Category Archives: History and Politics

You Like the Idea of The Fourth Reich?

I wake up almost every morning, the grandchild of two people who had their entire families massacred one August night in 1943, to the banging of drums and the caterwauling of drunken Ukrainians (all relatives of my other two grandparents disappeared, with no trace at all, into the fog of Nazi genocide), slightly sick to my stomach at the latest news of how heartily homegrown fascism is growing in our promising democracy. The antidemocratic insurrection that came to an ugly head the day a Jew and a Black tipped the balance of a closely fought Senate is still openly in progress as feckless liberals ring their hands and vow to get to “the truth”.

It is a supremely sickening subject, one detail more vomit inducing than the next, so we must not speak about it, it is too upsetting, plus we are utterly helpless to do anything about it but watch in horror, let’s talk about anything but what is taking place right in front of us! So I sit to write every day, and try to clear my head a little bit, lessen the sick feeling in my gut. Some days it works better than others.

We live in a country that, as a culture, does not believe in history. Six months back might as well be fifty years ago, two hundred years. Since nothing happened to really refute the lies Trump told about the effect his explosive lies had on the followers he incited to storm the Capitol to stop certification of the election he lost, well, who’s to judge him? Nobody has ever held him accountable for anything, why start now? In additional, there are important institutional questions to be debated before we act hastily, about the administration of justice, the Supreme Court, prosecuting the organizers and inciters of the MAGA riot.

Who among us has not wanted to have people who hated us shot to death by riot police, the military? What his fans love about him is that he does exactly what they would do if they were in charge. Even when he lies, he’s telling a larger truth anyone who is really angry can instantly identify with. Enemies? Fucking kill them, what’s the problem? They’d do the same to you, if they could.

In every new book about the previous regime, led by a giant two-year old in a perpetual temper tantrum, we learn more details about how destructive a giant angry “populist” baby can be when in charge of a country with violently emotional divisions.

Russia, we learned the other day, again, made a calculation in 2016 based on the usefulness of a vain, insecure, easily flattered and manipulated American president of strong opinions and limited intellect, an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex” according to a leak of Russian documents reported by The Guardian[1].

This claim by a super-liberal British fake news rag is pure propaganda to tens of millions of Americans who may not agree with everything their leader does, but who know that he has their best interests at heart, even as he weaponizes vaccination (he himself quietly took the vaccine, and softly admitted on FOX that everyone should get it), exacts revenge on everyone on his long, ever-expanding enemies list, humiliating even those most loyal to him once he feels they failed him, and continues to fan the flames of the audacious, violence-stoking lie that, but for the grace of God and some Capitol police who fought against overwhelming odds, would have cost his supremely loyal Vice President his life (along with others). He plays to rage, his particular “genius” is inspiring greater and greater bonfires of rage in his followers. He will say literally anything to keep them mad as hell, fired up, ready to take names and kick disloyal, unAmerican commie ass.

At least 40% of America is in denial about their destructive champion, no matter how much evidence of his destructiveness is revealed by people close to him who remained fatally silent when it mattered most to reveal these alarming details (“just shoot the protesters” “I need a favor, though” “support my self-serving lie or I’ll end your fucking career”). This man, aided by the able, and morally supple Bagpiper Bill Barr, sent a death squad to execute an unresisting American citizen they believe had murdered a Trump supporter in a street brawl in Portland.

Forget the Three Percenters (their name is based on the myth that only 3% of British colonists in the New World actively supported the American Revolution, and that was enough to start it), 40% of the electorate, angry and motivated, in a country whose electoral system was designed to protect the minority power of slaveholders, can decide the destiny of our experiment in democracy.

This group is glad to believe that it’s irrationally angry Blacks who are the racists, not White Christians. The teaching of history, they believe, must not be political, it must be patriotic. They are happy to renounce the vaccine that their leader once touted among his greatest accomplishments, the result of his brilliant and history making Operation Warp Speed. They are willing to die en masse for the freedom to ignore the best advice of infectious disease scientists. They belong to a death cult they fervently believe is a cult of freedom.

My friends, in a way, are right. There is very little any of us, as individuals, can do to change any of this supremely depressing stuff. If one million people a day read this blahg, where I attempt to make sound arguments based on actual facts, it would make little difference, would change almost no minds that didn’t already agree with my point of view. The price for my success would probably be dozens, if not hundreds, of trolls telling me every day that I need to take a fictional red pill to really understand the seriousness of the Satanist cannibal pedophile ring that runs the world (speaking in a heavy Yiddish accent, of course).

On the other hand, things looked hopeless for flipping the Senate as the Georgia run-off approached. It seemed unbelievable that after all of the clear fuck-ups of the giant peevish baby’s disastrous (except to the rich and religiously extreme) administration so many of his most ardent supporters easily won reelection. Why the Democrats didn’t take a dozen seats, including Lindsey Graham’s, McConnell’s, was a perplexing mystery to people like me.

As the Georgia run-off approached, Sekhnet and I attended Zoom meetings and did everything possible to get Georgia Democrats to the polls. On January 6th a Jewish journalist and a Black reverend made history, becoming the first of their kinds to be voted in as Georgia senators. That victory was quickly swallowed up in an outburst of organized rage that the Party of Patriots is defending, counter-factually, as a lawful protest, based on a patriotic reaction to an infuriating allegation advertised to the tune of $50,000,000 plus dozens of influential, free, presidential tweets and speeches in the weeks leading up to the deadly siege. Democrat (sic) determination to investigate the MAGA riot is just another example of a child-blood drinking radical leftist witch-hunt against a man whose only crime is trying to make America great again, and rid us of the rule of murderous pedophiles.

No facts can really enter this existential debate. Facts are malleable, subject to definitive refutation by allegations of alternative facts, as we’ve learned. Here is a nice quote from a powerful, ambitious Republican who never tired of the taste of his leader’s crusty nether sphincter:

Here are a few other quotes that jumped out at me, wound up flapping around in my stomach acid:

General Mark Milley, who’d accompanied Trump on his triumphant walk through used tear gas canisters to awkwardly and defiantly hold up a Bible for a photo op of a Strong president who showed cowardly governors how to dominate the protesters, distanced himself from the stunt, regretting his involvement. A few months after that he, a student of history, referred to these very fine Nazis by name. He at the time had

See also the Lyin’ Ted quotes above. The Leader has the right to say anything, no matter how much it might rile up some very fine Nazis, even who he would or would not Do a coup with.

The most loyal asslicker in US presidential history, Mike “No Homo” Pence, was unable to convince his master that he lacked the power to stop the certification of votes on January 6. He lacked the courage or the character to speak to him frankly, suggesting that perhaps the lawyers could have the final word, but not Rudy or Sidney Powell, nor Flynn or the My Pillow Guy. Never mind. He proved himself an unworthy coward, and such a person, in the eyes of a lynch mob, is richly deserving of kicking at the end of a rope.

