Wasn’t the inauguration lovely? I can’t say I’ve ever paid such close attention to a presidential inauguration before. The entire day — the speeches, the poem, the music, the ladies’ pretty coats, Bernie Sanders’s home-made mittens — exuded positive vibes of hope for a new day. It struck me how wholesome the entire presentation was. Even Lady Gaga was a wholesome version of Lady Gaga.

Nobody else is talking about this song, but I liked it.

And now, on to work. There is much to do.

For example, CNN tells us that the Trump vaccination plan didn’t exist.

… in the immediate hours following Biden being sworn into office on Wednesday, sources with direct knowledge of the new administration’s Covid-related work told CNN one of the biggest shocks that the Biden team had to digest during the transition period was what they saw as a complete lack of a vaccine distribution strategy under former President Donald Trump, even weeks after multiple vaccines were approved for use in the United States.
“There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch,” one source said.

Another big job is purging MAGA loyalists from key positions. This has begun. Michael Pack, who had turned the Voice of America into a propaganda outlet, was ordered to resign. Kathy Kraninger, who ran the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to protect the financial industry instead of consumers, is out and is to be replaced by Liz Warren protégé Rohit Chorpa. Peter Robb, the anti-union head of the National Labor Relations Board, refused to resign and was fired.

The chief usher of the White House, who was hired by Trump, also has been fired. I don’t know exactly why.

Michael Ellis, who was sworn in as the top lawyer of the National Security Agency on Tuesday, was placed on administrative leave on Wednesday. Ellis’s hiring is under investigation.

However, as of this writing the only Biden nominee to have been confirmed by the Senate is Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence. The Senate vote was 84 to 10. The Ten included The Usual Suspects: Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Mike Lee of Utah, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, James Risch of Idaho, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Mike Braun of Indiana.

Meanwhile, there is a massive unemployment problem.

On the plus side, I take it the White House press corps is practically weeping with relief over the first competent press briefing in four years.

This is somewhat encouraging — see Democrats rebuff McConnell’s filibuster demands by Burgess Everett at Politico.

Senate Democrats are signaling they will reject an effort by Mitch McConnell to protect the legislative filibuster as part of a deal to run a 50-50 Senate, saying they have little interest in bowing to his demands just hours into their new Senate majority.

McConnell has publicly and privately pressed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to work to keep the 60-vote threshold on most legislation as part of their power-sharing agreement. Democrats have no plans to gut the filibuster further, but argue it would be a mistake to take one of their tools off the table just as they’re about to govern.

It’s likely Dems don’t have the votes to eliminate the filibuster entirely.

We’ll see how that goes.

Dave Granlund

I feel better already.

Fascism is a much misused, and overused, word. On social media it is often used to mean “any political position with which I disagree.” It is sometimes used as a synonym for totalitarianism, even though all kinds of not-fascist governments can also be totalitarian.

Righties going back to the John Birch Society have tried to argue that fascism is socialism is communism, which is pathetically ignorant considering that fascism originated as a nationalistic backlash against socialism. And in 1930s Europe, rounding up and executing socialists was high on the fascist to-do list.

Yes, the Nazi party called itself the “national socialist” party, but that was just marketing. The Nazis were no more socialists than they were aardvarks. But you can always count on some semi-educated right-wing half-wit on social media to tell you (with relish) that Nazi stands for national SOCIALIST, you libtard. And, of course, you can no more tell them that Nazis weren’t socialists than you can teach a potato to sing. At least we all agree that totalitarianism is bad.

Has Trumpism morphed into a fascist movement? That’s been a debatable point until recently. Now, not so much.

Here is an article in The New Republic by Geoffrey Cain, dated June 3, 2019, headlined The Failure to Define Fascism Today. It provides some good background, pulled from scholarship, on what distinguishes fascism from other political movements. This bit was intriguing:

Yale emeritus historian Robert Paxton’s classic 1998 identification of the “five stages of fascism” argued that we should look to processes, not cosmetic features like flags and uniforms, to understand fascism. Fascism was marked first by conservatives seeking to seduce farmers and industrial workers into the resistance against left-wing unions. The movement then escalated into militants being deployed to city streets to enforce the fascist ideology, eventually leading to total control.

I have not read Paxton’s work, but there’s a summation of his major points here.

