Friday January 8, 2021 ( Electoral College Certification Day -2,
Insurrection Day -2,
Georgia Senate Election -3 )
Election Day -66
12 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
There’s a grab bag of facts and observations, but I am struck by two things:
Video of men with high powered rifles walking around in the gallery of the Michigan Legislature,
Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and that of Sinclair, between the two of them they own many of the news outlets available to people. In rural areas and small markets Sinclair may be the only media outlet.
What struck me about these two observations was that they are forms of tyranny. This did not become apparent until I was re-introduced to On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. Snyder is a Yale professor currently over in Vienna. The title sounds like something Thomas Paine would have written that is until you read the whole title “On Tyranny, Twenty Lessons from The Twentieth Century.”
What Snyder points out is that for tyranny and autocrats to succeed they need to tell a big lie and get people to go along with it.
This is nothing new. Snyder is merely pointing out this is how it works. The anecdote for this is the truth.
Let’s set that aside for a moment and look at the reporting and analysis of what happened at the Capital the other day. Depending on where you listened to reporting you got much different outlooks as to what happened. In regular national media I saw pictures and some video of the mob and what they were doing with little sound. This was not the case with international media, which showed the actions of the mob with audio, full bore. The international reporting made it very clear how terrifying this was. The regular national media made it more antiseptic. What about the right wing media? From what I can discern they were dismissive and letting people comment that “it wasn’t them. It was someone else.” Ie it wasn’t Q-anon and Trumpers it was antifa, etc. This is laughable on it’s face because there were people photographed with sweatshirts with large “Q”s on the front and many flags, shirts, and hats with “TRUMP” on them. Okay, you can believe that a bunch of George Soros antifa folks dressed up in Trump paraphernalia attended a rally by the president and then marched on the Capital if you want. There are problems with that thinking. The people photographed are known to those who follow the Q-anon and other white supremacist hate groups. They are known by name!
This brings me to the question many have asked, “Why weren’t the police better prepared?” It’s not like this wasn’t known. It was all over social media for months. The president was tweeting about it long before the day. He held a huge rally behind the White House. It was covered on national media. Yet, the Capital was ready for a day like any other. This was compared to when the Black Lives Matter marches were held and phalanxes of police in riot gear with helmets, shields, and batons were deployed shoulder to shoulder around the capital and the monuments.
Why wasn’t the mob dispersed earlier and quickly? They were able to clear Lafayette Square of peaceful protestors for a photo-op but not protect the Capital? What happened?
It also seemed that some of the police were on the side of the protestors turned insurrections by taking selfies with them and holding the door open for them. (I have not seen this video footage, but this is what is being reported.) How could this be?
Some answers are emerging and we’ll get to those soon enough, but let me return to the commentary by some journalists, most to them black, who said basically, “What did you expect? This is white supremacy plain and simple.”
Other comments were that the Republican Party is a cult of white supremacists masquerading as a political party. How does this stack up with what Snyder says about tyranny? It’s right in line.
For tyranny to succeed you need a big lie, an armed presence to suppress dissent, and people willing to believe your big lie.
Another point both Snyder and the black journalists made was that such authoritarians do is to use the freedoms and laws to gain control and subvert them.
Does anyone think that a man walking around a gallery of a congressional body holding an automatic weapon that can wipe out virtually everyone below in a matter of seconds is really expressing his freedom? His rights?
Does anyone think that a media outlet that continually lies is expressing their freedom of speech.
This is not about Freedom of Speech, or Second Amendment rights. This is about intimidation, and deception for the express purpose of gaining and keeping power.
In the 1930s we passed legislation to prohibit the owning of machine guns by most people. In the 1950s we eliminated the Communist Party from running in elections because if they ever won they would seize power and destroy the means that they gained power.
There is nothing different today. It is time to dismantle these tools and instruments that spread lies and suppress people. It is time to do more than stand up to the falsehoods with truth. It is time to eliminate these vicious insidious tools used by a shadowy elite to suppress and misinform the public.
Miscellaneous tidbits:
The National Guard of Maryland was asked to come in by the leaders of the Senate and the House. The governor of Maryland needed permission from the Federal government to do that. Typically, this comes from the Pentagon. From the Secretary of Defense. The Secretary of Defense did not return the governor’s calls. Finally, an hour and a half later the Secretary of the Army called him back.
The rioters came with zip ties and pipe bombs. What would you need those things unless you were planning on taking hostages and blowing stuff up.
President Trump was reportedly enjoying watching the TV coverage of the insurrection. He was not willing to do anything to stop it.
Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education, and Elaine Chow, Secretary of Transportation and the wife of Mitch McConnell, have both resigned. They claim it’s over the riot. Most people, me included, don’t think so. In fact, the second I hear Chow was resigning I could only think that she did so to eliminate having to vote to remove the president from office via the 25th Amendment. That and the fact that she’s happy to take our money and shovel projects to her husband’s state, but other than that what has she done?
Connor Lamb, Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania, stood in the House chamber at 1:30 in the morning after the riot to speak. He had prepared remarks about how the election in Pennsylvania had been free, fair, and lawful. However, after 130 Republican members of the House repeated untrue conspiracy theories about the Pennsylvania election, Lamb instead called them out and told them what they were saying was a lie.
This is apparently a big no-no. You don’t call a fellow Congressperson a liar. The Republicans moved that his remarks be struck from the record. Pelosi refused. Then they decided to move across the aisle in an apparent attempt to attack Lamb. This ended when they were meet by a Congressman who was a former big time football player.
This 130 House members and the handful of Senators who insisted on repeating the lies about the election and trying to overturn the election and the Electoral College should be thrown out of office, if not arrested.
In other news, a huge surprise. Mike Pence does not seem interested in invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the president. In fact when the House Speaker and the Minority Leader of the Senate called him, his office put them on hold for 25 minutes before a staffer came on to say that the Vice President wouldn’t speak to them.
Trump is considering self-pardoning. In a new twist on this, speculation was raised that this would increase the chances that the Biden legal team would investigate him. Why? Well, if you are pardoning someone they must have done something wrong. What was it? Inquiring minds will want to know.
Senator Josh Hawley has been notified by his publisher that they will not be publishing his book. (Pictured raising his fist in support of the insurrectionists before going into the Senate chamber to whine about the Pennsylvania election process.)
And finally, let this sink in. The Trump insurrectionists have managed to do what the Confederacy was not able to do. Take the Capital and parade their flag in the Rotunda and Halls of Congress.
Full auto weapons are illegal. I did see some firearms, but not many. The police did fight, they were overwhelmed. In fact, in a very odd and somewhat sinister way, this shows how the police can show restraint.
Some points to consider. We spend billions on defense and a bunch of Duck Dynasty Morans can walk into one of the highest offices in the land, where the only plan is to evacuate the people in them so fast that laptops with sensitive material on them are left open on the desks. Imagine if(there might of been)there were competent operators within and they DID have a plan. Like, using all those restraints, or using the scaffold they’d set up earlier.
The police chief has resigned. Law makers had asked if they had enough security the day before and were told: ‘We have a handle on it.’ Well that was obviously not true.
The FBI is taking names.
Many people have been identified by curation groups that have risen since Ferguson as these Morans(hey, that’s their spelling)did live stream, but the social media apps are taking these down right and left, which, while i understand why, without curation, how do we use the forensic to identify and prosecute?
Subsequent to the above, many of the participants have already been doxed.
That Satan has not been locked up, put in a straight jacket and frog marched into a cell shows that systemic change is needed in this country. There are young smarter, more driven authoritarians that will plan better next time. There will be a next time.
Foreign intelligent offices are reporting that we have some seditious people at high levels in our military. This is not good.
Now back to the police presence, the reason they police didn’t respond at a higher level is just logistics. They were outnumbered in such greater number, that even a 9th grader could see they wouldn’t have enough bullets to stop that herd. That’s on the leadership of that police dept. Any excuse they make is only that, an excuse. We knew this would happen, hell, they had t-shirts made saying Civil War, and the date. WTAF did they think would happen?
Pence has no spine and should not be anywhere near a school, or hold any office ever again, along with the traitorous repugs who supported this absurdity. In all, Trump and his allies filed 62 lawsuits in state and federal courts seeking to overturn results in states the president lost. Of those, 61 failed, with a minor Trump victory in Pennsylvania requiring voters to provide identification to cure a defective ballot. The obvious lack of evidence made this entire congressional escapade a farce. Republicans said they objected as a means for clearing the way for a 10-day congressional audit of election fraud allegations. But those bogus charges have already been investigated and debunked. The courts have rejected the same claims as baseless, and even Republican state officials have certified Biden’s victory as legitimate. While it is impossible to run down every allegation of election irregularity, no one has found any credible proof of widespread fraud.
And finally, what is the difference between the U.S. Capitol and Mordor?
One does not simply walk into Mordor.
I don’t understand why there wasn’t more security. Seems to me they knew something was brewing and they should hav assigned more security.