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FTR #1174 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: The title refers to the U.S. and its citizens harvesting the crops risen from deadly seeds sown for decades. The Capitol Riot was one of those.
It is to the U.S. as the Beerhall Putsch of 1923 was to Germany–a harbinger of things to come.
The program begins with discussion of Richard Hofstadter, whose theories have been bruited about in the wake of the Capitol Riot. An icon of the mainstream media and the so-called progressive sector, Hofstadter’s work was underwritten by the CIA.
In the context of Hofstadter’s work being underwritten by CIA, one of the factors allowing the seeds of evil to grow has been the government financing of much of U.S. political life.
Intellectual curiosity has been dampened by financial gain.
The armed confrontation in the Capitol reminded us of a confrontation that took place in Parkland Hospital on 11/22/1963.
A contingent of Secret Service agents and Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell confronted and threatened Parkland physicians who were going to autopsy President Kennedy’s body in accordance with law.
(Author Joseph McBride presents convincing evidence that O’Donnell faced probable indictment for corruption. He helped arrange the Kennedy motorcade route through Dealey Plaza, setting JFK up for assassination. O’Donnell succumbed to alcoholism, dying in 1977.)
McBride—drawing on scholarship by numerous authors and researchers—concludes that the Federal agents were intent on preventing an autopsy in Dallas, so that JFK’s body could be surgically altered to obscure the fact that Kennedy was killed in a crossfire.
The “official version” of the murder—an institutionalized historical fiction–maintains that Oswald—the lone assassin—slew Kennedy by firing from the rear.
Analysis of the Capitol Riot highlights a “Before” and an “After.”
Even relatively staid political and national security insiders, as well as media outlets openly expressed fear after a series of post-election shuffling by Trump at the Pentagon.
” . . . . there is speculation that more defense officials may be on their way out and that this is just the beginning — even with only 70 days until the Biden administration takes over. . . . The flurry of departures apparently sent shockwaves through the Department of Defense. A defense official told CNN that the situation was ‘unsettling,’ adding that ‘these are dictator moves.’ The Associated Press wrote that ‘unease was palpable inside’ the Pentagon Tuesday. . . . ‘I’ve been shot at a lot. I’ve been nearly killed a bunch of times. I’m not an alarmist. I try to stay cool under pressure. Mark me down as alarmed,’ retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey said on MSNBC Wednesday. . . .”
Unnamed officials in NATO countries have opined that the events of 1/6/2021 were a coup attempt by Trump’s forces.
In addition, there is an ongoing investigation of an active duty PSYOP officer who operated under the Special Forces command structure for leading a contingent of 100 strong to the “rally” on 1/6/2021.
As veteran listeners/readers will no doubt realize, these events are to be seen against the background of numerous programs and posts highlighting Specialized Knowledge and Abilities and Serpent’s Walk.
Notable among the crocodiles shedding tears over the Capitol Riot was former President George W. Bush. Condemning the riot in one breath, he intoned that he would be attending the inauguration and that “ . . . . witnessing the peaceful transfer of power is a hallmark of our democracy that never gets old,’ he added. . . .”
The program concludes with discussion of some of the Nazi connections to the 9/11 attacks, as well as to the business relationship between Dubya and the Bin Laden family.
1a. The program begins with discussion of Richard Hofstadter, whose theories have been bruited about in the wake of the Capitol Riot. An icon of the mainstream media and the so-called progressive sector, Hofstadter’s work was underwritten by the CIA.
. . . . But in a strange coincidence, Hofstadter first delivered a version of the title essay in a talk as the Herbert Sender Lecture at Oxford University in November 1963. . . .
. . . . It may be coincidental, but Hofstadter’s biographer David S. Brown notes instances in the fifties and sixties when some of the historian’s work was funded, albeit indirectly, by the CIA. Copies of his influential 1954 essay “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” on the dangers of rightwing extremism and its “widespread latest hostility toward American institutions,” and his book The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (with Walter P. Metzger, 1955) were distributed by a CIA front organization, the Fund for the Republic. Hofstadter worked for the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, “a society of liberal cold warriors opposed to international communism” whose parent organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was heavily funded by the CIA. In the sixties, Hofstadter also wrote for Daedalus and Encounter, two publications partially backed by the CIA.
1b. In the context of Hofstadter’s work being underwritten by CIA, one of the factors allowing the seeds of evil to grow has been the government financing of much of U.S. political life.
Intellectual curiosity has been dampened by financial gain.
. . . . One of the many prescient observations in President Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell speech warning about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex” was that “a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. . . The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.” . . . .
2. Before highlighting the Capitol Riot, we present a different, earlier confrontation between federal officials and American civilians.
. . . . [Parkland physician Dr. Charles] Crenshaw recalled, “A man in a suit, leading the [federal] group, holding a submachine gun, left little doubt in my mind who was in charge. That he wasn’t smiling best describes the look on his face . . . . Kellerman took an erect stance and brought his firearm into a ready position. The other men in suits followed course by draping their coattails behind the butts of their holstered pistols.” When Dr. Rose insisted on holding the body in Dallas for autopsy, explaining, “You can’t lose the chain of evidence,” one of the men in suits screamed, “Goddamit, get your ass out of the way before you get hurt,” and another snapped, “We’re taking the body now.” . . . .
3. Analysis of the Capitol Riot highlights a “Before” and an “After.”
4. Notable among the crocodiles shedding tears over the Capitol Riot was former President George W. Bush. Condemning the riot in one breath, he intoned that he would be attending the inauguration and that “ . . . . witnessing the peaceful transfer of power is a hallmark of our democracy that never gets old,’ he added. . . .”
We call attention to a number of things:
- What happened in Washington D.C. on 1/6/2021 was not fundamentally different from the “Brooks Brothers Riot” in Florida that aided the theft of the 2000 election. Organized by Trump flak catcher Roger Stone, that incident and the efforts of current Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett saw to it that Shrub would inherit his father’s Presidential mantle.
- In the wake of the Capitol Riot, the “Opining Heads” raised the subject of the Turner Diaries and its foreshadowing of fascist violence. In 1998, the author of that tome,–William Luther Pierce–explicitly foreshadowed the 9/11 attacks which defined and cemented Dubya’s administration. “ . . . . In one chilling commentary Pierce, (after noting that Bin Laden and the rest of the lost generation of angry Moslem youth had it with their parents’ compromises and were hell bent on revenge against infidel America) issued this stark, prophetic warning in a 1998 radio address titled, ‘Stay Out of Tall Buildings.’ ‘New Yorkers who work in tall office buildings anything close to the size of the World Trade Center might consider wearing hard hats . . .’ Pierce warned.’ . . . The running theme in Pierce’s commentaries is—to paraphrase his hero Hitler—that Osama Bin Laden’s warning to America is ‘I Am Coming.’ And so is bio-terrorism.’ . . .”
- In (among other programs) FTR #186–the last program recorded in 1999–Mr. Emory noted that George W. Bush’s first business venture–Arbusto Energy–was capitalized by the family of Osama Bin Laden.
- Also in FTR #456, we also noted that Francois Genoud was a key financial adviser to the Bin Laden family. One of the most important figures in the Nazi diaspora, Genoud was the heir to the collected works and political last will and testament of: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann. “ . . . . According to [financial expert Ernest] Backes’ information, the trail leads to Switzerland, to the accounts of an organization that was founded by the late lawyer Francois Genoud and evidently still survives. Says Backes, ‘One of the grounds for accusation is that this Swiss attorney had the closest connections with the Bin Laden family, that he was an advisor to the family, one of its investment bankers. It’s known for certain, that he supported terrorism and was the estate executor for Hitler and part of the terror milieu.’ . . .”
- The Bank Al-Taqwa had an account for Al Qaeda’s operations with an unlimited line of credit. Also in FTR#456, we noted that Al Taqwa chief (and former Nazi intelligence agent) Youssef Nada helped the Grand Mufti escape from Europe in the aftermath of World War II. “ . . . . Another valued World War II Nazi collaborator was Youssef Nada, current board chairman of al-Taqwa (Nada Management), the Lugano, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Bahamas-based financial services outfit accused by the US Treasury Department of money laundering for and financing of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. As a young man, he had joined the armed branch of the secret apparatus’ (al-jihaz al-sirri) of the Muslim Brotherhood and then was recruited by German military intelligence. When Grand Mufti el-Husseini had to flee Germany in 1945 as the Nazi defeat loomed, Nada reportedly was instrumental in arranging the escape via Switzerland back to Egypt and eventually Palestine, where el-Husseini resurfaced in 1946.) . . . .”
- The San Francisco Chronicle reported that: “ . . . . Authorities believe Genoud founded Al Taqwa Bank and allocated its resources to support international terrorists such as Vladimir Ilich Ramirez, alias Carlos the Jackal, and Bin Laden. . . . .”
- One of the most important elements in the investigative trail leading to and from the 9/11 attacks is SICO–the Swiss-based holding company that manages the Bin Laden family interests. Here, too, we see the influence of Genoud: “ . . . . This company, established by the bin Ladens in 1980, is the flagship for the group’s activities in Europe. It is headed by Yeslam bin Laden, and the board of directors is made up almost exclusively of members of the family clan, except for a Swiss citizen, Baudoin Dunand. This well-known lawyer from French-speaking Switzerland, who is on the boards of several dozen companies, came to public notice in 1983 when he agreed to represent the Swiss banker Francois Genoud, a controversial figure who had been a disciple of Hitler . . . .”
Here’s an article the ongoing prosecution of the leading Jan 6 insurrectionists that raises a grimly fascinating question about the scope of what was planned for that day. In particular, questions about the scope of the heavily armed “Quick Reaction Force” (QRF) that the Oath Keepers had ready to go that day. Ready with the expectation that then-President Trump might call them into action:
Prosecutors filed new court documents related to the prosecution of Oath Keeper Thomas Caldwell. Recall how Caldwell was working with fellow Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins in coordinating the QRF. The court documents contains a remarkable quote for Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes. The quote was taken from a communication between Rhodes and other Oath Keepers in the run-up to the riot at the Capitol, warning them not to carrying weapons at the Capitol and assuring them of the availability of weapons from the QRF if needed.
Here’s the part that raises questions about the scale or the QRF threat: We already know about the one observed instance of what appeared to be a QRF of around 10 men conspicuously hanging around across the river from the Capitol. But Rhodes told his fellow Oath Keepers that, “We will have several well equipped QRFs [Quick Reaction Forces] outside DC. And there are many, many others, from other groups, who will be watching and waiting on the outside in case of worst case scenarios.” So there were “several other equipped QRFs outside DC” along with “many, many others, from other groups, who will be watching and waiting on the outside in case of worst case scenarios,” there that day, which sounds like A LOT more than just the one group of 10 guys that we already know about. Perhaps more importantly, Rhodes’s comments make it sound like the Oath Keepers’ plans for having QRFs with heavy weapons laying in wait for the signal wasn’t just an Oath Keeper plan and there may have been numerous QRFs from multiple militias all working in coordination with each other:
““We will have several well equipped QRFs [Quick Reaction Forces] outside DC. And there are many, many others, from other groups, who will be watching and waiting on the outside in case of worst case scenarios,” he also allegedly texted.”
How many different QRFs were in the DC area that day? And what was the extent of the Oath Keepers’ coordination with other groups in planning these QRFs? We’ll presumably never know the full extent of it.
An notice the role Rhodes played in verbally instigating his Oath Keepers at 1:38 pm, 20 minutes after Trump concluded his inciting speech: Rhodes had previously told his followers that they were waiting for Trump’s personal order before they called in the QRF, suggesting a level of coordination between the Oath Keepers and the Trump Team. And that coordination was already apparent with the reports of the Oath Keepers carrying out personal security roles for figures like Roger Stone and Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins being allowed into the VIP area of the Stop the Steal rally where the Trump Team was located. So when we see Rhodes send out a communication to his followers expressing disappointment that Trump wasn’t about to “do anything” after giving his incitful speech at the rally and calling for the ‘patriots to take things into their own hands’, we have to again ask if this was all coordinated and intended to provide Trump with a degree of plausible deniability. They were planning a coup, after all. Thoughts of what to do if it went awry had to be incorporated into the planning:
Keep in mind that all the reports we’ve heard about Trump’s response to the storming of the Capitol was glee. He was excited it was happening. Also note that it took time for the protestors to walk to the Capitol, so it’s almost as if Rhodes waited for the crowd to reach the Capitol before sending this communication that was effectively an order to storm it.
And whether or not Trump formally gave the order to his followers to storm the Capitol, he pretty clearly intimated to his supporters during the rally that that is exactly what they should do. So when Rhodes sends a communication to his followers expressing frustration that Trump wasn’t giving the orders, we have to ask: was this arranged? Was this the prearranged alibi that was worked out where Trump wouldn’t actually give the orders? After all, it’s difficult to imagine Trump actually directly and openly giving these orders. Why would he? Why not give order like that behind the scenes?
Also note that it would appear that we can conclude that Stewart Rhodes himself did give orders to storm the Capitol, at 1:38 pm, 20 minutes after Trump’s speech. So based on available information at this point, we can say that the leader of the group that was surreptitiously coordinating with the Trump team was the guy who directly gave orders to storm the Capitol. It’s not exactly exculpatory evidence for Trump.
We’re learning details about one of the figures arrested in connection to the January 6 Capitol insurrection: Timothy Hale-Cusanelli. It turns out Hale-Cusanelli worked as a security contractor at Naval Weapons Station Earle and held a secret-level security clearance. Oh, and he’s an open neo-Nazi who would crack jokes about Hitler on a daily basis. He was so open with his beliefs, that when 44 of his colleagues were interviewed about him following his arrest, 34 of them told investigators he would openly express neo-Nazi belief. And when investigators searched his home, they found copies of “Mein Kampf” and “The Turner Diaries”. Surprise!
It’s the kind of a story that’s disturbing enough on its own, with echos to the story of neo-Nazi Coast Guard officer Christopher Hasson, who was found plotting biological terror campaigns with fellow Nazis. But given the growing number of former and current members of the armed forces who have already been found to have played a role in those events, the case of Hale-Cusanelli raises the question of just how many open neo-Nazis are serving in the US armed forces and what role did this larger contingent of highly trained extremists play in the planning and execution of the insurrection:
“The reservist, Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who worked as a security contractor at Naval Weapons Station Earle and held a secret-level security clearance, was arrested and charged Jan. 15 for allegedly breaching the Capitol. At the time, prosecutors described him as an “avowed white supremacist” and Nazi sympathizer, a determination based in part on evidence provided by a confidential source to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and a YouTube channel in which Hale-Cusanelli expressed those views.”
How many other neo-Nazi with secret-level clearances are working a military weapons stations? It’s a question investigators had better be asking. Don’t forget about the discovery of missing C‑4 from a Marine base in California. It would only take a relative handful of embedded extremists to give access to nightmarishly powerful weapons to the broader far right underground.
But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this story is how open Hale-Cusanelli felt he could be with his Nazi beliefs while on the. 34 out of 44 colleagues confirmed he held extremist views. In other words, he was barely hiding them if he was hiding them at all:
And note the ironic defense of Hale-Cusanelli by his attorney in light of the discovery of “Mein Kampf” and “The Turner Diaries” at his home: “There is no evidence Mr. Hale-Cusanelli is a member of any white supremacist organizations.” And while that may or may not be true, it’s also kind of at the heart of the danger figures like Hale-Cusanelli represent: He doesn’t need to be a member of a white supremacist organizations because he is the member of a leaderless resistance movement. The lack of organization is a feature, not a bug:
Of course, it’s entirely possible Hale-Cusanelli really is the member of a white nationalist organization. In the age of encrypted internet communications he could be the secret member of a dozen different secret groups. Recall how insurrectionist Riley Williams — the person who stole Nancy Pelosi’s laptop out of her office — was later discovered to be a probable member of either Atomwaffen or The Base. She was a known extremist, but her extra-extreme affiliations weren’t previously recognized. What are the odds that Hale-Cusanelli hasn’t also been secretly swearing allegiance to accelerationist neo-Nazi groups? How many other secret accelerationists were in that crowd? More generally, just how much did the Jan 6 Insurrection end up accelerating the growth of “accelerationism”, in particular in the US military? It’s the kind of question that will hopefully be answered with more investigations that lead to prosecutions and expulsions. But, of course, it could also be answered with military-grade weapons being used in a domestic terror attack. Either way, we’ll get our answer.
Here’s one of those stories that reminds of the saying, “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” It’s also the kind of story that raises the question of just how widely will the broader GOP be dragged into the growing number of serious investigations into Trump-related corruption and wrongdoing? In particular, just how extensively will the broader GOP be dragged into covering-up Trump’s numerous crimes:
The Wall Street Journal recently reportedly on a newly discovered recorded phone call between then-President Trump and Francis Watson, Brad Raffensperger’s top elections investigator. Trump was, of course, trying to pressure Watson into overturning Georgia’s election results.
First, recall the now-notorious recorded phone call between Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger and Trump where Trump is basically telling Raffensperger to find enough votes to allow him to win the state. Also recall the phone earlier call Trump made directly to Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp pressuring him to overturn the election results. And now we have the Watson call. So Trump made at least three phone calls to Georgia state officials that were clearly coercive and illegal in nature. At least three phone calls.
But here’s the potentially scandalous new detail that’s emerged: The recording of the phone call between Watson and Trump was only discovered after a public records request and found in the trash bin of Watson’s computer. In other words, Watson tried to delete the recording, but thankfully didn’t actually empty her computer’s trash bin, leaving it available for recovery after the public records.
At least that’s what it looks like: a classic cover-up. Watson, or someone in her office, tried to delete the highly incriminating phone call but made a mistake and now the incriminating evidence is public. Oops.
And that makes this story not just the latest example of the blatant corruption of the Trump administration, but also a test case. A test to see what, if any, consequences that might be for the broader Republican Party’s efforts to engage in cover-ups on Trump’s behalf. Because if Trump made these kinds of phone calls to at least three of different Georgia state officials, how many other recordings of this nature of phone calls to other states’ officials are sitting in PC trash bins somewhere?:
“The Washington Post mentioned that detail when it reported on the tape last week (which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal). State officials initially told the Washington Post and CNN that they didn’t believe that a tape of the call existed. It was reportedly found when they were responding to a public records request.”
Georgia state officials initially claimed they didn’t believe a recording of the call existed. So were they merely mistaken? Because if not, that’s a cover-up. But at this point we don’t know who knew about the existence of the file and who placed it in the trash. Hmm...that seems like something worthy of investigation:
The list of potential culprits of who deleted the recording doesn’t seem like it would be a huge list. Watson or other people working in her office are the obvious suspects. At least in terms of actually deleting the recording.
But that obviously isn’t the full list of possible relevant suspects in the cover-up. After all, this whole situation arose when the Trump administration basically tried to extort Georgia’s state officials into flipping the state in his direction. And, in fairness, Brad Raffensperger’s office has overall demonstrated for more integrity on this matter than we could expect from a lot of other Republican Secretaries of State.
And that’s why the questions over this possible cover-up include the question of what kind of pressure the Trump administration was subsequently applying to the state officials Trump called and harangued to ensure they deleted any recordings of those haranguing phone calls. Along with the question of what kind of illicit pressure might be applied to state officials today, with Trump out of office, to ensure any evidence is destroyed. After all, the guy who acts like an out of control mobster while in office probably isn’t going to break those mobster habits when out of office. Especially while facing multiple investigations. If there’s one thing that could free the broader GOP establishment from Trump’s grip, it’s these numerous state-level criminal investigations. Extorting the broader GOP into silence is probably a critical aspect of Trump’s general defense strategy going forward. Arguably the critical step.
While the shadow of Donald Trump continues to loom large over the future of the Republican Party, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the shadow of Steve Bannon is still out there, lurking over the shadow of Donald Trump’s shoulder, whispering in its shadowy ears, endlessly plotting a darker future. So here’s a reminder that Steve Bannon remains a dark cloud over the future:
Last month, Bannon told a group of Boston Republicans that not only will former President Donald Trump return to the White House in 2024, but Trump might actually first get run for the House of Representatives in 2022. Why run for a House seat when he’s planning on a White House rerun two-years later? Because, according to Bannon, if the Republicans retake control of the House of Representatives in 2022, Donald Trump would replace Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.
Should that happen, the plan is for the Republican-controlled House to immediately impeach Joe Biden. What will Biden be impeached for? For stealing the 2020 election from Trump. Now, as with both of Trump’s impeachments, it would be highly unlikely that the Senate would convict Biden should such a scenario transpire unless the GOP somehow sweep the 2022 Senate races too. But let’s not kid ourselves, the probability of the Republicans retaking control of the House ion 2022 is actually reasonably high. It’s just a built in feature of American democracy: despite scattered state-level reforms that improved regulation over gerrymandering, the Republicans are still going to have the power to gerrymander 128 more House seats than the Democrats during the 2020 redistricting process.
And don’t forget the GOP picked up House seats in 2020. Given the long-standing US political tradition of incumbent presidents’ parties losing seats during mid-terms, it’s not all implausible that the GOP retakes control of the House in 2022, and arguably probable that it happens. So Steve Bannon’s scheme isn’t nearly as hairbrained as many would prefer. In terms of giving Trump a new avenue to inflict daily chaos on the US political establishment, this is a very reasonable bet.
