#no one had issue killing insurrectionists

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Nine people died as a result of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection that Republicans pretend was a "normal tourist visit." Four rioters and five police officers lost their lives during the attack or in its immediate aftermath, in ways that likely would not have happened but for the Capitol riot. This death toll is rarely discussed in the media coverage of the attack, likely because journalists don't want to argue with gaslighting fascists who want to get into bad faith debates about whether the assault "caused" the heart attacks and suicides that took lives. But there is one death that no one can deny was due to Jan. 6: That of Ashli Babbitt, the QAnon-believing insurrectionist who was shot by a Capitol police officer as she attempted to lead a charge of rioters to run down fleeing members of Congress.

Instead of erasing her death in their efforts to pretend the riot was "peaceful," Donald Trump and his goons have turned the 36-year-old conspiracy theorist into a MAGA martyr. As with much of Trump's campaign antics, it calls back to the tactics of the Nazis, who turned a murdered scumbag named Horst Wessel into a fallen fascist hero honored in iconography and song. Babbitt is even easier to prop up as a sympathetic figure, she was both pretty and female.

Trump in particular likes to get maudlin, calling Babbitt an "innocent, wonderful, incredible woman." He also spent months demonizing the Capitol police officer, Michael Byrd, who was forced to shoot Babbitt that day. (Byrd's actions have been exonerated through multiple investigations, though anyone who has seen the footage of the shooting can see he had no choice.) Trump has suggested Byrd should face extra-legal execution, complaining, "if that were on the other side, the person that did the shooting would be strung up and hung." It's language that should remind us that his "bloodbath" talk is both serious and literal.

So really, it should be bigger news that recently released testimony from a White House valet shows that Trump's reaction when told about Babbitt's death was utter indifference. It's buried in a New York Times report on this recently released transcript of an interview the anonymous valet did with the House committee investigating Jan. 6. The Times reporters are more focused on the valet's recollections of how Trump told his vice president, Mike Pence, that it would be "a political career killer" if Pence refused to steal the election for him. In passing, however, they also mention Trump did not care about Babbitt's killing — and the timeline suggests he understood perfectly well at the time that Babbitt was to blame for her own death.

As the transcript shows, the investigator asked the valet about a note that was given to Trump, shortly after the shooting, informing him that "1X civilian gunshot wound to chest at door of House Chamber." The valet affirmed that he saw Trump with the note, and that they also knew of the killing because it was being reported on cable news, which Trump was watching avidly throughout the riot.

"But there was no, like, reaction" to the news, the valet explained. Trump said nothing. But shortly after being informed, he did send out a tweet telling the insurrectionists "to remain peaceful, no violence," and to "[r]espect the law and our great men and women in blue."

Everyone understands — and understood at the time — that the tweet was just a CYA measure from Trump, who stubbornly refused for hours to ask the rioters to chill out, despite drinking in all the violent images on TV. But that he issued it after being told a supporter of his was shot makes it all the more clear that his main focus at the time was disavowing responsibility for the violence he fomented.

That Trump did not actually care about Babbitt's death, outside of fears that it made him look bad, is not a surprise to most Salon readers, journalists, or anyone who is honest about Trump's utter lack of morality. Perhaps this is why this revelation isn't getting more press attention. There's a tendency in the jaded press to assume "everyone" knows that Trump has never in his life cared about anyone but himself. But not all voters know that Trump is for-real sociopathic, and they may be surprised to find he reacted to a deluded woman dying for him like normal people react to stepping on an ant.

But this should be a huge story. Trump is making his phony concern about the fates of the January 6 insurrectionists the centerpiece of his campaign. He opens his rallies with elaborate ceremonies to honor the rioters, characterizes them as "hostages" and "unbelievable patriots," and promises pardons for people convicted of assaulting police and seditious conspiracy. He pretends to care about these people to valorize his selfish efforts to overthrow democracy. His feigned love of them is also about keeping up morale among the nastier members of the MAGA movement because Trump unsubtly expects them to use violence on his behalf again.

Trump's exploitation of Babbitt's is also part of a larger habit of faking outrage over imaginary threats to innocent white womanhood from dark-skinned men. Trump loves to brag that "I protect women," which is a lie like most words that come out of his face. But he definitely likes to share his elaborate fantasies of men of color raping and killing white women. That goes back to his 2015 campaign kickoff when he said Mexicans were "rapists." He has falsely declared that, because of immigration, "women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before." He's recently been hyping the murder of Laken Riley, a Georgia woman who was allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant.

Trump's lurid obsession with violence against women is dishonest on two levels. First, he's lying about the racial dynamics of gendered violence. Most men who sexually abuse, beat or kill women target those they know, and who are usually of the same race. It's not the dark-skinned strangers lurking in bushes of Trump's imagination. Trump knows this personally, as nearly all the over two dozen women who have come out with stories of being sexually abused by him are white women who met him through normal work and social situations.

Thus, Trump not only doesn't care about violence against women, he's a big fan of it. He bragged about sexually assaulting women on the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape. A New York jury found he did sexually assault journalist E. Jean Carroll in the 90s. He's repeatedly used the word "fortunately" when asked if he thinks rich men have the privilege of sexually assaulting whomever they wish. Over and over, Trump goes out of his way to defend other men who are accused of sexual harassment or abuse.

Babbitt's death is an outlier in the sense that she was the person at fault and gender had nothing to do with it. Still, Trump talks about her with the same tones of fake outrage he brings when exploiting the deaths and rapes of genuine victims. Pretending to suddenly care about violence against women when it suits his political needs is doubly gross, given Trump's otherwise lengthy record of cheerleading for gendered violence. But the mainstream media tends to avoid contrasting his pretend views on this issue with the substantial real-world evidence that he has no problem with violence against women.

The Babbitt case is especially egregious because, ultimately, her death is his fault. If Trump hadn't spun up ordinary people with lies about a "stolen" election, she wouldn't have been in the Capitol, foolishly dying for a man who does not care about her. That he's now using her corpse as a campaign prop is disgusting. Most MAGA voters will refuse to see this, of course, or make false claims that "all" politicians do it. But if they knew how little he cared, maybe a few would wake up and see that Trump would happily let them all die for him.

#us politics #news #salon #2024 #jan 6 insurrection #donald trump #conservatives #gop #republicans #ashli babbitt #fascisim #new york times #Michael Byrd #mike pence #house select committee #violence against women #e. jean carroll #laken riley #op eds

[bloodpen-to-paper]

Nimona's Subtle Racial Placement in a World of Wealth Gaps

The racial placement of Nimona was not lost on me, and its something I'm seeing more of in media, so lets talk about how Nimona did it and why:

The Queen was black, and as a black woman she was the one who chose Ballister, a commoner, a brown kid, to be the next Knight of the Realm. She chose him above all the elitist kids because she saw his merit, and chose not to let the status of the others affect her decisions. And she was killed for it by a white insurrectionist.

For years Ballister was bullied by Todd, a white man, while the other elitist knights did nothing. Except for Ambrosius, an Asian man (presumably since he's modeled after Eugene Lee Yang), who not only stood up for him, but ended up becoming so close to him that they became lovers.

There's a lot of diversity in this movie, both within the wealth classes (the highest position of power being held by a black woman while Nimona, who's whole story is about being oppressed and ostracized, is white), and among the general populace of multi-racial and ethnic side characters. Yet there's still mostly white knights among the Queen's guard, not to mention the original story of Gloreth revolves around a white girl brought into legacy. You could even argue colorism with how Ambrosius has a lighter complexion (especially considering he was originally white in the comics) and is brought up as the trusted descendent of Gloreth over the commoner Ballister.

Despite being a movie about classism that's set in a diverse world, Nimona still has a subtle racial aspect within its character dynamics. It does this for a very important reason: to bridge the gap between art and reality. In real life, we have white supremacy. In real life, we have capitalism. And Nimona uses its racial aspects to further make its point about the class divide and bigotry within a caste system.

Racial supremacy and the dismantling of it is a complex matter. Diversifying the world is easiest to achieve among the working class; you can show people of different skin tones in movies and TV, hire a more diverse racial pool within work environments, etc. But what gets difficult is changing the diversity within the elite spaces, because their place in the wealth gap has made them near impossible to touch from a working class position. Diversifying the space in a local diner? Easy, as long as the manager is willing. Diversifying the spaces within the Electoral College? Harvard alumni? HBO Executives? Good luck, you'd give an arm and a leg just to change maybe one person's position in those spaces. Because the power is so hoarded and privatized that changing anything, like racial diversity, would include upending the entire system that allowed for them to exist as they do. A local diner involves being able to convince one person in a small position to either change their model, or changing out that person with someone with a different model. The systems of supremacy don't have roots as deep within that scenario, but the elitists? They are the system. And to change them is to change the system entirely. You cannot eliminate the racism from elite spaces without dissolving the wealth gap.

Nimona shows this subtly, in that among the common people its super diverse (black news anchors, people of different skin tones occupying the same spaces, etc), but within the elite institutions, the Knight of the Realm was always someone who was from the elite, and had nepotism to get them through. Ambrosius was expected to be the Knight because of his heritage, and most of the knights in the guard along him and Ballister were white and had Old Money. The movie didn't need to include racism in their message against classism, but the creators wanted to bridge that gap between "movie metaphor for real world issues" and actual real world issues. They created "commoner" and made sure the audience knew that represented not just the "working class", but the racial working class. They made sure the implications of racial bias were there and readable for the people who could relate to the struggle of being a person of color in a supremacist society. They even made queer people feel seen, not just with Ambrosius and Ballister's relationship, but with Nimona's entire allegory for gender-queerness. Its a movie that aims to have its art reflect reality for the sake of making people get invested in their own real world issues within our real world society. Many "progressive" works now utilize talking points from progressive movements without actually giving representation to those affected, causing a case of appropriation painted as representation. Nimona aimed to create genuine representation that would be seen by the people who needed it most, not just with the obvious messages from the story-telling, but from the subtle bridges that connect this piece of fiction to the very real world it took inspiration from. And I think its safe to say Nimona achieved just that.

#anyway go watch Nimona #right now #and Sea Beast while you're at it #nimona #nimona movie #politics #wealth gap #racism #classism

[your-krazy-uncle-bob]

"Civil War" Porn

As President Joe Biden’s polls stagnate and the midterms approach, we are now serially treated to yet another progressive melodrama about the dangers of a supposed impending radical right-wing violent takeover.

This time, the alleged threat is a Neanderthal desire for a “civil war.”

The FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, the dubious rationale for such a historic swoop, and the popular pushback at the FBI and Department of Justice from roughly half the country have further fueled these giddy “civil war” conjectures.

Recently “presidential historian” Michael Beschloss speculated about the parameters of such an envisioned “civil war.”

Beschloss is an ironic source. Just days earlier, he had tweeted references to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who passed U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, in connection with the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

That was a lunatic insinuation that Trump might justly suffer the same lethal fate due to his supposed mishandling of “nuclear secrets.” Unhinged former CIA Director Michael Hayden picked up on Beschloss’ death-penalty prompt, adding that it “sounds about right.”

Hayden had gained recent notoriety for comparing Trump’s continuance of the Obama administration’s border detention facilities to Hitler’s death camps. And he had assured the public that Hunter Biden’s lost and incriminating laptop was likely “Russian disinformation.”

So, like the earlier “Russian collusion” hoax, and the Jan. 6 “insurrection,” the supposed right-wing inspired “civil war” is the latest shrill warning from the left about how “democracy dies in darkness” and the impending end of progressive control of Congress in a few months.

On cue, Hollywood now joins the “civil war” bandwagon. It has issued a few bad, grade-C movies. They focus on deranged white “insurrectionists” who seek to take over the United States in hopes of driving out or killing off various “marginalized” peoples.

Pentagon grandees promise to learn about “white rage” in the military and to root it out. But never do they offer any hard data to suggest white males express any greater degree of racial or ethnic chauvinism than any other demographic.

When we do hear of an insurrectionary plan—to kidnap the Michigan governor—we discover a concocted mess. Twelve FBI informants outnumbered the supposed four “conspirators.” And two of them were acquitted by a jury and the other two so far found not guilty due to a mistrial.

The buffoonish Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol is often cited as proof of the insurrectionary right-wing movement. But the one-day riotous embarrassment never turned up any armed revolutionaries or plots to overthrow the government.

What it did do was give the left an excuse to weaponize the nation’s capital with barbed wire and thousands of federal troops, in the greatest militarization of Washington, D.C., since the Civil War.

In contrast, Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters were no one-day buffoons. They systematically organized a series of destructive and deadly riots across the country for more than four months in the summer of 2020. The lethal toll of their work was more than 35 dead, $2 billion in property losses, and hundreds of police officers injured.

Such violent protesters torched the iconic St. John’s Episcopal Church and attempted to fight their way into the White House grounds. Their violent agenda prompted the Secret Service to evacuate the president of the United States to a secure bunker.

The New York Times gleefully applauded the rioting near the White House grounds with the snarky headline “Trump Shrinks Back.”

As far as secession talk, it mostly now comes from the left, not the right. Indeed, a parlor game has sprung up among elites in venues such as The Nation and The New Republic imagining secession from the United States. Blue-staters brag secession would free them from the burden of the red-state conservative population.

Over the past five years, it was the left who talked openly of tearing apart the American system of governance—from packing the Supreme Court and junking the Electoral College to ending the ancient filibuster and nullifying immigration law.

Time essayist Molly Ball in early 2021 gushed about a brilliant “conspiracy” of wealthy tech lords, Democratic Party activists, and Joe Biden operators.

Ball bragged how they had systematically poured hundreds of millions of dark money into changing voting laws and absorbing the role of government registrars in key precincts.

What was revolutionary were new progressive precedents of impeaching a president twice, trying him as a private citizen, barring minority congressional representatives from House committee memberships, and tearing up the State of the Union address on national television.

In contrast, decrying the weaponization of a once-professional FBI and the scandals among its wayward Washington hierarchy is not insurrectionary. Nor is being appalled at the FBI raiding a former president’s and possible presidential candidate’s home, when historically disputes over presidential papers were the business of lawyers, not armed agents.

Historic overreach is insurrectionary, not objecting to it. And those who warn most of some mythical “civil war” are those most likely to incite one.

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email [email protected] and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

[bllsbailey]

Trump Fact Checks Biden State of Union in Real Time

In a rare contrast between a former president and a sitting one steamrolling toward a 2024 rematch, former President Donald Trump real-time fact-checked President Joe Biden's State of the Union speech Thursday night, calling his rival "so angry and crazy."

"That may be the angriest, least compassionate, and worst State of the Union speech ever made," Trump wrote in his post-speech analysis. "It was an embarrassment to our country!

"Whether the Fake News Media likes admitting it or not, there was tremendous misrepresentation and lies in that speech, but the people of our country get it, and they know that Nov. 5 will be the most important day in our nation's history," Trump wrote just after the speech finished.

Trump's real-time messages did not pull any punches in a presidential general election cycle that officially kicked off with Biden's rare and controversial use of the State of the Union as a campaign speech, former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., told Newsmax in post-debate analysis.

"He's done nothing for Israel compared to what I have done," Trump wrote, when Biden claimed to be the most pro-Israel president in American history, a claim Trump had made for years during his administration to a word.

"It's only words he speaks, not TRUTH!

Also, Trump warned Biden has enriched Iran and destabilized the Middle East.

With the border the No. 1 voting issue in the GOP presidential primary exit polls, Trump noted it was not first and foremost in Biden's America.

"Biden talked about the SNICKERS Bars, before he talked about the Border!" Trump lamented.

"It took him over 40 minutes to get to immigration, and then said nothing about it," he added.

Trump also repeatedly noting Biden had to interrupt his speech with coughing.

"Don't shake people's hands going out – he keeps coughing into his right hand," Trump added, noting the media pool feed was favoring views of Democrats clapping and not showing the Republican side of Congress.

"See, as he's getting ready to cough yet again into his right hand, the Fake News Media rushes him off the screen!" Trump wrote, noting the camera's panning.

Trump rejected Biden's remarks on the Second Amendment, warning of gun grabs, and the Biden administration permitting crime to run rampant in Democrat-run cities throughout America.

"He's talking about violence, but migrant violence is leading to the worst crime wave in history," Trump wrote.

Biden opened with warning Russia's Vladimir Putin to not take Ukraine, but Trump noted Putin only did that under Biden's watch.

"Putin only invaded Ukraine, because he has no respect for Biden," Trump wrote on Truth Social, which showed a brief outage on Downdector.com, perhaps because of a flood of traffic. "Would have never happened under the Trump administration, and for four years it didn't happen!"

Biden then weaponized Jan. 6 once again against his political rival, as Trump noted the only deadly weapons at the Capitol were in the hands of the government.

"The so-called 'Insurrectionists' that he talks about had no guns, they only had a rigged election," Trump wrote. "The only gun was that used on Ashli Babbitt, who sadly, is no longer with us!"

Trump was already hitting Biden before the president even arrived, after he was reportedly blocked by anti-Israel protesters.

"The president is very substantially late," Trump trolled. "Not a good start, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure he had very important things to do, but he is just now getting into the car.

"They will have to drive very, very quickly, you just don't want to be late to the State of the Union. They will need Mario Andretti to be at the wheel of the limo."

It was not just Biden taking Trump barbs either. "Push back on them" Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., was not spared.

"Maxine Waters, very nice woman, even though she's constantly saying she wants to beat up or kill people on the opposite side of the aisle," Trump wrote. "If I ever said that, they would call me an insurrectionist, and all hell would break out!"

But, ultimately, Biden cannot say anything that can measure up, according to Trump.

"There is nothing he can say tonight that can absolve him from letting 15 million people into our country illegally," Trump posted. "He'll probably blame me, but I had the safest border in the history of our country, so that won't go very far!"

Trump was having a little bit of fun early before Biden went in heavy on his political opponent and Jan. 6.

"This is the longest walk in presidential history," Trump wrote, calling the delayed start "very disrespectful to our country." "It is ridiculous! Now he's actually taking the selfies at their request. He's not a Photographer – he's got to get moving!"

Eric Mack ✉

Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.

© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

[debunkingtherightwing]

Walshed Up; November 21st, 2023

As per usual, Matt Walsh was in a rather transphobic mood on the 21st, this time arguing that anti-trans violence simply does not exist and that the trans day of remembrance is completely nonsensical. Matt seems to think that “I don’t like them” is a valid excuse to minimize violence a group of people that he doesn’t like. Before we truly pick apart the full episode, I’d like to provide some statistics that show just how full of shit this guy is;

According to Human Rights Campaign, at least 41 transgender people in the US were fatally shot in 2022. In 2021, 59 were shot.

71 percent of these people were killed with a gun.

This number is staggering given that trans people make up only 1.4% of the  population of America.

And just in case someone like Matt asks who the victims are, fear not, Human Rights Campaign has a full list of all of their names and their photos which I encourage you to check out.

Also just to let you all know, there’s a lot of viscous transphobia, misgendering, and general bad takes in this document. If that kind of stuff triggers you, stop here, it’s perfectly understandable why you wouldn’t want to go further. I also obviously don’t share these opinions with Matt and if you are trans, you're valid and amazing. People like Matt are the problem, not you. Now with all that out of the way, the actual episode Starts at 2:06

2:22 - 

“One of the easiest ways to find out what is important to a group of people is to look at who they honor in death. The ancient greeks built shrines to heroes and kings who won great battles, nearly every culture until recently has honored people for similar reasons”

It’s unsurprising that Matt Walsh, a guy who is very much an advocate for keeping up statues of Confederate Generals, views “winning battles” as the bar for values that society should uplift. In Matt’s world, winning battles and conquering people is the only way society can move forward. He believes fully in the “law of conquest”....at least as long as it’s not him being conquered. I wonder how Matt would feel if he was brutally uprooted from his home and 'conquered' only for people to say "Well, they won fair and square". This section also applies to his segment on thanksgiving.

2:58

“Don’t want to reward thugs, criminals, and other degenerates”

It’s extremely telling that Matt lumps trans people simply trying to live their lives without, you know, getting shot in with “thugs and degenerates”. Trans people aren’t thugs and degenerates, but they are four times more likely to become victims to them. Also, while we are on the topic of rewarding criminals let’s not forget that Matt has made a career out of defending them. How about the time he devoted an entire episode to defending Enrique Tario, the leader of the Proud Boys who had a role in planning the January 6th insurrection. Ooh, how about the time he ran cover for pedophile priests by saying the real problem is that there are too many gay preachers and that pedophilia in the church isn’t an issue. But yeah, keep talking about trans people.

3:05 -

“If you care about the future of this country, at least it’s disturbing”

Some lovely fear mongering here. Heaven forbid that we start accepting trans people, they’ll destroy our country. Again, this is the guy who ran cover for pedophiles and insurrectionists. 

3:50

“Of course the trans day of remembrance is very important because it had been about 3 ½ days since the last day set aside to celebrate trans people and you know we need to have at least two a week or it’s a genocide”

What in the actual fuck are you talking about Matt?! November is trans awareness month, similar to black history month, so of course there are going to be more trans related events. Furthermore, outside of this month there is only one other day devoted to trans people, the international trans day of visibility on March 31st. And even if there are a lot of trans related days, which there aren’t, who gives a crap?! Does it seriously affect him that much? The second the months over he doesn’t have to think about trans people for the rest of the year if he doesn’t want to, although that’s not gonna happen since Matt Walsh thinks about trans people more than most trans people do. Also I’m not even going to begin to unpack how stupid that snippy little genocide comment is. 

6:19

“What none of these statements from the Biden administration or these corporate media outlets ever get around to clarifying is this; why exactly are we honoring these 26 dead trans people who were killed?”

Picture if you will Matt, that white males with beards were a minority that frequently got killed in violent incidents. Wouldn’t you want people to honor people like you who died due to bigotry and hate?

7;13

“Like any other trans activists they lie about everything all the time” I could make an easy joke here but instead I’m gonna just link this completely unrelated definition here.

8;26 

“What you're not supposed to do is go and look at these cases. And I did that thing that you’re not supposed to do and here’s what I can tell you…there is not a single instance among these 26 so-called trans and gender nonconforming people where it has been proven that the killers were motivated by transphobia or sexism or ableism or any other ism or phobia.”

Interesting how Matt didn’t mention racism despite the large number of black transgender people on this list. You would think that racism would come to mind before ableism since disability plays, if any role, a minor one in this discourse whereas racism plays a major role. 

And how about Unique Banks who, along with another trans woman who thankfully survived, was targeted in a mass shooting and died. Considering that two trans women were in that house (one of whom claims to have a personal connection with the shooter), I doubt it was a coincidence. Besides, as mentioned prior, a lot of these crimes could have been racially motivated leading to them STILL BEING HATE CRIMES. 

9;17

“We know from the surveillance tape that Banko Brown, who is a female I believe who identifies as male, tried to rob the Walgreens. A security guard tried to stop her and then Banko started fighting with the guard and then when she turned her back towards the guard while threatening to stab him, the guard opened fire”.

First of all, I am sorry for this misgendering here. That’s Matt being a dick, not me. As for his argument, look, theft is a crime. You know what’s a bigger crime? Police brutality. Matt even is forced to admit that Banko was shot with his back turned. Surely this guard could have physically restrained him. While Banko threatened to stab the guard, he was unarmed at the time. Now you can say the guard didn’t know that, and this is true, but keep in mind that Banko was a homeless person who was only 5–foot–four whereas the guard was listed on the police report as six feet tall. Even if the guard couldn’t overpower him, he could have shot him non fatally. Thoughts on the actual incident itself aside, a much more constructive discussion might be around what drove Brown to homelessness (and whether or not THAT was caused by transphobia given that apparently he’d been experiencing it since he was 12). But Matt doesn’t want to talk about that because it gets in the way of his “Hurr, hurr, trans bad” narrative.

9;32 “Now it’s not exactly a story about a virtuous transgender person who was murdered simply for being themselves”

Who said Banko was purely virtuous? Nobody said he was murdered just for being himself. Matt’s rhetoric that the world is portraying these people as “heroes” is stupid as hell. The world is portraying them as what they are, victims of hate crimes and violence. Now I understand that not understanding nuance is a requirement for working at the Daily Wire, but here’s a newsflash, not everyone is purely good or purely evil!

10:08

“If you're thinking along those lines, you should know that it only gets worse from there. Another so called trans person on the white house list goes by the name Tortuguita”

Alright, so Tortuguita was killed by the police during the Stop Cop City demonstrations after he allegedly shot a state trooper. What Matt here doesn’t mention is that the city of Atlanta released footage that suggested that this trooper was injured by friendly fire. Whatsmore, they were shot 57 times which is clear overkill even if they injured this trooper. Furthermore still, autopsy reports showed that they had their hands up implying they were trying to surrender. What happened with this demonstration was a complicated situation for sure, but Matt is leaving out crucial details to make the narrative that all trans people are brutal thugs more easy to digest for his audience.

15;34

“Now at this point you have to take a step back and ask; did anyone on this list of 26 trans people die because of transphobia?”

See 8;26. Matt still hasn’t brought up racism by this point.

16;12

“Several others were out walking in the middle of the night in conspicuous locations like highways and motel rooms which suggests prostitution might be involved”

I go out walking at night all the time. I live in a big city and sometimes I like to stretch my legs a bit. That doesn’t make me a prostitute, but since I’m not trans Matt wouldn’t likely assume that I am a prostitute.

Even if they are prostitutes, is Matt saying it’s ok to murder prostitutes? Because it really sounds like he’s saying it’s ok to murder prostitutes

Most importantly HOW CAN YOU BE OUT WALKING IN A MOTEL ROOM!? That doesn’t make any sense. Matt says that walking along a highway is conspicuous, fine. But the inside of a motel room is a secluded space that you are renting out with the expectation of privacy. Not to mention the fact that a majority of the people on this list were disenfranchised in some way meaning it likely wasn’t prostitution so much as it was that a motel was a cheap option at the time. I get that motel rooms are commonly associated with prostitutes, but when you stop and think about Matt’s argument and the way he’s framing it, it doesn’t make any sense.

17;23

“21 year old Unique Banks meanwhile, died in a mass shooting so the odds that Unique Banks was targeted for being trans are pretty low.”

As mentioned before, a mass shooting seemingly targeting trans individuals. 

19;00

“Even if all 26 of these transgender people were killed by right wing bigots solely because they’re transgender, it would still in that case be safer to be transgender than any other demographic group in this country.”

This is such a ridiculous ass thing to say. 375 transgender people were killed in 2021 worldwide, over one a day, and the statistics show that the number of transgender hate crimes is rising. Furthermore, anti-trans legislation is on the rise making it a struggle to be a trans person in the United States. Not to mention all the loud bigots like hmmm…Matt Walsh to use one example, who whip conservatives into a frenzy regarding trans people leading to more violence and anti-trans legislation. It’s a cycle of abuse and Matt is very much a willing participant in it, and him acting like it’s so extraordinarily easy to be trans in the USA is shameful.

21;57

“You know, most societies throughout all of history would call this kind of celebration a form of cultural suicide. A guarantee that the worst among us will be rewarded and propagated until society itself can’t exist anymore. But the Biden Administration, corporate media, trans activists, they have a different name for this. They call it the trans day of remembrance.”

What a fitting way to end this segment. Matt basically reveals his insane belief that saying “Hey, maybe all these trans people being killed is bad” will lead to the total collapse of society. If Matt was around in 1964 he’d be saying that the civil rights act would lead to the total collapse of society.

23;53

“The Matt Walsh Flannel”

As a Canadian, please stop ruining flannel. 

26;09

“Even as the country is run by these globalists”

Hang on, let me check if I’m still watching Matt Walsh because I heard the voice of Alex Jones ringing through my computer there. The fact that Matt is now using Alex's favorite buzzword shows that while Alex Jones is way less polished than the Daily Wire and people like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro will deny up and down that they are anything like Alex Jones, they are spreading the same conspiracy theories at the end of the day.

27;16

“In the military it’s not nearly that easy (as leaving a corporate job). And so you are helplessly subjected to it (diversity training)”

Oh my god, the horror. It’s so terrifying that these poor soldiers are being subjected to….training to be a bit more empathetic to other cultures (many of whom include their fellow soldiers)? The way America treats its soldiers and veterans has historically been poor at best so I find it kind of amusing that diversity training is the horrific thing in the military that Matt is hanging his hat on. What’s more, the military is in clear need of diversity training. The military has a long and well documented history of fostering a racist culture in its ranks that should be addressed.

27;37

“So this is a guy in the army leaving the service and revealing how when he went to turn his gear they charged him $4,000…he was told by his superiors to leave it behind (in Afghanistan)”

There are some major holes in this guy's story. First of all, if this was the case there would be more than one guy reporting it and it most likely would be a national news story instead of some video being reposted by Matt Walsh and Chaya Raichik. What do you think the odds are that the military just decided to charge this one guy specifically on gear turn in day? Second of all, soldiers have to do kit layouts and training inspections. Between the TWO YEAR PERIOD this guy allegedly was told to leave his gear in Afghanistan, surely he had to do something with it post withdrawal. I’m not saying his story is impossible, but it seems highly unlikely. 

Even if this was a rare isolated incident, this isn’t exactly Biden’s fault as much as it would be an unfortunate side effect of the complications that arise from a large scale military withdrawal. Some things slip through the cracks and if this is the case it absolutely should be dealt with, but to blame it on the president is stupid unless Biden was directly behind the counter asking for the money.

32;50

“Do I want them (his kids) to be potentially sent off to die on foreign soil in defense of some foreign nation that has nothing to do with us”

While not wanting your children to die is obviously valid, Matt’s really telling on himself here. Gotta love how he doesn’t care about who dies in wars abroad because “Hey, they have nothing to do with us!”

(The next segment is stupid but relatively unimportant, just Matt talking about some news clip from MSNBC where one of the hosts is talking about Donald Trump being authoritarian. Trump is very clearly really authoritarian leaning and Matt’s arguments against it are really dumb as he seems to think Trump isn’t authoritarian enough. Matt comes pretty close to saying Trump “might as well be Hitler” because the media portrays him as Hitler anyway at one point, which is equal parts stupid and horrifying. Check it out for yourself if you wish, I guess it shows how much these Daily Wire people seem to live in an alternate universe, moving on)

45;43

“We have programmed them (teenagers) to look inwards, always…constantly staring back at themselves…thinking about how they’re feeling.”

In this segment, Matt’s using a New York Times Article (which doesn’t say what he thinks it says, and also is somewhat up in the air anyway due to some studies showing that suicide rates among teens actually plummeted during COVID.) to justify his long streak of mental illness denialism. Naturally, Walsh seems to hold the belief that teenagers shouldn’t think about their feelings and just “man up”. Don’t believe me? Here’s a tweet where Matt Walsh confesses that he doesn’t believe that depression and anxiety are real mental illnesses while fundamentally misinterpreting what depression and anxiety actually are. Where is Matt Walshes psychological training that allows him to make such a bold statement? Oh wait, I forgot, Matt just sees tweets and thinks “I’ve been sad and I didn’t complain about it”.

This rhetoric is extremely vile and dangerous. Think about all the parents who watch Matt Walshes show. Now imagine their child comes to them and confesses that they are suffering from depression or anxiety. Now instead of giving them the support that they need, these parents will likely tell them to toughen up because depression and anxiety are not actual mental conditions. Hell, let’s apply this logic to another group Matt likes to crap on. Let’s say a child of a Matt Walsh viewer comes out as trans to their parents. Chances are they won’t be accepted because remember, all trans people are degenerates.

Far-right clowns like Walsh never seem to think about how their actions affect other people's lives, mainly because they don’t care. 

47;51

“You’ve got young people that don’t understand that suffering and discomfort, anxiety, sadness, these are all normal.”

There’s that “I’ve been sad before so depression isn’t real” argument again. Now, sadness can be a SYMPTOM of depression but depression itself isn’t sadness. Depression is an overpowering and all consuming pit of despair that consumes a person with feelings of sadness and lack of motivation 24/7, it’s not something you just simply cry out. Depression is all encompassing, sadness is passing. 

49;59

“That’s what's at stake here. What’s at stake is a society of people that don’t know how to be people”

Acknowledging mental illness helps people be better people, not worse ones. I shouldn’t have to explain why this is the case.

50;20

“We need to speed the realization process up, because pretty soon we are gonna live in a country where literally everybody is on a psychiatric drug and has been numbed into basically unconsciousness”

Matt regularly does this thing where he makes ridiculously grim predictions for the future of humanity. You see, if we begin doing things that Matt doesn’t like such as acknowledging mental illness and trans people, society will begin to implode upon itself until total anarchy ensues. 

(The next segment is the “comments section”, stealing Brett Cooper's MO but whatever, which is where Matt just snarkily replies to selected comments on his videos. Unimportant)

59;16

“Well you know, Thanksgiving is a wonderful time. It’s my favorite holiday. It’s a time for celebration, gratitude, time to gather around the table with your family…unless you are a deranged leftist in which case you will insist that thanksgiving is not so simple. There are nuances, as you like to say”

Here we go, since it’s Thanksgiving it's time for Matt to engage in some defense of the brutal treatment of the American indigenous population. Lovely. 

1:04;32

“I guess they’re right. How many times, countless times, that we’ve all been sitting around the thanksgiving table…and then everybody says ‘I’m thankful for murder and death.’ ” 

Matt, nobody is saying that people are intentionally celebrating the genocide of native Americans. What people have a problem with is the downplaying of the sheer brutality of European colonizers towards the natives that goes on every Thanksgiving. This is such a ridiculous argument when you think about it. “We shouldn’t be forced to confront our problematic history because we don't think about it. After all, what you don't know can't hurt you". Give me a break.

1:05;55

“I don’t know if you saw there…the woman's name was ‘chief ladybug’ and she was dressed as a ladybug. This is apparently what the day of mourning consists of. First of all, I don’t think it’s appropriate to dress up as a ladybug for the day of mourning festivities…the tonal shift doesn’t feel right”

Despite saying “first of all”, Matt never does bring up that second point. Anyway, if Matt cared to look into the group he’s mocking in this segment he’d find out that ladybugs are considered a symbol of healing in some native American cultures. Considering that this is, as Matt calls it, “a day of mourning”, a symbol of healing is actually a pretty fitting symbol for healing from the traumas of the past. But Matt doesn’t know this because he relates to different cultures like a sneering middle school bully. 

1:08;35

“First of all, it’s true that the traditional story of thanksgiving that they used to tell young children in school decades ago is simplistic. And there’s probably a certain element of legend to it”

I can assure you that a lot of schools in more right-leaning states still teach that quote-on-quote traditional story of Thanksgiving so don’t give me this “They used to tell it decades ago” crap, as if nobody tells it anymore. Secondly, myths and legends aren’t real. Having a myth taught in school is insane. What if they started teaching the legend of Zeus and the Greek gods as pure fact? Matt then continues to conflate history with myth by saying that “Stories are passed down and details are changed to fit the key message” implying that he seems to relate to ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY as if it were a myth. 

The issue here is that since many Americans are taught that America is this perfect nation that does no wrong and treated the natives wonderfully without getting that worldview challenged, something which Matt and his cronies want to preserve if their complaining about critical race theory is anything to go by, many people go through their lives without being educated about the horrors of the past. And how are we expected to learn those lessons if we don’t understand the realities of the past? 

Anyway, that’s all for Matt Walsh's deranged program. I could have gone a little deeper into his bizarre thanksgiving take but I’m tired of hearing him speak and I’m not crazy about the idea of transcripting Matt’s ghoulish white man's burden tier arguments. If you want to check it out for some godforsaken reason, it’s on his Twitter. Happy Thanksgiving to all you Americans out there and I’ll see you in the next one!

#bad takes #alt-right #right wing bullshit #right wing extremism #matt walsh #transphobes

[a-daks]

thinkin about how PFL was formed as a magic bullet to end the war but we never actually saw them fight aliens. They were just mercenaries who gave up freedom of movement and negotiation for the comfort of blissful ignorance and moral superiority.

Blood money is just as red when you close your eyes.

#rvb #red vs blue #I would love to see someone point this out to wash and carolina #how could they act so noble #they only got indignant when Alpha was mistreated #no one had issue killing insurrectionists

[florrickandassociates]

TGF Thoughts: 5x06- And the two partners had a fight...

I’ve been waiting for this episode for nearly a decade, and I didn’t even realize it. More under the cut. 

(This is very long! Please fight me on stuff and disagree because I just wrote all these words about this episode and I STILL want to talk about it more, it was that interesting!) 

This is the second episode in a row to start off with a TikTok video. 5x02 and 5x03 both ended with elevators. Is there some sort of pattern they’re going for here?  

This case—which is, it’s important to note, in Wackner’s court—is about TikTok content creators and copyright laws. Probably not enough material for a full case, but definitely an interesting theme to explore.

Marissa doesn’t have her laptop volume off (which I suppose makes sense; she was just playing the TikTok videos) and a notification sounds. She shuts the laptop.

Wackner rules that the profits made from the TikTok dance must be split evenly between the guy who stole the dance for his video game and the creator. The thief does not like this, removes his moose costume (oh, yeah, did I mention they’re in costumes again?), and starts shouting that he’s going to sue and then moons the whole court. Okay!

He follows through on his threat, and next thing we know, Liz, Cord, Wackner, and Marissa are meeting to discuss strategy.

Liz’s computer makes the same noise Marissa’s did; she punches some keys.

Liz points out that Wackner’s biggest problem is that real judges are not going to like Wackner playacting as a judge. “I’m not playing a judge. I am a judge,” Wackner says. Liz notes that Wackner’s court lacks any way of forcing people to comply with his rulings, but real court can shut him down.

I guess whatever keys Liz punched did not silence the annoying notification sound.

She asks Wackner to try not to become the focus of the court case, since that’s how they’ll lose. “This is why I started a court,” Wackner says after Liz instructs him to only answer yes or no and to wear a suit.  

Liz asks Marissa to keep Wackner in line. She says she’ll try.

Now we are at the Black Lawyers Association, where there’s a panel with leaders from Chicago’s four top black law firms. For reasons passing understanding, DIANE is on this panel. This makes absolutely no sense (I mean, unless only white people were involved in this decision, and even then!) and I’ll only excuse it because they mention later that it makes no sense for Diane to have been on this panel.  

I wonder why everyone else’s firm gets named but not Diane’s.  

Diane also gets the first question, which is, pointedly, about opportunities for black lawyers. Her phone starts making the annoying notification sound. Ever heard of silent mode??  

The annoying sound happens every five seconds at the RL offices. According to David Lee, it happens twenty times an hour, but it seems like more than that! He, for some reason, goes to Carmen to ask how to stop the sound. He also wants to know what it is. Carmen explains that it is “Dawnk” which is a new messaging system within the company.  

On Dawnk, you can talk about anything you want and be anonymous. Who approved this?! In one frame, I can see there’s someone complaining about someone being promoted too fast because of “the future is female bs.” In another, someone is upset that they are anonymous and wants to use their real name (only Jay, who is otherwise absent from this episode, seems to have figured out how to turn this anon mode off).

Sorry, before I can get on board with this plot, I just need to note for the record how phenomenally stupid the idea of using anonymous messaging software within a company is. This was obviously not going to end well! It’s like workplace YikYak... (remember YikYak?!)  

David Lee hates the idea of a messaging software; Carmen says the associates prefer this.  

Jay is being very nice in the chat and defends the person who was promoted “too fast”.

“Who’s ‘Anonymous Crab’?” David Lee asks. Well, I think the fact they are “anonymous” should be a bit of a hint there, David.  

Anonymous Crab asks, “How the hell did this happen??! How did Diane end up at a Black Conference speaking for our firm?” Good question, Anonymous Crab.

Anon Crab also shares a video and David Lee doesn’t understand how to press play. Carmen plays it for him. Diane looks really awful on the panel. No shit! David Lee seems to enjoy Diane looking bad, even though he should be able to connect the dots between Diane looking bad and potential for bad things to come for the firm...  

Not only does Diane get quizzed about why she’s running a firm that is still insisting on calling itself a black firm, she also gets questions about her insurrectionist husband. “He was completely cleared of those charges,” Diane notes. Oh, hey!!!!! Remember how last week I said I’d be more surprised if that was the end of the FBI nonsense than if it continued? I am surprised!! And relieved. Mostly relieved. Dealing with the consequences of that high profile, relationship-straining ordeal is so much more interesting to me than any FBI machinations.  

Next Diane is asked if Kurt just took a job to revitalize the NRA. She hasn’t heard of this yet. I’m glad she’s getting grilled on this stuff... it is about time.  

There’s a hint that Carmen will be representing Mr. Rapey next week. I assume that’s why there’s a line where David checks in with Carmen on Mr. Rapey’s case?  

Anon Platypus says, “I heard she didn’t even have seniority. She just jumped past other black partners to become our name partner. It’s crazy!!!” Anon Platypus is correct—technically. Diane was a name partner at one of Chicago’s top firms before joining RL, so while she skipped the line... that doesn’t seem to me like the PRIMARY issue in bringing her on. The primary issue is that bringing on someone that senior from outside the company is more similar to a merger than a promotion, and Diane’s partnership meant changes for the firm.  

Other anonymous animals also don’t like Diane. One calls her clueless; another says that “Liz needs to do something about this.” Someone responds to that, “Liz will never do it on her own,” which is an interesting sentiment I want to come back to in a little bit.  

“What is Black Twitter?” David Lee asks Liz out of the blue. “People on Twitter who are black and talk to each other,” Liz responds. David Lee asks how he can find it. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you,” Liz jokes. And to think Jay said Liz wasn’t funny!  

The Dawnk conversation shifts and now everyone’s ragging on Julius for representing Kurt and just generally being a Trump voter. There’s a lot of heated and racial language I’m not going to type here, enough to make Julius spit out his coffee and storm down to the associate floor.

He goes to Devin, who I’m not sure if we’ve seen before but is high ranking enough to have Lucca’s old office, to get information on the anonymous posts.

Anonymous Bison says, “Unpopular opinion: I blame Adrian.” Hey, Anon Bison, let’s be friends! I am with you. Adrian is the one who brought Diane on, who encouraged them to lean into Julius’s Trump connections, and who pushed the firm to pursue profit over everything else. Diane and Julius aren’t blameless (though I don’t actually think defending Kurt is a bad thing) but if there’s someone who actively strategized to make RL what it is today? Adrian all the way.  

In what world does noting that Julius is pissed in an anonymous message do ANYTHING to stop people who are pissed at him? If they were that concerned about him being pissed they wouldn’t have said anything in the first place.  

Liz and opposing counsel talk over each other in court until the judge makes them stop. I think we’ve seen both the judge and opposing counsel this season, making me wonder if there’s a bit of a COVID bubble situation going on here with the guest stars.  

Judge Farley jokes about “contempt cards” that go up in value and Wackner, of course, is all, “Wow, I really love that.”  

Liz, whose entire strategy was to not let on that anyone calls Wackner a judge, refers to Wackner as “Judge Wackner.” Come on, Liz! (I buy that she’d slip up—there's no one in the world I wouldn’t believe slipping up—but ugh!)  

How did the opposition not realize that they could make this about Wackner’s “crazy court” by referring to him as Judge Wackner? You’d think they’d be all over that.  

Judge Farley looks SO unhappy that Wackner would refer to himself as a judge; it’s phenomenal.  

Now Marissa stumbles over stuff because she’s, for some reason, speaking in court. I bought Liz’s dumb moment more.  

The plaintiff’s strategy is to make it look like Wackner is of unsound mind, and they’ve got video evidence. Remember how Del, Cord, and Wackner all chatted in the RL elevator? Well, turns out that lead to a reality show about Wackner for Del’s streaming service. Sounds about right.  

I don’t really think Wackner cares about attention or anyone else’s motivations... I think he just likes the idea of budget and an audience and a platform.  

Liz meets Del for a romantic dinner and asks him when he was going to tell her about Wackner’s show. Del doesn’t understand why she’s upset. He doesn’t get why he would’ve needed her permission to go into business with Wackner. (I don’t think he’s wrong from a business POV, but from a relationship POV, he totally should’ve let her know!)  

Liz says he should’ve asked because they’re using it against her in court. “That is unfortunate, baby, but this streaming show could be really good for Wackner. It’ll draw attention to his court. And... as I say that...that sounds... okay, look I’m sorry,” Del realizes. I like that he sees that Liz has a point. He goes on to note that he would be totally open to Liz trying to go into business with any of his acquaintances, and I think he genuinely means it.  

Del notes that this is what “power couples” do. Oh? So they’re an official couple? Don’t power couples also associate in public and not hide their relationship from their colleagues?  

This is the place where I note, yet again, that it is always going to be more interesting to see a relationship that feels realistic than to see a relationship that feels like it takes place in a vacuum.  

Liz doesn’t want Wackner becoming popular. Del argues someone else would’ve made the show if he didn’t, and that “disrupters gotta disrupt.” Oh God.  

Are we going to remember that Liz has a child at any point this season?  

Diane is reading the Dawnk discussion at home. It’s still lively even after work hours. The associates appear to be discussing the vaccine before someone changes the topic to “the Diane situation.”

One associate notes that the partners probably aren’t happy about Diane either and just have to vote her out. Kurt arrives home as Diane reads this, reacts to the loud music Diane has playing, the open alcohol, and her general demeanor and asks if they’re getting drunk. “Are we getting a job with the NRA?” she counters.  

Turns out it’s not entirely untrue about Kurt and the NRA. They want him for a new role. It would pay $167,000. I can’t decide if I think that’s a lot (objectively that’s a high salary) or not very much at all (isn’t Kurt the top of his field?)  

Kurt notes he doesn’t have a job so he’s considering it. “Diane, our politics are very different,” he starts. “I know,” Diane says. “I’m, lately, struck by just how different they are.”

“I would just like one week when I don’t have to defend you,” Diane says in frustration. Kurt doesn’t even know what that means at the current moment.  

“You’ll tell me when they offer you the job?” Diane asks. “They may not offer it,” Kurt says. “No, they will,” Diane says, because she knows that it’s basically a done deal already.  

In the middle of the night, Diane turns to Kurt and tries to ask him a question. That wakes him up. She asks who he voted for in 2020 and he doesn’t answer. Uh oh.  

Dreaming now, Diane sits up and asks, “Hello? What do I do?” More on that later...

The HR nightmare known as Dawnk is still going wild the next day at the office. (Seriously, with HR that strict, the anon feature would’ve been disabled the second the first semi-controversial comment was posted.) Everyone’s obsessed.  

The partners, minus Diane, all gather in Liz’s office to discuss Dawnk (and the topics of conversation on Dawnk). Madeline says they should ignore it. I say they should make STR Laurie shut it down and be the bad guy. It is nonsensical that this workplace would continue to allow Dawnk to continue! In addition to being an HR nightmare, it’s also a drain on productivity if everyone’s constantly glued to it, and I imagine STR Laurie cares about profit more than anything else.  

But like I really don’t get why Madeline says they can’t censor their associates. Of course they can shut down the app if they want to! Someone put the app there in the first place, no? I do understand not wanting to look like you’re violating free speech (even though taking away anonymous commenting in the workplace would not be a violation of free speech) but I highly doubt it would be only the partners complaining. Tina, whose promotion was called into question, would be complaining too. Anyone trying to get work done, or anyone who didn’t like the toxic culture, or anyone who was uncomfortable with a joke made, would be complaining. There are more than enough reasons it would be perfectly acceptable to take the anon commenting away.

Now the partners are fighting about Kurt’s case too. “Diane is not responsible for her husband,” Liz says when Madeline says that Diane should’ve known better than to get involved. Um, Liz, Madeline is right. Diane isn’t responsible for Kurt’s actions but she’s sure as hell responsible for volunteering to represent him.  

“In the real world of this firm, Diane’s billable hours speak for themselves,” Liz notes when a partner tries to call Diane’s unsavory associations into question.  

“The rest of us put in the hours too, for the record,” notes another partner. I’m sure... but do you put in DIANE’S hours and have DIANE’S client list? My guess is no. If Diane weren’t the biggest earner at the firm we wouldn’t be having this debate. She’d just be gone. She’d never have been at the firm to begin with.  

“Liz, when I joined this firm, it was because of your father’s legacy. It was about Black civil rights, activism, justice. That’s what people talked about in meetings. Now, people talk about billable hours, million-dollar clients, corporate payouts. Now, I know it’s not your fault. That was Boseman’s vision and we were trying to survive the Trump years by bringing in white lawyers, but those days are gone. They’re done with. And I miss being a strong black firm,” Madeline says. Everyone but Liz (and probably Julius) seems to agree with that.

This is one of many interesting facets of this issue. When Madeline argues against Diane, she’s not just arguing that she wants a black person running the firm for optics. She’s not saying that Diane-but-black would be an acceptable choice. She is saying she wants RL to be the firm it was at the very very start of the show—a firm committed to social justice, not maximizing revenue. A firm that didn’t just accept every client that came their way because they love profit. A firm that stood for something. So my question is: Does Liz want that firm?  

Liz is hard to read throughout this whole plot, and I think that may be intentional. Liz isn’t a manager by training—she was an AUSA who suddenly became a name partner at a firm (if you want to talk about seniority and skipping the line, Liz is a way better example than Diane—you can even through some nepotism, twice over, in there). She doesn’t seem to have a clear goal for her firm other than maintaining the status quo and keeping power. Liz not taking a stronger stance from the start (either accepting that they are no longer going to be a social justice-oriented firm or pushing to get them back to that place) allows these kinds of questions to fester. It’s my hope that this becomes text instead of subtext pretty soon, ‘cause this is the kind of thing that if it’s subtext for too long will start to feel like bad writing/Liz being conveniently clueless. It’s way more interesting if Liz is just not yet good at being a manager... because she is learning on the job.  

Anyway. I think the ideal solution here is probably that Diane and Liz continue to run RL: A STR Laurie Company (the fact they’re owned by corporate overlords kind of makes any decision about RL’s mission moot) since Diane wants to do that and Liz seems to be content where she is. Madeline and the other partners, instead of trying to force STRL to let them pursue the cases they want, can accept pay cuts and go start their own firm. Maybe they can even team up with Barbara Kolstad!  

None of that’s to say that the dilemma here is easily solvable, nor is it to say that Diane shouldn’t consider stepping down. I’ll say more on that later. My point here is just that this issue is much deeper than just if Diane is on the letterhead or not. As long as they’re owned by STR Laurie and have clients like Rivi, Diane stepping aside would just be a band-aid.  

(And that, I think, is intentional... they’ve been building the “why are we even representing x?” tension pretty consistently this season, so I imagine it’s on the writers’ minds.)  

Diane stumbles across the secret partner’s meeting and knows something’s up.  

“You gotta handle this, Liz. You cannot have a white partner leading a black firm. We’ll lose clients with that kind of hypocrisy” Madeline insists after Diane heads back to her office. I’ve already said it, but just to say it in a less rambly way: Madeline is right, but she’s right IF AND ONLY IF the goal is to be a black firm. So, Liz, is it?  

(They’ll lose clients, sure, but which ones? They’ll lose the clients Madeline wants while Diane continues to keep bringing in business and Rivi and Cord and Wolfe-Colman and their elk* stay put.)  

*I know this is not the correct word; see 6x17 of TGW

David Lee has also noticed the meeting in Liz’s office and thinks this may be the “beginning of the end.” Diane glares at him and he says he was just joking.

Diane schedules a meeting with Liz. Liz’s assistant doesn’t know Diane by voice, adding to her frustration.

Credits! We are 22 minutes in! This might be a record if 5x01 hadn’t saved the credits til the very end!  

I’ve already written more than I did last week by a couple hundred words.  

Two interesting things about the credits. First, this episode was written by Aurin Squire. Forgive me if I’ve mentioned this in a prior recap (I know I thought about it but can’t remember if I deleted), but I think Aurin Squire and Davita Scarlett are key to why TGF and Evil are both always so good. They’re the two writers other than the Kings who are in both the TGF and Evil rooms, and they both REALLY seem to be on the same wavelength as the Kings. I imagine that having four people who are in both rooms helps with managing both at basically the same time.  

(This isn’t where I wanted to go with this bullet point, but I may as well shout out how great Evil is this season, too! It also just aired an episode by Aurin Squire about the lead white female character realizing her privilege!)  

Second, this episode was directed by Brooke Kennedy. I didn’t know that going in, but seconds before the director credit popped up, I was thinking to myself, “this episode feels like it’s going to be a very important one. I bet Brooke directed it.” I was very pleased to see her name appear.  

(For anyone who doesn’t know, Brooke is an EP who’s been involved in nearly every episode of both Wife and Fight and she tends to direct important episodes that require a lot of familiarity with the characters. She directed 5x15 of The Good Wife and she’s done a bunch of the premieres and finales that Robert King hasn’t claimed for himself.)  

Diane and Liz meet in a bar to catch up. Diane’s still staring at Dawnk. Liz takes her phone and silences the notifications. “Who thought that sound was pleasing?” Diane complains. “All day in court today,” Liz commiserates. Carmen had to teach her how to silence the notifications. Liz, you’re using an iPhone, there is a very easy to use switch that silences your phone, like you would need to for court. I know you know this.  

(I think Diane, despite her complaining about the sound, is captivated by Dawnk.)  

Liz orders soda water instead of a drink. I assume that’s intentional, perhaps because she knows this isn’t going to be an easy conversation or a long night of drinking? She has wine in an earlier scene.  

I love that Liz and Diane chat about Dawnk even though there’s no real plot reason for them to spend this much time discussing it. Little moments like this make me believe Liz and Diane are actually colleagues who get along well and make management decisions together.  

Diane asks if Liz thinks Dawnk actually increases productivity. Liz laughs—she does not. But she knows the associates would “riot” if they got rid of it. She’s right. I still think they can get rid of it without too much blowback. But at least they’re acknowledging this.  

“What do the partners think?” Diane asks, very intentionally shifting the subject. You can hear it in Christine’s voice and see it in her body language—Diane is looking for an opportunity to talk about what she wants to talk about.

“God, Madeline can’t even open it. She’s lost her password three times. She finally just gave up,” Liz says. This is concerning! Madeline should know how to open an app! Probably not unrealistic, though. When you’re that senior, you probably don’t need to know how to use a messaging app. And messaging apps can be confusing sometimes. Like, I still don’t understand how to use Discord.  

The captions have a line I can’t hear in this scene—Liz (I presume?) saying “You know, ‘cause it’s Madeline.” This makes it sound like Madeline is a little less than competent, no?  

“Thanks for sitting down with me, Liz,” Diane says in a quite serious tone. “Of course. So, you’re wondering about the meeting today?” Liz immediately understands. “I am.” “Yeah. Uh, it was about Julius. He’s being harassed on Dawnk,” Liz explains.

“Okay, and I couldn’t be a part of that?” Diane wants to know. “He’s being harassed because he’s defending your husband,” Liz explains. Diane doesn’t seem surprised (perhaps because she, too, would have read these messages?). “Well, that’s unfortunate. We’ve represented people far worse than Kurt, who, by the way, was found innocent,” Diane argues like they’re having a very different conversation. It’s one thing to represent rapists and murderers and drug lords—and I’d argue that the same people pissed about Kurt are also pissed about them!-- and another for your leadership to be married to/close friends with someone who you believe participated in the events of 1/6.  

“I’m not saying it wasn’t. But, January 6th. I mean, we watched the Confederate flag make its way into the Capitol building. You know, those people that Kurt didn’t want to turn over to the FBI, those people. They don’t even want us alive,” Liz says better than I ever could. I think it’s important that Liz mentions a POV that likely wouldn’t have ever crossed Diane’s mind here. This is a small glimpse of why it could be so important to have black leadership at a black firm. Would Diane be thinking about the implications of having the Confederate flag in the Capitol? Probably not in the same way that Liz instantly does.  

“Well, not all of them,” Diane Lockhart, who is suddenly an idiot, says. Liz looks at her drink and grimaces, and Diane realizes she’s said something wrong. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. I’m certainly not defending those people. They’re all despicable traitors.”

“And now, that’s what people are saying about Julius,” Liz explains. “And me?” Diane asks, though she already knows the answer. Liz doesn’t want to answer that. Before she can say anything, Diane asks if she’s being pushed out.  

“No. Not pushed out. You’re a name partner. You can’t be pushed out,” Liz clarifies. Diane knows there’s a but. “The partners just think you should do the right thing,” Liz adds.

“And step aside?” Diane asks. “No. Stay in the firm. Stay as an equity partner, just step back from your managerial role,” Liz says. Diane pauses. “Liz, I... I pull in the big clients. I... I get the billable hours. But still, ‘maybe you should step aside.’ Weren’t we going to form a firm led by women?” Diane argues. Oh, wow, I have so much to say.

First, I completely understand why Diane doesn’t want to give up her title or her power. She's Diane Lockhart! She’s been one of the best in her field for decades. She’s not wrong about the clients and billable hours. It’s just that every time Diane decides to be at this firm, making arguments about how she should retain her role in power, she’s saying that she values her own career/appearance more than the values she claims to care about. And every time she refuses to take a back seat or threatens to walk rather than sacrifice, she’s saying she’ll only through her weight behind her colleagues and their mission if she gets credit for it. To be clear, I don’t think it would be the shittiest decision in the world if Diane decided to walk, to take her clients to a new firm and to let RL become the firm Madeline and the rest envision. It’s asking a lot of her to give up that power and prestige. The interesting part of this dilemma is, to me, that Diane claims to value working for RL and to be active in the fight against racism... but the second she’s forced to choose between that fight and her own power, we all know what Diane is going to choose. There was never really any doubt. Diane doesn’t have to be on the forefront of this fight if she doesn’t want to... but she can’t claim to be invested in the fight if she isn’t willing to sacrifice, at all.

Second, LMAO at this firm led by women idea. Every time Diane talks about her firm led by women idea it sounds sillier! Not because a firm led by women is silly, but because Diane has a habit of saying this like it is a shared goal and each time she references it, it sounds less and less intersectional. For example, when she says it here, she’s essentially saying a firm led by women only has meaning if one of those women is a white woman (specifically a white woman named Diane Lockhart). Who’s to say that Madeline wouldn’t be made partner in Diane’s absence? Or Barbara (haha) or someone else we haven’t met? There is a very real possibility that Liz and another woman could run the firm and Diane would still be unhappy about it. Diane doesn’t ask Liz for a commitment that if she does step aside, her replacement would be female (idk if it’s legal to make this commitment but you get my point). Diane acts like asking her to step aside is already a betrayal of the female led firm.  

“And I hope that it will be,” Liz says, basically hinting to Diane that there are women in the world besides her.  

“But black women?” Diane says, agitatedly. “Diane, I... am not voting against you. I promised you that I wouldn’t. But there is growing anger here. They want to address it at the next partners' meeting. So just think about it,” Liz responds.

I think Liz is totally fair and forthcoming in this scene and strikes pretty much the right tone for this initial conversation. She gives Diane a choice and is honest with her.  

“You’re a good person,” Liz adds. Diane does a double-take, understanding that Liz is actually telling her “You are a good person, so you know that you absolutely need to step aside.”  

“No, I’m not!” Diane responds. As I said: Diane already knows what she is going to do. She needs to do mental gymnastics to excuse her actions, but her mind was made up before the question was even raised. (She did warn Liz in 5x01 she was going to fight any attempt to push her out.)

“Yes, you are,” Liz says again. She may as well be saying, “No, don’t try this. Everyone will think you’re in the wrong if you push this.”

Later, at home, Diane is doing some stretches on the floor and groaning. I don’t know if this scene is meant to show her age, but it does remind me that Diane is nearly 70 and started off this show by planning to retire. Retirement doesn’t seem to be an option for her here. (That’s fine by me; she is a workaholic whose career is her life.)

Kurt asks Diane what she wants to do. She says she wants to keep her name on the letterhead and “keep what I fought for.” Heh, I was just re-reading something I wrote about Cary a while ago and I’d pointed out that when Alicia and Cary discuss merging with what’s left of LG, Cary is also concerned about his name on the letterhead because even though he wants to change the world, he also cares about having power. It’s almost like Diane and Cary are really similar characters! (They are! That’s why the Diane/Cary moment in Hitting the Fan is so good!)  

Diane calls her position as name partner a fight against “gender and then age discrimination.” She isn’t wrong, especially when you consider how meaningful it likely was when she and Stern went into business together. It’s very easy for me to forget that when Diane has such an attachment to fighting for white women’s rights, it’s not just because she’s out of touch and selfish: it’s because that was something she personally had to fight for. That doesn’t make it okay that she seems to forget the concept of intersectionality (which she’s definitely aware of) the second anything challenges her own power, but it does explain why a firm run by women is so important to her.

Diane is not wrong that she deserves name partnership and she’s not wrong to not want to step aside. Yet, starting a war to retain her position as name partner is a CHOICE. The best thing for Diane to do here (morally, I mean) would be for her to step aside and throw her resources behind the firm’s new leadership, using her experiences and stature to benefit the firm (this would also be a way for her to cement her legacy and mentor a new generation of leaders). The best compromise, I think, would be for someone to leave the current firm—either Diane or the dissenting partners, probably Diane since Liz seems to agree with Madeline—without any hard feelings. The worst possible choice is for Diane to insist that this firm is hers and force every single tension at the firm to come to a head, screwing over Liz in the process and potentially permanently ruining the firm’s status as a black firm. Sooo... yeah.  

(I say it could ruin the firm’s status as a black firm because if Diane’s a white partner who happens to be there and the firm is mostly black, that’s one thing. If Diane is a white partner who fought all of the black partners to assert her own dominance over their firm... that’s hard to come back from. She can’t really call herself an ally, can she?)  

“Diane, this is the first time I’ve ever heard you sound defeated,” Kurt says. “Because I can’t win this,” she says. She insists she can’t even after Kurt tries to cheer her on (of course he does, he probably thinks having an all black firm is just identity politics and therefore worthless).

“You just don’t want to,” Kurt says. He is not wrong. This is a winnable fight for Diane. Liz is smart but Diane has the experience, the clients, the power, and her own reputation to use in this fight. Liz has her dad’s name (and I don’t think it would come to this, but Diane knows how she can pretty easily destroy Liz’s dad’s reputation). (Liz is great, don’t get me wrong. Liz is also someone who happened into a name partnership because her dad was important.)  

“It’s bigger than that. To fight this would go against every fiber of my being,” Diane says. “Every fiber in your being is about winning,” Kurt counters. Oh, damn. That’s a succinct way of putting it. He is completely right. Diane would love to think that every fiber of her being is about her commitment to social justice and women’s rights. It is not. If that were the case, would she really be a lawyer with clients like ChumHum, Bishop, Sweeney, Rivi, and Wolfe-Colman? We all know the answer to this. We all know Diane likes social justice a lot but winning, wealth, and power far more.

When I first watched TGW, now nearly a decade ago, I was a high schooler and my media diet mostly consisted of Desperate Housewives and a bunch of procedurals like Bones and Castle. The thing that hooked me about TGW—more than Alicia’s journey, more than anything—was that TGW never had easy answers to anything. Will tells Diane in 1x07 that “nothing here is pure and nothing here is simple” and that basically blew my mind. TGW always made it obvious that Will was morally gray, which fascinated me. But I struggled with Diane. Here was this woman who looked like she should be someone so impressive and inspirational I could write a college admissions essay about her (I did not, but that was my frame of reference at the time)… but the decisions she made... never seemed all that great?? I couldn’t comprehend it.  

When Blue Ribbon Panel aired in March 2012, I wrote to a friend, “Diane confused me a little bit tonight. She didn’t approve of Alicia standing up to the panel, and yet, she’s supposed to care about people, the truth, morality, etc etc. I never understand Diane’s motivations– is her philosophy to help others whenever it wouldn’t hurt her, personally, to do so?”  

At that point, Diane compromising her values struck me as something confusing because I wanted to think of her as a powerful role model and icon, and I didn’t know what to do with someone who looked like and often was role model material who also sometimes betrayed her values for her own self-interest. I had my analysis of Diane down: she her motivations ARE to help others whenever it wouldn’t hurt her, personally, to do so. All I needed to do was remove my question mark from the end of that thought.  

I promise I’ll move on from quoting myself, but I also want to share a paragraph I wrote about Diane in March 2014 (during season five of Wife) because it says what I want to say now as well as anything I could write today:

Diane is driven and ambitious. Her initial actions can come as the result of intense emotions, but given enough time and space, Diane will always be strategic and pragmatic when it comes to business. She’s spent her entire life putting her career first, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. That she found love is just icing.  Kurt aside, the two most important things to Diane are advancing her own self-interest and doing good in the world. These objectives appear to be a contradiction, and often, they are. Nine times out of ten, when it comes down to it, she’ll choose herself. I mean no judgment here: another central aspect of Diane’s character is that she’s upfront about her choices and stands by them, and this sort of moral ambiguity makes for a great character.  

The reason I quote myself here is not to be like, ha ha, I was right. It's because I think this episode is even more powerful because I can copy/paste in stuff I wrote nine years ago or seven years ago (oh god, 2014 was seven years ago?) verbatim and it can hold up as analysis. Both Fight and Wife have always implied Diane’s selfish side and given more than enough evidence to make a convincing argument about it, but they’ve never really engaged with it directly (and if you ask the social media teams for either show, Diane is a #queen who can never do wrong). This episode interrogates something that’s always been an unpleasant part of Diane’s character, and I’m so fucking glad about it.  

(I don’t think anyone’s accusing Diane of not growing as a person but it crossed my mind that this could be seen as lack of growth. I don’t think it is. I wouldn’t expect Diane to change. Her life and career are so set that growth on this without a LOT of struggle on her part would feel like a cop out.)  

Another reason I quote myself is to highlight how friggin’ character driven this episode is. I’ve seen a lot of people saying this episode felt like old-school TGW—and it absolutely does; that’s also how I felt—and I think that’s because it’s so character focused and meaty.  

But back to this scene. Kurt tells Diane that if she doesn’t try to win she should just give up entirely. Seems like bad advice.  

“Kurt, I appreciate the pep talk, but I don’t think the way you think. I cannot put my interests above a whole group of people—black people—just so I can keep my position.” Sure you can, Diane. You just don’t like to believe that about yourself. You know how Diane says to Kurt earlier that she knows the NRA will offer him the job? That is how I feel about this scene. The writers go to great lengths to explain where Diane’s head is at when she decides to fight for her partnership, but they’d have needed to do ten times more to get me to believe Diane would step aside voluntarily.  

Kurt basically thinks that Diane should fight because if her competition is actually talented enough to deserve name partnership, they should fight her for it. He’s missing the point here.  

“But a black person’s talent has always been valued less than mine,” Diane counters. The fact she knows and understands this makes her decision even less forgivable.  

Kurt knows he’s going to lose this argument and tries the same strategy he did on 5x01: telling Diane she’s right and should just give up and leave the firm. Diane doesn’t like that answer either.  

Given how much I loathed Jay’s hallucinations, I was expecting that when Diane asks Kurt in the middle of the night if he believes the election was stolen and then sits down at her fireplace to have a chat with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I’d loathe what happened next. I did not! I actually really liked it!  

I think this is more effective than Jay’s hallucinations, at least for me, because it's less gimmicky. It isn’t played for humor or quirk, and it gets to the character-driven point a LOT faster. This feels more similar to Alicia imagining Gloria Steinem is telling her she’s good enough to be on the Supreme Court in 6x03 than it does to Jay’s hallucinations.  

I LOVE that Diane would dream that RBG would advise her on her work dilemma. Dream!RBG tells Diane that “any law firm would be insane to let you go.” (I don’t wanna spend too much time fighting dream logic, but I feel like the operative phrase here is ‘let you go’. Are the RL partners seeing this as letting Diane go? Or are they just trying to get at a different goal and Diane is in the way, and they don’t really care if Diane has top connections or billable hours? It’s almost like the other RL partners want a firm that stands for something and all Diane has stood for thus far at the firm is profit...)  

Diane pushes back on RBG and RBG shares her “real” thoughts. This is where this sequence clicks into place for me, because it’s working on a LOT of levels. Obviously, Diane is going to imagine that her hero tells her to do exactly what she wants to do (the aforementioned mental gymnastics). But without losing the level on which this is dream!RBG and filtered through Diane’s POV, the writers are also... criticizing RBG for not stepping down herself!? It’s fascinating and pointed and makes her the exact right choice to play Diane’s conscience.  

Dream!RBG shares her life story and notes how she was always asked to step aside, but she didn’t and that’s how she got to be RBG. “Don’t step aside because someone wants you to. Don’t step aside for politics. Men are always asking women to step aside so a man can go first,” RBG advises Diane. Even Diane knows that this isn’t exactly equal to her current situation-- “Even though I’m being asked to step aside so that a black person can take my place?” she counters.  

So RBG asks if Diane can still do something “for women” if she says. Diane says yes, and RBG says Diane should do that instead of stepping aside—she should do whatever it takes. That’s the wrong takeaway, Diane! If you want to do something for women then a) you could do something for the black women at your firm lol or b) you could politely remove yourself from the firm, encourage your most profitable clients to stay on if they are wanted by the other partners or and/or c) you could choose to bring your talent and your stature to a non-profit. But, of course, these options aren’t on the table. There’s a reason the options are leave and lose everything or stay and fight for name partnership, and it’s that Diane cares about maintaining control of what she sees as hers and winning more than she cares about anything else, including or even especially her desire to help women.

And also what women is she even helping at RL? Herself? She’s certainly not helping Wolfe-Coleman's rape victim. The closest she’s recently come to helping women is when she told off Weinstein’s lawyer and tried to start #MeToo... in a DREAM.  

The score for the next sequence sounds so familiar and I can’t place it. At first, I thought it was Hitting the Fan, but I’m not sure if that’s the right reference (also, damn, the Hitting the Fan score is REALLY GOOD!). I think it might be similar to 5x14 when Alicia’s pacing back and forth in the hotel room.  

Anyway, Diane starts meeting with her (white, male) clients to tell them about how she’s stepping aside. She hasn’t run this past any of the other partners, of course. She’s doing exactly what they want, in the most malicious and calculated way possible.

One of her clients is a fracking client who wants to win over democrats by being a RL client.  

Diane is so sneaky here! No one said that if Diane steps aside as partner she can’t handle the day to day on her cases... yet that’s what Diane tells this client since she knows it’ll make him mad!  

Diane makes a point of showing her fracking client that his new representation will be Madeline. He doesn’t know anything about Madeline, and, as Diane was likely counting on, he isn’t confident in having a black woman he’s less “comfortable” with on his cases. I don’t know if Diane was going for the racial element here, but... if you’re really concerned about continuity, you don’t have this meeting without having Madeline ready to jump in and show she’s read up on the client. I’m sure it’s possible that Diane meant nothing in giving this client only Madeline’s name, title, gender, and race to go off of, but is that likely?  

She hands another (white, male) client off to Julius, whom she describes as a “very competent lawyer.” What an introduction. She says she’s not retiring and the firm “just wants to let some other people step forward into a name partner position.” Diane knows how to sell clients on changes they won’t like. She knows this isn’t how you do it.  

That phrase, “comfortable with you” is doing a lot of work, no? Both clients so far have said it, and while it might not be racially coded... it’s racially coded.  

“Who should we call about it?” the clients ask. Diane can barely keep herself from smiling.

They call David Lee, immediately. He takes the call in the middle of a meeting, while someone else is talking—he is David Lee, after all.

The information on the screen in David’s meeting is quite interesting. It’s about STRL’s plans for RL. Here’s how the firm is described: “RL is a high-end mid-sized Chicago law firm that can consolidate its specialized brand within the American POC community and expand its national and global brand with STR Laure.” Soooo... yeah. For the corporate overloards, RL needs it to be just black enough that it appears like a black firm, but they care more about appearances and branding than anything of substance. (Notice how it says “POC” and not black? Notice how there’s this mention of national and global presence that doesn’t seem to be on the RL partners’ mind?)  

There’s an area called room for growth, listing top clients—entertainment law, fracking, the DNC, and civil cases against CPD. Interestingly, two of these are Liz’s clients (entertainment and DNC), one is Adrian’s (civil cases against CPD), and only fracking is Diane’s... so maybe I didn’t give Liz enough credit earlier.  

There’s also a plan of action that includes partners working with STRL and the 15-20% layoffs we already know about. I don’t think this text is meant to include any new info, but I assume one of the writers had a hand in writing it and it’s a good way of confirming things that had been subtext.

Wackner’s reality show looks... well, like his court, because his court always looked like a reality show. Cutting together the most out-there moments (audience reaction cards, Wackner singing “Come on defense!”, Wackner renaming himself Judge Shmuley for a day) makes Wackner look pretty bad.

Hey Liz, I thought you figured out how to silence your notifications for Dawnk permanently. (It’s not all high-stakes controversy over on the “R&L General” channel—the anon animals are now discussing a broken coffee maker.) (Though even this discussion is a bit political! Anon Owl says they bet STR’s coffee machine works, and Anon Dolphin wants to know why they don’t have more coffee maters at RL.)  

There’s also a dance party—which Marissa participates in—in the footage of Wackner.  

Hey, wouldn’t Marissa have reported the cameras to Diane and Liz? I feel like she’d know they’d want to know.  

Wackner ends up on the stand to offer context for the strange-looking clips. In a smart move, Liz offers to just let Judge Farley ask questions—she knows that’s what Farley is really after.

Unsurprisingly, Wackner’s context makes his outrageous practices seem much more reasonable. There’s a scoreboard to keep lawyers aware of where they’re standing so they can gauge instead of guess at Wackner’s thought process. Shmuley is to honor a recently deceased relative. The costumes are to prevent bias and cut down entitlement.  

Plaintiff’s counsel argues that Wackner is biased and the case continues even though Wackner’s (mostly) won over Farley.  

The case next turns to something about copyright law that sounds downright silly—the point is to underline that Wackner’s court makes more sense than real court on some things. It makes more common sense and it’s less racist.  

Del gets called into court. It’s interesting how these scenes are blocked together rather than spread out. The same is true of Diane’s scenes—after credits, we have Diane and Liz at the bar, Diane at home, Diane talking to RBG, Diane making moves, and then David Lee becoming aware of the situation. Then we have several consecutive court scenes (all of which feel like they have natural break points) of Wackner stuff. If I had to guess, I would guess that it’s to keep the momentum going. The Diane stuff plays better when it feels like a continuous chain rather than a subplot.  

(The only thing that suffers is that I have no idea why there’s a court scene about copyright law right after the plaintiff argues they have evidence about Wackner’s bias? I probably wouldn’t have even noticed if the scenes had been spread out more.)  

Now Cord’s involvement with Wackner’s court becomes an issue. It’s funny they need a witness to bring up Cord when Cord is SITTING IN THE COURT ROOM.  

Apparently Cord is financing a company that would compete with the plaintiff’s company and this means Wackner is biased. As the next scene will explain, Cord wasn’t even aware of his investment in the rival company, and Wackner certainly wasn’t. But, regardless, it’s going to be challenging to prove that neither Wackner nor Cord knew about the investment, and the opposition is going to go after Cord’s financial records, which no one wants. Liz suggests a continuance, which would give Wackner about a year to keep working on his court before they have to come back to this issue.  

Wackner HATES the idea of delays and is all, THIS IS WHY I HAVE MY OWN COURT and again, he isn’t wrong.  

David Lee needs to see Liz, now. Liz and Diane meet in David Lee’s office and stare at their phones. Diane says she has no idea what the meeting is about, even though she basically set up the meeting herself.  

“What the fuck is going on?” David Lee says. Diane feigns surprise and asks for more specifics. David Lee reveals that four top clients have called with issues about their representation shifting.  

Liz knows what’s going on and aggressively says, “Diane, thoughts?” “Nothing from me. I met with my clients. I just told them of a restructuring that I was being told about,” Diane says like it’s no big deal. Liz and Diane both know that Diane forced this meeting.

“Is this a power play on your part?” Liz asks Diane. “No, it’s just updating my clients,” Diane says for David Lee’s benefit or commitment to the bit or something. It is definitely a power play, and a nearly unforgivable one done to an ally.  

“David, Diane was told about frustration at the partner level about a white woman being a name partner in a black firm. And apparently, this is her response,” Liz explains. “I just told our clients what was going on,” Diane defends. David Lee doesn’t really care about what happened: he cares about one thing, and that thing is money.  

“Diane’s a fucking name partner until STR Laurie says she’s not. No one decides until I decide. Now stick your race war back in its bottle,” David Lee says. I mean, basically, yeah, that’s what happens when you merge with a huge firm that only cares about profit.  

I like that this ends up coming back to STRL. You can’t really have a conversation about RL’s identity without also acknowledging that RL is not independently owned. Sure, STRL will care at some point if RL loses its clout with the black community—but like most companies, they care about guaranteed loss of profit and the short term more than long-term what-ifs. It may sound cynical, but if Madeline and all of the other partners quit, STRL would simply put all their effort into keeping Liz or even just the Reddick name and would then hire black lawyers who think more like Julius than Madeline to keep the reputation. STRL does not give a shit about helping anyone, and that’s what Diane counts on.  

