Category Archives: January 6 MAGA riot

Trump Had a Mob. He also had a plan

A great piece by Jamelle Bouie, in the NY Times

Trump Had a Mob. He Also Had a Plan. 

https://nyti.ms/3lX0uH8

When this was first revealed, I assumed that Trump simply wanted Pence to do whatever it would take to keep himself in power. But this week we learned that he had an actual plan in mind, devised by John Eastman, a prominent conservative lawyer who worked with the former president to challenge the election results, a job that included a speaking slot at the rally on the National Mall that preceded the attack on the Capitol.

“We know there was fraud,” Eastman said to the crowd that would become a mob. “We know that dead people voted.”

“All we are demanding of Vice President Pence,” he continued, “is this afternoon at 1 o’clock, he let the legislatures of the states look into this so we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not!”

These weren’t just the ravings of a partisan. Eastman was essentially summarizing the contents of a memo he had written on Trump’s behalf, describing the steps Pence would take to overturn the election in Trump’s favor.

https://nyti.ms/3lX0uH8

We need a subpoena for John Batshit Eastman

https://www.newsweek.com/some-questions-kamala-harris-about-eligibility-opinion-1524483?amp=1

Footnote (and John Eastman’s 6 point plan for Pence to steal the stolen election on January 6 for himself and his boss)

Trump has no friends, his type never does. They regard men as base coin to gratify their passions, in a phrase used to describe Napoleon’s attitude toward other humans. Some humans’ blindly driving ambition is useful, can greatly benefit the man who knows how to skillfully use others to his own advantage. As base coin, these ambitious types can be cast away at any time and replaced by other tarnished instruments.

Nobody truly likes a deeply damaged, loveless motherfucker [1] like our former president except for ambitious lackeys and angry mobs. Angry mobs adore his relentless in-your-face, norm and common decency smashing assault on liberals, queers, mass media, disloyal party members, Muslims, Mexicans, women of color, disloyal Jews, Blacks, cripples, losers, non-Scandanavian immigrants, socialists, anti-fascists, etc. He rules his spineless, platformless (2020 RNC platform — whatever the big guy wants) party by terror. The famously vindictive man’s sure, vicious revenge, guaranteed to be visited on anyone opposing his will, is a constantly reinforced reminder that he will not be opposed, no matter how insane his demands. Here’s the thing:

This particular angry, boastful, lying Orange maniac did not invent any of the corrupt, lying, authoritarian routine he practices, and while he certainly wasn’t their first choice, radical right billionaires have found their audacious front man to be very useful for their larger purpose, keeping everyone distracted and enraged as they game democracy to protect the privileges of vast inherited wealth in perpetuity. This Orange Polyp, since he is a malignant narcissist and an amoral opportunist, is their go to guy in the war of the few to keep hold of everything, in the face of the rising threat of the John Birch and Federalist Society’s great enemy, ‘majoritarian tyranny’.

Here is what former Trump lawyer John Eastman [2] advised Trump to do in a two page Privileged and Confidential memo entitled Scenario for January 6. This is the action plan part of what Glenn Kirscher and many others have called a blueprint for insurrection.

1. VP Pence, presiding over the joint session (or Senate Pro Tempore Grassley, if Pence recuses himself), begins to open and count the ballots, starting with Alabama (without conceding that the procedure, specified by the Electoral Count Act, of going through the States alphabetically is required).

2. When he gets to Arizona, he announces that he has multiple slates of electors, and so is going to defer decision on that until finishing the other States. This would be the first break with the procedure set out in the Act.

3. At the end, he announces that because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States. That means the total number of “electors appointed” – the language of the 12th Amendment — is 454. This reading of the 12th Amendment has also been advanced by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe (here). A “majority of the electors appointed” would therefore be 228. There are at this point 232 votes for Trump, 222 votes for Biden. Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected.

4. Howls, of course, from the Democrats, who now claim, contrary to Tribe’s prior position, that 270 is required. So Pence says, fine. Pursuant to the 12th Amendment, no candidate has achieved the necessary majority. That sends the matter to the House, where the “the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote . . . .” Republicans currently control 26 of the state delegations, the bare majority needed to win that vote. President Trump is re-elected there as well.

5. One last piece. Assuming the Electoral Count Act process is followed and, upon getting the objections to the Arizona slates, the two houses break into their separate chambers, we should not allow the Electoral Count Act constraint on debate to control. That would mean that a prior legislature was determining the rules of the present one — a constitutional no-no (as Tribe has forcefully argued). So someone – Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, etc. – should demand normal rules (which includes the filibuster). That creates a stalemate that would give the state legislatures more time to weigh in to formally support the alternate slate of electors, if they had not already done so.

6. The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission – either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court. Let the other side challenge his actions in court, where Tribe (who in 2001 conceded the President of the Senate might be in charge of counting the votes) and others who would press a lawsuit would have their past position — that these are non-justiciable political questions – thrown back at them, to get the lawsuit dismissed. The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind.

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NOTHING TO PROSECUTE ANYONE FOR, ON MY SIDE!!! TOTAL WITCH HUNT!

[1]

Of course, sometimes motherfucker simply means motherfucker, but a few words are in order about using this vulgar and inflammatory phrase to describe a vulgar man who treats others like his slaves.

My father, during a few years of my school life, taught a group dynamics seminar where, at one point, he asked Black kids and White kids to give their thoughts on the word “motherfucker.” It’s origin on the plantation, of course, was a guy like Thomas Jefferson, rich, powerful, entitled, who, if he found your mother beautiful, was at liberty to fuck her, since he actually owned her body and controlled her actions. If a child was born, the motherfucker owned another slave, it was win-win for him. So the term was always ambiguous and multi-edged for male slaves on the plantation, you hated the motherfucker, but also, damn.

