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Fun Facts for the “controversial” January 6 Commission
Because, I perhaps foolishly, still believe that the facts are important for any intelligent discussion or debate, I’m going to try to pull together any publicly available information I find that could help the, eh, controversial January 6 Commission that Congressional Republicans are so dead set against, because, you know, the recent Party of Trump attempt to subvert democracy and forcefully impose a one-party cult of personality government is over.
It might be a different story, of course, if Trump was still insisting the 2020 election had been stolen from him, or if his party was changing election laws in numerous states to impose new hurdles to voters towards continued minority rule, or criminalizing many instances of the right of assembly, redefining “riot” to make a felony of various exercises of the first Amendment Right of Americans to peacefully dissent without infringement by the government.
So, according to reasonable Republican legislators there’s really no point, you see, in allowing nosy, partisan investigators in to look into the lead-up and execution of the MAGA riot that resulted in a violent breach of the Capitol, though admittedly 140 police officers were injured defending the Capitol and five died, of natural causes (trampling, heart attack and so on) in the course of the March for Trump that got a little too exuberant.
Even on January 6th (as the reporting below shows) we had a wealth of information about the lead up to the riot, the urging by Trump for patriots to attend the Stop the Steal rally, and the fiery speeches immediately before that incited the riot. We saw much of the violence on television, on January 6 and the days that followed. Much of the violence was so ugly and upsetting that YouTube requires viewers to swear they are adults before they can view it online.
The January 6 Commission would answer tricky questions like why federal forces were not immediately called in by Trump appointees to stop the riot, particularly once the mob attacked police, breached security and was inside the Capitol.
The riot, everyone knows, was set into motion by the constantly repeated Trump lie about massive voter fraud (he made the same claim when he won in 2016), and the infuriating idea that radical Democrats had stolen the presidency from the exemplar of all that is great in America. Here are two Republicans making their points very succinctly:
Republicans now urge bipartisanship and moving forward, and, for some reason, oppose any investigation into how close we came to a mass casualty event during the insurrection of January 6, 2021. As the recent Vice News video history of the riot shows, the pro-Trump crowd outside the Capitol as rioters overran police was HUGE. If all, or even 25% of them, had been hopped up enough to invade the Capitol, is it unlikely that Pence or Pelosi would have escaped alive. The riot would have likely killed many, many more.
The striking thing is how much solid information about this insurrection was out there in public, before, during and immediately after the MAGA riot. The second striking thing is how effective right wing propaganda has been since the riot in minimizing the seriousness of the far-right’s violent assault on democracy.
NOTE: all facts and quotations in this post are from January 3 and January 5, 2021 reporting from WUSA9, the Washington, D.C. CBS affiliate. I also refer you to two other reports, from right after the riot on January 6:
Highlights and analysis: Trump commits to ‘orderly transition’ after mob storms Capitol: Lawmakers were evacuated during the counting of Electoral College votes after supporters descended on the Capitol at Trump’s urging.
and:
Trump Told Crowd ‘You Will Never Take Back Our Country With Weakness’: As Congress prepared to certify the victory of his successor, President Trump railed against the election and helped set in motion hours of violence.
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The facts that follow are from WUSA9’s January 5 article, the opinionated asides are, of course, my own.
The WUSA9’s headline the night before Trump’s “Stop the Steal Rally” read:
Here’s everything you need to know about the ‘March For Trump’ rally
This struck me, in light of the criminalization of First Amendment assembly (punishable as a felony with a 15 year prison sentence) enacted by Florida, and ready to be signed into law in other states:
Restricted vehicular traffic only allowed in the First Amendment Activity Zone for the January 6 ‘March for Trump’ rally
Presumably the organizers of the rally didn’t want any kind of Heather Heyer situation with people angrily driving cars into pro-Trump demonstrators, as is now permissible under several Republican state “anti-terrorism” laws, like Florida’s, that immunize drivers against presumably justifiable road rage (against demonstrators who are not white patriots).
The ‘March for Trump’ rally will not officially be a march for Trump
We kept hearing about the permit that Women for American Autocracy obtained for the march to the Capitol, making it perfectly legal. Here are a few details for the January 6 Commission to look into:
The March For Trump rally organized by the conservative women group, Women For America First, on Wednesday, Jan. 6 on the Ellipse Grounds is projecting about 5,000 Trump supporters to make their way to the nation’s capital…
…The March For Trump rally will not be an organized march from the Ellipse, according to the permit approved by the Department of Interior. The organization stated in the permit that some participants may leave their rally to attend other rallies at the United States Capitol to hear the results of Congressional certification of the Electoral College count.