But there’s another dynamic in all of this: from a historical perspective, one of the primary reasons we should expect the GOP to retake control of the House in 2022 is simply because the ‘out of power’ voters tend to be much more animated during mid-terms. Plus, Republican voters tend to be far more reliable mid-term voters than their Democratic counterparts. So if 2022 goes as expected (without a Trump run), the GOP control of the House after the 2022 elections would be a pretty good bet. But that dynamic completely changes if Trump decides to run. All of a sudden, the threat of Trump returning to politics would become very real for millions of people who voted against Trump in 2020 but would otherwise be unlikely to vote at all 2022. In other words, it’s hard to imagine a more effective figure for animating the Democratic vote in 2022 than the threat of Speaker of the House Trump.
So 2022 represents a fascinating puzzle for Bannon and Trump: winning a House seat and becoming Speaker is arguably the fastest and likeliest path of success for Trump returning to politics in a big way. But it’s a very real gamble that really could backfire on the entire GOP during a year the party would otherwise be positioned to do rather well. We don’t know if Trump is actually considering this scheme, but if he is considering it that sets up the question of whose ambitions will take priority here? Trump’s ambitions to reenter politics? Or the House GOP’s ambitions to hold onto their seats and retake control. The answer is obvious. Trump’s ambitions will trump all others. And that’s why this is a story to keep an eye on: if Trump wants to do this, he’ll do it. And Steve Bannon, the Trump-whisperer, really wants Trump to want to do this:
““We totally get rid of Nancy Pelosi, and the first act of President Trump as speaker will be to impeach Joe Biden for his illegitimate activities of stealing the presidency,” Bannon said, leading to applause and hollers from the Boston Republicans.”
The idea is out there. And based on the response from those Boston Republicans, it sounds like they were open to the idea:
There is a certain logic to it: Trump is the brand of the GOP at this point. And he really is extremely popular with the Republican base. Why not stick with the brand? Trump did come obscenely close to being reelected, after all. We can see the seeds of a Trump congressional run already taking root.
But, again, while no figure would animate the Republican base to come out in 2022 like Trump, there’s no avoiding the reality that he really would be a dream for getting out the Democratic vote. And then there’s the fact that it’s not actually clear which House seat Trump would run for, in part because the obvious seat — Florida’s 21st district, where Mar-a-Lago resides — is held by Democrat Lois Frankel, who won handily over far right Trump super-fan Laura Loomer in the 2020 election. So if Trump does decide to run for a House seat in the hopes of revenge-impeaching Joe Biden, he’ll probably need to find a more Trump-friendly congressional district to move to first:
“It’s also unclear whether Trump would be able to win a House seat. Although the state of Florida went for Trump in 2016 and again in 2020, the former president would likely run in his current district, represented by Democratic Congresswoman Lois Frankel. During the 2020 election, Frankel was challenged by a pro-Trump Republican candidate but easily won reelection by a double-digit margin. Frankel secured the support of 59 percent of voters in her district compared to the 39.1 percent who backed her opponent.”
Might Trump run for the House and lose? It’s hard to imagine he would run if he thought he might lose. It would just be too embarrassing.
At the same time, becoming Speaker of the House and revenge-impeaching Biden must be in incredibly tempting option. Plus, keep in mind that, at Trump’s age and with his overall state of health, it’s very unclear if he’ll even be alive for the 2o24 elections. The 2022 election, on the other hand, is just around the corner. 4 years is a LONG ways away for someone in Trump’s position. This ‘House Speakership’ avenue back to national relevancy has to be awfully tempting for someone with Trump’s psychology.
Will Trump play it safe and skip the opportunity? Run in his home District 21 district and Frankel and risk losing? Or maybe move to another district and run from there? We’ll see. But Bannon has no doubt made his 2022 pitch directly to Trump so Trump must be thinking about it. So for anyone who owns a garish eyesore on the market that happens to be located in a Trump-friendly Florida congressional district, there might be a notable uptick in demand in coming months.
As we’ve watched the parallel rise of the “accelerationist” strains of neo-Nazism at the same time far right thought has capture the Republican Party in general, one of the dark questions raised by these trends is the extent to which there’s any meaningful distinction between the “accelerationists” and the more traditional far right activism. After all, it’s not like the end goals differ all that much between the “accelerationsts” and their slower moving far right brethren. The differences has long been a matter of tactics and timing, with of the “accelerationists” preferring the path of unrelenting ‘leaderless resistance’ domestic terror attacks intended to destabilize society, while the more traditional neo-Nazis stick to the slow boil approach.
But given the way these two strategies can synergize with each other, there’s really no need to distinguish between the two movement. Aren’t these two sides of the same coin? It’s a question ominous raised by the growing evidence that a good number of those January 6 Capitol insurrectionists were, in fact, operating under an accelerationist mindset. After all, “accelerationism” could merely be one wing of a much broader movement, a domestic terror wing built in a manner to excupate the larger movement from the public blowback over the consequences of the domestic terror attacks. That’s why we have to ask: just how many of the more ‘prominent public intellectuals’ on the far right are secret accelerationists?
Well, based on the following SPLC piece, there’s at least one accelerationist in those circles: Kevin DeAnna. And when someone as central to the contemporary far right circles operating in Washington DC as DeAnna gets outed as an accelerationist, the question starts turning into who isn’t a closet accelerationist in those circles. After all, as we’ve seen, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe was reportedly quite chummy with DeAnna. DeAnna went on to play a major role in the rise of the Alt Right at the same time DeAnna was navigating supposedly respectable conservative circles like the International Leadership Institute that ostensibly generates the next generation of conservative leaders. Then there’s the July 2016 far right dinner party DeAnna attended at Peter Thiel’s house, where attendees reportedly concluded that Thiel was fully on board with the ‘Dark Enlightenment’. And when DHS employee Ian M. Smith was forced to resign in 2018 after he was outed as a white nationalist, we learn that Smith was hanging out in the same social circle as DeAnna. DeAnna really has been operating at the heart of the far right’s operations in DC.
And as we’ll see in the second SPLC excerpt below, DeAnna was actively soliciting resumes from his far right friends on behalf of VDARE for work in the Trump White House after Trump’s victory in 2016. The guy lives in that grey area where overt white nationalism merges with ‘respectable’ Republican politics and real power in DC. And he’s an accelerationist. It raises quite a few urgent questions, especially in the wake of Trump’s ‘stolen election’ loss.
So how many of DeAnna’s fellow travelers are accelerationists too? We have no idea. But with Trump out of power and his based getting increasingly radicalized towards political violence, odds are there’s a lot more fellow accelerationist travelers than there used to be:
“DeAnna’s work under the pseudonym “Gregory Hood” drew upon foundational white nationalist and neo-Nazi texts that have inspired numerous acts of domestic terrorism. As both “Kirkpatrick” and “Hood,” DeAnna frequently refers to a “System” – often with a capital “S,” mirroring “Turner Diaries” author William Pierce’s own orthography. DeAnna, like Pierce, presents “the System” as both a governmental and nongovernmental coalition of minority groups set out to destroy whites.”
Yes, DeAnna’s writings mirror the Turner Diaries. Imagine that. But it’s not just the Turner Diaries where DeAnna finds his inspiration. DeAnna’s ex-girlfriend Katie McHugh confirmed that, yes, DeAnna owned a copy of James Mason’s “SIEGE” — the handbook for accelerationists — before its recent rise in popularity. He even referenced it in some of his pseudonymous writings:
So the guy has effectively been acting as an accelerationist evangelist within far right circles...at the same time he’s snuggled up to the GOP establishment in DC. Which, again, raises the question of how many other closet accelerationists are operating in the shockingly ‘mainstream’ far right circles within the contemporary Republican Party. Along with the question of how many of those closet accelerationists managed to get jobs in the Trump administration:
“McHugh replied to DeAnna’s email seeking resumes for the administration by recommending that he also apply. DeAnna wrote back: “Doing my best. Please put a good word in for [Steve] Bannon for me if you can. Doing resume as we speak and drinking Trump champagne.” Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist at that time, served as the executive chairman of Breitbart News while McHugh wrote for them.”
The exchange between McHugh and DeAnna, where McHugh encourages DeAnna to apply for a White House job himself, really captures the spirit of that moment for the far right. It was like an open invitation to the White House. They just needed to be a little surreptitious about it, which might explain why, in some cases, the 2016 White House recruitment campaign DeAnna was running seemed like it was being done an behalf of Ann Coulter, but was later revealed to be done on behalf of VDARE:
Finally, just to highlight how high up the support goes for figures like DeAnna and groups like VDARE, here’s a quick reminder that the most prominent right-wing mainstream political dark money group, DonorsTrust, gave VDARE $1.5 million in 2019 so it could by a castle near DC in West Virgina. Yes, mainstream big money Republican donors effectively bought VDARE a real castle last year:
So at least one of DonorTrusts super-wealthy donors is a big fan of VDARE’s white nationalists content. You have to wonder how many of DeAnna’s numerous VDARE articles were read and enjoyed by this anonymous donor. But more importantly, we have to wonder if this anonymous VDARE donor happens to share DeAnna’s accelerationist mind-set. Just how popular is James Mason’s SIEGE these days? That remains unclear. But as the story of DeAnna’s accelerationist evangelizing makes clear, accelerationism is probably a lot more popular than many people want to admit...at least admit outside of their secret elite white nationalist dinner party circles.
Here’s a set of articles about the ongoing investigation into the January 6 Capitol insurrection that relates to the questions of the extent to which ‘accelerationist’ thought has overtaken the far right and the broader questions about the risks of a sustained Trump-inspired domestic terror movement for the US going forward. Perhaps a Trump-inspired domestic terror movement designed, in part, to help Trump avoid the legal repercussions over the insurrection:
Michael Sherwin, the former acting US attorney who initially led the investigation into the insurrection, just gave an interview on “60 Minutes” last night about the direction of the investigation. Sherwin confirmed that sedition charges are being examined and that, in Sherwin’s mind, there are facts that support sedition charges against at least some of the rioters.
And that raises the obvious question of potential sedition charges against the chief rioter: the-President Donald Trump. Does Sherwin see possible sedition charges against Trump too? Yes, according to Sherwin, Trump may be culpable. It’s not a guarantee, but the door to sedition charges against Trump appears to be open. And as we’ll see in the third article below, Harvard constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe concurred on Sunday that, yes, Trump should face sedition charges over his actions leading up to the insurrection. And he should probably face extortion charges over his phone calls to Georgia state officials trying to coerce them into overturning the election results.
So while we have yet to see what, if any, charges Trump will face over his multi-faceted efforts to overturn the election results, it’s sounding like a real possibility he could face serious charges. The kind of charges that could result in major jail time. And the closer we get to Trump facing serious criminal charges, the closer we likely get to Trump and others in his movement going down the ‘accelerationist’ path of domestic terror and retributive violence. That’s part of why these stories about the growing legal peril for Trump and his followers are so significant. Because if they start arriving at the conclusion that they have nothing to lose because they are already in legal peril, they might act like people with nothing to lose:
“The Justice Department has already filed cases against 400 suspects involved in the assault, but none have yet been accused of sedition, the crime of opposing the authority of the U.S. government through force.”
No one has been charged with sedition yet. But the available fact do support sedition charges according to the guy who was initially leading this investigation which means we should probably expect at least some sedition charges. Will that include sedition charges against Trump? According to Scherwin, yes, evidence would support a sedition charge. In particular, the volume of evidence provided by the arrested rioters themselves who make it very clear to investigators that they felt they were acting on Trump’s orders when they raided the Capitol. On the other hand, there’s the militia members who claim they raided the Capitol in response to Trump being ‘all talk’, which could act as a defense of Trump against sedition charges. Although it’s not obvious why being accused of being ‘all talk’ is necessarily a defense against charges that your words were deliberatively incitful. So it sounds like sedition charges are a possibility against Trump, but not a slam dunk and dependent in part on the insurrectionists’ claim of how Trump’s words and actions, or lack thereof, influenced their own words and actions.
It’s an interesting situation from a MAGA-land game theory standpoint: the best defense for the insurrectionists — that they were just following Trump’s lead — is the most damning indictment of Trump. While the militia members who claim Trump was all talk and no action, on the other hand, are providing the best legal defense of Trump but the most damning indictment of Trump’s leadership qualities. They’re basically calling him a paper commander in chief. It’s the kind of dynamic that raises the question of of what Trump is personally hoping to hear from the his followers under questioning: that he as leading them in into the insurrection with his fiery rhetoric, or disappointing them into the insurrection with his general weakness:
““What I could tell you is this: Based upon what we see in the public record and what we see in public statements in court, we have plenty of people-we have soccer moms from Ohio that were arrested saying, ‘Well, I did this because my president said I had to take back our house.’ That moves the needle towards that direction,” Sherwin said. “Maybe the president is culpable for those actions.””
Was Trump an effective leader? If so, it’s hard to avoid a guilty ruling. But if he was just this blowhard that was losing his grip on the hearts of minds of his most dedicated followers, well, then maybe he isn’t directly culpable for the riot. That’s one of the key question facing prosecutors:
Recall how, as we’ve seen, the Trump team was working extremely closely with groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, with members of the Oath Keepers being allowed into the VIP area of the Jan 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, ostensibly to provide VIP security. Also recall how the “Quick Reaction Forces” (QRFs) — which were positioned to rapidly deploy large stores of heavy arms to the insurrectionists — were reportedly waiting for orders from Trump himself. But then, at 1:38 pm, about 20 minutes after Trump concluded his speech at the rally, Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes wrote, “All I see Trump doing is complaining. I see no intent by him to do anything. So the patriots are taking it into their own hands. They’ve had enough.”. And while the QRFs don’t appear to have ever been called in, the full-scale storming of the Capitol clearly happened. So Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes made a statement that ostensibly would clear Trump of some rhetorical culpability, but this is literally the guy leading the organization that was clearly working closely with the Trump team on that very day and providing the private ‘muscle’ to the movement. It’s not like anything Rhodes says should be seen as absolving Trump of culpability over the events of that day. They’re effectively co-conspirators.
So as we can see, the evidence both indicting and defending Trump against sedition charges is a bit messy. At best, the argument that Trump literally left the militias so disappointed that they decided to unilaterally carry out the insurrection (still on his behalf) is a pretty bad sedition defense. But a bad defense might be good enough in a court a law. Although as Constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe points out in the following article, there are different possible sedition-related charges. There’s the charge of actually leading the sedition conspiracy, which could be punishable with up to 20 years in prison. But there’s also the lesson charge that applies to “anyone who gives aid or comfort to insurrection or rebellion,” which could be punishable with up to 10 years and prison and would permanently disqualify the person from holding any state or federal office. Yep, impeachment isn’t the only way to keep Trump out of office. Charging him with doing what he blatantly did in public — giving aid or comfort to insurrection or rebellion — will do the trick. Oh, and then there’s all the extortion in Georgia:
“If Trump is convicted of “conspiracy to commit sedition — which is a fancy way of talking about trying to prevent the government from functioning,” — Trump could get 20 years in prison, Tribe said. A conviction on another charge, which applies to “anyone who gives aid or comfort to insurrection or rebellion,” would be punishable by up to 10 years and permanent disqualification from ever holding any state or federal office.”
Did then-President Trump give aid or comfort to insurrection or rebellion? For people with eyes and ears, yes. And that aid and comfort may be enough to permanently disqualify Trump from holding office. Are prosecutors looking into this option?
And then there are the charges with even more blatant evidence: election fraud and extortion in Georgia. As Tribe puts it, “And we saw it happen in real-time and we heard it with our own ears. So, it’s really hard to wiggle out of that.” Again, Trump’s guilt isn’t really in question for people with functioning eyes and ears:
Will Trump find a way to wiggle out of another legal pinch? You can’t just declare bankruptcy and walk away from something like this. And if there is no walking away, what are Trump’s other options? The guy isn’t going to allow himself to go to jail. So if he really is facing real possible jail time, what is he going to do? Oh right, foment another insurrection. Although, logistically speaking, another insurrection of that nature isn’t exactly easy to organize. A ‘leaderless resistance’ domestic terror campaign, on the other hand, is exactly the kind strategy that could be deployed in that kind of situation. A domestic terror campaign designed to not only protect the Trump family but extend a protective threat virtually all of the perpetrators of the insurrection and send the message that the price of legally punishment over the insurrection will be too high and not worth the blood and turmoil. Is that something we should expect to emerge from this situational bile? An unofficially-Trump-led domestic terror movement intended to thwart the prosecution of the insurrectionists? Hopefully not, but as the above articles make clear, it’s not like Trump has a lot other great legal defenses available.
Plus, while the idea of Trump fomenting a domestic terror campaign as an indirect legal defense against sedition charges might seem ironic, you can’t argue with the underlying logic there for someone with few other options. It’s awful predatory logic, but it does make sense as a last ditch move by someone with nothing to lose. And thanks to Trump’s ‘leadership’, a whole lot of the most violence-prone people who followed him may have nothing to lose too, legally speaking. It’s ironically one of Trump’s greatest accomplishments, albeit more of an accomplishment on behalf of ‘accelerationist’ groups like Atomwaffen.
Here’s an article that’s notable not so much for its content but for the fact that it’s likely the first in what will be a new genre of horrible Trump-focused articles: It’s the first post-Presidency interview of Donald Trump where he basically calls for a revolution after grousing about how the election was rigged and stolen from him. Or, in the Trumpian way he put it, “What happened to us with the presidential election could never have happened to the Democrats. You would have had a revolution if the tables were turned, you would have literally had a revolution. And guys like Mitch McConnell, they don’t fight.” Yes, Trump is now basically shaming his conservative audience for not succeeding in keeping Trump in office during the Jan 6 insurrection. The Democrats would have successfully fomented a coup. Only weak Republicans allowed this to happen. That’s Trump’s current message to MAGA-land.
It’s arguably surprising that it’s taken Trump this long to give an interview where he makes these kinds of statements. Trump has been oddly quiet over the past couple of months and it wasn’t clear if that silence was due to legal fears or the guy just wanted to take a break from being a loudmouthed fascist 24/7. But he’s now arrived at this seemingly inevitable rhetorical place, essentially telling the audience of Fox News’ Lisa Boothe’s “The Truth” podcast that they didn’t riot for him hard enough. And the 2024 race to the White House has clearly already begun:
“We had a great election and we won and they took it away. It was a rigged election. Cause as you know, we won the first one, but we did much better in the second one. So people always say, Oh, what do you mean you did better? I say, we did much better, almost 75 million votes. And that’s the votes that we know about. And it was a really a terrible thing. I mean, it was really an unfair thing to the people that support us.”
Cries of a rigged election certainly aren’t unprecedented for Trump. But it hasn’t been entirely clear what to expect from Trump after the Jan 6 insurrection, especially since he still has a legal exposure to those events, including possible sedition charges. But we now appear to have gotten our answer. Damn the legal threats, Trump is going to keep shouting at the world about how the election was rigged and stolen from him. And raises another question about this recent Trump interview and the likelihood of more interviews of this nature going forward: Do interviews like this that continue to push the ‘stolen election’ claims while dismissing or mischaracterizing the nature of events of Jan 6 while encouraging a repeat constitute an ongoing form of sedition? How about if there’s a sustained rhetorical campaign by Trump claiming the election was stolen followed by a sustained that pro-Trump domestic terror campaign? Will it be sedition at that point? Or is Trump more or less free to spend the rest of his life giving interviews like this where he laments the lack of courage among conservatives unwilling to fight for his victory? As Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe pointed out over the weekend, in addition to direct charges of sedition, there are also possible charges directed at “anyone who gives aid or comfort to insurrection or rebellion.” So did Trump’s interview rise to the level of giving “aid or comfort to insurrection or rebellion”? No enough? How about if he delivers the same underlying message in every interview he gives in the next four years? Because that’s probably what’s going to happen, so hopefully some prosecutors are taking a closer look at sedition-related laws. Because while it’s not clear yet if Trump is actively trying to find ways around sedition laws, or if he’s just ‘being Trump’ as usual, it’s pretty clear that Trump is still actively pining for some sedition. Or as Trump would put it, pining for “the Revolution” he’s hoping his supporters will still bring him.
Here’s a pair of updates on the ongoing investigation into the role the Proud Boys played in organization and executing the January 6 Capitol insurrection:
First, the legal defense of Proud Boys leader Joseph Biggs, who was indicted back on March 10 over his role in the insurrection, raised eyebrows after Biggs’s lawyer asserted to the court that Biggs had been a willing FBI informant after FBI agents approached him in July of 2020 wanting to know what he was “seeing on the ground” in relation to Antifa. Biggs apparently answered an agent’s follow-up questions in a series of phone calls over the new few weeks. In addition. Biggs’s attorney claims Biggs received “cautionary” phone calls from FBI agents and routinely spoke with local and federal law enforcement officials in Portland, Oregon, about rallies he was planning there in 2019 and 2020.
Keep in mind that we’ve been getting reports about the Portland police coordinating with far right groups for years now. For example, recall how, back in 2017, the Multnomah County Republican party chairman James Buchal announced he was interested in using groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys as security for party events. Which ended up actually happening. And as this story played out we learned about the extensive contacts and coordination between the Portland police and a number of far right groups and that was just one of the examples in recent years of stories of the Portland police coordinating with these groups. So Joe Biggs’s assertions that he routinely spoke with local and federal law enforcement officials in Portland, Oregon, is just the latest detail in a larger well-established story.
And as we’ll see in the second article excerpt below, about the Capitol insurrection charges against Biggs and three other Proud Boys members, it appears that, while evidence against Biggs’s role in the direct break in of the Capitol building remains unclear, there is evidence that Biggs was playing a leadership role in the Proud Boys’ plans for possible violence in the lead up to the events of that day. In other words, to the extent that the Proud Boys actively had a plan on breaking into the Capitol and potentially seizing lawmakers, Biggs is likely a top designer of that plan. And that’s the guy law enforcement was creating this exceedingly cozy relationship with in recent years. So cozy that the FBI was asking Biggs to act as their eyes and ears against Antifa months before the insurrection:
“Biggs, 37, of Ormond Beach, Florida, wouldn’t be the first Proud Boys informant. The group’s chairman and top leader, Enrique Tarrio, previously worked undercover and cooperated with investigators after he was accused of fraud in 2012, court documents show.”
