Trump's crowds aided and abetted the insurrection.

The people who attended the "Stop the Steal" rally were cheerleaders and validators of the insurrection that followed. 

     “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people. And they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like.”              

              Mitch McConnell

Parental guidance: 

This post will display below two photographs of the thousands that are available of crowds at lynchings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The photos are unpleasant to see.

The photo records of lynchings are available because photography was available and lynchings were community events people wanted recorded. The people in the crowds posed for the camera. Here we are, at a lynching!

People at the "Stop the Steal" rally and subsequent invasion of the Capitol did the same thing. They took selfies and recorded themselves and others, and posted them. A local professional man who attended the rally communicated to me how thrilled he was to have been there to support the president. 

In the weeks ahead Americans will be parsing out degrees of guilt. Was Trump guilty of insurrection by inciting a crowd? He certainly intentionally gathered it, in tweets and speeches urging Proud Boys and other Americans to show up, to be strong, to be courageous, and to stop the horrendous thing that was happening right then at the Capitol.  

Was Giuliani guilty of incitement? He told the crowd that something terrible was happening and they could stop it and it would be trial by combat.

What about Steve Bannon in his January 5 podcast? Was he inciting or just matter-of-factly sharing the common knowledge that the next day's event would be about storming the Capitol:

Just understand this: All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. . . . So many people said, ‘Man, if I was in revolution, I would be in Washington.’ Well, this is your time in history. . . . It’s all converging, and now we’re on the point of attack tomorrow. And all I can say is: Strap in. You have made this happen, and tomorrow it’s game day.

January 6 was game day. The crowds came and many brought weapons. 

Some of them succeeded in doing what Trump urged. They stormed the Capitol. Some people recorded themselves going through desks, breaking things, carrying weapons. They are all easy to accuse of wrongdoing. They were actively and by force carrying out Trump's stated effort, disrupting, as McConnell put it, "a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government." It was criminal, possibly sedition or treason. They took arms against the country.

What about the crowds at the rally? Weren't they simply and innocently exercising their First Amendment right peaceably to assemble and their First Amendment free speech right to cheer Trump, including when he urged the crowd to intimidate Congress into overturning the election? And don't their large numbers demonstrate that they are expressing a sentiment too widespread to be criminal? 

Some readers will consider it a stretch to think crowd members at the January 6 rally, ones who did not themselves enter the Capitol, were aiding or abetting the insurrection or that they share any guilt whatever.

What about people in these crowds below?

Or these people?

Very few of the people who came to watch the lynching and then stuck around for photos would themselves have handled the rope or bound the victims' hands and feet. They did not, personally, kill someone. They there to watch an extra-legal act, and be part of a crowd of affirmation and validation. They knew what the gathering was about--a lynching. This was not a birthday party that got out of hand by a few ruffians, who unknown to them decided to lynch someone. It was "game day." 

The crowd's presence demonstrated something to the people who did carry out the act, and to the wider community of officeholders, friends, and potential future victims: The lynchings were OK by them. The community approved. Atta-boy.

Had those large crowds assembled in opposition, shouting "Shame! Stop!" the lynchings would not have taken place. The crowds validated illegality.

We look at those photos and we know we are looking at something that should not have happened. It is shameful. Still, we realize the people in the crowds are not ashamed of themselves at the moment. They are posing and they brought their children to the event. Like them, people on January 6 posed for photos and a few brought children. It was OK by them that the president called to use fear and violence to stop Congress from doing its work.

The one person I have spoken with directly regarding his participation in the rally has an explanation for his presence that shows a sense of guilt. He does not admit to cheering Trump, only attending, and he says that the people who did illegal things were in fact Democrats. That's right. That is what he says. Ignore those Trump flags and MAGA hats and what so many people said on video. It was all a false flag to make Trump supporters look bad. 

This is ridiculous on its face, but it is progress. He is in denial. Hypocrisy and dishonesty are understood to be the tribute vice pays to virtue. 

Dishonesty is one notch better for America's future than if Trump supporters were proudly to say they support the violent overthrow of the government. At least they know what Americans who pledge allegiance to the flag should say and think. 

If crowd members in the lynching photos had come to regret they were there, and failed in later years to mention it to their grandchildren, that would have been progress. And if the people in the lynching crowds, however improbably,  later blamed the lynchings on Black activists who were trying to make the White community look bad by killing one of their own to blame on Whites, that, too, would be progress. The hypocrisy and deflection would show they don't want to own what they did. It shows shame.

Perhaps in time Trump supporters will re-think the wisdom choosing Trump over loyalty to the republic, and maybe they will decide that overthrowing elections sets a dangerous precedent.  Hypocrisy and deflection are a start.

January 6, prior to the march on the Capitol

Right Shift. The Republican Party in Oregon and Delaware.

The Oregon Republican Party made the national news. They looked like kooks.

The Oregon GOP said the Trump rally and subsequent Capitol insurrection was actually the Democrats' doing.  Really. 

