Liz Cheney with another great line today, about Trump’s willful ignorance about losing the election and rejecting advice from his more clear-eyed advisors, instead following “the course recommended by an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani” to just claim victory.  If I was Rudy, I’d be drunk too.

The pundits all seem to agree that these hearings will change no minds among the 25% to 30% who believe the imperfect vessel of Trump as leader was sent by Jesus Christ Himself, to restore moral clarity to a fallen nation.   It certainly won’t change minds among the 3% of Americans who own 40% of the guns, nor the 0.5% who own everything else.  Those groups are not the target of these hearings.  

The 110,000,000 eligible voters who sat out the 2020 election (that number still blows my mind) which saw record levels of voting, in the teeth of a pandemic, are one target.   Most of these apathetic couch potatoes won’t pay much attention, but some will, if the hearings are done right, which, so far, so good.   

Another audience is the prudent, apolitical Merrick Garland, who, it must be pointed out, has already indicted several domestic terrorists for seditious conspiracy, a seven tentacled conspiracy the Committee is laying out evidence of.  It is inconceivable that a DOJ already investigating seditious conspiracy on behalf of a president who lost and falsely sworn  electors for that same person, will not reach the obvious conclusion about who the raging, scheming octopus at the center of these flailing tentacles is.

The pundits remind us not to get our hopes up, and FOX crows that no minds will be changed by the hearings, no matter how clearly and powerfully the January 6 Committee presents their findings.  But, you know what, fuck the pundits.  They appear to us on mass media controlled by the advertisers, our most powerful corporations. 

The real problem for Democrats in the midterms, we are told by most pundits (or “pundents” as Sarah Palin says), is Biden inflation, which afflicts only Biden’s America, and the exploding price of gasoline, which the oil giants are powerless to control (even while making record profits) and which no American law can regulate or offset.  Taxing windfall profits is functionally illegal in the USA, unlike in Great Britain where a Conservative government recently imposed a windfall profits tax, payable to consumers, to offset the spike in gas prices.

If you are a wealthy corporation intent on maintaining a wonderful, often tax-free status quo for the wealthiest, the more you raise prices, the higher inflation gets, the better your chances of getting rid of so-called do-gooders like well-meaning, weak Joe Biden and his party of flawed idealists and social justice warriors. Better to have their own in charge of government regulation and taxation. Trump 2024.

I’m watching these hearings with great appetite.  A coherent picture is emerging and the only conclusion that makes sense is that criminals of this scale must be, and will be, brought to justice.  Like many, I’ve been frustrated at Merrick Garland’s seeming hesitancy, questioning his ability to act as the wartime consigliere we need at this perilous moment in human history.  I have to believe he is pursuing a smart strategy, building a complex racketeering case that cannot be overturned on appeal.

Glenn Kirschner points out that by giving the J6 Committee the first crack at a thousand witnesses (something the DOJ always likes to get) Garland allowed all of their testimony to become public, and increase the pressure among the public to bring these criminals to justice.  If DOJ had heard them first, in the Grand Jury, everything they said would have been kept strictly secret until indictments, in 2023 or later.   We’d learn only “Ivanka spoke to a grand jury under oath for five hours.”  How much would that suck?

Be of good cheer.  Hope and hopeful action are indispensable. 

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