The Proud Boys are clearly proud to act as FBI informants. At least when it comes to informing on Antifa. And then he waged an insurrection. It’s the kind of story arc that makes the FBI’s encouragement of Hal Turner seem tame in comparison. It’s a reminder that a willingness to cooperate with law enforcement isn’t necessarily an indication some sort of respect for justice or democracy:
And recall that, in 2019, when Portland opened an internal investigation after more than 11,500 text messages between Patriot Prayer founder Joey Gibson and police Lt. Jeff Niiya, we had already received confirmation back in 2017 from the Portland police that Sgt Niiya had been in extensive contact with Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers. So when that internal Portland police investigation was opened in 2019, it was already kind of old news:
Ok, and now here’s an article from a couple of weeks ago about the nature of the charges against four of Proud Boys who were charged on March 10 over their roles in the insurrection. And as the article describes, while the exact nature of the the planning that went into the Proud Boys’ actions during the insurrection remain somewhat unclear based on the evidence laid out in the different trials already underway, it is extremely clear that the Proud Boys were planning for violence of some sort. With Biggs, but no exclusively Biggs, leading the planning:
“All four defendants are charged with conspiring to impede Congress’ certification of the Electoral College vote. Other charges in the indictment include obstruction of an official proceeding, obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder and disorderly conduct.”
Note the charges: conspiring to impede Congress’ certification of the Electoral College vote. Not just a charge about rioting or property damage. A conspiracy to stop the Electoral College vote certification. And it’s not low-level Proud Boy members getting these charges. It’s leaders like Biggs. This was a high-level Proud Boys operation. They even communicated about “regrouping with a second force” as some rioters began to leave the Capitol. That’s a planned invasion:
And note the seeming awareness of the severity of what they were engaged in: when Proud Boy leader (and prolific FBI informant) Enrique Tarrio was arrested, the group freaked out about their communications being compromised and one of them issued an order to “Stop everything immediately”. It raises the question of whether or not what we saw transpire was actually a much scaled-back version of what they were actually planning:
But despite all that evidence, it’s not clear prosecutors are going to be able to prove that the Proud Boys actually planned on breaking into the Capitol building. They had plans, it’s just not clear if that was in their plans:
So the outcome of the trial remains very much uncertain, in part because the defense can legitimately claim their clients were indeed FBI informants. Arguably extensive and enthusiastic FBI informants who have been working with the agency for years, in addition to their work with who knows how many local law enforcement agencies.
It points towards one of the more interesting, and ironic, aspects of the ongoing trials over the perpetrators of the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection: their best defense against charges that amount to war against democracy will be their extensive history of enthusiastically helping the government crack down on anti-fascists and civil rights activists. Because of course that’s how it turned out.
Here’s a story that’s kind of interesting on its own, but it’s really as a kind of barometer of the strength of the Trumpian grip on the hearts and mind of the GOP voting base. It’s also a barometer of the the strength of the gag reflex that’s developed in the GOP in recent years in response to the name ‘Bush’:
George P. Bush, son of Jeb and current Texas Land Commissioner, is reportedly seriously considering running for attorney general of Texas. This would pit him against sitting Attorney General Ken Paxton. And Paxton isn’t just any Republican. He’s a wildly corrupt Trump super-fan-style politician and it’s that open corruption that appears to be the basis for George P’s planned bid.
But this is Trump’s GOP. Open corruption is potentially political asset these days. Especially if it’s open corruption in service of Trump’s glory, and that’s been a theme for Paxton. For example, recall how, back in June of 2016, Paxton tried to use a cease and desist order to muzzle a former state regulator who says he was ordered in 2010 to drop a fraud investigation into Trump University for political reasons. Flash forward to December of 2020, where we find Paxton literally petitioning the US Supreme Court to overturn the presidential election results for the states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan. We also discovered that Paxton was working directly with far right disinformation outlet Project Veritas in order to whip up voter fraud allegations well over a year before the 2020 election. He’s even refused to turn over communications about his participation in the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Capitol insurrection. And going forward under a Democratic White House, Paxton’s open support of “nullification” legal theories will probably be pretty popular with a lot of conservative voters.
And then there’s the more traditional forms of corruption, like the charges for securities fraud, bribery, and abuse of office.
So Paxton is openly and grossly corruption. As shocking as it is to say, but George P. Bush just might be a serious step up from the rot currently festering in the attorney general’s office. And yet it’s not at all clear that Paxton’s rot isn’t actually quite popular. Sure, the securities fraud probably isn’t popular. But the rest? Are we sure the GOP electorate wouldn’t see those corrupt acts as a plus?
It’s also worth noting that George P. stood out from the rest of his fellow Bush family members in heartily endorsing Trump. So this race wouldn’t descend into a pro-Trump candidate vs anti-Trump candidate kind of referendum. At least not on the surface, although we should expect it to include a competition over who loves Trump more. But if the race is going to be about Ken Paxton’s corruption as George P. intends, well, that is at least kind of a referendum on Trump. Paxton’s corruption is Trumpism. Gross open corruption sold to the masses as bold populism while dismissing the charges as attacks from the ‘Deep State’. That’s why the story of this race is potentially a lot bigger than just the story of whether or not someone named ‘Bush’ can still win Republican elections. It’s a real test of whether or not the Trumpism model of turning gross open corruption into political gold can translate to other grossly openly corrupt politicians:
“Bush, the grandson of former President George H.W. Bush and nephew for President George W. Bush, went on to say a Paxton challenge would not be centered on “conservative credentials” but how the incumbent has run his office. “I think character matters and integrity matters,” Bush said.”
“I think character matters and integrity matters.” LOL. It’s almost quaint. And that’s why this could be such an interesting race. Paxton is both the poster child for why character and integrity should matter in politics. But he’s also the poster child for the political success of Trumpist-style wild open corruption. The guy literally got reelected in 2018 while facing securities fraud charges. It’s that open corruption that makes him such a tempting political target for figures like George P., and yet there’s no denying he’s still in office despite those charges. It remains very unclear if any of it matters or if it’s even an asset. After all, every legal charge against a Republican these days doubles as a new excuse to claim the ‘Deep State’ is attacking them:
It’s going to be a race of the past vs the future: the ‘character matters’ political aesthetics of yesteryear the Bush family long played to vs the ‘nothing matters, burn it all down’ contemporary politics of Trump. Old awful or new awful. It’s going to be awful either way, but the particular flavor of awful remains in question.
A new timeline of the January 6 Capitol insurrection was just released by the AP. The new details are reportedly based on a previously undisclosed document prepared by the Pentagon for internal use. It confirms what we’ve already known for the most part. But there’s some interesting new information on the actions taken by Mike Pence that day. It turns out Pence issued a direct order to then-acting defense secretary Christopher Miller at 4:08 PM to “Clear the Capitol”. This was happening around the same time Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were making similar requests to military leaders. 9 minutes after Pence issued that order, then-President Trump broke his long silence about the riot that was hours-old at that point and tweeted for his followers to “go home and go in peace.” At 4:40 PM, Pelosi and Schumer were on a call with the Pentagon leadership, asking Miller to secure the perimeter. During that call, they accused “the National Security apparatus of knowing that protestors planned to conduct an assault on the Capitol,” according to the documents.
So only minutes after Mike Pence issues the order to clear the Capitol does Trump tell his followers to “go in peace”. And that raises the question: so was Trump ‘in the loop’ about Pence’s orders? It’s part of the larger question about how aware Trump was of all of the chaos and pleas for help coming from the Capitol and the government leaders holed up inside. After all, if there’s one person who could over rule Pence or the congressional leadership, it’s Trump. So was Trump at all playing a ‘commander in chief’ role that day or were those responsibilities preemptively passed off to Pence? That’s still unclear. But what is clear from this new timeline is that Trump didn’t call off the party until just minutes after Pence issued the order:
“With Trump not engaged, it fell to Pentagon officials, a handful of senior White House aides, the leaders of Congress and the vice president holed up in a secure bunker to manage the chaos.”
With Trump not engaged, it was up to Mike Pence and the congressional leadership to issue the calls to restore order on the Capitol. Which, again, raises the question of why Trump wasn’t engaged? Did he just decide to go incommunicado during the riots? Or was it arranged in advance that Pence would be the acting commander in chief? But for whatever reason, it was up to Pence, Pelosi, and Schumer to try to get the military to step into action. And at 4:08 PM, as rioters were calling for Pence’s hanging, we learn that Pence called Christopher Miller to issue the “clear the capitol” order. Less than 10 minutes later, Trump breaks his silence and issues the “go in peace” tweet:
The timing sure is interesting. Was Trump directly told about the order Pence made? Or was he perhaps surreptitiously tipped off about it? Was Trump being intentionally kept ‘out of the loop’ that day and secretly given tips? It’s a question that’s been raised a number of times as we’ve learned about the timeline of that day. For example, recall the earlier reports about Michael Flynn’s brother, Charles Flynn, was sitting in on the chaotic Pentagon conference call that day. Did Charles perhaps tip off his brother about the “clear the Capitol” order, who then passed it along to Trump? Or was Trump told right away? We have no idea but these are increasingly important questions:
Finally, note the contents of the phone call from Pelosi and Schumer to the Pentagon leadership that took place around a half hour after Pence issue that order:
Keep in mind that we’re learning about this phone call from an internal Pentagon document that got leaked. So when we read that the congressional leadership on the call “accuses the National Security apparatus of knowing that protestors planned to conduct an assault on the Capitol,” we’re really just getting a vague summary of those accusations. It would be interesting to know if the actual contents of that phone call are recorded somewhere.
So the new AP report based on this internal Pentagon timeline hasn’t profoundly changed our understanding of what happened on January 6. But it does raise important questions. Important questions like whether or not Trump made his “go in peace” tweet with the awareness that Pence had just ruined all the fun by issuing an order to clear the Capitol of the Trump’s insurrectionary mob trying to find and hang him.
Following up on the doubling down by Fox News on Tucker Carlson’s repeated prime-time promotion of the “Great Replacement” white nationalist meme, here’s another example of the US conservative movement being led off the far right cliff:
It’s looking like we might be getting an idea of the direction the QAnon movement is taking now that “Q” has effectively disappeared from the internet and the identity of “Q” was potentially revealed a few weeks ago in an HBO documentary. Recall how “Q” went silent following the November 2020 election. And that silence was quickly followed by accusations by major followers that the account for controlling the “Q” persona had been sold on the dark web for $1 million, raising the possibility that “Q” would some day return, under new management. So major questions ahve been swirling for months now about the future of the QAnon movement.
Then, a few weeks ago, an HBO documentary appeared to out the identity of ‘Q’. It’s not a confirmed ‘outing’, but based on the documentary it sure looks like Ron Watkins has either been “Q” all along or was at least playing a supporting role. Watkins made what appeared to an accidental admission in passing during the filming and continues to deny that he is “Q”.
So how have the QAnon followers responded to this revelation? By ignoring it entirely or dismissing it as fake news. That’s been the response so far.
But as the second excerpt below reminds us, the QAnon phenomena has always been less about “Q” and more about being a tool for people to indulge in warped and fantasy. Warped fantasies with a distinct far right white nationalist apocalyptic tinge. Which is why we shouldn’t at all be surprised to learn that the leading Q follower in congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is planning on forming a new congressional caucus: The America First caucus. It’s going to call for the complete ending of immigration and the promotion of America’s Anglo-Saxon heritage. Yes, that’s right, this caucus will specifically ensure that America’s Anglo-Saxon heritage, and no other heritage, is promoted as essentially the core heritage of America. Even US architecture should reflect an Anglo-Saxon aesthetic, according to the leaked draft of the America First caucus documents.
Other members of the GOP who have come out in support of the America First caucus idea include Matt Gaetz, currently under investigation for underage sex-trafficking charges, and Paul Gosar, the lone member of congress who attended the far right America First PAC conference.
Taken together, it’s a hint. A very big hint about what we should expect next from the QAnon crowd, which is exactly what we should have expected all along: a full embrace of white nationalist mythologies. And a continued embrace of “Q”, no matter what:
“None of the main QAnon influencer accounts have mentioned the documentary on Gab, and aside from a couple of random questions by followers of the biggest QAnon channels on Telegram, the documentary’s explosive findings have not been discussed.”
Ron Watkins basically admitted it on camera. We can all watch it over and over. And yet this hasn’t even discussed in the QAnon forums. It’s a remarkable form of...not quite self-discipline...more like denial. But it’s remarkable. The community fixates on every last Q utterance but doesn’t care at all about the revelation of Q’s identity. It raises the question of just how many of the self-professed Q super-fans believe any of it ever or it was always just a giant scam *wink* *wink* joke on the rubes.
And note Ron Watkins’s attempts to suggest it was Steve Bannon who was really Q. Keep in mind that, based on what we know, it’s entirely possible both Watkins and Bannon share control of the Q persona. It’s not mutually exclusive:
And as the response, or lack of response, by the QAnon community to this revelation reveals, we still have no way to predict what’s next for a movement of this nature, even after its prophet is seemingly revealed. Q hasn’t spoken since the election. The QAnon community — perhaps the most gullible online community in existence — is rudderless and without its leader:
But as the following article reminds us, it’s not like we have no idea at all where the QAnon community will go without its leader. We have a very good idea because QAnon is basically just a mainstream extra-trashy rehashing of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So the community will presumably just continue down that path and continue networking and merging with other extremist movements. Which is why the new reports about the new pro-Anglo-Saxon America First caucus being started by the biggest Q fan in congress is exactly what we should expect:
“In a section on immigration, the document describes the United States as a place with “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and argues that “societal trust and political unity are threatened when foreign citizens are imported en-masse into a country, particularly without institutional support for assimilation and an expansive welfare state to bail them out should they fail to contribute positively to the country.””
When will America return to is “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and end the erosion of trust that comes with non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants? It’s the logical illogical next step for the conservative movements plunge into the QAnon abyss:
Will President Biden’s big infrastructure package now face calls from Republicans for the inclusion of a more Anglo-Saxon aesthetic on America’s roads and bridges? We’ll see, but there’s no denying that what we find in the “America First” caucus document captures the contemporary GOP’s id. It’s barely any weirder than what Donald Trump would tweet out on a daily basis for the past four years.
And its Marjorie Taylor Greene, Q leader in confess, apparently leading the way on this initiative. It gives us a sense of where the QAnon movement will go from here as ‘Q’ steps out of the spotlight: into greater and more influential leadership positions inside the conservative movement.
There’s a new Reuters report out on the existing relationship between the Proud Boys and the FBI in the lead up to the January 6 Capitol Insurrection and the ongoing questions about what the FBI knew about the Proud Boys’s insurrectionary plans:
First, recall how one of the Proud Boy leaders who appears to have played a significant role in the group’s Jan 6 planning, Joseph Biggs, was also one of the members of the group with the most extensive history of passing information on to the FBI. Also recall how the Trump team was working closely with the Oath Keepers for providing VIP security for figures like Roger Stone at the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally the immediately preceded the insurrection. Stone is notoriously close to the Proud Boys and has used them for security in the past, which is the kind of fun fact that raises obvious questions about how much the Trump team’s secret planning in the lead up to the Jan 6 insurrection included secret planning with the Proud Boys.
That’s the context that makes one of the newly reported details in the following article potentially so significant. Because it turns out the Proud Boys held a previously unknown vote on December 12, weeks before the insurrection, that was specifically intended to obscure the size of the Proud Boys’ presence in the upcoming January 6 rally. The vote was held after pro-Trump rally in DC where Proud Boys ended up wandering the streets looking for Antifa members to beat up. Four people were stabbed by the end of the night. In response to the bad press, the Proud Boys voted to ban the wearing of Proud Boy colors and outfits at future rallies. And that means the Proud Boys’ presence at the Jan 6 riots was almost certainly much larger than currently recognized:
“A third Proud Boy leader, Joseph Biggs, who was indicted and charged with conspiracy in the January attack, has said in court papers he reported information to the FBI about Antifa for months. Reuters spoke to Biggs two days before the riot. In that interview, he said he had specific plans for Jan. 6, but declined to disclose them. But, he volunteered to Reuters in that call, he was willing to tell his FBI contact of his plans for the coming rally, if asked. Reuters wasn’t able to determine whether such a contact took place.”
They just can’t stop dropping hints about all the details the Proud Boys have been sharing with the FBI. Joseph Biggs literally told a reporter two days before the insurrection that, while he was unwilling to share his plan for Jan 6 with the reporter, Biggs would be willing to share them with his FBI contact. It was an intriguing public admission that got a lot more intriguing after the insurrection two days later. And even more intriguing now that we’ve learned about the previously undisclosed secret vote on December 12 where the Proud Boys planned on showing on January 6 effectively as a secret army:
So in addition to the ongoing questions about the extent of the Trump team’s secret planning and coordination with the Proud Boys, we now have questions about the size and intent of this secret Proud Boy army. Questions that should probably include questions about the futures plans for this secret army.
Just how much of a real difference is there really between proto-fascist Trump-worshipping groups like the Proud Boys and Accelerations neo-Nazi groups like Atomwaffen? That’s the question raised by a recent set of failed “White Lives Matter” rallies that were planned for cities across the US on April 11. It sounds like the idea behind the rallies were was very similar to the intent of the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally: to create a public-friendly presence for the far right while simultaneously bringing together members of groups like the Proud Boy with more their overt violent neo-Nazis under a common banner. Giving the appearance of a genuine grass-roots spontaneous “White Lives Matter” movement was seen as a top priority and, as such, one of the rules the rally organizers imposed was no symbolism of organized groups like the Proud Boys.
There wasn’t a single organizer of the planned rallies although the Proud Boys appear to have played a significant role. At least, the Proud Boys played a significant role until a bunch of antifascist infiltrators leaked the chats of their plans to the media, revealing that this ‘grass roots’ event was heavily a Proud Boys operation that included a number of other open violent neo-Nazis. Those leaked chats, combined with some organizers simply being unable to publicly contain their neo-Nazi track-record, ended up getting most of the rallies canceled, although a few sparsely populated rallies did take place.
So we recently learned that the Proud Boys — a group that played a significant role in the January 6 insurrection and could almost be seen as a kind Trump militia — tried to secretly coordinate a nation-wide series of “White Lives Matter” rallies in coordination with a number of other far right white supremacists, but had to cancel the plan after their secret organizing role was revealed. So, again, what exactly distinguishes the Proud Boys from the violent neo-Nazis they organize with other than perhaps a more refined sense of optics?
“In late March, in a public Telegram channel for the White Lives Matter rallies, administrators emphasized that the marches were unaffiliated with far-right groups like the Proud Boys. “No mentioning of any groups,” a message read. “This is grassroot and no groups are affiliated.””
There’s no group behind the “White Lives Matter” rallies. It’s a purely grass roots phenomena. That was a core rule for the rallies from the very beginning, issued by the Proud Boys and friendly neo-Nazis behind the whole thing:
And while differences erupted in the private chat groups over these rules, and the inevitable violations of these rules by neo-Nazis who can’t feasibly hide their neo-Nazi status, note how the attempts to bring everyone together relied on acknowledging that the Proud Boys and Atomwaffen have different opinions about things but they should still be able to come together under a common cause. The same organization of this North Carolina rally used a swastika avatar. The regular ol’ neo-Nazi is the ‘peacemaker’ between the Proud Boys and Atomwaffen in this dynamic...although the guy sounds a like an Atomwaffen member himself:
So that was a highly revealing fizzled rally attempt. Thanks to the “White Lives Matter” fiasco, we now know that the Proud Boys — the primary paramilitary group behind the Jan 6 insurrection — was networking with violent neo-Nazis just a few months later. And while that networking may not have resulting in the nation-wide “White Lives Matter” rallies like they hoped, that doesn’t mean something awful isn’t going to emerge from this effort. In fact, it turns out that the same NC organizer who was calling for the Proud Boys and Atomwaffen to embrace their common cause decided to create a new group dedicated to doing exactly that.
This still-anonymous individual, who goes by the online monicker “Bolts”, also claims to have joined the National Guard in recent months and has been hoping the 2020 election results and cries of a stolen election will trigger a civil war soon. For “Bolts”, the common cause that should unite the Proud Boys and Atomwaffen is this coming civil war. And, again, this is the guy positioning himself as the relative ‘moderate’ in this movement:
“After canceling the “White Lives Matter” rally, “Bolts” invited the cluster of supporters involved in planning for the scuttled event into a private voice chat to discuss the launch of the new group. A major preoccupation of the discussion was how they will be perceived by the public.”
The implosion of the “White Lives Matter” rally after the exposure of the group’s real intent has clearly triggered the far right. And with good reason. The movement realizes it has to trick people into supporting it so getting exposed like this was kind of a big deal. At least, if would be a big deal if this new got the kind exposure it deserves. After all, we’re talking about the unofficial Trump militia, the Proud Boys, networking with violent neo-Nazis just months after the insurrection. The seeds for future national crises are being sown. And if “Bolts” has anything to say about it, those future national crises will revolve around the active coordination of all of the different White Power movements acting as one:
But, of course, the Proud Boys were already working as one with the rest of the violent far right when these rallies were getting organized. It was only the exposure of their plans, along with the boastings of overly proud neo-Nazis, that really derailed it. The Proud Boys clearly had no actual issue of directly networking with other violent extremists. So, again, we have to ask: what exactly is the difference at this point between the Proud Boys and Atomwaffen other than a more refined sense of optics?