Mark Hatfield

The Republican Party of Oregon passed a resolution. It shocked the national media because Oregon Republicans had a reputation for sanity and moral courage: Mark Hatfield; Bob Packwood; Tom McCall. They stood for a kind of practical, business-oriented common-sense Republican. They didn't seem to be haters or especially partisan. They reflected Main Street and the Chamber of Commerce. 

They weren't pitchfork ideologues. 

The resolution was voted on by a 22-person Executive Committee. The Party Chair, Bill Currier, represents the "establishment" business-oriented wing of the GOP. He has been fighting intra-party contests for years against overtly Trump-oriented populist rivals. The resolution shows how dramatically party consensus shifted to the populist, smash-mouth, fire-breathing right. Remember, Currier is criticized for being too moderate.

What does the resolution say?

1.  Republican traitors. It called GOP Representatives who voted to impeach Trump traitors, and likened them to Benedict Arnold. They said their criticism of Trump's behavior on January 6 was a "surrender to leftist forces seeking to establish a dictatorship void of all cherished freedoms and liberties."

2. False flag. They wrote: "Whereas there is growing evidence that the violence at the Capitol was a “false flag” operation designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters, and all conservative Republicans; this provided the sham motivation to impeach President Trump in order to advance the Democrat goal of seizing total power, in a frightening parallel to the February 1933 burning of the German Reichstag."

3. False flag will unleash tyranny. They wrote to expect detention without trial, secret witnesses, end of due process, the re-establishment of the Sedition Act of 1798, and worse.

The Oregon Republican Party is hurting the Republican brand.

Republican members of the Oregon House understood this was a bridge too far. The Party position statement labels officeholders who run for re-election a kooks, as fringe conspiracy-nuts, and people who need to face the voters rushed to disassociate themselves from the statement. All eighteen state House Republicans signed a statement repudiating the statement. They said there is no evidence the Capitol insurrection was a false flag. The Party position was un-tenable. Too many passionate Trump supporters were there, proudly, waving Trump flags then coming home to fellow Republicans saying on camera they they were there for Trump and because of him. 

Republican politicians are in a squeeze between their primary election voters and the general electorate. The Republican Party in Oregon represents voters who show up for primary elections, and they are in a bubble of belief and affirmation in the suite of Trump assertions regarding election fraud, Biden as socialist, the need to overturn the election by force, and some or all of the Q-anon conspiracies. The wider electorate thinks those ideas are nuts.

Up close in Delaware. I don't follow Delaware politics but college classmate Jonathan Walters does. He shares a matter-of-fact report on the state of politics in his Philadelphia-area home, at the confluence of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware. He is an attorney with a practice representing labor unions and who by virtue of his practice, has to be attuned to what is happening in the political world.

Guest Post by Jonathan Walters

Jonathan Walters

Delaware (a state close to where I live and where I often find myself practicing law in representing labor unions), in addition to being the adoptive home of our 46 th President, is one of the smallest states in theUnion, but with a disproportionate influence on the national economy, given that it is the legal state of incorporation for many of the largest corporations in the U. S. For decades, it elected both Democrats and Republicans to Federal and state positions. William Roth held a U. S. Senate seat from 1971 through 2001, having been the one Delaware congressman for four years previously and Mike Castle was Governor of Delaware from 1985 through 1992 and then became the Delaware Congressman from 1995 through 2011. By and large, the Republicans were center-right.

Since 2008, the Democrats have controlled all branches of Delaware state government as the Republicans have moved further and further to the right. At this point, there are no state wide offices held by Republicans (for 30 years, one Republican was state auditor and for a two year period between 2016 and 2018, there was a Republican state treasurer), and the Democrats control both houses of the legislature, as they have since 2008.

Perhaps 2010 was the year that explains what has happened in Delaware and why the Republicans have no presence ---in 2010, Mike Castle decided to run for the U. S. Senate, the seat being held, after Joe Biden was elected Vice President, by Ted Kauffman who decided not run to fill the rest of Biden’s term. He was considered the heavy favorite over the likely Democratic candidate Chris Coon, who was New Castle County Executive. However, in 2010, the Tea Party movement developed a major presence in the U.S. within the GOP and Christine O’Donnell, a right wing Republican most noted for having dabbled in witchcraft (I am not making this up) and creatively embellishing her educational record, beat Castle in the Republican primary. She was then swamped by Coons in the 2010 general election.

Since 2010, the GOP in Delaware has moved far to the right. The important point to be made is that it has been marginalized in terms of its ability to play a role in political debate with the state. While it still has a presence in the less populated Kent and Sussex Counties, it is very weak in New Castle County (where Wilmington is located) where over 60% of Delawareans reside. The effect of this – as one of my union clients who has a leadership position with the State AFL-CIO and the Building Trades explained to me, there are a number of legislative moves on, including an increase in the minimum wage to $15 per hour. Such goals would have been far harder to achieve before 2008.

A similar development has occurred in three of the suburban Philadelphia counties – Delaware (where I lived for many years), Chester (considered horse country) and Montgomery (the financial core of the Pennsylvania Republican Party) - which were, when I first moved to the Philadelphia in 1976, rock-ribbed Republican. County governments were completely controlled by the GOP and the voting Federal offices – President, Senate, and House – followed that pattern. Over the past ten to 15 years, these counties have completely shifted and more moderate Republicans – such as Ryan Costello (and Charles Dent in the Lehigh Valley just north of  Philadelphia – concluded they could not run and win.

My final point is that the Republicans that used to get elected in both Delaware and the suburbs of Philadelphia, were not crazy – they could make temporary alliances on issues with different groups, including labor, which still has a presence in the area, when the need arose. But that is simply not the case anymore as the GOP has moved further to the right. In fact, this is reflected in some very ad hoc observations I made in October while driving around Delaware County, where I used to live and which was at one time controlled by a GOP political machine. There were numerous areas where I would see yard signs (Pennsylvania seems very big on this method of communication) for various Republican local candidates but not for Trump. On the other hand, there were Biden signs galore. 

Where that leaves the Republican parties in Delaware and the Philly suburbs is anyone’s guess but as an article in today’s NewYork Times indicates, the state GOP seems to have drunk the Kool-Aid.

Election Fraud Arrest--of a Trump fan

The U.S. Justice Department announced an election-related arrest and prosecution.

It was a Trump operative.

Democrats need to acknowledge election misbehavior can and does happen. 

Republicans need to realize the fraud might be theirs.

The fraudulent activity was not one of forged ballots or votes cast by people who had died, moved away, or any of the allegations posited by Trump and his supporters. This fraud arrest was for a "wholesale" scheme, intended to affect thousands of votes, accomplished by tricking members of a voting group presumed likely to vote for the opposing candidate into "voting" by a mechanism that caused their vote not to count. The Justice Department investigation started two years ago but was slowed and complicated by the accused man's use of aliases and the low priority the Trump Justice Department put on election fraud investigations of the 2016 campaign. This week, though, the Justice Department announced the arrest of Douglass Mackey, who used the alias 'Rickey Vaughn' in a scheme to trick voters planning to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Douglass Mackey, a Trump supporter, is active in White supremacy groups. He says he is a Proud Boy, the rough people who Trump called to come to his aid on January 6, the day to "be wild."  Mackey's plan was clever and effective. Using one of his many Twitter accounts--@Ricky_Vaughn99--which had 58,000 followers, he used graphics of Afro-American supporters of Hillary and tweeted the message that her supporters had an easy and convenient method of voting. "Avoid the line. Vote from home," he tweeted. It then directed people to cast their votes by texting a number.

An analysis of Twitter accounts in October 2016 showed the Ricky Vaughn99 account to be the 107th most influential Twitter account in its effect on the election, ahead of Newt Gingrich and Steven Colbert. Some 4,900 unique phone numbers texted that number. Presumably many or all of them thought they had voted.

Twitter suspended this account in October 2016 for suspicious and activity like this. Currently, Twitter is under attack for suspending accounts, with critics calling it an abridgment of free speech and a form of censorship.

This case is unlike those this blog reported from a close look at election prosecutions in Oregon and Wisconsin coming out of the 2016 election. The Heritage Foundation publishes a list of election law prosecutions, but it is incomplete. However, prosecutions get news coverage in the states where they take place, with a description of the crime. I chose to look at Oregon because it has universal mail-in voting and Wisconsin because it is a battleground state.  

A clear pattern emerges. The prosecutions were essentially random one-off errors. The frauds were either solo acts of partisanship, neglect, or legally ambiguous. The cases where a motivated partisan individual cast votes in other people's names were few. I wrote about it in December: Click: What election fraud prosecutions look like  

More typical was prosecution of a case of a woman who moved from Washington to Oregon. Washington's primary election is two months earlier than Oregon's. She voted in Washington then voted again in Oregon when she moved there. She claimed she forgot she voted in Washington.  Another was a student who voted both at home in Oregon and at school in Colorado. She claimed forgetting. A Trump supporter in Wisconsin intentionally voted for himself, his son, and his son's girlfriend using absentee balloting. Wisconsin voters who turned 18 by the time of the general election are not allowed to vote in the primary election if they were still 17. Some County Clerks improperly allowed the youth to vote, thinking the Wisconsin rule was the same as the Illinois rule where they could vote. 

These are examples of essentially petty theft: Wrong and illegal but unlikely to change an election result. They do not fit the paradigm of "massive voter fraud' as alleged by Trump. 

The Mackey "Ricky Vaughn99" case is different. It was broad in scale, and intended to affect a large number of votes in a single partisan direction; therefore a matter of special concern. It is a form of election crime better described as partisan voter suppression rather than ballot fraud, but it is criminality that both Democrats and Republicans should consider in any new legislation. 

Prior to the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s, Democrats in the South were the primary party of voter suppression. After the 1960s, Republicans attempted to make voting more secure, i.e. more difficult. Democrats in recent years worked to ease voting access, with polls open longer, early voting, more polling stations with shorter lines, and mail-in voting. Republicans have cited these as vectors for election fraud. 