My father asked an Italian gang leader from a Brooklyn high school what the word motherfucker meant to him.

“That’s the last word you hear before the fists start flying and the chains and gravity knives come out,” he said, looking across at the Puerto Rican and Black gang leaders. The Black kid smirked. My father asked him what ‘motherfucker’ meant to him.

“Where I come from ‘motherfucker’ is one of the most useful and versatile words we have,” he said. “Contrary to the usage given by my Italian-American colleague over there, it doesn’t generally mean I want to fight you, unless I say it right before I’m going to fight a motherfucker. In that case, I use it as a deliberate provocation, otherwise it means a lot of things, depending on the context.”

For example?

“The late great John Coltrane played like a motherfucker. Miles Davis is a motherfucker. Are you crazy, motherfucker? That motherfucker is hilarious. Motherfucker… please… That algebra test was a motherfucker. This motherfucker thinks his shit don’t stink. That motherfucker can’t take a joke. Relax, motherfucker. Motherfuckers were dancing in the street. Motherfucker be like…” and he imitated an idiosyncratic motherfucker they all knew.

My favorite dictionary definition of all-time is Merriam-Webster’s explanation of the word ‘squeamish’: “Exhibiting a prudish readiness to be nauseated.” This language-scrupulous Caucasian motherfucker has a prudish readiness to be nauseated by the word ‘motherfucker,’ and also by the unexpurgated ‘n-word’ and the common ‘f-word’. Oh, my.

[2]

Eastman spoke at the January 6 rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol. He retired from his position as a professor at Chapman University a week after January 6, which occurred amid protests from faculty at the Southern California university over his participation in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.

Eastman told the Washington Post that his memo merely “explored all options that had been proposed.” In an interview on Tuesday, Eastman told CNN that the two-page memo had been only a preliminary draft. He provided CNN with a longer six-page memo laying out numerous other scenarios for Pence to follow on January 6. Eastman told CNN that during the January 4 meeting he’d had in the Oval Office with Trump and Pence, he had told Pence he should only delay certifying votes in the seven states, not try to throw the election to Trump.

The reality, however, is that a delay was simply another avenue to stop Biden from taking office.

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Did someone say Seditious Conspiracy?

According to a Mother Jones article, entitled FBI Seizes Oath Keeper Lawyer’s Phone in “Seditious Conspiracy” Investigation, the Department of Justice is looking into Seditious Conspiracy charges in connection with the January 6 MAGA riot to stop the final certification of Biden’s victory/Trump’s electoral loss. You will google this story in vain, no other media has published a peep about this search warrant or the investigation into Seditious Conspiracy.

Glenn Kirschner did a piece on the warrant and the seditious conspiracy investigation at the time, based on the Mother Jones reporting, and noted that it is encouraging, a sign that the DOJ is putting its prosecutorial ducks in a row for a real prosecution of the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. It is a conspiracy there is ample, public evidence for. The evidence demonstrates intent, the involvement of numerous co-conspirators, and dark money funders of the conspiracy [1], with new pieces of graphic evidence emerging daily.

Yesterday we had this one from the NY Times, about a legal memo outlining various vote fraud conspiracy theories and explaining why they were unfounded, conspiracy theories that, though debunked, were nonetheless lyingly deployed in the conspiracy to overturn, and steal the “stolen” election. After Trump’s team got this memo, on November 13, dismissing as baseless each of these wild counterfactual conspiracies, they went to court to make meritless legal claims based on information they knew to be false. The Times report begins:

Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump.

But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening.

By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.

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The legal memo referred to in the article (and linked to above) examines claims like the CEO of Dominion Voting Machines having ties to Antifa. It concludes he does not. The memo appears to be silent on Q’s role in the resurrection of a dead Venezuelan socialist and his apparent zombie involvement in the stealing of the disputed election for Chinese Communist Puppet Biden, with the assistance of Italian anti-democracy hackers. No connection was found, the memo reported, between Dominion Voting Machines and the notorious, shady, sneaky, radical Communist Jew George Soros.

One troubling aspect of the memo Glenn Kirschner referred to as a blueprint for insurrection (wait, that was the other memo, written by former law professor, then Trump-lawyer John Eastman, which described an insane claim Pence could make to swing the election to Trump on January 6– I’ll put a link to this batshit crazy memo in a future post [2]), is its heavy reliance on the NY Times and Washington Post to dispute claims Trump and his followers continue to make. Like so (though this bit cites AP):

What the hell’s up with that? Trump lawyers citing the fake media?!!!

Here’s the text of the law, 18 USC Section 2384, Seditious Conspiracy:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. For a seditious conspiracy charge to be effected, a crime need only be planned, it need not be actually attempted.

Let’s look at just a few elements of the conspiracy to use force to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of law of the United States (note, the Trump-incited MAGA riot tried to prevent, and succeeded in hindering and delaying, the vote certification that is the last official act by Congress to ensure the peaceful transfer of power).

A president loses his bid for re-election, but not to worry. He has set the stage for contesting the results, by repeatedly claiming the only way he could lose was by massive voter fraud. There has been no proof of widespread voter fraud in any American election in recent decades. The diligent, ideologically-driven fraud hunting voter fraud myth promoters that support people like the former president have found about 1 fraudulent vote per million, according to their database that goes back to 1982. The candidate brought literally hundreds (300?) cases in various courts before the election, attempting to limit the number of ballots that could be cast in contested states.

Low turnout has historically helped his minority party. His hand-picked Postmaster General, a “mega-donor” to his campaign, took valiant, brazen steps to slow the mail and limit the votes in urban districts, places the president and his gunsel had designated enemy territory– Anarchist Jurisdictions — by removing and dismantling high speed mail-sorting machines. The former president’s cabinet level supporters constantly warned the public of unfounded, but theoretically possible, potential massive electoral fraud in urban Anarchist Jurisdictions where the former president was understandably hated for simply protecting his religious, rural base.