Not a problem. The guy was a coward, you kick his ass to the curb, like that guy who married a dog (the only woman who would have him) and whose father was involved in the Kennedy assassination. We’ll leave colossal piece of shit Bill Barr with the last supremely aggravating word:

That, and the fact that he ran against the second most hated politician in America in 2016 (fuck Barr and his fucking last word).

[1]

The second big story came this morning in the form of an article from The Guardian, which purported to reveal leaked documents from the Kremlin in which Putin and Russian leaders agreed in January 2016 to make Trump president to sow discord in the United States in order to get U.S. sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Crimea overturned. The documents described Trump as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex.”

There are many reasons to be skeptical of this “leak,” but, in the end, whether true or not, it doesn’t tell us much that we don’t already know. There is ample evidence, articulated most clearly in the Senate Intelligence Report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, that Russia worked hard to get Trump elected in 2016.

source

The War on History Is a War on Democracy

Historian Timothy Snyder wrote an excellent extended piece in the NY Times recently entitled The War on History Is a War on Democracy. He goes over the recent history of “memory laws”, usually used by totalitarian states, and would-be totalitarians, to ban the teaching of inconvenient aspects of history in furtherance of their demand for citizen obedience. If you make cause and effect disappear you can convince ill-informed citizens of virtually anything.

These memory laws are counterfactual, since they deny things that actually happened, but they don’t need to make sense — they are strictly political in their intent. They’re intended to erase accounts and collective memory of bad things that actually happened, things the law may have shrugged at, held nobody accountable for, things essential to study if you hope to avoid the mistakes of the past. Erase the awful things done under color of law, et viola, a beautiful past, an inspiring and idealistic past, made to order!

Snyder points to the example of Putin’s 2014 “memory law” banning the discussion of Soviet war crimes during history’s deadliest war. The law claims that since all war crimes were adjudicated at the Nuremberg trials, bringing up alleged Soviet war crimes is actually “holocaust denial”. Of course, as Snyder points out, the Soviet Union participated in the prosecution of Nazi war crimes and no Soviets were tried, let alone held accountable for any of the massacres done by their troops, approved by their generals and by Stalin, but no matter. If you talk about any of that in Russia today, you are guilty of “holocaust denial” and in violation of the 2014 Russian memory law.

We have the same thing going on here, obviously, with the many new state laws proscribing the teaching of horrible, often racially motivated, moments of violence in our past, some little remembered to start with, that the law, and American historians, long winked at here. Ever hear of the New Orleans Race Massacre of 1866 [1]? You sure won’t now in any state that is determined to teach only an inspiring, patriotic history of our Exceptional USA. Mentioning an unspeakable horror like this massacre under current Florida law will get you in very hot water, very fast.

Snyder puts his finger on what is so destructive about these laws, designed to keep people in the dark about cause and effect in history.

If it is illegal in Florida to teach about systemic racism, then aspects of the Holocaust relevant for young Americans go untaught. German race laws drew from the precedent set by Jim Crow in the United States. But since Jim Crow is systemic racism, having to do with American society and law, the subject would seem to be banned in Florida schools. 

Timothy Snyder

Well-done and well worth reading. If you can’t read it at the link above, shoot me a comment and I’ll be happy to cut and paste the entire piece for you.

Nothing bad ever happened to this man for any “systemic” reason..,

 [1]

The New Orleans Massacre of 1866 occurred on July 30, when a peaceful demonstration of mostly black Freedmen was set upon by a mob of white rioters, many of whom had been soldiers of the recently defeated Confederate States of America, leading to a full-scale massacre. 

Wikipedia

We learn, (unless in a Florida classroom, apparently):

By the end of the massacre, at least 200 black Union war veterans were killed, including forty delegates at the Convention. Altogether 238 people were killed and 46 were wounded.

source

How did this happen?

The New Orleans Massacre, also known as the New Orleans Race Riot, occurred on July 30, 1866.  While the riot was typical of numerous racial conflicts during Reconstruction, this incident had special significance. It galvanized national opposition to the moderate Reconstruction policies of President Andrew Johnson and ushered in much more sweeping Congressional Reconstruction in 1867.

The riot took place outside the Mechanics Institute in New Orleans as black and white delegates attended the Louisiana Constitutional Convention. The Convention had reconvened because the Louisiana state legislature had recently passed the black codes and refused to extend voting rights to black men. Also on May 12, 1866, four years of Union Army imposed martial law ended and Mayor John T. Monroe, who had headed city government before the Civil War, was reinstated as acting mayor. Monroe had been an active supporter of the Confederacy.

As a delegation of 130 black New Orleans residents marched behind the U.S. flag toward the Mechanics Institute, Mayor Monroe organized and led a mob of ex-Confederates, white supremacists, and members of the New Orleans Police Force to the Institute to block their way. The mayor claimed their intent was to put down any unrest that may come from the Convention but the real reason was to prevent the delegates from meeting.

As the delegation came to within a couple of blocks of the Institute, shots were fired but the group was allowed to proceed to the meeting hall. Once they reached the Institute the police and white mob members attacked them, beating some of the marchers while others rushed inside the building for safety.

source

Or as Trumpist governor Ron “DeathSantis” would say to any Florida teacher allowing this kind of anti-American propaganda in her classroom “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Reischstag Moment

General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is quoted as calling the last days of the Trump presidency, after the lost election of 2020, as well as the months before the election, when the ex-president openly considered invoking The Insurrection Act to have the military round up his enemies, a “Reichstag moment”. He also referred to the Trump dead-enders who were advising the increasingly desperate Trump as Nazis and was determined not to let them win.

Of course, to appreciate what a Reichstag Moment is you need to know a snippet of history. If you are on the right you will also be very skeptical toward the comments of the disloyal Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as reported, and framed, in an influential newspaper owned by a supremely greedy billionaire Satanist pedophile cannibal who pays no tax. This account of General Mark Milley’s reaction to Trump inner circle authoritarianism really got my attention. Nobody has been sued over the account in the book, reprinted in the article, including some Milley quotes that could have been uttered by me, so there’s that too.

The Reichstag is the German Parliament building. After Hitler came to power, with a 37% share of the electorate, he was part of a coalition government, initially hemmed in by an eighty-six year-old general (the chancellor) and other determined (but overmatched) traditionally conservative functionaries. Within a few weeks the Reichstag went up in flames. Hitler was not surprised when he arrived on the scene (Nazis almost certainly set the supremely useful fire) but angrily vowed quick restoration of law and order and a fight to the death against the perpetrators of this shameless communist provocation [1]. The members of the Reichstag quickly granted Hitler emergency powers, as authorized in the Weimar Constitution for times of national emergency, which in this case was to last the entire twelve increasingly murderous years of the Thousand Year Reich.