The Republican leadership in the House is in the middle of a fascinating identity crisis right now. The kind of identity crisis that, depending on how its resolved, could end up fast-tracking the next Trump-led insurrection:
The growing tensions between House GOP caucus chair Liz Cheney and the rest of the GOP over whether or not to condemn Donald Trump over the January 6th insurrection hit a boiling point this week. On Monday, we got reports that House minority leader Kevin McCarthy was caught on a ‘hot mic’ episode trashing Cheney while appearing on Fox News. The next day, Cheney published a scathing op-ed in the Washington Post calling this moment a turning point for the GOP while warning that a failure to condemn Trump’s insurrectionary Big Lie about a stolen election is setting the stage for future insurrections.
And, of course, there’s no way in hell Cheney’s op-ed is going to change more than a handful of minds in her caucus. So Cheney essentially committed political suicide by making such warnings. She really must feel a need to issue those warnings.
And now, today, we are learning that the House member who has been tapped by Trump himself as the favored replacement for Cheney in her GOP caucus leadership position, Elise Stefanik, just went on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast where she fully endorsed the ‘stolen election’ meme while promoting the GOP’s joke ‘audits’ of the Arizona vote.
So all indications are that Liz Cheney is set to be punished for her condemnation of the January 6 insurrection and replaced with a Trump sycophant who has been giving full-throated endorsements of virtually all of the stolen election lies. All in all, that sure sounds like the seeds of the next insurrection being sown. Although the next insurrection won’t be a ‘Trump insurrection’. It’s too late for that. It’s going to be a full blown ‘GOP insurrection’ after the party refuses to heed Cheney’s warnings:
“In public statements again this week, former president Donald Trump has repeated his claims that the 2020 election was a fraud and was stolen. His message: I am still the rightful president, and President Biden is illegitimate. Trump repeats these words now with full knowledge that exactly this type of language provoked violence on Jan. 6. And, as the Justice Department and multiple federal judges have suggested, there is good reason to believe that Trump’s language can provoke violence again. Trump is seeking to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure that make democracy work — confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law. No other American president has ever done this.”
Liz isn’t mincing words. There really is very good reason to believe that Trump’s language can provoke violence again. Especially if the Big Lie behind that insurrection is fully backed by the rest of the party.
And note her observation about the broader impact this stolen election Big Lie could end up having around the world: the GOP is effectively undermining the idea that the institutions that run a democracy, or at least multi-ethnic democracy, can be trusted. It’s a meme no doubt appreciated by authoritarian governments around the world, including the government of China that the has become the a GOP propaganda focal point in recent years:
And that brings us to the interview just done by Cheney’s Trump-annointed replacement as caucus chair, Elise Stefanik, on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. An interview where Stefanik fully backed the stolen election Big Lie and the sham ‘audits’ schemes. In other words, it was basically an audition for Cheney’s role as House caucus leader and Stefanik made it clear she wants the job:
“Stefanik’s remarks on Bannon’s podcast came a day after the former President revived his post-insurrection attacks against prominent Republicans.”
The timing of it all it is quite remarkable: On Monday, we have reports Kevin McCarthy’s ‘hot mic’ moment attacking Cheney. Tuesday brings us Cheney’s op-ed, but also renewed attacks by Trump on Cheney and other GOP leaders who haven’t demonstrated adequate post-insurrection fealty to Trump like Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence. And then Wednesday we have Stefanik going on Steve Bannon’s podcast to get showcased for the role. It’s been a demonstration of where the real power lies in the contemporary GOP: in the hands of figures like Trump and Bannon:
The real leader of the GOP has made his decision: Trump chooses Stefanik because Stefanik choose Trump over all. And now it’s just a matter of time before Stefanik gets the role. Because Trump über alles.
So when the next insurrection happens — and it’s increasingly looking like a when, not if, question — it’s going to be important to keep in mind that what we’ve witnessed over the last few months is the full party embrace of the January 6 insurrection and Big Lies that fueled it. Trump owns the party. Any future ‘Trump insurrections’ are going to be GOP insurrections. Fealty has consequences.
New details came out today on the actions, or lack of actions, during the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Details about who precisely issued the belated order to the National Guard to deploy and clear the Capitol of the insurrectionists. And yet, despite these new details, it’s still not actually who ordered what and why the deployment was delayed for 90 crucial minutes while the a Trumpian army rampaged through the Capitol.
According to the updated timeline, the Pentagon issued the order to mobilize the Guard at 3:00 pm, but only issued the order to deploy the Guard at 4:32 pm. During this 92 minute period, then-Vice President Mike Pence spoke with Miller at ~ 4:08 pm and reportedly called on Miller to “clear the Capitol”, raising questions of whether or not the 4:32 pm order to deploy was in response to Pence’s call.
But Miller told congress that, no, Pence’s call had no bearing on his decision to issue the deployment order at 4:32 pm, in part because Pence was not in the chain-of-command and not able to legally issue military orders at that moment. So if Miller’s deployment order wasn’t in response to Pence’s call, why did it happen at that point, over 90 minutes after the mobilization order? According to Miller, there’s no mystery here. The 90 minute lag between the mobilization and deployment orders was actually a remarkably short period of time.
Miller also appeared to be trying to shrug off responsibility to D.C. National Guard commanding general William Walker. At 3:00 pm, Miller issued the deployment order but after 3:04 pm it was up to Walker to draft the actual plan for clearing the Capitol. And yet, it was Miller who ultimately approved Walkers plan and that approval didn’t happen until 4:32 pm. So Miller appeared to be putting the onus for actually deploying the troops on Walker and yet it really was Miller who ultimately issued the approval.
The distinction between the mobilization orders and deployment orders hadn’t previously been appreciated. Miller himself was confusing the orders during his testimony, initially saying he issued the deployment order at 3 pm, and only later clarifying that it was a mobilization order. It’s a distinction that raises new question about what exactly the decision-making process on that day because the mayor or DC and congressional leaders had been calling on Miller to send troops to the capital for nearly 90 minutes before that 3 pm mobilization order. Up until now, we had assumed that the 3 pm order given by Miller was a deployment order, raising question about why the deployment didn’t happen for another 90 minutes. But now that we are learning that the 3 pm order was just a mobilization order, we have to ask just what exactly was the Pentagon doing from 1:30–3:00? Beyond that, the official deployment order was actually given by Miller until 5:08 pm, which Miller attributed to the ‘fog of war’.
Miller also claimed at one point that Walker had the authority to issue the deployment order on his own at any given point. And yet Walker has testified that he had to wait for approval from Miller and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy before he deployed the troops. So Miller appeared to just be making stuff up at that point.
Oh, and Miller also testified that, while he didn’t speak to Trump at all on Jan 6, he didn’t need to because he already had orders and the authority he needed. But he did speak to Trump on Jan 3, when Miller to Trump of the mayor’s request for additional Guard support. Miller says Trump told him, “Fill it and do whatever was necessary to protect the demonstrators that were executing their constitutionally protected rights.” So the orders Trump gave Miller on Jan 3 was to do whatever is necessary to protect the rights of the pro-Trump insurrectionist ‘demonstrators’. How exactly those Jan 3 comments from Trump translated into the actions, or lack of actions, three days later is one of the many unanswered remaining questions. And the the longer we go without getting straight answers to these question, the more the meta-answer is emerging that a massive cover-up is underway. A cover up of a very real insurrection plot at the highest levels of government:
“Debates over when the National Guard should have been deployed have been obfuscated by people misinterpreting the 3:00 p.m. order to mobilize the guard with an order to physically deploy soldiers to the Capitol.”
It’s critical distinction: did the acting Secretary of Defense give an order to mobilize or deploy the Guard. A distinction that obscures how awful the timeline for that day really is and hadn’t really been appreciated up until now. In part because even Miller himself was confusing his mobilization and deployment orders during the testimony. He starts off claiming it was a deployment order:
But when asked about why it took so long for the guard to be deployed, Miller then attempts to shift the blame on Walker by pointing out that the 3pm order was a mobilization order, suggesting it up to Walker at that point to orchestrate everything:
Miller even claims that Walker had the authority on his own to issue the deployment order. A claim Walker has directly countered:
Then there’s the interesting detail of a further 36 minute delay between the unofficial deployment order at 4:32 pm and the official one at 5:08 pm. Why the delay? According to Miller, it was “fog and friction, so much going on”:
Finally, there’s the question of what communications Miller may have had with Trump that day. Miller claims he didn’t speak to Trump at all. He also denies that his deployment order was in response to his call with Mike Pence. So at the same time Miller is shirking responsibility for the orders given that day, he’s also asserting that no one issued orders to him that day:
And now, here’s a piece that gives us a bit more in Miller’s Jan 3 interactions with Trump. According to Miller, Trump asked him to do ‘whatever is necessary’ to protect the first amendment rights of the protestors. And as Miller described it, there was no need for him to communicate with Trump on Jan 6 because he spoke with Trump ahead of the insurrection and had the necessary authority and “knew what had to happen.” So Miller seemed to be hinting that he was operating from a set of general orders he got from Trump a few days earlier. Orders to go extra-easy on the insurrectionists:
“Former President Donald Trump was criticized for failing to squelch the Capitol riot, but ahead of the January 6 rally, he requested that the Secretary of Defense pull out all the stops to protect people’s First Amendment rights.”
Do whatever you can to protect the pro-Trump rioters. That’s the ‘request’ Trump made of Miller. A request that is effectively an order when the president makes it. So when Miller says he “knew what had to happen,” we have to ask the question of whether or not the insurrection is what “had to happen”:
And then there’s Miller’s assertion that, no, the deployment was actually remarkably fast:
That’s some high quality trolling right there. Trolling and misdirecting. At least that’s the more direct way to interpret Miller’s shifting narrative. Trolling, misdirecting, and buying time. Kind of like how he was buying time for Trump’s insurrectionists to succeed on Jan 6. Will it work? Will the US eventually just kind of forget about all this and allow a plot to overthrow the government to fall down the national memory-hole without ever truly being exposed and understood? That remains to be seen, but let’s just say Miller’s ‘troll, misdirect, and buy time’ approach to a massive coup plot cover-up in the hopes that the nation just kind of forget isn’t the worst strategy for a successful cover-up. These kinds of strategies actually work.
There was a new DHS report on domestic extremism released on Friday with a particularly ominous warning: white supremacists are apparently planning on infiltrating BLM and police brutality protests in the hopes of finding opportunities to commit violent acts “in furtherance of ideological objectives.” In other words, following the open insurrection of January 6, the far right is returning to its original the ‘boogaloo’ playbook of using false flag violence to instigate a civil war. But it also sounds like they’re interested in attacking the protestors too. So it’s sounding like the strategy going forward is stoking as much violence as possible and making it appear like it’s coming from all sides:
“The bulletin, issued through the National Terrorism Advisory System, says that domestic violent extremists and white supremacists have been looking for “civil disorder” as an opportunity to commit violent acts “in furtherance of ideological objectives.””
Act of violence “in furtherance of ideological objectives.” It’s a disturbing enough phrase on its own, but far more disturbing when considering that those ideological objectives just happen to include the fomenting of a civil war. Orchestrated violent provocations, both from within the protests and against them, likely organized over encrypted apps:
It’s also worth keeping in mind that any plans for strategic false flag violence will also presumably be predicted on the assumption that the broader right-wing media complex will treat these events much like how they’ve covered the January 6 Capitol insurrection: by sticking with the Big Lie narrative about a stolen election and the illegitimatacy of the Biden administration. And then there’s the fellow travelers, like the 124 retired US generals and admirals who just published a letter calling the Biden administration as moving the US towards a Marxist tyrannical government and posing the greatest threat ever to the nation since its founding. The. letter included an implicit denial of the reality of the events of January 6, decrying how troops ave being used “as political pawns, with thousands of troops deployed around the US Capitol Building, patrolling fences guarding against a non-existent threat”. So these generals are providing rhetorical cover and military prestige for exactly the kind of civil conflict the white supremacists are hoping to create:
“The letter, signed by 124 retired members of the armed forces calling themselves ‘Flag Officers 4 America’, said that America is “in deep peril,” having “taken a hard-Left turn toward Socialism and a Marxist form of tyrannical government”.”
The US is careening towards a tyrannical government under Joe Biden as a result of a stolen election. And no, there is no threat to the Capitol from far right extremists and never was. That’s the message from 124 retired generals and admirals. Every single one of the people who signed that document effectively declared the US to be a occupied nation, thereby framing far right domestic terrorism as waging a fight for liberty. The white supremasists targeting BLM and antifa are probably freedom fighterss in the minds of authors of this letter:
“The conflict is between supporters of Socialism and Marxism vs supporters of Constitutional freedom and liberty.” Which is exactly how the ‘boogaloo’ boys and white nationalists tends to fancy themselves. As “supporters of Constitutional freedom and liberty”.
Also recall the recent revelations about the shocking extent of the open boogaloo support that was found in the military following the investigation of Steven Carrillo. You have to wonder how many of these 124 generals and admirals are closet ‘boogaloo’ generals and admirals.
And that’s all part of why the very real concerns about the emboldening of far right domestic terrorism as a result of the GOP’s embrace of the January 6 Big Lie narrative shouldn’t be limited to the Big Lie narrative around the events of that day. The new far right meta-narrative — where everyone on the left is part of a Marxist totalitarian conspiracy to destroy the country — has already internalized the Jan 6 Big Lie and moved on to ‘Joe Biden is a Marxist out to destroy freedom after stealing the 2020 election’ narrative that’s going to be the GOP’s message for at least the next four years. Which is a pretty emboldening message.
It’s the cover-up, not the crime. That old adage of US politics might be put to the test in a very big now in the upcoming 2022 mid-term elections now that the congressional Republicans have overwhelmingly come out against a commission to study the January 6 Insurrection, explicitly citing concerns over the impact such a commission could have on the 2022 elections. Yes, after House Republicans overwhelmingly voted against a commission, Republicans in the Senate began publicly grousing about how a commission was part of a Democratic partisan plot to paint Republicans in a bad light in 2022.
That was the basis for their opposition to a commission. The prospect that it could make Republicans look bad. And sure, such concerns about how an investigation might make a party look would obviously be a factor in the decision to support such an investigation. But you don’t normally come out and say it so openly like that. And yet we have multiple Republicans with a similar message, suggesting this was a coordinated deliberate strategy. A strategy of choosing to focus public attention on the cover up. The GOP has clearly concluded that fighting over whether or not to hold a commission on the Capitol Insurrection is politically advantageous vs a commission. Looking openly guilty is preferable compared to the strategy of pretending to be innocent and interested in justice by agreeing to a commission and then allowing all the insurrectionist evidence to spill out.
So we can already see the contours of at least one of the major dynamics of the 2022 election: it was already guaranteed that 2022 was going to be, in part, a referendum on whether or not the Republican Party should pay a political price for the January 6 Capitol insurrection. But by openly opposing the commission due to concerns over Democrats politically weaponizing the commission, the GOP is actively choosing to ensure the 2022 mid-terms aren’t just about Donald Trump’s insurrection but also the party-wide GOP cover up of the insurrection. The party has found a new way to fall on its sword to shield Trump. This time by creating a giant open cover-up. And that’s all what makes this a fascinating test of whether or the cover-up really is worse than the crime, because the GOP is clearly betting otherwise:
“Up until this point, the 2022 factor has been more tacit in Republicans’ opposition than explicit. A commission of the sort proposed in the House bill encompassing the attack and “influencing factors” — e.g. the conspiracy theories peddled by former President Donald Trump and his GOP allies — would keep focus squarely on the sins of the Republican party. In recent days, Republicans have channeled this concern more through complaints about the commission’s scope, seeking to zoom out so far that Trump’s and their culpability seem insignificant. ”
Yeah, up until this point, there hadn’t really been a need for GOPers to come out and explain their 2022 political calculus in their insurrection commission decision-making. It was just assumed by reasonable people to be a factor. But now, when forced to finally make a vote on the matter, we’re hearing senator after senator openly express concern about the political impact of a commission:
Overall, it’s a fascinating political tactic because, on the one hand, it’s a weirdly honest admission of the GOP’s political calculus. But on the other hand, these qualms are being expressed in a manner that seems to be designed to frame all of the concern about the insurrection in general as part of a partisan Democratic plot. In other words, while the explicit message has become, “we are concerned about Democrats politicizing this issue for 2022”, the implied message to the audience is closer to, “there was never really any problem with what happened on January 6th because the Democrats actually stole the election from Trump, and we’re not going to allow them to extend their partisan charade any further.” We’ve entered a political period where open talk of cover-ups act as code language for the Republican Party’s much more sinister under-the-radar political messaging that implicitly justifies the insurrection by describing the Biden administration as an illegitimate Marxist rogue government that stole the office from Trump.
So is the cover-up worse than the crime? Or is an open cover-up a winning political message? We’ll find out in 2022.
With the Republican Party now nearly united at the national level against the idea of a congressional commission to study the January 6 Capitol Insurrection, here’s a recent piece in Vice about the transformation of the Republican Party at the state level. A nearly complete transformation that has left nearly every single state chair in the hands of someone who either openly endorses the ‘stolen election’ Big Lie or at least isn’t going to say anything to rebut the claims.
But as the following article also makes clear, it’s not just Donald Trump’s capture of the Republican Party taking place right now. It really is a much broader capture of the party by the most extremist elements both inside and outside the GOP establishment, with the national Republican establishment using the stolen election Big Lie as an opportunity to push voting restriction laws as aggressively as possible at the same time extremists continue to make gains at the state level. It’s the most far right politicians, after all, who are most shamelessly willing to embrace the popular Big Lies of the day, making this their moment to really shine politically. As a result, in state after state, we’re seeing figures winning the state party chair position with a history of calling for everything from secession to fire squads:
“A VICE News review of public positions of all 50 GOP state chairs shows a significant number are openly pushing conspiracy theories, spouting unhinged rhetoric, and actively undermining voters’ trust in democracy. That includes the chairs of nearly every swing state in the U.S. And the trend is accelerating: Many of the most extreme chairs just won their chairmanships or have been reelected since Trump left office four months ago, a number of them with his explicit endorsement.”
The state GOP chairs of nearly every swing state in the US are dutifully parroting Trump’s election theft Big Lie. Because that’s now a job requirement for almost every GOP state-level and national position, not just the swing states. But it’s the swing state party chairs who are going to be the most consequential in upcoming elections and in nearly every case, these state party chairs or either echoing the Big Lie or at least refusing to refute them...all the while pushing the kind of “election integrity” voting restrictions. It points to what is arguably the most despicable aspect of the party-wide embrace of the ‘stolen election’ Big Lie: it’s cynically being embraced in order to pass sweeping voting restrictions in virtually every GOP-controlled state. It’s the embrace of a Big Lie attack on democracy in order to justify and facilitate a further legislative attack on democracy:
And right one cue, we’re already seeing a return of the GOP calls for secession. It’s one of the features of the modern day GOP: whenever there’s a Democrat in the White House, talk of secession is how aspiring Republican politicians can distinguish themselves. Only now, it’s calls for secession in response to the notion that Trump had the election stolen away. And one of those state party chairs calling for secession, Wyoming Republican Party Chairman Frank Eathorne, sits on the GOP’s sham ‘election integrity commission’. That’s how mainstream the secession idea is within in the GOP caucus these days:
And then there’s Oregon, where the state GOP appears to be openly supporting not just the Capitol insurrection but insurrections against its own capitol:
Finally, we have Oklahoma, where the new state party chair called for executing Hillary Clinton by firing squad shortly before the 2016 election and won the state chair with the backing of arch QAnon-advocates Michael Flynn, Mike Lindell, and Lin Wood:
And that’s all what it’s important to remember that it isn’t just that Donald Trump has personally capture the hearts and minds of the Republican electorate. Trump’s psychological capture of the conservative mind hasn’t just allowed Trump and the Trump family to take over the party. It’s a far right capture of the party. Or rather, a triumphant open consolidation of the ongoing far right capture of the party that’s been accelerating for year. And it’s that far right consolidation of power that could end up being far more consequential in the long run. Trump won’t be around forever.
Of course, the force of political gravity could eventually kick in should the Republican Party open extremism end up costing the party races at the state level. We have no idea when, or if, that state-level electoral rebuttal might take place. The GOP outperformed expectations at the state level in 2020, after all. But if the GOP’s extremism does ever get extreme enough to cause the party to start losing power at the state level in significant way, we might end up seeing some degree of moderation sink in. Assuming, of course, those state-level losses weren’t the result of a Satanic deep state conspiracy to rig the vote, which is clearly an assumption too far for the contemporary GOP. It will presumably just be more calls for secession and executions at that point instead.
Is it news when the inevitable happens? It’s one of the meta questions raised whenever the GOP behaves acts like the treasonous entity it is. So we have to ask, is it really news that the GOP in the Senate is filibustering the creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol insurrection? It would certainly be news if the GOP supported such a commission. Astonishing news. But is it news that the thing that was almost surely going to happen eventually happened? The sad answer is, yes, it’s news. Just not new news. The same old story of Republican treason.
But what is new, and profoundly troubling, are the reasons for this ongoing treason. Because as the following piece points out, when we look at recent polls asking the US voters about whether or not they think political violence might be required, it becomes clear that the GOP isn’t simply worried about an investigation into the insurrection making the GOP look bad. They’re simultaneously worried about the fact that 28% of Republican voters just told pollsters that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders,” and that “things have gotten so off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” In other words, 28 percent of Republican voters basically told pollsters they support the insurrection. So while the GOP is obviously concerned about an investigation making casting the party in a bad light, there’s the parallel concern of being forced to characterize the insurrection in a bad light:
“The more dangerous truth is that a not-insignificant portion of the GOP’s Trumpian base actually appears to believe that the violent mob was justified in its effort to disrupt Congress as it conducted its pro forma tally of the electoral votes that made Joe Biden the 46th president.”
You can condemn, ignore, and celebrate the insurrection simultaneously. That’s the challenge facing the GOP and refusing to support the commission for overtly specious reasons is about as close as you can get to pulling off that trifecta. Or at least the GOP had better hope they managed to thread this needle, because otherwise they just ended up pissing off the dangerously violent 28 percent of the party that not only supports the insurrection but seems to be pining for a lot more insurrections. More insurrections with lots of executions:
How will the GOP walking this line between deploring/ignoring/supporting the insurrection as the Democrat-only congressional investigations into the insurrection plays out? We’ll find out, but it looks like the legally imperiled Matt Gaetz just gave us a preview during a speech at the “America First” conference this week:
““The internet’s hall monitors out in Silicon Valley, they think they can suppress us, discourage us,” Gaetz told attendees at a rally in Dalton, Georgia. “Well, you know what? Silicon Valley can’t cancel this movement, or this rally, or this congressman. We have the Second Amendment in this country and I think we have an obligation to use it.” He went on to suggest that the Second Amendment intended for people to have the ability to form an “armed rebellion against the government” when necessary.”
The 2nd Amendment isn’t just a constitutionally protected right. It’s a constitutionally protected right intended to protect the ability for the populace to form an armed rebellion against the government when necessary. And if you watch the video, that was the big applause line. The crowd loves the idea of an armed rebellion and politicians like Matt Gaetz are more than happy to fan those flames. They’re popular flames in a party that just wants to burn it all down right now. So while we’re forced to wait and see how the GOP’s strategy of deploring/ignoring/supporting the insurrection will evolve as this story plays out, we can be pretty sure it’s going to increasingly look like what Matt Gaetz just did. It will be news when that inevitably happens, but not really.
We got a few more details during the House Oversight Committee hearings on Tuesday on what exactly was ordered, or not ordered, by government authorities during the January 6 Capitol Insurrection. And who issued, or didn’t issue, those orders. There weren’t any major new revelations. Just further confirmation of what we already know. Although we did get a better sense of how many times Pentagon officials ordered the National Guard troops to “standby” on that day: 5 times. We also learned that the Capitol police and DC officials made more than a dozen requests of the Pentagon for the National Guard to come help during this period. Over 12 requests for help and 5 standby orders. The numbers tell a story. The story about a coup that almost happened.
Another part of what made the House hearings particularly interesting is who testified. Because it was two of the generals who oversaw the National Guard forces that day who were called to testify, and one of those two generals happens to be Charles Flynn, brother of arch-insurrectionist Michael Flynn. Recall how the Pentagon initially falsely denied that Flynn was present at all during these meetings. Also recall how we learned that concerns over the military being seen as supporting a coup were held by Charles Flynn and others at the Pentagon who oversaw the preparations and execution of the Jan 6 Capitol Hill security. Those concerns were allegedly the reason for both the lack of preparation in advance of the insurrection and the continued holding back of the National Guard after the insurrection started and congressional calls for help grew. So now we’re learning that five “standby” orders were issued by this group at the Pentagon before the deploy order was finally, belated allowed to happen after the local police had already largely gotten the situation under control. And Charles Flynn was one of the figures issuing those standby orders:
“The House Oversight Committee is holding a hearing on Tuesday with FBI Director Chris Wray and two generals who responded to increasingly frantic requests from the Capitol and law enforcement to deploy the guard: Gen. Charles A. Flynn and Lt. Gen. Walter E. Piatt. The hearing will begin at 2 p.m.”
Yes, it wasn’t just the case that Charles Flynn was present in these meetings. We’re learning that it was Flynn, Piatt, and Miller who were the ones repeatedly issuing the “standby” orders to the Guard. Ostensibly due to concerns over fears of the military being seen participating in a coup. Concerns that would have made sense if the guard was being order to halt the election certification so the vote could be overturned. But they still haven’t explained how stopping an active insurrection at the Capitol would be seen as a coup:
And we can’t forget that by the time the national guard was allowed to show up, the situation had already been mostly suppressed by the police:
In other words, the guard was only allowed to show up after the insurrection failed. And based on Tuesday’s testimony, it was Chris Miller, Lt Gen. Walter E. Piatt, and Charles Flynn who were determining whether or not the guard needed to continue standing by while Trump’s army ransacked the Capitol. And as we just saw, they were actively deciding to issue standby orders. This wasn’t a situation where an order wasn’t given or somehow wasn’t received. Orders were repeatedly given. Orders to standby...until they stood by long enough for the eventual orders to deploy to no longer matter.
In related news, the Pentagon has decided not to prosecute Michael Flynn over his recent calls for a Myanmar-style military coup in the US. Why the lenient treatment for one of the leading figures behind the insurrection? It sounds like fears of right-wing claims that the Biden administration is using the military to impose a left-wing agenda were the impetus for this decision. Which sure sounds an awful lot like fears of using the national guard to stop an insurrection.
Was the January 6 Capitol Insurrection all just an elaborate federal operation designed by the FBI to entrap Trump supporters? That’s the latest right-wing meme getting pushed by Tucker Carlson this week. It’s a narrative based on an observation and an extreme extrapolation. The observation is that the federal charging documents for the insurrectionists include references to “unindicted co-conspirators”. This observation led to the extrapolation that these unindicted co-conspirators are actually undercover FBI agents and, therefore, the entire Capitol Insurrection was actually an FBI-orchestrated event designed to malign good Trump-loving patriots as domestic terrorists. The meme was first put forward in Revolver.news, a right-wing garbage news outlet.
One of the figures from Revolver, Darren Beattie, joined Tucker Carlson on his show to talk about this story. Recall how Beattie was fired from his position as a White House speechwriter in 2018 after it was revealed that Beattie spoke at the 2016 HL Mencken Club, a small annual conference started in 2008 regularly attended by prominent white nationalists like Richard Spencer. Beattie declared it a “great honor” during the event. But that wasn’t the end of Beattie’s time with the Trump administration. In November of 2020, then-President Trump appointed Beattie to a commission that helps preserve sites related to the Holocaust. Yes, following his loss, Trump appointed a guy he was forced to fire over white nationalist ties to a Holocaust remembrance commission.
Oh, and Beattie is also the guy behind the report in Revolver that was used to suggest Capitol officer Brian Sicknick — who died following the insurrection — had actually died of natural causes and there was a plot to pin his death on the insurrection in order to puff of the impeachment case against Trump. So Beattie someone with exactly the kind of bad faith journalistic track record that would make him the perfect fit for a segment on Tucker Carlson whitewashing the Capitol Insurrection:
“A Revolver representative, Darren Beattie, appeared on Carlson’s broadcast to agree that the “remarkable” report “certainly suggests” the “possibility” that the FBI “organized the riots.” Beattie claimed that the piece is “the most important and the darkest investigative piece” many people have seen “in years.” Beattie said people deserved to know the truth about what occurred on Jan. 6th for the sake of Ashli Babbitt and others. Babbitt was shot and killed by a law enforcement officer as she attempted to enter the Speaker’s Lobby during the siege.”
Yes, the “remarkable” report “certainly suggests” the “possibility” that the FBI “organized the riots.” At least that’s how Tucker Carlson and Darren Beattie wanted the audience to conclude. A conclusion based on the assumption that the unindicted co-conspirators in the charging documents were not just FBI operatives but also the people behind the whole insurrection plot. As Carlson sees it, “In potentially every single case, they were FBI operatives”. And a new meme is born: It’s now going to be taken as gospel in right-wing media that the Capitol Insurrection was the work of undercover FBI operatives. Tucker Carlson and Darren Beattie merely wondering if its possible that all of these unindicted co-conspirators were FBI agents is evidence enough in the minds of this audience that, yes, they were all likely FBI agents and the whole insurrection was an FBI plot:
And notice the subtle word play at work here: Beattie asserts that “key that unlocks the truth to 1/6” is the question of whether the key militia groups were infiltrated and led by the FBI and other government agencies. That leadership role is crucial here. Because if you had FBI agents or informants that were merely members of thee groups plotting the insurrection, but weren’t actively leading the plotting themselves, that is a very different scenario than one where the FBI agents themselves are acting as the ring-leaders of an operation and coaxing unsuspecting people into an insurrectionary mindset. And yet Beattie and Carlson are basically smudging that distinction between those two very different situations by pointing to the possibility that the unindicted co-conspirators were FBI agents and then heavily implying that they were also leading the insurrection planning. It’s just one more bad faith performance by one of the most cynical and dangerous shows on television. And yes, Carlson and Beattie will acknowledge that they don’t yet have the information to prove their case, but the overarching message conveyed to the audience over the course of the segment is that yes, it was probably an FBI set up designed to entrap Trump supporters:
And note how we already know the identity of at least one of the unindicted co-conspirators: “Person 1” is Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes. Recall how we’ve already seen how Rhodes was actively issuing orders to his Oath Keepers during the insurrection. Orders to literally breach the doors of the Capitol in one case. Are we to assume that Rhodes was actually working as an FBI agent this entire time? Although, in fairness, a lot of the leaders of these groups probably do have histories of working with the FBI. Recall how Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio was revealed to a long-time FBI informant. But there’s still a big difference between having a history of acting as an FBI informant and acting as an actual FBI undercover agent. Especially when you’re talking about groups like the Oath Keepers that are literally set up to recruit former members of law enforcement with deep anti-government sentiments. It’s the perfect recipe for finding people with a history of acting as informants who are simultaneously genuinely working to overthrow the government:
So that’s where the memetic lines are currently being drawn on this story. As the Revolver story frames it, “If it turns out that an extraordinary percentage of the members of these groups involved in planning and executing the Capitol Siege were federal informants or undercover operatives, the implications would be nothing short of staggering.” Which is true. The implications would be staggering. At the same time, if there weren’t any FBI informants or undercover operatives in these groups at all that would also be pretty staggering. Wouldn’t that have been a gross dereliction of duty? So we’re facing the question of what is the appropriate number of FBI informants that should have been in these groups without it seeming like an FBI-run entrapment operation. Along with questions of what the role actually was of any informants. Nuanced questions about how the law and justice system works. And that’s a set of questions the American public is obviously deeply ill-equipped to ask, as evidenced by the enduring popularity of someone like Tucker Carlson. It’s part of why this emerging meme is such an important story: it’s exactly the kind of complicated mess the right-wing media has specialized in exploiting for maximum propaganda success:
We’ll see what more we learn about these unindicted co-conspirators. But as Beattie’s appearance on Carlson’s show makes clear, we can expect the lack of certainty about what role those unindicted co-conspirator played in the insurrection to be treated as a green light by figures like Carlson and Beattie to push whatever narrative they can think of that absolves Trump and the insurrectionists.
With that in mind, it’s worth noting another story that popped up this week regarding the culpability for instigating the insurrection: there are growing calls for the arrest of Alex Jones for the role he played in leading the insurrection. This is after social media posts from Jan 6, where Jones brags about paying $500,000 for the Jan 6 pro-Trump rally that immediately preceded the insurrection. In that same post, Jones claims the White House instructed him to lead the march to the Capitol. So we have Alex Jones on video claiming the Trump White House literally gave him marching orders:
“In a video posted from Washington D.C. on January 6, Jones said his media company paid to organize the pro-Trump rally that took place prior to the insurrection. He also claimed that the White House instructed him to lead the march to the Capitol.”
Those were the claims. And yet Alex Jones has never been arrested in relation to those claims. Was he working with the FBI?
And as Jones describes in the following Jan 8 article, those marching orders were given to Jones by the White House three days before the event, so it wasn’t an impromptu decision. Jones also hints at a secret element behind the insurrection, asserting that 80% of the $500,000 came from an unnamed donor:
“In the Thursday video filmed in Washington, Jones said he was asked by the White House to lead the march to the Capitol three days before the event.”
A planned march, led by Alex Jones. That was the request made by the White House three days before the event. That’s what Jones claimed. He even asserted that the secret service pulled him out of the front row 30 minutes before event ended so he could lead the march. The secret service was apparently in on the plan! Along with an unnamed donor who cover $400,000 of the $500,000 Jones paid for the rally:
It’s worth recalling the claims by Jessica Watkins — the Oath Keeper member who lead the military-style “stack” formation group up to the Capitol — who said she was operating as VIP security at the Trump rally before the riot and had even been coordinating with the Secret Service in this capacity. So Jones wouldn’t be the only person to make these claims about the Secret Service working in coordination with the insurrectionist.
Finally, note Jones’s rather hilarious attempts to blame antifa on the insurrection: he claims he didn’t lead the march before a crowd was already there ready to go...a crowd of undercover antifa obviously, who were just there to make the Trump supporters look bad. We were going to lead the march to the capitol but antifa got there first to make us look bad. That’s literally his defense:
Were those really antifa dressed up as patriots? Maybe they were actually undercover FBI agents out to thwart Alex Jones and his totally non-violent patriots who merely wanted to peacefully march to the Capitol to make more speeches? These are the kinds of questions that are going to have to be asked with increasing intensity by figures like Tucker Carlson and Darren Beattie going forward. Otherwise audiences might start asking the basic question of whether or not they should believe their lying eyes and ears.
Here’s a tale of two Republican death threats. Or, rather, a two tales of Republican death threats. There are a lot more than just two death threats involved:
First, Reuters came out with a special report on the growing pandemic of death threats being hurled against the officials and workers who actually conduct US elections. It turns out the volume and intensity of the death threats is far more pervasive and severe than previously acknowledged. Especially in the contested states like Georgia. But part of what makes this story so interesting is that the pattern of Donald Trump publicly targeting election officials who then get inundated with death threats is so clear at that point that it’s possible this wave of death threats and intimidation could be used to prosecute a racketeering case against Trump. And in Georgia, where the death threats have been particularly egregious and severe following Trump’s repeated demonization of state election officials, there are indications that prosecutors are looking into exactly that kind of charge. At least if they can prove Trump’s public comments were part of a coordinated intimidation campaign.
Of course, as the article also notes, this intimidation campaign is inevitably going to work, forcing states to lose some of their more experienced election workers in upcoming elections. So while it’s possible Trump will be facing some sort of criminal charges related to this intimidation campaign, its a virtual certainty that this intimidation campaign is doing very real damage to the ability of states to carry out honest elections. As the following article makes clear, these death threats aren’t targeting the election workers. They are explicitly targeting the elections workers families. That’s the nature of the people behind this campaign. They’re doing the kind of stuff even the mafia might find unseemly:
“Trump’s relentless false claims that the vote was “rigged” against him sparked a campaign to terrorize election officials nationwide – from senior officials such as Raffensperger to the lowest-level local election workers. The intimidation has been particularly severe in Georgia, where Raffensperger and other Republican election officials refuted Trump’s stolen-election claims. The ongoing harassment could have far-reaching implications for future elections by making the already difficult task of recruiting staff and poll workers much harder, election officials say.”
Who will carry out future elections in the states currently inundated with death threats against election workers? Presumably the people carrying out the death threats and their friends. That’s who will carry out future elections in states like Georgia. At least that’s presumably the plan.
And it’s not just high-level elected officials like Brad Raffensperger who are on the receiving end of these threats. Low and mid-level workers are getting them too. Low and mid-level workers who were almost de facto volunteers given how little they are paid for the job:
And it’s not a coincidence that the waves of death threats immediately follow public statements by Donald Trump. Intentionally or not, he’s been the ring-leader of this terror circus:
Then there’s the actions by Trump’s supporters, like the posting of personal phone and home address information:
And these threats aren’t entirely anonymous. Oath Keepers have already been caught directly outside Raffensperger’s home. And when we’re talking about the actions of the Oath Keepers we are implicitly talking about the actions of Trump proxy-militia, as the Oath Keepers made clear with the profound role they played in the January Capitol Insurrection. It’s further evidence suggesting this is an intimidation campaign run in coordination with the Trump team:
And that’s all why the investigation into this intimidation campaign may not be limited to the individuals carrying out the individual threats. This could become a Trump Racketeering case:
Could we see Trump prosecuted for election-related racketeering? Let’s hope so, because otherwise it’s basically an endorsement of some sort of war lord-style ‘democracy’. But, of course, if there was a real racketeering investigation of Trump, it raises the question about what kinds of death threat campaign those prosecutors will face. It’s never easy prosecuting the mob.
But also keep in mind that, while this intimidation campaign has plenty of direct ties to the Trump team, we shouldn’t delude ourselves into assuming that much of this couldn’t be a genuine kind of ‘grass roots’ fascism bubbling up from the Trumpian fever swamps of contemporary America. A whole lot of people really do believe that Donald Trump was some sort of saviour sent by God to vanquish the evil Satanic progressives. People who fervently believe that really are probably willing to kill for Trump out of a sense of fighting for the greater good. It’s part of what made Trump’s public comments demonizing these election officials such dangerous rhetoric.
And that brings us to the next story of Republican death threats and intimidation. This time is an intra-party affair, with the threats taking place within the GOP primary of one of Florida’s most competitive congressional seats. William Braddock, a little-known competitors to GOP candidate Anna Paulina Luna, was recording telling another local Republican to stay away from Luna because Braddock was going to have his ‘Russian Ukrainian’ mafia friends assassinate Luna. Why did Luna need to be assassinated? Well, according to Braddock’s explanation during the phone call, Luna didn’t stand a chance of winning in the highly competitive district. That was his stated reasoning. He wasn’t going to kill her off for the good of the Republican because control of the House is so closely contested. It’s another snapshot into the psyche of the contemporary GOP. A psyche apparently looking for any excuse to murder their political opponents:
“I really don’t want to have to end anybody’s life for the good of the people of the United States of America,” Braddock said at one point in the conversation last week, according to the recording exclusively obtained by POLITICO. “That will break my heart. But if it needs to be done, it needs to be done. Luna is a f—ing speed bump in the road. She’s a dead squirrel you run over every day when you leave the neighborhood.””
He doesn’t want to kill Luna. But William Braddock is willing to do it. Why? Because he’s convinced she can’t win that congressional seat. And everyone congressional seat counts when the House is this divided. That’s his apparent reasoning:
And how was Braddock planning to have Luna killed? A Russian and Ukrainian hit squad. Of course. They’ll even send Braddock pictures. Paid for by Freemasons or the someone from Malta (presumably a reference to the Knights of Malta). He even seems to suggest it’s “beyond my control this point”, which raises the question of whether or not it’s actually Braddock calling for this hit or if he’s doing this on behalf of someone else:
Keep in mind that it’s very unclear that Braddock would win the primary if Luna suddenly died from an extreme case of ‘lead poisoning’. He’s a little-known candidate, which further raises questions of whether or not Braddock was acting on behalf of someone else. Which brings us to his reference to a claimed alliance with two other candidates in the primary Amanda Makki and Matt Tito:
Are we looking at a group assassination effort here? Is this just the unhinged rantings of a lone disturbed individual? Hopefully investigators will be able to figure that out, sooner rather than later. But as the first article made clear, it’s not as if the Republican Party as a whole hasn’t experienced a significant collective psychological shift during the Trump years. Political violence is a much more acceptable topic to bring up these days thanks to the Trump experience. It’s one of the few areas where Trump showed consistent leadership.
And that’s the our two tales of Republican death threats. Death threats for democracy, allegedly. I the first case, we have death threats targeting families designed to intimidate. And in the second case we had what amounted to a ‘collateral damage death threat’ issued, with Braddock telling Olszewski to stop supporting Luna because Olszewski could end up getting hit too. So it’s more like a death threat/assassination plan rolled up in one story. And in both cases, the ostensible justification for these threats was the greater good. That’s the mind set of the contemporary GOP: murdering your political opponents to save democracy. For the greater good, of course.
One of the sadder aspects of watching the sociopolitical cannibalization of the US by far right forces is how the news is increasingly forced to cover news about how right-wing news organizations aren’t covering the news but instead making it up. The story about how the growing domination of far right fantasy-versions of reality is one of the biggest stories of our time. And growing. So along those lines, here’s the latest chapter in that story:
The topic of mass political executions was in the news this week after a One America News Network host, Pearson Sharp, mused on air about what the legal consequences should be if it is indeed determined that the election was stolen from Donald Trump in an elaborate nationwide vote-stealing operation that involved involved governments (the ‘ItalyGate’ scenario). Mass executions, of course. Execution is the punishment for treason laid out in the Constitution and thousands, potentially tens of thousands, of people were involved in the mass fraud. So mass executions are what’s called for. Specifically, mass executions of Democrats. At least that’s how Sharp saw it and he just felt the need to share those sentiments on air. Because that’s the state of right-wing journalism in America:
““What are the consequences for traitors who meddled with our sacred democratic process and tried to steal power by taking away the voices of the American people? What happens to them?” Sharp wondered aloud in a monologue. “Well, in the past, America had a very good solution to dealing with such traitors: Execution.””
Traitors hang. It’s a simple, compelling message. Now all you need to do is somehow define all of your political opponents as traitors and you have a recipe for mass executions. How many people will need to die? That depends on how many people are discovered to have been involved in the mass voter fraud. Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Just asking questions:
It’s the kind of story that, on one hand, is the logical extension of the GOP’s current propaganda madness making it difficult to take seriously. But it’s also hard to ignore the reality that once the GOP is going to be in the mood for mass executions by the time it inevitably regains full control of the federal government. Anyone deemed to be a traitor, by whatever the definitions they come up with at that point, will be subject to execution.
So with that looming threat of mass executions for the GOP’s perceived traitors in mind, here’s an update on the network of figures who are not only continue to promote and expand upon the ‘stolen election’ narrative but are managing to turn it into a self-financing industry. Figures like Mike Lindell and Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne who are not only working closely with people like Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell, but are also coordinating directly with Trump himself. Perpetually promising audiences that Trump really won and the evidence for all of this evidence is really just about to come out. Any day now. Just keep sending them donations in the mean time:
““The Deep Rig,” a film financed by former Overstock.com chief executive Patrick Byrne for $750,000, is set to be released online this weekend — the latest production by a loosely affiliated network of figures who have harnessed right-wing media outlets, podcasts and the social media platform Telegram to promote the falsehood that the 2020 election was rigged.”
Yes, “The Deep Rig” is only the latest production from a loosely affiliated network of figures and groups that has rallied around the idea of a stolen election. Not just rallied around the idea, but built an entire industry growing industry around it: wealthy, potentially anonymous, donors back the production of these documentaries purporting to prove a stolen election. And those documentaries in turn are used to solicit more small dollar donations from the audiences convinced their democracy is being stolen away. The class right-wing grift-machine had no problem at all settling into the new stolen election big lie. The difference between this grift and most of the previous one is that it’s kind of an ‘end game’ grift. A grift intended to not just raise money from the victims but also whip them into an insurrectionary fervor:
But while this network might seem like it’s loosely affiliated, the fact that the wealth donors for these movements are able to keep their involvement entirely hidden from the public is a reminder that this network might not be nearly as loosely affiliated as it appears. Dark money has a way of tightening up loose affiliations:
That’s why there’s every reason to assume this loose network was actually working tightly with the Trump White House in the lead up to the January 6 insurrection and continues to work with the Trump White House-in-exile today. Mike Lindell and Trump are openly working as a team at this point:
And note how openly the leading figures in the network are about the fact that they are just stringing their audiences along. It’s again, the classic grift. The ‘big reveal’ is always just a few weeks away. ‘White hat hackers’ told Lindell personally. Just keep sending more donations to ensure it happens:
And note the level of the claims being made by Patrick Byrne: it literally told reporters that all of the digital evidence of election fraud was sitting right next to him. When asked to see this evidence, he told the reported to ‘stay tuned’ and then later told reporters that this stunning evidence will be included in an upcoming lawsuit being prepared against Dominion System. The big reveal is always just around the corner:
And note the role OAN plays in this grift. It’s essentially the same scam: Keep audiences glued by constantly telling them the big reveal is just around the corner. It’s coming! Soon! Keep watching OAN to learn more!
So when we step back and look at this network of grifters — a network of grifters that literally uses cable ‘news’ networks to perpetuate the grift — we have to ask a basic question: if you knowingly perpetuate a grift intended to sow an insurrectionary spirit in the populace based on the big lie of stolen election, and you’re doing this for both political gain and personal profit, does that constitute traitorous behavior? If so, what should be done about that? Mass executions seems like a psychopathic solution. So what are some a non-psychopathic constitutional solution to increasingly traitorous behavior of these powerful well-financed far right networks intent on capturing and/or destroying the US’s democracy? The question has been raised.
For all of the legitimate concern about the implications of the events of the January 6 Capitol Insurrection on the future of the US’s democracy, here’s a reminder that that the investigation into the events of that shouldn’t be limited to what happened that day and led up to it. There also needs to be an intense investigative focus on what the forces who planned that insurrection are planning next. That’s the takeaway lesson from new reports about a “Bible study” group involved with the insurrection that was infiltrated by the FBI. A “Bible study” group that continued developing its bomb-making capabilities while planning for some sort of civil war even after the events of Jan 6. For this group, the Capitol insurrection was just the opening chapter in a much larger civil war fantasy scenario.
It also sounds like this group had ties to the more ‘mainstream’ militia groups like the Three Percenters. But it is still its own distinct group. We don’t know the size of the group and only know the identity of its apparent leader, a Fi Duong — a Virginia man who goes by “Monkey King” and “Jim”. Which raises the obvious question of how many other groups previously unknown groups like this immediately transitioned from Jan 6 insurrection planning to post-Jan 6 guerilla warfare planning.
It’s also interesting to note that Fi Duong was dressed up in all black during the insurrection in an attempt to make himself look like a member of Antifa. Given that Fi Duong is an Asian American involved in a movement that is overwhelmingly white, you have to wonder if other non-white insurrection collaborators were also tasked with dressing up as Antifa members during the insurrection, or if this was just Duong’s own initiative.
Also, regarding the ongoing public suggestions by Trump and others that he’s going to be reinstated as president in August, it’s worth noting that Duong reportedly met with an undercover FBI agent in mid-June to discussing testing his homemade bombs. On that day, Duong told the FBI agent, “We’re not a point where people are out in the street rioting. It’s coming soon. I’d give it about another six weeks...whatever supplies you can get now, get ’em now.” About six weeks. That was his prediction in mid-June, which would be right on time for the scheduled far right street riots in August:
“The newly disclosed criminal case against Virginia man Fi Duong — who also goes by “Monkey King” and “Jim,” according to the court record — arose after Duong interacted with undercover law enforcement officers several times on January 6 and into recent months, when the FBI ultimately gained access to his group in Virginia then accompanied him to an old jail as Duong allegedly pursued bomb-building.”
The insurrection continues. That’s the message from this newly disclosed investigation. When the insurrection failed, the group went to plan a civil war. In other words, plan a much bigger, longer, and bloodier insurrection:
And note the ongoing interest in the Capitol. They were making videos and planning intelligence runs on the Capitol in early February, when the National Guard was stationed there. That indicates some serious interest in future attacks. Future attacks in the relatively near future:
And the planning continued, culminating with a mid-June trip to a former prison to test homemade bombs. And it was during this trip that Duong indicated that mass street riots are just six weeks away...so around some time in August, right on time for Trump’s planned August reinstatement. Keep in mind that Trump is supposedly going to be reinstated after massive voter fraud is discovered. So presumably under this plan, first the Arizona GOP ‘auditors’ declare they think there was mass fraud, and then all the armed militias take to the streets and storm the Capitol. And probably every other state capitol:
Finally, note these twin fun-facts: Duong was apparently dressed up as an Antifa member during the insurrection. And he was also just released from detention. So while we obviously need to be concerned about the guy continuing his insurrection plotting now that he’s been released, don’t forget the potential for some sort of false flag attempt. The point being that if there happens to be some sort of ‘event’ attributed to Antifa, but the identities of those alleged antifa members is never determined, it’s going to be important to keep in mind the far right’s existing plans for false flag acts:
And, again, this whole story is about a group that doesn’t even appear to be one of the mainstream militia groups. It operates completely under the radar. How many more groups like this are out there? Let’s not forget that recruiting for underground groups like this is A LOT easier in the age of social media and encrypted communications. Note how we still don’t know how many people are in this “Bible Study” group or how they originally met up. Was this another instance of Facebook acting as a militia match-maker service? Networking through a religious group? We have no idea. We just know that this group was able to coalesce around the idea of opposing Trump’s 2020 loss and eventually waging a civil war and all of the communications involved with this were done in secret and under the radar. With the obvious exception of the FBI infiltrator. So how many other groups are out there like this? It’s a mystery. This is the only group so far to be charged in a post-insurrection plot, but it’s impossible to believe this ‘Bible study’ group is the only group that’s been involved in post-insurrection plotting. Perhaps we’ll learn more about broader extent of this plot that during the upcoming August insurrection.
Following up on the disturbing report of a bomb-making “Bible Study” group of Trump supporters and what appeared to be plans for mass violence at some point in August, here’s a pair of stories related to the growing fears of some sort of August plot by Trump supporters driven by the latest meme that Trump will be reinstated by mid-August:
First, the DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis just got a new head. John Cohen, the top DHS counterterrorism official, is going to be taking over. This is the same office that spectacularly failed in to warn about the potential for violence by Trump supporters in the lead up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection. So Cohen obviously has no shortage of fires to put out. As the article notes, it sounds like one of the first fires is the growing concern within the department of the spread of the meme that Trump is going to be reinstated as President in August one way or another:
“Mayorkas brought him back to DHS, where he has focused on the department’s efforts to combat domestic terrorism. Earlier this year, DHS stood up a new team in the intelligence office to focus on that specific threat. And late last month, Cohen told members of Congress in a closed-door briefing that the department was concerned about the spread of the conspiracy that Trump will be reinstated as president in August.”
August is only a few weeks away. In an Insurrection II in the works? Will it be limited to the Capitol in DC, or are we looking at more like a multi-state insurrection? And if we do see multi-state insurrections, just how many of the GOP-controlled state governments will go along with it? Theses are the questions Cohen had better be dealing with. Or at least some of the questions. Because as the following article describes, the questions currently haunting DHS aren’t just about what the Trump extremist movement is planning for August. There’s still very open questions about why DHS missed all the warnings in the lead up to the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection in the first, along with the parallel question of just how many of these Trump extremists are in law enforcement and other positions of official power:
“The August theory is essentially a recycled version of other false narratives pushed by Trump and his allies leading up to and after January 6, prompting familiar rhetoric from those who remain in denial about his 2020 election loss. But the concern is significant enough that DHS issued two warnings in the past week about the potential for violence this summer.”
Two DHS warnings were issued in the last half of June about the potential for violence this summer. That’s the official warning status at DHS for domestic violence. You have to wonder what the unofficial internal warnings are sounding like. Especially with threats of violence by Trump supporters appearing to have gone so mainstream that there was open talk of civil war at a recent Trump rally if Trump doesn’t get reinstated in August:
And then there’s the question of just how many of the groups that pose threat of violence consist of members who themselves served in the military and law enforcement and have the kind of specialized training and access that makes them exceptional domestic threats if they choose to be. As one source put it, “It does kind of feel like there is just sort of a giant elephant in the room — a threat that’s kind of lying in wait. It does sort of feel like it can kind of rear its head at any moment”:
But that’s not the only giant elephant in the room. There’s also the elephant of of those giant lingering questions of why the national security state failed so significantly in the lead up to the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection. Warning lights were flashing everywhere and yet somehow got officially ignored. Why did that happen? We still don’t know:
Yes, as the then-acting head of the DHS intelligence branch, Melissa Smislova, told Congress in March, it is a “complex challenge” to distinguish between people engaged in constitutionally protected activities and those involved in violent behavior. That was at least part of the explanation for that historic intelligence failure. But it’s not a great explanation. Of course it’s a complex challenge. And now it’s John Cohen’s complex challenge. A complex challenge that, if all of these warnings are correct, includes an increasingly credible threat of mass political violence being organized in real-time and planned for next month. Just imagine how complex that challenge is going to get if they ignore all the warning signs this time around.
Remember when Nick Fuentes — a leading online white nationalist personality — threw a rival America First conference (AFPAC) down the street from the establishment CPAC in Orlando back in February? It was one of those events that may have seem relatively insignificant one day story about another case of far right trolling for attention.
But when considered in the context of the tumultuous changes taking place within the GOP as the stolen election Big Lie takes hold, the story of the rival AFPAC could end up being one of those events that years from now comes to symbolize transformation of the GOP from a mainstream national party to something more resembling an political wing of an armed insurgency. Don’t forget that Fuentes was working directly with the network of people behind the ‘Stop the Steal’ rallies and even led a crowd in a “Destroy the GOP” chant at one of the rallies. At the same time, he was calling for the assassination of Republicans who didn’t support overturning the election results. So the way the political dynamic has played out over the last 8 months or so has been wildly in the direction of where Fuentes has been trying to pull the Republican Party. There’s simply no denying that the GOP is an even more radicalized party today than it was before the 2020 election and even more radicalized than it was back in February when Fuentes held his rival AFPAC to troll the GOP establishment. The radicalization is happening in real-time.
That’s all part of the context of the next CPAC event being held in Dallas this weekend. And while there isn’t an AFPAC rival event set up this time, Fuentes and his “groyper army” of loyal followers made sure to show up and make clear that they view themselves as the real carriers of Trump’s torch. CPAC is for cucks:
“Since 2019, Fuentes has made a point of showing up at CPAC gatherings, likely to create friction and push the bounds of acceptable rhetoric at the American Conservative Union’s events, at times making participants and organizers distinctly uncomfortable.”
It’s becoming quite a tradition: CPAC throws an event, and all the real (i.e. openly white nationalist) Trump supporters show up to troll them. Fuentes’s open racism isn’t the brand the GOP establishment is looking for. And yet that’s the brand a growing portion of the Trump base is demanding. That’s why Fuentes keeps doing this. For a lot of the attendees of CPAC, Fuentes really is the real deal telling it like it is. Like Trump:
But, again, part of what makes this planned confrontation between Fuentes’s Groyer Army and the CPAC cucks so fascinating is that it’s becoming less and less easy by the day for entities like CPAC to deny the influence of relevance of people like Fuentes in the conservative movement. There really is a risk of CPAC effectively being replaced by AFPAC some day. That’s why we can be sure the CPAC folks are putting serious thought into how they can someone either absorb or come to terms with Fuentes’s movement. Don’t forget: CPAC isn’t against white nationalism. Quite the contrary. There’s a long history of CPAC hosting white nationalist figures. But it’s a soft white nationalism. The kind of white nationalism that cloaks itself in the language of faith, family, and patriotism. But for the upcoming generation of internet-schooled conservatives, that’s a cuck’s form of white nationalism. Fuentes is the political future they want, where open vocal white nationalism is the political rallying cry.
So how did Fuentes’s crashing of CPAC go? Well, it sounds like they were allowed into the event, which is more successful than their trolling attempts back in February, where they weren’t even allowed into the even. They got in this time...while chanting “white boy summer”. But Fuentes was eventually kicked out for harassing a Salon reporter. That’s what got him kicked out:
“Security removed Fuentes from the Dallas CPAC on Saturday after he harassed a Salon reporter. Prior to leaving the building, he vowed to “give the most unchained speech ever” across the street from the event in the evening.”
All in all, quite a success for Fuentes. He was allowed in. He got to let attendees know about about the “most unchained speech ever” that he’s going to be giving this evening across the street. And he got kicked out for a reason that had nothing to do with being a white nationalist.
Is this how CPAC is going to had the challenge Fuentes poses to their conservative credentials? Let him in to the events and then kick him out on a technicality like harassing left-wing reporters? We’ll see. But it’s worth noting another controversial attendee who also appeared to be harassing a Salon reporter but wasn’t kicked out. And this attendee really is arguably far more controversial and concerning than Fuentes: Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes. Recall how, despite Rhodes’s denials, evidence points towards Rhodes playing a direct role in the planning an coordination of the “Quick Reaction Force” (QRF) of weapons stationed near the Capitol ready to be called in on a moments notice. And that’s on top of Rhodes’s years of threatening civil war:
“Yet according to a high-ranking CPAC official that spoke with Salon exclusively on Friday evening, conference leaders have been in touch with federal law enforcement authorities to seek guidance as to whether Rhodes is considered a threat to attendees’ safety and well-being.”
Is Rhodes too hot to handle? CPAC had to check with authorities. But it sounds like they arrived at the conclusion that Rhodes was just fine. He has an official pass, after all. You have to wonder if their decision to give Rhodes a conference pass, despite concerns that he might pose a threat to attendees’ safety and well-being, were rooted in fears of the consequences if they didn’t let him in. It’s a reminder that as the GOP becomes more and more unmoored from any principles, threats of violence will increasingly become the glue that’s going to holds the movement together. Warlord democracy isn’t pretty.
And note the not so kind words Rhodes and his associate had for a Salon reporter. It makes you wonder what Fuentes had to do to get kicked out:
So based on these reports, it appears that CPAC is open to violent insurrectionists, but only as long as they don’t cross the line of being too open about the underlying white nationalist motivations for their violent insurrectionary ambitions. Or at least not if they’re too open about the underlying white nationalist motivations for their violent insurrectionary ambitions and also harass a Salon reporter. It’s a fuzzy line.
The question of how close the US came to experiencing a full-blown open coup on January 6 was once again raised by a disturbing new book just put out by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. And the answer to that question appears to be that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, was so alarmed by what he saw at a November 10, “Million MAGA March” rally that he called up former national security adviser H.R. McMaster to ask whether or not a coup was imminent. Following that conversation, Milley began informally planning with other military leaders to strategize how they might block an illegal order to use the military. Recall how Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert suggested an Egypt-style revolution if Trump wasn’t reelected at that “November 10 Million MAGA March”. Neo-Nazi Trump super-fan Nick Fuentes also made his first pledge to “Destroy the GOP” at that event if Trump wasn’t reinstalled. That was the event that filled Milley with a sense of impending doom.
But perhaps the most disturbing part of this story was the reasoning Milley went through for how Trump might successfully pull off a coup: he would need to gain sway over the FBI, the CIA and the Defense Department, where Trump had already installed staunch allies. Recall the post-election appointments of extremist military figures like Anthony Tata inside the Pentagon. Milley reportedly told his closests aides that, “They may try, but they’re not going to f—ing succeed,” in response to this recognition that Trump likely already had a pro-coup bureaucratic infrastructure in place.
It’s pretty chilling. But let’s also recognize that Trump doesn’t appear to have ever actually given that coup order. At least no explicitly. No such order was necessary in the face an insurrectionary mob, after all. Trump just needed to ensure the military didn’t respond to the insurrection in a timely manner. So in the end, we don’t actually know what would have happened had Trump issued those pro-coup. But we also don’t really know if soft coup orders were quietly given to select individuals who could ensure the planned insurrection wasn’t thwarted and we do know that one of the lingering mysteries around the January 6 Capitol Insurrection is why agencies like the FBI and DHS seemed so woefully unprepared for an insurrection everyone knew was in the works and why the military was so slow footed in releasing the National Guard. Questions directly related to the role Michael Flynn’s brother, Charles Flynn, played in those decisions.
And, of course, this book is being published at the same time the GOP is doubling and tripling down on its obstruction of an investigation into the Capitol Insurrection at the same time Trump is going from rally to rally demanding that Republicans embrace the insurrection as a just act in response to a stolen election. And that’s all why these accounts of Milley’s alarm over the threats of a coup can’t be viewed as purely retrospective alarm about what might have been had things gone worse. The coup-ing continues, albeit more indirectly now:
“As Trump ceaselessly pushed false claims about the 2020 presidential election, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grew more and more nervous, telling aides he feared that the president and his acolytes might attempt to use the military to stay in office, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report in “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.””
It was bad enough that the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was talking with aides about Trump trying to use the military to stay in office. That gives us a sense of what it was like on the inside during this post-election period when Trump lost the election but was still president. As Milley put it to his aides, “This is a Reichstag moment”:
But it was the November 10 Million Maga March that appears to have instilled Milley with a sense that a coup was a very real possibility. It was following a conversation with HR McMaster that evening that he began informally planning with other military leaders of how to stop a Trump attempt to use the military to stay in power:
And note how Milley did actually appear to intervene on one of these post-election mysterious high-level staffing changes, when Trump tried to install Kash Patel as director of the CIA:
It raises the question of whether or not that intervention actually caused a shift in the Trump team’s plans and perhaps helped avoid a formal coup attempt. But we’ll presumably never know...assuming Trump doesn’t get reelected in 2024. Or some non-Trump Republican president. This is a pro-coup party now, after all. These lessons about avoiding coups aren’t just Trump-related lessons. They’re lessons that are applicable for basically every Republican administration going forward now.
In related news, another new book out about the Trump administration talks about how Trump told his then-Chief of Staff John Kelly in 2018 during a Trip to Europe to mark the 100 year anniversary of the end of WWI, that Hitler “did a lot of good things”. He then doubled-down on statement was pressed by Kelly. It’s a reminder that those inside the Trump administration were probably getting implicit warnings about a possible fascist coup the entire time. They just became a lot more explicit after Trump actually lost.
This was probably inevitable given the prevailing Big Lie political treachery of the day: a newly released poll conducted between June 26-July 2 found a shocking level of support for secession. The support was found in both Republicans, Democrats, and independents, with 66 of Republicans in 13 Southern states voicing support for the idea. That part of the polls was the worst of the news, but it was mostly all bad, with even 47 percent of West Coast Democrats in California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii voicing support for the idea. Interestingly, in the Midwest it’s partisan independents who expressed the highest levels of support at 43 percent.
But perhaps the worst of the news wasn’t that 66 percent of Southern Republicans supported the idea of secession. It’s that this number rose from 50 percent when this poll was last taken back in February. So 3 out of 6 Southern Republicans were ready to seceded back in February and now it’s 4 out of 6. What happens to the politics of the day when that number reach 5 out of 6 Republicans? We’ll presumably find out in an upcoming polls, because the political cancers that have long haunted the United States are clearly metastasizing under the stolen election narrative:
“Support has increased significantly across the board since the same question was asked in a Bright Line Watch poll from February, when only 50 percent of Southern Republicans wanted to leave the union—16 percent less than the current figure. A 6 percent increase in support for secession occurred among West Coast Democrats.”
We’re watching the radicalization in real time. The radicalization of the already-radicalized. These kinds of dynamics don’t resolve themselves casually. As the following describes, the 2022 mid-terms are already shaping up to be a referendum on whether or not the 2020 election from Trump. At least that’s how the GOP primaries are playing out. Raging against Trump’s stolen election ‘lost cause’ is how you win GOP primaries today, which is the kind of platform that naturally translates into a secession platform should the stolen election platform not result in the GOP retaking control of congress:
“Across the country, as campaigns gear up for a handful of key races this year and the pivotal 2022 midterms, Republican candidates for state and federal offices are increasingly focused on the last election — running on the falsehood spread by Trump and his allies that the 2020 race was stolen from him.”
