OMNI
INSURRECTION ANTHOLOGY
January 2, 2022
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace,
Justice, and Ecology
Omnicenter.org/donate/
This anthology gathers articles, books, and
films that indict Trump for attempting to foment an insurrection and in many
other ways to replace our democracy with autocracy. The collection begins with the PBS Frontline/ProPublica
documentary, American Insurrection, includes
special attention to Costa and Woodward’s book Peril, and ends with American
Nero: The History of the Destruction of the
Rule of Law, and Why Trump Is the Worst Offender by Richard Painter and Peter Golenbock.
CONTENTS
PBS Frontline, American
Insurrection
NYT, “The Politics of
Menace.”
NPR, Fresh Air, Trump’s Strategy, Next Time
Robert Costa and Bob Woodward, Peril
Alfred McCoy, To Govern the Globe and “An American Coup”
Karen Greenberg, Subtle Tools
Robert Kagan, “Our Constant Crisis
Is Already Here”
Kate Woodsome, “How the Capitol
Attack Unfolded,” Washington Post
Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Was the January 6th a Dress
Rehearsal for a Coup d’État”?
Dick, Trump’s Ongoing Attempted Coup
Increasingly Autocratic
Joshua Cho, US Media and Trump’s Coup
Attempt
Gregory Krieg, CNN, “Trump’s Attempt
to Steal the Election”
Ezra Klein, “Trump is Attempting a
Coup in Plain Sight”
Two Books Recommended by George
Paulson:
Mazower, Hitler’s Empire
Childers, The Third Reich
Painter and Golenbock, American Nero, rev. by Dahlia Lithwick
Dick, Benjamin Hett’s The Death of Democracy
TEXTS
Watch FRONTLINE's documentary on how far-right extremist groups have evolved from the deadly
2017 Charlottesville rally to the assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Consulting Producer: Ford Fischer, Correspondent: A.C. Thompson, Directed by: Richard Rowley:.13
FRONTLINE |
American Insurrection | Season 2021 | Episode 7
PBS Apr 13, 2021
American Insurrection | Inside Look | FRONTLINE | PBS
YouTube · PBS Apr 11, 20210:31
FRONTLINE: American Insurrection |
Preview
TRAILER: "American
Insurrection" | FRONTLINE
YouTube · FRONTLINE PBS |
Official
Apr 9, 2021
American Insurrection | A Frontline Film - PBS
https://www.pbs.org ›
Home › Film Landing Pages
American Insurrection | A Frontline Film. In the aftermath of the assault on the U.S.
Capitol, FRONTLINE and ProPublica team up again to examine
how ...
American Insurrection (full documentary) | FRONTLINEhttps://www.youtube.com ›
watchApr 13,
2021 — FRONTLINE, ProPublica and UC Berkeley's Investigative
Reporting Program present “American
Insurrection”: a timely, 90-minute
documentary ...
“The
Politics of Menace,” The New York Times - News Concerns
https://newsconcerns.com ›
the-politics-of-menace-the-...Nov 22, 2021 — For years in Congress,
the unofficial rule of receiving death threats was to avoid talking about them.
That seems to have changed.
|
The
politics of menace |
|
For years in Congress, the unofficial rule
of receiving death threats was to avoid talking about them. That seems to
have changed. |
|
As the House debated last week whether to
censure Paul Gosar, a far-right
congressman from Arizona, for posting an altered anime video depicting him
killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive from New
York, something unusual happened. Speaking one after the other, lawmakers
delivered candid and raw confessionals about the frequency with which they, too,
had received violent threats. |
|
Nikema Williams, a freshman Democrat from
Georgia, described how strange it felt to drop off her child at kindergarten
flanked by security officers. Jackie Walorski, a veteran Republican from
Indiana, disclosed that an activist had recently tried to run her over with
his car. |
|
“The threat
of actual violence against members of Congress is real, and it is
growing,” said Ted Deutch of Florida, a Democrat who leads the House Ethics
Committee. “Now more than ever, many of us fear for our physical safety.” |
|
I’ve covered Congress for more than three
years, and those lawmakers’ testimonials struck me as evidence of the extent
to which the rising threat of political violence has loomed over American
politics since the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters. |
|
But the Republican response to Gosar’s
eventual censure was just as striking: Party leaders in the House pointedly
refused to condemn the video, and their rank and file nearly unanimously
closed ranks around Gosar. A dozen or so Republicans huddled in solidarity
around him as he was censured. |
|
The vote was intended to showcase
accountability for political violence. Instead, it revealed a more worrying
trend: a growing tolerance in the Republican Party for the menacing, incendiary rhetoric increasingly espoused by its loudest
voices. It was a preview of what could become the new status quo in
Washington. |
|
How we got here |
|
The timeline that culminated in Gosar’s
censure began when he posted the video this month. A crudely edited work, it
depicted him slashing Ocasio-Cortez’s neck and swinging swords at President
Biden. |
|
Gosar, who has allied himself with white
nationalists,
refused to apologize. He insisted the video was meant to depict a “symbolic”
policy battle over immigration. |
|
But it was clear that the shadow of the
January attack on the Capitol hung over last week’s proceedings. Democrats
warned that Gosar’s comments could be perceived as the same kind of call to arms made by Donald Trump on Jan. 6 when he encouraged his
supporters at a rally to march on Congress and “fight like hell.” |
|
And while Gosar’s video was the most
provocative display of violence amplified by a sitting member of Congress, it
was just the latest example of Republican lawmakers using viciously
suggestive language. |
|
In the days and weeks before the riot,
Trump’s closest allies in the House, including Gosar, used bellicose, inflammatory rhetoric to encourage their followers
to fight against Biden’s victory. They falsely suggested that Trump was the
victim of an attempted “coup” and cast Jan. 6 as the party’s “1776 moment.” |
|
While politically motivated violence targeting
lawmakers — in both parties — is not a new phenomenon, the Capitol
Police say they have seen a rapid uptick in violent threats and messages over
the past five years, as Trump’s style of politics became mainstream. A
spokesman declined to break down the threats by party, but a review of court
records indicates that both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have been
targeted. |
|
What’s next |
|
Democrats stripped Gosar of his posts on two
House committees. But his exile might not last long. Republicans are already
vowing political retribution if they take back the House. |
|
Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader,
told reporters that he would return Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the
Georgia Republican whom Democrats also booted off committees for violent
comments, to their panel assignments if Republicans take back the majority in
2023. And McCarthy reiterated that Republicans would consider kicking some
Democrats out of their committee seats. |
|
Shortly after he was censured, Gosar
retweeted his original violent video, and Trump rolled out a fresh
endorsement of him. |
|
The takeaway |
|
The act of congressional censure is meant to
cast a shadow of disgrace over a lawmaker for politicians and voters alike to
see. Instead, by rallying around Gosar, Republican leaders conveyed their
implicit support, even as they publicly but vaguely denounced violence. |
|
Those ramifications will stretch beyond
Gosar’s political standing. |
|
“This is not about me. This is not about
Representative Gosar,” Ocasio-Cortez said on the House floor. “This is about
what we are willing to accept.” |
Trump's strategy
to overturn the 2020 election didn't work. Next time it might. October 28, 202111:07 AM ET.
Heard on Fresh Air
Supporters of
President Trump protest outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty
Images
On the night before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Washington Post reporter
Robert Costa walked through the streets of D.C., surrounded by a throng of
Trump supporters. He says he remembers a particular energy in the crowd that
night.
"They were
clashing with police officers. They were fighting with each other. There was a
euphoria," Costa says. "The mob ... it was loud."
Costa's new book Peril, which he co-wrote with
journalist Bob Woodward, centers on President Trump's final days in office — specifically
the events leading up to and following the Capitol siege.
As the crowd agitated outside, Costa says, inside a "war
room" at the nearby Willard hotel, Trump lawyers and allies,
including Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and Jason Miller, were laying out a strategy to overturn the
results of the 2020 election.
According to Costa,
Trump attorney John Eastman drafted a memo suggesting that an alternate slate
of electors be used as a tactic to stop the certification of the election
results.
'Peril' Details The Capitol Riot And Trump's 'Last-Ditch'
Effort To Hold Onto Power
"They were trying
to get [Vice President] Pence and others to move the election to the House of
Representatives to block Biden from taking office," Costa explains.
Costa says that Pence
declined to go along with the plan — mostly because there were no alternate
slates of electors on hand. But, Costa adds, "Imagine if in January 2025,
Republicans are much more organized and they have alternate slates of electors
ready in many states. What happens then?"
'Peril' Co-Author Robert Costa Describes The Fraught
Transition From Trump To Biden
Ten months later, hundreds of members of the mob who stormed the
Capitol are facing prosecution for their actions. But it remains to be
seen whether anyone from the Willard war room will be charged.
"The looming question for Merrick Garland, the attorney general, is: Is he going to go
at the key players, who may not be directly tied to the violence or may not
have their fingerprints on the steel bars that were used against the Capitol
Police officers that day, but [who] were part of planning an effort to defraud
the United States?" Costa says. "I'm not a lawyer, but I think raising
the question is certainly understandable based on all of this reporting."
Interview highlights
On the scene on the street the night of Jan. 5 and into Jan. 6
Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
Simon & Schuster
[The crowd] was so loud that Trump could hear them. And Trump
doesn't like being outside — from what I've witnessed over the years, he's more
of an indoor person — but he keeps the door to the Oval Office open on the
night of the 5th after Pence leaves just so he can hear the mob. And Woodward
said to me, it's almost like when he was writing The Final Days with Carl Bernstein, when [Richard] Nixon was talking to the
pictures on the wall, Trump is talking to the mob. A few aides come in from the
press shop, and say, "Mr. President, Mr. President, it's cold. We closed
the door. Why is the door open?" [And Trump says,] "I want to hear my
people. Listen. They have courage. Listen." And he keeps the door open for
the whole meeting on the night of Jan. 5.
Bob Woodward Paints A Presidential Portrait Like No Other
For Donald Trump
On Trump's direct calls to the Willard war room
The fact that the calls happened is very important in the
context of the whole insurrection because for months, as reporters, we know
that Trump was pressuring Pence in the Oval Office. That's been
well-documented, and we knew that Giuliani and Bannon were up to a lot of stuff
in Washington that night. What we wanted to figure out when we were looking at
this book is was there a connection between the two? And the fact that Trump
calls Bannon and Giuliani after Pence leaves the White House around 7:30 p.m.
on Jan. 5 to update them, it shows that there is at the very least coordination
between these two power centers on the eve of an insurrection. It will be up to
the DOJ to decide whether this is a conspiracy, a crime to defraud the United
States.
Trump Consistently Bends Reality, Sells His Narrative In
Interviews For Woodward Book
On the statement the Trump campaign issued Jan. 5 about Pence's
support, which wasn't true — and the resulting tension between the president
and the vice president
It was a campaign
statement on Trump campaign letterhead saying, in Donald Trump's words, that
Mike Pence fully agrees with me. The quote that stunned the Pence people was
"Mike Pence is in total agreement that on Jan. 6, the election should be
overturned and he should move it to the House." It was issued on a formal
statement.
Gen. Milley Defends His Call To A Chinese General About
Trump's Rhetoric And The U.S.
This is where you start to see the crack in the American
democratic system — when the vice president and president are not in sync, and
the president starts to speak for other constitutional officers. This is where
Pence and his team really go into a bunker mode and they don't even share
the letter Pence ultimately releases on Jan. 6, explaining his decision to
not try to do anything crazy on Jan. 6. They don't even share it with the White
House counsel or with Trump. That was the level of tension between the
president and the vice president.
On a possible criminal charge of defrauding the U.S. for those who
organized the insurrection
Read Trump's Jan. 6 Speech, A Key Part Of Impeachment
Trial
It's a well-known part
of the U.S. Code, and if someone wants to look it up, it's 18 U.S. Code 371. It
means that if you have one or two people conspiring to commit an offense
against the United States, to defraud the U.S., then you have committed a crime
and you shall be fined or imprisoned for possibly up to five years. This is a
crime, and it's been prosecuted many, many times.
On the perils that remain and the threats to our democracy
Bob Woodward: 'People Need To Wake Up' To What's
Happening Under Trump
You have a former
president in Donald Trump who refuses to share documents to give any kind of
information to an investigation about an insurrection that his friends and
allies were part of, at least on the legal and political level, in trying to
force the election to be overturned. There is violence and connections that
need to be explained at a grassroots level and potentially at a higher level.
And these unanswered questions are part of the peril that remains. If we don't
have accountability in truth and answers in a democracy, then what kind of
democracy is it?
There are so many things that we just still don't know. ... What
else don't we know about the domestic side of things? The QAnon movement, the
Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers seem to be growing by the day across the country.
There's a violence and extremism and a lot of the rhetoric now, publicly. You
see Trump out there ... he's as active as ever. ... There is a huge effort,
whether it's the Arizona "audit" — isn't an audit at all. But the
Arizona effort to maybe say Trump won the state. All these
Republican-controlled states have people in them, in the Legislature's key
leaders who are doing a lot to try to change election laws, change voting rights.
And [House Majority Whip] Jim Clyburn ... says in our book that "democracy
is on fire" because, on the federal level, Democrats won't break the filibuster and pass voting rights legislation that they all agree on. But Republicans
are very busy passing their voting laws in different states. And what I just
see on the horizon is a collision of some sort on the voting rights issue and
on the foundation of democracy. If the system's not functioning and people
aren't accepting reality and pushing to change the laws, who knows what happens
next?
Heidi Saman and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview
for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it
for the Web.
|
|
|
|
Opinion: Our constitutional
crisis is already here by Robert Kagan, Contributing columnist. September 23, 2021. Opinion by Robert Kagan.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/23/robert-kagan-constitutional-crisis/
“Is there no virtue
among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.” — James Madison
The United States is
heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil
War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of
mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the
country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured
by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises,
and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no
doubt:
First, Donald Trump
will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and
expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been
delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive
campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable.
Barring health problems, he is running.
Second, Trump and his
Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever
means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now
primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election
results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun
preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in
the California recall contest.
Meanwhile, the
amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized
nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the
control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those
recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from
calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump
are being systematically removed or hounded
from office.
Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election
certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed
measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election
authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other
executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may “revoke the
secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s
certificate of election” by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures
seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have
committed “technical infractions,” including obstructing the view of poll
watchers.
The stage is thus
being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple
states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with
unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to
be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would
governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the
Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send
troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests?
Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would
find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during
the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded
— navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what
constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.
Today’s arguments over
the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the American political system
enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy.
Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take
this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the
case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents
are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian.
They have followed the standard model of appeasement, which always begins with underestimation. The political and
intellectual establishments in both parties have been underestimating Trump
since he emerged on the scene in 2015. They underestimated the extent of his
popularity and the strength of his hold on his followers; they underestimated
his ability to take control of the Republican Party; and then they
underestimated how far he was willing to go to retain power. The fact that he
failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American
system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way — if
Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if
Trump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his
administration, Congress and the states. As it was, Trump came close to
bringing off a coup earlier this year. All that prevented it was a handful of
state officials with notable courage and integrity, and the reluctance of two
attorneys general and a vice president to obey orders they deemed
inappropriate.
These were not the checks and balances the Framers had in
mind when they designed the Constitution, of course, but Trump has exposed the
inadequacy of those protections. The Founders did not foresee the Trump
phenomenon, in part because they did not foresee national parties. They
anticipated the threat of a demagogue, but not of a national cult of
personality. They assumed that the new republic’s vast expanse and the historic
divisions among the 13 fiercely independent states would pose insuperable
barriers to national movements based on party or personality. “Petty”
demagogues might sway their own states, where they were known and had
influence, but not the whole nation with its diverse populations and divergent
interests.
Such checks and
balances as the Framers put in place, therefore, depended on the separation of
the three branches of government, each of which, they believed, would zealously
guard its own power and prerogatives. The Framers did not establish safeguards
against the possibility that national-party solidarity would transcend state
boundaries because they did not imagine such a thing was possible. Nor did they
foresee that members of Congress, and perhaps members of the judicial branch,
too, would refuse to check the power of a president from their own party.
(Illustration by Anthony
Gerace for The Washington Post; photos by Getty Images)
In recent decades,
however, party loyalty has superseded branch loyalty, and never more so than in
the Trump era. As the two Trump impeachments showed, if members of Congress are
willing to defend or ignore the president’s actions simply because he is their
party leader, then conviction and removal become all but impossible. In such
circumstances, the Framers left no other check against usurpation by the
executive — except (small-r) republican virtue.
Critics and supporters
alike have consistently failed to recognize what a unique figure Trump is in
American history. Because his followers share fundamentally conservative views,
many see Trump as merely the continuation, and perhaps the logical culmination,
of the Reagan Revolution. This is a mistake: Although most Trump supporters are
or have become Republicans, they hold a set of beliefs that were not
necessarily shared by all Republicans. MORE https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/23/robert-kagan-constitutional-crisis/
So, if the results
come in showing another Democratic victory, Trump’s supporters will know what
to do. Just as “generations of patriots” gave “their sweat, their blood and
even their very lives” to build America, Trump tells them, so today “we have no choice. We have to
fight” to restore “our American birthright.”
How the Capitol attack
unfolded, from inside Trump's rally to the riot | Opinion
Early on Jan. 6, The
Post's Kate Woodsome saw signs of violence hours before thousands of President
Trump's loyalists besieged the Capitol. (Joy Yi, Kate Woodsome/The Washington
Post)
Where does the
Republican Party stand in all this? The party gave birth to and nurtured this
movement; it bears full responsibility for establishing the conditions in which
Trump could capture the loyalty of 90 percent of Republican voters. Republican leaders
were more than happy to ride Trump’s coattails if it meant getting paid off
with hundreds of conservative court appointments, including three Supreme Court justices; tax
cuts; immigration restrictions; and deep reductions in regulations on business.
Yet Trump’s triumph also had elements of a hostile takeover. The movement’s
passion was for Trump, not the party. GOP primary voters chose Trump over the
various flavors of establishment Republicanism (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio), and
after Trump’s election they continued to regard establishment Republicans as
enemies. Longtime party heroes like Paul Ryan were cast into oblivion for
disparaging Trump. Even staunch supporters such as Jeff Sessions eventually
became villains when they would not do as Trump demanded. Those who survived
had a difficult balancing act: to use Trump’s appeal to pass the Republican
agenda while also controlling Trump’s excesses, which they worried could
ultimately threaten the party’s interests.
That plan seemed
plausible in 2017. Unlike other insurgent leaders, Trump had not spent time in
the political wilderness building a party and surrounding himself with
loyalists. He had to choose from an existing pool of Republican officials, who
varied in their willingness to do his bidding. The GOP establishment hoped that
the presence of “adults” would restrain him, protecting their traditional
agenda and, in their view, the country’s interests, from his worst instincts.
This was a
miscalculation. Trump’s grip on his supporters left no room for an alternative
power center in the party. One by one, the “adults” resigned or were run off.
The dissent and contrary opinions that exist in every party — the Northeast
moderate Republicans in Reagan’s day; the progressives in today’s Democratic
Party — disappeared from Trump’s Republican Party. The only real issue was
Trump himself, and on that there could be no dissent. Those who disapproved of
Trump could either keep silent or leave.
The takeover extended
beyond the level of political leadership. Modern political parties are an
ecosystem of interest groups, lobby organizations, job seekers, campaign donors
and intellectuals. All have a stake in the party’s viability; all ultimately
depend on being roughly aligned with wherever the party is at a given moment;
and so all had to make their peace with Trump, too. Conservative publications
that once opposed him as unfit for the presidency had to reverse course or lose
readership and funding. Pundits had to adjust to the demands of their pro-Trump
audiences — and were rewarded handsomely when they did. Donors who had opposed
Trump during the primaries fell into line, if only to preserve some influence
on the issues that mattered to them. Advocacy organizations that had previously
seen their role as holding the Republican Party to certain principles, and thus
often dissented from the party leadership, either became advocates for Trump or
lost clout.
It was no surprise
that elected officials feared taking on the Trump movement and that Republican
job seekers either kept silent about their views or made show-trial-like
apologies for past criticism. Ambition is a powerful antidote to moral qualms.