*Note: In accordance with the event permit approved and released by the Department of Interior, this event is not a march from the location of the rally.
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As was openly and honestly stated in the permit that “some participants may leave their rally to attend OTHER rallies at the United States Capitol” such as the heavily armed (though not ‘fire-armed’) riot, for example.
We also note, surprisingly, that permission on the Public Gathering Permit for the First Amendment Rally at the Ellipse extended from 6:30 a.m. Saturday January 2 to 8 pm Friday, January 8th (see graphic below). Hell of a First Amendment Rally there, Brownie!
The President will address the March for Trump rally
The president tweeted Tuesday evening that he would be speaking at the Save America Rally on the Ellipse at 11 a.m.
Several pre-event rallies took place Tuesday, and DC Police said two arrests were made during the first day of demonstrations (as of the afternoon). Charges included carrying a pistol and rifle without a license, possession of high capacity feeding device, unregistered ammunition and firearms, no permit while driving an unauthorized van and possession of illegal fireworks
Attendees rallying on Wednesday are holding the first amendment rally, “to demand transparency and protect election integrity” on the same day Congress is set to officially approve the 2020 election results. This event comes after President Trump warned via Twitter that there would be a “very big” and “wild” protest on Jan. 6 after he refuses to concede due to unfounded allegations of election fraud.
I will be speaking at the SAVE AMERICA RALLY tomorrow on the Ellipse at 11AM Eastern. Arrive early — doors open at 7AM Eastern. BIG CROWDS! pic.twitter.com/k4blXESc0c
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2021
One of the former president’s last tweets before being permanently banned from the social media platform. His long, inspired speech to the fired up crowd on January 6 is worth a close read/listen by the January 6 Commission. He used the word “peace” once, proving he never meant to incite anything other than peace when he used the words “fight,” “fight like hell,” “stolen from you,” and “bullshit [election]” to great cheers from the crowd.
The president, in advertising the January 6 ‘March for Trump’ had tweeted “Be there, will be wild.” [1] For once Mr. Trump was telling the truth.
Speakers advertised for the Ellipse rally prior to the unofficial ‘March for Trump’ included Roger Stone and Diamond and Silk
Stone, architect of the 2000 “Brooks Brothers Riot” in Florida during the Bush/Gore recount, pardoned by Trump for felonies including lying to Mueller’s investigators, was apparently already down by the Capitol on January 6, with a contingent of Proud Boy Oath Keeper Bugaloos who provided personal security for the convicted felon and self-proclaimed “Political Dirty Trickster”. Members of the white supremacist militia who were Stone’s body guards in DC on January 5th and 6th are under indictment for violent actions during the MAGA riot.
Speakers at the Ellipse for the “March for Trump” rally (what I was originally looking for when I found the WUSA9 piece):
Congressman Mo Brooks (R-Alabama), 25 year-old Madison Cawthorn (R- N. Carolina), Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, campaign fundraiser/Don’s girlfriend Kimberly “The best … is … YET… to COME!!!” Guilfoyle and Eric’s wife, Lara, former campaign adviser Katrina Pierson; personal lawyer Rudy “Trial By Combat” Giuliani; “Women for America First” head Amy Kremer; law professor and conspiracy theorist John Eastman; former Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones, who announced from the stage that he was becoming a Republican. and, the star of the show, Donald John Trump himself. source
Pardoned felons Mike “Lock her UP!” Flynn and Roger “I never met Paul Manafort” Stone, as far as I recall, gave stirring speeches to whip up the crowd at a rally the night before the ‘March for Trump’ that was not, officially, a march.
D.C. Police were on alert, and sought National Guard assistance for January 6, 2021 in expectation of further violence.
MPD reached out to D.C. National Guard to assist D.C. officers with crowd management and traffic control, MPD Police Chief Contee said during a Monday news conference. He said this will allow District officers to focus on individuals that may instigate or agitate violence in the city.
Firearms will not be allowed in the city, Contee said. The department has already posted signs across the city.
RELATED: DC prepares for Pro-Trump rallies, MPD places new signs reminding people no guns allowed at protests
“We will not allow people to incite violence or intimidate our residence and cause destruction in our city. We are asking residents to avoid confrontations with people that may incite a fight,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said. “So we are asking people to avoid the areas.”
As a smirking Roger Stone might quip “I got your non-States’ Rights right here, Muriel Bowser”. Because D.C. is not a state, it had no authority to mobilize the D.C. National Guard. The March for Trump rioters attacked and overran the Capitol Police, broke into the Capitol and the MAGA riot raged unchecked by federal authorities for more than three hours.
