January 12, 2021

Observation from Anne Applebaum's book "Twilight of Democracy"

Many of these people are disgruntled, resentful people who think they've gotten a raw deal in life and are attracted to a demagogue like Trump who tells them they are right to be angry and their failures in life are someone else's fault.

So they think they've suffered terribly in life. Terribly! Like having their cell phones seized while they sit in jail.

January 12, 2021

"Going to the antifa protest" it appears is their euphemism for attending

forthcoming MAGA insurrection rallies. It's a very lame attempt (laughable, really) to cover their tracks, because they are so clever.

It's sort of like how The Third Reich routinely used the phrase "deportation to the east" in verbal and written communications as a euphemism for shipping Jews to Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec for extermination.

January 12, 2021

Of course this is just a guess...

Can Trump really retain his role as Kingmaker? A month ago I would have said 'yes' but strangely, over the past week, I'm not quite so confident. I also think the future for the other Trumps is dim at best. I'm not nearly so fretful as I was that there are political futures for Don Jr., Ivanka and Lara.

I can imagine the Trump movement actually separating from Trump and continuing to foment violence, although in random bursts and not anything quite as organized as we'll see between now and the end of January. They actually existed before Trump, although in fractured, fragmented form. I do think they've got a taste now for inflicting terror and trying to experiment with their "power" such as it is. We can continue to deplatform, shame and fight them. Law enforcement has a huge role here because if determined to do so, I believe LE could badly degrade the criminal element of the Trumpsters, which is the most dangerous element (Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Boogaloo Bois, The Base, Atomwaffen, Q, radical Christian Nationalists, etc.).

The Republican Party itself can go in one of several ways:

They can be on their good behavior for a short period of time before recommencing their project of making America ungovernable. Now, thankfully, we won the Senate. This is a huge freakin deal that makes me more optimistic about the next two years.

There could be, as people like Steve Schmidt predict, a war within the Republican party as they try to save it from self-destruction. IMHO this is the preferred outcome. It would force part of the Republican party to repudiate and fight the violence from the fascist right. This is in the best interest of large segments of the Republican Party because by expelling fanatics they clear the way for more reasonable Republicans to run for POTUS in 2024.

But there is still a perception among many Republicans that the Trump base is something precious and worth pandering to. So much depends on whether or not the MAGAts remain as a unit or whether they re-fragment and go their separate ways. I think they will try to stay united, but it will be hard if the tech giants help us remove their gathering spots.

Something could happen that nobody has quite predicted, too.

It's just my nature to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

January 12, 2021

Attempting to channel Timothy Snyder...

Putin hates to see democracy succeed as intended. He likes for Western democracies to fail and be rife with disasters, chaos, corruption and scenes like we had on Wednesday. Why? So can hold up the United States as an example to unhappy Russian citizens and proclaim, "See, what we have here is better than what the US has... Democracy doesn't work." And here we have an example of the President being punished for doing wrong. That is the exact example Putin doesn't want Russian citizens to see, because it might give them ideas. It might send them out into the streets to say, "We want a mechanism like the US has to hold Putin responsible for creating a hell on earth."

Remember, Putin just signed into law a decree that he is immune from any and all prosecution for any and all crimes for the rest of his life.

Impeachment is the opposite of that (at least symbolically).

January 12, 2021

Perfectly in keeping with the mind of a pathological narcissist. Domestic abuse murders

are so often predicated by this kind of thinking: If I can't have her, nobody can have her.

And it makes people like this so dangerous, to the extreme of treating an entire nation this way, as when Hitler signed the so called Nero Decree ordering subordinates to destroy Germany as the allies closed in, and commenting that Germans didn't deserve to survive the war because they had let Hitler down (by this time Hitler had decided he would commit suicide if the Red Army advanced on Berlin, so it represented a death wish for all of Germany).

January 12, 2021

Hell yes!!

"Trial by combat". I don't care too much about Rudy's explanation. It seemed to mean: "We lost every case we brought in the courts of law, so let's use our fists and weapons to get what we want."

Honest to God, that entire day, starting from the speeches to the attack on the Capitol, reminds me of footage I've seen of the "protests" in the lead up to the Yugoslav wars of the 90s, with Slobodan Milošević working Serbians into a blind fury over totally fabricated stories of Kosovo Albanians committing atrocities against Serbs. It really has that same flavor.

January 12, 2021

This entire thing needs to be shut down and fast.

I was just reading about the "three plans" being considered by his goons and trying to absorb this. Everybody should check out those stories.

This has to stop. These plots have to be prevented, and the seditionists prosecuted to the maximum allowed by the law and driven back into the fringes.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/democrats-briefed-plot-overthrow-government_n_5ffd29a4c5b691806c4bf199

If we don't beat this back totally and immediately, we are not using good sense and defending ourselves and our country against a lethal domestic enemy.

Also, purge all the politicians who participated in this. We must find a way to do it. If we don't/can't do it now, we will never do it.

January 11, 2021

Thanks. I appreciate your post, and also your tweeting about this.

One thing I didn't mention in my post, but should have, is that I still have questions about how the F.B.I. finally "found" and arrested Ghislaine Maxwell a week or so after a tabloid wrote an article revealing where she was hiding out.

The F.B.I. claims it found her by surveilling her phone activity, but if that's true, they let her run around for over a year.

It's another instance of the F.B.I. abruptly acting after another entity made something public.

I actually like Chris Wray and have a lot of faith in the F.B.I., but some recent developments have given me pause.

Thanks again for your input.

January 11, 2021

I have great faith in the FBI but I have this feeling they are behind the curve on

this. I mean, I hope they didn't learn about this from the Friday Twitter press release, which seemed to be the first that most news organizations learned about this.

Those of us who read a lot of journalism and watch the #OSINT on Twitter seem to know when these things are coming. I usually hate those posts that say, "Who is surprised by this?" but honestly, this is a bit ridiculous since the domestic terrorists have been explicit and crystal clear in their intentions with respect to threats, locations and dates.

I bet the Southern Poverty Law Center could have told them all of this.

Sorry, this is just the way I strongly feel right now. No disrespect to the FBI (I'm an avid fan, especially of the BSU)

January 11, 2021

And not just here.

He scored successes, with some help, in Hungary, the UK (Brexit/UKIP) and has supported the dismantling of democracies in Poland, Italy (attempted), Spain (attempt underway) and, Anne Applebaum claims, in Brazil. All the NATO hate is a Russian export, too, as well as the distrust of the EU. He also assists the Christian Nationalists with their agenda to reject Western democracy and replace it with a "Christian State."

The internet is much cheaper than nuclear weapons.

Sources: The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder
Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum
Unholy by Sarah Posner