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This segment analyzes Serpent’s Walk, a Nazi tract published in 1991 and authored by one “Randolph O. Calverhall.” Published by National Vanguard Books, which also published The Turner Diaries, the book is purportedly a “novel” about a Nazi takeover of the United States in the middle of the twenty-first century. It is Mr. Emory’s considered opinion that the book is far more than a novel — he feels that it is a blueprint for what is already going on and what is planned for the future. Mr. Emory feels that the book is extremely important and that it should be studied. The events portrayed in it have a foundation in reality. In Serpent’s Walk, Hitler’s SS goes underground after World War II.
The SS then begin building a huge capital organization and buying into U.S. industry, the opinion-forming media in particular. (Just such an organization was put together! See Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile by Paul Manning. The book was published in 1981 by Lyle Stuart Inc.) The SS then infiltrate the United States Army and the U.S. government in general. At the end of the war, much of the Nazi intelligence system was married to the American espionage establishment, permitting just such infiltration.
After the President and Vice-President are killed in a biological warfare attack that utilizes genetically-engineered viruses (of ostensibly Russian origin), the Speaker of the House (“Jonas Outram”) becomes President, declares martial law and invites the Nazis into a governing coalition, which then takes over the United States. It is Mr. Emory’s opinion that the Jonas Outram character is based on Newt Gingrich and that Gingrich was recruited to the Nazi philosophy in Germany while his father was stationed there with the Army.
It’s official. Or at least as official as something like this can be: President Trump is openly declaring war on the 2020 election results and therefore declared war on American Democracy:
“But in stranding millions of his own voters in an alternate reality in which the election was stolen, Trump has dropped a bomb in the country’s political system, leaving the U.S. with a constituency primed to disbelieve in the basic fabric of our democracy.”
Trump just bombed American democracy. A Disinformation Bomb masquerading as a Truth Bomb and intended to blow of the necessary civic acceptance of the election results that democracies depend on. It really was a bomb intended to blow up democracy.
But this is far from just a Trump-declared war on democracy. The vast majority of his fellow Republican leaders and elected officials are quietly supporting the president’s decrees. Beyond that, Fox News’s prime time personalities, who have a profound influence on Trump’s thinking, are fully behind the narrative that the election is somehow being stolen through mass voter fraud. It’s a group effort.
And as we’ll see in the following article, Newt Gingrich — long one of Trump’s biggest backers and an informal advisor — was just on Sean Hannity’s show last night calling for Trump to begin mass arresting Pennsylvania’s poll workers and just throw out the votes out from Democratic strongholds like Philadelphia. As the above piece describes Trump’s general attack on the out, it’s the logical conclusion of decades of the great Republican voter fraud hoax and the logical conclusion for a party increasingly reliant on using any trick available to win elections. And that’s what we’re hearing for Gingrich. It’s the next logical conclusion of this war on democracy: Just declare voting inherently corrupt and move throw out all the ‘bad’ (Democratic) votes:
““You take them back,” Gingrich exclaimed. “Any precinct, any precinct that we were not able to observe, strip those votes out. Do not count them. Because they are by definition corrupt.””
Just throw the Philadelphia votes out because they are by definition corrupt. That was Newt Gingrich’s advice to Trump last night on Sean Hannity’s prime time Fox News show. And as we should expect, the underlying complaint of these Philadelphia votes is complete nonsense. Republican observers were allowed to observe the vote counting. They just weren’t allowed to be right up next to the vote counters due to coronavirus concerns. That’s the pretext of this complaint:
And, again, Newt Gingrich isn’t some random talking head. Not only has he long been a very influential voice regarding Trump’s political ambitions but, as the following important 2018 article in the Atlantic make clear, if we had to identify the figure how made the rise of Trump-style anti-democratic politics possible, Newt Gingrich would almost certainly have to be at the top of the list. He really is a genuinely despicable individual who spent decades using the strategy of creating chaos, poisoning the political atmosphere, and telling Big Lies for the purpose of gaining power under a no-holds-barred ethos. His political career is like a manifestation of Serpent’s Walk. The only reason his role in the destruction of American democracy isn’t more widely recognized is because he was so successful the entire GOP has been remade in his image. A remaking that took place long before Trump came along. Trump really is the logical conclusion of the existential psychic damage Gingrich inflicted in the US decades earlier:
“But few figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise. During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction. Gingrich’s career can perhaps be best understood as a grand exercise in devolution—an effort to strip American politics of the civilizing traits it had developed over time and return it to its most primal essence.”
A grand exercise in the devolution of America’s democracy. It’s a great way to summarize the career of Newt Gingrich. From the very beginning, when he first ran from Congress in 1978, Gingrich was intent on breaking Congress’s ability to function and then running against that dysfunction. A wildly cynical strategy that really did work. It’s how he took over the GOP:
It was Gingrich was ushered in an era where generating political “noise” was a goal in and of itself. Creating political fights for the purpose of getting attention. As Gingrich put it, “Noise became a proxy for status.” Noise that included making up goofy names for his opponents or indulging in the lowest quality conspiracy theories he could find. Sound familiar?
By 1994, the success of Gingrich’s ‘any and all smears’ strategy at taking down House Speaker Jim Wright makes him the de facto leader of the Republican Party. So in anticipation of the 1994 mid-terms, he comes up with a new innovation that should sound extremely familiar: blocking any and all legislation in the hopes that frustrated voters would blame the Democrats. It worked so well it created the largest political wave in modern history:
And what does Gingrich do after winning this wave? He reduces the time congress members spend on actual legislating so they can spend more time fund-raising from wealthy donors. It’s like he poisons everything he touches:
Oh, and then there’s the now-permanent threat of government shutdowns with every congressional budget. That wasn’t always the case. It’s another Gingrich innovation:
Flash forward to 2015, and we learn that Gingrich apparently played a role in Trump’s decision to run. Another ‘gift’ to America’s democracy:
But helping to bring about Trump’s candidacy isn’t Gingrich’s final ‘gift’ to America’s democracy. What Gingrich is doing now, by openly encouraging Trump to just start throwing out the ‘bad’ votes, that’s his final ‘gift’. Because there won’t be a democracy left once this is over. Which has clearly always been Newt’s goal. A four decade long quest to destroy the ability of America’s democracy to function and destroy the idea that conservatives and liberals could even coexist. That’s openly been his goal all along and he isn’t shy about this.
So perhaps one of the silver linings of the nightmare situation the US finds itself in is that maybe now we can finally come to terms with incredible damage Newt Gingrich did to America that helped bring us to this point. Again, it’s as if his career was dedicated to carrying out the fascist takeover of the United States described in Serpent’s Walk. That’s a truly reprehensible yet profoundly impactful legacy that isn’t done yet. If Newt is going to go on Fox News and put these ideas in Trump’s head it’s clear his assault on America’s democracy isn’t over. There’s a few more chapters left in Gingrich revolution and if history is a guide they’ll be the worst chapters. More incredible damage is on the way. Peak Newt is upon us. Trump is just his vessel. Perhaps now we can finally recognize this. Better later than never, even if its way too late.
The End is Nigh for the Trump administration. At least that appears to be the case now that the networks have finally all called the election for Joe Biden. So it really might be over, assuming the election results are accepted, of course. And as we should expect, the Trump administration is refusing to concede and continuing to make allegation of mass voter fraud. So this isn’t really over yet. It’s just closer to officially being over but, unofficially, there’s no end in site. Only Trump his millions of followers get to decide when this is truly over, which is part of what makes this phase of the Trump experience so perilous. We might be at the beginning of the end. But we also might be at the beginning of some sort of horrible domestic terror movement fighting for Trump’s ‘stolen honor’ or something. A neo-neo-Confederacy movement. That could easily happen and Trump’s refusal to concede is only pointing in that direction.
We also have yet to get a sense of whether or not the Republican Party remains a plaything of the Trump family or if we’re going to see some sort of passing of the torch of the GOP’s id to some other personality. There’s long been talk of Trump forming his own media outlet should he leave office., the kind of thought that must have Fox News quaking it its boots. We’re already hearing about a Trump 2024 rerun. It’s a real possibility.
But it’s also possible we’ll see Trump effectively flee the country in coming months. After all, we know there were tons of crimes committed by this administration but we have no idea yet just how many undiscovered crimes are just sitting there waiting with evidence to be exposed. In other words, Trump is the unchallenged leader of the Republican Party right now but It will probably take a few months for a Biden administration to settle into the role and conduct a damage assessment before we really have a sense of what kind of long-term criminal liabilities Trump could be dealing with in coming years.
So while Trump is still the leader of a American conservative movement, and might remain in that role, it’s still a fluid enough situation where we can’t assume he’ll necessarily be the leader of the #MAGA cult in the months and years to come. Which raises the question of who might step into that role if Trump can’t or won’t do it. Who is even remotely qualified? They would have to have their pulse on the id of conservative America, the media skills to exploit it, and the lack of moral compass required to engage in such behavior. And while there’s no shortage of people who have some of those skills there aren’t that many people with all of them. But there is one pair of individual who have those skills in spades and are more than capable of stepping into the void should Trump’s presence in the American psyche no longer be an option: Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson.
Alex Jones is an obvious choice for replacing Trump as the id of #MAGA America. He’s pretty much carrying out that role already. The rise of Trump arguably couldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been preceded by the rise of social media as a primary new source for Americans and the Alex Jones-style pop garbage conspiracy theories that dominate those platforms. By the end of the George W. Bush administration, which was so disastrous even conservatives were looking to distance themselves from the trainwreck, we’ve seen growing interest in the Alex Jones worldview that peddles to the audience the narrative that it’s actually secret Satanic left-wing(((Jewish)}} Illuminati billionaires who are behind the world’s ills, and that includes the Bush family. All of your woes are due to secret ultra wealthy power hungry left-wingers who are secretly plotting against white American and are planning on imprisoning us all in some sort of techno-communist dystopia. Big media is actually all secretly left-wing — let’s just ignore the vast right-wing disinfotainment complex that has dominated political messaging in the US for decades and the Big Media’s corporatist track record and coddling of Republicans — and big corporations and Wall Street are all in league with this left-wing movement to subjugate the populace. All of the socioeconomic woes experienced by working class Americans aren’t a consequence of the US’s extreme lurch to the right on economic policy. No, they’re a consequence of a secret Satanic left-wing cabal that actually has communist in mind. All of the socioeconomc blowback from decades of supporting the GOP’s ruthlessness corporatism is actually the fault of a diabolical alliance of Hollywood and teachers unions plotting against white conservatives. It’s that fundamentally ahistorical and warped presentation of history that has helped propel Alex Jones into the hearts and minds of conservatives across the US. It’s so seductively stupid you couldn’t have had QAnon had people not already been trained by Alex Jones to shut their brains off. He really is the id of modern day conservatism. If there’s a replacement for Trump it’s hard to see why it shouldn’t be Alex Jones. He’s already writing Trump’s scripts.
But, of course, while Alex Jones has widespread appeal on the right, and an alarming level of appeal among the apolitical, it’s still dicey for a political party to have Alex as its official mouthpiece. He’s just a little too loopy for 2024. The 2028 Republican Party might be ready for an Alex Jones run for the White House, but 2024 could be a little too soon. We’ll see.
And that brings us to Tucker Carlson, the preppie fascist who managed to reinvent himself as Fox New’s alleged ‘populist’ over the last few years. What sort of populism? Well, it’s basically just a slightly warmed over version Alex Jones. Tucker’s new ‘populist’ narrative is the same underlying Alex Jones narrative — that an elites left-wing cabal run out of Hollywood and Wall Street is plotting to utterly destroy the lives of conservative white Americans — just without using the terms ‘Zionist’ and ‘Illuminati’ all the time. He really does routinely make the allegation on his show that the Democratic party is the party of Big Business. Big Corporations LOVE the Democrats. Wall Street LOVES the Democrats. It’s only Trump’s Republican Party that stands between decent conservative Americans and the Democratic-led corporatist communist cabal.
It really is that stupid. And yet Tucker Carlson’s show is the highest-rated cable new show today. He’s wildly popular on the right. If there’s another figure who isn’t Donald Trump that almost every conservative American today will listen to it’s Tucker Carlson. He’s the mainstreamed Alex Jones. A genuinely Machiavellian mainstream Alex Jones who routinely pushes up-is-down, black-is-white Big Lies on his show without a hint of reticence. The guy clearly enjoys being a malevolent propagandist.
So if we’re going to try to answer the question who what happens to the Republican Party and US conservative movement going forward, it’s not just a question of what Donald Trump decides to do. It’s also a question of what Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson do in the coming months and years. Do they take on even bigger roles in shaping the movement? Will conservative Americans be even more convinced that a left-wing Illuminati is out to destroy them by 2024? Will they decide to lead some sort of violent MAGA insurrection? These are the kinds of questions we have to ask. Questions centered around Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson. Because no one else is really qualified to lead the kind of massive movement that Trump led, outside of Trump himself. Carlson and Jones have that ‘it’ factor (or perhaps ‘Q’ factor is the appropriate term). Few others can actually pull it off.
And that’s all why it’s going to be increasingly important going forward to point out that Tucker Carlson is not only a demonstrably fraudulent populist. He’s a self-admitted demonstrably fraudulent populist. It’s an admission he made to a Vox News reporter back in January of 2019, at time when there was a bunch of coverage of Carlson’s new found populism after he went on what appeared to be an anti-neo-liberalism rant on his show. It was a sharp departure from his decades of being a classic Republican corporatist shill. The kind of departure that raised all sorts of questions about what the hell was going on and to what extent it was just Carlson trying to capitalize on Trump’s fake populism. A fake populism that blames the woes for working class American exclusively on immigration and trade deals, and frames is as, again, part of some sort of left-wing corporate plot. The massive deregulation and slashing of taxes on the wealth and corporations and the decades of the Republican Party’s embrace of offshoring manufacturing wasn’t at fault for the destruction of US manufacturing jobs. No, it was actually a Democratic (((Illuminati))) plot to use immigrants against white working-class Americans. That narrative.
Was that narrative the explanation for Carlson’s seeming 180-degree shift? Well, as we’ll see in the interview, Carlson is surprisingly up front about his motives. As Carson puts it, “I’m just saying as a matter of fact,” he told me, “a country where a shrinking percentage of the population is taking home an ever-expanding proportion of the money is not a recipe for a stable society. It’s not.” Carlson then stressed that he is not a populist. But he believes some version of populism is necessary to prevent a full-scale political revolt or the onset of socialism. Using Theodore Roosevelt as an example of a president who recognized that labor needs economic power, Carlson added, “Unless you want something really extreme to happen, you need to take this seriously and figure out how to protect average people from these remarkably powerful forces that have been unleashed.” Yep, in his own words, Carlson isn’t a populist. He just plays one on TV in order to avoid a real political revolution in response to the wealthy capturing almost all of the wealth over the past forty years:
“Carlson told me he wanted to be clear: He is not a populist. But he believes some version of populism is necessary to prevent a full-scale political revolt or the onset of socialism. Using Theodore Roosevelt as an example of a president who recognized that labor needs economic power, he told me, “Unless you want something really extreme to happen, you need to take this seriously and figure out how to protect average people from these remarkably powerful forces that have been unleashed.””
He wanted to be clear he’s not a populist. He’s just very aware of the potential populism has to change a country and clearly wants to get out ahead of it. Get ahead of the populism driven by the spectacular failure of decades of the exact same right-wing economic policies he spent decades supporting. Get ahead of the populism by adopting the kind of rhetoric one would expect from an Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but twisting it so it’s just about the working-class white Americans that Trump appeals to. Twist it so the economic policies that destroyed working class white America are cast as part of a larger corporatist left-wing elitist conspiracy to destroy America with issues like trans rights or creeping secularism. It’s Machiavellian ‘populism’:
And note how didn’t have any particular policy changes in mind beyond tweaking the tax code. A tax code that Trump made even more distorted for the super-rich. It’s an example of how superficial Carlson’s ‘populism’ truly is. He makes populist-like noises but that’s it. Because his actual underlying message to his audience is that real solution to their economic woes is to somehow completely politically destroy ‘the left’ that’s already conspiring to destroy conservative America, and then everything will work out:
And it’s crucial to keep in mind that, while Carlson may have implicitly voiced some tepid criticism of long-standing Republican mantras when he went on the anti-neo-liberalism rant that prompted the above interview, if you watch his regular show such rants are pretty rare. Far more common are rants about ‘liberal coastal elites’ who are dead set on subjugating the ‘normal Americans’ with political correctness and immigration in league with the Big Corporate America. A near daily disgusting display or Machiavellian ‘populism’ that really is designed to confuse and misdirect the audience while promoting an underlying narrative that really is basically Alex Jones without the repeated ‘Illuminati’ or ‘Zionist’ references. Machiavellian ‘populism’ made all the Machiavellian by the fact that Carlson, the real Carlson, is himself a proud self-described elitist chauvinist with a long track record of literally joking about beating his servants:
“In another instance, the conversation on the show centered on Fox chair Rupert Murdoch’s decision to pull ultraconservative host Sean Hannity from broadcasting at a Cincinnati tea party rally in 2010. “I’m 100 percent [Murdoch’s] bitch,” Carlson said. “Whatever Mr. Murdoch says, I do. … I would be honored if he would cane me the way I cane my workers, my servants.””
Jokes about caning his servants in 2010. Yes, these were obviously just jokes. But taken in the context of Carlson’s life and career they sure didn’t seem like intentionally ironic jokes. More like just the cruel ‘punching down’ elitist humor that would be exactly the kind of humor that would have been Carlson’s ‘brand’ before he made his sudden ‘populist’ shift a few years ago.
And then there’s the 2009 ‘joke’ about how, growing up wealthy, Carlson learned that, “you don’t wanna stoke envy among the proletariat.” A lesson he’s demonstrably applying today. He literally explained it just like in the above interview. He’s not a populist, but he knows what populism can do, so he’s getting out ahead of it. With Alex Jones-style conspiracy theories that blame all of life’s problems on a left-wing communist Satanic billionaires:
And that’s why the Machiavellian nature of Carlson’s ‘populism’ today is so chilling. He really is an out-of-the-closet elitist. His words, from not that long ago. And he really is a fake populist. Again, his own damn words just last year. It’s not hard to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory versions of Tucker. Tucker Carlson has made it abundantly clear over the years that he doesn’t actually respect the rabble, but he does fear the rabble. New Tucker is just Old Tucker in populist drag, hoping to redirect and eventually lead the inevitable torches and pitchforks.
It’s the kind of fear that must be shared by far more out-of-the-closet elitist than just Carlson. After all, if you successfully loot a society you do have to wonder about the response. He wasn’t wrong about the potential power of populism and it’s not a stupid move for the elite billionaire to try and get ahead of it. Carlson’s fake populism makes logical sense. Logical deeply Machiavellian sense. Just as Rupert Murdoch giving him his prime time platform makes perfect logical Machiavellian sense. It’s worked, after all. He has the most influential show on cable TV. Millions of poor Americans who are offered nothing but doom from Republican policies are convinced that the party of the billionaires is the only thing that will protect them from the Satanic communist leftist cabal. Barring Trump, or Alex Jones, it’s hard to think of someone more influential with contemporary conservatives than Tucker Carlson, a proven and skilled Machiavellian ‘populist’. And that’s why any discussion of what comes next for the Trumpified (or Gingriched) Republican Party has to include a discussion of the role Tucker Carlson will play. If Alex Jones is the modern day conservative id, Tucker Carlson is that id’s mainstream persona. The future of the GOP isn’t clear, but what is clear is that it’s going to be deeply ‘populist’ in form and deeply Machiavellian in reality.
Carlson/Jones 2024!
I’ll believe Trump is out when I see him turning green in his coffin with a stake through his heart, a mouthful of garlic and three silver bullets in his head.... Unfortunately the doghandlers will just move on to the next.....
Timing is everything: President Trump just fired the Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper. And while this firing had been predicted for months, with many expecting Esper leave on his own before the 2020 election, it’s hard to think of a time when this particular move would have been more unsettling. That’s in part because of the timing, with this replacement taking place right when it looks like President Trump might be planning some sort of coup. But also because the source of Trump’s tensions with Esper appears to be heavily driven by Esper disagreement with Trump call to invoke the Insurrection Act and use of the military against protestors. So right when it looks like Trump might be very interested in using the military to quell protests over his refusal to leave office we have Trump replacing the head of the Pentagon wasn’t enthusiastic about his earlier attempts to use the military to quell protests. We knew the firing of Esper was just at matter of time but, wow, is that some ominous timing.
So it’s worth noting another major Pentagon position that just opened up: James Anderson, the acting undersecretary of defense for policy, just resigned from the influential Pentagon policy position in response to Esper’s firing. Who will replace him? Anthony Tata, a guy who Trump nominated for the position earlier this year. So why didn’t Tata get the job? Well, CNN unearthed a bunch of tweets that were inflammatory enough that even the Republican-controlled Senate soured on him. Tweets that included calling Obama a “terrorist” and a “Manchurian Candidate”. It also turns out that Tata is a regular on Fox News, of course. So Tata is exactly the kind of person who is grossly unqualified for such a position in general but excels at the one key qualification: Tata is extremely ‘Trumpian’ and appears to be the kind of person who won’t have qualms following Trumpian orders. And now he’s likely going to get this crucial Pentagon job right when it looks like Trump might be in the mood for a coup:
“Tata, who has been performing the duties of the deputy position since the summer, will now likely slide into the No. 1 role. After the White House announced his nomination this year, Tata came under fire for tweets calling Obama a “terrorist leader” and for referring to Islam as the “most oppressive violent religion I know of,” among other controversial statements.”
The guy called Obama a “terrorist leader”. That alone may have been all it took for Trump to initially nominate Tata for the position that he now appears to be poised to get.
But we should also note that when Trump had Tata in mind for that position when he nominated Tata over the summer, Trump also someone in mind for Tata’s chief of staff: Rich Higgins, a figure even more ‘Trumpian’ than Tata and who was fired from Trump’s National Security Council until he was fired for pushing conspiracy theories on Twitter:
So here’s a look at what we learned about Higgins back in July, before Tata’s nomination was withdrawn. We learned that Higgins was obsessed with charging people with being Chinese communist agents or compromised by communist agents. Everyone from Black Lives Matter members to Trump’s former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. He also claimed that former CIA director John Brennan issued a secret assassination order against Trump in 2018. And we also learned that the Trump White House was reportedly the force pushing for Higgins to get Tata’s chief of staff job. Tata and Higgins were like a package deal. And Higgins was just one of the ‘Trumpian’ figures Trump was trying to get installed in key positions in the Pentagon over the summer:
“The push to hire Higgins, a conspiracy theorist, and Tata, a frequent and ardent defender of the President on Fox News, to senior positions at the Pentagon comes as the White House seeks to install loyalists, many of whom hold extremist views, throughout the administration.”