The long delay of the National Guard’s intervention, after the riot was raging, was recently pooh-poohed by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley who concluded there was nothing deliberate about the three hour delay in mobilizing troops that were waiting less than 20 minutes away from the Capitol. The January 6 Commission should make the general repeat his credulity-straining claim under oath, and back it up with some kind of factual basis for his “opinion”.
As rioters ran amok inside, after the breach and before federal intervention, as bands roamed the halls of the Capitol taunting those they threatened to execute, frantic calls to Trump from Republicans locked down in the Capitol were not put through to him. The president was reportedly transfixed by the live television feed of the riot, admiring his handiwork. When House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy finally got through to him, eye witnesses say, the following tense exchange took place, as reported by the ultraliberal Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal:
“He’s getting reports of what is happening. He did not accept people doing this type of the behavior. I know he’s getting reports as well. I wanted to give him a first-hand report,” Mr. McCarthy told Fox News on Jan. 6.
But Mr. Trump initially claimed the protesters were linked to antifa, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R., Wash.) said in a statement Friday night, referring to the loose network of antiracist, antifascist protesters.
When Mr. McCarthy pushed back, saying that the protesters were Trump supporters, Mr. Trump fired back, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” Ms. Herrera Beutler said in her statement, recounting the the conversation as described to her by Mr. McCarthy.
The call got heated and at one point, Mr. McCarthy angrily retorted, “Who the f—- do you think you’re talking to?” according to a person familiar with the discussion.
Mr. McCarthy’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the aftermath of the call, Mr. McCarthy wrestled with whether Mr. Trump was fit for office. He asked some GOP lawmakers whether he should press Mr. Trump to resign, according to someone familiar with the discussions.
One week after the riot, when the House voted to impeach Mr. Trump, Mr. McCarthy said Mr. Trump bore responsibility for the events of Jan. 6.
“The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack by mob rioters,” Mr. McCarthy said in a speech on the House floor, although he voted against impeaching [the vindictive, all-powerful party leader].
Of course, Trump and McCarthy worked things out a few days later during McCarthy’s visit to Mar-a-largo. McCarthy’s current position is that he and Trump, who he now claims knew nothing about the riot while it was going on — until his call– had a private conversation that is nobody’s business. And, as we continue to hear from Republicans like Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, those rioters probably were antifa, just posing as thousands of Trump supporters. You understand, like the actual outcome of the possibly rigged and jiggered 2020 election, we’ll never know!
As you can plainly see, there is nothing whatsoever to see here.
If you click on the link above, and scroll to 22:28 in the video, you will be as alarmed (or happily excited, if you love Trump) as I was when a MAGA rally participant, who had climbed a scaffolding outside the Capitol during the breach, panned to show the enormous crowd of Trump supporters who had rallied to “Stop the Steal”. Maybe Trump wasn’t lying when he said there were over 100,000 at the Ellipse and dared the lying media to show the size of the crowd, which I’d read was about 5,000, the number the permit for the First Amendment Rally cited.
Nothing to see here. No reason to investigate anything but Black Lives Matter and the radical left antifa, which is short for anti-fascist– unAmerican! No reason to think this was a serious attempt, by an unhinged maniac, on behalf of his fellow right wing billionaires, to overturn a legitimate high-turnout election by violence and install himself as an authoritarian who would certainly have invoked martial law to settle the matter of who rules this land, once and for all. Nothing to investigate!
Outside of the striking fact that even the pugnaciously partisan Bill Barr tendered his resignation prior to this scheduled, well-planned attempt to violently block the peaceful transfer of power.
Some charitably saw Barr’s resignation as related to Trump finally crossing a moral, ethical and constitutional line by refusing to accept the results of the election that Barr’s DOJ had certified as fair, after repeatedly sowing doubts about the fairness of the election and launching numerous investigations to support that doubt. I saw Barr’s well-timed skitter away from Trump as a strictly practical move to avoid potential prosecution as a key part of a conspiracy to commit insurrection.
The latest polls have the ex-president’s popularity among Republicans at 44%, though 69% believe, for unknown reasons, that the election was stolen from him. Most Republicans, of course, oppose the formation of a January 6 Commission. Why wouldn’t they? Joe Manchin himself probably opposes it. After all, how can you have bipartisan cooperation in the Senate if you accuse the other party of supporting a violent insurrection just because they held things up in the Senate on January 6, calling for a commission to investigate a possibly rigged, stolen election?