Roger Griffin, political science professor at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom, zeroed in on a different defining feature of fascism in his 1991 book The Nature of Fascism: the fusion of “populist ultra-nationalism” with a “mythic core.” Fascists sought to return to the past, to strengthen the nation by resurrecting it. Fascist leaders everywhere convinced their early followers that their nation had descended from a glorious heritage, hijacked and destroyed by a corrupt elite. The fascists, the heroes, could strengthen themselves into what were called the “New Men,” channeling a mythical tradition of knight-like strength, protecting community and tradition, but often, paradoxically, through powerful, modern militaries.

If you’ve seen the recent footage of the January 6 riot from the New Yorker, you must recognize that box is pretty much checked.

Geoffrey Cain — writing in the summer of 2019 — said “Today, we have no true mass fascist movement: We lack paramilitary squads roaming the streets, and a communist uprising that supposedly merits destruction by a one-party fascist state.” Except that we do have paramilitary squads roaming the streets. Militias, anyone?

And we have a phantom communist uprising. How many Democratic candidates in the November election, including Joe Biden, were labeled “socialist” or “communist” by Republicans? I lost count. It may not matter that there is no looming, or even vaguely distant, threat of a real communist takeover of America. If mobs are organizing in the belief that there is such a threat, it’s the same thing, I say. So let’s check those boxes, too.

And did you know that some of the January 6 rioters were waving the flag of the now defunct South Vietnam? This is considered an expression of opposition to communism.

But now the afore-mentioned Robert Paxton himself has written a piece called I’ve Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist. Until Now.

Paxton begins the article by explaining why he hadn’t considered Trump to be a fascist leader, even though Trump exhibited many chilling similarities to Hitler and Mussolini on their way up. But then he wrote,

Trump’s incitement of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2020 removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.

This is the guy who wrote the classic book on fascism.

Writing at Vox, Dylan Matthews talked to another academic authority on fascism.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at NYU and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, told me in October that she preferred the term “authoritarian” to “fascist” in describing Trump. This past week, though, Ben-Ghiat took to Twitter to draw parallels between the Capitol siege and Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome, and between Republicans now turning on Trump to Italian fascists who voted Mussolini out of power in 1943, not to reinstate democracy but to save fascism.

Something else to consider — Hitler famously consolidated power in Germany through the Nazification of the police. Law enforcement increasingly acted in the interests of Nazi authority, not upholding law or protecting people. At the same time, Nazi paramilitary groups like the SS were deputized to act as auxiliaries to the police. Here it hasn’t yet been made official, but this summer, way too often, police responding to unrest surrounding protests treated white militia as allies. See, for example, Why police encouraged a teenager with a gun to patrol Kenosha’s streets by Zack Beauchamp at Vox.

And today the Associated Press is reporting that the FBI is vetting the 25,000 National Guard troops currently deployed to Washington, DC, because it fears “an insider attack or other threat from service members involved in securing President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.”

How did it come to this? And the answer is that the hard Right in America has been moving us in this direction for a very long time. And too many of us have for many years had our brains pickled in neo-fascist propaganda generated by the likes of Fox News and Rush Laimbaugh. This is not going to go away any time soon.

But if we are clear that Trumpism is a fascist movement that would, if left unchecked, end democracy in America, then we are better prepared to deal with it.

See also Paul Krugman, Appeasement Got Us Where We Are and Olivia Nuzzi, Senior Trump Official: We Were Wrong, He’s a ‘Fascist.’

In yesterday’s post I postulated that the Republican establishment would cut itself loose from Trump. But David Atkins at Washington Monthly disagrees.

By any normal political calculation, Trumpism should be a spent force.

But normal political calculations no longer apply to the Republican Party, because the Republican Party does not operate by traditional political incentives. The GOP is continuing on a pathway to radicalization that began as far back as Newt Gingrich, if not Ronald Reagan and even Richard Nixon.

Trumpism is merely a stepping stone on that journey that began with dependence on the Southern Strategy to smash the FDR coalition and win white supremacist support, and continued via an unholy alliance with conservative infotainment from AM radio hosts to Fox News to Breitbart. The GOP also depends for continued power on efficient geographic distribution in gerrymandered districts and rural states that maximize white evangelical power. All of these factors ensured that the GOP would continue marching rightward with increasingly devastating consequences.

And he could be right. It might be that it’s just too late to go back to a Republican Party that isn’t crazy, that had room for people like Nelson Rockefeller as well as Barry Goldwater. Too many of the GOP in Congress are too young to remember when the primary responsbility of a Republican legislator was not investigating Hillary Clinton.

