Category Archives: History and Politics

Journalism is the first draft of history

Brilliant reporting by American historian Heather Cox Richardson, who has emerged as our greatest journalist during these times of world history scale turmoil. Here is a taste, followed by her full report from last night.


White House Counsel Pat Cipollone urged people to stay away from Trump to limit their chances of being prosecuted for treason under the Sedition Act. By midnight, four staffers had resigned, as well as Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger, with other, higher level officials also talking about leaving. Even Trump adviser Stephen Miller admitted it was a bad day.

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Today the Confederate flag flew in the United States Capitol.

This morning, results from the Georgia Senatorial runoff elections showed that Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff had beaten their Republican opponents—both incumbents—by more than the threshold that would require a recount. The Senate is now split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats, so the position of majority leader goes to a Democrat. Mitch McConnell, who has bent the government to his will since he took over the position of majority leader in 2007, will be replaced.

With the Democrats in control of both Congress and the Executive Branch, it is reasonable to expect we will see voting rights legislation, which will doom the current-day Republican Party, depending as it has on voter suppression to stay in power.

Trump Republicans and McConnell Republicans had just begun to blame each other for the debacle when Congress began to count the certified electoral votes from the states to establish that Democrat Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. The election was not close—Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million votes and the Electoral College by 306 to 232—but Trump contends that he won the election in a landslide and “fraud” made Biden the winner.

Trump has never had a case. His campaign filed and either lost or had dismissed 62 out of 63 lawsuits because it could produce no evidence for any of its wild accusations. Nonetheless, radical lawmakers courted Trump’s base by echoing Trump’s charges, then tried to argue that the fact voters no longer trusted the vote was reason to contest the certified votes.

More than 100 members of the House announced they would object to counting the votes of certain states. About 13 senators, led by Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), agreed to join them. The move would slow down the count as each chamber would have to debate and take a separate vote on whether to accept the state votes, but the objectors never had anywhere near the votes they needed to make their objections stick.

So Trump turned to pressuring Vice President Mike Pence, who would preside over the counting, to throw out the Biden votes. On Monday, Trump tweeted that “the Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” This would throw the blame for the loss onto Pence, but the vice president has no constitutional power to do any such thing, and this morning he made that clear in a statement. Trump then tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”

It seemed clear that the voting would be heated, but it was also clear that most of the lawmakers opposing the count were posturing to court Trump’s base for future elections. Congress would count Biden’s win.

But Trump had urged his supporters for weeks to descend on Washington, D.C., to stop what he insisted was the stealing of the election. They did so and, this morning, began to congregate near the Capitol, where the counting would take place. As he passed them on the east side of the Capitol, Hawley raised a power fist.

In the middle of the day, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani spoke to the crowd, telling them: “Let’s have trial by combat.” Trump followed, lying that he had won the election and saying “we are going to have to fight much harder.” He warned that Pence had better “come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country.” He warned that Chinese-driven socialists are taking over the country. And he told them to march on Congress to “save our democracy.”

As rioters took Trump at his word, Congress was counting the votes alphabetically by state. When they got to Arizona, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) stood up to echo the rhetoric radicals had been using to discredit the certified votes, saying that public distrust in the election—created out of thin air by Republicans—justified an investigation. 

Within an hour, a violent mob stormed the Capitol and Cruz, along with the rest of the lawmakers, was rushed to safety (four quick-thinking staffers brought along the electoral ballots, in their ceremonial boxes). As the rioters broke in, police shot and killed one of them: Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran from San Diego, QAnon believer, and staunch Trump supporter. The insurrectionists broke into the Senate chamber, where one was photographed on the dais of the Senate, shirtless and wearing a bull costume that revealed a white supremacist tattoo on his abdomen. They roamed the Capitol looking for Pence and other lawmakers they considered enemies. Not finding them, they ransacked offices. One rioter photographed himself sitting at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk with his feet on it.

They carried with them the Confederate flag.

Capitol police provided little obstruction, apparently eager to avoid confrontations that could be used as propaganda on social media. The intruders seemed a little surprised at their success, taking selfies and wandering around like tourists. One stole a lectern.

As the White House, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security all remained silent, President-Elect Joe Biden spoke to cameras urging calm and calling on Trump to tell his supporters to go home. But CNN White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins later reported that she spoke to White House officials who were “genuinely freaked… out” that Trump was “borderline enthusiastic” about the storming of the Capitol because “it meant the certification was being derailed.”

At 4:17, Trump issued his own video, reiterating his false claims that he had been cheated of victory. Only then did he conclude with: “Go home, we love you, you’re very special.” Twitter immediately took the video down. By nighttime Trump’s Twitter feed seemed to blame his enemies for the violence the president had incited (although the rhythm of the words did not sound to me like Trump’s own usual cadence): “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

Twitter took down the tweet and banned the president for at least twelve hours for inciting violence; Facebook and Instagram followed suit.

As the afternoon wore on, police found two pipe bombs near the headquarters of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C., as well as a truck full of weapons and ammunition, and mobs gathered at statehouses across the country, including in Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota, California, and Georgia.

By 5:00, acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller issued a statement saying he had conferred with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Vice President Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and had fully activated the D.C. National Guard.

He did not mention the president.

By late evening, Washington, D.C., police chief Robert J. Contee III announced that at least 52 people had been arrested and 14 law enforcement officers injured. A total of four people died, including one who died of a heart attack and one who tased themself.

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone urged people to stay away from Trump to limit their chances of being prosecuted for treason under the Sedition Act. By midnight, four staffers had resigned, as well as Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger, with other, higher level officials also talking about leaving. Even Trump adviser Stephen Miller admitted it was a bad day. Quickly, pro-Trump media began to insist that the attack was a false-flag operation of “Antifa,” despite the selfies and videos posted by known right-wing agitators, and the fact that Trump had invited, incited, and praised them.

Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis laid the blame for today’s attack squarely at the feet of Trump himself: “Today’s violent assault on our Capitol, and effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule, was fomented by Mr. Trump. His use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice.”

The attempted coup drew condemnation from all but the radical Trump supporters in government. Former President George W. Bush issued a statement “on insurrection at the Capitol,” saying “it is a sickening and heartbreaking sight.” “I am appalled by the reckless behavior of some political leaders since the election,” he said, and accused such leaders of enflaming the rioters with lies and false hopes. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) was more direct: “What happened here today was an insurrection incited by the President of the United States.”

Across the country tonight are calls for Trump’s removal through the 25th amendment, impeachment, or resignation. The Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have joined the chorus, writing to Pence urging him to invoke the 25th. Angry at Trump’s sabotaging of the Georgia elections in addition to the attack on our democracy, prominent Republicans are rumored to be doing the same.

At 8:00, heavily armed guards escorted the lawmakers back to the Capitol, thoroughly scrubbed by janitors, where the senators and representatives resumed their counting of the certified votes. The events of the afternoon had broken some of the Republicans away from their determination to challenge the votes. Fourteen Republican senators had announced they would object to counting the certified votes from Arizona; in the evening count the number dropped to six: Cruz (R-TX), Hawley (R-MO), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), John Kennedy (R-LA), Roger Marshall (R-KS), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).

