Heather Cox Richardson

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June 6, 2022 (Monday)

Today the Justice Department filed a superseding indictment charging Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio and four colleagues with up to ten criminal counts, including seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, in relation to the January 6 insurrection. Sedition is the crime of inciting a revolt against the government, and conspiracy means there was an organized group of people with a plan.

A grand jury indicted Tarrio and Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola, all of whom had already been charged with crimes; this filing adds to those charges. The indictment says that the five men “did knowingly conspire, confederate, and agree, with other persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to oppose by force the authority of the Government of the United States and by force to prevent, hinder, and delay the execution of any law of the United States…. The purpose of the conspiracy was to oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power by force.”

Wow.

The DOJ is acknowledging that the insurrectionists were trying to overthrow the government. As retired Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe tweeted, “Seditious conspiracy is huge. No more serious federal crime short of treason.”

The indictment alleges these Proud Boys members used their social media platform as leaders of the gang to stir up anger about the election. “It’s time for fking War if they steal this st,” Biggs wrote, referring to the presidential election. Nordean posted on social media: “We tried playing nice and by the rules, now you will deal with the monster you created. The spirit of 1776 has resurfaced and has created groups like the Proudboys and we will not be extinguished. We will grow like the flame that fuels us and spread like love that guides us. We are unstoppable, unrelenting and now…unforgiving. Good luck to all you traitors of this country we so deeply love…you’re going to need it.” Rehl posted: “Hopefully the firing squads are for the traitors that are trying to steal the election from the American people.”

They urged others to join the insurrection, raised money for their trip to Washington, D.C., bought paramilitary equipment, met secretly and used encrypted communications, hid their gang colors to appear incognito, led the crowd to the Capitol, stormed the barricades, destroyed property, and assaulted law enforcement officers, all to prevent Joe Biden from becoming president.

This indictment mirrors that of January 13, 2022, when the Department of Justice indicted the leader of the Oath Keepers, Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, and 10 other members of the group, a far-right antigovernment militia that specializes in recruiting veterans, for a number of crimes including seditious conspiracy in relation to the January 6 insurrection.

Today’s indictment says that Tarrio and his gang coordinated with the Oath Keepers.

But there are pretty broad hints here that they coordinated with others, too. There is still hanging out there that at the presidential debate on September 29, 2020, about a month before the election, Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” Then, on December 12, 2020, Tarrio published on the right-wing social media site Parler a photo of himself at the White House, saying that he had received a “last minute invite to an undisclosed location.” White House spokesperson Judd Deere later said: “He did not have a meeting with the president, nor did the White House invite him.”

But the Tarrio indictments have always indicated there was something big afoot, and now that seditious conspiracy charges are on the table, they are worth revisiting. Both an earlier indictment and this one have this paragraph: “Between December 30 and December 31, 2020, TARRIO communicated multiple times with an individual whose identity is known to the grand jury. On December 30, 2020, this individual sent Tarrio a nine-page document titled, ‘1776 Returns.’ The document set forth a plan to occupy a few ‘crucial buildings’ in Washington, D.C., on January 6, including House and Senate office buildings around the Capitol, with as ‘many people as possible’ to ‘show our politicians We the People are in charge.’ After sending the document, the individual stated, ‘The revolution is [more] important than anything.’ TARRIO responded, ‘That’s what every waking moment consists of…I’m not playing games.’”

There is also this: As these five Proud Boys were near an entrance to the Capitol, “[s]econds before 12:53 p.m [on January 6], BIGGS was approached by an individual whose identity is known to the grand jury. The individual put one arm around BIGGS’s shoulder and spoke to him. Approximately one minute later, this individual crossed the barrier that restricted access to the Capitol grounds. This was the first barrier protecting the Capitol grounds to be breached on January 6, 2021, and the point of entry” for the Proud Boys.