The election featured massive voter turnout, the largest in American history, during a pandemic that was surging as the election got closer. Every attempt was made by the Republican National Committee to thwart mail-in voting, the safe from of voting favored by anti-Covid Democrats. Republicans, the pro-freedom, pro-COVID party, were willing to show up in numbers, in person, maskless and proud, to support their candidate. To the dismay of the MAGA faithful, record numbers of Democrats stood on line for hours, masked and keeping a safe distance on line, to vote in person. Trump bragged about getting the most votes ever for an incumbent, 74,000,000, which was true, oddly enough. As for the record 81,000,000 votes his opponent got — fake news! Fraud. Communists, anarchists, antifascists, Antifa!!! and other enemies, plotting, stealing and lying, as they always do. The former president lost every one of the sixty post-election cases his myrmidons brought in various courts, he lost for lack of evidence, for lack of any credible legal claim. Fake judges, disloyal, sickening, a conspiracy against a great president, an ongoing miscarriage of justice!

All of this is well-known, by anybody who does not live in Rupert Murdoch’s echo chamber (or the unimaginably even more fair and balanced Newsmax, OANN, Breitbart, Der Sturmer). Then, on January 6, the day a joint session of Congress officially certifies the election, results of which were recounted, more than once, in more than one state the former president lost, the Orange Polyp plans a rally. A huge, wild rally he tweets to his followers they must attend. A gigantic crowd shows up, spurred, in part, by $50,000,000 in ad buys to promote the stolen election. Say that again? FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS IN ADS (PAID FOR BY “DARK MONEY”) TO CONVINCE AMERICANS THE ELECTION HAD BEEN STOLEN [3]. Before the stirring speeches about a stolen landslide victory and the need to fight like hell to take back our country, a stirring propaganda video, portraying American carnage and Trump as our only savior, was played on a giant screen behind the bulletproofed podium in front of the barricaded White House where the president would deliver the final remarks prior to the march on the Capitol [4].

The large crowd that marched down to the Capitol, along with Trump himself, thankfully, did not all choose to break the law by attacking police and storming the building. Had the entire crowd surged in behind the violent leaders it is likely that many lives would have been lost in the fight for the Capitol. An unknown number of the boldest and most violent, an estimated 800, stormed the building to disrupt the final certification of Trump’s loss. Bands roamed the halls calling for Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, to kill them and decapitate the line of succession (apparently they hadn’t googled “third in line” or they’d have also been after President pro tempore of the Senate, Chuck Grassley). When the National Guard finally arrived hours later, after Capitol police had been instructed not to use anti-riot gear against the surging MAGA mob, and surrounded the building, they did not corral and mass arrest the hundreds who had broken down barricades and assaulted the police, as the law-abiding among us might have assumed, the pro-Trump mob was allowed to peacefully disperse. Eventually about 600 of these folks were tracked down and arrested, charged with various fairly minor crimes. The first plea deals have been made with a small wave of these defendants.

America heard Trump violate every letter of the Georgia law in a recording of the early January call when he tried to cajole, influence, threaten, convince, persuade, pressure, intimidate, and otherwise move Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to give him a break and just “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” No consequence, nine months later, though there is an ongoing criminal investigation in Fulton County that has not been reported on since the grand jury was convened in April. So, why WOULDN’T Trump try again with Raffensberger, this time with an even bolder lie?

When the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse story broke, a couple of grunts, who’d taken selfies with prisoners they were humiliating, per the directives of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, were eventually prosecuted and thrown into prison. The architects of the torture program, those who wrote the tortured legal justification for illegal “enhanced interrogation” (it’s not torture unless the pain is like organ failure) and war mongers like Dick “Other Priorities” Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld who gave the orders for Americans to “go to the dark side”, after ensuring secrecy at torture sites, suffered no consequences at all, outside of lifetime university tenure (John Fucking Yoo), a lifetime federal judgeship (Jay Fucking Bybee) and other honors, along with their comfortable lives.

So you can convict a bunch of zealous, hopped up grunts in Trump’s ragtag, extra-legal army, put a few in jail, but how does this do anything to prevent the repeat of this kind of violent putsch? Without holding the planners, organizers, funders and inciters of the riot accountable, and prosecuting them for instigating a seditious riot, the hope for avoiding the next one is approximately… none. We learned that $3,500,000 was paid to the organizers of the “event” — who, exactly, got paid, for what [3]? Why no charges for seditious conspiracy against the rioters who stormed and defaced the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power?

We learn:

Last summer, then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen sent a memo allowing federal prosecutors to consider sedition charges against police reform demonstrators, particularly in Portland, Oregon, where clashes between rioters and federal authorities raged outside a federal courthouse. It was never used.

But the memo said the Justice Department believed the statute doesn’t require proof of a plot to overthrow the government and could also be used when a defendant tries to oppose the government’s authority by force.

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Fair is fair, justice is justice, the status quo is the status quo and good enough will just have to do. Merrick Garland was tearful at his confirmation hearing, expressing gratitude for this beloved country that had rescued his family from death at the hands of a prior iteration of Trumpism, back in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. So far, scrupulous about appearing fair and impartial, he has not shown the stomach to stand up in the fight against unprincipled zealots, united behind clearly disprovable lies, and ready to do whatever it takes to make this country great again, including physically attacking and massacring whatever hated enemies need to be taken out of the way, including many Blue Lives Matter traitors, or generals, who believe the rule of law is more important than allowing a very stable genius to continue his world-changing work of making this country great again.

[1]

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has tracked the flow of dark money in American politics, told me that a “flotilla of front groups” once focussed on advancing such conservative causes as capturing the courts and opposing abortion have now “more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.” These groups have cast their campaigns as high-minded attempts to maintain “election integrity,” but Whitehouse believes that they are in fact tampering with the guardrails of democracy.

One of the movement’s leaders is the Heritage Foundation, the prominent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. It has been working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (alec)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions. Among those deep in the fight is Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society, the legal organization known for its decades-long campaign to fill the courts with conservative judges. In February, 2020, the Judicial Education Project, a group tied to Leo, quietly rebranded itself as the Honest Elections Project, which subsequently filed briefs at the Supreme Court, and in numerous states, opposing mail-in ballots and other reforms that have made it easier for people to vote.

Another newcomer to the cause is the Election Integrity Project California. And a group called FreedomWorks, which once concentrated on opposing government regulation, is now demanding expanded government regulation of voters, with a project called the National Election Protection Initiative.

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[2]

We now know that Donald Trump’s scheme to steal the 2020 election was put into writing, and we can all read it. Call it the Trump coup memo: John Eastman, a lawyer representing Trump, wrote a memo outlining how Vice President Pence could supposedly subvert Trump’s election loss in Congress on Jan. 6, the day of the violent mob assault on the Capitol.

After the news broke that this memo existed, CNN posted the full text online. It further underscores the argument that schemes like this one illustrate the need for reforming how Congress counts the electoral college votes, lest something like this succeed in the future.

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[3]

What fraction of the money Mr. Trump did spend after the election was plowed mostly into a public-relations campaign and to keep his perpetual fund-raising machine whirring, with nearly $50 million going toward online advertising, text-message outreach and a small television ad campaign.

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[4]

I’d never seen this video, until more than a month after the riot. The two minute propaganda video, apparently narrated by Trump himself and fired up with a triumphant hiphop soundtrack, begins at 1 minute 19 in this youTube, and resumes at 6:56, 8:54 and afterwards.

Department of Let’s Let Bygones be Bygones

Glenn Kirschner has been promoting the indisputable idea, with everything we’ve seen the last six years or so, where norms and all pretense of fair play are thrown into the shitter along with all other democratic values, that justice matters. “Justice matters” is Glenn’s mantra and coat of arms, and he’s been fighting a hard public fight to encourage his former employer, the US Department of Justice, to pursue accountability for crimes like Seditious Conspiracy for the conspirators who planned, funded and facilitated the January 6th MAGA riot.

Usually the man to turn to for encouragement after some really bad MAGA news, sometimes even Glenn Kirschner gets discouraged, which is heartbreaking to see, but at the same time, it shows that even the most dogged fighter for justice just gets frustrated and tired sometimes. Here he is asking a simple and basic question, and right back on the case the next day:

Here is the video the clip is from:

here is today’s:

The Party of Life will fight to the gates of Hell for the right to infect others

Finally sick of Trumpist governors railing about liberty from government tyranny and ordering mobile morgues for the unvaccinated dying from COVID in their communities, communities where infection rates are far above those of heavily vaccinated areas, places where hospitals and morgues are overflowing again, Biden took to the bully pulpit and ordered millions more to be vaccinated or face large fines for refusing. As Democracy Now! reported this morning:

President Joe Biden: “Despite the fact that for almost five months free vaccines have been available in 80,000 different locations, we still have nearly 80 million Americans who have failed to get the shot. And to make matters worse, there are elected officials actively working to undermine the fight against COVID-19. Instead of encouraging people to get vaccinated and mask up, they’re ordering mobile morgues for the unvaccinated dying from COVID in their communities. This is totally unacceptable.”

The Republican National Committee immediately promised to sue the Biden administration over its vaccine mandates. South Carolina Republican Governor Henry McMaster tweeted, “we will fight them to the gates of hell to protect the liberty and livelihood of every South Carolinian.”

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To the gates of hell, then, see you there, freedom lovers.

Call the MAGA party what it is

Nice soundbite from Madeleine Dean (D-Pa) reminding us, amid radical Republican rhetoric about violent vigilantism, that the MAGA rioters broke into the Capitol to bust up the line of succession by hanging the Vice President and killing the Speaker of the House,

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To answer her rhetorical question: what the GOP learned from Trump’s January 6th riot is that their base loves it and that the funders and organizers of the violent attempt to decapitate the government by killing those in the line of succession appear to be immune from prosecution.

USA! USA!!!

No consequences for murder equals a license to kill

If a bullying kid never faces consequences for terrorizing and beating up classmates, it is permission to the little fuck to continue bloodying noses. If a terrorist organization is free, for a century, to lynch people with the winking cooperation of local authorities — after the federal government has been taken out of the anti-terrorism law enforcement equation by the Supreme Court — why WOULDN’T they continue terrorizing and making examples of anyone claiming their federally guaranteed constitutional rights? The main reason society punishes things like murder, rape and torture is because if you don’t punish these things they simply become normal.

Ezra Klein recently made a good point about the lack of consequences for the architects of our generally disastrous (if always highly lucrative) military slaughters abroad:

The consequences come for those who admit America’s foreign policy failures and try to change course, not for those who instigate or perpetuate them.

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So, on the right, and even among the moderate, corporate, conflict averse mass media, Biden is to blame for problems with a largely successful civilian evacuation after a military withdrawal negotiated by Trump, a supremely artistic deal that included the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters in a negotiation that did not include the democratically elected government of Afghanistan. Anything goes wrong, it’s the fault of the illegitimate, corrupt, mentally challenged, defeated clown who botched the perfect peace deal (after stealing a landslide victory from the rightful winner)!


The latest episode of Heather Cox Richardson’s podcast (with fellow historian, Joanne Freeman, an expert in the Revolutionary War period) called Treason(ish), comes to mind.   


The main takeaway, for me, is that lack of accountability, lack of consequences  — for things like violent treason — ALWAYS ensures the same kind of behavior.   Guarantees it, really.