Republican Senator Ben Sasse from Nebraska has an article at The Atlantic called QAnon Is Destroying the GOP From Within. And he is right, I think. Sasse has voted with Trump about 85 percent of the time, and as a candidate he received endorsements from the Club for Growth, the Tea Party Patriots, and Ted Cruz, so Sasse is firmly right of center. But he’s smart enough to know it’s time to get off the crazy train, because it’s heading for a cliff.

Until last week, many party leaders and consultants thought they could preach the Constitution while winking at QAnon. They can’t. The GOP must reject conspiracy theories or be consumed by them. Now is the time to decide what this party is about. …

…If the GOP is to have a future outside the fever dreams of internet trolls, we have to call out falsehoods and conspiracy theories unequivocally. We have to repudiate people who peddle those lies.

We also have to show a healthier path forward. The frustrations that caused so many people to turn in desperate directions for a political voice are not going away when Trump leaves the White House for Mar-a-Lago, because deception and demagoguery are the inevitable consequences of a politics that is profoundly, systemically dysfunctional.

He called out one Representative as an example of what not to do:

The newly elected Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. She once ranted that “there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it.” During her campaign, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had a choice: disavow her campaign and potentially lose a Republican seat, or welcome her into his caucus and try to keep a lid on her ludicrous ideas. McCarthy failed the leadership test and sat on the sidelines. Now in Congress, Greene isn’t going to just back McCarthy as leader and stay quiet. She’s already announced plans to try to impeach Joe Biden on his first full day as president. She’ll keep making fools out of herself, her constituents, and the Republican Party.

Of course, Republicans were preparing to impeach Hillary Clinton before the election she didn’t win, so pre-emptive impeachment isn’t new with them.

Also note that Rep. Greene appears to have no stand on issues other than “to stop gun control, open borders, the Green New Deal, and socialism.” And she also wants the Affordable Care Act to die. If she is actually for anything, other than guns, I can’t say what that might be even after checking out her website. In this, she exemplifies the problem the Republican Party faces. In a November profile of Greene in New York magazine, Zak Cheney-Rice wrote of Greene’s campaign positions, “The exact ways in which this kitchen-sink slurry of right-wing pathologies was meant to congeal into a coherent theory of governing was never very clear.”

In fact, the Republican Party has no coherent theory of governing any more. All it knows how to do is stop the Democrats from governing. But this isn’t new, either; Richard Hofstadter was writing about this phenomenon roughly sixty years ago, saying things like

The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.

And

Writing in 1954, at the peak of the McCarthyist period, I suggested that the American right wing could best be understood not as a neo-fascist movement girding itself for the conquest of power but as a persistent and effective minority whose main threat was in its power to create “a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”

What Hofstadter got wrong is that the American right wing really did become a neo-fascist movement that really did seize considerable power by taking over the Republican Party. But otherwise he had them pegged. They’ve created a political climate in which effective governing is near impossible, as our disasterous approach to the pandemic has shown us. The rest of the world has looked on with astonishment as Americans face hunger and eviction without help from our allegedly powerful government that can’t pass a relief package without the say-so of one Mitch McConnell, who has no interest in the rational pursuit of well-being and safety.

Going back to Sasse, I see that he hasn’t completely come over to the light — for example, at one point he wrote “Already on Twitter, a conservative position as long-standing as opposition to abortion has been recast as “domestic terrorism.” Senator, mere opposition to legal abortion is not terrorism, but bombing abortion clinics, stalking and harassing women, and murdering physicians certainly is. And so is rhetoric that incites others to do those things, and most of you Republicans are guilty of that. And the problem with the GOP is bigger, and older, than QAnon. But on the whole Sasse’s essay is worth reading, and I think he gets more right than wrong.

And if Repubicans are going to take their party back from Trumpers and QAnon, the first thing they have to do is to make it clear that Joe Biden fairly won the election. No more trying to take a middle position between truth and falsehood, or to stand silently by while Trump and his cult screams “stop the steal.” There was no steal. Most Republicans in the Senate know that, I believe, even if they won’t say it. What House Republicans know I cannot say.

And then Republicans need to stop winning elections by lies and dog whistles, not to mention gerrymandering and voter suppression. They need a coherent theory of government that applies to the real world.

In his essay on “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics” from 1964, Richard Hofstadter wrote,

The difference between conservatism as a set of doctrines whose validity is established by polemics, and conservatism as a set of rules whose validity is to be established by their usability in government, is not a difference in nuance, but of fundamental substance.