[1] WUSA9’s January 3, 2021 reporting begins:
WASHINGTON — Trump supporters are planning a rally on Jan. 6, the same day Congress is set to officially approve the 2020 election results, according to a flyer on the Trump March website.
The organization’s website said they plan to “demand transparency and protect the election integrity” after President Trump warned via Twitter that there would be a “very big” and “wild” protest on Jan. 6 after he refuses to concede due to unfounded allegations of election fraud.
Trump rests his case for the necessity of the MAGA riot
When you say this to an angry crowd that’s been whipped into a frenzy about their lives being stolen from them by sick, dangerous enemies, it makes perfect sense.
badinage
Visual Argument makes strong case for January 6 Commission
Vice News compiled a visual timeline of January 6 in a recent video piece they describe this way:
This treatment of the insurrection recreates the attack moment by moment, tracking the protesters mounting agitation and rage, and some rioters breaking into various fronts of the U.S. Capitol, eventually marching the Confederate flag into the building and occupying the halls of Congress.
It also reveals the diverse and competing ideologies that coalesced on Jan. 6: angry Trump voters marched alongside sovereign citizens, Three Percenters, Proud Boys, and Christian Nationalists. Some rioters demonstrated solidarity with the police as others brutally assaulted officers.
The film highlights moments within the mayhem that add to the complexity of our understanding of the attack. It enables viewers to feel what it was like to be drawn into participating in this event.
In this 45-minute film we see how the false narrative of electoral fraud that was stated and restated by former President Donald Trump led thousands of Americans to attack their own Capitol, and the unprecedented violence that left hundreds injured, five dead, and a shaken democracy.
Read more about the project here: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pk… [1]
The piece starts with cellphone video of a plane full of enthusiastic Trump supporters en route to D.C. from Tampa. All of the video is from public broadcasts and footage shot by demonstrators and others on the ground before, and during, the January 6 MAGA riot at the Capitol. When I clicked on it on my phone the other night, YouTube gave me this warning.
Kind of an ambiguous statement, I thought. Confirm that some audiences found this inappropriate or offensive?
“Inappropriate” to “some audiences”– like very soft core child pornography lite, tastefully shot and without nudity, a Ku Klux Klan video purporting to lay out the truth about America’s race problem?
“Offensive” — like a video convincing the credulously angry that America is in the grips of a vast cabal of Satanist Democrat [sic] cannibal pedophiles who drink the adrenalized blood of the children they torture and terrify before slaughtering?
I think YouTube could have better chosen its warning. Perhaps: this video contains upsetting images of explicit violence and instances of very coarse fucking language.
The all-purpose, nonjudgemental YouTube warning was made a tiny bit more explicit today, covering the blacked out video screen on my computer and offering me a reasonable choice to click on:
Less than a half hour later (since I did the screen capture above) YouTube changed the designation and warning. If you verify that you’re over 18 you can click on the video below, which I recommend watching at 1.5 speed (you won’t miss anything), if you have the stomach to proceed beyond the first minute or two.
I’m about 13 minutes in, so far (watching at 1.5 speed), and have no doubt that this documentation is all that’s needed to establish the urgent need for a January 6 Commission.
We don’t even need the additional damning, un-contradicted facts raised at Trump’s second impeachment, the $50,000,000 in ad buys to promote the false and incendiary message that Biden stole the 2020 election, the $3,500,000 in dark money to organize and promote the March for Trump to Stop the Steal that led, inexorably, to the riot. Just watch the video with your eyes and ears open. It’s like watching the slow killing of George Floyd.
Nothing controversial about the need for a January 6 Commission, my fellow cucktards, unless you stand to be prosecuted for your role in it, or your party’s electoral chances could be hurt by a report outlining the vast scope of the GOP’s unified, historically unique (and ongoing) attempt to block the peaceful transition of power in our fragile experiment in democracy, after a fair, historically high participation election their candidate lost by an indisputable margin.
“Indisputable” of course, now being in contentious dispute … by influential lawmakers and right-wing media pundits, men and women of unimpeachable honor and love of country. Check them out:
To speed it up, click the settings wheel, bottom right, and change playback speed. You’ll thank me for it.
[1]
From that article:
This film also reflects the years of groundwork laid by Trump and his staffers that ultimately culminated in the insurrection. In 2015 on the campaign trail, he falsely claimed that elections are rigged and the only way he could lose would be through systemic voter fraud. He said it again in 2016 when he won. He repeated it throughout his presidency. And he claimed fraud again—and again, and again—when he lost.
“All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing,” Trump said during his January 6 speech.
“We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with: We will stop the steal.”