As part of the surrender that ended the Civil War Grant allowed the defeated Confederate army to keep its guns and go home with a gentleman’s promise they wouldn’t use the guns to continue the armed insurrection.  None of the Confederate generals who massacred surrendering black troops during the war were ever charged with anything (outside of the Nazi-forerunner, Henry Wirz, who ran the notorious Andersonville death camp, and who was executed for his devilish crimes).  No leader of the Confederate rebellion faced any sort of terrible consequences. Many served in the US federal government after the war, continuing their dogged fight for race-based superiority. 

Heather:

So one of the things that jumped out at me when we were going to go ahead and do this episode was a song that is sung in the south in 1866, immediately after the war, it was called, I’m A Good Old Rebel and it went like this: ‘I hate your Spangled Banner, your great republic too. I hate your Freedmen’s Bureau, in uniforms of blue. I hate your constitution, your eagle and its squall, and a lying thieving Yankee, I hate the worst of all. 300, listen to this, three’… I’m sorry, I live this stuff.

Joanne Freeman:

Go for it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

‘300,000 Yankees lie moldering in the dust. We got 300,000 before you conquered us. They died of Southern fevers and Southern steel and shot. And I wish it was 3 million instead of what we got.’    Can you imagine that after the Revolution and that entering American culture in that period?

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The only consequences faced by anyone in the south after the Civil War (aside from Klan leaders locked up by agents of the brand new Department of Justice, awaiting trial, until the Supreme Court quickly decided they were not really subject to federal law) were faced by American Civil War veterans who fought for the USA — Black ones, routinely massacred any time they tried to assert their newly “guaranteed” constitutional rights.

Heather:

I’m going to say that while I would like to talk about the way the government worked and the way the laws worked in that period and we need to, what really jumps out to me in this period is I’m so glad you’re sitting down, culture.

Because what really matters in the determination of the way this is going to play out is the fact that when Ulysses Ulysses Grant for the United States goes ahead and accepts the surrender of The Army of Northern Virginia from General Robert E. Lee. He does so with minimal punishment. He lets the men keep their firearms on their own words saying they’re not going to continue to fight. He says, go ahead, go home and plant your crops because I know everybody in the South is starving as they were. And he believes that being lenient is going to bring these people back into society. And interestingly enough, a number of the leaders at that point including people like Wade Hampton are like, well, I wasn’t there, I didn’t give my word, I’m going to go run a guerrilla war, which they don’t actually do and that’s itself an interesting story. But what he sees, what Grant’s sees as being magnanimous, because everybody is really going to want to be in this together, really quickly gets reinterpreted on the Southern side as being, look, see, they knew we were right all along.

We had the better argument, nobody dared to stand up against us because we were the ones with the moral argument. And you can see really quickly in the summer of 1865, after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, by a Southern sympathizer, the idea that they’re going to literally assassinate the leader of the opposite government, the government that won the war, and there’s not going to be any kind of backlash in a legal sense against that. Of course, John Wilkes Booth is killed in the manhunt for him and they do actually hang the people that are believed to be responsible for Lincoln’s death, a number of them. But that’s it. That and Henry Wirz who ran the Andersonville Prison camp, they’re the only executions of Confederates after the war. But again, one of the things that keeps me up at night is there are tons of executions after the Civil War, tons of them, but they’re of African-Americans who fought for the United States government.

I mean, you look at the whole picture here. It was an incredibly vengeful period, but not of the victors against the losers, the other way around. And one of the things I think that really drives that is the idea that the government had represented first by Grant and then after that, by Andrew Johnson who took over after Lincoln was assassinated, that everybody’s got the right idea, everybody wants to get along, we can do this and all be friendly and the people who wrote things like the Good Old Rebel song have every intention of taking every step that they can, and they continue to push that envelope until they essentially re-take over the south after 1877.

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Makes me wanna holler.   We have “controversial” public monuments to violent traitors who committed war crimes they were never tried or punished for, instead they have literally been put on pedestals as immortal American heroes.  150 years after the Confederate surrender a ragtag mob of outraged Trumpists carry the flag of bloody treason, (laundered by an army of influential historical revisionists, into an innocent, totally non-racist, banner of “States’ Rights”), into the halls of Congress after fighting the Blue Lives Matter cops in brutal hand to hand combat — to violently stop the joint session of Congress in its constitutional duty to finalize the election of the next American president.   Now it’s time, says the Trumpist GOP in one voice, to just turn the page.   What could go wrong? 


A good start, although grossly belated and susceptible to eternal additional delay

The news broke the other day that the House Select Committee on Trump’s January 6 MAGA riot (he owns it, no matter what spin you put on it, its purpose was to extra-legally keep him in power based on a lie, Trump organized it, publicized it, incited it, walked down to the Capitol with his private army…) is finally casting a wide net to learn how many people were involved in the planning and execution of this premeditated attack on constitutional government in the United States.

Me, personally, I’d have convened this Select Committee on February 1, after the GOP came together as a bloc to disappear and defend the January 6 MAGA riot. The long delay in getting a serious investigation started is deadly to the case, at least to the diehard 39%, since most Americans of all political persuasions view the events of nine months ago as irrelevant ancient history.

The clock is also ticking on that razor thin Congressional majority. The replacement for anti-filibuster reform senator Diane Feinstein (D-Ca), 88, for example, will be appointed by Gavin Newsom’s replacement as California governor, if anything happens to her, as the GOP exploits the odd Recall Law in that state to once again replace a Democratic governor, this one elected with a more than 60% majority. Any of the forty-six assorted clowns running to replace him will get to be governor if recall gets 51% of the votes and they get more votes than the others.