When someone who knows a bit of history mentions the “Reichstag” it is usually in the context of a terrifying atrocity done to enable a radical political change. Once they burn your seat of government you’re allowed to go to a very different rule book for fighting these motherfuckers, as the former president might say. Which, frankly, he did say, when using his monumental lie about a stolen election to incite the MAGA riot:

The Washington Post article, entitled “Joint Chiefs chairman feared potential ‘Reichstag moment’ aimed at keeping Trump in power” begins:

In the waning weeks of Donald Trump’s term, the country’s top military leader repeatedly worried about what the president might do to maintain power after losing reelection, comparing his rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s during the rise of Nazi Germany and asking confidants whether a coup was forthcoming, according to a new book by two Washington Post reporters.

As Trump ceaselessly pushed false claims about the 2020 presidential election, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grew more and more nervous, telling aides he feared that the president and his acolytes might attempt to use the military to stay in office, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report in “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.”

Milley described “a stomach-churning” feeling as he listened to Trump’s untrue complaints of election fraud, drawing a comparison to the 1933 attack on Germany’s parliament building that Hitler used as a pretext to establish a Nazi dictatorship.

“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides, according to the book. “The gospel of the Führer.”

A spokesman for Milley declined to comment.

source

The article continues:

. . . as military and law enforcement leaders planned for President Biden’s inauguration, Milley said he was determined to avoid a repeat of the siege on the Capitol.

“Everyone in this room, whether you’re a cop, whether you’re a soldier, we’re going to stop these guys to make sure we have a peaceful transfer of power,” he told them. “We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”

Nazis did get in, some very fine Nazis (now being persecuted by radical leftists in power illegitimately), and the ring of steel Milley talked about did not stop tens of thousands of them from gathering to cheer the audacious lies of America’s Greatest Liar and then, the most audacious of them from storming and ransacking the Capitol to halt the peaceful transfer of power in what many call an insurrection (the GOP calls it patriotism), but, as Milley predicted, our institutions held, even if barely.

As Democracy Now! summarized the same revelations today:

Top U.S. General Mark Milley feared then-President Trump could attempt a coup to remain in power, and compared Trump’s rhetoric in the final weeks of his presidency to that of Nazi Germany. The revelations come in a new book by Washington Post reporters, which says Milley described Trump as a “classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose.” Milley also reportedly called Trump’s baseless claims of electoral fraud his very own “Reichstag moment.”

source

Is it hyperbole to call people Nazis merely for being willing to use violence to overthrow a fair election out of undying loyalty to a bullying, constantly lying leader?

You be the judge, here’s my recently composed synopsis of Nazism in action:

They calculatingly used the rage of a suffering populace to fuel a right wing revolution in Germany and install an anti-democratic one-party government. Nazis were pioneers in the now popular technique of the Big Lie — an audacious and incendiary lie (Biden, the Clintons and Tom Hanks all fuck children and drink their blood, BLM and antifa stole your president from you!!!) to keep the rage and fear levels high. They employed street violence (brown shirt squads, kicking ass and taking names!) which they defended as necessary to save the nation from radical leftists who wanted to destroy Germany. They called for the execution of all critics of Nazism (and soon got around to doing it). They had the backing of many of Germany’s top industrialists, who feared socialist reforms in poverty-stricken post-WWI Germany more than they did street violence in the name of the free market, militarization and, soon, vastly increased profit from Nazi government slave labor programs and the like. They instituted loyalty pledges and purged all non-Nazis from public positions, judiciary, civil service, professorships, medicine, law. They went along, step by step, first “euthanizing” people in mental hospitals, then conducting nationwide pogroms against a hated minority, then taking the citizenship away from classes of citizens, then detaining them, confiscating their property, deporting now stateless “resident aliens”, etc. It was years until they had everyone ready for what they became famous for during the last three years of the war, high tech mechanized mass murder of at least ten million hated subhumans (six million Jews, five million others were killed in death camps). The Nazi one-party police state advanced step by step, with the support of millions of purposefully deluded Germans and the willing connivance of a fully Nazi judiciary.

As for very fine people on both sides, on both sides, it’s impossible for me to see any very fine people on the Nazi side, or the Klan side, or the Trumpist side, for that matter. Most likely because I am a judgmental hater, as so many of my ilk seem to be.

You are a judgmental hater, sir

[1]

A dim witted Dutch communist was quickly tried and executed as the sole perpetrator. This van der Lubbe, who in spite of his modest intelligence was apparently a gifted athlete who sprinted, breaking all speed records, to the various spots in the large building that were simultaneously set ablaze to turn the Reichstag into a dramatic bonfire.

The chilling breeze of history

The best people only hire the best people, it’s like a thing among the best people, to surround themselves with only the very best people. At the same time, the best people often need to be the smartest person in the room, so if they are of average intelligence they’ll wind up choosing the best people who are not as smart as them, meaning they’ll be surrounded by spineless toadies, many of them dumb as a post. Makes sense.

Here are three of the best people in Germany, right after the failed Beerhall Putsch, an early Nazi attempt to overthrow German democracy [1], and the well-publicized trial for treason, before a right wing judge sympathetic to Nazi aims, that made one of them an international symbol of militant nationalism (the photo was taken in Landsberg Prison during their short stint there):

[Fuck, I love the mandolin, I just saw it. Not only the best people, but at least one of them loved music! He seems to be actually fretting a chord. Can you hear these best people singing along? I can.]

Mediocre minds often dream desperately grandiose dreams. It is not possible that destiny created me just to live out an obscure life, greatness is in my soul, leading the masses to glory is my birthright! I have been chosen, I am the Chosen One, the Savior, the only One who can make things right, the only One who can lead the terrible fight against PURE EVIL!

Critical people will view these types as deluded, insane, but true believers will faithfully follow them into the jaws of death. It has been this way from the dawn of human history, those who can convince others that the force of history has chosen them will always find a ready army.

As horrible as the glowering faces of the most threatening monsters in human history are, their smiles are far worse. The smile on the face of a violent sadist is a sickening sight. There are few things more horrific, to those opposed to things like genocide, than a beaming Nazi. Check out these fucking faces.

The Poisonous Dwarf, Hitler’s Minister of Public Enlightenment, in a buoyant mood

I know, I know. These human expressions of happiness are familiar to us all, and on the faces of history’s greatest criminals they are particularly hideous. I always had the same feeling whenever I’d see the self-hating Stephen Miller (Trump’s would-be Minister of Public Enlightenment without portfolio) or Bagpiper Bill Barr (Mr. Trump’s pugnacious Hermann Goring-style gunsel) smiling. Before that the aptly named Dick Cheney’s rare, jagged, apparently painful smile always evoked that sick in the stomach feeling. The revulsion comes from knowing what makes this type smile, the triumph of their twisted views, the suffering of others, of people they passionately hate.

Hate and resentment is good for business, if your business is uniting masses of angry people. As long as hate rages anger remains unquenchable and the loop is endless. You cannot rest, if you truly believe powerful Satanist cannibal child molesters are out to turn your home into a totalitarian Marxist state where the blood of your own children will be lustily slurped down, after they are raped by these vampires, until you join an army to root out and KILL every last member of this evil cabal.