2020 is the big issue for 2022. It’s the perfect substance-free platform for the contemporary GOP. No talk of policy or solutions. Just rage about how the entire system is rigged against Trump and conservatives. With 500 out of the nearly 600 state lawmakers who publicly embraced Trump’s stolen election claims being up for reelection next year, this issue can’t be avoided. It has to be front and center:
Will this be a winning strategy for the GOP? It might be, which would be an obvious disaster scenario. But if not, that’s just leads us to the next disaster scenario, where all of the elected Republican officials in charge of overseeing elections start using all the new powers they gave themselves to overturn those elections:
And what happens if those efforts by GOP officials to overturn the election results fail? 66 percent of Southern Republicans have an idea of what’s next. Well, at least 66 percent. It’s probably higher by now.
Here’s a story that, on one level, is merely a local curiosity about a far right Michigan sheriff engaging in the kind of politically charged theatrical antics we should expect from such individuals at this point. But on another level, it’s the kind of story that should serve as a warning of what’s to come:
Remember Sheriff Dar Leaf, the Barry County, Michigan, sheriff who decided to publicly share his views on the plot to kidnap and execute governor Gretchen Whitmer last year over Whitmer’s COVID-lockdown policies? As Leaf expressed at the time, this assassination plot may have merely been a perfectly legal citizen’s arrest. Part of their civic duty, in fact. And as we saw, part of the reason Leaf may have had such sympathetic views about the assassination plotters may have had to do with the fact that he had shared a stage with one of the accused men, William Null, earlier last year during an anti-lockdown rally. Null was holding a long gun standing next to Leaf while Leaf was ranting about Whitmer in a speech to the crowd. As we also saw, Leaf just happens to be a member of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), a far right group with close ties to the Oath Keepers that advocates sovereign citizen-style legal theories that the county sheriffs are the ultimate law-enforcement authorities in their counties, outranking state and federal officials.
Well, we just got an update on what Leaf is up to these days. As we should expect, he’s promoting the 2020 stolen election meme. But he’s not just promoting the idea that the election was stolen from Trump. Leaf has apparently been quietly sending sheriff’s deputies, paired with a private investigator, to interview local elections officials in relation to the stolen election theories currently being promoted by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow Guy. The private investigator, Michael Lynch, is a former chief security officer at DTE Energy. Leaf claims that Lynch came recommended by Stefanie Lambert Junttila, one of the attorneys facing legal sanctions for the frivolous lawsuits she filed to overturn Michigan’s election results. Juntilla represented Leaf in December when he sued Whitmer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and the Board of State Canvassers for massive election fraud. The suit was tossed out the next day.
So as we can see, the stolen election fervor and schemes that will somehow reveal mass fraud are continuing at the local level through local officials like Dar Leaf. Local officials who happen to espouse a political ideology that doesn’t recognize the authority of state or federal officials. But Leaf’s agenda goes much further than overturning the election results, as he made clear during another rally he spoke at last week. The “Arise USA” rally was organized by Robert David Steele, a far right conspiracy theorist with a history of promoting ideas like the existence of secretly martian colony where child sex slaves from the Illuminati are kept. Steele warned that rally audience about the “satanic masonic attempt to take over the world” and defined Zionism as “a criminal state run by Russian criminals who pretended to be Jews.” CSPOA founder Richard Mack then spoke, followed by Leaf, who shared with the crowd that the election probe was “my biggest task I’ve got going on.” It’s the latest example of how the stolen election Big Lie is being used to further mainstream the QAnon-style far right ‘Illuminati (Jews!) run the world!’ rehashing of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion:
“The probe is being overseen by Sheriff Dar Leaf, one of a huddle of law enforcement officials around the country who self-describe as “constitutional sheriffs.” They assert that sheriffs’ legal authority trumps that of the state and federal government. Leaf made a name for himself last year by offering a hedged public defense of the men accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan’s governor.”
One man’s kidnapping and assassination plot is another man’s ‘citizens arrest’. That was the take Leaf had when he publicly defended the men accused of plotting to kidnap and execute governor Whitmer least year, in keeping with his apparent CSPOA sovereign citizen-style beliefs of the supremacy of county sheriffs. So we have to ask what a sheriff with that mentality is going to do now that he feels empowered by Mike Lindell’s stolen election conspiracy theories to take this investigation into his own hands. And we partially got our answer: he’s going to send deputy sheriffs and private investigators to conduct their own investigations. He shared it all with the crowd at the Arise USA rally, following an appearance by CSPOA founder Richard Mack and rally organizer Robert David Steele, right after Steele shared with the crowd how they were fighting against a satanic masonic Zionist plot to take over the world:
Now, it’s obvious that this investigation isn’t going to go anywhere. But that’s not really the issue here. The issue is that Leaf’s ‘investigation’ is part of an ongoing series of increasingly radicalized attempts by a growing movement to find any means available to seize power. A movement fueled by an increasingly radicalized QAnon-style narrative about satanic Democratic elites. And what happens when a series of increasingly radicalized attempts to seize continually power fails while the increasingly radicalized narratives fueling these power grabs just keep getting more and more extreme? Are we to expect that they’re just going to give up? Or do the attempts to seize power just get more and more extreme? Should we expect sovereign-citizen beliefs — which convenient allow figures like Leaf to ignore state and federal low — to grow or shrink in the GOP as this plays out? That’s the big question posed by this story. The big question for which we more or less already know the answer.
What role did private contractors and mercenaries play in the January 6 Capitol Insurrection? Are the Oath Keepers themselves moving into the area of private security contracting? These are some of the questions raised by a new piece in Mother Jones about the investigation into Michael Simmons, the designated Oath Keepers team leader in DC that day.
At least “DC team leader” is how Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes characterized Simmons’s role that day. Simmons, however, has a somewhat different characterization: Simmons claims he was hired by Rhodes working as security for Roger Stone and his work with the Oath Keepers was in a purely professional capacity. No ideology was involve. Simmons goes on to assert that he played a similar private security role for the Oath Keepers in Louisville and was overseeing Oath Keeper security efforts at multiple “Stop the Steal” rallies following the 2020 election.
Simmons’s resume would appear to indicate he’s well qualified for these types of private security jobs. His LinkedIn resume indicates he worked for:
* Blackwater in Iraq in 2006
* Blackwater successor Academi in 2012 and 2013
* Security firm Phillips Group, Inc
* As a police officer for the Metropolitan Police Department in Indianapolis as recently as 2020.
None of these employment claims could be verified, although Rhodes appeared to back up his Blackwater experience, describing Simmons as an explosives expert. It has been verified that he was a Combat Engineer from February 2003 to March 2006 and deployed to Iraq and Kuwait in 2005. So Simmons has military experience. Whether or not he has private contractor experience is another matter.
So what was Simmons doing on January 6? Well, according to court documents, Simmons was exchanging phone calls and text messages with both Rhodes and other Oath Keepers in the minutes before multiple Oath Keepers entered the Capitol building. The charging document listed 10 phone calls that Simmons exchanged between 1:59 p.m. and 2:33 p.m. with other Other Keepers. Eight calls were with Joshua James, one of the Oath Keepers facing charges, with the other two going to Rhodes. During this period when Simmons was calling James, James was traveling from the Willard Hotel in Downtown DC — where he had been leading a security detail guarding Roger Stone — to the Capitol with two other Oath Keepers. About an hour and a half later, Simmons and Rhodes met nearby the Capitol with 11 of the Oath Keepers who had been inside. Simmons is now asserting that everyone who entered the Capitol did it on their own.
This is a good time to recall the story of Jessica Watkins, the Oath Keepers figure who led the “stack formation” group of Oath Keepers into the Capitol. Watkins claimed to have been involved with VIP security at the Stop the Steal rally and was also involved with the “Quick Reaction Force” (QRF) of weapons that were ready to be delivered to the insurrectionists. So when Simmons claims he was involved with Roger Stone’s security, he’s likely working with exactly the same group Watkins was leading
All in all, it sure looks a lot like Simmon’s claims of merely being a hired security contractor are likely self-serving nonsense. But given the mystery about whether or not the guy really has done private security work for companies Blackwater and Academi, it raises the question that hasn’t really been asked much: what role did current or form mercenaries play in the insurrection?:
“Simmons also goes by the name Michael Greene (he declined to explain why) and said that he is a former employee of Blackwater, the infamous private security company founded by Erik Prince, a claim Mother Jones was unable to verify. He insisted that his involvement with the Oath Keepers is purely professional and not political. He said he went to Washington as as a security expert, helping to guard longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone and others for pay. He said his experience in the military and his life “as a Black man from a low-income neighborhood” underwrite his disinterest in politics. “It’s exactly the same whoever’s in office,” he said, which is why he said he supports neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump.”
He’s just a former Blackwater contractor doing professional private security work for the Oath Keepers. It’s a purely professional operation, with no political involvement. He even asserts that Rhodes was paying him for his services. In other worlds, Simmons is claiming to be be an Oath Keeper employee. Not an Oath Keeper volunteer. A hired guard paid to help guard Roger Stone. And Rhodes isn’t going along with that description of Simmons as a hired contractor, insisting that Simmons was the DC team lead and that the group relies on volunteers who are paid only to cover travel and lodging expenses. So Rhodes admits the group will pay volunteers, but only to cover travel expenses, which is very different from the kind of pay private security contractors get. So what’s the story here? Was Simmons working as a private security contractor or was he an Oath Keeper ideologue?
It’s a fascinating claim that casts the Oath Keepers as a group in the role of a private security contractor. And yet, despite Simmons’s many claims of work as a private contractor, no former employer would verify his employment as one. Beyond that, Simmons claimed to have worked as a police officer in Indianapolis as recently as 2020, but that department claims to have no record of his employment:
So is Simmons just a fabulist? Rhodes appeared to back up his Blackwater claims, but nothing could be validated. Could Simmons be deploying a kind of insanity defense? We don’t know. But based on the available evidence, it sure sounds like Simmons really was actively coordinating with the Oath Keeper members who did breach the Capitol. And this coordination took place minutes before the breach. Again, recall how Jessica Watkins claimed to be involved with providing VIP security at the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally and was also filmed leading the team of Oath Keepers in a ‘stack formation’ into the Capitol. Also recall how Watkin was involved with the Oath Keeper “Quick Reaction Force” (QRF) that was poised to provide weapons to the insurrectionists should the time come. So when we learn that Simmons was involved with providing security for Roger Stone and also communicated with the Oath Keepers shortly before they breached the Capitol, there’s a pretty good chance it’s Watkins’s group that he was talking with, which would also explain why he’s so interested in downplaying his role that day:
Was Simmons working directly with Watkins when her group breached the Capitol? How about the QRF stash of arms? What was Simmons’s relationship with the people handling all those weapons that afternoon? If he wasn’t in the Capitol, where was he? He claims he was just doing a security job for hire and that’s it. And who knows, maybe that was it. But if so, it, again, raises the question: where there mercenaries involved with the insurrection? And not ideologically driven mercenaries doing it because they believed in the cause but hired mercenaries. Were there hired mercenaries there that day? According to Simmons, yes.
We just got an update on the maneuverings by the Trump administration in the days and weeks leading up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection: A December 28, 2020, email from then-acting head of the DOJ’s civil division, Jeffrey Clark, to the then acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen was just made public. Clark was reportedly encouraging Rosen and then acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue to sign off on a letter Clark wrote that urged Georgia’s governor and state legislature to convene a special session to investigation voter fraud claims. Rosen and Donoghue refused to sign the letter and it was never ultimately sent. But it’s the latest evidence of just how serious the Trump loyalists inside the administration were about finding any means necessary to overturn the election results. Means that eventually included an insurrection that took place barely a week after this letter was written.
But as we’re also going to see, this news about that December 28 email was preceded last week with reports about a December 27 phone call made by Trump to Rosen where Trump not only encouraged Rosen to have the DOJ begin investigation the wild voter fraud claims but also floated the idea of replacing Rosen with Clark. So when Clark wrote that December 28 email asking for Rosen and Donoghue to sign on to Clark’s scheme to get the DOJ involved with the attempt to overturn the Georgia election results, Trumps threat to replace Rosen with Clark was implicitly part of that ‘request’.
But as we’ll see in the third piece below from back in January, a big part of what makes both of these stories so significant is the fact that the December 28 letter was written at the same time Clark was engaged in an an apparent attempted coup inside the DOJ. Days after Rosen and Donoghue refused to sign on to Clark’s letter, Clark and Trump tried and almost succeeded in replacing Rosen with Clark as the acting attorney general. The only thing that got in their way was an informal pact from all the remaining top officials at the DOJ to resign if Rosen was fired. It reportedly took three hours of arguing from White House counsel Pat Cipollone that the scheme was going to backfire on Trump to convince him to drop the plan. So the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection we preceded by a narrowly averted ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ at the DOJ that was only averted when Trump was convinced such a move posed too big a risk to him personally.
Ok, first, here’s an article about the recent revelation of the December 27 phone call from Trump to Rosen. A call that focused on Trump’s efforts to get the DOJ involved in the Georgia election results, but also included a threat to replace Rosen with Clark:
“It was previously known that Trump publicly and privately pushed the Justice Department to investigate his baseless claims that the election was stolen, but the new documents — nine pages of contemporaneous notes from a Dec. 27 phone call between Trump, then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue — provide new insights into those efforts.”
Just make the fraud accusations. You don’t have to defend the accusations. Leave that to Trump and the rest of the GOP. Just make the accusations. That was the thrust of Trump’s request to Rosen and Donoghue on December 27:
But another topic did come up during the call: replacing Rosen with Clark. In other words, Trump was implicitly threatening Rosen with a last-minute firing if he didn’t do what Trump was asking:
And that brings us to the new report on the December 28th email sent by Clark to Rosen and Donoghue. An email asking them to sign off on a letter essentially asking Georgia to convene a special session to investigate the election fraud claims. Beyond that, the letter suggested that Georgia’s GOP-controlled legislature had the power to ignore Georgia’s governor and do this all themselves if Governor Kemp refused to go along with the plan. So Clark was trying to pressure Rosen and Donoghue — with Trump’s implicit theat to replace Rosen with Clark from the phone call the previous day backing Clark’s demands — to sign a letter that could be used to pressure Georgia’s governor to concede to Trump’s demands:
“The emails, dated Dec. 28, 2020, show the former acting head of DOJ’s civil division, Jeffrey Clark, circulating a draft letter — which he wanted then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue to sign off on — urging Georgia’s governor and other top officials to convene the state legislature into a special session so lawmakers could investigate claims of voter fraud.”
Jeffrey Clark was clearly a driving force for the election fraud claims inside the DOJ. Apparently the highest ranking figure in the DOJ at the time pushing this line. But not high enough. He still needed Rosen and Donoghue to sign off. That’s the focus of the December 28 letter:
And, again, this email from Clark was sent the day after Trump’s phone call with Rosen and Donoghue where Trump floated the idea of replacing Rosen with Clark. This is clearly a coordinated pressure campaign.
And as the article notes at the end, it’s just a few days later that we see a last ditch attempt to replace Rosen with Clark:
So how serious was that attempt to replace Rosen with Clark? Well, as we’re going to see, it basically took an informal pact from all the other top DOJ officials to threaten to resign if Trump fired Rosen. That pact, and three hours of arguing by Trump’s attorney Pat Cipollone that such a much would make Trump’s legal situation even worse, eventually convinced Trump not to go through with the plan. So Trump entered that meeting psychological prepared to fire Rosen, elevate Clark, and go through with the rest of the DOJ-directed coup plans:
“The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.”
Trump was almost ready to through with it. The plan had been building for weeks. When Trump first faced resistance from Rosen in December, Trump’s relationship with Clark suddenly blossomed and some sort of secret plot Trump and Clark was soon underway:
Later that month, Clark approaches Rosen and Donoghue to pressure them directly himself. But it’s on New Year’s Eve, three days after Rosen and Donoghue refused to sign Clark’s letter to Georgia, the three meet again. Then next day Clark informs them that he’s going to be meeting personally with Trump early the next week. But those meetings with Trump were actually moved up. Clark met with Trump and then informed Rosen that Trump was indeed firing him and replacing him with Clark, who would immediately proceed with plans to have the DOJ contest the Electoral College results:
Upon hearing this news, Rosen headed to the White House to meet with Trump and White House counsel Pat Cippolone. It reportedly took three hours of Cippolone warning that a mass resignation at the DOJ would be a disaster for Trump:
Three hours. That’s how convinced Trump was to go along with the scheme. If the mass resignations weren’t threatened and Pat Cipollone hadn’t convinced Trump that firing Rosen would create even more legal troubles for the then-president, we probably would have seen this plan actually happen.
Also keep in mind that the January 6 insurrection only became necessary to keep Trump in office after this planned coup at the DOJ failed. And it failed just days before Jan 6. It’s a reminder that one of the reasons the January 6 coup attempt didn’t succeed was that the planning for a full coup was probably compressed into a couple of days after the DOJ coup attempt failed. It points to dark context of all these reports about this failed coup attempt: yes, it’s good that we are learning about how close they came to pulling it off. They’re learning too.
Is Donald Trump’s reinstatement as president just around the corner? That’s the promise of the current right-wing meme promulgated by figures like Mike Lindell and mid-August is just a week away. Is political violence a week away too? That’s the question reportedly being asked by people at the Department of Homeland Security right now and the answer appears to be maybe possibly yes. The Trumpers are thinking about it and talking about it in increasingly public ways. So we’re kind of waiting to see if any of these memes promoting political violence catch fire as they goes public:
“DHS says in the bulletin they do not have specific evidence there is a plot imminent.”
Well, at least there’s no specific plot. Yet. But that lack of specificity isn’t exactly reassuring in a political climate where ideas quietly percolating in some back corner of the internet can suddenly erupt into mainstream conservative online forums and take hold. And that eruption in public visibility of calls for political violence is exactly what DHS officials are witnessing:
Will we see another ‘deadline’ for Trump’s return to power come and go without incident or is the US due for another round of political violence. We’ll find out over the next couple of weeks.
But if this deadline passes without incident the sentiments behind this obviously are going to just fizzle out on their own. They’re going to morph into something new. What that is remains to be seen but we aren’t forced to blindly speculate. There’s all sorts of hints as to where a frustrated Trump movement will go next.
For example, we can look to the people who were effectively canaries in the conservative coalmine years ago. Figures like right-wing talk-radio host Kurt Schlichter. Recall how Schlichter was a huge Ted Cruz supporter in 2016 and didn’t even support Trump at the time. And yet he still argue that, should Hillary Clinton win, conservatives to stop recognizing the validity of a Democratic president and wage a peace ‘Conservative Insurgency’. And if the peaceful version of the insurgency doesn’t work they’ll have to go with the non-peaceful version. Schlichter has been ahead of the curve in his ruthless demonization of liberals and Democrats for years. Donald Trump’s grievance politics schtick in many ways emulates a persecution narrative Schlichter has been refining for years.
And here we are today with the rest of the GOP more or less caught up to Schlichter’s point of view. Democratic presidents are inherently invalid because they are inherently un-American and wish to exterminate all conservatives. That’s the meta-meme driving contemporary right-wing politics in the US — a hysteria about ‘Marxist’ Democrats secretly controlled by George Soros, the Illuminati, Satan, Hollywood, and teachers unions to impose an unholy agenda of atheist transexuality on goodhearted Christians. That’s barely hyperbole compared to today’s real right-wing rhetoric.
So it’s worth noting Twitter thread just put out by Schlichter that seems to succinctly encapsulate where the US conservative movement is heading next: Schlichter is now calling for what amounts to outlawing liberalism. After calling Democrats “Marxists who cannot allow us to provide a counter example of freedom”. Schlichter calls for big tech companies and academia to be nationalized and mandated to hold conservatism as their operational ideology. Leftist media and entertainment should be banned from spreading misinformation. Voting rights should be restricted to property-owning individuals with children who served in the military. So it was basically a call for Christian white nationalist fascism, amped up to a new level of intensity. A new level of intensity that will eventually be met by the audience after these ideas have had enough time to get infused into mainstream conservative thought. Give it time. It’s all part of the context of this eerily looming mid-August ‘deadline’ for Trump’s reinstatement: When that deadline passes we immediately transition to the ‘what’s next’ phase of this situation. And if you want to know ‘what’s next’ for the US conservative movement, you look to figures who have been ahead of the curve the whole time. Figures like Kurt Schlichter:
It’s like the perfect encapsulation of the raw mindlessness of the contemporary right-wing grievance complex: “They started it.” Or rather, “They” are planning on exterminating us so we had better do it to them first. This isn’t hyperbole. Schlichter really writes this kind of stuff all the time. He’s been doing this for years and the rest of the GOP has been catching up to him the entire time.
So we’ll see what does or doesn’t happen as we approach this vague mid-August deadline to reinstate Trump as president. But if you want to see where this is all eventually leading, Schlichter just tweeted it out for us.
Oh look, federal prosecutors appear to be taking active steps to botch another mega case against a large group of far right anti-government actors. Who could have seen that coming: Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the federal court in Washington deluged with more than 550 prosecutions from the Capitol riot, is now openly question why federal prosecutors are handing out such light charges to some defendants, with charges amounting to little more than a misdemeamer plea for many. And in at least on case, the defendants who agreed to plead guilty to these lenient charges are reversed their pleas and claimed they had no intent on blocking any vote certification and didn’t even know what was happening on the Capitol that day, and federal prosecutors are accepting these absurd claims. Prosecutors even agree with judge Howell that it’s contextually reasonable to infer why these people were inside the Capitol that day, whether they have social media postings plainly stating their intent or not. And yet they go on to insist that more evidence than just entering the Capitol building is necessary. So this judge is basically arguing with a brick wall. The brick wall leading the ‘prosecution’ of the January 6 Capitol insurrectionists:
“Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the federal court in Washington deluged with more than 550 prosecutions from the Capitol riot, raised questions about why some defendants were being permitted to resolve their criminal cases by pleading guilty to a misdemeanor and why the amount of money prosecutors are seeking to recover through those plea deals was based on a relatively paltry estimate of about $1.5 million in damages caused by the rioters.”