Both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers storming the Capitol appeared to fancy themselves as heroic revolutionaries defending America. Clearly egged on by someone talking about “revolution,” they took up a great deal of space in social media and on private chats thumping their chests about “revolution” and “1776.” Charles Donohoe, who was not charged here because he is cooperating with the Department of Justice, wrote that Washington, D.C., officials were limiting access to the city “so that they can deny Trump has the People’s support. We can’t let them succeed. This government is run FOR the People, BY the People…. Congress needs a reintroduction to that fact.”

The Proud Boys—and the Oath Keepers, too—also talked about civil war. When president-elect Biden called for unity after he won the election, Tarrio posted a message on social media saying: “F**k Unity. No quarter. Raise the black flag.” On November 25, 2020, when Biden said, “We need to remember: We’re at war with a virus—not with each other,” Tarrio reposted the statement and added, “No, YOU need to remember the American people are at war with YOU. No Trump…No peace. No quarter.” And January 20, the day of Biden’s inauguration, one Oath Keeper messaged another: “After this…if nothing happens…its [sic] war…Civil War 2.0.”

For all their heroic talk, these men were not the good guys. They were plotting “to oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power by force.” That is, this ragtag crew plotted to take away from the majority of Americans their right, one of the four rights our Founders called “unalienable,” to consent to the government under which we live. That freedom to choose our own leaders was what 1776 meant, not the imposition of the will of a tyrannical minority on the rest of us.

Seventy-eight years ago today, on June 6, 1944, Americans and their leaders stood not for but against those determined to replace democratic government with tyranny. One hundred and fifty-six thousand U.S. and Allied troops and 195,000 sailors and at least 23,000 airmen with 5000 ships and 11,000 planes stormed five beaches along a heavily fortified five-mile stretch in the Normandy region of France to defend the concept of democracy against the tyranny of fascism.

The assault was known as Operation Overlord and more popularly known as D-Day. The day before, knowing that many of the men would not survive the assault, General Dwight Eisenhower reminded the men that they were fighting for the right of individuals to determine their own futures. “The eyes of the world are upon you,” he wrote. “The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.”

“Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely. But this is the year 1944!.. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!”

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Hmmm…

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June 7, 2022 (Tuesday)

Today, President Biden signed nine bipartisan bills designed to improve veterans’ health care and to honor those who have served in our nation’s military. It was an upbeat hour in the midst of a storm gathering as the nation takes on both gun safety legislation and the events of January 6.

Today, Good Morning America ran an 8-minute segment with teacher Arnulfo Reyes, who was wounded in the massacre at Uvalde, Texas, where on May 24 a gunman murdered 19 schoolchildren and 2 teachers and wounded 17 others. The gunman badly wounded Reyes before murdering all 11 of the children in his classroom. In a powerful interview, Reyes vowed, “I will not let these children and my coworkers die in vain. I will not. I will go to the end of the world to not let my students die in vain.”

Then, actor Matthew McConaughey, who is from Uvalde, gave a passionate speech to reporters from the press podium at the White House. A gun owner himself, McConaughey called for strengthening our gun safety laws with background checks, raising the minimum age to purchase an AR-15 rifle to 21, instituting a waiting period for those rifles, and establishing red-flag laws. “These are reasonable, practical, tactical regulations to our nation, states, communities, schools, and homes,” he said.

McConaughey described the children and teachers who lost their lives at the Robb Elementary School, and explained just how the killer’s AR-15 so destroyed their bodies that they had to be identified by DNA…or by their signature sneakers. He warned that “Responsible gun owners are fed up with the Second Amendment being abused and hijacked by some deranged individuals. These regulations are not a step back; they’re a step forward for a civil society and—and the Second Amendment,” he said.

