Daily Archives: December 1, 2020

How Insurrection Begins

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Today a group called The We the People Convention ran a full-page ad in the Washington Times (Sun Myung Moon, founder) calling for Trump to declare martial law and overturn the election. Here’s more from Gateway Pundit. This effort appears to be led by a Georgia attorney named Lin Wood.

Wood also tweeted today that Dominion Voting Systems is owned by “Communist China” through a Chinese affiliate of the Swiss firm UBS Securities. Here in Real World Land, Dominion was founded by a bunch of Canadians and has headquarters in Toronto and Denver. From what I could find out in a quick web search, Dominion is owned by its management and by Staple Street Capital, a private equity firm headquartered in midtown Manhattan. Apparently there are vast conspiracy theories connecting Dominion to all sorts of nefarious elements, including (as you’ve heard) the ghost of Hugo Chavez. Dominion should sue the socks off a few people, starting with Lin Wood. But let’s go on.

Speaking of lawsuits, former cyber security chief Christopher Krebs is considering legal action against Trump campaign attorney Joseph diGenova, who called for Krebs to be “taken out at dawn and shot.” You may remember diGenova as part of the legal team Toensing and DiGenova, which has been involved in right-wing plots going back years.

On the other hand, Bill Barr just released a statement saying the Justice Department has not uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Even Barr has decided enough is enough. But Trump has a zombie army that will not be deterred, I fear. Barr may need a bigger security detail.

Ron Brownstein has a piece at CNN that compares Trump to Joe McCarthy. I have been thinking the same thing. Trump really is more like McCarthy than like Hitler, IMO. I realize that may be a subtle distinction. But like McCarthy, Trump is a, shall we say, unexceptional man who stumbled into genuine power. And it revealed him to be a monster, but not before doing a lot of damage to a lot of people. But the interesting part here is the relationship between the Republican Party and McCarthy and how much it resembles the relationship between the Republican Party and Trump.

In McCarthy’s era, most of the GOP’s leaders found excuses to avoid challenging conspiracy theories that they knew to be implausible, even as evidence of their costs to the nation steadily mounted. For years, despite their private doubts about his charges and methods alike, the top GOP leadership — particularly Senate Republican leader Robert A. Taft, the Mitch McConnell of his day — either passively abetted or actively supported McCarthy’s scattershot claims of treason and Communist infiltration.

McCarthy in his heyday was very, very powerful. A word from him could ruin somebody. At first McCarthy went after Democrats and career diplomats in the State Department, so he was useful to Republicans. But then he started on President Dwight Eisenhower and other figures in his administration. Still Republicans stayed silent. Then in March 1954 Edward R. Murrow at CBS had the guts to rip McCarthy apart in a See It Now episode. And later that year McCarthy imploded on national television during the Army McCarthy hearings. Support for McCarthy plummeted, and only then did Senate Republicans move to censure McCarthy. McCarthy did the Republican Party a huge favor when he died of liver damage caused by heavy drinking in 1957.

Trump hasn’t yet reacted to Bill Barr’s statement, but he’s been eviscerating Georgia’s Gov. Kemp so ruthlessly I almost feel sorry for Kemp. Any Republican official involved in certifying a contested state for Biden has been subjected to Trump’s wrath. Several have reported receiving death threats. Republicans are worried that Trump is going to cost them the Georgia Senate runoffs (please), but still they are afraid to correct him.

Greg Sargent:

By now, it’s been widely established that President Trump’s nonstop lies about the election being stolen from him have created a potential problem for Republicans. If GOP voters believe the system is rigged, why would they turn out to vote in the two runoffs in Georgia that will decide control of the Senate?

In a new turn in this ugly saga, Georgia Republicans are now actively pleading with Trump to put an end to this problem for them. But what’s even more darkly absurd is how they’re going about doing this: They apparently do not believe that they themselves can explain to voters that the voting was actually legitimate in their own state — until Trump gives them permission to do so.

Back to Brownstein at CNN:

“For me it’s the dog that hasn’t barked,” conservative strategist and Trump critic Bill Kristol says of the party’s silence about the President’s unfounded fraud claims. “This is as if we’ve had the Army-McCarthy hearings and everyone is just quiet. No one is rethinking anything.”

It took years for the GOP to unshackle itself from McCarthy, and even then the separation came only after a figure as formidable as Eisenhower, a sitting President and national hero, privately encouraged it.

As Kristol notes, with McConnell and other GOP leaders deferring to Trump so completely — and many in the GOP breathing a sigh of relief over the party’s surprisingly competitive performance in the House and Senate elections — it’s not clear where a critical mass of resistance to him might develop, despite his increasingly open attacks on basic pillars of American democracy.

“It was easier to get beyond McCarthy than it will be to get beyond Trump,” Kristol predicts.

I haven’t looked at it, but apparently there is some kind of “hearing” being shown on One America News in which people are testifying to seeing all kinds of fraudulent voting things going on in the contested states. Joe McCarthy didn’t have the advantage of “alternative” news. In 1954 there were four networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and DuMont). The Army-McCarthy hearings were broadcast gavel to gavel by ABC and DuMont. There were no other outlets, no social media, no filter bubbles, to present an alternative hearing or another version of what happened.

Meanwhile, the Washington Examiner is running a news scoop claiming that the USPS was delivering Biden campaign material but not Trump material. The story also claims all manner of mail-in ballots were lost, without noting that, if true, that probably hurt Biden more than Trump.

As it says here, beware the beginnings.

Viral photo by Joshua A. Bickel, Columbus Dispatch, of Ohio anti-restriction protesters.