Put another way, the distinction is between holding conservative values that guide one’s opinions and conservatism as a set of dogmas that must be “believed in” and followed loyally whether they work or not. And, of course, our Republican Party has been all polemics since Reagan. The polemics are what Paul Krugman calls “zombie ideas,” or “ideas that should have been killed by evidence, but just keep lurching along.” Supply-side economics is a prime example.

This brings us back to the crossroads. Can the Republican Party become a political party again and not a pseudo-conservative cult? And if you look at it that way, I have to say, probably not. They’ve been a pseudo-conservative cult for too long. There are none left in office who remember a Republican party that was anything but a pseudo-conservative cult, I don’t believe. But there are some who will try, and I hope they succeed.

Although we’re going to be living with his zombie supporters for awhile, all signs point to Trump being a washed-up has-been once the clock strikes noon on January 20.

For example, see Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin at the New York Times, Post Trump, Republicans Are Headed for a Bitter Internal Showdown. The Republican establishment wants to be rid of Trump. Trump supporters want to be rid of the Republican establishment.

As President Trump prepares to leave office with his party in disarray, Republican leaders including Senator Mitch McConnell are maneuvering to thwart his grip on the G.O.P. in future elections, while forces aligned with Mr. Trump are looking to punish Republican lawmakers and governors who have broken with him.

The bitter infighting underscores the deep divisions Mr. Trump has created in the G.O.P. and all but ensures that the next campaign will represent a pivotal test of the party’s direction, with a series of clashes looming in the months ahead.

The friction is already escalating in several key swing states in the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s incitement of the mob that attacked the Capitol last week. They include Arizona, where Trump-aligned activists are seeking to censure the Republican governor they deem insufficiently loyal to the president, and Georgia, where a hard-right faction wants to defeat the current governor in a primary election.

We’ll have to see how that plays out. But the money is going to stay with the establishment, which also has more hands on the levers of government. The Trumpers have guns, flags, and pickup trucks. I think the Trump takeover of the Republican party will eventually fizzle away.

Trump himself is going to have bigger things to worry about than politics. See Jonathan Chait, Trump Is on the Verge of Losing Everything.

One crisis, though the most opaque, concerns Trump’s business. Many of his sources of income are drying up, either owing to the coronavirus pandemic or, more often, his toxic public image. The Washington Post has toted up the setbacks facing the Trump Organization, which include cancellations of partnerships with New York City government, three banks, the PGA Championship, and a real-estate firm that handled many of his leasing agreements. Meanwhile, he faces the closure of many of his hotels. And he is staring down two defamation lawsuits. Oh, and Trump has to repay, over the next four years, more than $300?million in outstanding loans he personally guaranteed. …

… If this were still 2015, Trump could fall back on his tried-and-true income generators: money laundering and tax fraud. The problem is that his business model relied on chronically lax enforcement of those financial crimes. And now he is under investigation by two different prosecutors in New York State for what appear to be black-letter violations of tax law. At minimum, these probes will make it impossible for him to stay afloat by stealing more money. At maximum, he faces the serious risk of millions of dollars in fines or a criminal prosecution that could send him to prison.

He’s talked about starting a media company, but that takes work, and it’s hardly a guaranteed money maker. And then there is the real possibility of criminal conviction.

The assumption until now has always been that Trump wouldn’t really be convicted of crimes or sentenced to prison, despite the fairly clear evidence of his criminality. American ex-presidents don’t go to jail; they go on book tours.

That supposition wasn’t wrong, exactly. It rested on the understanding of a broad norm of legal deference to powerful public officials and an understanding of the dangers of criminalizing political disagreement. But what has happened to Trump in the weeks since the election, and especially since the insurrection, is that he has been stripped of his elite impunity. The displays of renunciation by corporate donors and Republican officials, even if they lack concrete authority, have sent a clear message about Donald Trump’s place in American society.

Indeed, the Republican establishment would probably support — tacitly, of course — throwing Trump in jail. It would shut him up and get him out of their hair.

At noon on January 20, Trump will be in desperate shape. His business is floundering, his partners are fleeing, his loans are delinquent, prosecutors will be coming after him, and the legal impunity he enjoyed through his office will be gone. He will be walking naked into a cold and friendless world. What appeared to be a brilliant strategy for escaping consequences was merely a tactic for putting them off. The bill is coming due.

Heh.

The real question is what will happen to the QAnon Cult? I think cult followers are more likely to somehow fold a ruined and jailed Trump into their evolving mythology than to give it up. But David Atkins thinks the cult can’t survive without Trump.

The QAnon conspiracy theory contains many elements that have long pervaded far-right beliefs: Satanic panic, anti-Semitic blood-libel, Illuminati control, a new Great Awakening, and similar notions. But what makes QAnon unique–beyond its distribution via the modern message board and social media technologies–is its focus on a single man: President Donald Trump. In Q world, Trump is the Messiah, the God-Emperor, the infallible 5-D chessmaster who knows all and can do no wrong. For them, he is standing in the way of a fallen world dominated by child-sacrificing Satanist communist cannibals addicted to adrenochrome, the one person who will bring about a new world order in which all debts are wiped clean, free energy is released. The Cabal that has been holding humanity back is exposed and executed in secret military tribunals.

But all of this depends on Trump’s remaining president. In some sects of QAnon, it is believed that enough Americans must be “red-pilled” to create society anew once the shock of “the Storm”–in which their enemies are destroyed–has arrived, fulfilling the function of Q. In others, Trump is so totally in control that they are all simply “watching a movie”–the more dramatic, the better–depicting a historic transition unseen (in their worldview) since the time of Jesus.

QAnon is thus not just a conspiracy-theory cult like many in the history of the American right, but a cult of personality and a cult of power. Cults of power are closely associated with the worst authoritarian regimes globally and require significant cognitive gymnastics. The Great Leader is indomitable and infallible but also beset by insidious enemies both within and without. As Umberto Eco famously wrote of fascist ideologies, “The enemy is both strong and weak. By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” So it is with Trump: simultaneously, the smartest and strongest saint ever give up his billionaire lifestyle to save the world but also opposed by the greatest forces in evil in human history.

Prophetic cults tend to survive when their prophecies are proved wrong, such as if the world doesn’t end or the Messiah doesn’t arrive on schedule . The prophecies are simply adjusted. But cults of power tend to evaporate when the leader falls, Atkins writes.

But Atkins also quotes a QAnon expert who thinks that the cult can survive without Trump. They’ll still believe in the Satanic forces stuff, just not in Trump. Without a singular focus on one person, however, I question if they will remain a political force. Some other God-Emperor would have to step into his place, and I can’t think of anyone who could pull that off.

David Horsey, Seattle Times

We keep learning that there were many intelligence warnings that should have inspired much better security in the Capitol before January 6. At Talking Points Memo, Josh Kovensky explains why the warnings were ignored.

Across conversations with multiple former DHS officials and analysts, TPM found that a top-down aversion from the Trump administration towards addressing the threat of far-right extremism, inept management, and the dismantling of DHS bureaucracies aimed at coordinating, analyzing, and disseminating information about extremist groups contributed to the lack of warning.

“Nobody wanted to write a formal intelligence report about this, in part out of fear that such a report would be very poorly received by the MAGA folks within DHS,” one former DHS official who served in the Trump administration told TPM, on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

And you know that’s true. You know that left-wing activism, especially involving Black Americans, is addressed very differently from right-wing activism. If anyone stumbles onto this blog who doubts this, please see Lafayette Square, Capitol rallies met starkly different policing response at the Washington Post. Back to TPM:

Multiple former officials described a climate of fear within DHS around reporting threats from the far right, specifically within the Department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). …

… DHS’s deprioritization of far-right domestic terrorism has been well-documented over the years, as analysts in the unit were reassigned to cover other topics. 

One whistleblower, who went to Congress after himself getting involved in a scandal in which the unit surveilled journalists, said that DHS officials had ordered him to stay away from the threat of white nationalism.

Former officials at DHS echoed the whistleblower’s comments, saying that a climate of fear had been instilled in the office which made intelligence officers want to “keep their heads down” for fear of their jobs.

In fact, I had forgotten that in 2019 the Trump Administration dismantled a domestic terrorism watch group in the DHS.  In my blog post on this, I wrote, “If I were given to conspiracy theories, I might think this is a prelude to a putsch.”

There was also a failure of communication between agencies responsible for security, which you might remember happened before September 11. We don’t learn.

Josh Marshall has a post up headlined We’ve Been Coddling Right Wing Terrorists for Thirty Years. This one’s behind a subscription firewall, but I’ll explain it. Bascially, for the past thirty years we’ve seen cycles of reports of dangers from right-wing domestic terrorism followed quickly by Republicans quashing the reports and screaming that “conservatives” were being “demonized.” Josh Marshall:

Go back to April 1995 and the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. This sparked the first widespread interest in the militia movement which had begun to take root in the country in the 1980s. But Republicans, who had just taken control of Congress in January of that year, quickly shifted gears to defending militias as conservatives being smeared the association with McVeigh and his accomplices. Indeed, in June of 1995 the Senate held a hearing aimed at humanizing members of the militia movement as little more than very motivated conservative activists. As Ken Adams of one Michigan militia group told Senators at the hearing: “What is the militia?. We are doctors, lawyers, people getting involved in their government.”

The whole spectacle turned into a bit of a PR debacle because the militia witnesses turned out to be characteristically feral, meandering off the ‘gee howdy’ bias narrative to darkly warning senators about “vengeance and retribution” and “armed conflict” if their demands weren’t met.

McVeigh was trying to start a race war, as I recall, which is also the aim of our current Boogaloo Bois.

And then there was the 2009 DHS assessment of danger from right-wing extremism. That threw Republicans and their media enablers into such a tizzy that the report was recalled.

Now go to something I wrote in 2018, The Terrorists Among Us.

Back in 2009 I wrote ablog post about a report issued by the Department of Homeland Security to federal, state and local law enforcement regarding the threat of terrorism from right-wing extremists groups. And I wrote about how “conservatives” threw a fit about the report and called it a political hit job. See “Malkin et al. Admit That ‘Conservatives’ Are Right-Wing Extremists and Potential Terrorists.”

Under pressure from conservatives, in a few months DHS repudiated the report. The chief author of the report no longer works at DHS.

Now the New York Times is running a major story called U.S. Law Enforcement Failed to See the Threat of White Nationalism. Now They Don’t Know How to Stop It. The truth is, they were warned.

This year, even when DHS released information that pointed to a greater threat from the Right than from the Left, somehow the news was all about the Left. See, for example, Far-Right Groups Are Behind Most U.S. Terrorist Attacks, Report Finds, in the October 24, 2020, New York Times. Somehow, the article was more about Left-wing violence. The article is not the actual report, but I get the impression that the report tries to blame Right-wing violence on the Left. Then there’s this:

Of the five fatal attacks this year, the report attributed one in Portland, Ore., to an activist affiliated with the loose far-left movement known as “antifa”; one in Austin, Texas, to a man described as a “far-right extremist”; one in New Jersey to an “anti-feminist”; and two in California to a man linked to the so-called Boogaloo movement, an anti-government group whose members seek to exploit public unrest to incite a race war.

In an endnote, the researchers said they did not classify the shooting in Kenosha, Wis., that killed two protesters in August, as a terrorist attack. They said that the person charged in the shooting, a teenager whose social media accounts showed strong support for the police, “lacked a clear political motive for the killings.”

Let’s start with the first sentence. The activist who self-described as antifa who was accused of a shooting was Michael Forest Reinoehl. After the shooting Reinoehl made a video saying that he shot Aaron Danielson, an activist affiliated with the right-wing Patriot Prayer group, in self-defense. Danielson was about to shoot him, Reinoehl said. I don’t know if Reinoehl was telling the truth. A video of the incident doesn’t show anything clearly. But Reinoehl was assasinated by federal marshalls who didn’t even attempt to take him into custody. No need for a messy trial that might have found Reinoehl was innocent; he was much more useful dead.

And as for the kid in Kenosha — Kyle Rittenhouse is out on bail and was just seen posing with Proud Boys, flashing white power hand gestures, in a Wisconsin bar.

In the past five years we’ve had the Charlotte Church shooting and the Portland train shooting and the Charlottesville car killing and the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting and the El Paso Walmart shooting and the 2020 Boogaloo killings and now the insurrection of January 6. Yet security agencies only turn out in force when there’s a left-wing demonstration. BLM might paint stuff on the sidewalk, you know.

I’m sick of it. Let’s hope the Biden Administration makes some changes.

See also Joe Biden’s Looming War on White Supremacy by Ron Brownstein at The Atlantic.

One aspect of the November 6 insurrection I want to explore a bit is the role of law enforcement. There were cops on both sides.