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Justice, when racist culture warriors run the Department of Justice
I must point out two things — the incredible restraint of the peaceful Black protesters at the scenes of several police killings of unarmed Black citizens SINCE Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murder in an incident Minneapolis police originally headlined “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.”
The restraint of the Black community seems superhuman to me, at a time when we have a seemingly decent man as the president and now daily police killings of unarmed civilians, disproportionately Black and brown, that police departments in many cases immediately justify in public relations campaigns and do their best to cover up.
The other thing to note is that the Department of Justice was specifically created to bring justice to the victims of racism. It was established pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment that extended the constitutional freedoms of the Bill of Rights to every person born in America, all citizens.
The DOJ was tasked with supervising the states, particularly the former slave states that had taken up arms against the US government, to ensure that former slaves (soon to be victims of a hundred years of variations on the Black Codes, lynching and deprivation of basic rights under “Separate but Equal”) had the constitutional protections of the federal government.
The Supreme Court stepped in, within a few years, to effectively nullify the Fourteenth Amendment, putting it into a judicially induced coma that lasted for almost a century. A political compromise that settled the close 1876 presidential election resulted in the end of Bayonet Rule (federal enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment) and the return of Home Rule, by white supremacist “Redeemers,” the former Confederate leaders.
During that long century of unpunished terrorism there was no federal protection against racist or otherwise oppressive state action, what became known as civil rights violations. Enforcement of all laws was at the discretion of each of the United States, as though the constitution had never been amended by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Nowadays, after a century of blood, activism, organizing and court victories against white supremacist terrorism and racially discriminatory practices across the nation, the Fourteenth Amendment is back. Citizens, since the mid-nineteen sixties, can go to federal court to seek redress of grievances against their state under the constitution, as intended in 1868 when the amendment was added to ensure the rights of citizenship to a new class of citizens..
The Department of Justice, we see, changes, sometimes radically, with every administration. Regard for the spirit and letter of laws enforcing equality of citizens comes and goes with the strong opinions of the Executive.
Trump’s Department of Justice abdicated all federal responsibility for overseeing even overtly racist police departments. Recall the grim determination of Trump’s first Attorney General (followed by his evil second A.G.) to keep American policing strictly in local hands. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (Trump’s first senate supporter, a man deemed too racist to be appointed to the federal bench, imagine that) insisted “it is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies.” The diminutive racist:
made clear he believed policing should be left to local and state law enforcement bodies, no matter how brutally they treated black and other minority citizens supposedly under their protection.
Bagpiper Bill Barr, Trump’s provocative, partisan culture warrior gunsel, who replaced the “weak” and “disloyal” Sessions as Attorney General, agreed 100% and was even more proactive in his partisan and race-baiting attacks. Antifa and Black Lives Matter, he insisted, are the problem (also mail-in ballots were an “obvious” invitation to massive voter fraud), not heavily armed white militias exercising their protected First and Second Amendment rights to resist the tyranny of pandemic precautions, or local and federal police simply doing their best to keep the peace, doing their difficult, thankless jobs in a nation overrun by savage, vicious, terrorist haters.
It should be noted that the fat, pugnacious fuck resigned before the actual insurrectionist “poop” hit the fan in the weeks leading up to Biden’s inauguration. Barr may be enraged at disrespectful liberals, atheists, humanists and so on, but he’s not going to prison behind that rage.
Barr consistently did major damage for his master, spun whatever Trump wanted as perfectly legal and proper and justifiable, using legal quibbles like “material lie” to exonerate Trump allies who’d lied under oath to protect their boss. Other times, Barr was right in your face.
Remember his December 3, 2019 speech at the Department of Justice when he pointedly reminded Black people that if they want police protection, (Barr at his deniable best– he never singled out Black communities by name!), they’d better start respecting and obeying [1] the police.
Today, the American people have to focus on something else, which is the sacrifice and the service that is given by our law enforcement officers. And they have to start showing, more than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves. And if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.
“Nice little family you got there, shame if anything happened to ’em.” [2]
It is encouraging to have a Justice Department that is now looking into what appears to be a pattern and practice of corrupt and selective prosecutions by the Executive branch under America’s Greatest Winner President, Donald J. Trump, and his smugly bullying gunsel Mr. Barr.
We learn from the recent execution of search warrants against another of Trump’s personal lawyers, that Barr kept a lid on the investigation into Rudy Giuliani’s mad attempts to make money and keep the far right in power by spreading Russian propaganda leading up to the election and meddling in every other possible way. After all, Barr must have reasoned, what’s really the big deal about helping the president in an arguably shady effort Trump wasn’t even convicted for when a politically motivated impeachment was brought against him? More to the point, investigating an ally of the president was absolutely and completely within Barr’s discretion, as top US law enforcement official.
