I'ma take my victory lap.
After years and years of "ZOMFG THIS IS HOW HITLER HAPPENS" and "If Lebanon, then USA" and "If Hungary, then USA" and "If Italy, then USA" and "beer hall Putsch Putsch Putsch" and everyone inflicting exactly one Hannah Arendt quote on anyone who listened,
Everyone
Can Shut
The Fuck
Up.
The January 6th Report Takeaway: Trump Incited the Riot
The Select Committee estimates that in the two months between the November election and the January 6th insurrection, President Trump or his inner circle engaged in at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation, targeting either State legislators or State or local election administrators, seeking to overturn State election results. This included at least:68 meetings, attempted or connected phone calls, or text messages, each aimed at one or more State or local officials;
18 instances of prominent public remarks, with language targeting one or more such officials; and
125 social media posts by President Trump or senior aides targeting one or more such officials, either explicitly or implicitly, and mostly from his own account.
Furthermore, these efforts by President Trump’s team also involved two other initiatives attempting to enlist support from large numbers of State legislators all at once: The Trump Campaign contacted or attempted to contact, nearly 200 State legislators from battleground States between November 30, 2020 and December 3, 2020, to solicit backing for possible Statehouse resolutions to overturn the election. At least some messages said they were “on behalf of the president.”
Nearly 300 State legislators from battleground States reportedly participated in a private briefing with President Trump, Rudolph Giuliani, John Eastman, and others on January 2. The president reportedly urged them to exercise what he called “the real power” to choose electoral votes before January 6, because, as President Trump allegedly said on the call, “I don’t think the country is going to take it.”
- “It’s not there. In this business, you can have it and have it so hot and it can go overnight and it’s gone and you can’t get it back. I think we’re just seeing it’s gone. The magic is gone,” an adviser said. “When Seb Gorka and Raheem Kassam and Kash Patel and Devin Nunes are your stars, that’s the D-list. It was D-list MAGA. When Brick Man — that freak, Brick Man — is in the VIP seating, we’ve got a problem.” Brick Man is a man who wears a suit made of fabric with — you guessed it — a brick pattern. The bricks symbolize the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. He wandered around the ballroom offering interviews to reporters. I have a high tolerance for this kind of shit, obviously, and I could not. “If you’re looking for an indication of how bad things are going,” the adviser added, “it’s Brick Man not just being there but being in the VIP section. Don Jr.’s not there!”
- Bannon’s speech is complicated, for all that it sounds like it was written with a testosterone shot as a pen. He is screaming for war. He is invoking the revolution. He is calling for the imprisonment of everyone in the intelligence community who prevented Trump from seizing power in 2020. Bannon claims not just one stolen election but two: that Russiagate deprived Trump of the ability to do all the Trumpy things he wanted to do. This is an aggressively pro-Trump speech.
Except Bannon’s speech too uses the past tense for the former president.
_______________________________________________
We now have an 800-page congressional report that says, in plain English, that Donald Trump AND ALL HIS FOLLOWERS did EVERYTHING THEY COULD TO OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT. For MONTHS. Speaking as someone with a perverse attraction to political instability, the United States withstood more internal political pressure than ANY OTHER GOVERNMENT I KNOW OF without breaking. If you include the fucking Russians? External pressure, too. One of two political parties tried to flush democracy down the goddamn toilet and FAILED because enough normies in the halls of bureaucracy just want a fucking reliable paycheck.
- Although the committee is right to laud the Republicans who testified, it must be said that most of them only spoke up long after the fact. And mostly when their own personal prospects were threatened. And some refused to speak at all. The report pointedly notes that Mike Pence refused to speak with the committee. Yet Cheney describes him as someone who “worked to defeat many of the worst parts of Trump’s plan to overturn the election.”
It’s an ugly quirk of this period of American history that people like Pence can be recognized for stepping away from the shattered-glass, ketchup-dripping, feces-smeared mess they helped Trump create, without lifting a finger to do any meaningful clean-up.
This was not a republic saved by a few good people doing good things. This is a republic saved by inertia, saved by apathy, saved by bureaucracy, saved by the selfish self-interests of a million men in gray. But save it they did?
- He had wanted to be in the movie business. It’s important to never forget this about him. He watches Sunset Boulevard, “one of the greatest of all time,” again and again and again. A silent-picture star sidelined by the talkies, driven to madness, in denial over her faded celebrity. When he was a businessman, he showed it to guests aboard his 727. When he was president, he held screenings of it for White House staff at Camp David.
