*Parler
That would be a fantastic sting operation!
The American Empire, even pre-, say, 1990, has certainly not been an unalloyed good for the planet.
At the same time, since 1945 and extending until at least 2100, if not beyond, most of the world is stuck choosing between a world with the US as the pre-eminent power, the Soviet Union and latterly Russia as the pre-eminent power, and China as the pre-eminent power.
Be careful which devil you choose.
It had been worked on for over a month before it was passed.
I don’t know how many of you have seen the video of the first group of insurrectionists inside the chamber, reminding each other to be respectful, going through papers in desks, taking photos of them, looking for the smoking gun evidence of election theft. There’s a part that’s kind of funny where they get confused by them …Ted Cruz was going to object to Arizona… traitor.
But there is a part of this video that I want everyone to see, and I haven’t seen a lot of news stations play this part. At eight minutes in, they do this toxic hyper-masculine prayer group thing. It last a minute and twenty seconds and everyone in the room joins in. It confirms what I’ve suspected, that the people in the core group are religious zealots. BTW, this type of breaking into spontaneous prayer is a thing among the Pence / Meadows /Pompeo crowd as well.
I put this in another thread a few days ago — “What’s next for the insurrectionists, or something like that, but I’m going to repost it here.
My immediate concern is the fundamentalist groups around the country that expose some variation of an “End Times” theology. They’re tightly bonded groups of people that live in close proximity to one another. They share beliefs and lifestyles that are outside of the mainstream and rely heavily on their religious leaders to instruct them how to live in accordance with God’s will.
I’m going link to a post I wrote a few days ago in another thread that goes into more detail.
If any of them believe this is the holy war moment they’ve been waiting for, that could spell trouble. If a lot of them do, that could spell big trouble.
I think, in most cases, their leadership will try to call them off and in most cases they will succeed. These groups are generational cults, they aren’t a bunch of crazies that found each other. These are just people, indoctrinated from birth, doing nothing more than living the lives they were born to. They’ve been waiting for this apocalypse for generations and it’ll be easy to go back to waiting. I think most of the leaders will see it’s bad for the bottom line. People that really believe something can still grift.
But there may be a handful of leaders that don’t back off, and a handful of men that won’t believe that God did a 180 degree turn, and they may think their leader has been corrupted by the Deep State. Some of them want to believe this.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it’ll take much violence to register an economic impact, especially if it’s random. I keep coming back to the hit that the DC area took during the 2-3 week spree of the Beltway sniper.
But in the long run, the biggest danger isn’t from a spate of terror attacks. It’s from the vast moneyed underground looking to turn the US into a right wing Christian theocracy, gradually and bloodlessly. Ted Cruz, the Devos/ Prince and the Mercer dynasties. The dozens, if not hundreds, of advocacy groups with words like Faith, Freedom and Family in their name. Pence and the Prayer Breakfast Gang.
That’s really a subject for another time, but I think the events of the past few weeks may have dealt a real blow to this second group, especially if they view, as they should, all the STOP THE STEAL disinformation as part of the greater insurrection plot. Silver lining, maybe.
Been saying it since 2016: American Antichrist
That makes even less sense than
- Invade the Capitol
- ??
- Win!
Did they expect to find a diary entry, 11/4 Ordered 200,000 more votes in Pennsylvania – that should do the trick?
-
Overthrow Government
-
Make Trump President for Life
-
PROFIT!
This is interesting… I watch tons of police procedural shows, and it always kills me how the cops in the shows can go into someone’s office and after a cursory look at the desk, the file cabinets, and the bottom drawer, they inevitably find the one piece of evidence that makes the case. Sometimes they only have a few minutes because the suspect is in the kitchen making a drink (or in a British show, making tea).
I KNOW these shows aren’t real and that no one can walk into an unfamiliar office and find a specific thing in 30 seconds. Hell, I can barely find things in my own home office and I know what’s here.
I think the passage I quoted is correct. These doofuses thought they’d just breeze into someone’s office (like on TV) and within minutes find everything they needed to prove election fraud. Maybe even find a file labeled, “2020 Stolen Election.”
They may have–for the first time–actually realized that when you go to war against the US government, you are going to war against the US government. You feel a little less smug when ten thousand gun barrels are pointed at your head.
That is a legitimate fear - the idea that the act of prosecuting a former President then goes from inconceivable to something that was done. It normalizes the idea that it is a possibility. Slippery slope arguments are typically a fallacy, but it is human nature to become accustomed to something through repetition.
Just look at Impeachment in the modern era. It was a HUGE deal for Nixon, so bad that he resigned and then was pardoned by Ford. But that put it in the playbook. Then Reagan is accused of stuff with the Iran-Contra scandal, and the term is bandied about but not carried out. But when Clinton comes along, the Republicans set out on a mission to find something to impeach Clinton with. They started with Whitewater, but that went nowhere, but then they shifted to the Lewinsky affair, and that still didn’t do it, but finally they got something with his statements regarding Paula Jones. BOOM. Impeachment is now a political tool.
So here comes Trump. He is a disaster, he is reckless, selfish, unashamed, corrupt, intentionally uninformed, and probably criminal in his actions. He is a walking example of why Impeachment is written into the Constitution. But the Republicans have made impeachment a political tool, and so they act as if any attempts to regulate Trump are just standard political attacks, not legitimate attempts to control the executive.