It’s not like Mueller got the truth out of Manafort or Stone in time to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Trump campaign had been in an actual criminal conspiracy with Russia. We now know that Manafort gave critical polling data to the Russians so they could help Trump win the Electoral College in 2016. We also know Stone, among other unsung services to his far-right colleagues, worked with Wikileaks on the timing of revelations harmful to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Some of us know it, anyway — there are millions who believe the whole thing is a hoax on top of a lying liberal hoax. And that storming the Capitol to stop these election-stealing murderers is more than justifiable, it was patriotic.
God bless these United Shayssssh.
[1]
I know, I know, Barr said “support” not “obey” but these pricks always dogwhistle in easily translatable code.
[2]
I see in finishing the article I got Barr’s quote from, that Adam Serwer (staff writer for The Atlantic) put it even better, in a tweet (from December, 2019, mind you):
Bill Barr, almost verbatim: “nice community you got there. Shame if something happened to it because you said the police shouldn’t murder innocent people.”
Solving the cellphone animation registration problem for an 8 year-old
Liz Cheney posed the proper constitutional and practical questions to her Trumpist colleagues 3 days before the January 6 MAGA riot
Leading up to, and even immediately after, the Trump-donor funded MAGA rally, and separate subsequent march to and riot at the Capitol on January 6, loyal Trumpists with presidential ambitions, like senators Lyin’ Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and rioter high-fiver Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), were holding up the certification of Biden’s victory and calling for the formation of a commission to investigate why millions of Americans believed allegations of widespread voting fraud that may have, quite possibly, led to Joseph R. Biden being able to steal the election from Donald J. Trump.
These senators, and their indignant counterparts in the House, kept insisting “we’ll never know who the real president is, unless there’s a commission to revisit every faulty or corrupt bipartisan state recount and each of the dozens of unfair court decisions from judges prejudiced against Trump … unless we form a commission to study this, America will never know who our real president is!”
We know who the real president is. But tens of millions of Americans, for some reason, believed (and still believe) the Big Lie (which 2/3 of Republicans polled spontaneously appear to regard as the Big Truth) about widespread voter fraud that led to the theft of an election, and so seven Trump supporters in the Senate, and 140 in the House (including ‘March for Trump’ speakers Madison Cawthorn and Mo Brooks, both of whom gave stirring speeches right before the riot), contested the awarding of Electoral Votes to Biden and called for a commission to figure out exactly how the Democrat [sic] party pulled off this slick, massive, historically unprecedented voter fraud. In service of Trump’s lie about a rigged, stolen election, they called for the formation of a commission, before any Electoral College votes were made official.
To which uber-conservative Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) responded, on the first page of her long January 3 memo to her anti-reason caucus:
The recent proposal for a new “Commission” is even more problematic [than Congress overruling state determinations about Electors]. It is not reasonable to anticipate that any commission so formed could wrap up its work in 10 days; indeed, the subsequent debate at both the state and federal level would likely require months. Did those proposing a new commission realize that they were in essence proposing to delay the inaugural? Did they mean to set up a new future precedent where the inaugural is delayed and we have an “Acting President?” For how long? Who decides when that process is over? Will that require another Act of Congress? Could the Acting President veto any such future Congressional action? If Congress has authority to create such a commission now, are state elections, recounts and state law legal challenges just “make-work” until Congress gets around to investigating and deciding who should be President? Members who support the new commission proposal may need to answer each of these questions. And in particular, Members should be prepared to answer how such a commission would be justified by the actual text of our founding documents.
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No wonder the Wyoming Republican Party censured Cheney! Many want more fitting, more consequential, punishment than censure — she should be primaried, tarred, feathered and drummed out of the Grand Old Party! What kind of goddamned stupid, counterproductive questions are those, at a time when a rigged election has been brazenly stolen, when Black Lives Matter rioters — and antifa terrorists — are burning down the country in a reign of terror as power-mad pedophile cannibals drink our children’s blood and laugh at us while patriotic white militias do their best to hold off the violent non-white hoards?!!!!
Is there a single coherent answer to ANY of the questions Liz Cheney raised in her memo three days before the widely supported MAGA riot? I address this question to the 147 Trumpist Congress members who voted to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election on the grounds of massive fraud Trump claimed, without proof (and advertised to the tune of $50,000,000), had happened everywhere he “lost”. Their answer, of course, is a united “fuck you, Democrat [sic] party! Fuck you, Liz Cheney!”