More revealing was the behavior of Republican elder statesmen, former
secretaries of state in their 80s or 90s who had no further ambitions for high
office and seemingly nothing to lose by speaking out. Despite their known
abhorrence of everything Trump stood for, these old lions refused to criticize
him. They were unwilling to come out against a Republican Party to which they
had devoted their professional lives, even when the party was led by someone
they detested. Whatever they thought about Trump, moreover, Republican elders
disliked Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democrats more. Again, this is
not so unusual. German conservatives accommodated Adolf Hitler in large part
because they opposed the socialists more than they opposed the Nazis, who,
after all, shared many of their basic prejudices. As for conservative
intellectuals, even those who had spent years arguing that Woodrow Wilson was a
tyrant because he created the Federal Reserve and supported child labor laws
seemed to have no concerns about whether Trump was a would-be despot. They not
only came to Trump’s defense but fashioned political doctrines to justify his
rule, filling in the wide gaps of his nonexistent ideology with an appeal to
“conservative nationalism” and conservative populism. Perhaps
American conservatism was never comfortable with the American experiment in
liberal democracy, but certainly since Trump took over their party, many
conservatives have revealed a hostility to core American beliefs.
(Illustration by Anthony
Gerace for The Washington Post; photos by Getty Images)
All this has left few
dissenting voices within the Republican ecosystem. The Republican Party today
is a zombie party. Its leaders go through the motions of governing in pursuit
of traditional Republican goals, wrestling over infrastructure spending and
foreign policy, even as real power in the party has leached away to Trump. From
the uneasy and sometimes contentious partnership during Trump’s four years in
office, the party’s main if not sole purpose today is as the willing enabler of
Trump’s efforts to game the electoral system to ensure his return to power.
MORE https://news.yahoo.com/watch-trump-rally-turned-capitol-230022508.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAMPLDarx3FDA-bdCjVut1mMTemMpONKVbWUq7pXrpWQ2Sp8QxDMwiab68pVyMUhPUE8kjnPdXnDMBtzknCmfqVx8sMM6e1vSItH-RiQdGexPTf-IuTNmqcrEu7Qwp2FoA7nEty0sxjTJbZw9V5GgGAQOjhHuPYBf3xGxSAK12XLh
Was January 6th a Dress Rehearsal
for Coup d’État in the U.S.? By Jeremy Kuzmarov. CovertAction Magazine (Jun 12, 2021).
New Senate report sheds light on failure of
intelligence community to “properly analyze, assess and disseminate
information” that would have led to an adequate law enforcement response to the
Capitol riots.
9The Army deployed the National Guard three hours after request by chief of
Capitol Police. Some officials even claimed rioters were “peaceful” despite
extremists’ calls to execute the Vice President and Speaker of the House.
This all begs the question as to whether the agencies which have done so much
to destroy democracy in countries worldwide can be trusted with democracy here
in the U.S. […]
The post Was January 6th a Dress Rehearsal
for Coup d’État in the U.S.? appeared first on CovertAction Magazine.
TRUMP’S ATTEMPTED PUTSCH:
FROM FDR TO BIDEN
1-7-21
Dear Friends,
The Germans have a word for yesterday: putsch. A sudden, surprising uprising or
rebellion against legal authority.
Hitler failed in his first attempt to capture the Weimar Republic, and
was imprisoned. Later he employed more
cunning, systematic, technical methods to “legally” capture it.
With these thoughts in mind this morning, I
started rereading The Plot to Seize the
White House, the story of the conspiracy to overthrow FDR. The hero of the book is Major General Smedley
Butler. The conspirators needed a
high-ranking, respected military officer to command the troops for the putsch. Two choices were obvious to them: Douglas MacArthur and
Butler. But MacArthur, having violently
expelled veterans from D.C. who were demanding the promised bonus, was not
popular with veterans. Butler was very
popular, but had a reputation for probity.
The planners chose Butler, who promptly reported the plot to Congress.
I hope someone will compare Hitler’s putsch with
Trump’s and their later actions asap.
Hitler went to prison for trying to overthrow the government, an act of treason. What will be the response to Trump is on all
our minds. Right now I expect we are
all preparing to continue the struggle for our democracy and the New Deal/Great
Society against the right turn that started with the rejection of Henry
Wallace, election of Truman, Nixon, and emphatically Reagan, and that has become
increasingly right wing.
Dick
Corporate Media Begin to
Acknowledge GOP Coup Attempt
JOSHUA CHO
NOVEMBER 25, 2020. https://fair.org/home/corporate-media-begin-to-acknowledge-gop-coup-attempt/
Even though
President Donald Trump had telegraphed his intent months in advance to steal
the 2020 election, by planning to get judges, state legislators and/or the
Electoral College to illegitimately declare him the winner—laying out a pretext
by lying about widespread voter fraud—corporate media were slow to accurately
convey the reality and significance of Trump’s election theft efforts. I’ve
noted twice before (FAIR.org, 9/15/20, 11/5/20) that corporate media betrayed their
journalistic responsibilities by refusing to report, outside the context of
opinion columns, that Trump has been attempting a coup, despite all the plain
evidence.