Why were some rioters receiving serious indictments while others who seemingly engaged in the same acts are being allowed to plead guilty to trivial misdemeanor charge? That’s the question raised by the judge herself in this case in response to the case of Glenn Croy, who initially agreed to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of parading or picketing in the Capitol, but even that was too far for Croy. Instead, he changed his plea to state that he had “no intention of stopping any vote” and didn’t actually know that the Electoral College votes were scheduled to be tallied at the time the historic building was stormed. So the guy got an insanely light charge in return for a misdemeanor guilty plea and he couldn’t even go along with that. And prosecutors agreed to this change in plea:
It’s as if they’re looking for an excuse to drop the case. Why? That’s the question raised by this judge. And the answer appears to be that simply being in the Capitol on that day wasn’t evidence itself of an intent to block the certification of the Electoral College vote. More evidence is required, like social media posts expressing intent. Yes, the prosecutors agreed with the judge, it’s contextually reasonable to infer intent by their very presence there that day, but they nonetheless insisted that the government needed more evidence of intent than just entry into the building:
Finally, there’s the issue of the shockingly low cost estimate for the insurrection: $1.5 million, compared to congressional appropriations of a half a billion dollars to the National Guard for the costs incurred. What’s the explanation for this chasm? No real explanation is given, although prosecutors indicate the $1.5 million estimate comes from the Architect of the Capitol. That same office has cited far higher figures, including $30 million through the end of March for repairs and temporary fencing. So prosecutors basically gave a non-answer answer:
And that’s the theme we’re seeing emerge here: non-answer answers in response to legitimate questions. For some reason, federal prosecutors have decided to go extra easy on the insurrectionists. Maybe they’re angling for lenient treatment of their own. Federal prosecutors presumably won’t fare well after the next insurrection, after all.
Following the spectacular failure of Mike Lindell’s ‘cyber-symposium’ last week — the symposium that was supposed to show the world evidence of the 2020 election was stolen by Donald Trump by China, prompting Biden resignation and Trump’s reinstatement as President — and the warnings we were already getting about the elevated possibility of some sort of far right violence in coming weeks, we are once again in the “What’s next?” phase of this ongoing US civil crisis.
And we just sort of got our answer: A fervent Trump supporter drove a pickup trump up to the steps of the Library of Congress and threatened to trigger a bomb. The man, Floyd Ray Roseberry, 49, from Grover, N.C., made his demands and aired his grievances over a Facebook Livestream, where he appeared to be demanding Joe Biden step down as president and Trump be reinstated. Roseberry gave up After negotiations with the police and it appears there was never a bomb. In the end, it’s unclear how serious this threat ever was. But it’s pretty clear where the threat arose: the swamp of far right disinfotainment fully animating tens of millions of more die hard Trump supporters who are absolutely convinced Joe Biden represents some sort of diabolical international communist Satanic plot to subvert the America. And that’s what makes this story so disturbing. It’s like an appetizer for what’s next:
“Several hours after the report of the incident, Facebook said it had deactivated a livestream, purportedly of the suspect in his truck.”
Several hours after the report of the incident, Facebook said it had deactivated a livestream. Several hours. So the guy had plenty of time to rant to the world. Great job Facebook. Again.
So what do we learn from his extensive Facebook rants? Well, Josh Marshall gives us an idea and it includes another disturbing detail. The kind of detail that hints of Roseberry not working alone and also gives is a hint at “What’s next?” Roseberry claimed he originally planned on going to Washington on Labor Day weekend, rendezvousing at a local park in North Carolina with others who would follow him North. But for whatever reason he changed his mind and set out to do this on his own.
Now, it’s entirely possible Roseberry is just nuts and isn’t working with others. But when someone pulls a stunt of this nature that appears to be an attempt to create a kind of rallying cry event, we have to ask whether or not there were others Roseberry has been in contact with that he was expecting, or hoping, would join Roseberry or would be inspire towards future actions. Either way, it’s a remind that Labor Day weekends is probably the next time we should expect someone doing something crazy in the name of Trump’s glory:
“Over the last few hours I watched multiple videos from Roseberry in which he discussed his goals, grievances, family heartaches. According to his video, he originally planned on going to Washington on Labor Day weekend, rendezvousing at a local park in North Carolina with all those who would follow him North. That appeared to be the until last night or at least until his video posted late Tuesday evening.”
Did Roseberry have a whole crew ready to drive to DC and issue bomb threats over Labor Day weekend? We don’t know, but we’re in the midst of the internet golden age of far right leaderless resistance domestic terror cell groups. All the tools required are there. Encrypted communication platforms, social media for broadcasting their messages, and a former president enthusiastically ready to play the role of the Lost Cause. All the pieces are in place for an aspiring ‘leaderless resistance’ leader like Roseberry to assemble a team. The zeitgeist is there. But at this point it’s looking like Roseberry might just be a genuine lone nu
t. We don’t know. But that’s the thing about contemporary domestic terror in the US. The far right ‘lone nuts’ is never truly alone. They have plenty of fellow travelers. That was made clear by Alabama Republican Congressman Mo Brooks, who went out of his way to express sympathy with the would-be-bomber’s “anger directed at dictatorial Socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom and the very fabric of American society”:
“Although this terrorist’s motivation is not yet publicly known, and generally speaking, I understand citizenry anger directed at dictatorial Socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom and the very fabric of American society,” Brooks tweeted. “The way to stop Socialism’s march is for patriotic Americans to fight back in the 2022 and 2024 election.”
It’s quite a message to Roseberry and his fans: You’re grievances are just, but there’s no need for violent revolution...yet. It’s the emerging GOP meta-answer for the question of “What’s next?” The GOP wins or it’s war. That’s what’s next. Not quite yet, but soon. Wait and see how 2022 and 2024 go first. And in the mean time, if you’re planning on any insurrectionary Labor Day weekend rallies and looking for a keynote speaker, consider sending Rep. Brooks an invite. He’s clearly already got a motivational speech on the topic ready to go.
Following up on the story of Steve Bannon’s swanky First Anniversary of the New Federal State of China, here’s a report on Bannon’s growing ambitions in Brazil. Specifically, growing ambitions to repeat in Brazil exactly the same kind of mass voter-fraud allegations we’ve seen from Donald Trump and his supporters following the 2020 election. Ambitions clearly shared by Jair Bolsonaro’s government. It turns out, Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, was in attendance at Mike Lindell’s bonkers “cybersymposium” this month and it was during Steve Bannon’s appearance on symposium panel when Bannon warned the upcoming election in Brazil was similarly at risk of mass electronic voting machine fraud that would steal the election away from Bolsonaro:
“Lindell’s cyber symposium was dedicated to the baseless notion that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was somehow stolen from Donald Trump. Bannon gave a curious performance. First he criticized Lindell for not providing enough evidence for the otherwise “very powerful” stolen election theory. Then he warned that a different election might be at risk: the reelection of far-right authoritarian president Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil.”
Look out world, there’s a new ‘election conspiracy’ conspiracy on the scene. Although it sounds like they’re basically going to just rehash the same playbook: assert that the only way your favored candidate could possibly lose is through election fraud while castigating your opponents as dangerous criminals who must be locked up by any means necessary. The only thing it’s missing from the Trump playbook is a reference to ‘Crooked Hillary’:
And this is all happening as Bolsonaro has already raised the prospect of a military intervention to ‘ensure the integrity of the vote’. The pieces are falling into place:
And note how this narrative isn’t one where Brazilian leftists are independently attempting to steal the Brazilian election using tactics similar to what Democrats used in 2020 to steal the election from Trump. This is Steve Bannon’s narrative being adopted by the Bolsonaro government and that’s a narrative where it’s the same global network of evil communist globalist leftist Illuminati Satanists behind all of these rigged elections. Evil globalist communist leftists Who teamed up with China to steal the US election in 2020.
For Steve Bannon, it’s global harvest time, which raises the question: will ‘China’ also be the culprit when Brazil’s election is ‘stolen’? On the one hand, China-bashing is pretty popular with Bolsonaro and his government, including Eduardo. At the same time, let’s not forget that this narrative includes doozies like Hugo Chavez manipulating voting machines from the grave. We’ll see. Thanks to the efforts of Bannon, Lindell, and the rest of the grift machine pushing this narrative, Bannon and Bolsonaro have a lot of content to work with. Fantasy content, but that’s beside the point. Or, in another sense, the point.
What’s going to happen if the GOP mega-donors decide it’s ultimately in their best interests to ‘move on’ from the ‘stolen 2020’ election narrative but Donald Trump and his horde of followers decide otherwise? That’s the interesting question raised by the following story about the apparent collective decision by the Republican Party’s mega-donors to focus their money on non-Trump-related political investments. In particular, Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Florida Senator Marco Rubio are the two figures who are getting a lot of mega-donor attention these days, with DeSantis representing a continued Trumpian direction for the GOP while Rubio almost feels like an anachronistic throwback to a pre-Trump GOP that died years ago.
It’s not just that these mega-donors are of the view that Trump’s political future isn’t as bright as his hints of a 2024 rerun hype suggests. They’re also reportedly concerned about giving money to a Trump organization that seems to exist solely for the purpose of fundraising. In other words, the mega-donors have concluded that the ‘give us money so we can fight the stolen election!’ meme is just the latest Trump grift for the rubes. Plus, the Trump PACs already had over $100 million on hand after the first have of 2021. Months into waging this ‘stolen election’ narrative, Trump is apparently flush with political cash.
As stunning as it might be to hear that Trump’s PACs have $100 million cash on hand, as we’re going to see in the second Politico article below, Trump’s organizations announced in December of 2020 that they had raised over $200 million since Election Day. So Trump’s organizations have been wildly successful at raising money based on the ‘stolen election’ narrative, but it’s also apparently been pretty successful at spending it, which is part of why these mega-donors are a lot less keen on making mega-donations in the direction of Donald Trump these days.
And yet, let’s face it, this is still Trump’s party and if he wants to run in 2024 based on the narrative of a stolen 2020 election, it’s going to be hard to stop him. He clearly has the GOP base behind him and the ‘stolen election’ is clearly the money-making narrative the base responds to. So Trump has the perfect fund-raising grift to target small donors, but the grift is too much of a scam for the GOP mega-donors to play along. It’s not quite a crisis of conscience for the GOP, but it’s about as close to a crisis of conscience as we can expect to ever see from this party so it should be interesting to watch:
“Donors are also concerned about how Trump’s organization is spending the piles of money it has raised from smaller donations.”
Lol! Mega-donors are ‘concerned about how Trump’s organization is spending the piles of money it has raised from smaller donations’. It’s another way of saying they’re watching Trump fleece the rubes and don’t want to become rubes themselves. And yet, the fact taht the rubes are so willing to hand over so much money to Trump over the stolen election narrative demonstrates the enduring and growing importance the stolen election narrative has on the right. Stolen election narratives are the future of the GOP. It’s what the audience wants. Trump’s PACs wouldn’t still have $100 million on hand if that wasn’t the case. Money talks:
It could be argued that money talks louder than Trump himself, even in the GOP. Which raises the question: what was the $107.5 million that Trump apparently spent in the last eight months actually spent on? Because as the following Politico article from back in December 2020 reminds us, Trump announced at the time that his organizations had raised $207.5 million since Election Day. Flash forward half a year and it sounds like only $100 million of that is left. Where did it go?
Adding to the mystery are the rules regarding how Trump can spend that money. Because as the article notes, all that post-election fundraising was being done under Trump’s ‘leadership PAC’ called Save America PAC. Here’s the thing about ‘leadership PACs’: he can spend that money trying to influence GOP primaries or just throw his weight around within the party. He can even hold rallies with the funds. He can also spend it in all sorts of ways that basically involve self-enrichment. But what he cannot spend that money on is a 2024 election. Those are the rules. So all of the money Trump has been raising since the election is money to be spent on embezzlement and/or bending the rest of the party to his will heading into 2024:
“The Trump campaign announced Thursday evening that the president’s fundraising operation raised $207.5 million since Election Day, parts of which were detailed in campaign finance reports filed later Thursday night. It’s a remarkable sum for a post-election period, usually the time when campaigns wind down.”
It was quite an announcement in December: $207.5 million, raised just since Election Day. And it was all going into Trump’s newly formed leadership PAC, Save America PAC. The type of PAC that allows the Trump organization to self-enrich, travel, pay for rallies, and get involved in other GOP primaries. The one thing he can’t do with all that money is use it for a 2024 run:
Yes, the biggest fundraising force in Republican politics today has been raising money hand-over-fist with hints of 2024 run, but none of that raised money can actually be used for that 2024 run. Every dollar donated to Trump’s Save America PAC is a dollar allocated towards ensuring Trump’s message dominates the GOP field heading into 2024. He’ll have to raise more money once he gets the 2024 nomination.
And that’s all part of the conundrum facing GOP mega-donors deciding where to ‘invest’ their political donations. If they want to stay on Trump’s good side they’re going to have to throw some money his way. But any money they give to Trump will just be either embezzled or spent on ensuring he’s got the loudest voice in the party with the most influence to give Trump a lock on the nomination again in 2024. And yet the ongoing success of his fund-raising from small dollar donors demonstrates his enduring charismatic hold on the GOP voter base. The success of the grift against small-donors is evidence the mega-donors can’t themselves ignore the grift either. Trump’s hold on the party is too strong. Again, money talks. Even when he’s not running for office he’s still the biggest money sink. Trump has managed to obtained a near monopoly on GOP fealty. The party of the grift is now the party of Trump’s perma-grift. At least until he experiences a heart attack from too many Big Macs or something.
When the GOP inevitable retakes control of congress there’s going to be hell to pay. That’s long been a truism of American politics, although it’s usually groups like the poor, minorities, and active duty soldiers who end up paying that hell. But if the trend in the following pair of articles continues, the groups slated for major payback by the GOP include anyone involved in the investigation of the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Including entities that cooperate with the ongoing congressional investigation. An investigation run almost entirely by the Democrats following the GOP’s near complete refusal to support it. That’s the picture that emerged after a flurry of publicly issued threats by Republican members of the House, starting with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who threatened to use a future GOP majority in the House to punish any telecommunications companies that complied with the investigators’ requests to save records relevant to the insurrection. More than 30 companies received a request for records from April 1, 2020, to Jan. 31, 2021.
Not to be outdone, Margorie Taylor Green then went on Tucker Carlson’s Fox New show and declared that telecommunications companies “will be shut down” if they comply with the requests. “That’s a promise”, said Greene. Another GOP House member, Jim Banks, also went on Carlson’s show last week and threatened to investigate the Democrats running the investigation once the GOP gets back power. So the companies that comply with the congressional investigation will be punished, along with the congressional investigators. This is narrative the GOP is developing in anticipation of the 2022 election cycle, where the results of the Democrat’s investigation will likely play a prominent role. A narrative where the Capitol Insurrection investigation is itself the grand crime that needs an investigation of its own:
““If these companies comply with the Democrat order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States,” McCarthy said in Tuesday’s statement. “If companies still choose to violate federal law, a Republican majority will not forget and will stand with Americans to hold them fully accountable under the law.””
The GOP is going to sue or sanction or somehow attack any companies that “violate federal law” by cooperating with this congressional investigation. It’s come to that. But it’s not just the House Minority leader issuing these threats. With members of the GOP caucus like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Banks already jumping on this bandwagon, it’s clear that this is going to part of the GOP’s messaging heading into 2022 as the insurrection investigation plays out. The more facts the Democrats unveil about GOP collusion with the insurrectionist mob, the louder the GOP is going to clamor about how illegal the investigation is and how much punishment they’re going to dole out to those who facilitated it. That’s the emerging narrative form the GOP as we’re heading into the 2022 campaign season. As the following Vanity Fair piece reminds us, it’s Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with sh#t” strategy. A narrative where the investigation of the Capital insurrection was the real assault on democracy. An assault that requires punishment to ensure it never happens again:
“The threat was not limited to the ever-expanding fringes of the party, where Greene and other MAGA acolytes thrive. Hours earlier, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, one of the most powerful Republicans in Washington, handed down his own ominous warning to the companies, tweeting that “a Republican majority will not forget” if they cooperate with the committee request. It’s hard to know what, exactly, that means, how the GOP would go about punishing private companies for obeying a congressional subpoena, or how doing so would not constitute a far greater government overreach than the one they claim Democrats are committing. The idea here isn’t really to make sense, though; in fact, logic and clarity would only detract from the aim of such threats, which is to “flood the zone with sh it,” as Trump strategist Steve Bannon once explained, until efforts to hold people accountable and efforts to evade accountability seem indistinguishable from one another. “Russian Collusion Hoax 2.0,” Congressman Mo Brooks, one of the chief instigators of the January 6 attack, tweeted Monday. “Why not subpoena Socialists who support BLM & ANTIFA?”
The ‘ol “flood the zone with sh*t” Steve Bannon special move. Is that what we’re seeing here? A strategy of simply shouting, “No, YOU’RE the criminals here! No us!”, as loudly as possible? That’s not doubt part of what’s at work here. But when we hear figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene declare it’s “a promise” that telecommunications companies “will be shut down” if they comply with requests and Rep Jim Banks announcing that, “we have a duty as Republicans to hold every member of this committee accountable for this abuse of power, for stepping over the line,” we have to wonder how much of this is just “flood the zone with sh#t” bluster as opposed to conscious moves to lay the groundwork for a grand raising of the stakes. Because if current trends continue, including the trend of the GOP fully embracing the ‘China stole the election for Joe Biden’ narrative, it only logically makes sense that the GOP will start campaigning on pledges to outright prosecute and lock up their opponents. The “Lock her up” chants of yesteryear are morphing into the “Lock them up” chant of 2022. Lock them up over the grand crime of investigating the Capital insurrection:
Will the GOP be able to successfully use Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with sh%t” strategy to not only deflect charges related to the Capitol insurrection but actually turn this issue into a cudgel to attack Democrats? That’s the plan. And given the strong odds the GOP re-takes control of the House purely through the power of gerrymandering, it’s a plan the GOP has a very real chance of putting into effect. Which makes this a good time to remind ourselves that Bannon’s “flood the zone with sh$t” strategy is merely one part of a much larger strategy to permanently plunge Western societies into a fascist fantasy worldview where up is down, black is white, and the future is controlled by figures like Steve Bannon writing these narratives.
With all of the indications that Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP isn’t going away any time soon and murmurings of an imminent Trump 2024 rerun announcement, here’s a pair of article about the enduring and growing grip on the party by another leading American fascist: Steve Bannon.
As we’re going to see, Bannon appears to have successfully led a kind of guerilla far right campaign to take over the Republican Party at the precinct level this year. And it’s worked. Thousands of people who had no prior involvement in local politics have flooded the party at the local precinct level, putting Bannon-following extremists in the key positions to run local elections. So Steve Bannon has already put in place an army of people who are ready and willing to invalidate future elections Republicans lose. That all happened just this year.
It’s all quite reminiscent of the Religious Right’s grassroots takeover of the GOP in the 80’s. But it’s also a reminder that we aren’t really looking at a Trumpian takeover of the GOP. Trump’s going to die some day. This is the outward fascist takeover of the GOP by figures like Bannon and his army of QAnon-huffing hardcore true believers.
And as the following article also reminds of, this army of true believers is absolutely still intent in reversing the 2020 election results, starting with a new march on the Capitol scheduled for September 18. The “Justice for J6” March, first announced on a July 30 episode of Steve Bannon’s podcast, is being organized by Matt Braynard, the head of data for the 2016 Trump campaign. The rally will focus on ‘seeking justice for Capitol riot defendents’. In other words, they’re going to declare the jailed insurrectionists political prisoners and demand their release. Because the insurrection never happened, you see. Don’t believe your lying eyes: it’s the perfect rallying cry for modern fascism:
““As we continue to raise the profile of these individuals, it makes it harder and harder for the left’s phony narrative about an insurrection to stick,” Braynard said on Bannon’s podcast July 30. “What’s going to define [the rally] is where it’s going to take place: we’re going back to the Capitol.””
The “left’s phony narrative about an insurrection” will crumble have hundreds of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers descend on the National Mall to raise the profiles of the jailed individuals. So is it going to be rally that basically publicly celebrates the jailed insurrectionists? Perhaps, but the primary message of the rally is clear: there was no insurrection. It never happened. All those videos of people storming the Capitol never happened. It’s not real. What is real is the theft of the election from Donald Trump and grand global Communist Satanic Illuminati leftist conspiracy that threatens decent people everywhere. The psychological stunt of selling and reinforcing that message appears to be the real goal of this planned rally.
But as the following Pro Publica piece makes clear, these calls for future rallies on the National Mall are just one part of an ongoing movement led by figures like Steve Bannon to ensure Republicans can’t lose future elections. Starting in February of this year, Bannon has turned his program into a platform for promoting a ‘precinct strategy’ focused on getting Trumpist die hard followers into local precinct-level party positions. Positions directly involved with the administration of elections. As the people behind this movement characterize it, this is the last alternative to violence. So the Bannon-led movement that continues to threaten the US with future insurrections is also currently in the midst of taking over the Republican Party’s bureaucracy involved with the administration of election and they’re telling us they’re taking control of these elections as a last ditch effort to avoid violence: