It is amazing, even in an ad-driven post-truth culture where “alternative facts” galvanize more passionate support than regular ones, that a carefully orchestrated prime time presentation is necessary to illuminate what most fair-minded Americans, having witnessed it on live TV, already know to be true.   

The violent storming of the Capitol, to stop the peaceful transition of power, was organized and fomented by the former-president in consultation with a small cabal of mad dead-enders like Sydney Powell, Mike Flynn, Rudy, Steve Bannon, the MyPillow CEO, and lesser known key players like John Eastman (former Clarence Thomas law clerk) and Jeffrey Clark (American Eichmann). 

We now learn that the storming was led by actual storm troops, three hundred or so Proud Boys who had been standing back and standing by, went to the Capitol earlier on January 6 to scope out the police lines and finalize a coordinated plan of attack so the locked down Capitol could be stormed by an angry mob.

We now know why there was no parade permit applied for that day (or at least none granted by DC police).   Trump’s secret service had already nixed the big guy’s participation in the protest at the Capitol.   It simply could not be organized, with that huge angry crowd at the Ellipse forming an unstoppable human tsunami if they’d all marched off together behind Trump’s motorcade to “stiffen the spines” of Republicans reluctant to subvert democracy.  In some cases this stiffening of the spine would be accomplished by the extreme means of hanging by the neck until good and rigid.  Not to worry, though, nobody was actually lynched with a rope.   Not to say it wasn’t very, very ugly there in the midst of the storming of the Capitol.

At one point, a police officer who was injured at the Capitol, Caroline Edwards, testified to seeing “officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up. I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage. It was chaos.”

“I can remember my breath catching in my throat because what I saw was just a war scene,” she said. “It was something like I had seen out of the movies.”

source

She had been trying to help Officer Brian Sicknick, who later died of “natural causes” (the medical examiner commented that the two strokes Sicknick suffered during the fighting were likely related to the mortal combat he faced), his face white after gassing.  She found his color troubling, since pepper spray produces a red face, but he was white as the sheet of paper she held up. 

Her confusion ended a moment later when she was sprayed in the face with the same mystery gas and she was blinded and fell to the ground again, as Trump’s peaceful supporters peacefully made their way into the Capitol to exercise their sacred First Amendment right to use deadly violence if all else fails. As unimpeachable Clarence Thomas’s Framers had explicitly intended, right in the text of the sacred document.  

These hearings are aimed partially at the 110,000,000 lazy American patriots who, while eligible to vote, declined to exercise the franchise in November 2020.

Republicans have played this game before. They insist that exposing an indefensible deed committed by one of their own “won’t matter” because those who have made up their mind (i.e., themselves) won’t be swayed. (Tautology alert!) The media repeats this talking report to sound “balanced” or sophisticated. Polls after the proceedings show that opinion has not shifted much. Republicans then exult: See, we were right! (Funny how they never voiced this argument regarding the Benghazi hearings.)

Such inane and irrelevant commentary is now coursing through mainstream media today regarding the House select committee’s hearings on the Jan. 6 insurrection, even though the hearings involve the fate of our democracy and the worst betrayal by an American president in history. Giving the party responsible for the attack on the Capitol veto power over whether the investigation “matters” is, sadly, what much of the news coverage has come to. The only thing worse is pronouncing investigations into hugely important topics “boring.” Ignore it.

https://wapo.st/3Qf65H0

The Nazis, in the years before they seized power, had street thugs in organized groups all over Germany. This informal army was called the SA, the Brownshirts, angry young men who would go into the territory of their political enemies, beat people up, occasionally kill them. This was done to intimidate the public, galvanize support by a show of manly action and give angry young men a meaningful cause to completely justify their rage. After all, if fucking Jews were responsible for all the misery in Germany, undefeated in the World War, but for backstabbing fucking Jewish criminals betraying the victorious German army, why wouldn’t you join an armed gang and go publicly humiliate as many Jews as you can?

Incendiary propaganda and normalized violence go hand in hand. Activated by an infuriating lie, you can join an outraged mob attack that sends dozens of cops to the hospital. Your political leadership will dismiss that violent overrunning of the Capitol as simply protected First Amendment expression, “legitimate political discourse”. Liberals will chafe at this, which is part of the point of saying it, but very few of them will risk having their asses physically kicked over it by maniacs all too happy to kick some liberal ass.

That’s what authoritarians count on — an inflammatory lie repeated on a loop and the willingness of violent followers to take names and kick ass — that and the general public’s not unreasonable fear of being lynched by an angry armed crowd chanting about killing people.

How to halt the free mass expression of hatred, lies and violent rhetoric that lead to these kinds of atrocities is a question that has increasingly bedeviled us here in the Free Market. The right of free people to freely choose to spread hateful lies that lead to violence must be balanced, capitalism’s staunchest defenders insist, against the inherent wisdom of the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, a hand that theorists of capitalism say always turns things to the best possible outcome (in terms of maximizing profit for those who produce the best product at the lowest price). In practical terms it means the right of several obscenely wealthy people to unlimited additional billions in personal wealth,l and great returns for shareholders must be balanced against potentially profit-limiting protection of an abstraction like “democracy”.

