Friends, some thoughts regarding insurrection,
Some correspondents
have expressed skepticism or disagreement regarding use of
“insurrection” to describe what happened at the 6 January joint
congressional assembly convened to accept the Electoral College
ballots. I also note some news reports use words such as angry mob,
rioters or other such descriptors to avoid using
insurrection or attempted insurrection.
I must point out
that it is difficult to remedy a problem if you fail to identify the
problem in the first place.
I argue we are in
the late stages of an insurrection begun decades ago with Ronald
Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (“government is the problem” “There
is no society only individuals”) and the adoption of neoliberal
ideology and cruel capitalism which continue to dominate our society
today. Successive Republican administrations have pressed for
reduction of regulations governing public safety and environmental
pollution. These changes often effected by hobbling the government
agencies responsible for the oversight.
Part and parcel of
the plan is destruction of labor unions, in part, because such
collective action violates Ms. Thatcher’s dictum. Those individuals
(read workers) who toil as Uber drivers, food delivery drones,
various gig workers and nomadic camper-living Amazon temporary
workers, are examples of the atomized work force with no claim to
community. The atomized have no weight, no power and likely feel no
commitment or loyalty to community or nation. That is the desired
effect described by some observers as alienation.
Five years ago two
knowledgeable Eastern European historians warned us of the
authoritarian tendencies of Donald Trump. They didn’t use the
insurrection label (or the fascism label at the time) but the warning
they offered included the clear, if only implied, description of a
possible take over of the government by that authoritarian.
January 2017 we got
Donald Trump as President and he immediately began to install his
loyalists and donors in positions of leadership in various
government agencies, agencies which are our government, agencies
which we expect to work for us, agencies we need for our security,
health protection and education. The obvious example is Postmaster
General DeJoy who crippled the Post Office to slow the mail of
absentee ballots. Some observers describe America as having fallen to
third world status for some parameters (poverty, life expectancy).
This destruction of government services should be understood as an
assault and a continuation of the ongoing insurrection.
We watched Trump
spit out his vile hate and bigotry for four years. The message was
embraced by those citizens who were susceptible for whatever reason.
His big lie propaganda and demonization of others, particularly
Democrats, instructed his followers who their enemies were and
continued right through to the January 6 assault on Congress.
Consider what might
have happened if the hate motivated mob had been able to take control
of the building and seize political leaders that day. What might have
developed if VP Pence had done what Trump wanted, that is to reject
the electoral ballots from several states sufficient to deny any
candidate to necessary 270 votes. The plan was to then shift the
selection of President to the House of Representatives and if several
of the progressive house members were detained and unable to vote,
the House would then vote to declare Trump President.
It failed for
several reasons. Trump apparently assumed he had greater support of
police and military. He was counting on Pence to do his bidding. His
“army,” probably a small percentage of the people who actually
entered the building, were prepared to take custody of some
legislators (zip ties in hand) but were stymied by the legislators
having been secured elsewhere. And, maybe Trump thought some of the
Republican legislators would help neutralize Democrats however, they
didn’t have the opportunity and might have been too cowardly to do
so anyway.
In closing I must
remind everyone the history of Europe in the last century. Adolf
Hitler was such a threat in the first years of the 1930s and was
actually jailed for a time. He came back big time in 1933 being named
Germany’s Chancellor in and then Führer in 1934. The Reichstag was
neutered at that time and Hitler was then allowed to function as a
dictator. The lesson for us here is that the threat of insurrection
remains. Trump is not going away and so we must consider the
Insurrection as ongoing.
Consider the recent
efforts by Republican controlled states to restrict voting
opportunities. Over 250 such laws have been introduced in 43 states
in recent weeks. Laws aimed at reducing the availability polling
places,restricting early voting and requiring citizen identification
documents. Such laws should be considered continued acts of
insurrection in so far as these actions are intended to control
election outcomes.
I will leave it the
reader to identify America’s enemies in this whole terrible
process. I have my opinions, implied in the above analysis, but
prefer to invite others to offer their observations.
Dr. Bandy X Lee, a
forensic psychiatrist and editor of "The Dangerous Case of
Donald Trump" has written a second book Profile
of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul, a
psychological assessment of the president against the backdrop of his
supporters and the country as a whole.
“I ...emphasize
in Profile of a Nation that we should consider
the president, his followers and the nation as an ecology, not in
isolation. Hence, what he does after this presidency depends a great
deal on us. This is the reason I frantically wrote the book over the
summer: we require active intervention to stop him from achieving any
number of destructive outcomes for the nation,” Read the whole
report here:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-shared-psychosis-of-donald-trump-and-his-loyalists/
Perhaps Dr. Lee’s
analysis will help us understand how to defend our country from the
fascist insurrection.
Wayne
--------------------------------------------
Trump’s Turn From
Immigration to the Enemy Within
Trump’s shift from demonizing immigrants to
targeting leftists is straight out of the fascist playbook.
Ryan
Devereaux October 3 2020, 6:00 a.m.
"...the Trump administration has increasingly and prominently centered
purported threats posed by leftists, anarchists, and anti-fascists in
its bid to hold onto power. This widening of the threat aperture is
straight out of the authoritarian playbook, said Jason Stanley, a
professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.”
https://theintercept.com/2020/10/03/trump-immigration-antifa-fascism/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
13 August 2019
President Trump is preparing to
sign an executive order creating an Internet speech police with
sweeping powers to censor the Internet.