Gregory
Krieg. “Trump’s Attempt to Steal the
election. . .” CNN (11/22/20)
Yet in the
past few days, it seems corporate media have decided to report on Trump’s
attempts to subvert the election and overturn its results as a fact, not as a
matter of opinion. Here are some recent headlines:
Wall Street Journal (11/19/20): “Trump Broadens His Efforts to Overturn
Election Outcome”
New York Times (11/19/20): “Trump’s Attempts to Overturn the Election
Are Unparalleled in US History”
§ NPR (11/20/20): “The Growing Backlash
Against Trump’s Efforts to Subvert the Election”
§ Associated
Press (11/20/20): “Trump Tries to Leverage
Power of Office to Subvert Biden Win”
§ Politico (11/21/20): “Trump Calls on GOP
Legislatures to Overturn Election Results”
§ CNN (11/22/20): “Trump’s Attempt to Steal
the Election Unravels as Coronavirus Cases Surge”
To be clear,
although coverage has improved to more accurately describe what’s going on in
the US, the media failure to report the facts much earlier is inexcusable.
Considering that corporate media ran op-eds (e.g., The Week, 8/11/20; USA Today, 8/16/20), letters to the editor (e.g., Washington
Post, 8/21/20), stating the undeniable fact that Trump has been
trying to steal the election months in advance, in addition to reporting on Trump’s subversion efforts in real time, they cannot credibly feign ignorance.
However, while
corporate media appear to have stopped downplaying Trump’s election theft
efforts for now, they have also run cover for the Republican Party’s complicity
in enabling and actively assisting Trump’s efforts, as Trump cannot steal the
election on his own.
Ezra
Klein, “Trump Is Attempting Coup in
Plain Sight.” Nov. 7, 2020. Vox (11/7/20). Vox founder Ezra Klein (11/7/20) pointed out that Trump is trying to create
something akin
to an autocracy-in-exile, an alternative America in which he is the rightful
leader, and he — and the public he claims to represent — has been robbed of
power by corrupt elites. This coup attempt, he
writes,has
made clear that would-be autocrats have a path to power in the United States,
and if they can walk far enough down that path, an entire political party will
support them, and protect them.
A Morning
Consult/Politico (11/9/20) found that 70% of Republicans don’t believe
that the 2020 election was free and fair, which is a stark increase from the
35% of Republicans who believed so before the election. If enough Republicans
are convinced that their electoral defeats can only be explained by Democrats
cheating, this could potentially incite massive reactionary violence, led by
an opportunist political party determined to maintain minority rule at any cost (Washington
Post, 11/12/20). This is why it’s important for media to
forcefully report and denounce these coup attempts in real-time.
(2 books Recommended by George Paulson)
Hitler's
Empire, by Mark Mazower
The
ragged, random Reich.
·
Reviewed by
David Cesarani. Friday 30 May 2008
00:00
Hitler's Europe has been described as everything from the last
European land-based empire to a forerunner of the EU. This variety reflects the
protean nature and short duration of Nazi rule. The Greater German Reich didn't
last long enough to resolve the ambiguities that characterised Nazi hegemony.
The confusion is exacerbated by the profusion of planning documents. As
Hitler's interpreter once remarked: "The Nazis kept talking about a
Thousand Year Reich but they couldn't think ahead for more than five
minutes."
This is the paradox at the heart of Mark Mazower's weighty
study. He sets out to analyse the origins and nature of Nazi imperialism, but
constantly provides evidence that it was unplanned, improvised, irrational, and
shot through with contradictions. He repeatedly resorts to
"absurdity", "craziness" and "fantasy" to
describe what he is chronicling. While each page groans with information, the
structure seems to dissolve into the data. Which is, perhaps, an accurate
reflection of the subject. By the end, although we have a brilliant account of
how the Nazis governed, the notion of anything as coherent as an
"empire" seems preposterous.
Part of the problem is that the Nazis drew on several models.
Mazower begins with the era of Bismarck when Germans were already preoccupied
with "the East". How could they exploit and control Polish labour and
avoid being overwhelmed by hordes of Slavs? Then there were the colonies they
grabbed in Africa and the Far East. Under the Nazis, men who had experience of
border warfare against the Poles and former colonial administrators all jostled
for influence.
None of them could prevail over Hitler. The constant theme of
Mazower's study is the Fuhrer's driving and divisive will. For Hitler, race and
war dominated everything. Yet the two frequently cut across each other, while
the speed of events and his implacability made coherent planning virtually
impossible. "Lebensraum" was more a slogan than a policy. MORE https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/hitlers-empire-by-mark-mazower-836313.html
The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by Thomas Childers.
Review: Rule
by Fear By Richard J. Evans. FEBRUARY 1, 2018.
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-men-who-made-the-third-reich/
New one-volume book
offers an updated history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich.
.
. . With The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany,
Thomas Childers becomes the latest historian to attempt to dethrone Shirer and
present a one-volume survey of this complicated subject. A senior academic at
the University of Pennsylvania, Childers has many of the qualities needed for
the job. He stays on top of the latest research, without neglecting the older
work. He reads German, understands German history, and has been working in the
field for over three decades. Most important of all, he is a master of English
prose, writing with clarity, elegance, and wit; his account of Nazi Germany is
every bit as readable as Shirer’s and deserves a wide audience, including
high-school and college students. Childers has aimed squarely here at the
general reader, and he hits his target with unerring accuracy.
