Were I running the House Select Committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021, and I wanted testimony from the likes of Steve Bannon or Stewart Rhodes, I would insist it be taken on videotape, preferably recorded in the old jail cells in the basement of the Capitol.

The possibility that Bannon—and Oath Keeper Rhodes—would testify lit up the news over the weekend. But the idea that either one would be allowed a public platform is sheer lunacy. Either they would demolish the great sense of dignity that has lent the committee's proceedings so much gravitas and credibility thus far, or they would concoct some wild, ruthless scheme that would blunt the momentum built up assiduously by the committee throughout the past several months. The circus most definitely need not come to town at this point.

And, significantly, this sudden change of heart from Bannon comes just as his trial for criminal contempt of Congress is about to begin. (Jury selection for that exercise is scheduled for next week.) This happy coincidence did not escape the notice of the Department of Justice, which filed a motion to exclude Bannon’s sudden change of heart from evidence in that trial on the grounds that it’s all self-serving moonshine.

In preparation for his July 18 contempt of Congress trial, Steve Bannon's lawyers are working overtime to flood the zone with shit. They're determined to make this case about everything but their client's refusal to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6 Select Committee. The strategy appears to involve lobbing a flaming sack of dog crap at US District Judge Carl J. Nichols's docket every 24 hours.

But there's a hearing this morning where some of this will get sorted out, so let's divide this doo-doo into three piles to see if we can wade through without getting too much on our shoes.

Originally the model included over 30 different factors, like poverty, income inequality, how diverse religiously or ethnically a country was. But only two factors came out again and again as highly predictive. And it wasn’t what people were expecting, even on the task force. We were surprised. The first was this variable called anocracy. There’s this nonprofit based in Virginia called the Center for Systemic Peace. And every year it measures all sorts of things related to the quality of the governments around the world. How autocratic or how democratic a country is. And it has this scale that goes from negative 10 to positive 10. Negative 10 is the most authoritarian, so think about North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain. Positive 10 are the most democratic. This, of course, is where you want to be. This would be Denmark, Switzerland, Canada. The U.S. was a positive 10 for many, many years. It’s no longer a positive 10. And then it has this middle zone between positive 5 and negative 5, which was you had features of both. If you’re a positive 5, you have more democratic features, but definitely have a few authoritarian elements. And, of course, if you’re negative 5, you have more authoritarian features and a few democratic elements. The U.S. was briefly downgraded to a 5 and is now an 8.

And what scholars found was that this anocracy variable was really predictive of a risk for civil war. That full democracies almost never have civil wars. Full autocracies rarely have civil wars. All of the instability and violence is happening in this middle zone. And there’s all sorts of theories why this middle zone is unstable, but one of the big ones is that these governments tend to be weaker. They’re transitioning to either actually becoming more democratic, and so some of the authoritarian features are loosening up. The military is giving up control. And so it’s easier to organize a challenge. Or, these are democracies that are backsliding, and there’s a sense that these governments are not that legitimate, people are unhappy with these governments. There’s infighting. There’s jockeying for power. And so they’re weak in their own ways. Anyway, that turned out to be highly predictive.

And then the second factor was whether populations in these partial democracies began to organize politically, not around ideology — so, not based on whether you’re a communist or not a communist, or you’re a liberal or a conservative — but where the parties themselves were based almost exclusively around identity: ethnic, religious or racial identity. The quintessential example of this is what happened in the former Yugoslavia.

HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. — A day after a gunman opened fire on a Fourth of July parade in this city, local officials painted a picture Tuesday of a lone shooter who planned the attack for weeks, dressed in “women’s clothing” to conceal his identity and blended in with the terrified crowd to escape.

Police are holding Robert E. Crimo III, 21, a local rapper, who they called “a person of interest” in the shootings in which six people were killed and more than 30 injured Monday. The killings terrorized the usually serene Chicago suburb of 30,000 on a day when crowds nationwide gathered to celebrate the nation’s history.

Officers arrested Crimo “without incident” after a chase, Highland Park’s police chief told reporters Monday evening as nearby towns canceled festivities, fearing more violence. Police said Tuesday that they think Crimo legally purchased his weapon, described as “similar to an AR-15,” and randomly fired more than 70 shots at the crowd. A second rifle was found in his car, police said.

This session, the newly-ripened conservative supermajority of the Supreme Court of the United States decided it was time to lift up their robes and piss on the 21st century and reality. The half-dozen justices, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, looked out at a nation, no, a world that demands progress, that demands care, that demands a government that can act to help people, and said, "Nah. Fuck that." And their reasoning essentially came down to, in every case, "Because we can."

We have a gun crisis in this country. The Supreme Court said that the only thing that mattered was that more people have easier access to guns. We have a policing crisis in this country. The Supreme Court said that it's more important to protect cops from being sued or charged with crimes and that you don't need to worry about being told your Miranda rights anymore. We have an ongoing pandemic that has killed over a million people in this country. The Supreme Court said that public safety takes a back seat to whatever stupid bullshit makes people decide not to get a vaccine. We have an electoral crisis in this country. The Supreme Court said that gerrymandering away fair representation is a-okay.

And then the Court decided, in two cases, that the whole separation of church and state wasn't real because Christians need to have group prayers at school and schools that discriminate against LGBT people need to get our tax dollars. The former one there is where Gorsuch, lying about the facts of the case, told students who feel pressured into praying to suck it up, which would probably get him a cane up his ass from Benjamin Franklin, which would be some actual originalism.

And then the Court decided that a fetus has more rights than the woman it's attached to, and so fuck 50 years of Roe v. Wade. It's time to turn that motherfucking clock back to the 1950s. Alito insisted that Roe was the cause of chaos because anti-choicers were sad about it, and he used as an excuse, among others, that states had anti-abortion laws 150 years ago, which is so fucking dumb that it boggles the goddamn mind. It didn't matter that the Court, in throwing it back to the states, created two different legal statuses for women and girls in the country. It didn't matter that the Court created two different countries, essentially, if not 50 different ones. "We can do this, so we will," they said, "because fuck you, liberals." Which, to be fair, makes more sense than anything in the goddamn decision.

And then the Court decided that, despite a climate emergency that will wreck the earth, the Environmental Protection Agency really can't protect the environment, even though the statue that established it said that it explicitly could. In the case over setting standards for systems to reduce emissions at power plants and elsewhere, Roberts wrote, "Yeah, I don't like that so here's a thing I made up to overturn it and eat shit because these other five crazy pricks will go along with me. Just be grateful we didn't completely outlaw the EPA." So, yeah, enjoy that "air" and "water" while you can.