Still, this step toward accountability and truth by the January 6 Select Committee qualifies as good news. The list of people whose records are sought is exhaustive, as it should be. Here’s a sliver of the hundreds of Trump-related people whose phone and online information from the days leading up to, and including, January 6 have been requested:

It’s fairly clear that many of these people had knowledge of, or were directly involved, in perpetrating or trying to stop (as Jared and Ivanka both claimed they were doing on January 6th) the MAGA riot at the Capitol. It’s also fairly clear that many of these people will fight to the death in court, as Trump and his ilk ALWAYS do, to delay the release of this politically poisonous information for as long as possible. Their legal fees will be paid by obscenely wealthy Nazis who will arrange to make these fees tax deductible donations to apolitical non-profit corporations.

Congressional subpoenas are no longer viewed, on the right (since Barr had Trump assert the blanket preemptive privilege that the Bagpiper pulled out of his ample, crusty ass), as legal commands to appear, backed by the ability to enforce them by sending the Sergeant-At-Arms to arrest you for contempt, but as partisan political tools deployed simply to harass and embarrass political enemies. The ability to drag out legal proceedings for years to block legitimate investigations into areas of vital public concern demonstrates the urgent need for former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner’s Interbranch Dispute Resolution Court. Two weeks, issue fully argued and decided — obey the fucking subpoena. Until we have this court, we’re as fucked as a nation that no longer has an enforceable Voting Rights Act that can guarantee the constitutional right to vote to all citizens.

As Democrats deliberate and try to do the right thing in a political system under sustained attack by literal fascists (first a polite request, then, two weeks later, a subpoena, then a long court battle) Trumpists are busy all day, every day, stirring the shit pot, passing new voter restriction laws, laws restricting the teaching of historical events that would make White Christian children feel bad, promulgating new anti-vaccine and anti-masking rules and blaming Biden for the chaos in Afghanistan and the massive surge in hospitalizations and deaths from the Trump variant.

One of the fiercest defenders of Trump’s “landslide victory” over Joe Biden has recently called for Kamala Harris to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove the mentally incompetent Biden from his illegitimate office. Madison Cawthorn is the name of this freshman Congressman and sophomore piece of shit. See, it’s all just partisanship, showmanship, brinksmanship! GO TEAM!

The Roger Stone-Donald Trump controversy explained | Roger Stone | The Guardian
Seig Heil, baby!

Strongmen by Ruth Ben-Ghiat (2)

Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s detailed discussion of modern autocrats jumps back and forth in history, from strongman to strongman, throwing an illuminating light on the gross consistency of the strongman playbook. She lays bare the always intimate symbiosis between the strongman and the wealthy elites he courts during his rise and rewards for keeping him in power. If you are a member of a wealthy elite, and your strongman doggedly protects your privilege, what else do you really need from government? On the other hand, for the average citizen, the thrill of committing violent mayhem against local and foreign “enemies”, with the blessing of Dear Leader, is about all you get, outside of stirring propaganda, confirmation of your hatreds and autocratic rule. Every strongman requires obscenely privileged wealthy backers and squads of angry men, standing back and standing by, to intimidate and bloody all enemies.

At random from this great book, when Italian rogue, whoremaster, construction, media and advertising magnate Silvio Berlusconi took power in Italy in 1994, after running as the candidate of the first corporately created political party, Forza Italia (a one stop corporate influence shop that had clubs all over Italy, ran his marketing campaign, auditioned candidates, lobbied government, etc.), he refused to divest himself of control of his huge business holdings. He appointed his daughter, Marina, to run the holding company that controlled his major businesses. In this way, as far as he was concerned, he’d solved the entire question of conflict of interest and government ethics, he simply made a bold political, not technically illegal, move nobody could stop him from making. This was when he first became Prime Minister in 1994. More recent examples of this same thing, by strongmen and would-be strongmen, immediately leap to mind.

Accordingly, Ben-Ghiat wastes no time making a connection that needs no mention, instead moving on to talk about the way the strongman’s rogue nature draws people to him. He thrills them by proclaiming strict law and order for enemies, and complete impunity for himself and his cronies.

Strongmen often demonstrate their power and virility by flaunting their ability to have unlimited sex with a parade of women. Ben-Ghiat describes the practices of Muammar Gaddafi and his bunga bunga rooms. Berlusconi credited Gaddafi for the term, which to strongmen means unlimited sex, with or without consent. Berlusconi loved the term bunga-bunga and used it to describe his own sex parties [1]. Gaddafi’s bunga bunga room was more of a rape room, for good looking teenaged girls picked out of crowds by a special team always on the look out for young beauties. Berlusconi consorted with a more professional class of women, he was very wealthy, didn’t mind paying for sex, and had a reputation as a rascal to uphold. Other recent strongmen have the professionals they pay for sex sign binding non-disclosure agreements in exchange for hush money.

This embrace of hyper-sexuality and entitlement to sexual gratification is part of the patriarchal “macho” cult of personality myth of the virile strongman, you know, you can walk right up and grab ’em by the pussy, really, seriously. Transgressing the law, and the norms of polite society, is intoxicating to mobs, and a sexual thrill to men who envy the leader’s power to command sex. Ben-Ghiat doesn’t go into detail about Mussolini’s sex life, aside from noting that he was at it for a good part of every day (in ten minute intervals, apparently) and that the cheering crowd was an unfailing aphrodisiac for the priapic womanizer El Duce. Ben-Ghiat includes this sexual predation as part of the strongman’s universal drives: to accumulate bodies, territory and wealth. Again, brings many things from not long ago to mind.