Somaticizing your people’s trauma
I heard a very insightful discussion (between therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem and Kritsta Tippett) of the deep bodily harm racism inflicts, on a cellular level. Menakem describes how the subjects of racist attention are born inheriting, in their bodies, the stress their mothers felt while carrying them in their wombs. It made a lot of sense to me, the innate vigilant tension that must be carried in the body by those who society marks, solely by their external appearance, as inferior and threatening.
Menakem makes this profound point:
Not just that they lived through trauma, but that the angst and the anguish was decontextualized. And so for my Black body to be born into a society by which the white body is the standard is, in and of itself, traumatizing. If my mom is born as a Black woman, into a society that predicates her body as deviant, the amount of cortisol that is in her nervous system when I’m being born is teaching my nervous system something. Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma in a people looks like culture.
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I immediately knew the truth of this. I thought of my advantage, as a white person raised in safety by white middle class parents [1], when an off-duty cop tried to punch my face in for a disrespectful remark I’d made to him. (In my defense, I had no idea the violent piece of shit was an off-duty cop.) When three of his colleagues finally pulled us apart, two pinned my arms. I immediately relaxed my body, signaling to them I was not resisting, that I was calm, that they could safely let me go, which I quietly asked them to do.
Had my body been programmed to tense up and resist, knowing in my ancestral memory that the next likely thing was for all four of them to start beating me, or worse, I’d never have been able to relax and free myself so easily. I’d never have had the chance to reasonably ask the guy who’d tried to punch me in the face over and over what was stopping me from doing the same to him, then doing it, in front of three witnesses, and making my exit without having the shit beaten out of me afterwards.
The trauma of growing up in a despised, feared group is somaticized, it becomes part of the body’s response system (making the body more susceptible to disease and early death, among other things [2]). Not surprising at all, once it’s put out there, but fascinating and important to consider. The inherited, instinctive fight or flight mobilization in traumatized bodies can also be described by epigenetics, which Krista Tippett also did a great show about.
The new field of epigenetics sees that genes can be turned on and off and expressed differently through changes in environment and behavior. Rachel Yehuda is a pioneer in understanding how the effects of stress and trauma can transmit biologically, beyond cataclysmic events, to the next generation. She has studied the children of Holocaust survivors and of pregnant women who survived the 9/11 attacks. But her science is a form of power for flourishing beyond the traumas large and small that mark each of our lives and those of our families and communities.
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These biological expressions of stress and trauma can be worked through by survivors who receive help and support, once the traumatic events are far enough in the past. But what of those whose stress and trauma are ongoing, systemic, unending, in the news every single day?
In the context of now daily police killings of unarmed Black people, this dynamic is very important to consider. The day after Derek Chauvin was convicted, unarmed, unresisting Andrew Brown was, shot to death in a rural county in eastern North Carolina. The warrant for his arrest called him a dangerous drug dealer and the unidentified sheriff’s deputies who went to serve the warrant on him wound up killing him. According to the officers who shot him, the proof that he was resisting arrest is that once they began shooting into his car, and four shots are confirmed to have hit him, he tried to drive away, attempting to back down his driveway, which seems to have been when the fatal fifth shot was fired into the back of his head.
Ask yourself how a Black man, even if he is not a “dangerous drug dealer”, does not try to flee from police bullets coming into his car, particularly after he has complied and kept both hands on the steering wheel.
Recall the original police account of the murder of George Floyd: “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.” We know now, thanks to the video shot by a courageous seventeen year-old, the testimony of several witnesses, police officials and medical experts, and the guilty verdict by a jury of twelve of Derek Chauvin’s peers, that the original police account, while strictly true (there was a “medical incident” but it was Floyd’s murder) was a grossly misleading oversimplification of what happened during those fatal final nine and a half minutes of the “police interaction” that ended George Floyd’s life.
Makes me want to holler, it really does.
I’ve been reminded that most people who become police officers, the vast majority of them “white,” grow up with a conservative mindset, conforming to the norms of our society and believing in a basic code of right and wrong based on enforcing the law, whatever it is, against lawbreakers. I believe many, if not most, are motivated to become police officers by a real desire to protect and serve. The burning, killing question is who and what, exactly, you have vowed to protect and serve.
[1]
Leaving aside my own epigenetic trauma to be the child of parents who lost all but a few family members, every single family member left in Europe, to an outbreak of murderous group madness in Ukraine and Belarus in 1942 and 1943. Every one of them murdered and disappeared without a trace, just thirteen years before I was born. Try as I might, it is something I can never get out of my head, or my body, I suppose, though my own experience never included anything like the killing crews that were the last thing my grandparents’ family members ever saw.