In the House, 121 Republicans, more than half the Republican caucus, voted to throw out Biden’s electors from Arizona. As in the Senate, they lost when 303 Representatives voted in favor.

Six senators and more than half of the House Republicans backed an attempt to overthrow our government, in favor of a man caught on tape just four days ago trying to strong-arm a state election official into falsifying the election results.

Today the Confederate flag flew in the United States Capitol.

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EDIT AT 12:00 on January 7: The symbol on the abdomen of the rioter on the Senate dais is a religious symbol that has been appropriated by white supremacists, not the Ku Klux Klan specifically, as I wrote originally. I apologize for the error.

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My guess here for the author of the uncharacteristic Trump tweet is Stephen Miller:

By nighttime Trump’s Twitter feed seemed to blame his enemies for the violence the president had incited (although the rhythm of the words did not sound to me like Trump’s own usual cadence): “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

Did you know? Pro-Trump groups rallied and clashed with D.C. police the night before they rioted at the capitol — D.C. mayor called the Pentagon for National Guard ahead of Wednesday’s violence, but no reinforcements showed up…

Can you spell conspiracy to commit insurrection?

As sickening as the spectacle of a mob of domestic terrorists swarming the capitol building while a joint session of Congress was certifying the election — the fact that these Confederate and Trump flag waving insurgents invited by Mr. Trump held a defiant rally the night before and clashed with D.C. police, and that the National Guard (under federal and state control, but D.C. must rely on federal), requested by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, did not arrive until long after insurgents overran, vandalized and occupied the Capitol, disrupting mandated constitutional business and forcing legislators and the Vice President to flee… leads to a strong presumption that the initial success of the riot was guaranteed by Trump dead-enders who left the Capitol under-protected. It could also be incompetence, of course, but the likelihood that it was the Trump administration’s last bloody fuck you to a Black woman in power is stronger.

Otherwise, the perfect storm that led to the breach of the building where the Vice President was protected by Secret Service is as eerie a coincidence as a notorious federal prisoner, Mr. Trump’s friend, child-sex trafficker and under-age sex aficionado Jeffery Epstein, who had attempted suicide and was on suicide watch, managing to die in his cell while his two guards were not paying attention and, coincidentally, the surveillance camera trained on Epstein’s death chamber was somehow not recording, darn it. You can imagine Bill Barr’s disappointment, as well as Alan Dershowitz’s and Mr. Trump’s own.

Anyway here is Amy Goodman reporting at 8 a.m. Wednesday morning, the morning of the historic riot, January 6, 2021. (Spoiler alert: you may be surprised to learn that Dick Cheney has emerged, for the moment, at least, from the dark side where his soulless essence resides). I’ve put a few things in bold, for later discussion. Here’s an appetizer, from the middle of the report, which suggests there was some planning involved in leaving the Capitol under-defended and vulnerable when Trump’s mob descended on it, smashed cameras of the Enemy of the People and breached the barricades:

The reality is that there are an awful lot of active-duty military engaged in Washington, D.C., in inaugural security, in the air defense of D.C., in reconnaissance operations and in emergency response, in support of everything from weapons of mass destruction events to continuity of government, thousands of active-duty military who are on alert and who could be called out and who would be called out if in fact the local authorities were overwhelmed. And so you have, on the one hand, a kind of a secret operation going on in the background that is the standard for inaugural security and the transition from one presidency to another, and then, on the other hand, you have this highly charged political reality that the outgoing White House is not speaking to the incoming White House, and the president of the United States is off in his own fantasyland.

AMY GOODMAN: Thousands who refuse to accept President Trump’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden are protesting in Washington, D.C., today as Congress meets to certify the results and make it official. Pro-Trump protesters clashed with police Tuesday night near Black Lives Matter Plaza. Mayor Muriel Bowser has called in the National Guard ahead of today’s protest. Police arrested six people on charges that include bringing illegal guns to the city.

This comes as the leader of the Proud Boys hate group, Enrique Tarrio, was released without bail Tuesday, after D.C. police arrested him Monday for allegedly burning a Black Lives Matter banner at a historically Black church during protests in the city last month and possession of high-capacity firearm magazines. Tarrio was ordered to stay out of D.C. He’s posted on social media that Proud Boys members would be incognito for this week’s protest.

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who Trump pardoned last month, spoke at last night’s rally and thanked the “digital soldiers” — a reference to the conspiracy theory QAnon. This is podcast host Clay Clark addressing Tuesday’s “Stop the Steal” protest.

CLAY CLARK: Last night, about 150 of us went into Whole Foods, and we dressed up like people that aren’t idiots hiding from a virus that’s not deadly: We did not wear a mask! Who here is up to the task of not wearing a mask? I ask you again: Who here is up to the task of not wearing a mask? Jesus is king, and it’s time to let freedom ring! … Turn to the person next to you and give them a hug, someone you don’t know. Go hug somebody. Go ahead and spread it out, mass spreader. It’s a mass spreader event! It’s a mass spreader event!

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump tweeted he’ll be speaking at today’s so-called Save America rally near the White House and has promoted the event for weeks.

Meanwhile, Trump signed an executive order Tuesday night that asks Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to, quote, “assess actions of Antifa activists,” stop its members from entering the United States, and see whether it can be classified as a terrorist organization.

All this comes as all 10 living former U.S. defense secretaries signed a Washington Post op-ed Sunday declaring the time for questioning the results of the election has passed. They also said the U.S. military should not intervene in the presidential election. They wrote, quote, “Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”

For more, we’re joined by William Arkin, national security reporter for Newsweek, whose recent piece is headlined “Threat of Pro-Trump Violence in Washington Overshadows Inauguration Security [Plans].”

Can you start, Bill Arkin, by talking about what the police and the authorities are most concerned about today in the streets of Washington, D.C.?

WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, they’re most concerned about Donald Trump, whether he is going to instigate the thousands of people who have flooded into the district to take up violence, either to march on the Capitol or even try to enter the Capitol during the elector count.

The people I’ve talked to — and it’s been a broad range of National Guard, law enforcement and military officials — all say to me that this is an unprecedented moment, unprecedented because you have a president who is not only instigating protest and violence against this constitutional process, but also because there are other conditions which have been introduced: first, talk of martial law; second, talk of an implementation of the Insurrection Act, which would allow the military and the National Guard to engage in law enforcement; third, a kind of break between the District of Columbia and the federal government, as was exemplified by a letter sent yesterday by the mayor of the district to the acting attorney general, to the acting secretary of defense, asking them not to put any non-uniformed people onto the streets of D.C.; and then, finally, the question of who is actually in charge of the U.S. Capitol Police, the U.S. Park Police, the uniformed branch of the Secret Service today and in the coming week, because there’s really no one in charge. In fact, the secretary of homeland security is in the Middle East right now.

So we have this very strange mixture of people who are both on high alert, but also the wildcard, in Donald Trump, as to what he will both do at his speech today at the Ellipse in front of the White House and then, secondly, what he could do in the coming days ahead in terms of issuing an order to the national security establishment, to the military, that the military would, I think, have to say that they could not follow because it was an unlawful order.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, William Arkin, I wanted to ask you — this issue of the joint statement by all the living former defense secretaries, which, according to some reports, was a letter or statement organized by former Vice President Dick Cheney, that would seem to indicate to me that these people, because they obviously are all connected to the current military establishment, that there are some — it’s not just rumors, but it’s actual — they’ve been getting some sense that the White House and President Trump might actually be thinking of attempting to, as you say, invoke the Insurrection Act or, in some way or other, bring the military in. Is it your sense that there’s actually been these kinds of discussions among top brass of the existing military?

WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, Juan, I’ve been covering the military for over 30 years. I remember when Dick Cheney was the secretary of defense, before he was vice president, in the first Bush administration. It is true that he was one of the organizers of this letter. And it really is an unprecedented statement, a bipartisan statement, that says that the military has no role. But I think it’s more of a message to the military itself, a reminder, if you will, that they need to go back to the Constitution and go back to their oath to the Constitution, to recognize that they are not just merely toys of the commander-in-chief. They’re not merely saluting soldiers without a brain. They have to also understand the difference between a lawful and an unlawful order.

And part of the problem that we’re facing right now is that there’s an acting secretary of defense, a person who was installed by Donald Trump after the election, a wildcard himself, that we don’t really know where he stands because he hasn’t said anything. And so, though, while the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, who got a lot of criticism in June when he accompanied the president into Lafayette Park in uniform, and thereby sort of implicitly gave the military’s imprimatur and support for what the president was doing — he has put out a statement saying that the military has no role in the election.

The reality is that there are an awful lot of active-duty military engaged in Washington, D.C., in inaugural security, in the air defense of D.C., in reconnaissance operations and in emergency response, in support of everything from weapons of mass destruction events to continuity of government, thousands of active-duty military who are on alert and who could be called out and who would be called out if in fact the local authorities were overwhelmed. And so you have, on the one hand, a kind of a secret operation going on in the background that is the standard for inaugural security and the transition from one presidency to another, and then, on the other hand, you have this highly charged political reality that the incoming White House is not speaking to the outcoming White House, and the president of the United States is off in his own fantasyland.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Jason Wilson into this conversation, investigative journalist who tracks the political right and extremist movements for The Guardian, the Southern Poverty Law Center and elsewhere. Talk about who’s out there today, expected to be out there. You’ve got QAnon supporters, Proud Boy members, Republican leaders. Trump is apparently going to address them. Can you talk about the confluence of these groups and where guns fit into it? You even have the new congress member, Boebert, from Colorado, who says she’s bringing her Glock into Congress, which Nancy Pelosi and others are trying to stop.

JASON WILSON: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head, actually, Amy. I mean, you know, it’s just another demonstration of the fact that during the life of this presidency, there’s been a kind of merger between far-right activist groups and the Trump version of the GOP. There’s not really a sharp dividing line between violent, far-right street activists and the supporters of the president in Congress. You know, yeah, you’ve got at least three congresspersons, from my count, who are talking about participating in this rally. You’ve got all of these Trump-world figures, like Roger Stone, Jack Posobiec, Sebastian Gorka, who are all talking about being a part of this.

And yeah, I mean, the guns are not only a sort of indication of the militancy and radicalism of the GOP in 2021, but they’re bound up with the version of freedom that we’ve seen articulated by far-right street activists throughout the life of the presidency, as well. So, you know, the guns are integral, really, to the political ideology and the political project of this movement. And again, they’re an indication of militancy, as well.

And I’m pretty concerned that we’re going to see some violence today. And don’t forget, I mean, everyone is rightly focused on the rally in D.C., but there are parallel rallies happening all over the country at state capitols. So there are a lot of moving parts today. There’s a lot happening all around the country. And I’m concerned that the conditions are kind of ripe for some sort of violence, maybe in more than one of those places.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  And, Jason Wilson, we only have about a minute or so left, but I’m wondering if you could comment on this whole issue that some of the Trump supporters are reportedly going to be coming dressed in black, which would make them indistinguishable perhaps from antifa folks, if some antifa folks show up, to counter-protest. Are you concerned about the possibility of agents provocateurs actually instigating violence as a means to give Trump an excuse for more drastic actions?

JASON WILSON:  Yeah, I would — I mean, again, over the life of the Trump presidency, these groups have evolved in their tactics. And provocation has always been a quiver in their bow, not only provoking counter-protesters, but provocation of police or setting up the conditions where police respond with force to protests. So, yeah, I mean, disguising themselves as anti-fascists, they’ve done this before. And the fact that they’re talking about it now doesn’t surprise me at all. And, you know, as I said, they’re looking to trigger some kind of violence in the streets, I think.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both for being with us. We’ll, of course, cover this closely today inside and outside Congress. We want to thank Jason Wilson, investigative journalist who tracks the political right, and William Arkin, national security reporter for Newsweek.

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Banana Republicans Running Amok

American mass media, case in point:

Violent mob, incited to riot by enraged lame duck president who stirs them up with a speech exhorting them to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and ACT, storms Capitol building, overruns police barricades, smashes windows to gain access while others scale the walls of the building. The mob, vandalizing federal property (the rationale for federal goons squads breaking heads in Portland) runs through the halls of the Capitol, breaks into Congressional offices, shuts down a Constitutionally mandated session at which over 150 insurrectionist Republican members of Congress are hard at work, angrily and seditiously [1] obstructing the official certification of a fully certified election and preventing the peaceful transition of power.

The Vice President and the members of Congress and their staffs are rushed out of the chamber as police guard the doors with guns drawn against the insurgents. They are hurried to a secure location. A quick-thinking Congressional aid grabs the envelopes containing the votes to be certified. As this scene of horror unfolds, the inconsolably enraged president maintains public silence, sucking his teeth and watching the mayhem on TV, presumably from his bunker under the White House.

CBS news reporter, describing this scene in real-time, which apparently included violence toward reporters (Enemies of the People) and breaking of some of their equipment, refers to this mob of violent criminals as “protesters”. (In fairness to CBS, within the hour they’d begin using the more accurate “rioters” to describe members of the violent mob of enraged insurrectionists)

Well, everybody’s got a point of view, I suppose. Mine? I fervently believe that up in heaven Jesus is looking down on these rioters pretending to be Christians, filled with righteous outrage. The Prince of Peace finally can take no more, implores His Father “Dad, for the love of Christ, smite these violent, hate spouting motherfuckers taking our names in vain! Smite them for sinfully carrying my name into this hateful battle for fascism, snarling it through their filthy lips as justification for their hatred. Smite them for being complete fucking assholes! Do it, Dad! You smote Onan and his brother for less than this — come on, man! Rain down some hellfire and brimstone on their dirty asses!”

Sekhnet contrasted the hands-off treatment these rampaging right-wing berserkers were getting from police and National Guard with the full anti-riot mounted charge, swinging batons, deployment of flashbangs and pepper spray used to clear peaceful protesters for Trump’s Bible photo op back in June. Imagine the police reaction if this crowd had been partly black. Can you say INSURRECTION ACT, Mr. Barr?

Oh, yeah, by the way, easily forgotten in the stench of this paroxysm of personal and political rage (on a day Georgia elected a Jew and a Black to represent it in the Senate) the riot was also a COVID super spreader event, not one of these very fine, screaming people wore a mask over their spewing mouths.

Let us hope this is a tipping point that proves that lying, inflammatory Nazi-type rhetoric used by some very fine people, who are rightfully (or even wrongfully) angry, leads directly to Nazi-type mob behavior. Let us stay focused on getting the now functional Congress and a non-psychotic president to do the right thing, fix some of the “soft norms” Trump routinely relieved himself on in the name of Bill Barr’s unaccountable Unitary Executive. Very fine people, on both sides, on both sides, even though some of them, well, are pretty much also Nazis and spineless opportunists.

Oh, by the way, this is the Georgia statute that could have been written to describe the felony Mr. Trump committed the other day during his hourlong perfect harangue of his supporter fellow Banana Republican Brad Raffensberger (who became a national hero simply for refusing to break the law):

Universal Citation: GA Code § 21-2-604 (2016)

(a) (1) A person commits the offense of criminal solicitation to commit election fraud in the first degree when, with intent that another person engage in conduct constituting a felony under this article, he or she solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage in such conduct.

Charge him, try him (play the entire tape at trial, it’s perfect), convict him (his self-pardon won’t help him in Georgia), lock him up (for not less than one nor more than three years) as it is written:

(b) (1) A person convicted of the offense of criminal solicitation to commit election fraud in the first degree shall be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than three years.

And because language actually matters (“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state“ and similar moronic presidential non sequiturs notwithstanding):

Amok:

1: in a violently raging, wild, or uncontrolled manner —used in the phrase run amok — rioters running amok in the streets Conditions had allowed extremism to run amok. 2: in a murderously frenzied state. 

Amok | Definition of Amok by Merriam-Webster

[1] Sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that tends toward rebellion against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent toward, or rebellion against, established authority. Wikipedia

Where was this kind of frank reporting for the last few years?

Tip of the cap to NPR for this, a news report simply telling what is happening, accurately, without the tap-dancing (“baseless” or “debunked” are not the same as “deliberately false”) we’ve become used to in the “both sides have a valid point… or at least a claim” corporate media approach to reporting on our openly psychopathic politics. It struck me that it’s been a long time coming in a nation that found little outrage in the head juror at the president’s impeachment trial announcing he’d be working closely with the defense team to quickly dismiss the case and that no witnesses or evidence would be allowed at trial. You can hear NPR’s four minute piece here.

“Numerous Republicans will go on the record against a democratic election. They’ve said they plan to object to the choice of the people. They will instead amplify President Trump’s baseless claims of fraud.“

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

This is a big week for democracy. Tomorrow, Georgia holds two runoff elections that decide control of the Senate. Wednesday, Congress formally ratifies the presidential election results. Joe Biden received 306 electoral votes, as affirmed by all 50 states and dozens of lawsuits. But Congress’ ratification of those results will not be unanimous. Numerous Republicans will go on the record against a democratic election. They’ve said they plan to object to the choice of the people. They will instead amplify President Trump’s baseless claims of fraud.

In a lengthy phone call on Saturday, the president made more false claims to the secretary of state of Georgia. Having promoted false conspiracy theories, the defeated president asked Brad Raffensperger to join him in an actual conspiracy. He said they were both Republicans, so Raffensperger should, quote, “find” exactly enough votes for Trump to win Georgia by a single vote.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state. And flipping the state is a great testament to our country.

INSKEEP: Our colleague Stephen Fowler of Georgia Public Broadcasting obtained the full recording. In it, Raffensperger declined to change the results, saying the president had his facts wrong.

We focus now on one of the Republicans who are promoting the president’s drive against democracy. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is leading a group of senators who will object to the election on Wednesday. Cruz has also been campaigning in Georgia’s democratic election. So what does Cruz say about that phone call? NPR’s Sarah McCammon reports from Atlanta.

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You can read about supremely spineless Lyin’ Ted at the link above. Even among disgusting pieces of shit, the stink of Lyin’ Ted stands out [1].

Just one Lyin’ Ted factoid: when he stepped up publicly offering to argue the Texas AG’s harebrained hail-Mary to the Supreme Court to invalidate the results of elections in four other states, he must have known, as a Harvard-trained lawyer, that there is no oral argument on an emergency application to the Supreme Court, they are decided on the filings. He also had to know there was no way that even Amy, Neil and Boof (and Clarence, Samuel and John) could take and rule on a baseless, legally incoherent application to the high court, no matter how much they may have wanted to rule 6-3 that democracy is whatever the president says it is.

The media is the filter through which we understand the workings of our government, the actions of corporations, the effects on our planet, our health and safety. How hard is it to report accurately? Just call it what it is, as Steve Inskeep did the other day on National Public Radio:

Numerous Republicans will go on the record against a democratic election. They’ve said they plan to object to the choice of the people. They will instead amplify President Trump’s baseless claims of fraud.

They are doing that now, in the Senate, as I type these words.

As a distracted media weighs yesterday’s decision by the Kenosha County DA not to file charges against a police officer who shot an unarmed Wisconsin man seven times, in the back, at point blank range. I mean, didn’t the guy who got shot seven times in the back admit that he had a knife? Kind of changes the story, you know, if the guy who was trying to get into his car was armed with a knife when the officer, quite reasonably, shot him in the back seven times!

Authorities will take reasonable precautions:

Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian was granted emergency powers by the Kenosha City Council Monday as officials braced for expected unrest following the decision.

The mayor and the Kenosha police department have indicated that they plan to institute curfews if necessary, designate demonstration spaces, limit city bus routes, close down roads and impose other safety restrictions if need be.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers also activated the state’s National Guard on Monday to provide assistance to local law enforcement in the event of unrest.

The moves are similar to measures the city instituted in wake of Blake’s shooting, which took place in August 2020 and was captured on video.

source

[1]

from the BBC

Over the years the Texas senator has gone from Trump’s biggest foe to one of his most loyal allies.

Mr Cruz once called Trump a “pathological liar” and a “coward”.

This week he is leading the charge in the US Senate against certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s election win.

source

Bad Acid Trip

This feels like a bad acid trip we are all on, when even familiar, harmless things turn monstrous and it seems perfectly clear that the ever-worsening horror will never end. The good news is that scary hallucinations wear off as the drug gone bad is metabolized. The bad news is that some of these despicable monsters out of a bad acid trip that we are seeing today are quite real.

The ultimate proof that a person is a monstrous piece of shit is his reflex to ignore the pain of those around him. He goes on about his self-centered business like nothing is wrong, coveting, bragging, lying, getting revenge, stinking, while others suffer, their pleading voices unheard by him. During an emergency, the monster turd continues blowing his foul, self-serving breath while all around people are anxious, terrified, hungry, literally dying. True it’s only been about 350,000 dead in our country so far, a number not much more than 1% of us, but still, not a number to sneeze at, particularly if you have the power to do something about it, unless, of course, you are a fly covered mound of excrement.

We don’t like too much hyperbole, or raw expressions of anger, but simply stating what is going on is enough make it feel like we are all on a bad acid trip that we are all struggling to make sense of, somehow. The COVID-19 pandemic is proving very difficult to manage, even in places where angry, reality-denying, lockstep following morons are not in charge. It is prolifically deadly, refrigerator trucks for corpses are once again parked outside overflowing hospitals in many places in our nation. We set new records for death and infection every day, yesterday we set the record for COVID-19 hospitalizations. The only way to control the spread of a massively infectious disease is if everyone looks out for everyone else. That is not our way here anymore.

The stupidest, vainest and most sadistic man ever to be our leader knows what to do. Attack the disease as a hoax, a deliberate Chinese attempt to help his political rival somehow, attack the precautions all medical experts everywhere urge us all to take, downplay its severity (though you are on tape before you began downplaying it expressing great and reasonable concern about it being airborne, how infectious and deadly it is) pretend to have defeated the disease as infection numbers once again peak (“Mission Accomplished!”), declare to the nation that it’s not your responsibility, blame Democrat [sic] governors and mayors– make them fight over PPE and declare them leaders of “anarchist jurisdictions”, make them take you to court to get their federal funds — refuse to wear a mask, create millions of proud “Anti-maskers”, encourage them to rise up against Democrat [sic] tyranny, hold indoor maskless rallies where crowds chant with you, sending moist plumes of breath into each other’s lungs, infect countless lackeys around you at super-spreader events, come down with the disease yourself, have a million dollars of instant tax-payer funded emergency medical care, recover and declare that COVID is no big deal, you just have to be a winner and dominate the disease.

Then somehow you lose the election, oddly enough, by only a few million votes (and a narrow 74 electors in the rigged Electoral College). No problem. The election, as you predicted and complained about many times (as in 2016) was rigged, fake, stolen, corrupt, a scam, a flimflam, dead people voting, completely fraudulent. The incidence of voter fraud is less than one thousandth of one percent, less than one ten-thousandth of a percent (0.000001%) — all of your court cases alleging electoral fraud and unfairness were tossed out of court for lack of evidence, or often, even a coherent legal theory. On the other hand, before the 2020 election, the great State of Georgia, under current heroes of the rule of law Governor Brian Kemp and Attorney General Brad Raffensberger (both vocal Trump supporters), disenfranchised another 198,000 likely Democratic voters. Even after that heroic voter purge, and yanking out mailboxes during a pandemic, and calling mail-in voting a massive fraud, and your base (al q’eada in Arabic) turned out in droves to vote in person, you still lost Georgia by 11,779 votes. No problemo. “I need you to do me a favor, though, Bradsky.” But Raffensberger is stubborn, refusing to play ball, secretly betraying you as you speak. You innocently tell the disloyal Georgia A.G. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.” Figure that one out, linguists.

As my sister, a teacher in Florida, is about to be dragged back into a classroom (her doctor’s note be damned) to spend seven hours a day in a closed-window air-conditioned classroom with her low-income four year-olds, with no PPE and certainly no mask mandate in that Freedom State, as many thousands of Americans are not homeless today only because there are still moratoriums on sheriffs and marshals forcibly removing them from their homes, as California hospitals are turning away patients likely too sick to recover, due to overwhelming numbers of new patients, we are talking about whether this narcissistic patient zero has every right to pursue every wildly insane scheme to remain in power after losing the election by a wide margin.

Mitch McConnell, who singlehandedly blocked a vote on cruelly delayed $2,000 relief checks that would likely have passed with bipartisan support, only waited a month or so to congratulate the president-elect, after weeks of drawling in his farting basso profundo that the president has every legal right to do everything in his power to see that he won the election fair and square and that it his absolute prerogative to insist the presidency was stolen from him.

The Sedition Caucus (Trump calls those Republican traitors who didn’t join in his attempt to overthrow democracy the Surrender Caucus) is set to contest certified votes in every state Trump lost, during a session of Congress that, every year but now, has been a mere formality, announcing the certifications in each state to make the president-elect’s victory official. In the background there will be an anti-democracy rally raging outside the Capitol, a show of violent force called for by our sitting piece of shit president over and over. The Proud Boys and their shameful ilk have been standing by, in spite of being gassed by police recently, are gathering for tomorrow’s hoped for riot.

We’re not able to be focused on fighting this virus that’s killing so many of us, because another, even more incurable, virus is killing us — the urge of angry, hopeless people to band together and implacably hate others united behind an infallible leader above mere reason, fact or so called “truth”. Faithful fascism erases ordinary reality, replaces it with a mass fantasy of glory and triumph.

The “transactional” “autocratic” “oligarchic” “kleptocratic” “malignantly narcissistic” “totally exonerated” American president calls over an over for a massive anti-democracy protest in our nation’s capital to STOP THE STEAL. The increasingly desperate, lawless American president violates federal (pardon me, sir) and state law by calling a state official (18 times it turns out, persistence is the key to arm twisting and persuasion both) to put the arm on him to find 11,780 votes, “one more than we won by”, as lawyers all over this ravaged nation discuss the exact subsections of the laws he has broken, and his defenders use what they have at hand, whining about the treacherous sneaks who leaked the disloyal tape of him violating the law, explaining that the hour-long tape is being taken out of context, he was only suggesting, cajoling, making a deal, negotiating in a hardball manner, as New York City Real Estate titans often do. When you’re a NYC Real Estate titan they let you do it. And so, out of personal loyalty to him we will band together to overthrow democracy for his sake, not let the certification of votes take place as the Constitution requires. You know, because of the tens of millions of un-investigated allegations of fraud out there, the ones the president has been spouting many times everyday, the ones we’ve been spreading at the president’s behest.

If, with all this foulness going on, the people of the great state of Georgia (those whose votes haven’t been successfully suppressed) elect Trump puppet and multi-millionaire scarecrow Kelley Loeffler and mega-Trumper, expert on outsourcing jobs, David Perdue, and Mitch the Grim Reaper keeps control of blocking all legislation and executive appointments — well, release the fucking Kraken, this shithole really deserves the biblical cataclysm that will follow. Nazis simply don’t care how many have to die to realize their dream of a perfect Nazi world. In the end, historically, tyrants and their foot soldiers lose, but as to us and our times, good luck to us all and God Bless these United Shayyysssh.

Inspiring words from historian Howard Zinn

Looking toward the future (at this perilous and hopeful moment), and our places in history (if there is to be history, in the future), here is Howard Zinn’s inspiring message, delivered as an older man, accepting a prize from a French historical society, talking about why he studied and taught history, why he wrote A People’s History of the United States:

“I wanted, in writing this book, to awaken a consciousness in my readers, of class conflict, of racial injustice, of sexual inequality and of national arrogance, and I also wanted to bring into light the hidden resistance of the People against the power of the establishment.   

“I thought that to omit these acts of resistance, to omit these victories, however limited, by the people of the United States, was to create the idea that power rests only with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth.  I wanted to point out that people who seem to have no power — working people, people of color, women– once they organize and protest and create national movements, they have a power that no government can suppress.

“I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements, but to think that history writing must simply recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat.  And if history is to be creative, if it’s to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I think, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.

“I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in the solid centuries of warfare.”

Assorted headlines, January 1, 2021 — and a CALL TO ACTION

As I get ready to volunteer to make a few calls to “low-propensity” voters in Georgia tomorrow, I scan the paper to survey the new world we have in front of us in 2021. A couple of them caught my eye. Then a call to action.

This is according to the New York Times, of course, so take it with the usual teaspoon of salt [1] but it’s of a piece with general modern-day extremist GOP electoral strategy. The red baseball cap could say FEAR BLACKS!!! on it and have the same galvanizing effect. This black reverend, Warnock, stands at the same pulpit that known Communist Martin Luther King, Jr. (as portrayed by J. Edgar Hoover’s secretly sourced — tippy top, top secret — also, coincidentally, false — memo on this radical menace sent to Attorney General Robert Kennedy back in the day) once abused for his Red purposes. If it barks like a communist, lifts its leg like a communist … need we say more? Gentlemen, who among us is safe in a country where somebody like that has a vote equal to Miss Lindsey Graham’s? As for that other one, that smart-mouthed young Jew journalist? Enemy of the goddamned people, son!

Of course, someone like incumbent Georgia Senator David Perdue, loyal backer of our nation’s greatest one term president, has nothing to worry about, really. Nobody in his party will hold it against him that he made his impressive fortune outsourcing good old American jobs. That’s just NY Times propaganda, folks. You can read all about it here, in a Scalawaggin’, Carpetbaggin’ hit piece called Before Embracing America-First Agenda, David Perdue Was an Outsourcing Expert . Keep your salt shaker handy as you read it and stay tuned to OAN and Newsmax for the rebuttals (note: FOX can no longer be trusted, they traitorously reported the president lost the election he won!).

Speaking of the wealthy and their financial assets vs. ordinary American workers, how do you figure this one?

The “tide” that lifts “financial assets” is the same one that always does — the misery of nickeled and dimed laborers and short-changed consumers (who own no “financial assets”) translates directly into increased profits for the investing class. Every job that is outsourced to cheaper labor markets, every workers’ union that is crushed is a boon to the owners of the enterprise. If you can force low-paid workers into the plant during a deadly pandemic, by designating them “essential” and denying them the right to organize for safe working conditions — well, shit, do the math!

Then all you have to do to keep that tide rising on your financial assets is have a law passed that says you’re immune to all lawsuits from the families of these worthless pukes who died doing their goddamned jobs. Or as we say on Wall Street “boo fucking hoo!”

If the above sounds like embittered Commie twaddle that ignores the realities on the ground in our complex global economy and so on, I come from working class stock. My beliefs about the heartlessness of “financial assets” are in my blood. My grandmother, a member of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, was very far to the left. She was one of many leftist Jews who had no hesitation to support the struggle of American blacks against their persecution. This solidarity with the oppressed was natural to her. Back in bleeding Ukraine (where native Ukrainians were enslaved and abused for centuries, by a variety of masters, leaving only the Jews to take it out on) the only light my grandmother saw as a hopeful young woman was the light of international worker solidarity, as preached by revolutionaries from the newly created Soviet Union, overthrowing the regimes that had kept boots (and worse) on people’s necks for centuries. Is there anything surprising in her readiness to embrace this vision of the future?

My ambitious grandmother got on a boat in 1921, after years of civil war in her part of Ukraine (eventually resulting in a communist takeover), bid farewell to everything and everyone she knew, and headed to a better life in America. She slept in a lower, cheaper compartment of the ship where a giant rat once walked along the partition that separated her bed from the next sleeping berth (causing her to leap over the little wall into the bed of the startled man who was sleeping on the other side) and dreamed of a life where her family could not be marched to a ravine in their hometown and shot in their heads. Barely two decades later, local Ukrainians, sick of the fucking Jews, enthusiastically helped round up all of my grandmother’s large family, march them to the ravine, confiscate their clothes, shoot them in the head, scramble over their corpses with surprising dexterity, straightening the rows for the next batch to be killed. The Nazi overseer gave the word, and… repeat.

Speaking of Nazi overseers, the SS, the outfit that ran the death camps, provided slave laborers to German industries who set up near the camps. They charged German corporations $1 a day, a sort of handling fee, for every slave laborer marched to and from work. An ideal way to lift the tide of the old financial assets, I’d say. One of the beneficiaries of this arrangement was the company that recently bought mega-corporation Monsanto — once again lifting all financial assets for everyone (who owned shares in those assets, of course).

Here is a central myth of our no-holds barred, a rising tide lifts all financial assets, let the free market freely decide the free rules of our neoliberal system of capitalism: it benefits those wealthy enough to own financial assets and pretty much fucks everyone else. This myth enables the belief that when Wall Street is booming the “economy” is doing great. That’s why Mitch McConnell can block financial aid to millions who have recently entered poverty — the economic indicators prove that the economy is growing at a record rate, doing great!

It’s related the the myth of the “White” person. You can be a dirt poor, ethnically “white” citizen of the great state of Georgia (or a dirt poor, ethnically “white” Ukrainian for that matter) and still, automatically be superior to someone with dark skin, someone traditionally called a “nigger” (or the Ukrainian equivalent for Jew). You can be the poorest, most oppressed white person in your county — you still have the invaluable consolation of not being a nigger, of being infinitely superior to even the most accomplished one of them. They can’t take that birthright away from me, unless they flay my skin off (which they might, don’t rule it out). I’m sure the Ukrainians who executed most of my family back in Europe felt the same way about their ethnic superiority when they were getting rid of a few thousand Christ-killers in my grandparents’ hometown.

All this history is just history, part of my eternal one note samba. Oy, they killed most of my family, Nazi fucks! It gets tiring, I know. Back to 2021, and the next few days. Here’s what I’m going to do, to try to get a working Senate that we can actually influence:

If you’d like to join the Focus 2020 effort, we have a need for volunteers on Saturday at 2pm PT/ 5pm ET for a phone bank targeting low-propensity GA voters. Please sign up here: https://forms.gle/NE31ey6F5fginjaa8

Here is the rest of their rap:

Hi All,

On the last day of 2020 (finally!) and with just 5 days to go until the Georgia runoffs, we wanted to share some key stats on the race.

There have been over 2.8 million votes already cast — a rate of about  80% of the votes cast at this point in the general.  

According to America Votes, Democrats have a modeled edge of approximately 52% of the vote, putting us about 3 points ahead of where we stood at this point in the general election.  
Black voters, who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, represent a larger share of votes than they did at this point in the general– 34% versus 31%. This increase is driven almost entirely by voters over 50.    

Significantly, about 105,000 of these early voters did not vote in the general election and black voters represent 41% of this group.

Despite these positive numbers, there is reason for caution. 

The trend in the general election, both in Georgia and in other states, was that Democrats had higher turnout in early voting, but Republicans had higher turnout on election day. And Republicans have more high-propensity voters left who have yet to cast a ballot so they could eclipse much of the lead established by Democrats.  See Graph from Catalist below.

Note: The Georgia electorate is 57% White, 33% Black, 4% Hispanic/Latinx, 3% AAPI, and 2% Native American or other races
The ground game by progressive groups has been impressive. For instance, there have been over 6.5 million door knocks by these groups and will continue at a rate of about 500,000 a day for the last four days.

And our Focus 2020 volunteer group has been working virtually to provide voter information to over 2000 local community leaders, and to reach thousands of low propensity voters.

The great unknown is how Trump’s rhetoric about election fraud, his enmity toward some Republican leaders in Georgia, and his delay in signing the relief bill will affect Republican turnout on election day.  

This race was never going to be easy to win and it’s still uncomfortably close, but Democrats are doing the work needed to get out the vote.  Our community has supported three programs that weren’t being funded by others (Block Power, site-based vote-by-mail registration, and Working America) and so will certainly add net votes to the total. Let’s collectively hope for the best.

[1]

It was the overheated, accusatory rhetoric of radical abolitionists, the paper opined on January 19, 1859 — that hardened the Southern resolve to keep their slaves. If not for the violently moralistic outrage of anti-slavery zealots directed against the Southern slaveholders (threatened with the taking of their property without compensation!) these genteel planters would probably voluntarily free their slaves, according to the Grey Lady.

Stating the Obvious, year-end edition

I am not alone in wishing good riddance to this fucking deadly year. Not that flipping the calendar page will do anything, really, but it’s nice to symbolically turn the page on 2020, which NY Times op-ed writer Michelle Cottle generously called a “soul crushing hellscape of a dumpster fire.” It has been that. Let’s look at just a few things we learned.

If you have an even one vote majority in the Senate, you get to decide what business gets in front of the Senate, what the People will get an up or down vote on, what democracy is.

Black guy picks a replacement for a suddenly deceased giant of the right on the Supreme Court? No hearing, no advice nor consent, forget it, let the People decide in the next election. President impeached by the House, the law requires a trial in Senate? No worries, we openly vow to work closely with the president’s defense team, allow no witnesses or evidence, acquit him ASAP and put the blame back where it belongs: on enraged haters, traitors, communists, black terrorists. COVID-19 puts burdens on the wealthiest corporations in the country (many making record windfall profits during the pandemic) while poor people who work for these outfits (“essential workers”) sicken and die? A liability shield for all corporate entities who may have inadvertently killed people by forcing them to work in unsafe conditions during a highly infectious, deadly pandemic. It’s only fair, and a totally reasonable pre-condition for any government aid to tens of millions of immiserated Americans.

Record Wildfires and Killer Storms, a small price to pay for continued prosperity.

A pandemic is first and foremost a political event.

Public safety precautions urged by medical experts may safely be mocked as partisan bullshit, a hoax, a nasty stunt fueled by irrational anger. Mayors and governors seeking to enforce mask mandates, social distancing? Sue these tyrants in court, exhort unhinged supporters to take up guns, rise up against tyranny!! No political price need ever be paid, in fact, the base (‘al qaeda’ in Arabic) loves it!

Check out this dead Republican’s official website, updated when he died of COVID-19. Do you think this staunch supporter of the president wore a mask, ever?

Alternative facts are just as good as so-called real facts.

When a police officer kills an unarmed person, live on video, particularly if that dead person is “colored”, the officer is entitled to the presumption of innocence, “qualified immunity” [1] from prosecution and a vigorous public defense by the media team at the police union.

And you can go down the whole disgustingly detailed list. How did we get to this hideous and embarrassing point in our experiment in democracy? My short answer: consumerism, materialism, greed, stupidity, the coercive power of advertising, extolling the unlimited virtues of unlimited individual competition between Rugged Individuals who duke it out for supremacy.

The value of the American Dream, and the life of every dreamer, can be expressed in a number, which follows a dollar sign. During this pandemic the 650 American billionaires increased their wealth by almost a trillion dollars. A trillion is a thousand billions, a million millions, like so: $1,000,000,000,000. Thousands of American lives could be saved, and many of the dead would still be alive, by the targeted infusion of that kind of money (a historic windfall to our 650 wealthiest, during a pandemic) into the fight against this terrible disease, to keep people from homelessness, hunger, terror and despair.

We’ve been successfully sold the idea that Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk and Koch deserve every penny of their more than $100,000,000,000 fortunes, and every blessed dollar of their tens of billions in plague-related profits. To tax any of that money, even a windfall made during a pandemic, for use on the public good, even in a vast public health emergency, is coercive, socialistic, yea, communistic, totalitarian. So we seem to believe here in the USA, the land where Rugged Individualism has been marketed so successfully by influential actors like The Great Communicator.

MacKenzie Scott, former wife of world’s greediest man Jeff Fucking Bezos, has so far taken about 10% of her estimated $59,000,000,000 fortune and given the money directly to causes that need help, like pandemic relief and anti-racist groups. She gave six billion dollars to organizations she believes in, asking them only to use it where it was needed most.

Contrast that with usual billionaire strings-attached philanthropist micromanagers like Gates and Zuckerberg (Bezos, Musk and Koch don’t seem to believe in philanthropy) who, considering themselves among history’s greatest geniuses, create foundations that bear their names and fund specific solutions they believe in, like proposing to solve inequality of education and its role in intergenerational poverty with private “charter schools” (that don’t work — certainly not to help fix our long-besieged public education system).

Heather Cox Richardson wrote a short version of how we got here, an essay that arrived in my inbox around 5 a.m. Our pay-to-play political cesspool today is directly traceable to the rage and determination of a group of very wealthy white men following Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision when the “activist” Supreme Court unanimously declared segregation unconstitutional. You can trace their privilege-protecting, anti-majoritarian determination to take back the unquestioned power they never lost in the Civil War to the years right after American schools were ordered to be de-segregated “with all deliberate speed.”

Racism plays an outsized role in our nation’s woes — though, like the “n-word” itself, it must never be uttered aloud.

Think of it, without racism you have a tiny group of super rich, politically insulated heirs of great fortunes (think the old slaveholding class in Dixie and their counterparts in the North) versus the overwhelming human force of the great masses of the poor and disenfranchised. If poor whites and poor blacks ever united in a voting block based on their mutual interests, ever marched by the millions demanding action towards justice — you’d have to hire literally an army of lone gunmen to shoot all of their leaders in the head. Remove racism from the mix and you’d have sudden, massive change, or a bloodbath of our greatest, and most valuable, citizens. The world would not be safe for those born, booted and spurred, to ride the backs of the rest of us.

Of course, not every one of the 74,000,000 who voted to give Donald Trump a second chance to make America great again is a racist. On the other hand, we all understand that every eligible racist in the country voted for Donald. Anger at racism? It brings me back to personal experiences with old friends and reminds me of how personal the political always is.

The guy I asked to please stop provoking me would not even acknowledge doing it, he’d never provoked me, he kept insisting. At the same time, the last time we talked, he couldn’t rest until, reminding me three times in 15 minutes that though it was unfair to accuse me of disrespecting him, based on the actual events of the day and my constant communication with him about delays, that he still felt disrespected by my lateness. The third time he brought this up was the charm. I finally exploded, listing several very specific reasons I had no respect for him. Set and match.

It’s this way with racism. You keep bringing it up, I’ll keep telling you it’s not a problem. We are never going to talk about it in any meaningful way, nor acknowledge its prevalence in our culture. When you get mad, well, it just proves I was right all along about you fucking people.

A guy complained that he had no idea how much he’d hurt me because I’d been so calm, reasonable and nonjudgmental when I told him I was hurt. Somebody who is really hurt cries out, he pointed out, it’s only natural. How could I really blame him for not knowing how upset he’d made me when I didn’t cry out? It was unfair of me to expect him to know how hurtful and aggravating his actions were without a little screaming to give him a clue. So, to allow him to understand why I was hurt, and how much, I cried out. When I did, he was devastated that I could be such a merciless fuck.

This is how it works with racism too. You can be philosophical in the face of the pain of it, but that’s only a way of coping. Your restraint can be cited, by those who don’t believe in racism, as a demonstration that you’re pretty much cool with the way things are, that we all enjoy freedom here, and basic equality under the law.

Everything seems fine, until another unarmed black man, not resisting his handcuffing by police (as a suspect in a very minor, non-violent crime), is slowly murdered on video, by an officer kneeling on his neck for long, agonizing minutes, while the officer’s colleagues assist in the killing — during a pandemic. A high school girl films the entire thing on her cellphone. There is no question about the hideous sequence of events, the lynching, exactly how long it takes the begging man to lose consciousness, how long they wait to call for medical help.

Now you take to the streets by the millions, finally bringing many thousands of “white” people with you, everywhere. Racism doesn’t seem so abstract now, does it, you reality denying motherfuckers? Of course, now you are a visible, united threat and people who deny that racism exists start getting defensive, even shrill. Who is really making the problem here?

Anyway, a happy, healthy 2021 to you all. It’s hard to imagine it can be as bad as 2020, though guys like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham will do their best to hold the line, keep hope alive for al q’aeda, the base. The feelings of those left out, the large majority shoved aside, hurt, in need, bereft by the preventable deaths of loved ones — well, as Mitch and Lindsey and their ilk are used to believing, they simply don’t have the votes to do anything about it, do they?

A majority of one vote or not, we’re going to have a much better 2021 than the surreal, stinking shit-show of 2020. Take that to the bank, stay alert and be of good cheer.

[1]

Qualified immunity is a judicially created doctrine that shields government officials from being held personally liable for constitutional violations—like the right to be free from excessive police force—for money damages under federal law so long as the officials did not violate “clearly established” law. Both 42 U.S.C. § 1983—a statute originally passed to assist the government in combating Ku Klux Klan violence in the South after the Civil War—and the Supreme Court’s decision in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics (1971) allow individuals to sue government officials for money damages when they violate their constitutional rights. Section 1983 applies to state officials, while Bivens applies to federal officials. Because damages are often the only available remedy after a constitutional violation has occurred, suits for damages can be a crucial means of vindicating constitutional rights. When government officials are sued, qualified immunity functions as an affirmative defense they can raise, barring damages even if they committed unlawful acts.

source

The Death of Dr. Susan Moore, also a tragedy

“This Is How Black People Get Killed”: Dr. Susan Moore Dies of COVID After Decrying Racist Care

Democracy Now! reports, earlier today:

As the United States reports record deaths and hospitalizations from COVID-19 in the final days of 2020, we look at how the pandemic that ravaged the country this year has shone a stark new light on racism in medical care.

In a viral video recorded by Black physician Dr. Susan Moore, she describes racist treatment by medical staff at a hospital in Indianapolis and says they did not respond to her pleas for care, despite being in intense pain and being a doctor herself. In the video, Dr. Moore says she had to beg to receive pain medication and the antiviral drug remdesivir, and accuses a doctor at Indiana University Health North Hospital of ignoring her pleas because she was Black. “I put forward, and I maintain: If I was white, I wouldn’t have to go through that,” she says. Dr. Moore died December 20, just over two weeks after she posted the video. She was 54 years old.

related source

Somebody compared watching this video to seeing the video of the George Floyd murder, and I can see that. Can you say “black lives matter,” motherfucker?

Or as noted non-racist former Attorney General William Pelham Barr would say: an infinitesimal number of female black doctors have been killed this way during this historic pandemic, certainly not more than a large handful. Obviously not indicative of any kind of institutional problem reflecting on the values of the larger society, and clearly, this is an angry dying woman in the “viral” video. And give me a break, forced lockdowns of people used to freedom and liberty are actually worse than centuries of slavery for people who have never known freedom or liberty!

Does my heart good to refer to the repellant Trumpist “Christian” as the former attorney general.

The power of honest history

The power of accurate, clearly written history writing is not the same kind of power as that threatening blunderbuss-style of power wielded by an unaccountable maniac with a childish view of life and a sadist’s keen delight in the suffering of others, but it is powerful. It cannot literally take food out of the mouths of hungry children, or a week’s pay away from their parents, as can randomly flexed presidential power when POTUS pouts and golfs while protesting the unfairness of things like the proposed name changes of military bases now honoring traitorous Confederate generals, not that it would want to. A president so inclined can mandate a national curriculum of denial of history, a historian with a conscience writes serving the opposite inclination.

A detailed, honestly told history is a powerful force in the world. Here is a prime example of it, written last night by Heather Cox Richardson, who ends with this inspiring observation:

One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.

But it is never too late to change the future.

Read the rest of her powerful piece here.

A friend sent me the recent NY Times business piece about the historian’s amazing and well-earned viral internet success and her sudden wealth. The reason so many subscribe to her nightly newsletter is that she has emerged as a clear, mostly calm voice, giving the perspective of history to shed light on this horrific moment in time. Forwarding this piece to my friend last night all I could add was “WOW”. All he needed to write was “Agree”. A short read, well worth your time, particularly if you think history is a bunch of boring and irrelevant busy-work with no relevance to our current predicaments and no clues to offer about a way to a better future.