Both sides might be arguing against partisan interest. Democrats may be the primary beneficiary of squelching election fraud and using a wider definition of election crime. Mackey's crime must be prosecuted as a civil rights violation, not election fraud.

Trump's behavior leading up to and after the 2020 election are a warning signal. Trump and the Republican Party generally have normalized and legitimized discarding elections for the purpose of getting a favored result. This is a profound change in morality and expectation. It is a version of the "Broken Window" theory of social norms. If election fraud is extravagantly alleged and perceived by Republican voters, and elections can be discarded, then the social norm is changed; why bother respecting election laws if elections are so corrupt and disrespected?

Democrats would be well advised to be on the side of election law-and-order, with severe penalties for cheating, for election audits, for paper ballot back-ups, for close observers. The conscientious Republican officeholders who held the line on election integrity are facing recalls, censure, calls to resign, death threats, and primary challenges. This is a bad sign for future elections.

Democrats have more to gain than to lose from enhanced election security.

Click: Justice Department release

Crazy has gone viral

     "Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and the Madness of Crowds."

             Title of book by Charles Mackay, 1841

 

Republicans believe the Big Trump Lie. They drank the Kool-Aid. 

The book by Charles Mackay looked closely at the tulip mania in Holland in the 1630s, then the South Sea investment bubble, the Salem witchcraft hysteria, and a time when poisoning one's friends was popular.

From time to time a popular enthusiasm catches on. A fad. At age three I owned a Davy Crockett coonskin hat--like all the three-year-old boys did in 1953. I remember hula hoops and Beatle-mania.  As an adult, I paid attention to financial manias. Mackay wrote about ones long ago but they still happen. The internet bubble. The mortgage loan bubble. We are witnessing something right now. GameStop, a thinly traded stock of a company with a dying business trading at $4 at the end of summer closed at 347, up 201 points for the day. (Don't buy it. Don't short it, either. Someone is going to get hurt here. Don't be one of them.) 

There are also social manias. There have been occasional infestations of teen-age girls getting and sharing the idea of committing suicide. Or political manias, like the Red Scare in the 1920s and Joe McCarthy's communist scare of the 1950s. Right now Republican voters are having a moment of crazy. They fell head over heels in love with Trump. They believe his lies, most recently the one about the election. The belief is unshakable. 

Click: Oregon Republican Party

Every bit of evidence can be dismissed or seen in mirror image. The Oregon Republican Party Executive Committee observed the insurrection at the Capitol and signed a resolution and published a press release saying the insurrection at the Capitol was not done by Trump supporters at all. It was entirely a "false flag" operation of tens of thousands of leftists, hoping to make Trump look bad. Those people in MAGA hats carrying Trump flags, cheering Trump were pretending.

"What a fool believes, he sees."

Penny Flenniken, a retired Portland School Teacher, shares her perspective on the hysteria involving fear of Satanic Ritual Abuse taking place in pre-schools. She wrote this Guest Post thinking it timely because she says she is seeing its parallel in the current circle of irrational belief held by Trump supporters regarding unverifiable--indeed debunked--conspiracies. He got started with an extravagant lie, telling Americans he had proof that then-President Obama was born in Kenya. The lie spread and stuck. It fit an idea that lots of Republicans had, that there was just something wrong about Obama as president, she said. Now Trump has a new one, the big Election-Fraud lie. It, too, is sticking.

"Now a majority of Republicans insist, against all evidence, that the election was fraudulent in some way," Flenniken said.  "It isn't about evidence or any search for Truth with a capital 'T.' It is a matter of faith. Audits. Hand counts. Republican election officials, Republican-appointed judges. It isn't that there is no evidence either way. There is overwhelming evidence that there wasn't fraud. But evidence doesn't matter."

Flenniken

She wrote "the vote counts all make a kind of sense nationally and in relation to the other races on the same ballot. Biden won by just a little in Georgia, where everyone thought it would be close, and then won again by the same amount in the election of the two Democratic senators, under the even-more-watchful eyes of everyone. It's crazy. They feel so certain of fraud that they go to the Capitol to riot and overthrow an election. They drank the Kool-Aid. It brings back memories of a very bad time in America for early childhood educators like myself." 

Guest Post by Penny Flenniken

                                         Hysteria 

In the early 80’s I trained to be a manager of a corporate daycare center in Washington state. Theoretically one might not see this a high-stakes-high-risk occupational decision. Daycare centers handle the task of managing a staff to take care of children aged two through five and provide them with meaningful preparation for school. It is hugely important work, and I was proud to do it. For many families centers like mine are an essential institution allowing parents to work outside the home.

A crazy idea--I call it hysteria--developed around daycare centers during this time. Stories were alleged that weird satanic rituals occurred in the middle of the day, especially during nap time while lights dimmed. The rituals involved supposed acts of sexual abuse and torture, all of which took place, and yet the children would go home apparently unharmed. There were fantastical things alleged. Puppies were said to be shoved up the bottoms of forty pound children. No marks or scars would be found, but prosecutors in court rooms argued that young children wouldn’t fabricate such details, and that somehow, because it was satanic, impossible things could happen without the children knowing or remembering or having any signs.

Parents and prosecutors asserted that the children testified that their daycare teachers flew around the room. They asserted they were taken on long trips inside tunnels underneath the building--tunnels which no investigation nor excavation could find, but which still certainly existed. Their undetectability was somehow proof that the devil was at work. It must be true.

As a result of these fears and wondering “who knew the real truth?" parents in need of child care almost always came at nap time to visit the center where I worked. Perhaps it was a lunchtime break, or maybe just a convenient hour, but it was difficult not to think parents believed that by visiting at the napping hour they were responsibly checking to see if evil was occurring.

I would take them from room to sleeping room and parents could see that everything was fine.

I lived during one era of hysteria to see another one now with the Q-anon conspiracies, or the more mainstream but widespread belief that somehow, in some mysterious way, Biden did not get the votes election officials and audits say he got. I hear that the people deepest in the belief-circle believe Democrats eat children, or at least drink their blood for growth hormones, or traffic them for sex. It is the same imagined peril of young children and abuse we saw forty years ago. Interesting parallel: Even adults with crazy ideas want to be heroes and save little children from harm.

I left the daycare center business soon after. It didn’t pay that much and the risk was too great. Some childcare workers were unfairly put in prison. People might have a question, which would turn into a concern, which could become an accusation. In an environment where evidence did not matter, truth and impossibility weren't a defense.

Teaching later in a public school I have often heard the blame leveled at educators for failing to teach critical thinking skills to students, who then grow up to be easily manipulated adults. Teaching critical thinking skills was always my first priority.

Provoked. Orchestrated. Induced. Incited

     "The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people."

               Mitch McConnell, on the Senate Floor

     "Orchestrating a mob to pressure Congress is inexcusable."

               Former Attorney General Bill Barr, to the Associated Press



We have the words for this: Persuade. Talk into. Pressure. Motivate. Persuade. Gin up. Coax. Entice.

Courts have set parameters to clarify that fuzzy line between legal efforts to inform and illegal efforts to incite. Donald Trump's defenders say he was just doing a good all-American political speech, and people who heard him and marched at his suggestion to the Capitol to seek out Mike Pence and other officeholders acted on their own when they did illegal things. After all, who could have anticipated they would enter the Capitol, seek out officeholders, ransack it, and cause the deaths of five people?

Others say Trump was the brains, energy, and master salesman who aimed the loaded-gun-mob and put it in motion. The crowd was there because Trump told them to gather. He told the Proud Boys to "stand by." He told the crowd a great crime needed to be stopped right then and told them to march to the Capitol.

Today's post is primarily a video link. The real impact of Trump's behavior on January 6 is best understood in the context of his saying for months that he would not accept the results of an election if he were to lose. His long speech on January 6 was a call to action: Go to the Capitol. Do something!

We have good records of what Trump said. What did the crowd hear?  

The video is a mix of Trump's words and the words of people on their way to the Capitol and inside it.  We hear people responding to Trump in the moment: "Storm the Capitol." "Invade the Capitol." Even days afterward, on reflection, a Florida businesswoman who was arrested says:

I felt like I was doing my patriotic duty. . . . I thought I was following my president. I thought I was following what we were called to do.

Now that they have had time to consult with attorneys people who were arrested have strong reason to cite the "Trump-told-me-to" defense. More credible is what they said in the moment, when they were full of excitement at the thought they were going to overthrow an election and "take back America," as Trump put it. They were making unguarded, spontaneous descriptions of their motives. 

The video is ten minutes, more time than this blog normally asks of people. Take the time to watch. The question of whether Trump was just a politician making a speech--Lincoln at Gettysburg--or whether he inappropriately encouraged, induced, incited a mob that then invaded the Capitol. This question will be in the center of the public debate for the next month. 

Click:   https://vimeo.com/504444733

"We're going to have to fight much harder. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us."

Oops. Sorry about that coup d'état

     "You say you want a revolution.
      Well, you know
      We all want to change the world

               The Beatles, Revolution

Trump was open about it. He told everyone he wouldn't accept the election result unless he won.

He tried a dozen different ways to overthrow the election, just like he said he would. That was OK with most Republicans. It still is. 

Most Republicans are embarrassed by the Capitol invasion itself, the four hours of vandalism, attempted kidnapping, and the part where people use American flagpoles as weapons to break people and things. That part looked bad. The part where Trump watched it live on TV for six hours doing nothing, before finally consenting to the frantic urging of this staff to tell people that he loved them but they should go home--that looks bad, too.

But the rest of it was OK, or at least OK-enough,  the part where elections are cast aside, and judges' decisions are ignored, and where a president pressures and threatens criminal action against election officials in the states, and where he urges Congress to refuse to count votes of states where he lost.

Some Republican elites have moved on from Trump, but Republican voters and audiences have not.  Fox is changing their lineup: Less news at primetime, and more red meat pro-Trump opinion hosts. I watch Christian broadcast stations choosing Trump over Christ, a good business decision for them. They have an audience and advertisers to keep happy. Bearing false witness isn't a sin if one is defaming a Democrat, and the audience wants to hear what it wants to hear.

But aren't there "good Republicans" I am asked? Don't some Republicans object?  Some. They get attacked and censured. People paying attention know which way the wind is blowing and it is better to keep one's head down. As William Butler Yeats wrote: 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

In Yeats' poem, The Second Coming, written in the aftermath of The Great War, he predicted mankind would look to a new Messiah, some "rough beast." Surely that prediction is too gloomy for 2021, a century after that was written. Surely mankind, Christians especially, would set their sights higher than Trump. Apparently not.

Before readers re-read "The Second Coming,"' shown below, let's try something new in this blog, a comic video. We experienced an insurrection and the perpetrators want to laugh it off. We could all use a laugh.

Mrs. Betty Bowers, the "World's Best Christian," has a comment. 

The video is a little over four minutes. 

Use this link: https://youtu.be/nMHviQunXBA

Or this one:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMHviQunXBA&feature=youtu.be

The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Unity and Healing for Domestic Terrorists

Imagine how Trump supporters would feel if the attack on our Capitol were carried out by Muslims, not Christians. 

We saw 911 as a terrorist attack.

Supporters of the attack on the Capitol are making a category error. 

A category error is mistaking the very nature of a thing. "The color green sleeps furiously" is a famous example. "Green" isn't something that "sleeps" and sleeping doesn't have emotion. Supporters of the "Stop the Steal" rally and the subsequent attack on the Capitol think of themselves as patriotic. They thought they were performing acts of citizenship.

That is the wrong category.  They were domestic terrorists attempting to overthrow the government. They were participants in a plot to end our system of self-government. Similarly, the five people in each of the planes heading toward crashes into buildings in New York and Washington, D.C. on 911 were not tourists. Wrong category. They were terrorists on a mission.  We understand who the 911 hijackers are; we need to understand the Capitol insurrection the same way. They were trying to scare Americans into changing our government through intimidation and violence.

What did Osama Bin Laden do? He had a story of the Great American Satan, and with his charisma, words, and organization encouraged and enabled a group to go to the seat of American government to damage it, to kill and intimidate elected officials, and to demand they change their policy and actions. He had a cause. Get American soldiers out of the Middle East. 

What did Donald Trump do? He called on Americans to gather on January 6 to "Stop the Steal." Tens of thousands came. Some people were there as organizers of the rally, some by speaking at it, some by attending it with signs and MAGA hats, and some came with weapons and body armor planning to enter the Capitol itself. Some of those who entered vandalized and looted it, rifled papers, stole laptops to sell to Russia. Videos taken there overhear them describing themselves doing they thought Trump and other officeholders wanted. Some of those who entered actively sought out elected officials to frighten, kidnap, or kill. Some killed a policeman.

Like Osama Bin Laden, President Trump has a devoted following. Like Bin Laden, Trump was not present at the final act, nor did he personally direct their specific actions, but, like Bin Laden, he encouraged it and financed it and articulated the goal they pursued, overthrowing the government. 

America's seat of government was under attack by more than just the several thousand people who entered the Capitol by force. They had help. They were encouraged by Republican officeholders--like Mitch McConnell--now who says that of course the election was fair, that of course Biden won and Trump lost, that we realized all along but didn't want to rock the boat and Trump and the people he had fooled. Others of Trump's enablers are backtracking and trying to redefine what they did. They no longer clearly assert the election was stolen, but only that a lot of people still think that it was, that they were just giving voice to the misled, and it is time to forgive, forget, and unify. Since people believed Trump you cannot really blame them for doing what they did. 

People believed Osama Bin Laden, too. 

There is a problem with forgetting and unification. It normalizes insurrection. Tens of thousands at the rally and the tens of millions who were at home silently supporting the "Save the Steal" idea were cheering the overthrow of an election. They would be the equivalent of passengers on flight 93 who might have insisted that the five terrorists were just patriotic people with a great cause: Get American troops out of the Middle East. Don't think about the tactics, think about the result. We get to keep Trump! 

The people inside the Capitol were the equivalent of the actual terrorists on each plane, people doing the hands-on work of destroying American democracy. Donald Trump was the equivalent of Osama Bin Laden, the brains and financing behind the enterprise.

Forgetting and "unification" should happen after the domestic terrorists and their cheerleaders and supporters understand and integrate into their thinking and politics what they were doing, the category of their actions. They were terrorists, supporting a demagogue who wanted them to overthrow American government. 

Heroes of the Republic

A few people in a few key places saved our democracy.

They were under pressure to buckle. They didn't. 

The January 6 attack on the Capitol was a culmination of a long campaign to stay in office regardless of the outcome of the election. Trump had support from within his own party for this. From long before the election he said it would be rigged against him, that polls showing him to be unpopular were wrong, and that there would be massive voter fraud. He said he would be the legitimate president, whatever happened in the election. 

Senatorial support for the insurrection crowd

Democrats have a hard time believing anyone supports this vulgar, narcissistic demagogue. They misunderstand and underestimate Trump's appeal. Throughout history charismatic demagogues led mass movements, and Trump was bad at governing but superb at motivating crowds and disciplining dissent within his party. Don Junior told the January 6 Stop the Steal crowd that it was Trump's GOP.  He warned senators and house members that they will "be voting on things in the coming hours" and that "we all are watching." He said, "These guys better fight for Trump, because if they're not, guess what? I'm going to be in your backyard in a couple of months!!"

It was a credible threat. We saw what would happen to Lindsay Graham. He was harassed in an airport: "You traitor, you traitor, you traitor, you traitor. It will be like this forever, wherever you go. You piece of shit. You human garbage." It goes on. https://youtu.be/ndWV63wMGTw   Graham switched back immediately to defending Trump.

This political pressure is the context for the failure of the Article One checks and balances on Trump. Elected Republicans supported their party--even in the face of an assault on our republic's system of government. 

But it turns out the republic survived. Here is who could have could have crumbled under that pressure but did not. We owe them.

1. The United States military. In the immediate aftermath of the Bible-in-the-park photo shoot, General Milley issued a statement saying that his presence there was a mistake, done out of a failure to realize that a campaign event was taking place. Then, after the election, a bi-partisan group of ten former Secretaries of Defense signed a joint letter re-affirming the norms and expectations for military officers:

Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.

2. State election officials. Trump and his supporters leaned heavily on them with a mix of threats and flattery. Trump urged Georgia's election officials to "find" votes. Trump and his supporters urged election officials at every level to move the decision from the administrative job of counting votes to a political body, the legislature, to assure a result. They refused. 

They faced legal and professional risk. Declaring that the election they supervised was fraudulent would have created an evidence problem. How would they "find" bad votes to dismiss without being discovered in the eventual re-audits. Plus there is the element of professional duty and pride. Their careers were built around administering elections, without regard to politics and outcome. They were being asked to un-do and reverse the very purpose of their careers. The pressure was an insult.

3. The judiciary. Judges demanded evidence. Some may have welcomed a different result, but they required a factual and evidentiary basis. They needed to see fraud in order to find fraud. They didn't, so they rejected the Trump lawsuits. 

4. Professionals in the Justice Department. Attorney General William Barr's surprising resignation with four weeks to run in the term is now understandable. It was co-incident with the abrupt resignation of the U.S. Attorney for Atlanta. Each was being pressured by Trump to "do something" to overturn the vote in Georgia. Barr's replacement, the Deputy AG Jeffrey Rosen, immediately came under the same pressure. The New York Times reports that a subordinate, Jeffrey Clark, offered to take over the department and then represent to the Georgia legislature that the Justice Department now considered there to be a basis for overturning the election.  

Rosen got a meeting at the White House with a group Justice Departmental leaders. They agreed as a group to resign in protest if this took place. It would be a new "Saturday Night Massacre." Such an event would define what would be taking place as an attempt to subvert justice. Trump backed off.

The republic survived.

Writers of the Constitution imagined and feared a demagogue, that great threat to democratic government. The Constitution worked.

Division of power to the states. States choose electors on their own. States that came under pressure were fighting to preserve their own autonomy and power.

Congress' power of the purse meant that the military has always understood itself to have two constituencies, both the executive Commander in Chief and Congress that supplies oversight and funding. The result is a tradition of non-partisan, nonpolitical military, indebted to many. That meant that General Flynn's martial law proposal did not find fertile ground with the military.

Article One legislative check worked, but imperfectly. Madison anticipated "factions" but not political parties. Republican legislators backed the leader of their party, not the independence of their Article One power.  The presence of a Democratic majority in the House frustrated what might have been an easy path to get the Congress to dismiss the states' electoral votes.

The Civil Service Act came a century after the Constitution, but it helped establish the notion that the federal and state administrative departments are non-partisan and professional except at the top policy positions. This is an ideal and expectation--not always observed in practice--but it establishes a norm.

We got through this.

COVID IS SPREADING

     "We're in a national emergency. We need to act like we're in a national emergency."

              President Joe Biden

COVID is America's leading cause of death. New mutations have formed.

Happy days aren't here again. Not yet, anyway.

The inauguration brought a sigh of relief to a great many Americans. News stories are filled with metaphors of change. We hear of turning a page, a fresh start, and a brand new day. And the vaccines are at hand, and news stories  are about distribution. 

One thing hasn't changed. COVID is still here, and new mutations have formed. More people are now dying from COVID than any other cause, outpacing all the big ones: Cancer, heart disease, and strokes. COVID is understood primarily to kill elderly people, but even adults as young as 45 are more likely to die from COVID-19 than anything else.

I am going to let Richard Holmes tell the story. Richard Holmes is a college classmate who has spent forty years advising and managing military and civilian healthcare. He has Masters Degrees in Management and Health Management, and then a Ph.D in Management and Health Policy. He is an expert on COVID and he prepares written updates on the disease. I have repurposed his most recent long and detailed update with excerpts below as a Guest Post. I include a photo of him having finished a marathon. He has run 770 of them, including seven in every state.

This update was from Inauguration Day, January 20, 2021

COVID UPDATE: Guest Post by Richard Holmes

 

Coronavirus Variants. New mutations of the virus dominate projections, while they were not even mentioned just 50 days ago. The most widespread, usually called the United Kingdom (UK) variant, is the dominant strain now in the United Kingdom and has been identified in 60 countries and 20 U.S. states, and is projected to be the dominant strain by March in the USA. Its biggest impact is that it is 70% more infectious than the original strains. This variant is not more lethal than the original strains.

Richard Holmes

The South African mutation has been identified to have spread to dominate both South Africa and Zambia, and has also been found so far in 13 other countries including Australia, South Korea, and numerous European countries. While not more infectious, it is more alarming in that its mutated shape is likely less targeted by existing vaccines, with perhaps a 50% reduction in protection from vaccination. It has also caused increasing new reinfections in previously recovered COVID victims. 

Two new strains have been identified as emerging from the Brazilian Amazon. These strains had been identified in Japan and the United Kingdom, and early data suggests they are both more infectious like the UK strain, and can cause repeat infections like the South African strain. 

In the last week, a new strain has been reported in California, accounting for as much as one-third of cases at some southern California hospitals. It is too recent for evaluation of its relative rates of infection, mortality, or susceptibility to the vaccines.  

Current Status. The United States remains the overwhelming driver of the pandemic. It has suffered more total cases than the next three most infected countries combined (India, Brazil, and Russia) despite having only one-fifth of their combined population. It continued yesterday to have more new daily cases than the next five most currently infected countries combined. The U.S. implemented mandatory testing controls on inbound air passengers yesterday, while world health likely would be better helped by mandatory testing controls on outbound American passengers.  COVID-19 continues to be the leading cause of death in the United States, and has now lowered U.S. life expectancy by more than one year.

Florida Data-Suppression. The purposeful suppression of data on Florida cases and deaths gained greater emphasis in the last 50 days as the insider who had been publishing the actual data was arrested, and all of her electronics confiscated. This will permit tracing and extinguishing those local health department sources who had been providing actual statistics to be revealed.

 Testing. In the vast majority of states the undercounting is due to under-testing, as shown in the positivity rates described below.

Half of the US states (and the District of Columbia) are performing enough tests to detect the magnitude of cases, which requires positivity rates below 10%. Only three states have positivity rates below the 3% that is required to control pandemic spread through testing and tracing: Vermont, Hawaii, and Connecticut. Sixteen states have positivity rates between 10% and 20%. Five are between 20% and 30%: Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah. Three are between 30% and 40%: Alabama, Iowa, and Pennsylvania. Idaho and Puerto Rico have over 40% positivity rates. 

The high positivity rates are from the combined effects of widespread infections and under-testing. Harvard and the Brown University School of Public Health estimate 4 million tests per day are required in the USA to measure spread and trace contacts to control the pandemic. Yesterday, 2.02 million tests were conducted or just over half the amount needed.  

The China approach. China, with only one death in the last 242 days, reacted to an outbreak last week of 162 cases in Shijiazhuang, a city about half again as big as New York City, by locking down and testing the entire city, and building in six days a massive quarantine apartment building where each person isolated has a separate apartment with normal furnishings, TV and internet, and to whom meals are delivered three times daily. 

Vaccine distribution problems. Industrialized western countries are generally counting on vaccines currently being produced by Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and AstraZeneca, all of which have approvals in multiple countries, and a Johnson & Johnson vaccine nearing the end of Phase III trials. However, demand far outstrips supply, and several additional problems plague rollout. In the U.S., the outgoing Trump administration was opaque about how much vaccine was being produced, stored, or could be made available, so the incoming Biden administration could not develop timelines or detailed plans for what will certainly become a massive federal effort to get vaccines out to the states. Further aggravating U.S. plans is that after the Trump administration promised hefty new shipments from what turned out to be a nonexistent reserve of the vaccines, many states expanded eligibility to younger age groups and then saturated the appointment slots with less vulnerable people before discovering that the states would receive little or none of the regular shipments previously expected.

Looking ahead. If Americans can be convinced to wear masks, hundreds of thousands of infections and tens of thousands of lives can be saved in the months to come, but disinformation is widespread and believed, and a major portion of the population have confused saving lives by wearing masks with unpatriotic behavior. It is reasonable to expect that Americans must still wear masks into the holiday season of 2021.

Just in. As of 5:23 a.m. today, January 23, Richard Holmes sent this: 

Of course this status was as of inauguration day, and things do not stand still. For example, most recently cited infection rates of the UK variant is double (100% more) as infectious than the wild (original) variant. The South African variant was reported yesterday for the first time in the Western Hemisphere, with a confirmed case in Panama in a sample taken on January 5th. The patient had reached Panama via Europe. It is likely that variant is also in the US, but our genomic testing is so backlogged and minimal that we haven’t yet observed it in a case.