[2]
For a very short description, see also, HERE.
Radical Republican Apostasy 2021-style
Here’s a dramatic illustration of why Joe Manchin’s present fetish for bipartisan consensus, highly desirable though such consensus is, is so misguided in the age of the cult of Trump that the GOP has become. By simply stating true facts about the 2020 election and Trump’s attempts to overturn it, arch conservative Liz Cheney has become a pariah in her party.
After the former president and his closest allies, in the two months after the election, spent $50,000,000 on ads falsely declaring the “rigged” 2020 Election had been stolen from America’s Greatest Sore Loser (he made the same claim in 2016, when he won), and at least $3,500,000 to organize and stage the January 6 rally at the Ellipse and the march-permitted march to the Capitol to “Stop the Steal,” and speaker after speaker (including newly elected Congressman Madison Fucking Cawthorn) urged the rally attendees to fight like hell or democracy would be stolen from them, there was little but silence from Trump’s party in Congress after the deadly riot of January 6th.
Only one top Republican member of Congress immediately spoke out, without equivocation, against the president’s attempt to overturn a US election by force. Liz Cheney (daughter of evil incarnate, the aptly named Dick Cheney), stated “there has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.” She voted for his impeachment, along with nine other House Republicans. Cheney was almost immediately censured by her state’s Republican Committee (as were virtually all of the others who concluded Trump deserved to be impeached) for disloyalty to the former president and his party. Cheney is poised to become the leader of a post-Trump GOP, if there is such a thing, but for the moment, she’s a Republican villain to most Republicans.
To defend [Liz] Cheney is to invite the wrath of Trump and his base, while for those members who remain Trump loyalists, interaction of any sort with “fake news media” is increasingly to be avoided. But I [writing for the NY Times] was able to listen in on Cheney’s remarks at a virtual fund-raiser for her on Feb. 8, hosted by more than 50 veteran lobbyists who had each contributed to her political action committee.
At the event, Cheney lamented the party’s drift away from reality, the extent to which it had become wedded to conspiracy theories. The party’s core voters, she said, “were misled into believing the election was stolen and were betrayed.”
Alongside a legitimate concern over a Biden administration’s priorities was “the idea that the election somehow wasn’t over, and that somehow Jan. 6 would change things. People really believed it.”
When one lobbyist raised the specter of Trump re-emerging as the G.O.P.’s dominant force, Cheney responded that the party would have to resist this. Citing the Capitol riot, she said, “In my view, we can’t go down the path of embracing the person who did this or excuse what happened.”
She added: “We really can’t become the party of a cult of personality. It’s a really scary phenomenon we haven’t seen in this country before. Our oath and our loyalty is to the Constitution, not to an individual — particularly after what happened on Jan. 6.”
This month, she told Fox News that she would not endorse Trump if he ran again in 2024.
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Too bad she’s not in the Senate (though she holds mostly repellant views [1] and, for all of our sakes, is better off arguing them in the House) — because the plain speaking Joe Manchin might find common ground with the staunch Wyoming opponent of Obamacare, environmental regulation, gun control, gay marriage and apologizing for our use of overwhelming military force to protect American interests around the world.
Who knows, they might even reach a principled compromise on a national $10/hr minimum wage.
[1] Her position on the first Trump impeachment, for example:
“It’s a system and a process like we’ve never seen before, and it’s really disgraceful,” Cheney said during one TV appearance. Voting to impeach Trump under such circumstances “may permanently damage our republic,” she warned on the House floor.
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Even her principled positions are laced with partisan accusations against Democrats, as she wrote in the opening section of an otherwise praiseworthy long memo to her colleagues three days before Trump’s riot at the Capitol:
The following summary begins by addressing the Constitutional issues, then provides excerpts from and a description of the principal judicial decisions in each of the states. As you will see, there is substantial reason for concern about the precedent Congressional objections will set here. By objecting to electoral slates, members are unavoidably asserting that Congress has the authority to overturn elections and overrule state and federal courts.
Such objections set an exceptionally dangerous precedent, threatening to steal states’ explicit constitutional responsibility for choosing the President and bestowing it instead on Congress. This is directly at odds with the Constitution’s clear text and our core beliefs as Republicans.
Democrats have long attempted, unconstitutionally, to federalize every element of our nation—including elections. Republicans should not embrace Democrats’ unconstitutional position on these issues.
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States’ Rights, y’all, as sacred as the Second Amendment itself. Can’t be a good conservative without attacking the fucking unscrupulous, partisan Democrats, not in 2021.
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