He once showed it to his press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who later described how “the president, who could never sit still for anything without talking on the phone, sending a tweet, or flipping through TV channels, sat enthralled.” And he once showed it to Tim O’Brien, the biographer, who wrote that when Norma Desmond cried, “Those idiot producers. Those imbeciles! Haven’t they got any eyes? Have they forgotten what a star looks like? I’ll show them. I’ll be up there again, so help me!,” Trump leaned over O’Brien’s shoulder and whispered, “Is this an incredible scene or what? Just incredible.”
A washed-up star locked away in a mansion from the 1920s, afraid of the world outside, afraid it will remind him that time has passed … Well, he does not like the way it sounds for Trump. He still talks that way, in the third person. “This was the same thing in 2016. They said first, ‘Oh, Trump is just doing it for fun,’ and then they learned that wasn’t true,” he told me. “And then they said, ‘Well, he won’t win.’ And they learned that wasn’t true.”
There's a world of fucking difference between writing Mein Kampf while serving five years for failing to overthrow the government the first time and playing golf while awaiting prosecution for "at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation, targeting either State legislators or State or local election administrators, seeking to overturn State election results."
I've been bringing up Oswald Mosley a lot. Go ahead and search. 'cuz I'm done. From here on out I'm gonna bring up this.
The United States is the most inertia-filled democratic republic the world has ever seen, for better or worse. If nothing else, it makes it really fucking hard to knock over.
- In the interview with Maron, the President, confronting frustrations with the fact that he wasn’t able to alter the world with the wave of a rhetorical wand, offered an alternative view of how big democratic societies work. They are, he said, like ocean liners: you turn the wheel slowly, and the big ship pivots. “Sometimes your job is just to make stuff work,” Obama said. “Sometimes the task of government is to make incremental improvements or try to steer the ocean liner two degrees north or south so that, ten years from now, suddenly we’re in a very different place than we were. At the moment, people may feel like we need a fifty-degree turn; we don’t need a two-degree turn. And you say, ‘Well, if I turn fifty degrees, the whole ship turns’ ” over. Note that the President wasn’t saying that big ships aren’t worth turning, just that it takes time. Their very bigness is what makes them turn slowly, but their bigness is also what makes them worth turning.
Anyone want to punt on what consequences might happen?
As sick as it is, I will accept nothing as the answer.
Whelp, I think Consequence 1 is that the State Department and CIA will never let Russia be a world power again. The fact that the neocons allowed Russia to regain enough power to place a useful idiot in the oval office will forever inoculate the Gray Men from allowing politicians to set policy. The CIA gets their teddy bear back - "destruction of the Former Soviet Union" has been on their wishlist since they checked off "Destruction of the Soviet Union". I don't know that they'll succeed but between the Magnitsky Act, the Bucket'O'Sanctions and the half-tithe we're spending to decimate the Russian military five times over, I know it's rough for Russia.
I think it will take several electoral cycles for Teh Crazeh to burn itself out in the Republican Party, but burn itself out it will. People forget: the number one requirement for Republicans has been LOYALTY since Newt Gingrich and we've seen the logical outcome of that. The era of Mitch McConnell is over; Democrats gained more seats than gerrymandering could protect, and Biden has nominated more judges than Trump as anyone with any character basically went "four more years" during the Trump Era. You can see this playing out in the Boebert Vs. Green debacle as the former nearly lost to a progressive Democrat while the latter handily beat her centrist challenger - Boebert now has to worry about actual voters while Green has to worry about even crazier morons to her right primarying her.
I think the cost of opportunism has been demonstrated for all far and wide. You can be Jason Miller? But all that's left for you is stand-ups on a hated network for old people whose only advertiser is a coke-addled pillow salesman. When all the world is leaning into ESG and everyone around you had a choice between ethics or opportunism, your scarlet letter is never going away. You know how Snowden shocked the world with all his revelations about the NSA? Ten years previously all that shit was called Total Information Awareness. Know what drove TIA underground? The whole country going "oh fuck not John Poindexter again." And that was effectively before social media, an era before teenaged citizen journalists could supercut your transgressions while bored. You can no more get history off the internet than you can get piss out of a swimming pool, and the whole of the Trump Posse Baby Ruthed the fuck out of that watering hole.
I think Jared Kushner is now Our Man in Riyadh. I think MBS went "I am the despot now" and the CIA went "fine, we see how well flattery works, we've got our own Donald Trump now." People forget - Donald Trump went "Jared is going to fix the Middle East" and by damn if Jared Kushner didn't somehow normalize relations to the point where you can fly direct from Riyadh to Tel Aviv now. Do I think Jared Kushner had anything to do with this? No I do not. The man's COVID solution was Facebook. But I think MBS doesn't give a shit about Palestine and the CIA went "we'll fund that emotion" and here we are. Will he still turn up drowned off the Canary Islands like Robert Maxwell? I sincerely hope so. But not while he's still a useful idiot. At its most cynical level, the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi sent a message to the CIA as to how MBS intended to run the country, and from a CIA standpoint, it wasn't particularly expensive or damaging - compare and contrast with Iran.
As far as consequences for Donald Trump? Whelp, he's likely got federal charges lined up against him, his extremely shady taxes are public, and at least two states are lined up for criminal and civil charges related to a smorgasbord of shady shit. And there is no disinfectant like sunlight.
I think he's got five, six years of ignominy left. I don't know if he'll ever serve time. I know we'll be talking about it until he fucking dies, which is extremely tedious, but objectively speaking, the man is a historical figure. He matters more than George Wallace, Herbert Hoover or Richard Nixon. He's up there with John Wilkes Booth as far as I'm concerned.
We have been worried about a man like Donald Trump since before he was born. It has always been up to question what would happen if a legitimate challenge to democracy were to arise - how fragile is the republic, really?
I believe we have our answer.
One thing about our Mennonite form of government: it doesn't move quickly. There are many faster, more agile implementations of democracy in the world and while they're clearly better at coming up with things like universal healthcare, they also give you things like Brexit and Hugo Chavez.
Which is not to say it won't happen again. But a whole lot of Donald Trump's maneuverability was due to the element of surprise. You can attack Pearl Harbor twice but it won't do nearly as much. History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme? And Donald Trump was what happens when George Wallace or Huey Long don't get shot, frankly. I don't know what that means for the future? But I know it'll be generations before anyone allows another Donald Trump to happen.
There's a lot to digest there, but thanks for such a comprehensive answer - more than I could ever have hoped for.
The link between Russia and US elections is interesting - and worrying - because I feel that, before the pandemic, China had deeply infiltrated and had far too much influence over US affairs although through other means. I've also noticed the quality of their social media propaganda has increased by orders of magnitude. If they had someone cunning with vision at the helm...
The concern about fascism is valid though - my main worry is that Trump was such a blustering narcissist that someone with real intelligence and guile might well have succeeded. Pretty sure Moseley was taken down as a deliberate decision so maybe "the system" does look after itself.
It will not surprise you to learn that not only am I several books deep into both Soviet/Russian and Chinese espionage, but that I grew up with it! Wen Ho Lee wasn't exactly a friend? But he was a customer at my book shop. And my high school was one of the very, very few in the United States that taught Russian in the middle of the Cold War for... reasons.
The link between Russia and US elections is clear. It's also clear that for all their meddling around on Facebook, they didn't actually tilt things that much. The link between Russia and Donald Trump is much, much clearer. He was big on the USSR in the '80s, they kept him solvent in the '00s and the whole of the Trump organization exists to launder oligarch money.
And I mean, c'mon. Melania is a swallow. That woman gave up her future to be Putin's conduit to a usefully stupid American oligarch. Everything makes sense about Melania if you look at her as an employee who ended up overworked and underpaid.
China?
China has always suffered from, what's the word? Racism. What immigrants built the American west and were immediately kicked out? The Chinese. Who mired the Japanese down to the point where the Americans could beat them and were then effectively abandoned? The Chinese. In fairness to the Americans, it's not just the Chinese, it's anyone with epicanthic folds... to the point where "Russian" has always been "White Russian" not Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Tuvan or any other minority who had to not only deal with being in the USSR but also be lower than any kulak. But the Chinese have always lacked access to power in the US.
The structure of Chinese intelligence is also very not Machiavellian. Western intelligence operations derive from feudal politics, where there's a heterogeneous mix of hierarchies to play against each other with a constant churn of status and opportunity. China, on the other hand, has always been the divine on earth calling the shots absolutely and everyone under him jockeying for relative power. This structure presupposes that really, nobody matters but the sovereign.