A draft copy of the executive order was
leaked to the media, giving us a chance to alert the public and
generate the grassroots backlash needed to kill Trump’s “Internet
speech police” executive order.1
The leaked executive order would put the
FCC and the FTC in charge of deciding what political speech is—and
isn’t—permissible on the Internet.
The order comes in response to a myth
pushed by far-right activists that Internet platforms like Facebook
and Google are biased against conservatives.2
But instead of protecting free
speech, Trump’s executive order would put political appointees in
charge of deciding what speech is allowed and what speech isn’t.
[1] White House
drafting executive order to tackle Silicon Valley’s alleged
anti-conservative bias:
Politico
[2]
The myth of social media anti-conservative bias refuses to die:
Columbia
Journalism Review
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IMPEACHMENT
15 March 2019
In an
interview with Breitbart, Donald Trump had a not-at-all-subtle
message for his opponents. “I
have the support of the police, the support of the military, the
support of the Bikers for Trump,” he claimed. “I have the tough
people, but they don’t
play it tough—until they go to a certain point and then it
would be very bad, very bad.” Breitbart Note: this venue is a mainline injection point for the Trump
army. (emphasis mine)
Explicit threats of authoritarian
violence from the orange ogre. We should take him at his word because
we know some elements of his assumed army of "tough people" are capable of acting on
such suggestions.
Considering the vile pronouncements
which spew from this nut job's pie hole, it is obvious Trump is a
threat to the safety of peoples all over the world. The New Zealand
Islamaphobic shooter was likely inspired by our hate champion.
With regard to police supporting Trump,
all you have to do is look at the video of Suffolk County police
officers, including ranking officers, clapping, smiling and smirking
as stage backdrop for Trump's theater event in Brentwod NY in 2017.
youtube Do not watch this on a full stomach. Disclosure: I am an
alumni of the aforementioned institution and can no longer be proud
of that association.
It is long past time for an impeachment
investigation to have begun. Palosi is just wrong about "He's
just not worth it." We are in a constitutional crisis and
congress is thus required to act!
Mr. Delgado, get on board with
impeachment now!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
But
Then It Was Too Late
“They Thought They
Were Free” by Milton Mayer, 1954,
Interviews of German
citizens to discover their engagement with Nazism
From Chapter 13,
“But Then It Was Too Late”, an excerpt:
“What no one
seemed to notice,” said a colleague of mine, a philologist, “was
the ever widening gap after 1933, between the government and the
people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in
Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make
people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s
government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense,
or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with
knowing one is governing.
“What happened
here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to
be governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in
secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the
government had to act on information which the people could not
understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand
it, it could not be released because of national security. And their
sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it
easier to widen the gap and reassured those who would otherwise have
worried about it.
“This separation
of government from the people, this widening of the gap, took place
so gradually and insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even
intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with
true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the
crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that
they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of
government growing remoter and remoter.
...
“Those,” I said,
“are the words of my friend the baker. “One had no time to think.
There was so much going on.” Your friend the baker was right,”
said my colleague. “The dictatorship, and the whole process of its
coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an
excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do
not speak of your “little men,” your baker and so on; I speak of
my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not
want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no
need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think
about-we were decent people-and kept us so busy with continuous
changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by
machinations of the ‘national enemies’ without and within, that
we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were
growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose,
we were grateful. Who wants to think?
To live in this
process is absolutely not to be able to notice it-please try to
believe me-unless one has a much greater degree of political
awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each
step was small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on
occasion, ‘regretted’ that, unless one were detached from the
whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the
whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’
that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to,
one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his
field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
How tall is our
corn? Wayne
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: this story is primarily about
ICE releasing large numbers of immigrants to civil service
organizations probably for the purpose of inflaming the right-wing
base leading up to the midterms. This is dangerous in that it puts
some of those innocent folks at risk given the anti-immigrant
sentiment the administration has engendered. But there is a larger
issue I will explain below.
“
...Trump ... urgently informing
his base that the real “national
emergency” facing the United States was external, and the
result of brown-skinned migrants.
It’s political theater, but it’s had real-world
consequences. ... the accused shooter in the Pittsburgh synagogue
attack, included the Trumpian conspiracy theory among the deeply
anti-Semitic complaints
he posted on a right-wing social media site.
Trump ... called up military assets to respond
to the caravan. According to a report
in the Wall Street Journal, “Operation Faithful Patriot”
will include the deployment of 5,000 troops to the border.
As the paper noted, “the additional troops would mean that the
number of U.S. forces deployed at the border would be greater than
those currently in Syria and Iraq, and roughly half of those deployed
in Afghanistan.”
Sure this is political theater, but it
is also very likely a premeditated fascist-authoritarian power grab;
create a crisis, exaggerate the threat, declare yourself the nation’s
guardian, then mobilize the military within our own borders. What
happens next might require additional “angry mobs” or subversive
agitators.
We are being set up for the military
to serve as a domestic “peace-keeping” presence. I suspect the
Republicans are anticipating rebellious civil disobedience if/when
Democratic candidates fall victim to voter dis-enfranchisement, voter
intimidation, and election fraud. This could get ugly very fast.
Wayne