It wasn’t the Pentagon’s idea to look into hiring Higgins. That idea came from the White House. And it’s no surprise why. Higgins is like a mini-Trump. Black Lives Matter and the media are all Marxists and John Brennan tried to have Trump killed. Most importantly for Trump, Higgins calls for the mass arrest of Trump’s opponents and charging them with treason:
And then there’s Higgins’s dismissal of the George Floyd protests as being a product of “Marxist” governments like Cuba and Venezuela. It’s the kind of language that suggests Higgins would be OK with treating any upcoming protests outside the White House as treason Marxist coup attempts:
So if we find that Anthony Tata does indeed assume the role of acting undersecretary of defense for policy, as now expected, should we also now expect that Rich Higgins’s hiring is just around the corner? We’ll find out. All we know at this point is that Trump wants loyalists in the Pentagon. Loyalists with a track record of calling Trump’s political enemies the enemies of the United States. If Trump isn’t planning on a coup he’s at least planning on implicitly threatening one.
Here’s a set of updates on President Trump’s last-minute high-level post-election national security leadership changes:
First, we’ve now learned that new Secretary of Defense, Christopher Miller, did indeed name Anthony Tata to replace James Anderson, the acting undersecretary of defense for policy, after Anderson resigned in protest of the firing of Miller’s predecessor, Mark Esper. So Tata, someone who called President Obama a “terrorist leader”, is indeed assuming that powerful Pentagon position.
Potentially far more significant was the move to make Michael Ellis—senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council and a former aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, Trump’s most loyal servant on the House Intelligence Committee—the general counsel of the National Security Agency. This decision was reportedly made at the behest of the White House and over the objections of NSA director gene. Paul Nakasone. So someone with a proven track record of acting as a Trump political shill now has a senior position in the world’s most powerful intelligence gathering agency.
Beyond that, CIA Director Gina Haspel and FBI Director Christopher Wray are reportedly on the chopping block, so we could see new leadership in those agencies in the near future. And Emily Murphy, director of the General Services Administration, refused to sign the letter that would allow Biden’s transition team to set up offices.
We’ve also learned that Miller, who was hand-picked by Trump to replace Esper, has already selected his Senior Advisor: Retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor. Like Athony Tata, Macgregor is a regular figure on Fox News who was turned down for senior Pentagon position earlier when his comments about Muslims and immigration came to light. He was also turned down for the position of ambassador to Germany, in part because of his comments that Muslim immigrants come to the the EU with the roles with the goal of eventually turning Europe into an Islamic state. He has also go for the declaration of martial law on the US-Mexico boarder and to “shoot people” if necessary.
So in these final(?) months of the Trump administration we’re seeing the figures who previously couldn’t make it through the nomination process for senior positions finally get those positions. Deep Trump loyalists with a track records that strongly suggest they would not just be fine with some sort of Trumpian coup but enthusiastic about it:
“Back in the Pentagon, after Esper was fired, James Anderson, the acting undersecretary of defense for policy, resigned in protest. Stepping up the chaos throughout the Defense Department, Christopher Miller—handpicked by Trump to take Esper’s place as defense secretary immediately—named Anthony Tata to take Anderson’s place. A retired one-star general turned action novelist, and Fox News commentator, Tata has publicly called Barack Obama a “terrorist leader” among other incendiary remarks. For that reason, Senate leaders declined to consider Tata for the job when Trump tried to nominate him last summer. On Tuesday morning, Miller, no doubt at Trump’s behest, named Tata an official ““performing the duties of”” the undersecretary for policy.”
The pieces are falling into place. One senior position after another is getting stacked with hardcore Trump loyalists. Hardcore Trump loyalists who couldn’t make it through the normal nomination process.
But perhaps the most disturbing new hire is arch-hack Michael Ellis ascending to general counsel of the NSA. So the guy who will ultimately decide what the NSA legally can do is an established hyper-partisan hack. He also happens to be the guy who tried to get Trump’s blackmail/shakedown phone call with Ukraine’s President Zelensky hidden away in a highly classified server. So Ellis is not just in a position to unleash the power of the NSA to an unprecedented degree but also bury evidence:
Also keep in mind that, of all those things of value that the Trump lackeys can take with them, top secret information is probably the most valuable asset because it’s the easiest to sell. They can take it and sell it and potentially no one needs to know. But it’s really fresh top secret information that’s the most valuable. So if we’re in store for a last round of information looting by the Trump minions in anticipation of selling that information after they leave the government we should probably also expect a fresh flood of top secret information to come onto the market. The longer they wait the less valuable it becomes.
Of course, any speculation about Trump minions obtaining and selling top secret information assumes the Trump administration is actually end soon. It assumes no coup. And all signs are pointing towards a coup. Or at least an ongoing exploration of the feasibility of the coup. Coup ‘feelers’ are clearly being sent out. And that’s part of what makes the selection of retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor to the position of Miller’s new Senior Advisor so disturbing. Because while Macgregor does have a track record of call for an end to endless wars — leading to speculation that his selection at this moment is intended to facilitate a more rapid withdrawal of US troops out of Afghanistan — he also has a track record of calling for martial law to be declared on the US-Mexico border. And if there’s one thing Trump has to guarantee is possible if he’s planning on staging a coup it’s martial law. You can’t have a coup without martial law:
“KFILE reviewed dozens of radio and television interviews with Macgregor and found he often demonized immigrants and refugees. He warned Mexican cartels were “driving millions of Mexicans with no education, no skills and the wrong culture into the United States, placing them essentially as wards of the American people.” He repeatedly advocated instituting martial law at the US-Mexico border and to “shoot people” if necessary.”
That’s the Secretary of Defense’s new Senior Advisor. A guy who has repeatedly advocated instituting martial law.
So as we can see, if indeed one of Trump’s plans at this moment is to fulfill his pledge to get all US troops out of Afghanistan by Christmas, we shouldn’t assume there aren’t going to be new orders awaiting those troops when they return home. Like orders to kill the American democracy. Whether or not the lower levels of the military would be willing to carry out orders of that nature from a bloodthirsty revanchist Trump administration is a grim question that has yet to be answered. It’s unfortunately less of a question for the military’s hand-picked senior leadership at this point.
Timothy Snyder wrote an op-ed with a refreshingly gloomy outlook on how the US presidential election will ultimately be resolved. Snyder implores us to ignore the reality that, yes, all available evidence points in the direction of a solid and fair Biden victory. Because as Snyder points out, reality doesn’t matter when you’re dealing with a authoritarian movement intent on pulling off a coup. Instead, what’s important is public perception. Public perceptions, not reality, of whether or not Trump had the election stolen from him are what will determine the kind of damage that will emerge from this period. Perceptions today but also perceptions months and years for now. As Snyder puts it, history shows where this can go. If people believe an election has been stolen, that makes the new president a usurper. Democracy really can be buried in a big lie. If enough people the lie, reality is kind of beside the point:
“After all, a claim that an election was illegitimate is a claim to remaining in power. A coup is under way, and the number of participants is not shrinking but growing. Few leading Republicans have acknowledged that the race is over. Important ones, such as Mitch McConnell and Mike Pompeo, appear to be on the side of the coup. We might like to think that this is all some strategy to find the president an exit ramp. But perhaps that is wishful thinking. The transition office refuses to begin its work. The secretary of defense, who did not want the army attacking civilians, was fired. The Department of Justice, exceeding its traditional mandate, has authorized investigations of the vote count. The talk shows on Fox this week contradict the news released by Fox last week. Republican lawmakers find ever new verbal formulations that directly or indirectly support Trump’s claims. The longer this goes on, the greater the danger to the Republic.”
A coup is under way, and the number of participants is not shrinking but growing. That’s the key underlying grim observation here. The GOP’s leadership is falling in line behind the big lie. We know where this can go:
And as the following article points out, it’s far from just the GOP leadership getting behind the big lie. The Republican electorate has already largely embraced it too. According to a recent survey conducted Nov. 6–9, around 70 percent of Republicans have already concluded that the election was not free and fair. Donald Trump had the election stolen from him. That big lie is already GOP’s consensus reality:
“Multiple new organizations announced Biden as the election winner on Saturday after four days of counting in several swing states. Following the news, 70 percent of Republicans now say they don’t believe the 2020 election was free and fair, a stark rise from the 35 percent of GOP voters who held similar beliefs before the election. Meanwhile, trust in the election system grew for Democrats, many who took to the streets to celebrate Biden’s victory on Saturday. Ninety percent of Democrats now say the election was free and fair, up from 52 percent before Nov. 3 who thought it would be.”
Unless something dramatic happens, this is going to be the case forever. 2020 will forever be a stolen election in the collective minds of the GOP, with all of the potential future implications Timothy Snyder (and history) warned us about. At this point, given the psychological grip President Trump continues to have on the Republican Party, it’s hard to think of anything that could convince the Republican base that the election wasn’t stolen from Trump other than Trump himself coming out and accepting the election results.
And as the following NBC article describes, there should be NO expectation of Trump EVER accepting the election results. The furthest he is will to go is to continue claiming the results were rigged against him but to drop his legal challenges. In other words, he’s willing to leave the White House peacefully, eventually, but only under a cloud of continued accusations that the election was stolen. This is what anonymous White House insiders are telling reporters. The compromise position Trump is willing to get to is one where he leaves the 2020 election as a permanent festering wound for America’s democracy:
““Do not expect him to concede,” one top aide said. More likely, the aide said, “he’ll say something like, ‘We can’t trust the results, but I’m not contesting them.’””
Trump will say something like, “We can’t trust the results, but I’m not contesting them.” That’s as good as it’s going to get. Don’t expect anything more from Trump. Ever. This is going to be a forever lost cause:
As one White House official puts it, it’s not wrong for the Biden team to call this theater. And this anonymous official is correct. Big Lies are theater. Theater designed to divide and conquer a society.
In related news, Trump is reportedly also looking into create a media empire that will take on Fox News. So Trump’s plans include not only continuing with this Big Lie but creating a media empire to amplify it. Get ready for a lot more ‘theater’.
The ongoing constitutional crisis created by President Trump’s Big Lie insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him at the same time he makes sweeping high-level personnel that would appear to be consistent with coup plans has understandably focused on Trump’s personal psychological state and his ability to even accept the possibility of losing.
But as we saw in that recent NBC News article where anonymous White House insiders warned that Trump would likely never accept the election results, it’s not just Trump who is resisting conceding the election. There’s a faction of senior advisors — most of them associated with the reelection campaign — who are telling Trump there’s still a path to victory:
So we have to ask, who are these people still telling Trump he has a path to victory? At this point it’s all anonymous sources talking about anonymous aides.
But when it comes to Trump’s “senior aides” for dirty tricks operations there are a couple of obvious suspects: Roger Stone and Steve Bannon. If Trump is planning on some sort of grand scheme to steal a victory he’s probably coordinating with Stone and Bannon and likely outsourcing part of the scheme to them.
And that, in turn, raises the question of what Stone and Bannon have been up to since the election. So it will probably come as little surprise that the “Stop the Steal” viral social media campaign that erupted almost immediately online following the election as a kind of umbrella protest to the general election results was created by Roger Stone. Four years ago. Yep, “Stop the Steal” was first launched by Stone during the 2016 GOP primaries. At that point it was the establishment Republicans like Marco Rubio who were stealing Trump’s victory. The slogan was revived again during the 2018 mid-terms for the close Florida gubernatorial race. But it was in 2020 when the “Stop the Steal” campaign really took off.
And as the following CNN article describes, ‘Stop the Steal’ is very much a Roger Stone operation. With help from figures close to Steve Bannon. On November 4, 2020, the Stop the Steal Facebook group was launched by Amy Kremer, the chair of Women for America First. Kremer has previously started a super-PAC with Roger Stone’s ex-wife called Women Vote Trump.
The Stop the Steal Facebook page was then managed by a team of conservative activists, including Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, a couple who have both written for Breitbart. Stockton and Lawrence were also both part of the “We Build the Wall” campaign. Recall how campaign finance violations associated with “We Build the Wall” led to Bannon’s arrest of the yacht of Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui (because they were basically scamming the donors). Stockton and Lawrence claim they’ve had no contact with Bannon since he was indicted in August.
As we’re also going to see, back in September, Roger Stone was publicly telling Trump to declared martial law and mass arrest his political opponents should he lose the election. And then there’s Steve Bannon’s recent advice to Trump supporters that they need to be willing to fight and die for Trump’s reelection. So if Trump is indeed getting advice from Stone and Bannon that advice is presumably advice to declare the election stolen and to prepare for war. The same advice they’re giving Trump’s supporters:
“Stone’s political action committee launched a “Stop the Steal” website in 2016 to fundraise ahead of that election, asking for $10,000 donations by saying, “If this election is close, THEY WILL STEAL IT.””
It’s a meme older than Trump’s presidency: if Trump loses, it’s because it was stolen:
Flash forward to the 2020 elections, and we find Amy Kremer, an associated of Roger Stone’s ex-wife, launching a new “Stop the Steal” Facebook group on November 4. The page is administered by Bannon associates Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence:
And then on November 5, Bannon himself launches an “Own your Vote” Facebook page pushing the same “Stop the Steal” message. Spinoff Facebook groups rapidly spread. It’s how digital ‘grassroots’ activism is done these days:
And as disinformation researchers observed, the national focus on the contested vote created a perfect environment for conservatives to get radicalized in real-time. All of a sudden, the kind of groups that routinely talk about ‘red-pilling’ and political violence had a much larger and more receptive audience:
So of course we’re also learning that these groups are actively encouraging violence, like when Dustin Stockton implored followers to “clean your guns”:
And this entire time, Stone and Bannon have personally been appearing online to push the idea that the election was stolen from Trump. Bannon has his own podcast and Stone appears on shows like InfoWars. They really are acting as disinformation ringleaders:
Finally, note how Stone is distancing himself from Bannon, calling Bannon an “enemy of the people” when asked about his association with him. That’s the kind of over-to-top denial we should expect if Stone and Bannon are not just working with each other but working on something truly treacherous and diabolical. It’s a tell:
So that’s what Bannon and Stone are pubicly up to. It raises the question of what Stone is advising Trump to do privately. So here’s a look at what Stone was publicly telling Trump specifically to do should he lose the election back in September: declare martial law and arrest your opponents. Because the election will obviously have been stolen if you lose:
“During his September 10 appearance on The Alex Jones Show, Stone declared that the only legitimate outcome to the 2020 election would be a Trump victory. He made this assertion on the basis of his entirely unfounded claim that early voting has been marred by widespread voter fraud.”
The only possible valid outcome is a Trump victory. Anything else is a sign of rampant voter fraud. That was Roger Stone’s message to Alex Jone’s audience nearly two months before the election. And then Stone then calls for Trump to declare martial law. On Alex Jone’s show:
We can’t say we weren’t warned. They’ve been open about this psyop for a while. Which means they’ve had quite a while to encourage their audience to think about and accept the idea of fighting and dying for Trump’s glory. Which is exactly what Steve Bannon was encouraging his audience to get ready to do. Fight and die for Trump’s quest to defeat America’s democracy. On Veterans Days, of all days:
“STEVE BANNON (CO-HOST): It wasn’t the impeachment that was really going to cause a constitutional crisis, right? You could see how that was going to kind of play out. But it was this vote in 2020 and particularly as you saw the Democrats go to this mail-in vote — ladies and gentlemen we’re hurtling towards a real constitutional crisis and it’s going to start — this prairie fire is going to burn right up to the first week of December. And you’re going to see some very interesting things. We’re going to need a couple profiles in courage. We’re going to need a couple of Horatius at the gate in the first week of December — places like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia. It’s all coming.”
We’re going to need a couple profiles in courage. We’re going to need a couple of Horatius at the gate in the first week of December. That was Bannon’s message to his audience. Be prepared to die for Trump. In the first week of December.
So just as Roger Stone made it abundantly clear months ago that they were going to declare the election stolen if Trump loses, we’re now getting hints from Bannon that some sort of violent actions are planned for the first week of December. People are going to die. Along with America’s democracy. For the glory Trump. We’ve been warned. Again.
Much has been said about the trainwreck press conference by President Trump’s legal team on Thursday, where Trump’s attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis made a slew of accusations about election rigging involving Venezuela, servers in Germany, followed up by promises that evidence for these accusations would be coming in the future. It was the kind of press conference that raised more questions than it answered, largely because it didn’t actually answer any question at all. And yet, in waging a press conference that is simultaneously evidence-free and yet filled with far flung international conspiracy claims that appear to have come from QAnon, we did indirectly get an answer to the question of the Trump team’s underlying strategy. It’s a strategy that should sound very familiar by now: They’re running Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with sh#t” strategy, where any and all accusations, no matter how unfounded, are welcome because the strategy doesn’t involve convince the public of anything. It’s a strategy of drowning the public in a flood of sh#t to convince the public it can’t believe anything:
“In a 90-minute, off-the-walls press conference Thursday, three attorneys for the Trump campaign used a tactic that former Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon once called “flooding the zone with sh it,” throwing wild accusations at the wall and hectoring the media for not amplifying their nonsense even more.”
It’s a diabolically simple strategy. And effective when deployed by skilled bullsh#t artists. And as the following article points out, it’s a strategy that Trump’s legal team has been executive under the direct advice of Steve Bannon himself. As we’ve seen, both Steven Bannon and Roger Stone have reportedly been whispering in Trump’s ear during this post-election period and encouraging Trump not to concede. Now we’re learning that Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s legal team are apparently working closely with Bannon too:
“According to people familiar with their conversations, Giuliani is conferring regularly with Stephen K. Bannon, the controversial former White House adviser who earlier this month called for Anthony S. Fauci, the coronavirus task force member, to be beheaded.”
Yes, the surreal Thursday press conference wasn’t solely the creation of Rudy Giuliani’s addled mind. It was Steve Bannon production too:
So as we game out what exactly Trump has in mind in carrying out this strategy of refuting the election results, keep in mind that we’re currently in the midst of a “flood the zone with sh#t” strategy. A strategy brought to us by America’s leading fascist political strategist, Steve Bannon, which means this is presumably going to be followed up with some sort of ‘and now we break democracy once and for all’ strategy.
Here’s the kind of story that has long been extremely relevant to understanding the contemporary dynamics of US politics but has taken on an additional relevancy in the era of QAnon, the systematic demonization of ‘the left’ as an evil force in America, and the growing threat of a Trump-led civil war:
There was a recent interview by former right-wing media creator Mathew Sheffield — who helped found NewsBusters and became the founding online managing editor of the Washington Examiner — that underscores why it really is appropriate to label the contemporary right-wing media industry as a dangerous disinfotainment complex. As Sheffield puts it, “I basically built the infrastructure for a lot of conservative online people and personally taught a lot of them what they know,” so he’s someone extreme well-positioned to comment on the actual thinking of the people generating this content. And it was that dishonest nature of that thinking, where facts were treated as acceptable casualties in a broader political war, that eventually disillusioned Sheffield and brought him to this point where he’s ready to expose what is effectively a Big Lie machine. A Big Lie machine that has as its core message the idea that Christians are under attack by secular Americans who are fundamentally evil. THAT’s been the meta-message at the core of US conservative media for years: secular Americans are attacking you Christians because they are evil. In other words, the QAnon meta-meme:
“But Mr. Sheffield, who is 42 and lives in the Los Angeles area, grew disillusioned in recent years. He said facts were treated as an acceptable casualty in the broader political war. “The end justifies the means,” said Mr. Sheffield, who hosts a politics and technology podcast called Theory of Change and is writing a memoir about growing up in a strict Mormon family. He now blames right-wing media for undermining faith in American democracy by spreading unsubstantiated claims by President Trump and others that the election was rigged. Through websites and platforms like Facebook and YouTube, Mr. Sheffield said, right-wing media has created an environment in which a large portion of the population believes in a “different reality.””
As Sheffield observes, you can’t just blame President Trump for spreading unsubstantiated claims of election rigging and undermining the public’s faith in democracy. This has been a group effort and right-wing media has been missed a beat.
But just as insidious as the endless attacks on democracy has been the long-standing meme that Christians — and people of faith in general — are under attack from evil secular liberal. As Sheffield points out, the view that Christians are under attack by secular liberals is FUNDAMENTAL to understanding the parallel version of reality concocted by right-wing media:
And that’s a big part of why memes about roving armies of antifa and Black Lives Matter super-soldiers coming into suburbs to drive burn down conservatives in their homes have so much resonance with conservative audiences who really do ACTUALLY believe this. They believe this because they’ve been told this day was coming FOR YEARS from right-wing media. ‘The left’ is evil and hates you and wants to destroy you. That’s been the meta-message from right-wing media. And in 2020, with the merger of traditional right-wing media with Alex Jones-style trash conspiracy theory media in the age of Trump, that meta-meme is now the QAnon meta-meme where ‘The left’ is evil and hates you and wants to destroy you and abduct and kill your children in Satanic sex rituals...and also stole the election.
So as the US wrestles with holding itself together going forward during a period with the unchallenged leader of conservative America is an icon of that QAnon-style worldview it’s going to be important to keep in mind that the message targeting conservative audiences isn’t just that Democrats stole the election. The complete message is that Democrats stole the election because liberals are evil and want to destroy conservative Christians and all that is decent....and also sacrifice children in Satanic sex rituals. And as Mathew Sheffield is now telling us, spreading this meat-message about the fundamental threat evil secular liberals pose to Christians is at the very core of of right-wing media’s business model, facts be damned.
THAT SERPENT IS MOTORING NOW! This country is badly in need of an Evilectomy (new word, pass it around). I am just finishing up
“The Plot to Seize the White House” came close that time. Once the Nazis were in along with the US oligarchs, rigging Democracy was ON! The answer is the system is rigged, the proof and the ways and means are still available. Serpents Walk includes a Plandemic, and here it is!...
There was an interesting development in Steve Bannon’s legal fight over the “We Build the Wall” campaign finance violations: Bannon just switched lawyers. The exact reason wasn’t given, but we are told that Bannon and his lawyer parted ways amicably after agreeing that a different lawyer would be better suited for Bannon’s defense strategy. So while we don’t know what exactly that defense strategy is, we do know it’s the kind of strategy a lawyer might part ways with their client over:
“Attorney William A. Burck sent a letter to the trial judge in Manhattan federal court to say that Burck and Stephen Bannon had amicably agreed that new lawyers would be better suited to Bannon’s defense strategy.”
What’s the mystery strategy? What types of strategies would require a whole new legal team? At this point we know it involves pleading not guilty but that’s about it.
But there are two more sigificant data points we know about this case that gives us a hint as to what type of defense strategy Bannon has in mind. The first data point is that President Trump is probably in a mood to pardon right about now, as his recent pardon Michael Flynn reminds us.
Ans as the following article from back in August describes, we also know that Steve Bannon’s testimony could probably send a lot of people close to Trump directly to jail. Trump, Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and even Erik Prince are all potentially at serious legal risk from Bannon spilling the beans. As the article warned at the time, the major obstacle preventing a Bannon pardon is simply the politics of the move and the then-upcoming election. But that’s not really an issue now. The main issue, at least from President Trump’s perspective, is likely avoiding legal troubles when he leaves office. And Trump’s need to avoid legal troubles is put in direct peril by the fact that Bannon could easily be facing 7–14 years in prison for his campaign finance violations. So if prosecutors approached Bannon about a plea deal he might be willing to talk about all of the other investigations . And that’s the kind of situation that could be making a pardon for Bannon extra tempting for both Bannon and Trump:
““It wouldn’t surprise me to see a judge impose something more along the lines of seven years, but it’s still a substantial amount of time for someone of his age,” McQuade said of Bannon, who is 66.”
What might Steve Bannon do to avoid a seven year, or longer, prison sentence? What information might he share. It’s the kind of question a number of federal prosecutors, especially in the SDNY, are probably asking themselves right about now which is why Trump himself has to be asking the same question:
So should we expect a pardon for Bannon soon? The stars do appear to be aligning that way. But perhaps we shouldn’t expect it too soon. Bannon is, after all, reportedly acting as a lead strategist in Trump’s plans to stay in office through any means necessary and that strategy includes Bannon floating the idea that people are going to have to be willing to die to keep Trump in office, in particular in the first week of December. Which means he might have a few more major crimes to commit before he asks for that pardon.
There’s no shortage of disturbing aspects to the Trump White House’s growing daily campaign to delegitimize the outcome of the 2020 election and declare it stolen as a result of an international vote-rigging conspiracy — one that includes a number of Republican state officials — but perhaps the two most disturbing parts of it all are that Steve Bannon and Roger Stone appear to be key architects of the strategy. Steve Bannon is calling on supporters to be ready to die for a second Trump term while Roger Stone was publicly advising President Trump to declare martial law and mass jail his political enemies if he lost the election back in September. About the only positive part of the situation is that Bannon and Stone aren’t officially part of the Trump legal team. And then this happened: Days after the Department of Justice changed the rules for federal executions to allow for death by firing squad, Trump attorney Joseph diGenova went on Newsmax and plainly stated that Chris Krebs — the former cybersecurity official for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and someone who has been highly critical of the accusations of widespread voting machine fraud and was fired by Trump a couple of weeks ago — should be “taken out at dawn and shot”. There’s no indication he was joking:
““Anybody who thinks that this election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be the head of cybersecurity. That guy is a class‑A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot,” diGenova said on Monday during the Howie Carr radio show, a program syndicated by the far-right propaganda channel NewsMax TV.”
As we can see, it isn’t just the people who unofficially speak for Trump like Bannon and Stone calling for political executions. It’s official. DiGenova was doing an interview as Trump’s attorney when he made that statement and he wasn’t obviously joking. The idea of mass political executions has now been injected into the political space by someone speaking for the president. And as the comments by hate-preacher Rick Wiles made clear, at least some of Trump’s followers were listening to diGenova and highly receptive to the idea. They just don’t want to limit the killing to Chris Krebs:
Keep in mind that these hints of mass killings of Democrats, the news media, leftists, scientists, professors are very much in line with the concept of the QAnon “Storm”, where Trump mass arrests the Satanic communist fascist baby-eating cabal running the world and executes them. So diGenova was operating on now-familiar rhetorical ground when he made those statements.
Also keep in mind that it was a little over a week ago when now-former Trump attorney Sidney Powell effectively “Jumped the Shark” when she made her claims about Georgia Republicans like Governor Brian Kemp being involved in the mass vote-rigging against Trump and she was formally kicked off of Trump’s legal team within a day. And as of Tuesday evening, DiGenova is still on Trump’s legal team. Because calls for the execution of Trump’s political opponents aren’t some ‘Jumping the Sharking’ plot diversion in the Trump era. They’re the main plot.
Here’s a pair of articles that give us a sense of what kind of advice President Trump is receiving as he gets closer and closer to running out of legal options in contesting the election results:
First, here’s a TPM piece about public calls for Trump to declare martial law under the guise of having the military oversee a re-vote. See, it’s just a temporary martial law. Just until the new election is administered. That’s the advice the recently-pardoned Michael Flynn gave Trump alongside pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood. In keeping with the military theme, Sidney Powell — who was recently a member of the Trump campaign’s legal team until she started calling Georgia’s elected Republican officials members of the ‘Deep State’ cabal working to steal the election from Trump — also called for Trump to suspend the Electoral College and set up a military tribunal to investigate voter fraud.
Keep in mind that the whole QAnon narrative involves martial law and mass military tribunals. That’s what “the Storm” is supposed to be. So these calls for martial law are going to have a very receptive audience among the QAnon followers.
But also keep in mind a new trend that could make those calls much more appealing for mainstream conservatives: Attorney General Bill Barr is now being increasingly portrayed by right-wing commentators as being a member of the hypothetical anti-Trump ‘Deep State’ too after he recently gave an interview where he stated there’s no existing evidence of systematic voter fraud. Roger Stone, who was give kid-glove treatment by Barr back in February, is on Parler — the new social media platform where mainstream conservatives and neo-Nazis are encouraged to intermingled — pushing the idea that Barr is part of a conspiracy to take down Trump.
So calls for martial law and military tribunals are likely to have increasing resonance with Trump’s base as this plays out as growing numbers of Republicans, including Attorney General Bill Barr, are thrown into the ‘Deep State’ polemical pile. The more it seems like the entire system is rigged against Trump the more tempting it will be to tear it all down:
“The press release cites President Abraham Lincoln’s actions during the Civil War and asserts that deploying martial law is the only way to avoid a “shooting civil war.””
Martial law is the only way to avoid a “shooting civil war.” Expect that to be part of the ultimate rationale should Trump try to pull this trigger. Martial law as a compassionate move intended to preemptively save lives. And only temporarily until the new militarily-administered re-vote is conducted. It’s all so civil:
And then Sidney Powell went as far as calling for the invocation of the Insurrection Act to not just suspend Joe Biden’s inauguration in January but also suspend the Georgia Senate runoff special elections. And also conduct military tribunals to investigate voter fraud. Considering that Powell was kicked off of Trump’s legal team in part for charge Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp with being in on the plot to thwart Trump those military tribunals would presumably include a vigorous investigation of Kemp and any other elected Republican officials who didn’t go along with the massive-voter fraud claims:
So assuming Trump did indeed declare martial law, and the military went along with it and administrated a re-vote, what kind of results would this Trump cabal deem to be reasonable and acceptable? Well, we got an idea of what they think the real vote tally looked like when Lin Wood and Roger Stone appeared as a “Stop the Steal” rally in Georgia yesterday. Recall that Roger Stone started “Stop the Steal” during the 2016 primaries to help Trump secure the nomination. Wood proclaimed near the end of the rally that he has seen the “real” election results. Trump won overwhelmingly, with 410 votes. He even won California! Yep. It’s an important insight into the nature of the narrative that the Trump base is being told by this group of pied pipers. The narrative that Trump is so wildly people with the “real Americans” that he won almost every state. Only a tiny cabal of international communists, George Soros, the ‘Deep State’ (including Bill Barr and any other Republican who doesn’t support these voter fraud charges), and a few liberal enclaves on the coasts rejected Trump. Everyone else loves him and want him to be president forever. That’s the narrative. The kind of a narrative that makes declarations of martial law and military tribunals seem like the only option available.
Sidney Powell joined Wood at the Georgia Rally and both shared a bit of advice with the crowd that gives us an idea of how soon they want to see this martial law declared: they told the crowd NOT to participate in the January 5 Georgia runoff special elections for the two Senate seats that will determine control of the Senate. Not if they have to vote on the communist-controlled voting systems. It’s a rather curious piece of advice to give to Republicans but it’s at least consistent with the broader narrative is the whole election system is so broken that only martial law can fix it. And that’s what makes so calls to skip the runoffs so disturbing: it’s an indication that this group that is extreme close to Trump really is doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on the martial law plan. Soon:
““He won over 410 electoral votes,” Wood said, referring to President Donald Trump. “He damn near won every state including California!””
Everyone loves Trump! At least all REAL Americans. And if we just count of the REAL vote we’ll find Trump won in a historic landslide. If only the communists hadn’t corrupted everything, including Georgia’s Republican officials. It’s so corrupt that Republicans should just skip the Georgia runoffs in January. It’s the kind of strategy that makes no sense at all...unless the plan is to make elections a moot point in the very near future:
So it’s looking like we should probably expect the Trump team to use the January 5 Georgia Senate runoffs as a further excuse for martial law, assuming it hasn’t already been declared by then. Two more elections that are only going to be stolen by all of the communist-controlled election hardware. Only martial law can save us.
In related news, Trump just released a 46-minute video today dedicated to his voter fraud claims, saying it may be “the most important speech I’ve ever made.” And he might be correct in this being the most important speech he’s ever made given that this video is increasingly looking like a 46-minute preemptive justification for martial law, although the upcoming martial law declaration speech will presumably be more important.
@Pterrafractyl–
“Communists” infiltrating the Democratic party, controlling voting machines, etc.
Worth remembering this: ” . . . . Baragona was a Nazi from Fort Sill. . . . Garrison also obtained a transcript of a letter written by Ferrie to Baragona. Next to Baragona’s name, Garrison wrote: ‘Note Baragona is important.’ The letter had been sent to Garrison by Glenn Pinchback, and a carbon copy was sent to Mendel Rivers, a congressman from Georgia. (Pinchback worked in the Operations Command at Fort Sill, where he intercepted mail.) In the letter, Ferrie shared his dream of the re-unification of Germany and living in a world where all the currency was in Deutschmarks. Pinchback’s summation of the letter described a ‘Neo-Nazi plot to enslave America in the name of anti-Communism,’ and ‘a neo-Nazi plot gargantuan in scope.’ The Ferrie letter spoke of the need to kill all the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. . . . Pinchback also reportedly obtained a letter from David Ferrie to Baragona confessing his role in the assassination of Robert Gehrig, who was a Nazi and Fort Sill soldier. . . .”
With what is going on now, Pinchback’s analysis is disturbingly accurate.
The “squad” and their financing by Chakrabarti, et al, play right into this.
Best,
Dave
@Dave: One of the more puzzling trends to emerge in this post-election struggle is the push by pro-Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood to encourage Republican voters to skip the Georgia special Senate runoffs in January unless the entire alleged voter fraud that cheated Trump out of his victory is exposed in Georgia. It’s a puzzling argument on its surface, especially given the importance of those two Senate seats for the control of the Senate. And yet, if you look at right-wing media’s coverage of Wood and Powell, you’ll find overwhelmingly negative opinions of Powell’s and Wood’s proposed Georgia boycott expressed by right-wing writers on sites like Breitbart.com or Redstate.com, but the comments to those articles are filled with people claiming that they actually agree with Wood and Powell that there’s no point in voting in the special elections if the fraud that caused Trump to lose Georgia isn’t exposed. That’s not the uniform sentiment and there’s plenty of push-back, but it’s really remarkable how many random commenters on these sites really seem to agree with Powell/Wood position on the Georgia race. And while commenters can be spoofed and there’s undoubtedly some left-wing mischief involved, a number of these of long-standing regular right-wing commenters so there really does appear to be a general conviction among Trump’s base that there really was just massive overwhelming systematic voter fraud that stole the election from Trump.
Additionally, China has almost completely overtaken any other traditional right-wing boogeymen as being seen as THE primary threat to the US. The meme about Dominion System voting machines being remotely controlled by Communist China really has taken hold in the right-wing psyche. It’s a Chinese Communist plot to subvert American democracy, Antifa and BLM are just communist pawns, and if this election theft isn’t corrected NOW there will never be another fair election ever again. That’s a major part of the sense of desperation driving the right-wing right now. If Trump loses, Communist China wins America forever and antifa will roam the streets terrorizing conservatives who refuse to submit to communism.
Here’s an example of a RedState.com piece that denounces the the calls for Trump to declare martial law and force an election redo that was made by Michael Flynn a couple days ago in Georgia standing next to Wood. Take a look at the comments. It’s shockingly in favor of martial law. It reflect a growing sentiment on the right that allowing Trump to lose Georgia (and the Whites House in general) is basically the American conservative last stand, and if Trump isn’t given his rightful victory there’s never going to be a Republican elected ever again because the international Chinese-led conspiracy to rig US voting machines will ensure Communist Democrat rule forever. That’s the current zeitgeist of Trump’s base. If Trump doesn’t win a second term ALL IS LOST FOREVER. It’s the perfect environment for pushing the US into a ‘hot’ civil war. A ‘hot’ civil war over Trump.
Interestingly, we just got reports that Trump asked Lin Wood to tone down the rhetoric on the Georgia Senate during a private phone call. Trump and the Trump campaign are barely publicly pushing back on the Powell/Wood narrative and kind of playing footsie with it. Sure, Powell was kicked off the Trump legal team after she asserted that Georgia’s Republicans were in on the vote-rigging scheme, but there hasn’t really been any forceful public condemnation from Trump’s team. And from Trump’s perspective, a pair of GOP Senate losses in Georgia might actually be desirable. For starters, handing the Democrats control of the Senate would potentially make the GOP much more riled up for a Trump 2024 re-run and only fuel suspicions of voter fraud. But in the short-term, if the Democrats win those two senate seats, that’s going to make the already-desperate Trump base that much more desperate. And desperation and despair are the perfect fuel for some sort of real far right violent insurrection. Steve Bannon’s dream scenario. And Trump’s dream scenario since he would have an army fighting for him. Trump is winning the ultimate loyalty test: a large chunk of the GOP appears to be ready to fight and die for him and those in the GOP who aren’t expressing that same level zealousness are increasingly being seen as RINOs or ‘Deep State’ plants.
So if the GOP does end up losing those two Senate races on January 5, that period between January 5 and the Biden inauguration on January 20 could end up being two of the most dangerous weeks for the American democracy in the country’s history. If Trump declared martial law right now he might not have the extremely high level of support among GOP voters that he would need to successfully pull off a stunt like that. But if the GOP loses those Senate races, and then Trump declares martial law in the weeks before January 20, well we could be in a very different a darker place in terms of right-wing mass psychology. It’s something to keep in mind as this strange GOP ‘should we vote or not’ tension plays out in Georgia runoff. While the Republican Party might want to win those Senate races, Trump himself and the genuine fascists around him might actually prefer to see the GOP lose those seats.
Here’s another pair of articles hinting at ongoing plans inside the Trump administration to actually attempt to declare martial law. First, it turns out one of the new Trump appointees to the Pentagon that he put in place after the election, Scott O’Grady, has been openly supporting on Twitter Michael Flynn’s calls for Trump to declare martial law:
““I don’t know who needs to hear this,” the account said, “But calling for martial law is not a bad idea when there is an attempted coup against the president and this country happening right now.””
Martial law isn’t a bad idea given the coup attempt against Trump. That’s the sentiment shared by Scott O’Grady, the new , a couple of days ago, which also happens to be a couple days after his nomination was sent to the Senate. Given that O’Grady is ostensibly only going to hold this post until January 20, a Senate nomination is apparently kind of beside the point:
So if Trump does decide to declare martial law he’ll at least have the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs backing him up.
Now here’s a story about Trump’s ongoing affections for QAnon. Affections that are pretty understandable since Trump himself plays the starring role as savior of humanity in the QAnon mythology. If Trump does end up declaring martial law, it’s probably going to be QAnon believers who comprise the bulk of the public support. And according to people familiar with a phone call that took place between Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Trump himself brought up newly elected QAnon-friendly Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and went on to describe them as people who “basically believe in good government.” It’s a hint that, should Trump declare martial law, it will be framed as a “martial law for good government”. It’s also a sign that QAnon, a group that really will fight and die for a second Trump term and would enthusiastically embrace martial law, is increasingly on Trump’s mind:
“This person confirmed that Trump told those present that QAnon consists of people who “basically believe in good government,” which led to silence in the room. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows then said he had not heard the group described as such.”
“QAnon is people who basically believe in good government!” *crickets* That’s how Trump’s phone with Senate Republican leaders was described. When Sideny Powell and Lin Wood call for boycotts of the Georgia runoff unless all the ‘fraud’ is uncovered they’re basically speaking for the QAnon movement. A movement that portrays Trump as humanity’s last stand. If Trump doesn’t unleash “The Storm” before leaving office, it’s all over. Satan and Communist China win everything. America dies. That’s really the sentiment among a significant chunk of the Republican voter base. A base that is less the Republican voter base and more the Trump voter base these days. A voter base that’s increasingly convinced that a Trump second term is the only hope for the future at the same time it’s increasingly convinced there’s no point in voting.
Here’s an update on the bizarre showdown within the Republican Party over whether or not Republican voters should even bother voting in the upcoming Georgia senate runoff races that are just a month away:
First, recall how pro-Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood have been arguing that, due to all of the charges of electronic voting machine rigging by the Trump camp, Georgia Republicans should demand that the election fraud against Trump be completed exposed before the upcoming special elections because otherwise the vote would just be rigged again. Also recall how Powell was kicked off the Trump reelection legal team after she asserted that Georgia Republican governor Brian Kemp was involved with the vote-rigging...the kind of charge that creates an internal logic to calls to skip the special elections. After all, if even the Republican officials were in on the fraud against Trump why bother voting at all?
And now we’re learning that President made a phone call to Governor Kemp this morning, pressuring Kemp to help convince the Georgia legislature to overturn the election results and choose a new pro-Trump slate of state electors. Kemp reportedly informed Trump during the phone call that Georgia state law forbids the governor was getting involved in these kinds of matters. This all happened hours before Trump is scheduled to arrive in Georgia today for a rally for the runoff elections. Trump subsequently angrily tweeted about Kemp.
So hours before Trump is scheduled to headline this rally — a rally that’s ostensibly intended to encourage Republican voters to get out and vote in those special election — Trump was rebuffed by Kemp, someone Trump has already repeatedly disparaged, and was left angrily tweeting about Georgia’s Republican establishment. We’ll see what this says about Trump’s willingness to back the Georgia Republicans in those senate runoff races, but there’s one clear big lesson in all this: Trump is still very much interested in overturning the election results through any means possible, regardless of how sleazy it might be, as we get closer and closer to the legal deadlines:
“Trump asked Kemp to call a special session and convince state legislators to select their own electors that would support him, according to the source. He also asked the Republican governor to order an audit of absentee ballot signatures.”
Would Kemp please convince the state legislator to just give the election to Trump? Pretty please? That appears to be gist of Trump’s phone call to Kemp this morning...a morning when Republicans were on pins and needles about whether or not the Trump team is going to start backing the Republicans in these races or if he’ll continue treating these races as leverage in an apparent negotiation to overturn the results. And then Kemp turned him down and Trump started rage tweeting about it:
Is Trump going to be the Republic savior or a spurned lover? He’s sure sounding spurned. Spurned and betrayed by Georgia’s Republican establishment that isn’t reciprocated by saving him first.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that we aren’t just seeing a preview for how the next month might play out in Georgia’s special runoff races. We’re also arguably seeing a preview for how the vote counts for the 2024 presidential election could play out if indeed Trump does end up running for in 2024 as he has strongly hinted. Especially if Trump also ends up creating a Fox News-like right-wing media outlet as so many suspect. Imagine how much media and political pressure an out-of-office Trump could apply to convince state government to pass laws that make it easier for governors or legislatures to just make up their own slates of electors for basically any reason. He’ll have four years to work on this.
How many states, especially swing states, are going to have a period of complete state-level Republican rule over the next four years and how many of those states would be willing to rewrite their election laws to appease Trump? Based on what we’ve seen from today’s Republican Party, virtually ALL of the Republican-run states would probably do this. As long as Trump controls the hearts and minds of the Republican base there’s very little the rest of his GOPers can do to stand up to him. Plus, it’s not like the pre-Trump GOP had a problem with breaking the rules of democracy. Trump could be giving them an excuse to do something they’ve already been wanting to do for years anyway. “Trump’s unstoppable will forced us to break democracy!” is a pretty convenient narrative.
So while we watch this 2020 nightmare situation play out, it’s going to be worth keeping in mind that every time we see Trump fail in his attempts to find a legal loophole out of this electoral loss, we’re also seeing a preview of the kind of shoddy election laws the Trumpists would like to see in place in the future. Laws like the ability of any state legislature to just make up a new slate of electors for whatever specious reason they can come up with. That may not be an option for Republicans in 2020, but how about 2024? We’ll see. This is, of course, assuming there’s still elections in 2024 and Trump didn’t find extralegal means to win this election.
Are you willing to die for a second Trump term? That was the question implicitly asked by Steve Bannon a few weeks ago on his podcast when he pined for a pair of “Horatius”-like individuals in the first week of December, presumably a reference to the December 8 “Safe Harbor” deadline for states to submit their slate of elector to the electoral college for the December 14 electoral college vote. The Arizona Republican Party was a lot more explicit on Tuesday, when it responded to a tweet from Ali Alexander — one of the “Stop the Steal” figures close to Roger Stone — in which he pledged that he was “willing to give up my life for this fight,” prompting a reply from the official Arizona GOP account asking, “He is. Are you?” The Arizona GOP twitter account also tweeted a scene from the movie Rambo with the statement, “This is what we do, who we are. Live for nothing, or die for something,” but later deleted the tweet, citing copyright concerns. So the Arizona GOP appears to be veering into insurrectionist territory here. As the following article describes Arizona’s Republican governor Doug Ducey appeared to be pushing back on the tweets, declaring that the Republican Party stands for “law and order”. But Ducey is also one of the Republican governors in a state Joe Biden won who has been targeted by Trump for not doing enough to reverse the results. So we’re looking at a situation in Arizona where the Republican politician who came out against the idea of dying for a second Trump term is also someone who was already in President Trump’s rhetorical crosshairs, which makes this the kind of situation where championing idea of dying for a second Trump term is set to become a new standard for establishing one’s loyalty to Trump:
“In a now-deleted tweet from Monday, the party posted a movie scene from “Rambo” featuring the quote: “This is what we do, who we are. Live for nothing, or die for something.””
Rambo and calls to die for Trump. This is, again, the message from the official Arizona GOP this week, Governor Ducey’s protests notwithstanding:
You can bet Governor Ducey’s security detail is on extra high alert tonight. Because with the way the GOP’s mass psychology is moving, if you aren’t in favor of doing everything and anything possible to overturn the election results you are seen as a treasonous traitor. This is where we are.
And not just in Arizona. Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward just gave an interview where she gave an explanation for why she didn’t sign a letter sent by 64 of her fellow Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers requesting that federal lawmakers invalidate Pennsylvania’s results and hand the electors to Trump. As Ward explained it, she didn’t sign the letter because she hadn’t seen it before it was sent out. But Ward also added a warning about what would have happened if she refused to sign the letter and openly stated she disagreed with it. “If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’ I’d get my house bombed tonight.”:
“The Republican leader told the Times that she did not join the other 64 Pennsylvania Republicans who signed the letter because she did not see it before it was sent last Friday.”
She just happened to not see the letter. She didn’t openly refuse to sign it. It’s a convenient excuse. Really convenient. Otherwise her house gets bombed.
So we have the Arizona GOP openly calling for people to die for Trump at the same time the GOP leader of the Pennsylvania Senate is admitting that her house would be bombed if she doesn’t openly support the GOP’s moves to overturn the election. There’s more than one way to ‘die for Trump’.
It all raises the grim question: so when should we expect to start seeing far right ‘lone wolf’-style attacks tied to this election. It’s clearly coming. Trump and the GOP appear to be trying to ensure there’s going to be as many ‘lone wolf’ as possible in coming years. The rhetorical groundwork has being laid.
And as the following article hints at, we just may have seen the first round of 2020-election-related far right ‘lone wolf’ attacks. It’s not confirmed yet, but the clues are there in an unfolding investigation over a pair of heavily armed white men arrested in Florida on Tuesday following an armed standoff with law enforcement. The two men, Duane Lee Storey, 38, of Grand Junction, Colorado, and Cody Sean Brelsford, 41, of Placerville, Colorado, reportedly fired on random drivers Saturday night in Port Panama City. The suspect fled, broke through a police barricade, ended up in a dead end, and eventually gave themselves up to police after a standoff. The pair appear to have left Colorado on December 1, and are suspected in connection with a shooting death of a nurse who was driving along the interstate in Nashville, TN, on their way to Florida.
Here’s the part of the story that suggests the pair may have been prompted to do this over the election results: Storey reportedly told police investigators that “it was time to go to war.”
That’s our only available clue in terms of their motive. It’s a time to go to war.
We’re also told that Storey’s wife had a restraining order placed against him a few weeks ago and she fear he could harm himself or others. And his mother mother had asked authorities to check on her son December 3 because he had made odd statements about being part of the CIA. She said he was in the military and appeared to be suffering from PTSD. Based on the accounts from Storey’s wife and mother, he appears to have gone of the deep end relatively recently. Just in the last few weeks.
We have a statement from one of the armed gunman saying it’s a time to go to war and he appears to have become noticeably dangerous to those around him just in the last few weeks. And he and his buddy go on a cross-country shooting spree during the first week of December, the exact same week Steve Bannon told his followers people are going to have to be willing to die for a second Trump term. And while one of the gunman appears to have known mental health issues, this can’t be simply one mentally ill person losing control. This is a pair of individuals, suggesting some sort of shared motive. So we have to ask: was this seemingly random killing spree the response of Trump voters answer the GOP’s calls for war?:
“The vehicle drove through a barricade at Port Panama City, before reaching a dead end, where an armed standoff ensued. Storey and Brelsford were heavily armed and wearing body armor, according to Bay County Sheriff’s officials.”
Heavily armed and wearing body armor. The pair clearly set off on this road trip in preparation for some sort of armed conflict. Or as Storey put it to investigators, “it was time to go to war.” And while Storey appears to have mental health issues (and thinks he’s part of the CIA), this isn’t just the story of someone suffering from delusions going off and chasing those delusions. This is a pair of individuals. Something was jointly motivating them to go on this killing spree:
We’ll presumably eventually learn what exactly they were planning on going to war for, but based on the timing there’s only one obvious ‘war’ being declared in American right now. And between the Arizona GOP, right-wing media outlets, figures like Steve Bannon, the rest of the far right communication infrastructure, and Trump himself, it’s a pretty loud declaration. Loud enough that everyone, including heavily armed individuals with mental health issues, can hear them. It’s a reminder that the people who are going to be dying for a second Trump term include all of the victims of the stoked violence.
Now that the Supreme Court has thrown out the bonkers lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton against the states of Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to force the states to overturn their presidential election results we are back to the question, “what’s next?” Now that time has essential run out for any legal means of overturning the election results, what should we expect next from a Republican Party animated by a base that appears to be absolutely convinced of a grand conspiracy to steal the election from Trump? Especially since the evolving narrative of this conspiracy is that it apparently includes Republican officials like Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp.
And here’s our hint about what’s next: A pro-Trump rally in DC that included hundreds of Proud Boys found a new rallying cry for moving forward: “Destroy the GOP! Destroy the GOP!”:
“The Trump supporters gathered a day after the Supreme Court dismissed a case from Texas that sought to overturn the results of the election. So, of course, many of those who spoke at the rally expressed anger at the justices, as well as Fox News and Biden. They also made clear they are angry with the Republican Party. “In the first Million MAGA march we promised that if the GOP did not do everything in their power to keep Trump in office, then we would destroy the GOP,” conservative commentator Nick Fuentes said from a megaphone while standing on a stage. “As we gather here in Washington, D.C. for a second Million MAGA March, we’re done making promises. It has to happen now. We are going to destroy the GOP.” The crowd loudly cheered and started chanting: “Destroy the GOP! Destroy the GOP!””
“Destroy the GOP! Destroy the GOP!” It does have a nice ring to it. But, of course, pledges to destroy the GOP still raise the question, “what’s next?” If the Trump movement really does destroy the GOP — and it can if it wants to at this point — what kind of monstrosity is going to rise from those ashes? Might we actually see the MAGA Party replace the Republican Party over the next four years? That’s what this group of die hard Trump supporters appears to be promising to do if the election isn’t somehow given to Trump.
And look who made an appearance, or sorts, at this rally:
And that Marine One flyby isn’t the only indication that Trump was pleased to see this rally. As the following article notes, the leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, was at the White House ahead of the rally. He claimed he was invited although White House denies that and insists he was just there for a public tour and was never actually invited by the White House:
Was Tarrio invited or not? It’s kind of beside the point when Trump does a Marine One flyby of the Proud Boy rally later in the day. But let’s not pretend that if the White House did invite Tarrio it would be an official invitation that the White House would public acknowledge. Presumably Don Jr or Steven Miller would issue the informal invite.
So that’s the current status of the push to hand Trump the election: The MAGA movement issue a threat going to destroy the GOP if it can’t find a way to keep Trump in office and Trump appeared to symbolically endorse that threat. The Grand Old Party is going to be broken apart and replaced with a Grand New Party built in trump’s image unless the Republicans find a way to keep Trump in office.
Of course, the GOP is already overwhelmingly beholden to Trump and had been the Grand Trump Party for at least four years now and veering in a fascist direction for decades now. So it’s not entirely clear what would actually change if the MAGA movement really did succeed in ‘destroying the GOP’ other than maybe a name change. And that’s why the answer to “what’s next?” is “probably more of the same, but worse”.
Are we finally approaching the last legal last stand for the GOP’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election? We’ll see, but that’s what should be transpiring in a few days on January 6 when Vice President Mike Pence is scheduled to officially count the electoral college votes and certify a winner. It’s ostensibly the last opportunity for some sort of GOP legal stunt, a point Roger Stone was making a couple of weeks ago when he publicly called out a number of Republican Senators demanding that they file an objection to the January 6 certification.
But January 6 is also the merely latest opportunity for Republican lawmakers — in particular those with 2024 presidential aspirations — to distinguish themselves as the most Trumpian Republican who isn’t Trump. So we probably shouldn’t be surprised to find an intra-GOP race to the bottom among Senators looking to lead this final GOP legal stunt. A race to the bottom that appears to include all of the Republican Senators (aside from Trump) who are seen as likely 2024 presidential contenders.
As the following TPM piece describes, the race to the bottom was kicked off when far right Arkansas Senator Josh Hawley announced that he was planning on objecting to the January 6 certification on Wednesday. On Saturday, Ted Cruz and a group of 10 other senators and senators-elect issued a statement declaring that they will also be objecting to the Jan 6 certification unless a 10 day emergency audit of the vote in disputed states is done by congress. After the audit, individual states will assess the congressional findings and could then convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote if they chose to do so. So the plan is basically to have the Senate, which is still controlled by Republicans, to issue a bad-faith report hyping all of the various fraud allegations and then hand that report to the Republican-controlled state legislatures that would make bad-faith assessments of those findings and ultimately make the bad-faith conclusion that the weight of the shoddy evidence calls for them to overturn their state’s vote. It’s not just a disturbing plot to save Trump in 2020 but also a template the Republicans can use for years to come as long as the party continues to dominate at the state-level.
Interestingly, Senator Hawley wasn’t one of the Senators who signed Cruz’s statement. And if we had to pick two of the likeliest GOP nominees in 2024 (who aren’t Trump) it would be Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. It’s easy to forget that Ted Cruz was the darling of the GOP base until Donald Trump entered politics, and Hawley is like a younger, scarier Cruz/Trump hybrid. So we appear to have two separate planned Republican objections to the Jan 6 vote certification led by two of the GOP senators most popular with the Republican base and most likely to run for president in 2024. It’s a disturbing reminder that the Republican path to a presidential nomination in 2024 is going to revolve around making the case that America’s elections are completely rigged against Republicans and that ‘other means’ of resolving US elections are required:
““Congress should immediately appoint an Electoral Commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states,” the lawmakers said. “Once completed, individual states would evaluate the Commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed.””
That’s the plan. The plan for continuing Republican political dominance in 2020 and a template for extending that dominance for ‘elections’ to come. As long as the Republicans control a chamber of congress and as long the disputed state has Republican-controlled legislatures, a state’s presidential vote can be flipped to the Republicans. It’s just a matter of making baseless disputes and issuing hyped ‘probes’ designed to give state legislatures political cover for overturning their results. At least 11 Republican senators/senators-elect signed onto this plan. And that doesn’t include Josh Hawley’s similar plan a few days earlier:
And that’s just the Senate. In the House, we find Rep. Louie Gohmert suing to give Mike Pence the sole authority to decide which slates of electors to count in disputed states:
So in a few days we’ll find out if these schemes end up being purely symbolic or if they end up creating a pretext for some sort of future legal challenge. But it the GOP’s legal challenges are clearly going to come an end soon. But as Rep Gohmert reminded us today, even if these challenges do end up being purely symbolic, it’s important to keep in mind that it’s the kind of symbolism that will be very handy for when the GOP shifts from legal challenges to non-legal challenges:
““But if bottom line is, the court is saying, ‘We’re not going to touch this. You have no remedy’ — basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you gotta go the streets and be as violent as Antifa and BLM,” Gohmert had told Newsmax on Friday after the judge issued an order for dismissal of his lawsuit.”
If the courts won’t acqiuesce to the GOP’s legal scheme, Republican voters “have no remedy” and should take to the streets “and be as violent as Antifa and BLM.” Keep in mind that when Gohmert is referring to being “as violent as Antifa and BLM, he’s referring to the fantasy version of these groups that the right-wing media has creating where Antifa and BLM are portrayed as hyper-violent entities burning down cities. So Gohmert is basically calling for his supporters to engage in hyper-violence and burn down cities. Again:
Also keep in mind that when Gohmert claims the Republicans have “no remedy” over their voter fraud claims, he’s basically saying the entire US court system is completely rigged against Republicans too because virtually all of the 50+ GOP lawsuits over this election have been thrown out, often by judges Trump appointed. This could end up being a crucially important theme in the Republican narrative over the next four years because that’s now becoming a narrative where THE ENTIRE SYSTEM is rigged against Republicans. It’s the kind of narrative that’s going to make calls for violence all the more appealing. The only remedy is mass insurrection. It’s a hint that, for all of the legitimate concern over Trump talking about invoking the Insurrection Act against protesters last year, our primary concern going forward should be Republican calls for an insurrection.
Given all of the uproar over the hour-long recorded phone call between President Trump and Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that was leaked over the weekend — a call where Trump appeared to be both pleading and cajoling Raffensperger into somehow finding the 11,780 votes Trump would need to win the state of Georgia — and given the fact that the GOP is already plotting some sort of January 6 stunt during the Electoral College vote count, here’s a pair of rather ominous stories that would be ominous even without that chilling context:
First, an Atlanta-based U.S. Attorney, Byung “BJay” Pak, just announced his resignation on Monday. Pak, a Republican nominated by Trump in 2017, had previously indicated that he was going to stay in office until January 20. He’s now citing “unforeseen circumstances” for his sudden early departure. No other information was given:
“The reason for U.S. Attorney Byung “BJay” Pak’s change of plans are not clear. In an internal email announcing his departure obtained by TPM, Pak cited only “unforeseen circumstances” as the reason he was leaving Monday rather than Jan. 20.”
What are these “unforeseen circumstances”? Was Pak given a heads up on certain favors the Trump administration is planning on asking of loyal US attorneys? Favors so treacherous that Pak felt the need to get out of the way ASAP? We have no idea. We just know that this Trump-appointed US attorney suddenly felt a need to resign immediately, just one day after the release of the now-infamous Trump/Raffensperger tapes, one day before the Georgia senate run-offs and two days before the expected GOP January 6 Electoral College vote counting fiasco. It’s kind of hard to think of more ominous timing for a surprise US Attorney resignation.
And then we get to the second article, which actually came out a day before we learned about Pak’s surprise resignation so this article is arguably part of the context of Pak’s surprise decision: All 10 living former Secretary’s of Defense just co-authored an Op-ed in the Washington Post warning against the dangers of having the military intervene in elections.
Recall that one of the more disturbing actions by the Trump administration following the November 3 election is his decision to replace a number of Pentagon officials, including then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. So this is a warning about the military taking place in the midst of a major and mysterious seemingly-last-minute reshuffling of the military’s leadership.
Here’s perhaps the most alarming part of the WaPo piece: The idea for the piece reportedly came from conversations between Eric Edelman, a former U.S. ambassador and defense official, and Dick Cheney. The conversation was about how the military might be used in coming days. This is where we are: Dick Cheney is the guy sounding legitimate alarms about threats to democracy:
“The article brings together a group of Republicans and Democrats who disagree on many national security issues. Its genesis is a conversation between Eric Edelman, a former U.S. ambassador and defense official, and former vice president and defense secretary Richard B. Cheney about how the military might be used in coming days, Edelman said in an interview.”
Yes, Dick Cheney has been having conversations with former defense officials about how the military might be used in coming days. Conversations that appear to have convinced Cheney and all of the other former secretaries of defense that the risk of the military actually being used is so high that they needed to write this piece.
And note the other related concern they raised in the piece: the lack of coordination between then Pentagon and the Biden transition team. Because there’s no need for a transition if the military secures the election for Trump:
So following a surprise post-election shakeup of the military’s leadership and days before the planned Jan 6 legal ‘last stunt’ GOP electoral college stunt, we now have a surprise US Attorney resignation and warnings from ALL of the living former US secretaries of defense about the perils of the military intervening in the election.
In related ominous news, a recent poll released a few days ago showed Donald Trump has 90 percent support among GOP voters if he decides to run again in 2024. So hopefully these former secretaries of defense will continue to refine their public warnings on the dangers of the risk of the military intervening in elections because they clearly have a lot more warning to do.
Welp, now we know: if Trump calls on his mob of supporters to storm the capitol, they’ll do. That’s no longer in question following Wednesday’s deadly pro-Trump raid on the Capitol that immediately followed a Trump rally. A Trump rally that ended with Trump himself exhorting the crowd to head to the Capitol, saying “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”.
We also got an answer to another highly disturbing question: so if President Trump leashes a riotous mob on the Capitol, will he be willing to call in the National Guard after things spiral out of control? The answer to that question appears to be No, which is why Mike Pence had to do it:
“Trump, who has proven over the past year to be eager to deploy the National Guard when violence breaks out, initially resisted doing so on Capitol Hill Wednesday as a mob of his supporters breached the building, per a source familiar. Pence played a key role in coordinating with the Pentagon about deploying them, and urged them to move faster than they were.”
Trump resisted, and it was Pence who actually made the call. Belatedly. That’s the reporting we’re getting on Wednesday’s decision to call in the National Guard. Reporting that raises serious questions about who was acting as commander in chief at the time. And then there’s the fact that public statements acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller seemed to indicate that Miller didn’t even speak with Trump about the order because Trump had no desire to see the National Guard crack down on a mob that was fighting in his name:
So we have what appears to be, if not a planned storming of the Capitol, at least a spontaneous storming of the Capitol that was highly welcomed by Trump himself, although not necessarily the rest of his staff. And that raises the question: was the storming of the Capitol planned in advance by the Trump team? Did the mysterious post-election reshuffling of the Pentagon top staff facilitate the initial slow response? Was that ominous Op-Ed warning from all living former Secretaries of Defense about the military playing a role in elections a reflection of more widespread awareness of a big plan to pull off a major stunt?
And what role did all of the various figures close to Trump who have been pushing the wildest election fraud theories. Did Roger Stone or Steve Bannon help to make that storming of the Capitol happen? Michael Flynn? What about Rudy Giuliani? All of these figures clearly endorse the storming of the Capitol. Did they help make it happen? At this point we don’t know. But that’s to another phone-gaffe by Rudy Giuliani, we did learn one significant data point about what the Trump team wanted to see happen on January 6: At ~ 7 PM EST on Wednesday night, Giuliani left a voicemail for newly sworn-in senator Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, imploring him to help delay the certification of the electoral college vote for at least one whole day, ideally until the evening of Jan 7, so the Trump team can have time to put together their evidence of election fraud. But Giuliani called the wrong phone and that person shared the voicemail with the media. So now we know that, hours after the pro-Trump mob was storming the Capitol and delayed the certification of the electoral college vote, Rudy Giuliani was calling Republican Senators asking them to delay it some more to buy Trump one more day before the vote got certified:
“At approximately 7 p.m., Giuliani called newly sworn-in Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a staunch Trump ally, imploring him to stall the process. “I want to discuss with you how they’re trying to rush this hearing and how we need you, our Republican friends, to try to just slow it down so we can get these legislatures to get more information to you,” Giuliani said in a voicemail. “And I know they’re reconvening at 8 tonight, but it ... the only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow—ideally until the end of tomorrow. I know McConnell is doing everything he can to rush it, which is kind of a kick in the head because it’s one thing to oppose us, it’s another thing not to give us a fair opportunity to contest it.””
Keep in mind that Giuliani probably called a lot more Senators than Tommy Tuberville. So at 7 PM, hours after the Capitol storming of the Capitol was largely resolved, Giuliani is calling up Republican Senators asking for them to buy Trump some more time. Not only that, but Giuliani indicates that the Trump team isn’t just planning on contesting 3 state results. It wants to contest 10 state results, indicating that the Trump team was planning on making its legal challenge to the election MUCH CRAZIER in coming days. A 10 state challenge hints at a planned complete legal fiasco that eclipses the existing legal fiasco. And we have every reason to assume Trump was fully aware of Giuliani making these calls:
So the Trump team had a plan that involved A BIG DELAY. And what did Trump receive on Wednesday? A big delay, thanks to an insurrection he helped incite. Followed by a big delay in the roll out of the National Guard. And later, after the insurrection was subdued, we had Rudy Giuliani calling senators and pleading for more of a delay. A delay that would give the Trump team enough time to deliver on its laughable legal objections that no one can plausibly believe are serious. And that leaves the question: if the desired delay wasn’t really a delay intended to give time for a laughable legal challenge with no hope of succeeding, what was the delay actually for? What was the actual plan and is that plan still in effect? We don’t know, but Rudy presumably does. Let’s hope he’s feeling carelessly chatty again tonight so we can find out sooner rather than later. Because when it comes to answering the questions of whether or not the president planned a secret coup-stunt and whether or not that plan is still in effect, you definitely want to avoid unnecessary delays.
With just 12 days to go, new articles of impeachment have been drafted by the House Democrats against President Trump. The charges? Incitement of insurrection.
And that raises the big question of whether or not there exists evidence that the Trump White House was indeed involved with orchestrating the storming of the Capitol. A big question with some big obvious answers. Trump was openly inciting his crowd of supporters at a “Stop the Steal” rally in DC immediately before the to raid took place, imploring them to “fight like hell”.
But now that we’ve learned that the National Guard was reportedly called only by Mike Pence, and only after initial resistance from the Department of Defense, the question of what role Trump played in incite the violent mob goes far beyond whether or not he verbally incited them. Especially now that Maryland’s Republican Governor, Larry Hogan, just told the world that his state’s repeated requests to send in the Maryland National Guard after receiving frantic phone calls from trapped members of congress were repeatedly rebuffed for an hour and a half by the federal head of the National Guard. And when the Department of Defense did eventually contact Hogan and give him the go ahead to send in the Guard, it was Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy who contacted Hogan, not acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller:
“Hogan told the Washington Post that Maj. Gen. Timothy Gowen, the adjutant general of the Maryland National Guard, “was repeatedly rebuffed by the head of the National Guard at the federal level.” The Guard announced Thursday afternoon that they were sending troops now.”
The head of the National Guard at the federal level repeatedly rebuffed the Maryland National Guard’s requests. Requests that came after panicked calls from congressional Democrats. 90 minutes later, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy contacts Hogan directly and gives the green light. So the National Guard at the federal level created a 90 minute delay, giving the insurrectionists plenty of time to ransack the Capital:
So that’s one major area of inquiry for the impeachment: what role did the Trump White House play in that 90 minute delay?
But as the following article makes clear, the questions about the role the Trump administration may have played in facilitating this attack on the Capitol go beyond questions of what was done on January 6. Because we’re now learning that the FBI, Homeland Security, and the White House all has intelligence that this exact scenario would play out and all apparently turned the other way:
“A half-dozen sources spoke openly about this very scenario: that the mob would take over the “People’s House” and that somehow the system would break down. They speculated that this could occur because of the president’s treasonous behavior, because of leadership deficiencies in the federal government and Congress, because of the extreme partisanship of the moment, and because everyone was looking the wrong way.”
Yes, a half-dozen sources spoke openly about a mob taking over the “People’s House”. And they were openly talking about this last weekend, days before it happened. It was that obvious to the national security state that something like this was coming. And yet nothing was done to prevent it. Why? Well, we are told that the White House presidential aides didn’t take any steps over fears that doing so would provoke Trump to do something even worse than whatever he was planning:
And then there was the speculation that the US Capitol Police might be intentionally stood down because Republican Congressional leaders also wanted to see a mob overtake the Capitol:
And, again, this was what these anonymous security officials were openly speculating to Newsweek reporters days before January 6. That’s how obvious it was this was coming. Will the impeachment investigation include an investigation into Republican Congressional leadership too?
Next, there are questions about what actions Trump took during the actual insurrection. And as we should expect at this point, the reports are that when aides were pleading with Trump to publicly condemn the violence, he resisted. Because of course he did:
“But Mr. Trump resisted those private and public entreaties to make any outright condemnation of the violence. Instead, his ire was more focused on Vice President Mike Pence, who earlier in the day made clear that he planned to reject the president’s pressure to block congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s victory. Mr. Pence was evacuated from the Senate chamber as the tension escalated.”
Was Trump troubled by the insurrectionist mob? Nope. He was upset with Mike Pence because Pence didn’t somehow obstruct the counting of the electoral college votes. That’s the picture that’s emerging based on White House sources: after aides implored Trump to say something to stop the violence and Trump initially refused and only eventually issued a highly tepid public response that could, if anything, be interpreted as an endorsement of the raid:
The evidence is accumulating. President Trump really did support this raid on the Capitol and really did take steps to facilitate the raid. He wanted it to go for as long as possible and ultimately succeed. And that raises another major question here: what exactly was the desired end goal of the insurrection? Other than vandalizing things and expressing their extreme anger over the election results, what did they plan on accomplishing? How about taking hostages?:
“Call the zip ties by their correct name: The guys were carrying flex cuffs, the plastic double restraints often used by police in mass arrest situations. They walked through the Senate chamber with a sense of purpose. They were not dressed in silly costumes but kitted out in full paramilitary regalia: helmets, armor, camo, holsters with sidearms. At least one had a a semi-automatic rifle and 11 Molotov cocktails. At least one, unlike nearly every other right-wing rioter photographed that day, wore a mask that obscured his face.”
A semi-automatic rifle, Molotov cocktails, and flex cuff. That sure sounds like someone planning on taking hostages. And there were a number of guys armed like this. Were we looking at a planned ‘mass citizens arrest’ situation? Perhaps “mass arrest” was the planned way to spin it, although it would actually be a mass hostage-taking situation. Take congress hostage and somehow ‘force’ the world to wait and hear the joke evidence from states about election fraud. And based on all of the data we have available, doesn’t that sound entirely plausible? Based on all of the data we have available, doesn’t that sound entirely plausible? Is there anything we’re seeing that isn’t consistent with the idea that this really was a planned far right coup? A planned far right coup that was started at the behest of President Trump during a rally and seemingly carried out with the quiet assistance of a national security state that had been effectively ordered to stand down while Trump’s rushes the Capitol and takes Congress hostage.
So as we can see, impeachment investigators will have plenty on their plate. The big question is whether or not there’s enough time to meaningfully look into this. It’s a bind. On the one hand, an open insurrection of this nature warrants a swift rebuke. But on the other hand, you probably don’t want to rush a coup investigation. You might miss some important details.
@Pterrafractyl-
As the dust starts to settle following the DC onslaught of maga nazis trying to overthrow the legislative branch of the US federal government
we’re already hearing the media — mainstream, right-wing and progressive — whining about the intelligence failures leading up to the attempted
putsch. The “Y’all Qaeda” and “Vanilla ISIS” rubes are purely expendable shock troops at the operational level. However as in the 911 attacks
and JFK assassination a co-ordinated fascist fifth column within the executive branch and the Pentagon was probably at work here. It’s being
reported that republican Maryland governor Hogan was blocked by the Pentagon from sending National Guard troops to assist DC capitol police
Exactly who in the pentagon was running inference? This should be the first question asked.
In November Trump installed one-star general and Fox commentator Anthony Tata as undersecretary of policy at the Pentagon. Of more interest
though is Ezra Cohen-Watnick a 30-something mystery man who Trump named as undersecretary of intelligence. General HR McMaster who
replaced the odious “Q‑anoner” Michael Flynn as national security advisor was able to boot Steve Bannon from the NSC Principal’s Committee but he didn’t have the juice to oust Cohen-Watnick. How come? Apparently he’s a favourite of both Jared Kushner and Bannon.
Any investigation into the January 6 insurrection which saw shock troops with nooses and handcuffs hoping to track down Pelosi Schumer and
Pence inside the Capitol buildings should start with scrutinizing the role characters like Ezra Cohen-Watnick played in subverting intel and
blocking the mobilization of troops. For example did he ever intern with the CIA?
@Dennis and Pterrafractyl–
Yes, indeed. The seeds were sown in the first half of the last century and nurtured and genetically modified–political, ideologized “gain-of-function” maneuvering–during the closing decades of this century and the first couple of decades of this century.
Anyone who was surprised by this hasn’t been paying attention.
The U.S. recruitment of fascist cadres from WW2 as “Stay Behind” forces in the immediate aftermath of that conflict is a matter of record.
It is unimaginable that they didn’t do something similar in the U.S.
https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-971-nazis-in-new-orleans/
History informs us that this is, in fact, the case.
In New Orleans, we saw this manifested.
This is going to be very interesting.
Even Paul Krugman of the “New York Times” and Pacifica Radio are talking about fascism.
When that happens, you know the End Times are near.
Jesus will be returning to earth any time now, riding on a jet-powered skateboard and accompanied by a phalanx of pastel blue and pink cherubim playing “The Walkin’ Blues” on National steel-bodied guitars.
Lots of fun.
Best,
Dave
@Dave-
What I’m about to discuss is a reminder that Jim Garrison’s profound Kennedy investigation still reverberates in 2021. I believe there are at
least two “stay behind-Gladio” figures currently embedded at the Pentagon. They are both GOP/intelligence operatives with Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) backgrounds. And incoming secretary of transportation/ONI reserve officer Pete Buttigeig is NOT one of the two. But
he may be one of “THEM” ie. spies or moles selected to infiltrate the Biden government on behalf of domestic fascist interests. The two I’m
talking about are Ezra Cohen-Watnick, recently installed by Trump as undersecretary of intelligence at the Pentagon. And attorney Michael
Ellis who was senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council and is a former aide to Rep. Devin Nunes. At the insistence of the
White House Ellis has been appointed general counsel of the NSA. I’ll give a fuller profile of Ellis another time but for now let’s examine:
Ezra Cohen-Watnick, 34, was a high-school intern for then-Senator Joe Biden. And nurtured dreams of becoming a spy. In 2008 he interned
with ONI, in 2010 he joined the Defense Clandestine Service, the undercover overseas spying arm of the DIA. “In 2013 the DIA assigned Cohen-
Watnick to The Farm, the CIA training facility in Williamsburg Virginia to learn the rudiments of recruiting and managing foreign spies ... he did
a rotation at the CIA...was eventually assigned to Afghanistan, with the rank of GS-12, equivalent to a captain in the army.” The information
I’ve unearthed about Cohen-Watnick comes from Newsweek’s Jeff Stein Inside The Rise of Trump’s Invisible Man 04/13/17 as well as the
Atlantic’s Rosie Gray The Man McMaster Couldn’t Fire 07/23/17.
At DIA Cohen-Watnick met renegade army general and Qanon fanatic Michael Flynn who brought him over to Trump’s White House where he
networked with fellow travellers Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka. Hey what’s a nice boy doing with so many fascists? And most significantly
E C‑W became the NSC’s Senior Director for Intelligence Programs where he held a TOP SECURITY CLEARANCE and gave briefings to both
Trump and Pence on national security issues. Older men seem to love the kid as Trump moved him into his current position as undersecretary
of intelligence at the Pentagon In November. His boyhood dream of becoming a spy has really paid off handsomely. But who’s he really working
for Dave? A top security clearance could come in really handy if you wanted, for instance, to pass on a map of offices in the Capitol buildings
to nazi maga thugs seeking to hunt down and execute politicians they despise. Does he report to Trump or does Trump report to Cohen-Watnick? He’s only 34 and he’s been a deep covert officer inside all the alphabet intelligence agencies already.
US rep from Washington state Pramila Jayapal and the new House Majority Democratic Whip James Clyburn believe there was “inside help”
enabling the psychotic mob to quickly find the offices of Nancy Pelosi, Clyburn and others. I seriously think they’re onto something pretty
big.
Next time I’ll give a short profile of Ezra Cohen-Watnick’s good pal Michael Ellis ONI Reserve and currently the new general counsel of the
NSA. Apparently neither of these guys enjoy being photographed. Wonder why? Quite the nest of spies awaiting the Biden administration.
When the likes of former GOP governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger compares the January 6 fascist riot in DC to that prelude to the
Holocaust known as Kristallnacht you can’t help but wonder what disaster is coming next to the USA. I mean Arnie ought to know right ? ( see
FTR #420 and #421 among many other shows Dave Emory produced on ex-governor Conan).
When the Army Times offers a headline “Army PSYOP officer resigned commission prior to leading group to DC protests” you can’t help but
wonder what disaster is next. This is a reference to 30 year old Captain Emily Rainey an army psychological operations officer who was still on
active duty when she participated as one of the insurgents, keeping in mind another rioter, air force veteran Ashli Babbitt, was killed by Capitol
police while participating in the putsch.
I’ve speculated that at least two GOP intelligence operatives with ONI backgrounds and now stationed at DOD in the Pentagon and NSA may be
stay behind-Gladio spy/saboteurs running clean up operations to sanitize Trump administration misdeeds. They may also bear some responsibility for blocking mobilization of National Guard troops and other federal agents from responding in a timely manner to the organized
mutinous mob in Washington. And now the Pentagon may be trying to scapegoat Capitol Police and throw that agency under the bus.
Newsweek has quoted Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Rath Hoffman as saying “We don’t do domestic intelligence collection. We rely on Capitol
police and law enforcement to provide an assessment of the situation. And based on that assessment that they had, they believed they had
sufficient personnel and did not make a request”. The pentagon sure as hell did a lot of domestic intelligence collection leading up to the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. Who authorized spokesman Hoffman to make this statement? Might it be the 32 year old general
counsel for the NSA Michael Ellis? The Trump White House aggressively lobbied for Ellis to take over that position in November.
Michael Ellis, like fellow staffer Ezra Cohen-Watnick is a young Office of Naval Intelligence reserve officer (ONI). His wife is an air force captain
who specializes in emergency medicine. Earlier this year Ellis was appointed Senior Director for Intelligence at the National Security Council (NSC). At 32 years of age how is someone a “senior anything?” Like Cohen-Watnick he’s been on a fast track and and has moved around a lot
of national security agencies during Trump’s one term in office starting out as chief counsel to Rep. Devin Nunes and Republican Majority on the
US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Ellis then served as Senior Associate Counsel to the president and Deputy Legal Advisor to the NSC. After Trump lost the election Michael Ellis
was installed as general counsel to the NSA. Why after the election? Was this a pre-emptive move ahead of the neo-confederate assault on
Washington in order to vacuum up intelligence that, as an almost certainty, was gathered by NSA in some raw form indicating an organized plot
was gathering deadly momentum?
On March 29 2017 the New York Times reported that Michael Ellis and Ezra Cohen-Watnick were involved in the leaking of intelligence documents to Devin Nunes chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Curious what additional intelligence these two powerful ONI reserve
officers might have acquired, deleted or passed on to malevolent fascist conspirators, some of which may hail (or “heil”) from the US military
and other national security and law enforcement agencies.
Retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former head of Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and the commander of all U.S. and allied troops fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, shared some thoughts recently on the implication of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Thoughts about the disturbing number of parallels McChrystal is seeing between the dynamics that fuels the creation of terrorist groups like al Qaeda and the radicalization taking place within President Trump’s following. As McCrystal put it, “I did see a similar dynamic in the evolution of al-Qaida in Iraq, where a whole generation of angry Arab youth with very poor prospects followed a powerful leader who promised to take them back in time to a better place, and he led them to embrace an ideology that justified their violence. This is now happening in America.” In other words, Donald Trump is America’s Osama bin Laden. That’s McCrystal’s interpretation of the events unfolding. We aren’t seeing the last gasp of Trumpism. We’re seeing the birth a new insurgency:
“With President Trump only days away from an unceremonious departure from the White House, the vision of a mob desecrating the citadel of democracy felt for many observers like the end of a shameful period of norm breaking and tradition smashing. But for counterterrorism experts who have spent the two decades since the 9/11 terrorist attacks closely studying and fighting violent extremist groups overseas, the spectacle looked like something altogether different: the likely birthing of a violent American insurgency.”
This isn’t over. In fact it’s just getting started. And as the crackdown on the insurrectionists plays out, and more and more of these groups retreat to tighter and tighter cells for security purposes, they’ll inevitably get even more radicalized. That’s how one of the leading counter-insurgency experts sees the situation, with Trump playing the role of the charismatic leader promising to take his followers back in time to a better place:
Then there’s the expectation of increasing international links being formed with other extremist groups around the world. Are we in store for not just more domestic terror but also a growth in international far right terrorism in the US? Based on the lessons from jihadism, yes, that’s what we should expect. Disaffected Trumpists are going to be increasingly networking with their foreign far right counterparts:
But perhaps the most disturbing part of McChrystal’s warning is that once these movements cross a tipping point the violence tends to escalate unless the extremist movement and its leadership are convincingly defeated and their narrative and ideology widely rejected:
So unless Trump himself is somehow widely rejected, the conditions for growing extremism and violence will continue. It doesn’t bode well:
“Almost 9 in 10 Republicans — 87 percent — give Trump a thumbs-up, compared with 89 percent who said the same before the November election.”
Almost 9 in 10 Republicans gave Trump a thumbs-up after the storming of the Capitol. That includes over 8 in 10 of the Republicans who told pollsters that they prioritize the Republican Party over allegiance to Trump. Only 21 percent of Republicans said Biden won legitimately and about half of Republicans blamed “social media” and “Antifa” for the insurrection. That’s the collective headspace of the movement General McChrystal has identified as birthing a new American al Qaeda. A movement that will only stop growing once it loses faith in its leadership:
Also keep in mind that, while Trump is the current leader of this movement, there’s no rule that says he won’t be replaced by someone even more charismatic. Even if Trump is eventually discredited under the weight of criminal investigations or some other scandal, or he simply dies and fades away, there’s no reason to assume Trumpist politics will be fading away with him. And beyond political leadership, there’s still the giant right-wing disinfotainment Big Lie media complex that created the appetite for Trumpian Big Lie politics to work in the first place and continues to pump out Big Lie content day after day, hour after hour. That whole media complex would need to be discredited in the eyes of Trump’s base too, which isn’t happening.
So that’s the warning from Stanley McCrystal, one of America’s top counterinsurgency experts. The craziness will only get more crazy unless or until the insanity can somehow be discredited. That’s the fundamental challenge at hand: discrediting insanity. Good luck with that. And that’s all why, if January 6 with the last gasp of anything, it was the last gasp of Republican Party’s interest in democracy.
@Dennis: It looks like the installation of Michael Ellis as the NSA’s general counsel is actually happening. One day before Trump leaves office. Will Ellis be more focused on deleting and hiding incriminating information? Or is this more about extracting valuable intelligence that might be of interest to Ellis’s many close Republican allies like Devin Nunes? We don’t know, but it’s hard to come up with a more suspicious appointmen scenario than what we’re seeing.
And as the following piece notes, this isn’t going to simply be a one day appointment with Ellis being kicked out on Jan 20. That’s because the NSA general counsel position is a civil service position, not a political role, which provides Ellis some protections against being quickly replaced. So all of those questions about whether or not Ellis is feeding intelligence to his political patrons are going to be questions about for the Biden administration:
“The agency’s selection of Ellis is significant because the role of general counsel at the country’s largest intelligence agency is a civil service position, not a political role, meaning it could be difficult for the Biden administration to remove Ellis.”
Is Trump going to be allowed to install a hyper-partisan loyalist into a powerful position they can’t be easily removed from one day before Trump leaves office? Apparently, yes, Trump will be allowed to do that. Even over the objection NSA Director Paul Nakasone, who is reportedly so opposed to Ellis’s selection that Nakasone still hadn’t installed Ellis as of 6PM Saturday, the deadline given to Nakasone by acting defense secretary Christopher Miller. So there’s significant institutional resistance to this move that goes beyond the concerns of congressional Democrats.
At the same time, we’re told that part of the reason Nakasone is resisting Ellis for this position is that Nakasone and others in the NSA a concerned that the White House is seeking to “burrow” Ellis into the job n violation of a long-standing policy that prevents embedding political personnel into career civilian positions prior to a change in administration. So it sounds like this appointment doesn’t just look highly questionable but is actually in violation of a long-standing policy:
“The concern of Nakasone and others, current and former officials said, is that the White House is seeking to “burrow” Ellis into the job in violation of a long-standing policy that prevents embedding political personnel into career civilian positions prior to a change in administration.”
The installation of Michael Ellis one day before Trump leaves office isn’t just super sleazy. It’s also against the rules. Imagine that. And yet the defense department clearly doesn’t see a problem with the rules since Nakasone was order to put Ellis in that position by 6PM Saturday, despite Ellis not taking a polygraph test as required:
How long will Ellis last in this position? We’ll see. But it’s hard to imagine he isn’t going to be spending each day in that position like it’s his last day. Which raises the grim question: if a Trump hack had exactly one day to be the NSA general counsel, what how would they spend that day? It’s a question the Biden administration had better be asking itself each day until Ellis is out of there.
Of course, Ellis is far from the only Trump mole that’s going to be left behind. The ‘Trumpian Deep State’ isn’t just going away overnight. If Ellis really is going to be feeding his allies valuable information he’s not only mole people need to worry about. There are others who will have continued access to highly sensitive information they probably shouldn’t have. For example...:
““There’s no circumstance in which this president should get another intelligence briefing, not now, not in the future,” Schiff said. “I don’t think he can be trusted with it now, and in the future he certainly can’t be trusted.””
Yes, as a former president, Donald Trump gets intelligence briefs for the rest of his life. At least that’s the tradition. Imagine how that’s going to play out, especially if Trump continues to declare himself to be the real president turns Mar-a-Lago into the ‘Alt White House’. What will Donald Trump, planning on running in 2024, do with the intelligence briefings he’s given? Does anyone seriously expect him to just sit on this information? Of course not. He’s going to be using all of the insider information as props in his larger shadow government fantasy psychodrama that’s going to be playing out in coming years. Or maybe he’ll keep quiet about it and just sell it. Who knows. But it’s very hard to believe that information isn’t going to be thoroughly abused in a manner that is most profitable to Trump, whether it be political or financial profit.
@Pterrafractyl:
It looks like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s public indignation regarding the appointment of Michael Ellis to the position of NSA General Counsel has resulted in a DOD inspector general investigation that will probe the
Ellis affair according to The Washington Post and CNN.
Matt Naham, a writer at Law and Crime noted in a piece
3/03/20 that Ellis worked under Karl Rove in the Office
of Strategic Initiatives from March 2006 to February 2007.
The best background information on Michael Ellis can be
found in Foreign Policy 10/23/20 by David Klion who, as
a teenager, played Diplomacy at Ellis’s house. It appears Ellis deeply admired Otto von Bismarck. Maybe that’s
what Rove found so interesting in the young ONI Reserve
officer.
What’s to be done about all the radicalized Trumpers? It’s the question of the day for America, punctuated by warning issued by the Department of Homeland Security today, the first in a year, about the ongoing heightened risk of attack by far right extremists emboldened by the January 6 storming of the US Capitol. And yet it’s a question with no easy answers, especially when the right-wing disinfotainment complex treats any policies designed to minimize far right misinformation as an attack on conservatives.
So here’s a reminder from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that the list of things to be done about growing Trump-inspired violent extremism includes redoubling efforts to ensure every single nuclear facility is adequately secured against both outside extremist attacks and insider threat. It’s an increasingly urgent need in light of the fact that “accelerationism” is growing on the far right, making nuclear weapons or nuclear facilities obvious major targets for these movements. If you’re planning on destabilizing society it’s hard to think of a more effective way to do it than setting off a nuclear weapons or triggering a meltdown. And if we’re going to secure nuclear weapons stockpiles and facilities against extremists threats, we’re going to have to figure out how to effectively screening government and military personnel with access to nuclear materials and information for far right ideologies:
“An increasingly active generation of violent far-right extremist groups and actors have adopted an especially dangerous ideology that is compatible with an act of nuclear terror: accelerationism.[7] Violent far-right extremists who adopt accelerationism view societal collapse as inevitable and seek to hasten that collapse in service of “total revolution”—the complete destruction of the existing system of governance.[8] Violent far-right extremists who adopt accelerationism hope to set off a series of violent chain events, with violence begetting more violence, destabilizing society.[9] Indiscriminate, highly destructive acts of terror—like a nuclear attack—are therefore perfect tools to sow chaos and accelerate this societal collapse.”
There’s no denying the underlying logic: if accelerationism is growing, the threat of nuclear terrorism is growing too. Because nothing destabilizes a society quite like a nuclear incident. And when it comes to nuclear threats, while incidents like the 2017 planned Atomwaffen attack on a Florida nuclear plant are a chilling example of what is possible, it’s insider threats that still pose the greatest threats. If accelerationism is going to be the new trend in American conservatism, there’s no getting around the need for greater insider threat surveillance for the people with access to this technology:
Will the US government actually respond to this growing insider threat in time? Who knows, but we already have a pretty good idea of how the right-wing disinfotainment industry will respond to such programs designed to identify and screen out far right individuals: they’ll be treated as government attacks on patriotic conservatives who merely have a different point of view. That’s literally the take Fox New’s Laura Ingraham had in response to reports of new efforts by the Biden administration to screen applicants for government employees for signs of far right extremism. The way Ingraham described it, such programs intended to keep extremists out of positions required security clearances were actually part of an ideological purge of the government of all mainstream conservatives:
Be sure to watch the actual video of the clip to get a full sense of Igraham’s faux outrage. Outrage over concocted fears whipped up by Ingraham that anti-extremism programs will mean that if someone voted for Trump they be labeled an extremist for life and barred from government positions. That’s the spin Fox News is taking to reports of new programs designed to keep QAnon supporters and other far right extremists out of highly sensitive government positions. Attacks on QAnon are attacks on all conservatives and anything done to prevent QAnon believers out of government positions is part of an ideological purge.
Of course, as we saw with reports on the Sovereign America Project group operating out of Florida, as the merger of mainstream conservative media and the far right fringes continues, at some point any programs designed to filter out extremists really will end up impacting some ‘mainstream’ conservatives because the ‘mainstream’ has veered so dangerously far to the right. Ingraham’s outrage is probably genuine at least in that respect because she really is genuinely a far right ideologue. With a far right ideologue popular TV show that continues to push mainstream conservatism further and further to the right.
So while it remains to be seen if we’re going to see a serious review of the US’s nuclear facilities and materials, it’s already very clear how the right-wing will perceive such programs: as an ideological attack on all conservatives. QAnon and Atomwaffen have a right to security clearances too, you know. It’s just diversity of thought. Anyone who says otherwise is the real bigot.
Given the rather ominous lack of public pronouncements coming from the Trump ‘Alt White House’ at Mar-a-Lago these days, one of the questions we have to ask is whether or not Trump has truly gone temporarily silent, or is keeping his communication under the radar? Don’t forget, the guy just pulled a coup. He probably has a lot to say to his supporters that he doesn’t necessarily want to say in public.
It’s that disturbing silence by Trump that’s part of the context for the following pair of articles. Articles that are a reminder that should Trump go down the route of forming his own third party, there’s a good chance the ‘MAGA Party’ will simply end up being an umbrella organization for all of the militias that have signed on to fight a civil war for Trump. In other words, it will be less a third party than it will be a second military. Trump’s military.
First, here’s an article about how the social media campaigns to start a new Trump-led “Patriot Party” are doubling as a social media campaign to encourage Trump supporters to join their local militias:
“On Facebook, the effort appears to be decentralized but growing rapidly, with some “Patriot Party” groups gaining thousands of members in a matter of days, according to the research conducted by watchdog group the Tech Transparency Project.”
A decentralized social media movement with two goals: promote the idea of a “Patriot Party” and promoting militias. It gives us a pretty good sense of what the “Patriot Party” is going to be focused on:
Now, here’s a recent Pro Public piece a secret chat room on the encrypted Telegram app that was set up two days after the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection. The group was focused on devising their next plans. The group reported grew from a few dozen people to over 200 in a week. The leader of the group, Edward “Jake” Lang, was then arrested on Jan 16 over his role in the Capitol insurrection.
So what post-insurrection actions did the group end up supporting? Recruiting “normies” and radicalizing them to the point that they join regional militia groups. That’s the big post-insurrection plan: a militia membership drive:
“The government charged Lang with committing assault and other crimes, but the account of his activities spelled out in court papers doesn’t mention how the 25-year-old spent the 10 days between the riots and his capture: recruiting militia members to take up arms against the incoming Biden administration by way of an invitation-only group on the messaging app Telegram.”
It wasn’t just an insurrection. It was also a militia recruitment campaign. That’s the picture that’s emerging now that we’re learning more about how the groups behind the storming of the Capitol reacted to the disturbing success of their action. They may not have overthrown the government, but they did show that you could storm the Capitol and largely get away with it. It’s quite a advertisement for joining a paramilitary group:
And as militia researcher Amy Cooter warns, the threat posed by this growing militia movement isn’t simply a long-term threat. It’s a short-term threat. In other words, we should fully expect more far right political violence sooner rather than later. It’s a warning punctuated by the plans discussed by Lang shortly before his arrest: armed marches on March 17th and 20th:
Are plans for armed militia marches still in the works? Will the focus remain on reinstalling Trump and claims of a stolen election? And will the Trump team be involved planning? Again? How about Alex Jones? Will he assume a similar role to the one he played in coordinating with the Trump team and also help to organize another armed pro-Trump militia march? These are the kinds of questions we have to ask right now. An insurrection fomented by a former president who remains unrepentant and seemingly convinced that the insurrection was the right thing to do was guaranteed to have a variety of consequences. And those consequences include having one of America’s two major parties being replaced by a private army.
Here’s an article that adds some new context to the reports of militia groups forming an umbrella “Patriot Party” to fight for a second Trump term:
The congressional adventures of QAnon-backing Marjorie Taylor Greene continued on Thursday with a vote in the House to strip Green of her committee assignments in response to Greene’s history of calling for the execution of Democrats. It wasn’t an entirely partisan vote. 11 House Republicans joined the Democrats in voting to remove Greene from her committee assignments. But with the rest of the GOP caucus standing with Greene, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Greene is going to be even more beloved by the Republican base. Now she can play victim. Special victim. And one thing the GOP excels at is playing victim. No matter how absurd. And now that the House Democrats went out of their way to single out Greene, she gets to play the role of ultimate victim.
So it’s very possible Marjorie Taylor Greene’s stripped committee assignments are going to turn her into an even more influential force in American politics than she already is. Greene was already a conservative grassroots super star as the first open QAnon Republican. And now she gets to embrace her role as the living, breathing evidence of horrible leftist persecution of conservatives. The right-wing fantasies of looming oppression by an powerful left-wing forces get to feel that much more real to the people watching the Marjorie Taylor Greene victimhood reality play. Reality TV found a new home in DC.
And as the following article notes, Greene has another troubling area of association that’s also going to be promoted now that Marjorie Taylor Greene is slated to be a darling of the GOP base: militias. She already has history of using the Georgia III% Martyrs as a security detail. And now we’re learning that the Georgia III% Martyrs and two other Georgia militias are forming a new coalition with a goal of pushing secession. So if you’re wondering where the GOP is heading from here, note that the militia providing the security for the party’s new far right darling just formed a pro-secession militia alliance:
“Thayer said the Martyrs have allied themselves with fellow “Three Percenter” militia the American Brotherhood of Patriots and American Patriots USA (APUSA), a north Georgia group headed by Chester Doles, a Dahlonega resident who belonged to various racist and neo-Nazi hate groups before forming the new group in 2019. The combined groups will advocate for Georgia’s secession from the union through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution or through “the collapse of the American experiment,” Thayer said.”
Secession is the plan. Either through an amendment or “the collapse of the American experiment.” And as the militias see it, the loss of Donald Trump is evidence that the American experiment has collapsed. Trump was the last Republican President in history and now American democracy is broken. That’s the view of the militias, which is more or less in line with the mainstream Republican view. It’s just one example of how the Republican mainstream is merging with the militia mainstream. QAnon being another example:
The goals of the ‘Unite the Right’ rally of 2017 have been realized. The right in united. QAnon adherents and militias members stand side by side with their mainstream Republican brethren. United in their support of Marjorie Taylor Greene. She may have been stripped of her committee assignments, but she’ll never be stripped from the hearts of the Republican base. At least not until she disappoints them by not arresting the giant Democratic Satanic cabal and they find a bigger lunatic to fall in love with.
There was an interesting story out of BuzzFeed last week that provides a scandalous new twist on the relationship played by the Mercer-owned Parler platform in the lead up to the Capitol insurrection of January 6 and the allegations by former Parler CEO John Matze that Rebekah Mercer blocked his attempts to throw violent extremists off the platform:
It turns out the Trump Organization was engaged in secret negotiations with Parler last year to offer a stake in the company to Donald Trump. The negotiations reportedly started in June of 2020, but were soon squashed by the White House counsel’s office over concerns that the deal would constitute a form of bribery. The bribery concerns were rooted in the fact that the proposed deal would involved giving Trump a 40% ownership stake in the company, but it would come with conditions like Trump exclusively using Parler first when posting messages to social media.
The negotiations were later restarted. After the November election. Concerns about bribery charges were presumably a lower priority for Trump at that point. Yes, on top of John Matze’s explosive claims that Rebekah Mercer blocked him from throwing violent extremists off the platform, we’re now learning that at the same time Parler was playing a major organizational role in the planning of the insurrection by those violent extremists the company was in negotiations with the Trump Organization.
And what was it that ultimately derailed the negotiations? The insurrection. That’s what we’re told. Which means these negotiations were taking place up until that day. So while the White House counsel’s concerns over the deal clearly should include bribery, those concerns probably shouldn’t be limited to just bribery because it looks like there was a “facilitate insurrection for Trump’s endorsement” negotiation taking place:
“Talks between members of Trump’s campaign and Parler about Trump’s potential involvement began last summer, and were revisited in November by the Trump Organization after Trump lost the 2020 election to the Democratic nominee and current president, Joe Biden. Documents seen by BuzzFeed News show that Parler offered the Trump Organization a 40% stake in the company. It is unclear as to what extent the former president was involved with the discussions.”
So after Trump loses the election, the negotiations are restarted. Now, if Trump hadn’t spent two months after the election insisting he was cheated and trying to find any means available to stay in office, it would be reasonable to conclude that the electoral loss prompted a restart of the negotiations because Trump was now looking for post-presidential business opportunities. But, of course, that’s not at all what we saw. Instead, we saw two months of increasingly inflammatory rhetoric about a stolen election that ultimately hit its crescendo on Jan 6th with an insurrection promoted heavily on Parler:
It’s also worth nothing that it’s unclear why exactly the negotiations fell apart after January 6. Was it because Parler was thrown offline after Amazon kicked it off of the AWS hosting service over the role Parler played in the insurrection? If so, is the deal back on after Parler finds a new hosting service?
Also keep in mind that Trump wasn’t permanently banned from Twitter until January 8. So it’s possible the negotiations fell apart a day or two before Trump found out he will never again be allowed to shout at the world on his favorite platform. How did getting permanently banned from Twitter change Trump’s interest in Parler? We can only speculate, although we’ll probably get a better idea once Parler is back online.
And note the additional details on the proposal by Matze to kick violent extremists, like people who are members of domestic terror groups, off the platform: Matze apparently proposed doing this only after Apple and Google kicked Parler off their app stores, which didn’t happen until after the insurrection. So Matze’s push to moderate dangerous extremists only took place after the insurrection and in response to Parler being kicked out of the app stores. And yet the Parler board still resisted the move:
So Parler is remaining fully dedicated to its mission statement of being open to everyone, including domestic terrorists apparently. It’s interesting branding given the context. A context where it remains unclear to this day whether or not the US is facing an extended period of far right domestic terrorism fighting for Trump’s lost cause.
And keep in mind that, should Trump keep going down the dark path he’s currently on, it’s entirely possible he’ll end up being labeled a domestic terrorist leader someday. What are the odds of Trump’s words leading to future political violence? Better than 50/50? It’s a grim question, but if he does end up becoming a terror advocate that would presumably put quite a few of his most fervent followers on a domestic terror watchlist too. Let’s hope that’s not how this pans out, but it’s a real possibility that grows more and more likely each passing day as the GOP continues to stand behind Trump and the insurrection. So when we see Parler stick with its commitment to being open to anyone, including domestic terrorists, that’s not necessarily just about being ‘on brand’. It’s also about planning for the future. A future where Parler is the communication hub of choice for a Trumpian domestic terror insurgency.
With the future of the Republican Party — and whether or not it remains a political party or instead morphs into a anti-democracy paramilitary movement or fragments into multiple parties- remaining an open question while the trial of Donald Trump’s second impeachment plays out in the Senate, here’s a set of articles that raise the question of how much the growing threat of political violence posed by a disaffected Trump movement will be directed against not just the Left but rival Republicans too.
First, we’ve learned some important details on the timeline of events the preceded the now notorious Jan 6 tweet by Donald Trump at 2:24 pm when he declared that Mike Pence lacked the “courage” to block the counting of the electoral votes. This was after Trump spent that morning publicly imploring Pence to show great “courage” that day. We now know that minutes before he issued that tweet decrying Pence’s lack of courage, Trump was made aware that the congressional chamber where the vote counting was taking place was being evacuated due to the dire nature of the security threat with insurrectionists already inside the Capitol and calling for Pence’s hanging. It’s the kind of details that makes that tweet attacking Pence sound less like the ramblings of an unhinged man-child and more like an order to execute Pence.
The fact that Trump basically threw is loyal Vice President to the wolves should, alone, raise serious questions about the nature of the future of the Republican Party. But as we’ll see in the second article below, Mike Pence is the leading 2024 contender for the GOP nomination according to recent polls if Trump doesn’t run in 2024. Those were the results of an Echelon Insights poll taken from Jan 20–26 that asked Republican and Republican-leaning voters who they would back in 2024. 34 percent said they would definitely support Trump if he runs again. But when given a list of candidates that didn’t include Trump, Pence led the pack with 21 percent, with Donald Trump Jr in second place with 10 percent
.
So the vice president that Trump almost got executed is the guy at the front of the pack for non-Trump 2024 candidates, while Trump’s son is in second place. We already know Pence has long had White House ambitions. And it’s just a matter of time before Don Jr jumps into electoral politics. What’s the GOP nomination going to look like in 2024 if it’s a race between Pence and Don Jr? This kind of post-Trump showdown has long seemed like a possibility. But it’s only now, in the wake of that Jan 6 violence, that the question of intra-GOP violence has been seriously raised and that’s a question that would obviously apply to a contested 2024 nomination process. Especially if it ends up being a race between someone seen as an ‘establishment’ standard bearer (like Pence) and someone like Don Jr.
Finally, as Josh Marshall has pointed out recently, we are now seeing the emergence of a Capitol insurrection “Truther” movement. It’s currently focused on the death of Officer Brian Sicknick, and the changing story around the exact cause of his death. Those questions, and the still-unresolved nature of his death, has led to the claims that maybe his death had absolutely nothing to do with the riot and has instead become a cudgel used to punish Trump. Yes, in keeping with classic far right conspiracy theory garbage logic, the questions over Sicknick’s death are being used to concoct a nebulous narrative that flips the events of January 6 into a vast nebulous conspiracy against Trump. This narrative is already being pushed by outlets like the National Review and on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News.
Oh, and it turns out that the person who appears to be the origin for this Sicknick meme is former Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie. Recall how Beattie was fired from the Trump White House in 2018 after he was found to have given a speech in 2016 at the white naitonalist H.L Mencken Club. Well, it turns out Beattie got a new White House job, following the election. He was appointed to a commission that helps preserve sites related to the Holocaust. Yep. And that’s the guy who appears to be behind the Sicnknick meme.
So we we have:
1. Evidence that Trump was actively encourage his supporters to violently apprehend Mike Pence after Pence refused to unconstitutionally block the electoral count.
2. Evidence that Pence still has a good deal of appeal in the GOP base to put him in the lead for a 2024 run should Trump not run. But Don Jr. remains a close second.
3. A growing narrative in right-wing media that the facts surrounding the events of the insurrection are skewed as part of a conspiracy against Trump.
Taken together, we seem to have a situation in the GOP where there’s still a large group of Republicans who have fond feelings towards Pence. Enough to give him a plurality in that poll. And yet there’s also clearly a growing contingent of Republicans who are going to view Pence and any other Republican who didn’t fully back Trump’s attempts to overturn the election as traitors. Traitors to Trump and traitors to their concept of America. So we have to ask: if Mike Pence does indeed run in 2024, how will the hard cord Trump base react to a Pence run? What if the race comes down to Pence and Don Jr? What are the odds that there won’t be violence directed at Pence? Or maybe it’s not Pence but some other establishment standard bearer. Is the Republican Party’s ‘civil war’ going to remain civil?
Ok, first here’s a piece out of Politico that confirms Donald Trump knew Mike Pence’s life was already at risk from the storming insurrectionist when Trump attacked him on Twitter for lacking the necessary courage :
“The existence of the phone call had been previously reported, but the detail that Tuberville informed Trump his vice president was in danger is a new and potentially significant development for House prosecutors seeking Trump’s conviction: it occurred just around the time that Trump sent a tweet attacking Pence for not having “the courage” to unilaterally stop Joe Biden’s victory. And Trump never indicated publicly that he was aware of Pence’s plight, even hours after Tuberville says he told him.”
The timeline is clear: Senator Tuberville tells Trump that Pence’s life is in danger from the mob of Trump supporters insider the Capitol, followed by Trump telling the world that Mike Pence failed him and them. Trump was clearly willing to see Pence killed by his mob of supporters if Pence lacked the “courage” Trump demanded.
Next, here’s a piece from last week about the poll taken on Jan 20–26 showing Mike Pence in the leading for a 2024 GOP nomination and Don Jr. in second place. But that’s assuming Trump doesn’t run. So the guy leading the post-Trump 2024 polls is the same game Trump tried to have executed last month, which points towards and interesting nomination process:
“They were also presented with a list of candidates excluding Trump. Given this list, 21 percent said they would back Pence. Behind him was the former president’s oldest child, Donald Trump Jr., who was supported by 10 percent.”
Can the GOP shake off its Trump addiction? Will the Trumpers allow that to happen, especially if it’s Mike Pence who gets ends up being the alternative? These are some of the questions GOPers have to be asking themselves...while they simultaneously ignore the very real plot to assassinate Mike Pence. A plot openly encouraged by Trump. It’s part of what makes the GOP’s denials of the violent nature of the insurrection so reckless. Those denials include denials of violence that was targeting the GOP too. That’s not something that can be casually ignored without consequences:
Finally, adding to this witches brew of awfulness is the emerging narrative in mainstream right-wing media that there exists a vast, if vague, plot to hype the nature of the violence during the insurrection as a means of attacking Trump. It’s like the birth of a new QAnon-style meme happening in real-time. A QAnon-style meme with the power to take on a life of its own. And that’s why any questions about the intra-GOP struggles heading into 2024 have to take into account that this meme that is new today is going to be a giant four-year old conspiracy theory by then. A four year old QAnon-style garbage conspiracy theory that will probably end up rewriting the entire event and describe it as a plot against not just Trump but Trump voters too. So anyone running against Trump (or Don Jr.) in 2024 is going to have to content with this up-is-down black-is-white narrative:
“Because of this, a new ‘truth movement’ has begun to crop up on the right suggesting Sicknick’s death was unrelated to the insurrection and may even be part of a cover-up to tarnish the reputation of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. It’s ugly and utterly predictable.”
They’ve found the real cover-up! Or rather, Darren Beattie found the real cover-up. The cover-up over Sicknick’s death. Expect this to be the fixation of right-wing coverage over the Capitol insurrection for years to come, thanks to the mainstream right-wing media coverage it’s getting:
Here’s a set of articles that point towards one of the more interesting angles in the ongoing investigation of the January 6 insurrection, and how the open coordination between figures like Roger Stone and groups like the Oath Keepers could form the basis for broader conspiracy charges that could involve members of Congress and the Trump team:
First, here’s an article from last week that describes the widening net being cast by prosecutors in their investigation of the individuals charged with storming the capital. The kind of widening net that just might ensnare people who didn’t storm the Capitol themselves but played a role in fomenting it and radicalizing the people who did. And that’s the kind of net that just might end up grabbing figures like Roger Stone, Ali Alexander, Alex Jones, and potentially even Donald Trump. but as First Amendment litigator Ken White points out, the legal bar for charging someone with incitement is quite high, and that’s why he anticipates “increasingly creative alternative approaches by federal prosecutors, like conspiracy.” So at the same time prosecutors are investigating the people who incited the riot, the legal barriers to actually charging someone with incitement are high enough that something more substantive, like conspiracy charges, might be required to actually convict. Were the riots an instance of ‘leaderless resistance’ that no one fomented? Or did the weeks of increasingly violent rhetoric by figures like Stone, Jones, and Trump himself act as the trigger for the event? That appears to be a core legal question at hand, which means we’re about to get a very interesting legal test of whether or not you can can months openly incite a riot and then act like you were just talking metaphorically.
But as we’ll see in the second and third articles below, part of what makes this avenue of investigation so intriguing is that it’s not necessarily going to rely entirely on publicly available evidence like Jan 6 videos of Trump inciting the crowd. We still don’t fully understand the scope of the private collusion and organizing that was taking place between the Trump team and the militant insurrectionists. There’s plenty of clues that indicate the private coordination was extensive, but that still needs to be proven in the courts.
So it was particularly intriguing on Sunday when Jessica Watkins — one of the members of a group of Oath Keepers who were videoed walking in a military-style “stack” formation as they snaked their way into the Capitol — claimed that she had been operating as VIP security at the Trump rally before riot and had even been coordinating with the Secret Service. Keep in mind that we already know that Oath Keepers had been acting as the personal security for Roger Stone in the days leading up to the insurrection. So the idea that the Oath Keepers were playing a ‘VIP security role’ is entirely consistently with publicly available evidence. The real question is whether or not they were actual coordinating their security role with the Secret Service detail that would have been providing Trump and his family with security at the Jan 6 rally.
But then, a day later, Watkins retracted her claims somewhat, with court filings that described her interactions with the Secret Service as more of a passing encounter. “She was given directives about things she could and could not do, including directions to leave all tactical gear outside of the VIP area, and she abided by all of those directives,” her court filing said on Monday. Note that, based on these revised filings, Watkins is still claiming to have been allowed into the VIP area of the rally. It’s part of what makes this unfolding story of Watkins’s claims to so interesting: the revised claims are still damning.
Ok, first, here’s a Washington Post piece from last week describing how prosecutors had already begun searching for possible links between the insurrectionists and figures like Stone, Alexander, and Jones. Which shouldn’t be a particularly difficult search since these ties are out in the open. But providing a legal case that demonstrates their words contributed to the insurrection is actually quite difficult, making charges like conspiracy charges all the more tempting for these prosecutors:
“A key task for prosecutors and agents is to sift through the multitude of motives and intentions of the roughly 800 people in the mob that descended upon the Capitol — from those who came as individuals drawn to the idea of derailing Joe Biden’s presidency before it began, to those who allegedly began organizing immediately after the election to show up in Washington in large numbers to use force to try to keep Trump in power.”
Why did that mob of roughly 800 people descend upon the Capitol? Was it all just an act of spontaneous mob mentality taking over? Mass temporary insanity? Was this instigated by the words or others? Or was at least some of the violence actively planned in advance? If so, who was involved in the planning? These are the questions investors are reportedly trying to answer. But given free speech protections, proving criminal culpability won’t be easy, which makes charges like conspiracy all the more tempting:
And then, a couple days after that report, we learn that one of the Oath Keepers videoed storming the Capitol claimed she had been providing VIP security at the rally earlier, even working with Secret Service to coordinate providing security to legislators and others during their post-rally March to the Capitol:
““On January 5 and 6, Ms. Watkins was present not as an insurrectionist, but to provide security to the speakers at the rally, to provide escort for the legislators and others to march to the Capitol as directed by the then-President, and to safely escort protestors away from the Capitol to their vehicles and cars at the conclusion of the protest,” the court filing said on Saturday. “She was given a VIP pass to the rally. She met with Secret Service agents. She was within 50 feet of the stage during the rally to provide security for the speakers. At the time the Capitol was breached, she was still at the site of the initial rally where she had provided security.””
Watkins wasn’t an insurrectionist. She was providing security to legislators and others as they marched from the rally to the Capitol, as directed by then-President Trump. She has a VIP pass and met with Secret Service. It’s quite an alibi. An alibi that’s in keeping with what prosecutors are charging too...that Watkins believed she was acting on order from Trump himself:
But then, a day later, Watkins changed her story. But only a little. Instead of her previous description of meeting with the Secret Service agents about providing VIP security at the rally, she now says she merely spoke with Secret Service members as they passed through security at the rally. But in the new filing, Watkins still asserts that she was playing a security role at the rally that was sanctioned by the rally organizers. She’s only revoking the previous suggestion that the Secret Service sanctioned it too. And the Secret Service appears to be concurring with this description, including the description of Watkins being allowed into the VIP section of the rally, saying, “She was given directives about things she could and could not do, including directions to leave all tactical gear outside of the VIP area, and she abided by all of those directives.” So everyone, including the Secret Service, is in agreement that Watkins was allowed into the VIP area of the rally. The only question is whether or not the Secret Service actively sanctioned her being there. Overall, it was less a retraction by Watkins, and more like a clarification that leaves the core of assertions intact:
“Still, Watkins’ details in court suggest how the efforts among paramilitants who are now accused of conspiracy on January 6 were closer to the apparatus around then-President Donald Trump and his rally than was previously known.”
Yes, while Watkins may have changed her claims slightly in her court filings, the revised claims still suggests that the paramilitary insurrectionists that stormed the Capitol were working a lot closer with the Trump team than previously known. And note how this clarification by Watkins and the Secret Service appears to rely on the clarification that there were actually two separate security services at the Jan 6 rally: the security provided by the rally organizers — which ostensibly applies to everyone where — and the security provided by the Secret Service that only applies to the officials under its protection. In other words, Watkins really was acting as security in an officially sanctioned capacity, but it was the rally’s security, not the security provided by the Secret Service:
So the picture that’s emerging is that Watkins wasn’t working directly with the Secret Service in providing security. She was working a parallel rally security service that was circumstantially forced to coordinate with the Secret Service. And that work got her access to the VIP area, necessitating some interactions with the Secret Service agents protecting those VIPs. Overall, it’s not exactly an exculpatory change to the story. It’s still a story about an organized paramilitary group executing a military-style invasion of the Capitol while working in close coordination with the Trump team. It’s just that now we know that work involved wondering around in the rally’s VIP area.
And that all raises another interesting question: so if Watkins was allowed into the VIP area of the rally, but she wasn’t playing a security role at that point since Secret Service was already securing the VIPs, what exactly was she doing back there? Who was she meeting with and what did they talk about? We still don’t know. We just know that whatever she did back in that VIP area of the rally, she did minutes before she was filmed snaking her way through the crowd of insurrectionists on their way into the Capitol. In that sense, if she had been playing a security role in that VIP section of the rally it would probably be a lot less scandalous than the obvious alternative reasons for being back there.
So which was the real Trumpian conference? Which conference truly captured the contemporary Trumpian zeitgeist? That’s the question posed to US conservative movement following the pair of far right political conferences in Orlando over the weekend. Yes, a pair of far right conferences. CPAC has a shadow. An extra far right shadow, because CPAC apparently wasn’t crazy enough: The America First conference (AFPAC), held just down the street from CPAC and led by far right personality Nick Fuentes.
First, recall how Fuentes has played a leading role in the “Stop the Steal” movement, with Fuentes notoriously leading a crowd to the chant of “Destroy the GOP! Destroy the GOP!” back in December to express displeasure with the Republican Party’s lack of official commitment to keeping Trump in office no matter what. He’s also routinely used violent political rhetoric, like when he pined about killing Michigan’s legislators who didn’t support overturning the election. That’s the guy heading up this ‘Alt CPAC’.
So which is the real Trumpian conference? It’s a question the AFPAC’s organizers are encouraging us to ask since they are juxtaposing the event to CPAC and presenting themselves as the real Trumpian conference. Are they correct? On the one hand, Trump did speak at CPAC and not AFPAC and the conference was basically the open worship of the cult of Trump. But there’s no denying that the embrace of open political violence by figures like Fuentes are far more representative of the ‘accelerationist’ wing of the MAGA movement. And in that sense, there’s no need to distinguish between the two events. Both are representative of Trumpism: CPAC is the ego and AFPAC the id:
“America First activists hosted an identical event in 2020 in the Washington, DC, area. Like last year’s event, the conference shares a date and location with the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Organizers have sought to juxtapose CPAC with their own event, hoping to project that their gathering is a truer representation of the conservative zeitgeist than the movement’s largest annual gathering of speakers and activists.”
Who are the genuine Trump followers? The true believers willing to do whatever it takes for their leader? It’s an open question in the cult of Trump. But there’s no denying that the leaders of AFPAC have one big advantage in currying the favor of Trump: they’ve been openly encourage political violence to keep Trump in office before and after the January 6 insurrection. Demonstrable loyalty to Trump over loyalty to the Constitution. That’s how you win the prize of ultimate Trump super-fan and Nick Fuentes has excelled at making those demonstrations of loyalty:
And as the following piece describes, that enduring loyalty to Trump was fully on display during Fuentes’s speech at the conference. A speech where Fuentes reflected back on the January 6 insurrection, fondly recalled how Trump’s supporters sent the Capitol police into retreat, and wished for similar days in the future:
““While I was there in D.C., outside of the building, and I saw hundreds of thousands of patriots surrounding the U.S. Capitol building and I saw the police retreating ... I said to myself: ‘This is awesome,’ ” Fuentes said to the applause of the crowd.”
The crowd applauded as Fuentes recounted the scene of hundreds of thousands of ‘patriots’ surrounding the Capitol and sending the police into retreat. It’s the kind of scene that gives us a sense of the zeitgeist of AFPAC. A zeitgeist that really does probably do a better job than CPAC of capturing the violent loyalty to Trump that animates so much of this movement. The torches and pitchforks zeitgeist of the movement that is determined to capture it all or burn it all down trying:
So while Trump chose to attend CPAC this year and skipped AFPAC, when it came to the open idolatry that Trump craves, it’s hard to argue that AFPAC didn’t deliver. It’s the conference for people who didn’t think CPAC was far right and Trumpian enough, after all. Of course Trump is going to have warm feelings towards it. They’re still calling for more insurrections for him. He must be absolutely smitten with AFPAC at this point.
And that’s why we can probably add to the list of questions about the future of the US conservative movement the question of whether or not we’re going to see CPAC eventually eclipsed by an even more extremist annual conference. Which conference will Trump attend next year? How about in 2024? We’ll find out. But keep in mind that if Trump starts attending AFPAC over CPAC, that’s probably in indication that he’s no longer interesting in running for office. That’s not to say he won’t be interesting to securing political power. Just not by winning elections.
Here’s a pair of articles that give us an update on Fox News’s veer to the right in response to the cannibalization of its audience following Donald Trump’s election loss and the rise of alternative conservative ‘news’ sites like Newsmax and One America News Network (OANN) aggressively pushing ‘stolen election’ stories:
It looks like Fox News may have a new formula for winning back the far right audiences who wandered off to Newsmax or OANN. It’s not really a new formula but more like taking the existing winning formula a step further: let the prime time hosts just openly push white nationalism. Or at least allow Tucker Carlson to do so, which is exactly what he did Monday evening when he fixated on “demographic change” for much of the show. It was a clear reference to the “Great Replacement” — that whites are being replaced by non-whites as part of a diabolical leftist plot — and basically echoed the themes found in the Camp of the Saints novel touted by Steve Bannon.
But Carlson, or Fox News, didn’t stop there. Following the denunciations of Carlson’s segment, Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch defended Carlson’s “replacement theory” comments but suggesting that Carlson was actually decrying the “replacement theory” and was merely making comments about voting rights (this was in reference to Carlson arguing during his segment that the “demographic change” was a violation of white conservative voting rights). Murdoch made this laughable defense right before Carlson went back on the air to address his critics and completely double down on his “replacement theory” comments.
Again, this isn’t exactly new for Fox News. The network has been preying on and flaming white nationalist sentiments for the very beginning of the network. But it usually isn’t this open. Which raises the question: is this the new normal for right-wing media? Open talk of “replacement theory” and how the existence of non-whites in a democracy inherently infringes on the rights of whites? We’ll see. It presumably depends on whether or not this gets Fox a ratings bump:
“Obviously, Carlson was never going to apologize for or retract his remarks. But he could have chosen to ignore the controversy, move on, and let it die out. Instead, he did the opposite. Carlson opened up his show by first replaying the comments he made last week — comments in which he essentially endorsed the “great replacement” theory. Then he mocked critics who were outraged he had done so. “It is amusing to see them keep at it,” Carlson said of those who have called for him to be removed from Fox’s air, a group that now includes the Anti-Defamation League. “They get so enraged! It’s a riot!””
Taking glee in the liberal outrage over his “replacement theory” segment. It’s hard to argue this isn’t exactly what we should have expected from Fox News. And after Lachlan Murdoch defended the segment, it’s hard to argue we shouldn’t expect a lot more of this:
“White replacement theory? No, no, this is a voting rights question.”
In case anyone was wondering if Fox News would somehow become less of a blight on humanity after Rupert finally kicks it and completely hands it over to his kids, Lachlan just gave you your clue. It also raises the question of whether or not anyone truly believed Carlson’s segment was just about voting rights. Carlson’s critics obviously didn’t, but how about his fans? Did they buy the idea that Carlson was just talking about voting rights? Perhaps the most gullible members of the audience. But as the following Vanity Fair article describes, if you were someone who was already familiar with the “great replacement” theory, it was pretty obvious what Carlson was saying. As one white nationalist aptly put it, “For the purposes of normie cuckservatives, this is based as fu ck as baby’s first redpill”:
“And strangely, despite Fox News’s and Murdoch’s insistence that Carlson’s focus on this topic has to do with voting rights, and not racist conspiracy mongering, he appears to have drawn praise from a certain segment of adoring fans. “Holy sh it, I just watched Tucker’s replacement segment. This is a turning point in the program,” wrote one user on 4chan’s /pol/ board––one of the few remaining online platforms that hosts self-described Nazis––in a thread praising Carlson for naming “the jew on national television.” Others on the thread shared their praise by posting a meme depicting Carlson as the far right’s cartoon frog mascot, Pepe, urging fellow 4chan-ers to “get your parents to watch right now to boost tucker’s ratings so murdoch doesn’t get cold feet,” and declaring, “HEIL TUCKER!””
“HEIL TUCKER!” It’s the rallying cry what what has become Tucker Carlson’s target audience: eager white nationalists hoping to ‘redpill’ their fellow conservatives. Carlson’s dog-whistling was compelling young white nationalists to encourage their parents to watch Fox News. Just think about that for a moment from the perspective of Lachlan Murdoch or another soulless cable news executive who cares about nothing other than ratings and faces an increasingly aging audience: Carlson’s “great replacement” segment was exciting young viewers. Getting them so excited they were going to tell their parents to watch. That’s like heroin to cable news executives.
And that could end up being the part of this story that has the biggest impact in the long run: the younger generation of Murdoch clan just learned a powerful lesson about the appeal of barely-veiled hate speech. The ‘redpilled’ far right youth of the internet age — people who self-radicalized on Facebook and YouTube — are ready and willing to become loyal Fox News viewers. The network just needs to keep giving them what they want.
Here’s one those stories that really captures that debased state of the modern US news environment: The most watched show on Cable News can’t find enough advertisers. The advertiser challenges facing Tucker Carlson’s prime time Fox News show aren’t new. Carlson’s show has been hemorrhaging advertisers for years now at the same time it continues to dominate the nightly cable news ratings. Simply put, his non-stop race-baiting and sophistry are just too toxic for most advertisers. And that’s what makes this latest story potentially so significant. Because after all that attrition in advertiser support, Carlson was left to just Mike Lindell’s MyPillow to buy up large chunks of that advertising time. There were even periods in 2020 when MyPillow accounted for 41% of the show’s ad inventory. Beyond that, MyPillow has become the largest advertiser on the entire network, not just Carlson’s show. And now Mike Lindell is threatening to pull all of the MyPillow ads from not just Carlson’s show but all of Fox News.
Why is Lindell issuing this threat? Because Fox is refusing to air his advertisements for a mid-August symposium where Lindell will prove the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump through the manipulation of voting machines. Recall how the meme about Trump be reinstated as President by mid-August is being aggressively pushed by Lindell and others, leading to growing concerns about the potential for political violence over the next month. That’s part of the context of this fight between Lindell and Fox News. By pulling all his ads from Fox, Lindell is positioning himself as the ‘one true conservative voice’ as we head into this mid-August period where Lindell and others will somehow reverse the 2020 election.
That’s the state of affairs with US Cable News. So the most watched Cable News network has lost so many advertisers over the years due to its toxic content that it was down to MyPillow as its biggest advertiser. And the most watch show on Cable News, Tucker Carlson’s show, was even more dependent on MyPillow because it’s even more toxic than the rest of the network’s content. And now Fox News is poised to lose this last major shameless advertiser because the network refuses to air ads from that provider for a symposium that promises to take the stolen election Big Lie to new levels of recklessness.
Has Fox News finally had enough of Lindell’s stolen election antics? We finally found a level of shamelessness Fox News couldn’t embrace? Perhaps. But also keep in mind that this upcoming symposium is looking like the possible open event for the declaration of a second insurrection. That’s the vibe emanating from the Lindell-wing of the GOP. It’s either going to be a rerun of 2020 or 1776. So when we find Fox News getting cold feet, keep in mind it could be because they are expecting that upcoming symposium to descend into exactly that: a call for insurrection and/or civil war. And the network probably doesn’t want to have to explain how they fomented a second insurrection this year:
“As Carusone noted, the situation on Fox News prime time is so dire that Fox Corporation, the channel’s parent company, is one of the largest paid advertisers. And now that situation goes from bad to worse, with MyPillow apparently dropping out.”
It’s a darkly fascinating business model conundrum: Toxicity sells. But no one wants to sell their products that way. Fox News has found that deceptive inflammatory content grabs audiences, but at the cost of coming across as such a dishonorable organization that no one wants to be seen associated with it. Only companies like MyPillow that exist exclusively in the right-wing disinfotainment universe want to be seen sponsoring Fox and that makes Fox News increasingly beholden to that shrinking number of companies willing to taint their brands with Fox ads. The success of Fox’s lies are propelling them further and further out of the realm of respectability and its not clear how this tension in this business model gets resolved. But we may get a better idea of how this gets resolved now that MyPillow is threatening to pull all its ads:
So it appears that Fox News’s integrity as an organization is be subjected to a stress-test of sorts over the next couple of weeks. Look out world. But at least we’re finally identify what is considered ‘the line’ for Fox News. You can have hosts who lie to the audiences, and guests who lie to the audiences, but if someone wants to run an ad for a symposium that is itself the culmination of those decades of endless highly profitable lies, that’s a line that can’t be crossed.
The Beast hasn’t reawakened. It’s not good news. That’s because the Beast never actually went to sleep. It’s been awake the whole time. That’s the glaring message coming out of Virginia as we wait for find out whether or not Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin can manage to pull off the remarkable come from behind victory he appears to be poised to win. A come from behind victory many see as a template hybrid form of campaign in the era of ex-President Trump, where candidates simultaneously avoid and embrace Trumpian-style politics. A kind of ‘moderate extremist’ branding. The kind of branding that relies heavily on the very same right-wing disinfotainment media complex that has been aggressively pushing the ‘2020 stolen election’ ever since the January 6 Capitol insurrection. That’s the Beast that never went to sleep and is alive and well in Virginia. Because as we’re going to see, the Virginia race isn’t just turning out to be a vindication of the enduring success of Trumpian style Big Lie politics. It’s turning into a vindication of the enduring success of that Big Lie strategy when deployed by by ‘moderate’ Republicans even after the strategy has been widely exposed well before election day.
Yes, it turns out Glenn Youngkin’s decision to run a campaign focused on hysteria about ‘Critical Race Theory’ — something not actually taught in Virginia’s public schools — is going to succeed as the dominant narrative despite the array of lies in his campaign being publicly exposed in the final weeks of the race. Glenn Youngkin’s lies are going to win out in the minds of the Virginia electorate and he’s likely going to become Virginia’s next governor. And as the following Washington Post opinion piece by Greg Sargent reminds us, this wouldn’t have been possible were it not for the incredible effectiveness of the right-wing media complex’s ability take its message directly to voters. It doesn’t matter that mainstream media outlets covered Youngkin’s lies. It didn’t matter that Democrats tried to tie Youngkin to a relatively unpopular Trump. That coverage wasn’t seen by most voters. What was seen by these voters is the ongoing torrent of right-wing propaganda. A direct-to-voter message apparatus that the Left has no response to and, so far, remains unstoppable. That’s the big lesson the GOP, and Democrats, are likely going to take from this election. The GOP’s special move — Steve Bannon’s strategy of “flooding the zone with sh#t” — still works like a charm:
“But this duplicity has benefited from a hidden assist. For months, Youngkin and his allies have pumped that raw right-wing sewage directly into the minds of the GOP base, behind the backs of moderate swing voters, via a right-wing media network that has no rival on the Democratic side.”
It’s not just a story about Glenn Youngkin successfully executing a ‘moderate extremist’ two-step campaign. It’s also about the how the vast right-wing disinfotainment media complex remains absolutely crucial for the execution of this ‘moderate extremist’ strategy. A strategy that allows Youngkin to eschew directly embracing the most controversial and polarizing aspects of Donald Trump-style politics while relying on the right-wing media complex to quietly do exactly that. A media complex that operates largely in the parallel right-wing media universe that most moderate voters are barely aware exists. In other words, Youngkin is relying on two parallel campaigns. The ‘moderate’ public campaign and an extremist direct-to-right-wing-audiences campaign. It this model has worked with flying colors.
But the situation is even worse for Democrats. Because as the whole ‘Toni Morrison’ episode demonstrated, even when Youngkin is caught in a blatant gross lie — like running a campaign commercial alleging lurid content involving pedophilia was being forced on children without acknowledging that this content was actually a classic by Toni Morrison as part of a generic attack on “Critical Race Theory” which isn’t actually taught in Virginia’s public schools — there was no real cost because the right-wing message prevailed in Virginia’s media environment. The Big Lie won, even after having a spotlight put on it:
And we have to note the sad perennial Democratic lament: “The Democratic Party needs to figure out ways to more actively court its base voters on a regular basis.” A perennial lament that never seems to include an acknowledgement that the left in the US has basically abandoned one of the most influential forms of political media that’s been dominated by the far right for over a generation now: talk radio. You almost can’t find a more effective medium for reaching new voters and keeping existing ones engaged. Instead, Democrats to this day rely on ‘mainstream’ corporate media to carry their message. Somehow the left has never figured this out in the US despite this being a dominant feature of American politics since the rise of Rush Limbaugh in the late 80s. It points towards one of the additional challenges Democrats face in taking lessons for the experience in Virginia: some of those lessons appear to be beyond the willingness of the party to learn:
So what narrative is this same dominant right-wing media complex that has already established its superiority over Virginia’s airwaves going to tell its audiences should the Democrats prevail and Youngkin doesn’t quite pull off this last minute upset? It’s not a mystery. It’s going to be the same narrative this media-complex has been pushing nationally for the entirely of 2021: that Democrats steal elections through mass voter fraud. It’s the mainstream GOP message at this point. A message that’s clearly taken root and shows no signs of dissipating, according to the 12th annual PRRI American Values Survey poll that was just released, showing conservative voters who primarily get their news from right-wing. According to the poll, while 44 percent of Republicans who trust mainstream news sources believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, 82 percent of those who said they trust Fox News believed this, a view shared by 97 percent of those who rely mostly on outlets like Newsmax or One America News. Overall, more than two thirds of Republican voters continue to believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Not surprisingly, 30 percent of Republican voters also agree with the sentiment that violence may be needed to save the US. But perhaps the most disturbing part of this poll is how consistent its results have been. Because PRRI has been asking these questions throughout 2021, and what they’ve found is a remarkable consistency. In March, 28 percent of Republicans agreed that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence,” and over the eight months that level has more or less gelled. As PRRI’s CEO put it, “As we’ve gotten some distance [from Jan. 6], one might hope cooler heads would prevail, but we really haven’t seen that...If anything, it looks like people are doubling down and views are getting kind of locked in.” So the message from Fox News and the other major right-wing ‘news’ outlets is the message that has won the media wars and taken hold in the minds of Republican voters not just in Virginia but across the US. A direct message that Democrats are stealing elections with the strongly implied message that violence is the only available answer:
““It is an alarming finding,” said Robert Jones, CEO and founder of PRRI. “I’ve been doing this a while, for decades, and it’s not the kind of finding that as a sociologist, a public opinion pollster, that you’re used to seeing.””
Republican voters have been giving pollsters alarming answers for years. But this survey was disturbing even by those jaded standards. An enduring 30 percent of Republican voters appear to have been successfully radicalized in a manner that isn’t going to reverse itself:
Radicalized by the exact same right-wing media that successfully dominated the airwaves in Virginia and won the messaging battle. The forces that successfully trolled Virginian parents with fearmongering about Toni Morrison are the same forces radicalizing the national GOP towards political violence. Keep in mind that driving a populace into a civil conflict through propaganda is more or less a battle of lies over reality. If the lies can prevail in the face of direct exposure and capture the hearts of minds of a group, that group is going to be capable of doing almost anything. Like civil war. In that sense, the success of Glenn Youngkin can be seen as the latest successful trial run for the messaging apparatus that will eventually be used by the far right to stage a full blown civil conflict:
And that brings us to what could be considered the other side of this coin: On the same day the GOP Big Lie machine is poised to prevail in Virginia, there’s a different manifestation of the success of this far right propaganda network: a group of QAnon adherents have descended on Dealey Plaza in Dallas with the apparent expectation that JFK Jr is going to appear there today. Yep. And the ‘stolen 2020 election’ narrative was front and center. According to the QAnon influencer who declared the event, Trump is going to be reinstated as president, with JFK Jr. stepping in as Vice President. Then Trump will step down and JFK Jr will become the president, with Michael Flynn then stepping up to become JFK Jr’s Vice President. At that point, Trump will become the “King of Kings”, a reference to a biblical passage in Revelations. As we should expect, it’s all rooted in sovereign citizen-style arguments about the post-Civil War Reconstruction era creating an invalid government, where “everything from 1871 was illegal and unconstitutional.” And while it might be tempted to attribute this QAnon rally to something completely separate from the political scene that has dominated Virginia’s politics, as we’ve seen there’s no real separation of these forces anymore. The forces that animate QAnon are largely the same forces animating Republican voters in Virginia: a right-wing Big Lie machine that is demonstrably unstoppable in the face of exposure. Think about how many QAnon predictions have failed. Hard predictions just shrugged off again and again. It’s not just the the Big Lie. It’s the Unstoppable Lie. The Lie Juggernaut. QAnon is just what you get when a Lie Juggernaut is allowed to keep going:
““Trump reinstated as 19th president calls up a new vice president, JFK Junior” wrote a prominent QAnon influencer with more than 250,000 followers on the encrypted messaging app Telegram. The influencer added that Trump’s reinstatement stems from the fact that “everything from 1871 was illegal and unconstitutional,” a reference to a convoluted far-right conspiracy theory aimed at invalidating Biden’s presidency by suggesting that an obscure law from the late-19th century renders every law passed and president elected since then as illegitimate. “Trump will step down. John will become President,” the post reads, adding that disgraced former general and QAnon celebrity Michael Flynn will become his vice president. The feverish fantasy concludes by claiming that Trump will become “1 of the 7 new Kings. Most likely the King of Kings,” a reference to a biblical passage in Revelations 17.”
Donald Trump is going to be reinstated before becoming the King of Kings. A large group of people decided to travel all the way to Dallas following messages like this. Messages they received from a random influencer on Telegram. It’s an example of the modern right-wing media ecosystem in action. An ecosystem that goes far beyond Fox News or right-wing talk radio but now includes encrypted messaging apps spouting out the wildest kinds of narratives, directly reaching audiences without having to worry about being exposed for spreading extremist content. That messaging beast isn’t just alive and well in the wake of the January 6 Capitol insurrection but still growing and spouting messages calling for actions that will make the Capitol insurrection look like warm up act. Maybe that messaging beast will still remain focused on “Critical Race Theory” alarmism going forward in 2022 and 2024, maybe not. That’s not really the major lesson the Democrats should take from the race in Virginia. The major lesson is that Big Lie message machine is still up and running and getting stronger by the day. When that’s the case, the specific messages used by Republicans to win elections is kind of beside the point.
The Republican plot to steal the 2020 election through any means necessary came into sharper focus with a new report on the “79 Days Report”, a recently discovered simulation run by the right-wing Claremont Institute and the and Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) in the final weeks of the 2020 election. Recall how John Eastman — one of the central figures in providing the legal justifications for the events that led up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection — also happens to be a Claremont Institute member. Still in good standing. Eastman is one of the authors of the report. So it’s a simulation run by one of the organizations at the center of the 2020 coup plot.
The report, from October of 2020, is like a dark mirror image of what actually played out and a perfect example of the GOP’s pathological reliance on a strategy of projection. But the simulation doesn’t imagine Trump winning a clean victory, resulting in the protests. The report assumes three scenarios: a clear Biden win, a clear Trump win, and an ambiguous result. The report focuses on simulating how that ambiguous third option might play out, and goes on to assume a one-state-one-vote House delegation scenario. Recall how this House delegation scenario was something Republicans were repeatedly looking at because it implicitly favored Republicans by operating on a one-state-one-vote procedure. As long as Trump got 26 state delegation votes, he wins. The whole simulation centered around that fantasy House delegation vote scenario!
But there was more to the report than just fantasies about winning through this one-state-one-vote constitutional crisis gimmick. The report goes on to descend into a dark right-wing fantasy about a nationwide crackdown on left-wing groups in response to large scale street protests by antifa and BLM groups. At the heart of the plot in the simulation, a hypothetical Republican congressman is hospitalized during an attack by left-wing groups. But that congressman’s vote also happens to be needed to bring Trump the 26 state delegation he needs to secure the presidency. The grievously wounded simulated congressman is brought to the House floor to cast the deciding vote, securing Trump’s reelection. But the simulation goes on to assume that the House delegation vote scenario doesn’t go so smoothly. In fact, it goes off the rails violently and this is where the simulation gets exceptionally disturbing. Because as we’ll see, this wasn’t really a simulation about the execution of a House state delegation vote to resolve the 2020 election. It was in reality a simulation about the implementation of martial law — including through the the use of paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys — to deal with predictable publicly outcry that would have resulted had the GOP managed to succeed in forcing a one-state-one-vote presidential election scenario.
But as we’re also going to see, there’s echos of a ‘Maidan’ kind of scenario here. Or maybe like an inserted Maidan that keeps in the government in power. Because the simulated martial law scenarios don’t just involve the preemptive arrests of identified left-wing leaders of the street protests. At one point, the simulation involves a police sniper killing a member of “Black Block” who was wielding a Molotov cocktail-wielding causing the person to drop the cocktail and engulf their fellow protestors in flames, resulting in serious injuries and one death. The simulation then includes a scene where the leader of the Chicago Police Union holds a press conference addressing accusations of police excessive force. The union chief has a rebuttal in the simulation: “Really?...Take a look out that window there, you tell me, what the hell is excessive right now? (leaves podium).” So mass preemptive arrests and police snipers were being envisioned in by this group. What are the odds at least some of the people involved with this happened to actually study the events of the Maidan in 2014?
It’s also worth noting some of the other notable authors of this report: Kevin Roberts, Jeff Giesea, and Charles Haywood. Jeff Giesea is one of the associates of Peter Thiel who was reportedly involved with the Trump 2016 transition process and a patron of Richard Spencer Kevin Roberts was then the executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He has made the head of the Heritage Foundation last month. And Haywood happens to be a right-wing blogger with a history of calling for an American “Caesar” authoritarian figure.
Finally, it’s worth noting what the triggering event is for all the chaos envisioned in the report: on election night, the state of Texas is declared for Joe Biden. But that call is quickly withdrawn following reports of some sort of cybersecurity attack on Texas’s voting tabulation systems. Riots break out in cities across the nation overnight and overwhelm law enforcement. Operation Spearfish, the mass sweep of left-wing individuals under almost any pretense, soon follows. That’s the scenario. A simple hack disruption. A wildly plausible scenario that could obviously apply to future elections. And that’s perhaps the most disturbing part of the simulation: it’s not at all clear why we shouldn’t assume the GOP isn’t still viewing this simulation as a valid template for how to deal with elections going forward:
“The report was a response to a similar tabletop exercise from the Transition Integrity Project, a group of anti-Trump Democrats and Republicans who war-gamed potential pitfalls ahead of the 2020 election — spurring plenty of right-wing hysteria about a supposedly imminent left-wing coup.”
Yes, everyone watch out of the imminent left-wing coup. That was the absurdist up-is-down climate this ‘simulation’ was released in when the Claremont Institute published it in October of 2020. A climate of hysteria that was apparently supposed to cover up the fact that this simulation was in reality plan for turning the street protests that would inevitably emerge during a contested election into an excuse for a full blown authoritarian crack down on the left. A crackdown that envisioned mass sweeps of just about any left-wing organizer under Operation Spearfish, and even envisions the political response by police union leaders following accusations of excessive force. The report is basically a plan for how to implement a brutal sweeping partisan crackdown:
But is the original article from the Bulwark on report describes, it’s not just that the simulation imagined a nationwide authoritarian crackdown by law enforcement on left-wing individuals and groups. It envisions an insurrectionist authoritarian crackdown by law enforcement on left-wing individuals and groups, where law enforcement leaders are operating as a kind of (pro-Republican) partisan force of their own in opposition to Democratic elected officials.
And here’s where the Proud Boy and other militias come in: the report also envisions the deputization of these groups by law enforcement. So the simulation envisions law enforcement leaders declaring their independence from elected officials while they deputy the militias. Yep. As the Bulwark article aptly puts it, “This isn’t a serious wargame or a policy study so much as a bowdlerized retelling of The Turner Diaries”:
“This isn’t a serious wargame or a policy study so much as a bowdlerized retelling of The Turner Diaries.”
It really is like some sort of far right fantasy scenario right out of the The Turner Diaries. A full blown right-wing authoritarian power grab under the guise of cracking down on a left-wing insurrection. Law enforcement was effectively acting in its own insurrectionary role under this simulation:
Following up on the new reports of the madness gripping the Trump cabal in the final weeks and days of the Trump administration, here’s a look back at a pair of articles that warrant a closer look in light of these new reports. As we just learned from Jon Karl’s new book “Betrayal”, it’s not just that there was a keen interest in neutralizing and/or implication CIA director Gina Haspel during this post-election period. It appears that implicating Haspel was targeted as part of the plot to create the narrative of a massive multinational vote-rigging conspiracy involving overseas servers used to carrying out the alleged mass hack of US election systems. And it was in late November, shortly after Trump’s pardon of Michael Flynn, that both Flynn and Sidney Powell began lobbying then-acting undersecretary of defense of intelligence Ezra Cohen-Watnick — one of the figures mysteriously elevated to a defense leadership position the prior month — for extreme measures involving the election. Flynn wanted Cohen-Watnick to order a military seizure of ballots. But it’s Sidney Powell’s request that is a particular note here: she was peddling an insane narrative that Haspel was caught trying to destroy one of those election-rigging servers in Germany and wanted Cohen-Watnick to somehow extract a confession from her.
It’s learning about that bonkers request made by Powell in late November that should prompt a reexamination of what we learned in the follow pair of articles from back when all this was playing out. The first article is a Dec 4, 2020, Washington Post article about the what was then the ongoing blocking of the Biden transition team from some, but not all, of the US’s intelligence agencies. In particular, intelligence agencies run out of the Pentagon were displaying an unprecedented unwillingness to meet with Biden transition official. Other agencies, like the CIA, were acting as normal. And as we’ll see, it turns out it was Cohen-Watnick’s office that was playing a central role in this transition process. So in the weeks immediately following those bonkers phone calls from Flynn and Powell to Cohen-Wathnick, we were still seeing indications of mysterious refusal inside the DoD’s intelligence community to work in good faith on the transition.
And that leads us to the second article below. It’s a January 16, 2021, Axios article about a near earthquake that was avoided at the CIA. A plot that almost led to Gina Haspel’s last-minute resignation. And a plot that appeared to have inducing Haspel’s resignation as one of its possible end-goals. It was a plot to replace Haspel’s deputy director with Trump loyalist Kash Patel. And as part of the plat, if Haspel refused and resigned in protest, she was be replaced by Patel himself or another Trump loyalist. So it was a plot to get Patel into the second-in-command position at the CIA and position in the top command. And the plot was basically put into motion. Trump ordered Patel to return to DC from an overseas trip on December 8. The plan was to elevate him to CIA deputy directory on December 11. Haspel, having caught wind of this, decided to attend the presidential daily intelligence brief that morning, after Trump had already given his chief of staff Mark Meadows orders to inform Haspel of the plan to promote Patel. Following the presidential briefing Haspel left the room, and Trump was reportedly dissuaded from going through with the plan by Mike Pence and White House counsel Pat Cippolone. But despite Trump changing his mind, Meadows had already informed Haspel of the plan. She threatened to resign as expected. But since Trump himself had already changed his mind, Meadows was forced to reverse the order, avoiding Haspel’s resignation.
So it would appear that Haspel almost resigned as CIA directory on December 11. The plan had been put in motion days earlier and was only thwarted by Trump’s last-minute vacillations. And, and as the Axios report reminds us, it was also in mid-January when we got reports of MyPillow CEO showing up at the White House pushing plans that included “Move Kash Patel to CIA Acting.” In other words, the question of just how close the US came to a full blown coup is the question of what how close we came to a full blown coup inside the CIA first (surprise!):
“The officials said the Biden team has not been able to engage with leaders at the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other military-run spy services with classified budgets and global espionage platforms.”
Other intelligence agencies were quite willing but for some reason the Pentagon-run intelligence agencies were refusing to meet with the Biden transition team as of early December 2020. The wait had already been more than a month. And these agencies refusing to meet happened to include the NSA, which is seen as a critical source for intelligence on threats including foreign interference in US election, making the NSA one of the agencies the Trump administration would have been extremely interested in turning to for making their foreign interference claims. It was all quite a compelling mystery at the time:
But it was the fact that this was all happening in the middle of a complete unexplained reshuffling of top Defense officials after the election that made this refusal to meet with the Biden transition team so ominous. And it just happened to be Ezra Cohen-Watnick’s office that was playing a central role in transition matters at the time. So it would appear that Cohen-Watnick himself could have been the immediate obstacle to a smooth transition. But with everything we’re learning, it’s clear that Cohen-Watnick himself wasn’t the driving force behind this obstruction. The desire of Trump and the cabal of figures around him like Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell to find any excuse possible to stay in office was that underlying force:
So that report was from December 4, 2020. Now here’s a Jan 16, 2021, Axios report that informs us of another major battle going on during this same early December period: the plot to replace CIA Deputy Director Vaughn Bishop with Kash Patel. And as part of this plan, if CIA directory Haspel quite in protest, then Patel or another loyalist would replace her too and end up leading the CIA. So it was like a plot to aggravate Haspel into resigning so she could be replaced.
A plot that came so close to coming to fruition that Trump issued the order to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to tell Haspel that Bishop was going to be replaced with Patel. Trump planned on formally replacing Bishop with Patel on December 11. But Haspel decided to attend the presidential daily intelligence briefing that day, and it was following the briefing after Haspel left the room that Pence and Cipollone gave their full-throated defense of Haspel. It was at that point that Trump reportedly changed his mind about replacing Bishop with Patel. But Meadows had just told Haspel about the plan to replace Bishop, presenting it as a fait acommpli to Haspel, who proceeded to threaten to resign if indeed Patel replaced Bishop. With Trump now vacillating, Meadows was forced to reverse the order. That’s the story we were hearing as of Jan 16.
But now we’ve learned that it was shortly after Trump’s pardoning of Michael Flynn on November 20 that both Flynn and Powell contacted Cohen-Watnick imploring him to take extreme measures involving the election. Flynn wanted him to issue orders to have the military seize ballots. But it’s the request made by Powell to Cohen-Watnick shortly after Flynn’s call that is so interesting here: Powell wanted Cohen-Watnick to order some sort of military special forces raid to capture Gina Haspel who had allegedly been injured during a secret mission in Germany to destroy the servers used to steal the election from Trump. So it was around two and half weeks after that bonkers phone call from Powell to Cohen-Watnick that Trump literally ordered the replacement of Haspel’s deputy director with Patel, only to be dissuaded at the very last minute, after the order had already been given:
“Why it matters: The revelation stunned national security officials and almost blew up the leadership of the world’s most powerful spy agency. Only a series of coincidences — and last minute interventions from Vice President Mike Pence and White House counsel Pat Cipollone — stopped it.”
Again, you have to wonder what exactly Pence and Cipollone actually told Trump to get him to change his mind at the very last minute. Based on the timeline, it appears this plot had already been approved days earlier. Trump summoned Patel back to DC on December 8. Meaning, he ordered Meadows to inform Haspel about Bishop’s replacement. And Haspel appeared to be willing to resign, giving Trump the opening to replace Haspel too! This sub-plot was days into being executed when Trump reversed his order. What did Pence and Cipollone warn him about to prompt the last minute back off?
Finally, we get the mid-January reports about Mike Lindell being photographed outside the White House with pitch that included ideas like “Move Kash Patel to CIA Acting”. The interest in imposing a Trump loyalist at the head of the CIA was one of the key moves in this plot:
It’s also worth keeping in mind the obvious implication of Lindell’s “Move Kash Patel to CIA Acting” suggestion: the plot to oust Haspel at the CIA was continuing up to the very last moment. Because there were presumably a bunch of other last-minute suggestions for Patel at that point. Suggestions that would have somehow kept Trump in office after January 20. It’s one of the more chilling aspect of this whole story: while they may have been concocting bonkers schemes, these are the kinds of bonkers schemes that were seemingly designed to get the desired results in days. Not just a coup but a rapid coup. The blitzkrieg of bonkers is the plan.
With the quoting of Hitler now a new ‘culture war’ front for US conservatives, here’s a pair of articles describing just how much ‘progress’ has been made on that front. Because it appears that overt neo-Nazi curriculum for K‑12 educations isn’t just acceptable in Ohio but will now have public financing. Yep. That’s thanks to the newly passed ‘Backpack Bill’, which finalizing the upcoming Ohio education budget.
The new bill includes a number of ‘reforms’ that effectively expand the public voucher system for private educations to potentially almost every student in the state. Under the new rules, vouchers up to $6,165 for K to 8 students and $8,407 for high schoolers is now available with families with incomes up to 450% of the poverty line ($135k). Families with incomes above that $135k threshold will also be eligible to means tested vouchers, with even the wealthiest families being eligible for up to 10% of the voucher. That extremely ‘generous’ new voucher system has teachers unions understandably raising alarms over the long-term impact this law will have on public support for public schools.
But as we’re going to see, this new bill isn’t just alarming generous towards Ohio’s wealthiest families. It turns out there’s absolutely no oversight on the nature of educational curriculum taught in these private schools, including private home schools. So does this mean that a family that effectively homeschools their children in a neo-Nazi education would get state funding? Yep. That’s what experts were warning about back in March when a group of anti-fascists unmasked Katja and Logan Lawrence, the couple behind the “Dissident Homeschool Network” which was producing neo-Nazi homeschool curriculum and sharing it with thousands of followers online. It turns out the Ohio Department of Education investigated the Lawrences back in February and concluded that they had done nothing illegal and could continue teaching Nazi-inspired curriculum. And if it seems like the lawmakers behind these new vouchers didn’t realize that they were facilitating the financing of neo-Nazi homeschools, keep in mind that they proposed this bill just several weeks after the Department of Education arrived at that conclusion that neo-Nazi curriculum is perfectly legal. So if the current culture war debates about the virtues of quoting Hitler seem bizarre and out of place, just wait for the upcoming publicly financed pro-Hitler curriculum culture wars.
Ok, first, here’s an article from last week describing the final details of the Ohio education budget. A budget that has some applauding the increased funding for education at the same time critics warn the expanded voucher system is creating new long-term risk:
“The compromise budget included near-universal private school scholarship eligibility, in which households earning up to 450% of the federal poverty level, or $135,000 for a family of four, qualifies for a full scholarship.”
Private school vouchers for families earning up to 450% of the poverty line. That’s one of the big new items in the new Ohio ‘Backback bill’. Nearly every child in Ohio is now eligible for some sort of private school voucher. It’s kind of educational ‘reform’ that critics see as just the latest Republican attack on public schools. An attack designed to drain money from public schools to pay for the private educations of the children of wealthy families:
And while concerns about the new voucher system in Ohio ‘backback bill’ draining public school funds for the benefit of wealthy families is indeed a legitimate concern, it’s far from the only concerning scenario raised by this new bill. For example, there’s the fact that neo-Nazi homeschoolers could now be paid to homeschool their children. Yep, that’s one of the big concerns that was raised about the new ‘Backpack bill’ back in March after a group of anti-fascists publicized the existence of the “Dissident Homeschool Network”, a network of neo-Nazi homeschoolers in the state who were collaboratively sharing neo-Nazi curriculum. As experts warned at the time, the Backpack Bill has no oversight at all on the content of homeschool curriculum that could be eligible for the new state vouchers. In other words, the Backback Bill doesn’t discriminate against Nazis:
“The bill would provide state funding for homeschooled children as well as children attending non-chartered private schools that don’t have to follow state education guidelines.”
Vouchers for all education! No matter what is actually taught! That’s the apparent spirit behind Ohio’s Backpack Bill. And note that the $22k figure arrived at for this family assumed $5,500 for k‑8 students and $7,500 for 9–12 students, which is actually less than the $6,165 for K‑8 and $8,407 for 9–12 students in the final form of the education bill. In other words, the Lawrences are presumably going to be getting more than $22k for the Nazi education of their kids:
And while neo-Nazi parents are obviously gooing to be mighty tempted to move to Ohio to set up publicly-funded neo-Nazi home schools of their own, it’s not like it’s just going to be neo-Nazis exploiting this new law. Thanks to the Ohio Department of Education’s conclusion that the Lawrences weren’t breaking the law, it’s hard to see how any educational curriculum isn’t going to be allowed under this new law. What’s to stop a jihadist was getting public funding for an ISIS-style education? Or any random extremist sect? Ohio could become like the cult gravy train:
Finally, note how their bill was introduced just weeks after the neo-Nazi homeschool network was unmasked. This isn’t some sort of ‘oops, we didn’t mean to finance those neo-Nazis’ situation. The public financing of the “Dissident Homeschool Network” is a feature, not a bug:
So what’s next on this new culture war front? Well, let’s just say the Dissident Homeschool Network has an alarming level of inter-state growth potential.
Now that Ohio has turned itself into a kind of magnet state for neo-Nazi parents with school-age children, here’s a set of article that add some additional context to this growing trend of using ‘anti-woke’ politics to inject far right ‘lessons’ into public education.
As we’ve seen, public schools have been a key target of the Council for National Policy’s (CNP) “Project Blitz” campaign of imposing a theocratic Christian Nationalist education in US schools. And it’s a trend that’s poised to only pick up steam with ‘anti-work’/‘anti-CRT’ politics now having completely overtaken the Republican Party in general as we head into the 2024 election cycle.
So with Ohio now basically paying for neo-Nazi home schooling, it’s worth noting another O