Inevitably, there are points of
intersection between Childers’s narrative and Shirer’s, and perhaps the most
pronounced is the absolute centrality of Hitler to their stories. The Third Reich begins with
Hitler’s birth on April 20, 1889, and follows him, to the exclusion of everyone
else, through his early life as a struggling would-be artist in Linz, Vienna,
and Munich; as an enthusiastic volunteer in the German Army during World War I;
and as a novice orator and politician in the immediate postwar months. Only from
about page 50 does the narrative broaden out, when we encounter the conditions
in postwar Bavaria that allowed Hitler to emerge onto the political scene.
Charged with investigating the myriad ultra-right-wing groups that proliferated
in the aftermath of an abortive attempt to stage a communist revolution in
Munich in early 1919, Hitler found his way into the tiny German Workers’ Party,
which, as Childers remarks, “had no program, no plans, no advertising, no
mimeograph machine, not even a rubber stamp (a vital necessity for any German
organization).”
Attracting
growing numbers of adherents with his spellbinding oratory, Hitler took over
the party, reorganized it, and led it into a disastrous attempt to seize power
in Munich on November 9, 1923, in the notorious beer-hall putsch, which he
launched in imitation of Mussolini’s successful March on Rome the previous
year.
Learning
the lesson of his failure—which also earned him a spell in prison—Hitler
focused on winning votes for his party, part of a larger strategy of working
within the political system in order to undermine it. Childers is absolutely
clear that this tactic was combined at all times with intense and pervasive
violence on the streets, particularly from the brown-shirted storm troopers,
the strong-arm wing of the movement. Childers’s view of the ill-fated liberal
democracy of the Weimar Republic is correspondingly gloomy, stressing the
continuity of political murders (376 from 1918 to 1922 alone), the economic
disasters of hyperinflation and depression, and the radical dynamism and
increasingly effective organization of the Nazis, who by the early 1930s were
reaching saturation levels in their electoral campaigns, as well as engaging in
extreme and brutal assaults on their opponents.
Childers
provides illuminating character sketches of the leading players both in the
party and in German politics overall, drawing a clear contrast between the
youthful activism of men like Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Hitler himself
and the tired, colorless figures who led the other political parties. What
comes through far more clearly in his narrative than in many other accounts of
the Nazi movement is the key role played by Hermann Göring, a World War I
flying ace and man of action, who more than once pushed a hesitant Hitler to
resolve the various crises into which he was plunged over the years.
Childers’s book offers its readers a
wealth of detail that captures how the most serious of these crises threatened
to overwhelm the Nazi organization toward the end of 1932, as the economy began
to recover and the party lost substantial numbers of votes in the November
election. But it was also because the party seemed to be weakening that the
conservative clique around Reich President Paul von Hindenburg and former chancellor
Franz von Papen felt they might be able to co-opt the Nazis, still the largest
party in the German Legislature, into their plans to bring an end to Weimar
democracy by putting Hitler into the Reich Chancellery as head of a new
government on January 30, 1933, and then keeping him in check by surrounding
him with their own nominees.
Childers
convincingly depicts the rapid series of moves through which Hitler
outmaneuvered them, using a ruthless combination of legislative decrees and
street violence to create a one-party state by the summer of 1933. Over 100,000
socialists and communists were thrown into improvised concentration camps and
subjected to horrifying brutality before being released as a warning to anyone
else who dared to oppose the Hitler government. Childers is indeed particularly
good on the violent nature of the Nazi seizure of power between January and
July 1933. He comprehensively demolishes the once-fashionable view that Hitler
achieved supreme power by the general consent of the German people and with
only a minimal use of force, exercised mainly against despised minorities and
marginal groups. Hitler’s rise during this period was based on terror in its
rawest, most radical form. MORE https://www.thenation.com/article/the-men-who-made-the-third-reich
/
Defending the rule of law in the Trump era
American Nero - BenBella Books
www.benbellabooks.com ›
shop › american-nero
Senate candidate
Richard Painter examines Trump's policies through an
historical lens in American Nero,
Book review of American Nero: The History of the Destruction ...
www.washingtonpost.com ›
outlook › 2020/03/19 Mar 20, 2020 — “American Nero,” by Richard W. Painter and
Peter Golenbock, showcases how Trump is eroding the rule of law.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Dahlia Lithwick is senior legal correspondent at Slate and host
of its Amicus podcast.
March 20, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. CDT
There are, to vastly
overgeneralize, two basic types of books written by critics of the Trump
presidency: One class of books tells us things we never knew, such as how
tyrannies arise or how Deutsche Bank operates outside meaningful scrutiny or
control. The other tells us what we already know and seem to have forgotten. “American Nero,” by Richard W. Painter and Peter Golenbock,
is very much in that latter category and serves to remind us, in icy, granular
detail, of what has happened to constitutional democracy in three short years,
and all that we have absorbed, integrated and somehow moved beyond. In some
sense, then, it stands less as a unified argument than as a scrapbook of things
that no longer horrify us.