A passionate mob is capable of the most atrocious actions you can imagine. Their passion does not need to argue with anyone, it doesn’t require evidence or fact — only faith and passion. True believers, if Christians, may think of it like the Passion of Christ [2]. Many destructive, abusive people in power wrap themselves in the pious cloaks of their religion (e.g. Bagpiper Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, Antonin Scalia, Osama bin Laden). Religion demands obedience to all-knowing, all-merciful God’s will. How do we know what God wants? Faith.

On the other side of the equation, we have decent people of good will wringing their hands, instead of taking the bold, decisive action that is needed to protect the rest of us from irrational maniacs hawking violence-inspiring lies and monetizing them. In history this has always been a recipe for the worst possible outcome. “Why won’t they accept the plain truth that we’ve proved ten times over?” they wonder. If only we could get things back to the way they were before everything was so out of control, they think, not really thinking things through.

Contrast these moderate, status quo embracing, nuance-appreciating institutionalists with the bold, passionate, reckless, history-making mold breakers admired by millions. The bold transactional liar acts with a game plan (to win it all) and lays out a worldview the average angry person can embrace. You can prove the guy is lying, but it makes no difference to the faithful, who see the world exactly as their leader does.

I’d always heard Hitler was a “failed artist” before he found his calling in German politics. This label always irked me, as I myself am a “failed artist” (though my army of fanatical followers does not begin to compare to Mr. H’s) since I stubbornly failed to monetize my talents in any way. I’ve seen few of Hitler’s art works over the years but here is one that, like Trump’s American Carnage speech (Blacks and the Socialist Left have reduced our cities to raging anarchist war zones), perfectly reveals the artist’s weltanshauung, his view of the world as a grim, scorched, treacherous battlefield for eternal struggle, a worldview that would inspire millions:

see FN 3

You can’t argue with that shit.

Fuck you, Widaen

[1]

Think of the January 6 MAGA riot/dress rehearsal at the Capitol.

[2]

The Passion of Christ is the story of Jesus Christ‘s arrest, trial and suffering. It ends with his execution by crucifixion. … The word Passion comes from the Latin word for suffering. The crucifixion of Jesus is accepted by many scholars as an actual historical event.

— the internets

[3]

The images above (with the exception of the soul-revealing shot of America’s Greatest Sore Loser) are all from episode one of Netflix’s new short series “How to Become A Tyrant”, narrated by the excellent, deadpan Peter Dinklage.

A few definitions

Some, I’m sure, will recoil from my use of the term Nazi for the public facing Republican party, with the lockstep obstructionist unity we are seeing these days. Highly partisan, sure, taking names and kicking ass, OK, sometimes a bit unfair, even unscrupulous, for sure, using the law to protect friends and prosecute, even persecute, enemies, fair enough, vindictive, all right, lying about an organized, well-financed riot to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, bad, sure, deliberately spreading a deranged lie about a “stolen” election and fundraising on that lie, not good, admittedly. Nazis though? Do I realize what Nazis actually did?

I know very well what Nazis did. They calculatingly used the rage of a suffering populace to fuel a right wing revolution in Germany and install an anti-democratic one-party government. Nazis were pioneers in the now popular technique of the Big Lie — an audacious and incendiary lie (Biden, the Clintons and Tom Hanks all fuck children and drink their blood, BLM and antifa stole your president from you!!!) to keep the rage and fear levels high. They employed street violence (brown shirt squads, kicking ass and taking names) which they defended as necessary to save the nation from radical leftists who wanted to destroy Germany. They called for the execution of all critics of Nazism (and soon got around to doing it). They had the backing of many of Germany’s top industries, who feared socialist reforms in poverty-stricken post-WWI Germany more than they did street violence in the name of the free market, militarization and, soon, vastly increased profit from Nazi government slave labor programs and the like. They instituted loyalty pledges and purged all non-Nazis from public positions, civil service, professorships, medicine, law. They went along, step by step, first “euthanizing” people in mental hospitals, then conducting nationwide pogroms against a hated minority, then taking the citizenship away from classes of citizens, then detaining them, confiscating their property, deporting now stateless “resident aliens”, etc. It was years until they had everyone ready for what they became famous for during the last three years of the war, high tech mechanized mass murder of hated subhumans. The Nazi one-party police state advanced step by step, with the support of millions of purposefully deluded Germans and the willing connivance of a fully Nazi judiciary.

So when I refer to these motherfuckers, fond of calling their Democratic colleagues “brown shirts” and Nazis (for crimes like trying to force people to take safety precautions during a highly infectious pandemic), well, I have to call a party committed to a series of absolute falsehoods (no systemic racism in US, bipartisan conspiracy to defraud the never defeated president who lost, witch hunts with no basis in law or fact, Capitol riot was a totally legal peaceful protest, taxation of the rich kills jobs, a screaming need to pass restrictive voting laws to defend “election integrity,” mask mandate = tyranny, vaccine = Nazism, etc.) and slavishly devoted to a deranged leader what they actually are: Nazis.

Some of them (Stephen Miller, for example) are literally the same as their Nazi forebears, driven by hatred and a radical desire to reshape the world according to their passionate prejudices. Most of the others, the moral mediocrities who make this scary moment possible, like many of the original Nazi party members, are simply ambitious careerists who calculate that the Nazi juggernaut is worth getting on if they want to attain and keep power.

Though he has lied about it, the former president’s first wife (he paid women he cheated on his third wife with to dummy up — no crime, no crime! His first wife retracted the claim that he raped her toward the end of their doomed marriage, retracted!!) revealed that he kept a book of Hitler’s collected speeches in a special cabinet near his bed. A friend always said his speeches, including his use of derisive, biting “humor” to reduce his many enemies to subhuman status, were remarkably similar to Hitler speeches he’d heard. I always said the clown was more like Mussolini, a strutting, posing, incompetent braggart who regards himself as a genius. Events have proved my friend was closer to the truth than I was.

In fairness to the former president, his ambitious rags to riches German born grandfather’s nationality and criminal instincts (he wound up deported from Germany) do not suggest any Nazi tendencies and, besides, he died in 1918 (of the last pandemic) before the formation of the National German Socialist Workers Party (NSDAP).

The same applies to his driven father, there is no proof that he attended a Klan rally in Queens as a young man because he agreed with their racist worldview. He may have gone as a mere spectator, the police arrest report is sketchy on which it was. It may be pure coincidence that as a wealthy builder of government subsidized (he made millions on tax breaks) middle class housing he refused to rent to Blacks and Hispanics, a practice that was not illegal until the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made it so. Roy Cohn got him out of that case, by settling the federal discrimination lawsuit with no admission of deliberate wrongdoing in trying to honestly preserve the segregation of his working class apartment complexes. So, you know, fair is fair.

Who are the most hated enemies of the modern Republican party and the armed militants who support the former president? Anti-fascists. I rest my case, boys and girls. And God bless these United Shaysssssh.

