracy with Russia. We now know that Manafort gave critical polling data to the Russians so they could help Trump win the Electoral College in 2016. We also know Stone, among other unsung services to his far-right colleagues, worked with Wikileaks on the timing of revelations harmful to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Some of us know it, anyway — there are millions who believe the whole thing is a hoax on top of a lying liberal hoax. And that storming the Capitol to stop these election-stealing murderers is more than justifiable, it was patriotic.
God bless these United Shayssssh.
[1]
I know, I know, Barr said “support” not “obey” but these pricks always dogwhistle in easily translatable code.
[2]
I see in finishing the article I got Barr’s quote from, that Adam Serwer (staff writer for The Atlantic) put it even better, in a tweet(from December, 2019, mind you):
BillBarr, almost verbatim: “nice community you got there. Shame if something happened to it because you said the police shouldn’t murder innocent people.”