Several of the Capitol cops took a real beating at the hands of the mob. One was killed. The story in common circulation is that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick’s head was bashed in with a fire extinguisher, although I notice major media hasn’t corroborated that.

The Washington Post reported that more than 58 D.C. police officers and an unknown number of U.S. Capitol Police officers were injured defending the Capitol building and the legislators:

An officer was hit with a bat. Another was struck with a flagpole. A third was pinned against a statue. A fourth was clobbered with a wrench. One became stuck between two doors amid a frenzied mob. Many were hit with bear spray. …

…How those injuries occurred is varied: pushed down stairs, trampled by rioters, run over in a stampede, punched with fists. …

… Videos circulating on the Internet show horrific scenes, including one of an officer, identified by the police union as from the D.C. force, being dragged down stairs outside the Capitol and beaten by people with clubs, a crutch and a pole with an American flag attached. The officer was rescued by other officers swinging batons.

Do read this whole story. Some really horrific stuff happened. It’s a wonder more of the LEOs weren’t killed or seriously injured by the mob. I also get the impression from this article that the DC police got the worst of it, although it may be that the reporter got more details from the DC police.

The Hill reports that a retired firefighter, 55-year-old Robert Sanford of Chester, Pa., has been arrested for throwing a fire extinguisher at police officers. This charge is not connected to Brian Sicknick’s death, the article says.

In the footage, according to the court documents, the fire extinguisher can be seen hitting one officer wearing a helmet before it ricochets and strikes an officer without a helmet. The object then ricochets again and strikes a third officer in the head. That officer was wearing a helmet.

Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman is being hailed as a hero for leading rioters up a flight of stairs away from the Senate chamber. However, TPM reports that two Capitol cops have been suspended. One was taking selfies with the insurrectionists; another put on a MAGA hat and was giving the mob directions. At least ten other Capitol cops are under investigation.

TPM also reports that cops from around the country showed up to cheer for Donald Trump and march to the Capitol. Their departments are investigating them. Two cops from Virginia were arrested and charged by the Justice Department with violent entry on Capitol grounds and unlawfully entering restricted areas. A Houston cop resigned. Others are still being investigated.

In short, there were police doing their jobs to defend the Capitol, and there were police in the mob committing sedition. This morning I saw a right-wing columnist accusing “the Left” of hypocrisy for concern over the death of Brian Sicknick. We’re supposed to hate cops, you know. But in truth we tend to focus on cops who unjustifiably kill Black people and escape accountability for it, which happens all too often. Sicknick, widely reported to have been a Trump supporter, was killed by Trump supporters while doing his duty.

That’s different. And I won’t comment further about who the real hypocrites are here.

See also Steve M, Everything Is Liberals’ Fault, Part MCMLXXVIII

Or, Impeached Again! Way to go, Donnie!

Yesterday I asked whether the Republican establishment would cut the Don loose or double down on the crazy. The answer appears to be the former. Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei write at Axios that Top Republicans want Trump done — forevermore. “Top Republicans want to bury President Trump, for good,” they write. “But they are divided whether to do it with one quick kill via impeachment, or let him slowly fade away.”

There are stories from multiple sources that Mitch McConnell more than likely will vote to convict. Other Republicans are fine with doing Trump in, but they don’t want to leave their fingerprints on the knife.

For the record, these House Repblicans voted to impeach: John Katko, NY; Liz Cheney, WY; Adam Kizinger, IL; Fred Upton, MI; Jaime Hettera Beutler, WA; Dan Newhouse, WA; Peter Meijer, MI; Anthony Gonzalez, OH; Tom Rice, SC; David Valadao, CA.

I’m not finding any news stories listing Democrats voting against impeachment. We still don’t know what the Senate will do.

But here’s an interesting bit, from Kaitlan Collins and Kevin Liptak, CNN:

Two sources told CNN Trump has said he is bringing Alan Dershowitz back after his stint defending Trump during the first impeachment proceedings. Trump has told people that Dershowitz’s defense of him on the Senate floor saved him during his last trial. Rudy Giuliani is also expected to be involved, though no concrete legal strategy had been cobbled together as of Wednesday morning, even though Trump was slated to be impeached within hours.

Several prominent figures from Trump’s last impeachment — including Jay Sekulow and Kenneth Starr — have declined to get involved. The White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, is also not expected to play a role, and considered resigning in the wake of last week’s insurrection. Trump has been dismissive of Cipollone for months now.