He urged lawmakers—and Americans—to come together to pass legislation to protect our children. “Because I promise you, America—you and me, who—we are not as divided as we’re being told we are…. How about we get inspired? Give ourselves just cause to revere our future again. Maybe set an example for our children, give us reason to tell them, ‘Hey, listen and watch these men and women. These are great American leaders right here. Hope you grow up to be like them.’ And let’s admit it: We can’t truly be leaders if we’re only living for reelection…. We’ve got to make choices, make stands, embrace new ideas, and preserve the traditions that can create true—true progress for the next generation.”

As McConaughey finished and left the podium, James Rosen from Newsmax called out: “Were you grandstanding just now, sir?”

That response reflects the continuing dislike of Republicans for gun safety regulations. While the House will begin tomorrow to discuss passing a federal red-flag law, a minimum age requirement that a buyer has to be 21 to purchase a semiautomatic rifle, and a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines, these measures will not get through the Senate, where the filibuster enables Republicans to stop legislation unless Democrats can muster a supermajority of 60 votes.

Senate Republicans have already said that they will not consider the regulations experts think are central to stopping mass shootings: an assault weapons ban such as we had until 2004, limits on ammunition magazines, and expansions of background checks to cover private gun sales are all off the table. They also say an age limit of 21 to purchase an assault-type rifle like that AR-15 is unlikely.

Republicans seem to be feeling the pressure of constituents angry at more and more frequent mass shootings. “This moment is different,” McConaughey said, in an echo of gun safety activist and Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg. “We are in a window of opportunity right now that we have not been in before, a window where it seems like real change—real change can happen.”

And yet, Republicans who have embraced an ideology that rejects federal regulations and celebrates the idea of gun-carrying men cannot accept the gun safety rules most people want. So they are turning to extremist rhetoric. Jennifer Bendery reported in the Huffington Post that the extremist American Firearms Association warned of “tens of thousands of Bloomberg-funded, red shirt radical, commie mommies all over the Capitol complex.” Its leaders told members to prepare for “battle” at the U.S. Capitol. “They’re coming after us right now,” a fundraising email warned.

Republicans are also under pressure from the upcoming hearings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. They have announced that they will launch counterprogramming to the committee hearings, and those Republicans most likely to carry water for Trump are already on social media trying to undercut the committee and to stir up new scandals of one sort or another.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Representatives Jim Jordan (R-OH), Jim Banks (R-IN) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY) will lead the way in arguing that the committee is illegitimate and out of touch. According to a document obtained by Vox, Trump has asked his chief supporters to shape the media coverage of the hearings and to ​​“control and drive messaging using the channels we control.”

Republican leaders appear eager to attack the committee without explicitly defending Trump, for it’s not clear yet just how bad he will appear in the story the committee tells. Tonight, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered lawyer John Eastman to turn over another file of emails…by tomorrow. Some of them, he said, fall under the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege, and he outlined how “Dr. Eastman and President Trump’s plan to disrupt the Joint Session was fully formed and actionable as early as December 7, 2020.”

The Fox News Channel says it will not carry the January 6 committee hearings live, although CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, and CNN will. As Sawyer Hackett, a co-host of the Our America podcast, noted, the Fox News Channel “ran 1,098 primetime segments on Benghazi from the day of the attack until the committee hearings, which they carried live for more than 7 hours.”

The Department of Homeland Security today issued a new bulletin in the National Terrorism Advisory System, stating that the U.S. “remains in a heightened threat environment.” It noted that “[t]he continued proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding current events could reinforce existing personal grievances or ideologies, and in combination with other factors, could inspire individuals to mobilize to violence.” Stories that the government is unwilling or unable to secure the southern border and the upcoming Supreme Court decision about abortion rights might lead to violence, it said.

Also, it noted: “As the United States enters mid-term election season this year, we assess that calls for violence by domestic violent extremists directed at democratic institutions, political candidates, party offices, election events, and election workers will likely increase.”

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June 8, 2022 (Wednesday)

Today, the Washington Commanders defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio complained to reporters that there have been “two standards” in the way we have seen the vandalism at some of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and the January 6 insurrection. “We have a dust-up at the Capitol, nothing burned down, and we’re going to make that a major deal.”

This is a common charge on the right, but it is a myth. An AP study showed that more than 120 defendants have pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial for rioting, arson, and conspiracy for the 2020 protests, and that they are from all over the political spectrum, with many of them far-right extremists who traveled across state lines to the protests. And the January 6 attack was hardly victimless: 5 people died at the Capitol riot or just after it, more than 100 law enforcement officers were injured, and the rioters did more than $1.5 million in damage to the Capitol.

What happened on January 6th was not a “dust-up.” It was an attempt to overturn our democracy and install as president someone who had lost the popular vote and the Electoral College, upending the Constitution that is the law of our land.

As a report from the Brookings Institution put it: “President Joe Biden legitimately won a fair and secure 2020 presidential election—and Donald Trump lost. This historical fact has been uncontroverted by any evidence since at least November 7, 2020, when major news outlets projected Biden’s victory. But Trump never conceded. Instead, both before and after Election Day, he tried to delegitimize the election results by disseminating a series of far-fetched and evidence-free claims of fraud. Meanwhile, with a ring of close confidants, Trump conceived and implemented unprecedented schemes to—in his own words—“overturn” the election outcome. Among the results of this “Big Lie” campaign were the terrible events of January 6, 2021—an inflection point in what we now understand was nothing less than an attempted coup.”

Part of the crisis in which we find ourselves today is that many people don’t understand what is at stake in the hearings, in part because commentators have turned the attempt of Trump and his supporters to overturn our democracy into a mud-wrestling fight between Democrats and Republicans rather than showing it as an existential fight for rule of law. Today in his Presswatchers publication, Dan Froomkin explored how U.S. news organizations have failed to communicate to readers that we are on a knife edge between democracy and authoritarianism.

Froomkin notes that journalists have framed the January 6 hearings as a test for the Democrats or as a waste of time because they will not change anyone’s mind or perhaps because no one cares. He begged journalists not to downplay the hearings and present them as a horse race, but to frame the events of January 6 in the larger context of Republican attempts to overturn our democracy.

Tomorrow night, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol will hold its first hearing to explain to the American people what happened at the end of the Trump administration. The hearings will be broadcast on C-SPAN, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, PBS, and the Fox Business Channel and streamed on the YouTube channel of the House Select Committee on June 9, 13, 15, 16, 21, and 23.

We have some idea of what the hearings will entail.

According to committee member Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the hearings will establish that the attack was the result of “concerted planning and premeditated activity.” The hearings will show who was behind the January 6th attack on the Capitol, ultimately connecting the attack to Trump and his closest aides. Raskin told the Washington Post that “we are going to tell the story of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power.”

As the Brookings report put it: “Trump attempted to retain power by any means necessary.” He prepared to argue that the election was stolen long before it took place on November 3, 2020. Trump’s stories about voter fraud shifted and were inconsistent, and he “was repeatedly told by trusted advisors, experts, and courts that there was no fraud.”

Committee members have said there will be new evidence produced at the hearings, and new information has been dropping all week.

We learned that Trump expressed great interest in the Insurrection Act, which enables the president to call out the military to put down an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” Court filings say that members of the Oath Keepers expected Trump to invoke the act to enable them to fight against those counting the electoral votes for Joe Biden.

We also learned that Trump badgered his Secret Service detail to permit him to walk with his supporters to the Capitol building after his speech at the Ellipse on January 6.

We have learned that Republican officials in at least 11 places in Michigan breached local election systems to try to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, and that the citizen initiative petition to limit voting rights in order to combat “fraud” had about 20,000 fraudulent signatures on it. In addition, there were allegations that petition circulators had lied to voters to get them to sign the petition, a practice that is legal in Michigan despite the attempts of Democratic lawmakers to prohibit it.

And, crucially, we learned that the Trump campaign told the fake electors in Georgia to operate in “complete secrecy.” The apparent plan of the Trump plotters was to get fake electors to present an uncertified slate of electoral votes that gave their state to Trump, rather than to Biden as voters had chosen. But, as a Trump official wrote in an email: “I must ask for your complete discretion in this process. Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result—a win in Georgia for President Trump—but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.” The official asked the electors to avoid the media and to lie to security guards about why they were at the statehouse. This email suggests the plotters knew they were acting illegally.

But perhaps the biggest sign that the hearings will turn heads is how hard Trump Republicans are trying to distance themselves from it, or to create a distraction.

Significantly, a piece in the New York Times by Peter Baker, published today, distanced Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump from the debacle of the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 election. “No matter how vociferously Mr. Trump claimed otherwise, neither Mr. Kushner nor Ivanka Trump believed then or later that the election had been stolen…. While the president spent the hours and days after the polls closed complaining about imagined fraud in battleground states and plotting a strategy to hold on to power, his daughter and son-in-law were already washing their hands of the Trump presidency,” the story reads.

If the former president’s daughter and son-in-law, both key White House advisors, are now trying to distance themselves from the events of January 6, perhaps the panic in the party more generally was best demonstrated today when the Republican National Committee responded to news of a man looking to harm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It sent out an email with the subject heading: “The Democrat SCOTUS Assassin.”

In his comment today about January 6, for which he later apologized, Del Rio claimed he just wanted to “apply the same standard,” and “to be reasonable with each other” and to “have a discussion.” The open-mindedness he calls for is a perfect approach to this month’s hearings.

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No, Del Rio, we had an insurrection and people committing treason at the capitol on Jan 6. We had terrorists trying to kill our law makers and destroy our democracy
This wasn’t a party. This wasn’t a protest. Those people went there to kill our law makers and stop the progression of a lawful and fair election.
If the capitol police had treated the Jan 6 terrorists the way the BLM protestors were, then there would have been a “dust up” because hundreds of national guard would have been arrayed around the capitol. The insurrectionists would have been contained or diverted.
But no. These insurrectionists were white. No one in power took them seriously enough. And now we absolutely must “make a major deal” about Jan 6 because it was a big fucking deal
/End rant

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Seriously. Jan 6 isn’t Dems vs Repubs, it’s Repubs vs the United States.

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Who turned out to be a wingnut worried Kavanaugh wasn’t extreme enough.

ETA: Whoops! I misread the quotes aboit the guys motivations.

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…is a bunch of disingenuous bullshit. That tone policing and faux reasonable language is on brand for conservatives and members of the GOP, who have zero intention of letting go of their double standards, irrational talking points, and yelling over or bullying others with name-calling instead of listening to opinions or ideas with which they disagree.

Del Rio won’t even follow his own advice on people in the NFL engaging in political speech:

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???

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He was apparently upset because he thought Kavanaugh would impose more gun controls after the recent school shootings. If Kavanaugh is too liberal for you, you are not a leftist.

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I do not understand.

He also allegedly said he was angry about recent mass shootings, and feared Kavanaugh would further weaken gun control laws.

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@DukeTrout
I’m confused-
CNN said

“Roske indicated that he believed the Justice that he intended to kill would side with Second Amendment decisions that would loosen gun control laws,” the FBI agent wrote.

And AP

He also said he was upset over the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, and believed Kavanaugh would vote to loosen gun control laws, the affidavit said.

Is there other information saying the opposite?

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Baby Drinking GIF by reactionseditor

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Nope, I misread the article!

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June 9, 2022 (Thursday)

“Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

So Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, damned her Republican colleagues at tonight’s first hearing on the January 6 insurrection.

And that was only a piece of what we heard tonight.

Calmly, carefully, convincingly, and in plain, easy to understand language, committee leaders Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Cheney placed former president Donald Trump at the center of an attempt to overturn our democracy. They were very clear that what happened on January 6 was an attempted coup, an “attempt to undermine the will of the people.” All Americans should remember, they reminded us, that on the morning of January 6, Donald Trump intended to remain president, despite his loss in the 2020 election and his constitutional obligation to step down in favor of President-elect Joseph R. Biden, as every president before him had done.

The committee established that there was no fraud in the 2020 election that would have changed the results of the election, showing testimony from Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr that the argument that Trump had won was “bullsh*t.” The committee presented testimony from other administration figures, including Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows and his daughter Ivanka, that Trump had been told repeatedly that he had lost. And yet, even with his inner circle telling him he had lost, and even with more than 60 failed lawsuits over the election, Trump continued to lie that he had been cheated of victory.

It was Trump who “summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame” for January 6, the committee says. Unable to accept his loss and determined to remain in power, Trump organized and deployed an attack on our democracy.

The committee established that the attack on the Capitol was not a random, spontaneous uprising. The rioters came at Trump’s invitation. While they had been muttering about the results since immediately after the election, it was Trump’s tweet of December 19, 2020, that lit the fuse. That night, the former president met with lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and others at the White House. Shortly after the meeting, Trump tweeted that it was “[s]tatistically impossible to have lost the 2020 election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Members of the extremist organizations the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers took Trump’s December 19th tweet as a call to arms. On December 20, they began to organize to go to Washington. These radical white supremacists had taken great pride in Trump’s shout-out in a presidential debate on September 29 that the Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by.” After that comment, membership in the Proud Boys had tripled.

Members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers testified that they went to Washington because Trump personally asked them to. “Trump has only asked me for two things,” one man testified: “my vote, and he asked me to come on January 6.”

The committee provided evidence that 250 to 300 Proud Boys arrived in Washington to stop the counting of the electoral votes. Nick Quested, a documentary filmmaker working to film the gang, testified that the riot was not spontaneous: the Proud Boys, who were allegedly in Washington to hear Trump speak, walked away from the rally at the Ellipse even before then-president Trump spoke, walking to the Capitol and checking out the police presence there. The Oath Keepers, too, were in Washington to stop the count and were expecting Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, enabling them to fight for him to remain president.

The groups quite deliberately fought their way into the Capitol in a planned and coordinated attack. Meanwhile, Trump continued to stoke the crowd’s fury at then–vice president Mike Pence for refusing to overturn the election in his role as the person in charge of counting the certified electoral votes. The rioters stormed the Capitol and went in search of Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), their calls for “Oh, Nancy,” echoing like the singsong chant from a horror movie. When he learned that the rioters were chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” the president said: “Maybe our supporters have the right idea.” He said that Pence “deserves it.”

Videos of the violence outside the Capitol further undercut the attempt of Republicans to downplay the rioters as “tourists.” Asked by Thompson if any one memory from January 6 stood out to her, Officer Caroline Edwards, who fought to protect the Capitol, said yes: the scene of “carnage” and “chaos.” It was like a war scene from the movies, she said, with officers bleeding on the ground, vomiting. She was slipping in people’s blood, catching people as they fell. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think… I would find myself in the middle of a battle,” she said. More than 100 police officers were wounded in the fighting, attacked with cudgels and bear spray, and at least nine people died then and immediately after.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was only one of many people caught up in the violence to contact Trump and beg him to call off the rioters. Clearly, Republicans as well as Democrats knew the mob were his people and that they would respond to his instructions. And yet, he refused. He did nothing to call out the military or the National Guard to defend the Capitol.

Ultimately, those requests came from Vice President Pence, in what appears so far to be an unexplained breakdown in the usual chain of command. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley testified that Pence was very clear that the military needed to turn up and fast to “put down this situation.” In contrast, Meadows talked to Milley not about protecting the Capitol, but to say “we have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions.” Milley said he saw this as “politics, politics, politics.”

After the attempt to overturn the election and keep Trump in power had failed, according to Cheney, Representative Scott Perry (R-PA) and “multiple other Republican congressmen” tried to get Trump to pardon them for their participation. While they are now insisting they did nothing wrong, the requests for a presidential pardon show that they were aware that they were in trouble.

After the hearing, CNN congressional correspondent Ryan Nobles talked to Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), who is on the committee. “It’s actually a pretty simple story of a president who lost, who couldn’t stand losing, who cared nothing about the constitution and was determined to hold on to power and who incited a mob when everything else failed,” Schiff said.

The hearing provided some new information about the January 6 coup attempt that had not previously been publicly available. It also put what we already knew into a clear and compelling narrative using the words of Trump’s own advisors, including his daughter, and video previously unseen by the public. That story singled Trump out as the author of an attack on our democracy and isolated him even from those in his inner circle in a way that could weaken his influence in his party.

At the same time, the committee’s presentation was horrifying, reviving the pain of January 6 and clarifying it by bringing together the many different storylines that we have previously seen only in isolation. The timeline juxtaposed the mob violence with Trump’s own statements about how Pence was letting them down, for example. It showed Officer Edwards being knocked unconscious while Trump claimed the mob was made up of “peaceful people… great people,” and described “the love in the air, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Pundits had speculated before tonight’s televised hearing that it would not make compelling television, but they could not have been more wrong. The Fox News Channel, some of whose personalities were involved in the events surrounding January 6, refused to air the proceedings. Nonetheless, that channel inadvertently proved just how powerful the hearing was when it ran Tucker Carlson’s show without commercial breaks, apparently afraid that if anyone began to channel surf they might be drawn in by the hearing on other channels.

Veteran reporter Bob Woodward called the evening “historic.” Looking back at the 1954 hearings that destroyed the career of Senator Joe McCarthy by revealing that he was lying to the American public, Woodward said that tonight’s event “was the equivalent of the Army-McCarthy hearings."

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so not on any of his email lists, huh? sad.

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June 10, 2022 (Friday)

Preliminary reports say that about 20 million people watched last night’s compelling hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. That number, which does not include streaming or later views, is fewer than tune in for a normal State of the Union address, but more than for the World Series. In contrast, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 11-hour testimony in a 2015 Benghazi hearing drew only about 4 million viewers.

Reviews of the hearing have generally concluded that it was a powerful presentation that effectively put former president Trump at the center of a conspiracy to overturn our democracy. And there has been little convincing pushback from Trump loyalists. Conservative commentator Bill Kristol noted: “Tons of counter-programming from the Right. But no counter-evidence.”

Although Donald Trump Jr. claimed he didn’t even know the hearing was happening and urged followers not to watch, it was clear that the Trump camp could not look away and that the program’s high ratings—a metric former president Trump cares about deeply—have stung. He snarled at the presentation on his “Truth Social” platform, complaining that the committee refused “to play any of the many positive witnesses and statements,” although he did not specify which those might be.

In fact, a great deal of the power of the committee’s presentation last night came from the fact that many of its key witnesses were themselves members of Trump’s inner circle. Those witnesses included his attorney general, William Barr; Trump campaign spokesperson Jason Miller; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley; and Trump’s own daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. They established that Trump indeed knew he had lost the election, that he nonetheless stoked a movement to keep him in power, and that when the insurrectionists attacked the Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes, he refused to intervene to protect lawmakers, law enforcement officers, or the law.

Both Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump appeared to turn against her father, and today he responded. Ivanka said she believed Barr when he told her that the 2020 election had not been stolen. Her testimony apparently infuriated her father, who said today that “Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!).”

As Trump’s attack on his daughter indicates, last night’s hearing appears to have exacerbated the chaos in the Republican Party as Trump and his supporters struggle to cling to power in the face of damning evidence that they tried to destroy our democracy.

The state of Michigan has embodied that chaos lately. Election machinery there has been compromised as pro-Trump activists got access to the system to try to prove voter fraud. Five right-wing candidates for governor got tossed off the primary ballot because the signatures on their nomination papers were fraudulent. The remaining front-runner, Ryan Kelley, is a staunch Trump supporter who was at the Capitol on January 6; yesterday, the FBI arrested him for his participation in the attack.

Someone on Twitter described the Michigan Republican Party as a “hot mess.”

Pro-Trump activism is in the news in another way today, too. In 2020, Ginni Thomas, who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote to 29 members of the Arizona legislature to urge them to ignore Biden’s victory in the state and instead to choose their own electors who would back Trump’s reelection. We knew she had written to two legislators, but it turns out that number was off by a lot. While Ginni Thomas maintains that her work is separate from her husband’s, it is at the very least a problem that he has refused to recuse himself from cases in which her activism might have caused a conflict of interest.

And yet, despite the increasing mess around Trump, other Republicans won’t risk angering him or his voters. Yesterday, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) refused four times to answer whether President Biden was legitimately elected. Asked the question by ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl, McCarthy avoided antagonizing pro-Trump forces by saying that Biden is president without saying he was elected legitimately or that Trump is wrong to say the election was fraudulent.

And Trump is making it clear he will tolerate no sliding away among his loyalists. Earlier, Trump threw Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL), who spoke at the rally on January 6, overboard, only to discover that Brooks’s numbers rose. After considering endorsing Brooks again, Trump today instead backed his challenger in the upcoming election. Trump claimed that he has given up on Brooks because he told a crowd to put the 2020 election behind them and to move forward, but New York Times reporter Blake Hounshell wrote that Trump backed Brooks’s challenger because her husband, a former NFL player, wooed him.

There are increasing rumblings about new coalitions to ditch the radical extremists in the Republican Party who are trying to destroy democracy and replace them with candidates who still care about our democratic system. In the New Yorker yesterday, Sue Halpern outlined the effort in Utah to replace Senator Mike Lee, who participated in the effort to overturn the election, with Evan McMullin, a former Republican running as an independent. Democrats did not field their own candidate in that race and are instead backing McMullin. McMullin has made Lee’s support for Trump’s coup attempt central to his campaign, and he is now running close to Lee in the polls.

A number of bipartisan groups made up of anti-Trump Republicans and moderate Democrats are backing pro-democracy candidates for office, including Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), whose party turned against her after she supported the investigation into the attack on the Capitol.

But a Twitter thread by New York Times reporter Ben Collins today made it clear that the right wing in America has grown beyond Trump. In the right-wing spaces Collins reports on, he says that participants are aware of the hearing but unconcerned about it. Instead, they “have moved onto full-time anti-trans panic. It has consumed them.” They now care far more about fighting to control the nation’s LGBTQ population than about Trump. “They simply want a fight,” Collins wrote, “and are looking for whoever will start it fastest.”

Collins noted that on a website named for Trump that was a key site for organizing the insurrection, the lead quotation today came not from Trump, but rather from Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

At the beginning of last night’s hearing, Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) called out the link between political extremism in the U.S. and social control, both of which are about a small group of people dominating others, a minority imposing their worldview on a majority. “I’m from a part of the country where people justified the actions of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and lynching,” Thompson said. “I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try to justify the actions of the insurrectionists on January 6, 2021.”

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2418

I would like to note that this concentration is an important part of reducing costs, which means maximising profits – but also keeping consumer prices comparably low. AKA “the market”.

I think in Germany right now, we do see first sings of a reversal of that in the food sector. I might be wrong, but regionally farmed and produced produce (SCNR) are a trend of the last years.

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2419

That, and in case of Western Germany, turning a blind eye towards the Nazis which the US deemed were indispensable, and were left in many rather important positions.

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Yeah, well, if you knew they were Nazis you could be sure they wasn’t Communists, see?

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