Hiding the truth

Every shameful practice, done by individuals or governments, is generally denied, hidden, explained away, recast as something else, blamed on “leakers” and vicious disloyalty. Often the exact opposite of what actually happened is promoted as the true story. This new false story can become a galvanizing battle cry, or the last stand of personal integrity (by the liar).

“Remember the Alamo!” is a great battle cry from American history, it mobilized the nation to fight a war against tyranny. In that story two hundred brave freedom loving Americans made a valiant stand, outnumbered ten to one by the Mexican tyrant’s army, and fought to the last man (except for Davy Crockett, who surrendered and was later barbarously executed by the Mexicans). The Americans who died at the Alamo mission became martyrs for the cause of a war against Mexico to conquer and seize a giant tract of Mexican land for the United States.

The real story of what actually led up to the doomed stand-off at the Alamo is a bit different from the myth. Americans were allowed by Mexico to settle in the northern Mexican area known as Texas. Mexico liked having a buffer against hostile Indian tribes, the Americans liked free land. They brought slaves, grew cotton, grew wealthy, everything was fine. Until 1830 when Mexico outlawed slavery. Americans reacted violently to this outrage against freedom. You see how this is going?

A full-blown war with Mexico a decade or so later, to the rallying cry of “Remember the Alamo!”, territory seized for the USA, slavery continues in Texas, Texas secedes from the union 15 years later and Texans fight the US government in their glorious ongoing campaign for freedom and human dignity.

I once loaned a guy a large sum of money, a short term loan he promised to repay within days. He didn’t pay it back, as promised, and I pressed him, by then needing the money myself. Unknown to me was that he’d borrowed money from all of his friends (most soon to become former friends), including a very wealthy guy I knew well. He explained that the rich guy insisted on being paid back first, and that he was working his way down the list, to me. I told him I’d talk to the rich guy, explain that I needed to be repaid before him. I was pretty sure the wealthy guy would understand my situation (it turned out he didn’t, being a wealthy guy).

The reaction of the guy who owed me the money should have told me the whole story about him. “I can’t believe you’d be such a rat, such a fucking pussy, to embarrass me like that. You have no respect for privacy, you have no character. What a fucking whiner you are. Do not talk to him about this, it’s between you and me. If you tell him, if you betray my trust, I’ll be really pissed off.”

Years later he would max out his dead father’s credit cards for cash, bringing his wife his “pay” every week, pretending for a year to be going to work every morning when he was actually living off his dead father’s credit cards. As you can imagine, he made every attempt to hide his scam, make it look like he was actually working. When it was discovered by his wife, he had many incoherent reasons for his criminality.

A true story can be talked about, learned from. A fake story, or a buried story, is a dead end. The details of what actually happened can be discussed and the issues they raise can be resolved. The details of a myth that never remotely happened lead only to ignorant opinions and stupid decisions based on the need to keep telling the lie.

Every abuser tells his victim a story that shifts blame from himself to the person abused. “If you didn’t have such a big fucking mouth, I wouldn’t have to shut it for you.” “You want to blame me, but you should look at your own infuriating behavior, then you’ll see who’s really at fault” and so on. As long as the true details of exactly what happened are never discussed, as long as I don’t mention an inconvenient detail like you bloodied my head with a stick because you flew into a rage, we don’t have a problem. “How is it my fault that you fell down and hit yourself in the face with the ground six or seven times? Fucking grow up…”

So we have pugnacious culture warriors, the Bill Barr types (fuck that fucking bagpiping fucking windbag), who smugly insist that angry blacks have nothing to be angry or even upset about, that statistically more unarmed whites than blacks are killed every year by cops, only a small handful of unarmed blacks are killed by police anyway, and whatever other freshly pulled out of the ass talking points his type can spout. “Why talk about police violence against those murderous fucking savages when they’re killing each other like the fucking animals they are? Let’s be honest, isn’t the real problem Blacks?”

In the telling of this type, American history has been one long, unblemished march toward a more perfect nation, based on the unalienable human rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of wealth. To them a simple answer suffices for all the carping, unAmerican critics of how we, as a nation, conduct, and have conducted, ourselves. The self-evident truth that “all men are created equal” should be the end of this Communist propaganda about a country that supposedly oppressed Blacks (it was the Democrats!), making racist laws for a century after the end of slavery that shamed even Mr. Hitler’s top lawyers, slaughtered indigenous people (they attacked us first!), villainized immigrants (dirty!) marginalized women (“all MEN are created equal, duh!”) fought a series of wars on the shakiest of grounds (freedom on the march!), etc.

Now we have non-profit “think tanks”, funded by a handful of right wing billionaires, who, in order to mainstream a narrative more friendly to them, write model legislation to make history denial enforceable by law. If teachers are critical of some of the counterfactual claims of America’s most powerful, well, maybe those teachers shouldn’t be working with young people. Slavery ended 156 years ago, why are we still talking about slavery? The Nazis were defeated 76 years ago, why are we still talking about Nazism? Hitler wasn’t all bad anyway, he had a great economic plan while he was getting the German war economy up and running again, he was a brilliant job creator. Sure, he may have killed a few too many Jews, but look at them… they hated Hitler without mercy…

Now we read that wealthy right wingers, who are furious that the tax records of their fellow billionaires — showing many pay virtually no income tax– were illegally “leaked.” The scandal is not the often legal tax avoidance of the very wealthy and corporations, the scandal is that some piece of shit made it public. You cannot raise taxes on the rich. You also can’t give more money to the IRS for enforcement, to catch wealthy tax cheats and put more money into the public coffers because… that’s Communism, and partisan, racist fuckery, and… uh, it’s unAmerican to start witch hunts against innocent job creators, philanthropists, the best of the best… and… uh… [1]

The main thing is, if you have a story that makes you look bad, rewrite that shit to make yourself look good. The only alternative is the things you have carefully hidden coming to light, inducing shame, and anger, even violence (not to mention accountability, God forbid!), and who needs any of that shit?

Investigators who looked into the use of federal force against peaceful protesters right before Trump’s photo op at the church didn’t interview the man who ordered the use of force.
Nothing to fucking see here!

[1] from accursed Jeff Bezos’s mouthpiece:

Over the past decade, persistent budget cuts have hurt the IRS’s ability to conduct audits, including those targeting wealthy and large corporations. Tax experts have expressed alarm that the weakening of the IRS has helped fuel the increase in U.S. income inequality, in part because the rich have more tools to dodge the increasingly weak tax collection agency . . .

. . . “Reports of increased audits, enforcement and reporting requirements raise red flags with our members,” Kuhlman said. “We would urge and encourage instead increased compliance assistance, better customer service and remedying the processing delays.” . . .

. . . The groups leading the opposition to the IRS budget increase include those that have received funds from major conservative donors, including the Mercer Family Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation and Donors Trust, a donor-advised fund that gives to conservative and libertarian causes. One signatory of the letter, Phil Kerpen of American Commitment, worked for five years at Americans for Prosperity, the main political arm of the influential Koch network.

source

Authoritative authoritarianism

This concise definition of “authoritarian” is not as delightful as my all-time favorite definition — squeamish: exhibiting a prudish readiness to be nauseated — but it’s pretty good:

favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.