So now Trump goes so far as to incite a crowd to attack the Congress and potentially physically assault and perhaps even murder leaders including the Vice President. That should be grounds for immediate 25th Amendment revocation of powers followed by rapid Impeachment. But many Republicans are too busy playing politics to defend the Constitution and Democracy.
They see this Impeachment and any future criminal prosecution as political revenge, not the direct enforcement of our legal processes. And that is why there is legitimate fear that prosecuting Trump will normalize prosecuting the outgoing President. “Lock Her Up” becomes a reality.
Thus the need to fight the normalization of the idea as a political tool while executing the laws of our country to prosecute actual crimes.
I will point out that the Impeachment process is by definition pardon-proof. That is in the Constitution itself.
I’m also torn on that idea. On the one hand we do really need an investigation into everything this Administration has been up to. On the other, that kind of an investigation is going to eat up a lot of Congressional time that could be spent on rebuilding this country. Though I suppose hunting out the corruption and documenting the reality might be a powerful tool for shedding light on how bad Trump really was and thus be part of the deprogramming of the conservative base. That might actual help heal some of the rift. Or, it could just incite the mob further and breed more ill will from the right about the excesses of the liberals and their dirty politics.
Yes, we are witnesses to his actual thought processes and practices that he has honed throughout his life and his business career. Scott Adams (Dilbert creator and Trump advocate) has described him as a “Master Persuader”, a term he created to describe the kind or orator that can gather huge crowds of followers. He also described Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama as such. Anyway, what it means is that Trump has a knack, a talent for crafting his intentions in “mob speak”, implications and innuendo instead of direct statements. Michael Cohen described such behavior and said it is Trump’s method.
And we see it here with the crowd. He didn’t say “Go down to the Capitol and break in whatever it takes and hunt down Mike Pence and persuade him to do this for me or punish him for not doing it,” but he certainly left that as the take away message for the crowd. It’s sickening, and we need to call it out and punish it.
Or schools, or courthouses, or any public facility. Waltz right in and boss the judge around, sit in his chair, and bang the gavel. Take a flag home as a souvenir.
Yes, they may be learning the same thing Adolph Hitler learned after the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. A militia-based coup has a low batting average; it is instead preferable to achieve power using an ethno-nationalist & anti-socialist platform, well-funded propaganda, procedural warfare, social and political polarization, and political obstruction.
… and Trump had both… the official power and the mob power, an advantage Hitler didn’t have in 1923. And Trump still failed.
Yeah, I know, but after Wednesday, he’ll be out of office.
This is a game changer for the hard religious right, but I haven’t been able to figure out if it will help or hurt.
Trump helped them in the past four years, a lot. Not just the moving the embassy to Jerusalem and the other mid-East policies that play into end times theology, and not just degradation and elimination of anti-bullying and sensitivity training, not the four years of pandering to religious right policy platforms.
He has transformed the Republican Party at the state and local level into a right wing theocracy and no one noticed. Why do you think 140 congressman refused to certify the election, even after the insurrection attempt. And a lot of states are no longer full democracies - when you have a state where the population is 50-50 Dem vs Republicans and the result of national and statewide races reflect that , but the same voting population results in a state legislature that is 30% D and 70%R, your state is no longer a full democracy…it may not be that extreme yet but some states are moving that way, at minimum.
But I think they underestimated the extent of the delusion they induced in the rank and file and created a new Christian ISIS. There is video I posted upthread, I think, that shows the core group of insurrectionists, while raiding the Congressional chamber …stopping and praying, loudly and proudly, for one minute and twenty seconds.
Posted elsewhere:
‘How Did We Get Here?’ A Call For An Evangelical Reckoning On Trump
Evangelicals, says Ed Stetzer of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, should start to reckon with their own behaviors and actions that may have helped fuel the insurrection at the Capitol.
As fallout continues from the deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol, Ed Stetzer, head of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, has a message for his fellow evangelicals: it’s time for a reckoning.
Evangelicals, he says, should look at how their own behaviors and actions may have helped fuel the insurrection. White evangelicals overwhelmingly supported President Trump in the 2020 election.
Some in the protest crowd raised signs with Christian symbolism and phrases.
“Part of this reckoning is: How did we get here? How were we so easily fooled by conspiracy theories?” he tells NPR’s Rachel Martin. “We need to make clear who we are. And our allegiance is to King Jesus, not to what boasting political leader might come next.”
In the interview, Stetzer also laments that evangelicals seem to have changed their view of morality in order to support Trump.
“So I think we just need to be honest. A big part of this evangelical reckoning is a lot of people sold out their beliefs,” he says.
…
Colorado Representative Norbert (R, Smith & Wesson), the lunatic who was tweeting Pelosi’s location during the riot, has been ID’d as the one giving the big group tour in the leadup to the attack.
And one of her chief aides resigned a day or two ago.
I think she’s probably in some deep doodoo.
Glock. Not even an American gun.
Not sure if this is confirmed yet, but one of the rioters may have been planning to ship Pelosi’s laptop to [wait for it] … Russia:
All those who were concerned about InfoSec … you all get a gold star 
Got a link for us? This is the follow-up story I’m most interested in.
Riley June Williams was charged with disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds with the intent to disturb a session of Congress and other charges…
I guess they can add espionage charges now, too. Nothing says ‘Patriot!’ more than selling U.S. information to an adversary nation! Oh, wait, That’s ‘treason’.