Melania Trump’s tireless campaign to rid our society of bullying seems to have been in vain. Bullies are at their mightiest online, hiding their cowardice behind a user name they are free to use threats of violence to intimidate anyone they hate. Bullies are driven by hatred and the humiliation they experienced. So they threatened to kill Christine Blasey Ford, and gave out her home address. She has had to move four times so far (the first time even before she testified credibly against Kavanaugh) as a suddenly bipartisan Senate rushed to protect Supreme Court justices from peaceful protests outside their homes when they restrict voting, allow unlimited dark money in politics, are poised to criminalize abortion (based on centuries’ old theories about women) and are set to turn the time machine back, in every possible way, to the good old pre-Civil Rights era. If you don’t like it, vote us out, bitches, says a spicy Federalist Society justice named Alito.

What is our government doing to protect us all from online violence and hateful rhetoric based on demonstrable lies, propaganda that leads to murder? Here is an excellent, and troubling, interview by Terry Gross, of recently resigned head of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, online disinformation and bullying expert Nina Jankowicz, who, in spite of her expertise and skills, was forced to resign after a short time on the job, after a deluge of online disinformation and cyber-bullying, including threats of violence and disclosure of her personal information to make her an easier target for angry young assholes. An important story that simply never got much traction in the firehouse of reactionary Trump/Bannon/Koch diarrhea we are all constantly being sprayed by.

Fresh Air: How A Disinformation & Harassment Expert Became A Target

Spoiler, it’s not flattering to either of them.

. . . After Election Day, Trump began another, more deadly assault on the electoral process.
“JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!” he tweeted on Dec. 30, 2020, from Mar-a-Lago, where he was spending the holidays.
Longtime chief strategist Steve Bannon, who had been in and out of Trump’s favor, picked up the thread in a phone conversation with Trump that same day.
“You’ve got to return to Washington and make a dramatic return today,” Bannon told him, according to reporting in Woodward and Robert Costa’s book, “Peril.”

“You’ve got to call Pence off the f—ing ski slopes and get him back here today. This is a crisis,” Bannon said, referring to the vice president, who was vacationing in Vail, Colo.
“We’re going to bury Biden on January 6th,” Bannon said.
If Republicans could cast enough of a shadow on Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, Bannon said, it would be hard for him to govern. Millions of Americans would consider him illegitimate.
“We are going to kill it in the crib. Kill the Biden presidency in the crib,” Bannon said.
Trump’s attack on Biden’s legitimacy included a stream of public statements, legal deceptions and a constant focus on disruption of the Jan. 6 certification in Congress

https://wapo.st/3ay2F1M

There is a national organization of Republican state attorneys general called RAGA, the Republican Attorneys General Association.   RAGA is gaga for MAGA.   In the lead up to the 2020 election, they met secretly with voter fraud conspiracy theory promoter/expert Hans von fucking Spakovsky, several times.  One tangible result of these meetings was more than one of their members limiting drop boxes for voting in their state, one to a county, regardless of population.  They had more in the works, they just didn’t have enough time to plan and implement it all.  Now they can plan for the next elections at their leisure.  They have been working at it steadily since they didn’t manage to snatch “victory” away from Joe Biden in November 2020 or January 2021. Rest assured, they are all very busy strategizing and passing laws.

RAGA was in the news yesterday, in the background, as a leaked RNC training video came out, in which plans from before the 2020 election were brought up to date, Big Lie style.  You insert an army of trained Republican poll watchers/voter challengers, with MAGA attorneys, police captains and the local Republican DA on speed dial, on call to make court challenges based on suspected fraud, to hold up long lines of fake voters on the spot, (you can tell they’re fake by the color of their damned skin!), gum up the works at predominantly Democratic voting precincts, get the local DA to stop voting due to suspected massive fraud, have the local RAGA member step forward to invalidate the votes from hostile districts, throw it to the independent MAGA state legislature and so on.   Remember, these ambitious souls are all, at the moment, gaga for MAGA. 

Hans von Spakovsky, who works for Charles Koch and friends at the Heritage Foundation, oversees a vast voting fraud database where he has documented more than a thousand instances of proven voter fraud, dating back to the 1980s.  That’s more than a thousand cases of fraud among billions of votes cast in all American elections in thirty or forty years.   The percentage of voting fraud, less than a ten thousandth of one percent, is what smart people call “statistically insignificant.”  Fortunately, that’s good enough for people who are gaga for MAGA, like RAGA!    

USA!   USA!!!!

These comments by the Michigan head of the RNC’s Election Integrity/ Minority voter intimidation board, are Hans von fucking Spakovsky’s wet dream of massive voter suppression. Recently leaked RNC training video presumably leaked by a goddamn traitor, I suppose. This “precinct strategy” is probably nothing illegal, because the consent decree the RNC signed in the 1980s preventing this kind of skulduggery expired in 2018. Just like that totally unfair Voting Rights Act the stupid Senate reauthorized 98 to nothing, before neutral balls and strikes umpire John Roberts fixed it for good after Obama “won”!

They won’t lose in court this time, he urges, because it won’t get that far, they will have an army of RNC trained partisans at the polls and countless reactionary lawyers ten, twenty, thirty million strong, on standby, plus law enforcement and prosecutors on their side! The South will rise again!

Here’s the communist view, from PBS: