"Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day.
It is regular citizens who threaten election officials and other public servants, who ask, “When can we use the guns?” and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience.
In short the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists. Rather, survival depends on looking back and forward at the same time. Truly grappling with the threat ahead means taking full account of the terror of that day a year ago." - NY Times Editorial, 'Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now', Sunday, January 3
"America has not come together to defend its democracy; it has only split further apart. Lies and disinformation spread by the former president have so permeated the political ecosphere that nearly universal outrage has reverted to separate blue and red realities." - Peter Baker, 'A Year Later Jan. 6 Becomes Just Another Wedge In A Divided Nation', NY Times today
"For the first time, I’ve begun to understand the plight of German Jews in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Some concluded that this time was different and acted accordingly, often by leaving the country. But most could not take the worst case seriously, or even conceive of it. We’ve seen bad times before, they thought, and we’ve always managed to get through them. Surely our friends and neighbors won’t believe unscrupulous demagogues. We’re all good Germans, aren’t we?"- William Galston, WSJ, 'What If It Can Happen Here?', p. A13,
"The right has doggedly resisted the idea of holding accountable the man — Trump — who called the rioters together, who exhorted them like Vince Lombardi in a pregame speech and aimed them like a gun at the heart of American democracy. This refusal to impose consequences, combined with the passage of laws designed to restrict Democratic-leaning voters’ access to the polls and the installation of Trump loyalists in positions of authority over state elections strongly suggests that the events of Jan. 6 will ultimately prove to be not an isolated event, but a dress rehearsal for something far worse. Because you see, they “love” America so. Oh, and their votes were “stolen.”
On this first anniversary, it seems appropriate — indeed, necessary — to call that claim out for the despicable crock it is." - Leonard Pitts Jr., The Miami Herald, Jan. 5, 'Jan. 6 Rioters Do Not Love America, They Hate And Fear The America We're Becoming'
We now know (WaPo, Jan. 2nd) that a Trump-incited traitor named Robert Palmer cheered on the violence at the Capitol on this date last year, even as his master sat watching it from a 55 in. TV in the White House, just outside the Oval Office.
“I’m just so ashamed that I was a part of that,” Palmer told U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Dec. 17 before she gave him the longest prison term for any rioter so far.
The question is why aren't the other rabble getting similar sentences, and why aren't the vile honchos who planned it - including Trump, Mark Meadows, Jeffrey Clarke and Jim Jordan, being held to account.
Instead of calling a halt to the treasonous violence, Trump relished it, enjoyed what his brain-fucked mob was doing in his name - after swallowing the Big Lie. This is the cockroach that the Repuke cult now can't wait to return to power, after they've spent the past year memory- holing the event to the point nearly 40 percent of Americans think we need to "move on."
No we do not! We need to absorb and process the worst sedition and rebellion since the Civil War and the most violent Capitol attack since the War of 1812. Those maggots tried to burn our democracy, our Republic to the ground using a pretext the 2020 election was "stolen". All of which has been totally skewered in a new book 'The Steal', by Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague, e.g.
The facts released in this welcome (and overdue) book showed how the attempted Trump coup was much more detailed and complex than most have been led to believe. Indeed, the authors make a strong case that the effort was merely a dry run for what to expect in 2024. As to the actual violence that unfolded, which the authors (on ALL In Tuesday night) described as a parallel ploy while the real subversion was going on behind closed doors, anyone paying close attention could see the buildup to violence from even before the 2020 election to its aftermath months later, and the unending lies spewed by Trump and his sycophants.
Indeed, writing a post on January 5th I actually had warned about a likely "shitshow" on the 6th, e.g.
The Trump-motivated traitors who stormed the Capitol this day one year ago want to smother the magnitude of their atrocity in euphemisms ("patriotic protest") and obfuscation, deflection ("It was Antifa", "It was an FBI false flag"). But the Right's own celebrities and hacks on FOX (Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham) were themselves panicked by what was going on, proving they grasped the significance of the abomination underway. See e.g. this clip of the released Hannity texts from All In Tuesday night:
Thus, the informed citizen, the real patriot who knows our real Constitution , knows these lying, obfuscating renegades- like Tucker Carlson- were really out to destroy this nation and still are. And this is why their deplorable cult can never be allowed to have power handed to them again. But how to stop the slow motion coup when:
- Some 47% of Republicans describe the attack on Congress as an act of patriotism.
- 56% say the attackers were “defending freedom.”
- Forty percent of Republicans believe that violence against the government is sometimes justified, a view shared by 23% of Democrats and 41% of independents.
- Sen. Joe Manchin doesn't believe preserving democracy is worth it, given he's not willing to even make a minor change to the filibuster, i.e. requiring at least 41 Senators to show up to block legislation as opposed to having 60 show up to support it.