See also NBC News:

Stripped of the ability to fire off real-time responses, Trump must rely on a White House staff that has largely been replaced with moving boxes as aides head for the exits and allies fail to offer a defense of him in public.

Are you tired of winning yet, Donnie?

Shane Goldmacher writes in the New York Times:

While all parties go through reckonings after losing power, the G.O.P. has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections and, for the first time since Herbert Hoover, ceded the White House, Senate and House in a single term.

That’s got to hurt.

I have no doubt Republicans are already looking to take Congress back in the midterms. Dems hold the houses by a hair, and the president’s party usually loses seats in midterm elections. Even so, I bet the Republican establishment right now wishes it had never heard the name “Donald Trump.”

The base, however, may not let them forget.

But the most acute danger for the health of the party, and its electoral prospects to retake the House and Senate in 2022, is the growing chasm between the pro-Trump voter base and the many Republican leaders and strategists who want to reorient for a post-Trump era.

“Have you heard what some of these folks waving MAGA flags are saying about Republicans?” said Representative Peter Meijer, Republican of Michigan, whose first days in Congress this month were marked by evacuations to escape from a mob. “They don’t identify themselves as Republicans.” …

… Some party leaders fret that as of now, they cannot win with Mr. Trump, and they cannot win without him. Right-wing voters have signaled that they will abandon the party if it turns on Mr. Trump, and more traditional Republicans will sour if it sticks by him.

It’s obvious to me that the Republican Party would be best off in the long run if it let Trumpism go and resigned itself to being in the wilderness for awhile. For one, the big donors have turned against Trumpism. It’s possible they would return in time, but for now they are clearly signalling they want the pre-Trump GOP back.

It’s also the case that the Trump base has revealed itself to be a tad, um, unstable, and not necessarily interested in the serious issue of protecting the wealth of the wealthy, which has been dear to the hearts of Republicans since McKinley. The GOP has long had to pull the scam of firing up the base with culture war issues — fighting racial integration, women’s lib, affirmative action, gay marriage, etc. — and pushing different issues in government policies — deregulation; tax cuts for the wealthy.  But QAnon is like an alien life form that keeps mutating out of control. There is no guarantee that it won’t work against the Republican Party in the future.

Paul Krugman:

… it would be a foolhardy prophet indeed who looked at the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and assumed that this time, under this pressure, the conservative coalition will finally break apart, sending the Republican Party deep into the wilderness and reshaping American ideological debates along new lines.

But breaking points do come, and the violent endgame of the Trump presidency has exposed a new divide in the conservative coalition — not a normal ideological division or an argument about strategy or tactics, but a split between reality and fantasy that may be uniquely hard for either self-interest or statesmanship to bridge.

The other problem for Republicans is that while it might be best for the party to move away from Trumpism, a whole lot of individual elected officials owe their relatively new careers to Trumpism. Will the likes of Josh Hawley or Marjorie Taylor Greene be willing to step away from the brink?

Of course, I’m also hoping that Democrats will use its majority to jump on election reform, and fast. No more voter suppression. And if they can do something about political gerrymandering that would be peachy.

It’s also the case that we haven’t yet gone through all of the fallout from the January 6 insurrection. Facts are still coming out. Today we learned that the FBI was given a stark warning about what would happen —

A day before rioters stormed Congress, an FBI office in Virginia issued an explicit internal warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and “war,” according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post that contradicts a senior official’s declaration the bureau had no intelligence indicating anyone at last week’s pro-Trump protest planned to do harm.

Yet, obviously, preparations were not made. Requests for National Guard were denied six times while the riot was happening.  It appears that people in the Pentagon and in Homeland Security made a deliberate decision to let the insurrection take place. Possibly that’s not true, but that’s what it looks like. We need to know. It’s all still very muddy right now.

And there could still be more violence from Trump supporters, which would dig the hole for Republicans much deeper.

Oh, and Chad Wolf resigned in the middle of overseeing security for the inauguration. Way to go.

But back to the Republicans — This afternoon, the New York Times published a story by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman saying that Mitch McConnell is pleased about impeachment.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has told associates that he believes President Trump committed impeachable offenses and that he is pleased that Democrats are moving to impeach him, believing that it will make it easier to purge him from the party, according to people familiar with his thinking.

Interesting. And Liz Cheney says she will vote to impeach Trump. So these signs point to a break between the old guard and Trump. I can also see the possibility that the Trumpers could form a third party that would spllit the right-wing vote for awhile. We’ll see.