Synonyms are autocratic, despotic, tyrannical, totalitarian, rigid, oppressive, inflexible, and things like that.

I had a friend who was raised by a father who was openly autocratic, the mother fawningly loyal and obedient to her husband’s every firm opinion and summary dictate. The boy never had a chance, he obeyed his father resentfully, feeling helpless to do otherwise. Anger at the way his life had been dominated by his never wrong father drove him to be very much the same way in his own adult life.

I think it’s a fairly typical scenario, which is why you see graphics like this in your internet search results:

Stereotyping, Prejudice & Discrimination - ppt download

The authoritarian personality, in the crudest sense the “bully,” is described this way (as per exhaustive five second internet search):

The authoritarian personality is a personality type characterized by extreme obedience and unquestioning respect for and submission to the authority of a person external to the self, which is realized through the oppression of subordinate people.

Mod 3 authoritarian personality

One of history’s most infamous infallible authoritarians was Germany’s Mr. Hitler, whose word was German law (Fuhrer worte haben Gesetzeskraft!) during the twelve years of his Thousand Year Reich. As a boy he’d been famously abused by his father, a vicious, drunken, petty bureaucrat authoritarian who beat young Adolf regularly, and without mercy, for sport. The same goes for the current leader of the radical right in the USA, our golden-haired poster boy for authoritarian infallibility. He was raised by a certified piece of shit, and it doesn’t appear he got much love from his gold digger mother, either. No severe beatings that we know of, in fact, he seems to have been spoiled as a child, except for the endless psychological torment of being judged harshly as unqualified by the demanding, driven father who groomed you, his reluctant second choice, to take over his empire.

The authoritarian depends on his subjects viewing the world as divided neatly into good and evil with no gray area in between. This black and white worldview makes things easier, and much simpler, for everybody. You can tell at a glance who is friend, and a good person, and who is foe, and a very bad person you can do whatever you want to. Obedience to the wise leader is good, defiance of the leader’s will is evil. Also, any rule the authoritarian makes, he can change at any time, with or without notice.

There are groups whose members can obey and praise the wise leader as much as they like, they will remain hated since they are members of an out-group that can never be equal to the ideal subjects of the authoritarian. The fascist worldview depends on this hated out-group being seen as an existential threat, beyond redemption, an enemy to be treated harshly and pointed to as the reason for the autocrat’s rule. Having a few token members of these despised groups march with the authoritarian is seen as a good thing, since it has the effect of making the authoritarian’s undeniable appeal seem to cross even to the hated out-group.

Not all authoritarians are on the right, by the way, though most of them seem to be. You can have rigid, inflexible, overbearing, bossy types on the right, the left or anywhere in between. They will not allow debate unless all of their rules for debate are followed. You must use certain words only, using the wrong phrases will end the possibility of debate before it begins. Tolerance of opposing views, or views expressed differently than required, is seen as a kind of moral weakness. There are Nazi types among us, as we can see on TV every day, and there are also the same rigidly self-righteous types on the extremest edge of the left.

For the ones on the left, the phrase I like is “there is a guillotine waiting” whenever they fall afoul of the newest orthodoxy. Unlike on the right, autocratic types on the left are subject to being hoisted on their own stinking petards when the political winds change.

They may not be there in the same proportions (American acceptance of autocracy is very high among those who consider themselves conservatives, it is not widely accepted on the left) but there are these intolerant motherfuckers on both sides, often dictating the terms of debate, as this type often seems to, down to the language that may be used in these debates. Some very fine intolerant motherfuckers on both sides, on both sides…

July Fourth Masterpiece

Historian Heather Cox Richardson:

And on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky problem of Black and Indigenous enslavement by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators clinging to the edge of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other. America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.

What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to guarantee that Black Americans, Indigenous Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, and Irish would be permanently locked into a lower status than whites. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.” “Four score and seven years ago,” Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

It did, of course. The Confederate rebellion failed. The United States endured, and as people of different races, incomes, genders, and abilities began to demand that the nation honor its founding principles, Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal.

But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against the idea of equality, as a few wealthy men seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.

The men who adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality, however limited they were in executing it. Ever since then, Americans from all walks of life have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Words to live by in 2021.

Happy Independence Day, everyone.

source

NY Times fact-finding on the Jaunary 6 MAGA riot

The New Yorks Times writes:

Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol By Dmitriy Khavin, Haley Willis, Evan Hill, Natalie Reneau, Drew Jordan, Cora Engelbrecht, Christiaan Triebert, Stella Cooper, Malachy Browne and David Botti  

A six-month Times investigation has synchronized and mapped out thousands of videos and police radio communications from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, providing the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.

By The New York Times June 30, 2021

In the six months since an angry pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, immense efforts have been made not only to find the rioters and hold them accountable, but also — and perhaps more important — to dig into the details of Jan. 6 and slowly piece together what actually happened that day.

Congressional committees have looked into police and intelligence failures. The Justice Department has launched a nationwide investigation that has now resulted in more than 500 arrests. And while Republicans in Congress blocked the formation of a blue-ribbon bipartisan committee, House Democrats are poised to appoint a smaller select committee.

Even now, however, Republican politicians and their allies in the media are still playing down the most brazen attack on a seat of power in modern American history. Some have sought to paint the assault as the work of mere tourists. Others, going further, have accused the F.B.I. of planning the attack in what they have described — wildly — as a false-flag operation.

The work of understanding Jan. 6 has been hard enough without this barrage of disinformation and, hoping to get to the bottom of the riot, The Times’s Visual Investigations team spent several months reviewing thousands of videos, many filmed by the rioters themselves and since deleted from social media. We filed motions to unseal police body-camera footage, scoured law enforcement radio communications, and synchronized and mapped the visual evidence

Here are some of the major revelations.

We pinpointed at least eight locations where rioters breached and entered the Capitol building — more than were previously known. The scenes revealed the extent of the rioters’ disregard for the law as they surged violently around the building’s perimeter and, eventually, inside.

The police were outnumbered and responded differently at various breach points, allowing rioters to break through doors using weapons like crowbars or, in some places, to simply walk through as the police stepped aside.

The multiple breaches also revealed the Capitol’s vulnerability. Despite locked doors and, in certain places, thick windows, rioters without specialized equipment were able to break in instantly in some places.

In the Senate, proceedings to certify the election results were halted almost immediately when a building-wide lockdown was called after the first breach by rioters. But we found that it took much longer for the House of Representatives to do the same. This delay appeared to have contributed to a rioter’s death.

Instead of evacuating, members of the House sheltered in place and resumed their work even as rioters overran the building. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was rushed to safety, but Representative Jim McGovern took her place presiding over the session. He told us that Capitol building security staff had said it was safe to resume.