Manchin's stonewalling on filibuster reform - to get the Voting Rights Bill passed - may mark the epitaph for this nation as a democratic Republic. This is no exaggeration. Author Ruth Ben-Ghiat ('Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present') pointed out on ALL In Tuesday night that the playbook of authoritarian fascists (like Viktor Orban of Hungary, "head of Axis 2.0" ) is exactly "a checklist of what the GOP aspires to." In her words, "he's domesticated the media, and we don't hear about people being poisoned - like Putin - but he uses a tremendous amount of pressure, economic and other, to make people's lives difficult if they don't cooperate."
Most importantly, Orban "doesn't ban elections but he fixes them". He "controls the judiciary, the electoral apparatus, so the results are the ones needed to stay in power. This sounds very familiar because it is just what the GOP wants to do in this country."
This is exactly true. How so? Over the past year Republican lawmakers in 41 states have relentlessly been trying to advance the ultimate goals of the authoritarian- obsessed insurrectionists by fixing future elections. Not by breaking laws but by making them, including making it as difficult as possible for minorities to cast ballots, and even to outlaw mail ballots except under the most extreme circumstances.
Hundreds of sham bills have been proposed and nearly three dozen laws passed which even empower state legislatures to overturn the will of their voters and sabotage their own elections. This according to a running tally by a consortium of pro-democracy organizations. It is literally a ticking time bomb ready to go off and blow our democracy to hell.
It's bad enough that cynical legislative pretexts are being employed to pass laws to destroy fair voting- especially if Manchin doesn't act to protect the franchise - as Ruth Ben-Ghiat ('Strongmen') warned two nights ago. But even worse is how those voters not in the Reep cult are being bamboozled - especially about the economy- which may lead them to vote in Reep authoritarians in the midterms. Columnist Dana Milbank writing in The Washington Post barely 5 days ago sounded the alarm on this:
The economy is going gangbusters, yet Americans express a gloom not matched by economic reality – or by their own spending behaviors. Polls and consumer-confidence indices show an economic pessimism as grim as when millions lost jobs in the pandemic shutdown. This is, in large part, because disinformation has prevailed. Partisanship long colored economic views, but now Republicans, in addition to occupying a parallel political reality, are expanding an alternate economic universe.
A Gallup poll last week corroborated Milbank's take. It found that Americans' confidence in the economy dropped to where it was in April, 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic when nationwide shutdowns brought us into a recession. This is crazy. But the reason is, like with the Covid blarney from Tucker Carlson, too many are getting their news from the least factual sources - mainly FOX. This prompted Milbank to write:
"In post-truth America, the economy is just another target for fakery."
The tragedy is that this fakery, like so many other versions (Covid, the lie Trump won), could lead us into the rabbit hole of an authoritarian state much like Viktor Orban's Hungary. (Which we beheld close up when we visited Budapest in 2015.)
Given this, our own voters need to be smarter and not fall for one or more of the conspiracy ideations Trump and his cabal have used to destroy minds and undermine our electoral system. Conspiracy nonsense and asinine lies that include:
- The insurrectionists are really "patriots" and those arrested are "political prisoners" being mistreated.
- Trump didn't really encourage or incite the rabble to insurrection and sedition.
- The insurrectionists weren't violent, rather they "could have been tourists" according to Reeptardo Rep. Adam Clyde (GA)
Voters, especially independents, also need to be more perspicacious and not be lulled by watching what they fancy as "entertaining" news sources - low on truth, high on baseless conspiracies and propaganda. Like Tucker Carlson's show.
That is one reason we faithfully follow Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC - which we highly suggest any other readers do as well. Leave FOX, Tucker Carlson, Hannity, Laura Ingraham and the other lying hacks to the gullible and low IQ segment. We need truthtellers now not mendacious monsters trying to tear the nation into pieces with their propaganda and lies.
The attempted overthrow of our government by these seditious right wing extremists was largely driven by the belief that a racist loser and narcissist psychopath was a "great man" - vastly more qualified than Joe Biden. This is aberrant brain- rotting toxic tripe. Trump is a lowlife guttersnipe goon unfit to even be a shithouse rat exterminator. His energy feeds solely on the cruelty he elicits and his forlorn knuckle dragger base demands. Read Adam Serwer's excellent analysis in 'The Cruelty Is The Point'. I.e.. that cruelty had become the core element of Trumpism — whose single point of coherence seemed to be “owning the libs”.
All the above translates into a wakeup call for millions ahead of the midterms. To wit, the entire constellation of odious, seditious actions by Trump and his fecal tribe needs to be burned into the memory of every person of decency. That event one year ago must never, ever be forgotten no matter how much the Reep reprobates try to whitewash it, flush it from collective national memory or remake the insurrectionist traitors as "patriots".
Further, real Americans have a moral responsibility to be awake and alert enough to not let it happen again, including by gaining insights into HOW our government and nation was nearly taken in an actual legal coup - apart form the violent effort, e.g.
'Slow-Motion Insurrection': How GOP Seizes Election Power | Georgia News | US News
In the months since the insurrection, even as the FOX maggots (like Tucker Carlson) have mocked and derided those who experienced it, Senators and representatives have chronicled the trauma of Jan. 6, recalling how they cowered behind seats in the House chamber and barricaded themselves in offices as Trump acolytes pounded on doors and shouted threats of violence.
This also explains why so many are quitting Capitol jobs in droves, terrified of a repeat with even worse psychotics to come. They also are terrified too many fellow citizens will let their guard down and be taken in by lies and propaganda to put these feral swine back into power again.
As for today's commemorations of Jan. 6 don't look for the Repukes to hold any. Why would they? They want the event permanently memory-holed as an insurrection, the better to grab power again in the midterms - hoping enough Americans look the other way.
AG Merrick Garland proclaimed yesterday:
"The Justice Department is committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators at any level accountable- whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy."
But as Rachel Maddow rightly asked last night:
"People otherwise responsible for the assault on the Capitol? Or does he mean people otherwise responsible for the assault on our democracy as in the election and its results? The effort to falsify those results and thereby seize power?"
These are critical questions, since the latter is exactly the Orban template in Hungary which the GOP wants to fulfill in the next 3 years. If Garland is only prepared to go after the lower level rabble - and higher level rabble in the actual assault - then we are no better off than before January 6th. As one commentator quoted last night put it bluntly:
"The continued defiance by Trump and his allies is forcing Garland to make a decision faced by none of his predecessors: whether to prosecute a former president who tried to subvert an election and may do so again,"
Indeed, and last night in an MSNBC interview Capitol officer Michael Dunn made it clear he wants prosecutions all the way to the top. Will Garland act, or will he punt, leaving our democracy at risk? We will soon see!
In the meantime other critical steps are needed including congress redoing the Electoral Count Act which remains an open invitation to mischief. Thus, right now, a majority in both chambers can conceivably overturn an election (Electoral college result) already certified, if enough alternate state electors are approved. This is what the Reep House & Senate scum (like Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz) tried to pull off on January 6th while their lower level rabble were wreaking havoc on the Capitol.
We cannot let this happen again! To that end only scorn must be heaped on a media source, WSJ - editorial today ('Democracy Isn't Dying')- claiming: "Jan. 6 was a riot not an insurrection") that attempts to muddy the perceptual waters for the political gain of its ideological fellow travelers - the GOP traitors.
See Also:
by Robert Reich | January 6, 2022 - 8:11am | permalink
And:
by Heather Digby Parton | January 6, 2022 - 8:45am | permalink
And:
by Thom Hartmann | January 6, 2022 - 8:31am | permalink
by James A. Piazza | January 5, 2022 - 7:59am | permalink
And:
by Alex Henderson | January 5, 2022 - 8:35am | permalink
And:
by Thom Hartmann | January 1, 2022 - 7:05am | permalink
Excerpt:
When fascism reared its ugly head in Europe and Japan in the 1920s, it signaled a coming war. As a newer and slicker form of that despotism rises here in America, it may well bring the same type of crisis.
We stand on the threshold of momentous change in this nation. While it’s rarely discussed in this frame, the next two elections will almost certainly determine what form of government we’ll have for at least a generation.
Will America become more free and democratic, or will we devolve into a 21st century form of Trumpy fascism?
And:
Excerpt:
Mr. Garland’s success depends on ensuring that the rule of law endures. That means dissuading future coup plotters by holding the leaders of the insurrection fully accountable for their attempt to overthrow the government. But he cannot do so without a robust criminal investigation of those at the top, from the people who planned, assisted or funded the attempt to overturn the Electoral College vote to those who organized or encouraged the mob attack on the Capitol. To begin with, he might focus on Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and even Donald Trump — all of whom were involved, in one way or another, in the events leading up to the attack.
Almost a year after the insurrection, we have yet to see any clear indicators that such an investigation is underway, raising the alarming possibility that this administration may never bring charges against those ultimately responsible for the attack.
And:
by Amanda Marcotte | December 15, 2021 - 8:57am | permalink
And:
by Will Bunch | December 17, 2021 - 8:07am | permalink
And:
by Cody Fenwick | December 14, 2021 - 8:56am | permalink