The direct consequence of this is that Chinese intelligence operations are low-value operatives performing low-value operations against low-value targets over and over and over and over again. Chinese intelligence is TikTok - a thing you try to put on every phone to snoop on everyone so that if anyone ever catches your interest, you query their phone. Chinese intelligence is Huawei - a thing you put on their network with the brazen ability to snoop whenever you need to, they'll never know they're idiots. The European-and-therefore-American approach is "weaponize just one or two things, hide the shit out of them, spare no effort or expense to get them near their target, scuttle that pipeline."
You wanna know how Chinese surveillance works? You go to NAB, you visit the creepy Chinese floor, you chat up some odd manufacturer of gimbal mounts, and within six months someone Chinese is taking you to dinner to pick your brain about cinematography while dangling the prospect of you shooting a movie in Mongolia. The movie will never happen, and they'll ghost the minute they've learned everything they can about how you work? And they never even broke the law. Or, you go to IMTS, you visit the creepy Chinese floor, you chat up some odd manufacturer of CNC routers, and for the next two years they send you "hello how are you friend would you like to be our distributor" emails.
Westerners spear-phish. Easterners spam. It reflects their fundamental understanding of culture. So yes - China has far too much influence over US affairs, primarily because they are paying for it. The difference between TikTok and Vine is that Vine was not an intelligence project fully subsidized and maintained by a state entity for the express purpose of influencing an adversary.
But it only takes a few instances of Shaq groveling before Xi for saying something vaguely offensive before that shit's over. You don't hear about One Belt One Road much anymore because the carrot has been supplanted by the stick.
Chinese policy towards Taiwan looks a lot like American policy towards Cuba... in 1962. There's 60 years of geopolitics between thar and hyar but fundamentally, Chinese foreign policy is "we don't have to know what you're thinking, you're animals." It doesn't take more than a couple interactions like that before you're no longer negotiating as if you have Most Favored Nation status. China has effectively squandered foreign influence for domestic control, which is what they tend to do every couple hundred years.
As far as fascism and Madison Square Garden, there's a Ken Burns for that. Yes, there were elements in the United States that were very pro-Nazi. There were far more elements in the United States that were very pro-isolationism. There has been and always shall be evil in the United States. I think I've come around to the recognition, however, that Americans will fight like hell for our right to be left the fuck alone. While "I'm in your business" is definitely the guiding light for far too many Americans, "live and let live" is dominant and "live and let live" doesn't attend rallies. It doesn't stop foreign holocausts either so it's not all upside... but I think Americans have far more apathy towards foreign catastrophes than we do for domestic ones.
Something to consider about populists - they come from outside the system, by definition. Which means the system will reject the infection if it's strong enough. Someone with cunning and vision will realize they have more power within the system, presuming the system is strong enough to withstand frontal assault. The court of Henry the Eighth will give rise to Thomas Cromwell; the Imperial Russian Monarchy will give rise to Vladimir Lenin.
Moseley was Lord Curzon's son-in-law. He was mutherfucking anointed. There were Nazi sympathizers at the very top. Mosely was taken down by antifa.
And that, really, is the difference between places with fascism and places without. Is there a tradition of self-determinism? Britain did execute a king who got too big for his britches. It didn't stick? But it definitely colored the future.
Since the travesty of the 2016 electoral season, my closest friends and I have been framing much of the conversation around current politics with 'How are we going to explain this to our children?'
My god daughter turned five in October. The world that I work towards creating has her in it, and my own children of some form or another.
I still don't think that I have anything like a reasonable way to describe the events of the last several years. Stating the facts outright sounds like the most shitty SNL bit imaginable.
cracks knuckles, clears throat
"The unchecked proliferation of social media during the 2000s and 2010s weakened social bonds and strengthened disinformation echo chambers to the point that the Russian Oligarchy successfully elevated a populist buffoon as the Republican candidate for President in order to oppose their nemesis, Hilary Clinton. Unfortunately the country was so fractured and electoral politics so slanted that the buffoon won. The ensuing years can best be explained as a power struggle between feckless Democrats accidentally bested by an FSB dirty trick, the establishment Republicans who found themselves led by a traitorous, vainglorious oaf, and the full-throated hoi polloi and craven opportunists who internalized populist fodder as their guiding light."
Everyone was worried about a political Three Mile Island. They got a political Chernobyl instead. All the rest is simply consequences.
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