Ben-Ghiat notes that strongmen can tolerate women in power, but only if they are subservient to the strongman. She describes the misogyny that Angela Merkel faced whenever she met with a strongman. Berlusconi made her wait, standing in front of his deak, while he took a long phone call. He referred to her as a “unfuckable lard ass” (the Department of Justice is currently defending an American former president for delivering a more delicate version of the same line, directed at a female journalist he also called a liar, at a press conference, part of his “official duties”). Trump refused to shake Merkel’s hand. Putin made her wait for hours and then, knowing her fear of dogs, unleashed his dogs near her. The German Chancellor said of Putin “I know why he has to do this, to prove he is a man. He’s afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this.”

This terror of their own weakness is the driving secret of every strongman. Ben-Ghiat asks “who would the strongman be without the crowds that form the raw material of his propaganda? His secret is that he needs them far more than they need him.” The pageantry that is the hallmark of every strongman regime “plays to his bottomless need for control and adoration. Of course, having it all is never enough for men who live in a secret state of dread at losing everything. Even as the strongman proclaims his infallibility he is pursued by the demon of fear. He’s wary of the people he represses… of individuals who can prosecute him, of elites who can turn on him and of enemies who wish to remove him from the face of the earth.”

Only a strongman understands his fellow strongmen on this level, which is why they tend to validate each other publicly. It is all love between macho strongmen. The love of the crowd reassures them. We all recall the “lovefest” of January 6 when some of the best people, in one of the largest crowds in history, got a little carried away kissing and hugging the police in their overwhelming adoration of our recent strongman. We could all feel the love.

Wait a second, you say mass media magnate Berlusconi fought to stay in power to avoid prosecution? Berlusconi, as Prime Minister, had the power to get Italian Public Television hosts fired for saying things he didn’t like, though he owned the three most popular television stations in Italy, featuring scantily clothed women, he had no direct control of these public TV hosts. Exploiting corporate conflict aversion he was able to remove critical voices from the mass media, effectively silencing public critics. He managed to remain unaccountable for many arguable crimes, bold risks, committed before and after taking office, though his top minister was later imprisoned for Mafia ties and a few others faced legal consequences, just not Silvio. Other strongmen have not done as well as the Italian forerunner of Donald J. Trump. Some ended badly, Saddam, Mussolini, Gaddafi, Hitler.

Every strongman must successfully exploit the mass media of his day to gain power and control public opinion. Radio was a boon to Mussolini and Hitler (as it was to FDR here), TV to more modern strongmen. “Social media” is today’s coin of the realm for strongmen. Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia (gruesomely murdering and dismembering a prominent critic with complete impunity) employs a gigantic army of internet trolls (“the flies”) spreading every message useful to his glorious, reformist rule and drowning out anything critical (MBS also doesn’t hesitate to imprison or butcher critics and rivals, clearly).

In regard to the internet age, a sobering realization dawns when thinking of our once and future Unitary Executive, Donald J. Trump. He could never have become president, in spite of his genius, in spite of being a self-made millionaire at age eight and all the rest, without the unregulated, powerfully influential battlegrounds of Twitter and Facebook. Before the ubiquity of internet echo chambers, before TV (which gave us JFK), the technological breakthrough for early modern stongmen was mass produced affordable radios. Mussolini and Hitler were pioneers in live radio broadcasts of their live mass rallies. It was amazing the effect leaders could have on millions listening at home, by delivering a direct message to each individual citizen in a compellingly personal way. “Social media” is the most directly “personal” form of mass messaging yet. Look, the leader spells just as badly as you do, LOL!

Dr. Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Public Enlightenment, saw at once that Hitler in the studio, trying to do radio, was a complete dud. Wooden and not the faintest bit charismatic in front of a studio microphone, Hitler’s rally-stirring genius only blossomed when the human geiger counter began to work a crowd into a frenzy. Goebbels only aired live Hitler performances, where his beloved idol really shined. The Fuhrer’s mesmerizing live performance was helped by body language training from a top German actor, he also worked with a skilled hypnotist, studying techniques to hone his native talents, constantly tweaking his Hitler brand, which Goebbels lovingly produced. Talk about reality TV.

Ben-Ghiat notes that for many it is intoxicating to commit criminal acts with impunity. “The special psychological climate that strongmen create among their people, the thrill of transgression mixed with the comfort of submitting to his power, endows life with energy, purpose and drama.” This criminal culture filers down from the top. “Making government a refuge for criminals who don’t have to learn to be lawless hastens the contagion effect. So does granting amnesties and pardons, which indebt individuals to the leader and make blackmailers, war criminals and murderers available for service.”

African strongman Mobutu hired the public relations/lobbying/political consulting firm of Paul Manafort and self-proclaimed rat-fucker Roger Stone to launder his corrupt, bloody reputation for the rest of the world.. Manafort’s job, immediately prior to volunteering to work for free as Trump’s campaign manager, was grooming Russian oligarch-backed strongman Viktor Yanukovich [2] to become strongman president of Ukraine. After Yanukovich was elected a massive anti-corruption movement ousted him from power, he fled Ukraine (to Russia) and was replaced as president by the young Jewish lawyer, comedian, TV star and anti-corruption candidate Volodymyr “I need you to do me a favor, though” Zelensky. Manafort was never prosecuted for his direct, secret dealings with the Russian secret service in connection with their help in Trump’s 2016 election campaign, but was convicted of other felonies, for which he was later pardoned by the president he’d loyally served, and refused to incriminate. As was Stone, Flynn, Bannon and a rogue’s gallery of other icons of transgression and polished criminals including Michael Milken. Y’all know the drill.

In relation to the strongman’s need for experienced criminals and dirty-tricksters, Ben-Ghiat cites Hannah Arendt for the proposition that “murderers were most likely to survive in Nazi death camps, not least because the SS appointed criminals to be be capos in charge of disciplining their fellow prisoners. Criminals proved to be some of the Nazis best torturers since they were highly imaginative when it came to pain.” Pinochet was a big believer in torture, with the official backing of the US government that made his rise to power possible.