The fact that it went
to press just before the Senate impeachment trial, and thus cannot account for
the near-collapse of an independent Justice Department, the capitulation of
Senate Republicans who believed that President Trump had inappropriately sought
Ukrainian election interference but who felt somehow helpless to hold him to
account, and recent lawsuits against opinion journalists in major newspapers,
actually only highlights the fact that even when one believes the situation
cannot get worse, it always gets worse, and often in the span of mere weeks.
Painter, who served as
White House chief ethics counsel under George W. Bush, and Golenbock, the
author of several New York Times bestsellers, seek to chronicle the erosion of
the rule of law in the Trump era, and in some ways, the most chilling parts of
the book are not the descriptions of Trump’s lawlessness, whether in the form
of attacking the press, benefiting financially from his presidency, obstructing
the Mueller probe or fawning over despots. Much of this will be familiar to
anyone who has tried to keep up with the events of recent years. But set
against the context of historical precedent, the case becomes crisper. In their
descriptions of the Salem witch trials, the internment of Japanese Americans
after Pearl Harbor, the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the
Palmer Raids and the pointless waste of the McCarthy era, the authors remind us
that each of those actions was taken under color of law, effectuated by
presidents, congressmen and lawyers.
Indeed they are quick
to remind us, in a terrifying chapter on the rise of the
Third Reich, that judges, prosecutors and democratically elected officials
formed the very backbone of Nazi Germany. And that the transformation of
Germany from democratic republic to bloody dictatorship took place in less than
three months. In urging Americans to stand up for the rule of law — and its
bulwarks of religious tolerance, guarantees of due process, truth, a free press
and freedom from corruption — Painter and Golenbock archly make the more
complicated case that law itself is often deployed to break the rule of law. As
was the case in Nazi Germany, the breakdown can be progressive and can come in
the guise of statutes, codes and court cases; these trappings do not make
descent into autocracy lawful, they merely make it invisible.
Two weeks before the
release of “American Nero,” Trump retweeted a meme of himself playing a fiddle, with the
words “My next piece is called nothing can stop what’s coming.” With a bizarre
sense of timing, Trump had evoked the Roman emperor of the book’s title, who
famously fiddled as Rome burned around him. Nero, who died in 68 A.D., was a
famously corrupt, nativist ruler who flaunted his great wealth, assassinated
perceived enemies and surrounded himself with sycophants.
While it’s not always
clear why Painter and Golenbock discuss certain eras, cases or ideas and
neglect others, what emerges in the
aggregate is a devastating picture of how much has been broken in how little
time. (Painter takes pains
to critique the Bush administration for, among other things, the Iraq War and
the torture program.) You may find yourself realizing that the choice of the
hopelessly ineffectual Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general to succeed
Jeff Sessions has been deleted from your personal memory bank — or that,
compared with Sessions, who seemed to have certain ethical lines he could not
traverse, William Barr appears to have no such lines, yet nobody seems to
recall what the old lines were or how they got there. In fact the book ends
with an all-out cri du coeur about the need for accountability for Trump in
some legal forum: “The rule of law requires it. But do Americans care? We
should, but do we? Too many Americans are numb to Trump’s behavior and rhetoric.
They don’t seem to be aware of how Trump’s actions and words threaten the rule
of law and our democracy.”
“American Nero” is
thus a kind of master class in law for the numb and the frozen. Painter and
Golenbock are less interested in defining what “rule of law” means than in
warning us that, time after time, in the darkest moments of history, tyranny has flourished in constitutional
democracies when it comes dressed as lawful actions taken by sober leaders. The
argument is that we need to understand the connection between the corruption
contemplated in the Constitution’s emoluments clauses and Trump’s properties in
Russia and Turkey. We need to lash the framers’ arguments about the need for a
free press to the president’s unrelenting Twitter attacks on the media,
specific reporters and provable truth. We all need, in short, to become experts
in law in order to recognize lawlessness, whether it comes from the
“nihilists in charge of interpreting laws,” such as those who authorized the
torture program, or Joe McCarthy’s efforts to purge the State Department and
the military of those he deemed disloyal.
Paradoxically, in this
view, the law is gossamer-thin and subject to abuse, but also enduring and
timeless and resilient. It is not up to Trump, his minions or his legal
defenders to decide what is lawful — but it’s up to those of us who may feel
like constitutional spectators, or hobbyists, or amateurs, to decide what the
rule of law means and what it means to us. That’s a herculean task, as the
authors are well aware, but the alternative is nothing less than the end of an
empire.
American Nero: The
History of the Destruction of the Rule of Law, and Why Trump Is the Worst
Offender By Richard Painter and Peter Golenbock.
BenBella, 2020. 456 pp. $26.95
A book crucial to
the comparison of Trump and Hitler is Benjamin Hett’s The Death of Democracy (the Weimar Republic). The ongoing coup
attempt and the growing violence under the increasing cover of legality described
by these authors suggest parallels with Hitler’s overthrow of the Weimar
Republic and call to the people to awaken and resist. Dick Bennett
11-22-21.
THE ABOVE WAS SENT TO BLOG, WS, MS?? 1-2-22
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