Eventually, the House session was halted and members began streaming out of a rear door guided by security personnel. Rioters had arrived at almost the same moment, just on the other side of a hallway door with glass panels. They became incensed at the sight of the evacuating lawmakers — a situation that could have been avoided if the lawmakers had left before the mob arrived.

Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter and follower of the QAnon conspiracy theory, tried to climb through one of the door’s broken windows toward the lawmakers. A plainclothes Capitol Police officer charged with protecting the House shot her once through the upper chest. The wound was fatal.

One of the biggest questions hanging over the aftermath of Jan. 6 was whether the riot was planned and carried out by organized groups.

By identifying and tracking key players throughout the day, we found that most — even some at the forefront of the action — were ardent, but disorganized Trump supporters swept up in the moment and acting individually.

The first person to enter the Capitol building, for example, was a 43-year-old husband and father from Kentucky named Michael Sparks. He has no known affiliation with any organized groups. Ray Epps, an Arizona man seen in widely-circulated videos telling Trump supporters on multiple occasions to go into the Capitol, also seemed to have acted on his own.

Yet we also found that the crowd did include members of groups who seemed eager for a confrontation, like well-organized militias and far-right groups including the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. This proved to be a combustible mix. In the videos we analyzed, they can be seen with baseball bats and body armor, and coordinating with one another using radios. On several occasions, a calculated move by a more organized actor — for example, a Proud Boy identifying a weakness in the police line near a set of stairs — set off a surge by the mob.

Evidence collected by the F.B.I. suggests that the Proud Boys in particular were aware that they had inflamed the mob of ordinary people — and may have intended to do so in advance. Just before the assault, one Proud Boy leader wrote on a group chat on Telegram that he was hoping his men could incite the “normies” to “burn that city to ash today” and “smash some pigs to dust.” Then, after the riot, another Proud Boy leader wrote on Telegram: “This is NOT what I expected to happen. All from us showing up and starting some chants and getting the normies all riled up.”VISUAL INVESTIGATIONS: Our investigative journalists use evidence that’s hidden in plain sight to present a definitive account of the news. Get an email as soon as our next Visual Investigation is published.Sign Up

By synchronizing footage from both sides of the Capitol building, we were able to establish how crowds on each side interacted with one another.

We tracked the movement of a group of rioters from the west side of the Capitol — which faces the National Mall and absorbed most of the attendees arriving from Mr. Trump’s speech — to the opposite eastern side.

The eastern crowd had remained largely behind the barricades, but all that changed with the arrival of rioters from around the side of the building. This more violent group was the trigger that put the entire mob over the edge, spurring them to push easily through a line of officers and surround the Capitol on every front.

Most of the videos we analyzed were filmed by the rioters. By carefully listening to the unfiltered chatter within the crowd, we found a clear feedback loop between President Trump and his supporters.

As Mr. Trump spoke near the White House, supporters who had already gathered at the Capitol building hoping to disrupt the certification responded. Hearing his message to “walk down to the Capitol,” they interpreted it as the president sending reinforcements. “There’s about a million people on their way now,” we heard a man in the crowd say, as Mr. Trump’s speech played from a loudspeaker.

The call and response didn’t stop there. We found evidence of his influence once the violence was well underway. In one moment, a woman with a megaphone urged rioters to climb through a broken window by asking them to “stand up for our country and Constitution” — echoing the language in an earlier tweet from Mr. Trump. In another, as the police were pushing to clear the mob off the building, a rioter screamed at officers: “I was invited here by the president.”

One unanswered question when we began this investigation was how the police managed to reclaim the Capitol building from the mob. We found that once officers increased their numbers, armor and crowd-control weapons, clearing the rioters happened quickly and effectively.

The footage revealed that officers cleared several locations in less than an hour after being reinforced by local Metropolitan Police, Virginia State Police and other local and federal agencies that arrived with more manpower and authorization to use more powerful crowd-control weapons.

It’s a stark contrast to what we saw during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, when federal officers were on scene from the start, already equipped with riot gear and authorized to use higher levels of force. Law enforcement’s relatively quick success in clearing the Capitol building once reinforcements arrived shows how the rioters might have been stopped far earlier with a different level of preparation — possibly preventing fatalities, countless officer injuries, over $30 million in damages.

There was another difference between the Capitol riot and those connected to this summer’s racial justice protests: Very few people who broke into the Capitol were arrested at the scene. Most were allowed to leave the building, forcing the F.B.I. to track them down later and take them into custody — a process that is still continuing today.

Continue reading the main story

Facts, anyone?

In light of the wide acceptance of Trump’s Big Lie (that his “landslide victory” was stolen by a bipartisan conspiracy against him), by tens of millions of Americans, it would appear that making a winning argument based on evidence and what you can actually prove, from a practical, tactical point of view, is a thing of the past — at least to a good 40% of our fellow citizens.

The real Big Lie, according to Trump, is that that everybody beside him, and those completely loyal to him, is lying about the rigged election he actually won in a “landslide.” The truth, Tump insists, is that a landslide victory was illegally stolen from him by massive voter fraud and a wide-ranging bipartisan conspiracy to deprive him of his rightful office and illegally install the illegitimate Joe Biden as the “president”. Hence, the rioters who stormed the Capitol January 6 had, as they believed, every right to be enraged, to fight like hell to protect their country and do what their president insisted was their patriotic duty — fight like hell to stop the steal of democracy in progress in the Capitol.

Not that long ago, facts (things that can be shown to have actually happened, things that are witnessed, that people swear to, that are recorded on cameras from multiple angles) supporting each side of an argument were weighed before deciding who was right and who was mistaken. Now, for purposes of American politics, one need only repeat the party line (“alternative facts” work beautifully), loudly and without deviation, and the “perception” of truth will do just fine for that loud minority of Americans.

If a violent mob unleashed by your party’s leader attacked you and threatened to kill your vice president, who, arguably, deserved to be punished for his cowardice and treachery, after all, you must say that there never was a lawless mob and nobody threatened violence against anybody. Anybody who says there was an armed, angry mob, 140 injuries to police, five deaths and threats to Pence and other elected officials is a bald-faced liar! Case closed, loser!

If a sitting president’s deliberate, months long, coordinated, well-funded attempt to violently stop the peaceful transition of power at the last possible moment doesn’t demand a fact-based reckoning, and accountability for the organizers and inciters of the violence, we all might as well just wait to be told where to report for re-education.

Facts still mattered in American court cases, in arguments over public policy, in basic agreement about what is reality and what is delusion, in our very recent history… (this doesn’t necessarily apply in the unappealable Supreme Court, of course, that non-political body Justice Breyer defends the impartiality of… [1])

It’s easy to forget important facts when a powerful firehose of ever more violent bullshit is constantly flooding our perceptions. Remember how Trump mega-donor Postmaster William DeJoy openly removed hundreds of mailboxes from urban areas and ordered urban high speed mail sorting machines dismantled? These moves were targeted to minimize the mail-in votes of Democrats. DeJoy was ordered to put the mailboxes back, but the high speed mail sorting machines could not be replaced, they were literally in a million pieces, already shipped somewhere to be sold for scrap. Sorry.

Polls showed Democrats were much more likely than Trump anti-maskers (future anti-vaxxers) to vote by mail during a pandemic. Trump and his mega-donor then made every effort to eliminate as much mail-in voting as possible, as he and Barr continued to spread furor with unfounded, evidence-free claims about fraud-rife mail-in voting, setting the stage for #Stop the Steal and the January 6 MAGA riot. (After the damage was done Barr claims to have told Trump the voter fraud business was “bullshit” and that he’d “suspected” that was the case even as he ordered — and announced — federal investigations of criminal voter fraud).

Trump won in 2016 by 78,000 votes delivered in key Electoral College districts in three states. One of them was Pennsylvania which he won by less than 1%. He could improve his odds of winning greatly in 2020 if he could eliminate a sizable percentage of anti-Trump votes in swing states where voting is always close. His party’s chances of winning elections are tied directly to voter suppression, particularly after Trump lost an election where he had the second highest number of votes cast, all-time, in an election that set the record for voter turnout, (during a pandemic, mind you).

CandidateYearPartyPopular vote
Joe Biden2020Democratic81,268,924
Donald Trump2020Republican74,216,154
Barack Obama2008Democratic69,498,516

The sixty baseless lawsuits challenging the 2020 elections brought by Trump and the RNC were famously all dismissed, often for lack of evidence. Sometimes forgotten is that before the 2020 election Trump and the Republican National Committee brought literally hundreds of lawsuits to stop forms of voting they felt would put them at a disadvantage. One was a federal suit in western Pennsylvania challenging the state’s plan to expand mail-in voting, and drop boxes, for an election during the second wave of a deadly pandemic. The judge ordered Trump/RNC to produce evidence of their claims that these long-used methods of voting would introduce massive fraud into the election. If they did not produce evidence, the judge ordered, they must state that they have no evidence.

The federal judge, J. Nicholas Ranjan, had been appointed by Trump and for a time it looked like he was bending over backwards not to dismiss the case. He wasn’t, as it turned out.

The Trump/RNC’s legal team’s initial response to Judge Ranjan’s order (which granted the state of Pennsylvania’s motion demanding evidence) by Trump’s attorneys was (according to Reuters):

The Trump campaign says the ballot drop box invites fraud. The federal judge asked the campaign to provide evidence of actual fraud, but the campaign declined, arguing it did not have to do so in order to win the case.

source

In the end Trump’s lawyers obeyed the judge’s order by submitting several hundred pages, screenshots and stories from Breitbart, FOX, OANN, Newsmax and similar outfits, alleging massive fraud, without presenting any actual evidence of widespread fraud. Even the right-wing non-profit Heritage Foundation’s zealous crackpot documenter of voter fraud, Hans von Spakovsky, has found a statistically insignificant number of actual voting fraud since 1984.

When Judge Ranjan finally dismissed the Trump/RNC case he wrote that since Trump and the RNC were likely to file an appeal, that he would explicitly lay out the law supporting every facet of his dismissal, basically appeal-proofing his dismissal of the evidence-free lawsuit. He did so over the course of more than 100 pages.

“Frivolous suit” is the usual term for a lawsuit submitted without any credible evidence in support. These lawsuits are designed to harass, intimidate, bully, bankrupt and they are deeply frowned on by American courts. Law students are taught that lawyers who submit frivolous lawsuits abuse the legal process, violate their ethical obligations as “officers of the court” and are subject to sanctions including disbarment.

Millions of Americans are waiting, without much hope, for the legal consequences of this wave of frivolous, evidence-free Trump lawsuits that created the “perception” that there was massive voting fraud because an angry, powerful man who has never lied told us it was true, and filed countless lawsuits. Suspending Rudy’s law license seems a few hundred wrist slaps too few.

Where the Trump-appointed J. Nicholas Ranjan demanded actual proof of fraud, the 6-3 Federalist Society majority on the Supreme Court (5 of the 6 appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote) had no such scruples before ruling in favor of their party. The “perception of fraud” was good enough for Samuel Alito to rule that perception of fraud alone is sufficient reason for, admittedly partisan voter suppression laws you can’t actually prove were passed with anything but good old partisan intent. It’s the quiet Nazis you’ have to watch out for, the silently smoldering ones, particularly when they’re protected by a robust like-minded majority of extremists.

Even (or especially) in a country where a good 40% of voters are entirely faith-based, rather than reality-based, facts need to be known. Thousands of enraged Trump supporters violently assaulted the Capitol to Stop the Steal. The procedure for calling in the National Guard had been changed by “federal officials” shortly before the riot, delaying the deployment of waiting troops that quickly stopped the riot when they arrived, four hours too late to prevent the multiple breaches of the Capitol. When the National Guard arrived, and surrounded the crowd, the riot was quickly over and, instead of the arrest of every rioter, the rioters were allowed to go in peace, no harm no foul. They celebrated their triumph, they actually did stop a joint session of Congress, and posted selfies and videos that got many of them arrested weeks later.

It is too simple a point to make that had this been a crowd of angry Black people, January 6 would be remembered as the day police and National Guard massacred hundreds of American citizens in front of the Capitol.

We are to be consoled, six full months later, that perhaps as many as half of the violent “protesters” who breached the Capitol that day and beat down police officers are facing charges for things like trespassing. Merrick Garland is no radical, after all. Now, calling for an investigation of this violence, planned and incited by the former president and several sitting Congressmen, aided and abetted by multiple senators, is a political hot potato in a land where facts are as malleable as the clay God originally formed into the first man.

On the other hand…

It may be that in following an unhinged but popular leader the now extremist GOP may have finally sealed its fate — no matter how many voter suppression laws they pass, their over the top extremism may be punished at the polls by voters determined to vote, and organizing to defeat the laws designed to disenfranchise them. Heather Cox Richardson provides a great historical echo for that proposition. It may be that, like celebrity psychopath Al Capone, it will be the former president’s greed, cheapness and true belief that he is untouchable, even for shooting someone in the face, that brings him, and his whole criminal empire, down. I can hear his faithful, should that day arrive: “For that? For that?!!!”.

For those who have the stomach for the hideous facts, here’s the NY Times visual account of Trump’s January 6 MAGA riot, very well-done — the video is harrowing [2].

see the full video here
  • Video Investigation: Day of Rage

    [1]

    “My experience of more than 30 years as a judge has shown me that, once men and women take the judicial oath, they take the oath to heart,” [Breyer] said last month in a lecture at Harvard Law School. “They are loyal to the rule of law, not to the political party that helped to secure their appointment.”

    source

    Just ask any of your six Federalist Society colleagues about that one, Steve. I’m sure even Clarence Thomas would agree with you…

    [2]

    A few handy links from the NY Times video investigation of January 6, 2021 .

    Capitol Riot Fallout