Strongman states are chaotic, violent and destructive, yet they claim economic growth superior to what is available under democracy. Some categories of people prosper under a regime that helps cronies and financial elites concentrate capital and privatize public goods. Non-cronies and ordinary citizens better just get on line for the rallies and cheer loud as hell for the strongman.

Ben-Ghiat turns to Arendt again:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and ficion, i.e. the reality of experience, and the distinction between true and false, i.e. the standards of thought, no longer exist.”

Every strongman harnesses the power of mass media to influence and intimidate, dismantle the public’s ability to think critically, and create the ideal subjects of strongman rule. All the strongman needs, beyond that and massive financial backing, are a few people with public gravitas who can harness the law, as Bill Barr did for Trump, to advance the strongman’s needs. Ben-Ghiat describes Barr’s March 2020 attempt to get Congress to declare a state of emergency (Covid-19) to allow him to detain, indefinitely and without trial, members of the Left who he accused of “a systematic shredding of laws and undermining the rule of law.” [3] Barr told cops that he was engaged in an “unrelenting, never-ending fight against criminal predators in our society.” He sure was, but only certain ones.

From a bruising, norm-busting presidential campaign, to Trump’s Bannon-composed America-first “American Carnage” State of the Union, which Dubya called “weird shit”, to the January 6 MAGA riot Trump organized, incited and defended after losing the election he claims to have won in a landslide, Trump and his allies followed the strongman playbook step by step. Create an inhuman enemy bent on destroying society, an existential threat, offer yourself as the only savior, keep your war chest full of dark money, control the mass media to convince masses that black is white, up is actually down, use violence and the threat of violence to intimidate the thoughtful, who tend to hesitate and deliberate rather than taking the bold, violent action the strongman is always ready to inspire, et, viola, you are on your way to creating a strongman state.

Ben-Ghiat points out that for strongmen politics is always personal. She notes that all strongmen are also “personalists” holding no real ideals beyond what is best for them personally. “Thirsty for profit and holding a propriety view of office, personalist rulers exploit their nation’s natural and human resources for economic gain.” Bolsonaro warned indigenous communities that they must adapt to his exploitation of their Amazon rain forest habitat or disappear. “Trump’s authoritarian bargain with elites — profits for them, political support for him — motivates his administration’s enthusiastic embrace of climate change denial.” She notes that as of May 2020 he’d rolled back a hundred environmental regulations, greatly increasing profits for his most highly polluting donors.

Strongmen, like all perpetuators of unfair systems, require maximum opacity for their most controversial operations to flourish. Here’s Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ending with a nice snapshot of corporate media’s famous “conflict aversion”, and its tacit support for the status quo, no matter how grotesque:

“To counter authoritarianism we must prioritize accountability and transparency in government. At the heart of strongman rule is the claim that he and his agents are above the law, above judgement and not beholden to the truth. Accountability also matters as a measure of open societies because the old yardstick, elections, is less reliable. New authoritarian states often simulate democracy. The nominal democracies governed by personalist rulers often act like autocracies. In Trump’s America, as in Berlusconi’s Italy, the legal and the illegal, fact and fiction, celebrity and politics, blend together until nothing means anything anymore and everything is a confidence game. The corrosive effects of the shift away from standards of accountability and truth were evident in the reaction of CBS news journalist Nora O’Donnell to Trump’s January’s 2020 State of the Union speech. Although the speech contained numerous false statements about economic growth during his presidency, O’Donnell hailed it as ‘a triumph by the Reality TV president, a master showman at his best’.”

Everyone of these motherfuckers, in their day, a master showman at his best.

[1]

A century later, the term bunga bunga became popular again as part of a joke on the internet.[7][n 1] This joke was then narrated by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at his dinner parties (in a version which featured, as prisoners, former ministers from the centre-left opposition party led by Romano Prodi).[8]

This expression was then frequently quoted by the Italian and international press during the 2011 investigation surrounding Silvio Berlusconi’s child exploitation acquiring a quite different meaning as “an orgy involving a powerful leader”; it was allegedly taught to Silvio Berlusconi by Muammar al-Gaddafi,[9] who was also the unwitting originator of the phrase Zenga Zenga.

In Italy, the term “has become an instant, supposedly hilarious, household expression”.[10]

Recent explanations disagree on its meaning, or perhaps illustrate the range of its reference. It “is said to be a sort of underwater orgy where nude young women allegedly encircled the nude host and/or his friends in his swimming pool”,[11] “an African-style ritual” performed for male spectators by “20 naked young women”,[12] or erotic entertainment of a rich host involving pole dancing and competitive striptease by skimpy-costumed “women in nurses’ outfits and police uniforms”,[13] the prize being prostitution for the host.[14]

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[2]

Ukraine was by no means the roughest place Manafort ever worked. His roster of clients going back to the 1980s has included Congolese and Filipino dictators, along with a guerilla leader in Angola. But even this range of experience did not make the Party of Regions an easy customer for Manafort. The reputation of its leaders had been stained with blood since at least 2000, when some of Yanukovych’s political patrons were implicated in the murder of Georgy Gongadze, an investigative journalist who was abducted and beheaded that year.

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[3]

Yet while the world is consumed by this pandemic and when he thought no one was watching, Attorney General William Barr proposed granting himself immense, permanent powers extending far past the needs posed by this threat.

For example, the proposal grants Barr personally the power to ask any chief judge to hold a citizen, “whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation.” What qualifies as such disobedience or emergency is left, once again, to Barr. So Barr would be able to hold any American—man, woman or child—indefinitely at his own discretion, whether related to COVID-19 or not, without trial.

The proposal also prevents people with COVID-19 from even applying for asylum. The most vulnerable populations around the world, including children with credible fear for their lives whom we are required under the Refugee Convention to protect, would be needlessly turned away.

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