I do not believe the version of RL that Madeline wants can exist when they’re under STRL’s control. I believe the version Diane wants (not really a black firm) can, and I believe the version Liz seems to want (one that’s mostly black and occasionally social justice focused) can, but this issue won’t go away until STRL does.  

Sure, Diane, keep telling yourself you’re fighting the good fight out here.  

(Perhaps “The Good Fight” is a more ironic and fraught title than it originally seemed.)  

“That was a mistake. I am on your side, and you don’t even realize it,” Liz tells Diane afterwards. Interesting that Liz says “I am” and not “I was.” I would love to know what Liz really thinks about this situation and hope we get more from her POV next week. I think Liz wants to run a black firm, but I also think she wants to run a successful firm and likes working with Diane. Liz is on Diane’s side about as much as she can be while still advocating for Diane to step down.  

Pissing off Liz is a very interesting move for Diane here, too. Diane wants to fight the one person who is on her side for control of a firm that doesn’t want her there, and she’s convinced herself this is the smart move! Kind of wild. What does Diane think the day to day will look like? I think I said this above, but in forcing this war, Diane is all but guaranteeing that if she wins, RL will only be a black firm in that STRL will say it’s one to make more money.

Julius and Diane chat next. Julius says he wants to start his own firm—with Diane. Her only reaction is laughter, but, like, this is probably happening. I’m not sure why she laughs. It’s not quite a case of unfortunate timing (Diane could’ve done this before she blew things up, and it’s not quite too late for Diane to commit to leaving and smooth things over with Liz), so maybe it’s just a “well, this sounds familiar!” laugh.  

(If you think of Previously On as 5x00 instead of 5x01, that would make this episode 5x05, which would make this a Hitting the Fan callback. I can also do mental gymnastics!)  

The episode could end there, but it doesn’t. We’ve still got a Wackner plot to resolve. Cord has some people beat up the plaintiff as a way of enforcing Wackner’s verdict and getting the real court case to go away. Marissa picks up on what’s happened faster than Wackner does, unless Wackner just doesn’t care.  

It’s subtle, but throughout this episode, there’s a little bit of a trend towards Marissa becoming more skeptical of Wackner. She tries to keep him under control in court, tries to reason with him about the continuance, and in this scene, she just looks entirely displeased and alarmed every time she’s on camera.  

We get another scene with RBG. “It’s different for me than it was for you,” Diane says. She notes that unlike RBG, she herself is up against another “dominated culture.” This other dominated culture is “black lawyers.” (I’m sorry, I just find the way she says “black lawyers” funny, partially because she says “lawyers” instead of people and partially because Diane seems insistent on only occasionally remembering that Liz is both black and female.)  

I can’t tell if this scene was originally intended to close the episode or not. The blocks of scenes, the way the episode seems like it should’ve ended with Julius’s laugh but instead has three more scenes (guy getting beat up, Wackner’s court, this one), and the fact the Kings said this episode had to be almost totally rethought because both Christine and Audra had concerns about the original script all suggest to me that maybe some of the scenes in this episode got shuffled around to keep momentum and hit the right notes at the right time.  

Diane acknowledges that RBG could’ve stepped down and we wouldn’t have a conservative majority on the court now if she had. RBG insists that she wouldn’t have stepped aside even if Obama had guaranteed that her replacement would be black. She says it’s because she only knows what she can do—not what others would do. And “what you know is always better than what might happen.”  

Even if this was originally supposed to happen earlier (Diane saying she doesn’t know what to do makes me feel like it way), I like that we get to see it’s still weighing on Diane after the fact.  

(Also, I have seen some comments about, for lack of a better phrase, the girl power energy of these Diane and RBG scenes. No! These scenes aren’t a tribute to RBG! She’s in these scenes because she didn’t step down and can thus help Diane excuse her own actions! These scenes aren’t exactly anti-RBG, but they are certainly critical of some of her choices!)  

The topic shifts to Diane and Kurt’s relationship (another reason to put this somewhere other than the main part of the episode; this would slow down the momentum of the middle part of the episode) and its similarity to RBG’s friendship with Scalia.  

Tbh, I don’t think a friendship and a marriage are all that similar on this front and I’d be curious to see Diane think about RBG/Scalia in the context of her potential partnership with Julius rather than her marriage.

RBG basically tells Diane to stay with Kurt. Diane thanks her, and then, back in reality, tells Kurt to take the NRA job so he’ll be happy—and then she’ll just sue him. Okay, that feels like an episode ending, so I am REALLY curious about all the re-writing and re-structuring that happened in this episode and what did/didn’t get touched. I can’t make up my mind about what feels out of place.

So we start out with Diane feeling like it might be the right thing to explore whether or not it still makes sense for her to be with Kurt, a suspected insurrectionist and future NRA employee, and Diane feeling like she wants to help her friends and partners at her mostly black firm do good in the world. And we end with Diane doubling down on her relationship with Kurt, giving her blessing for the NRA job, and fucking over her colleagues because she wants to keep her own power. Dark! I love it.  

This episode does this all without making Diane entirely unsympathetic, which is astounding. While I think Diane knowingly makes choices that further her self-interest over the values she (claims to?) hold and I am definitely NOT Team Diane on her decisions in this episode, this episode could easily have been less interesting and complex. It’s understandable that Diane would not want to step aside from a firm she’s helped build—who would? It’s understandable that Diane might not feel the passion for a black firm the way she does for a female firm. It’s understandable that Diane might not want to blow up her marriage, despite her political differences from Kurt. This episode allows Diane to be just sympathetic enough she never becomes a flat villain, but never sympathetic enough that someone could mistake this episode for one that shows Diane as a morally pure hero. Personally, I love that in a TV show. That’s the exact kind of writing that made me love Alicia Florrick enough that I still spend a considerable amount of time thinking about her character arc even though TGW ended half a decade ago. It’s what’s been missing from a lot of TGF episodes for me, and why I’ve said that TGF seems like a show more about theme than character. It’s why I’ve written—oh god, TEN THOUSAND words—about this episode.  

I have no clue what’s going to happen next, but I hope it includes more character-driven drama (ideally with a lot of good material for Liz) and not a lot of firm-jumping shenanigans.  

#tgf thoughts #the good fight

[stillness-in-green]

Ahistorical, Absurd, and Unsustainable (Introduction and Part One)

An Examination of the Mass Arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front

INTRODUCTION

The title states my premise here: the breezy way My Hero Academia presents and resolves the mass arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front is ludicrous. If taken as presented and allowed to stand without being further addressed, it serves as a breaking point from which the series will be incredibly hard-pressed to recover. Why, you ask?

From a logistical standpoint, it strains credulity. From an ethical standpoint, it suggests deeply troubling problems with the state of Hero Society. From a thematic standpoint, it unravels whole portions of the narrative’s spine. I’ll be looking at each of these facets in turn to discuss the questions they raise which My Hero Academia has not yet seen fit to answer. Many in fandom don’t seem to be thinking about it too hard, so I’d like to lay out—in exhaustive detail—all the reasons I find this plot element so wildly out of touch with causal reality.

Please note that while they are discussed when relevant, this essay is not principally about the named characters in the League of Villains or the erstwhile high command of the Metahuman Liberation Army. The sorts of consequences Shigaraki Tomura or Re-Destro would and should be facing in a courtroom are orders of magnitude beyond what Random Liberation Warrior X would be, but it’s the mass numbers of Random Liberation Warrior Xs that this essay is most concerned with, as they are the ones most in danger of being swept under a rug and forgotten by the series in its current state.

Further, be advised that this essay in its full form is both very long (about 21K words excluding Sources and Further Reading) and will contain extensive discussion of real-life Japan—comparisons to historical events, minutiae of its legal and carceral systems, and general cultural views on criminality. This will include references to imprisonment, government oppression, and incidents of terrorism both real and in the context of My Hero Academia.

Being as it is about quite a recent event in the series, it will also contain heavy spoilers all the way up through the most recent chapter as of this writing, Chapter 310. It likewise contains spoilers for the spin-off series My Hero Academia: Vigilantes up through Chapter 95.

The essay will be posted in parts on tumblr and in full on AO3. For the tumblr posting, I will provide links to other tumblr posts as I reference them; however, as I would like this to actually show up in the tags, outside links containing my sources and further reading will be provided in a separate post following the conclusion of the essay.

Lastly, I spent an entire month writing this as a fan who is sympathetic to the villains in general and the MLA in particular. If your response to the very concept of this essay is anything to the tune of, “Who cares what happens to a bunch of disgusting quirk eugenicists?” know that you and I have radically different views on the MLA, and the role of the justice system in general. You are, of course, welcome to read the essay anyway, but, having said my piece about the MLA and their relationship with quirk supremacy elsewhere, I will not be engaging with arguments or gotchas on that subject here.

PART ONE: The Facts at Hand

Before we get too deep into things, let’s lay out the basic facts: how many people are actually involved in the arrest, as well as some comparisons to real-life events to contextualize that number and provide some referents for the issues the arrest raises.

Re-Destro gives the numbers of the Metahuman Liberation Army as 116,516. A lot of people go on to die in Deika, though we’re never given a solid count. The biggest batch we see killed in a single go are the press of sixty or so people Shigaraki decays, then the sixteen-ish Toga drops, though some of those might possibly have had quirks that allowed them to survive. Any number of people certainly died as well simply in the moments we didn’t see, and who even knows how many were caught in the radius of Shigaraki’s last attack.

Further, there may well have been a measure of organization bleed when the MLA became the PLF (though I imagine trying to leave was a very dangerous proposition, giving an additional reason to stick it out on top of the general cult-like mindset the MLA displays); likewise, I find it hard to believe that there wouldn’t have been some deaths at the Gunga Villa, be it from Gigantomachia’s departure, Geten cutting loose, or combatants—be they hero or comrade—overcompensating somewhat in the middle of a chaotic melee.

I suspect it’s overestimating the depletion, but for the purposes of simplicity, let us call it 115,000 remaining members at the time of the raid.[1]

We are told that, in all, 16,929 people were captured at the villa—just about 17,000. 132 escaped in the confusion; this is a fairly negligible number, save for the fact that it includes high-ranking advisors, but not Machia and those of the Front that were with him.

We are further told, and I quote, “Their bases scattered around the country were hit too, and the sympathizers rounded up.” Horikoshi did not provide any solid numbers for this,[2] but if we’re to assume that it is just the rest of the group (more on the logistics of that bit of spycraft later), “the sympathizers” would be 98,000 additional people.

However, 98,000 may be a significant underestimation. It’s based, after all, on a number Re-Destro cites to describe “warriors lying in wait, ready to rise to action.” This begs the question: is Re-Destro quoting the entire membership of the group, or only those who actually are ready to take action? In other words, does his number account for non-combatants? Is he counting young children? I tend to assume the MLA doesn't have a retirement age as such,[3] but if they do, does his number account for the elderly?

How many more people might be “sympathizers” to the PLF insomuch as they are e.g. the six-month-old infant daughter of an MLA couple? What about the ninety-year-old man in the retirement home whose only real act of war these days is tying up the phone line at City Hall to complain about repressive quirk use laws? How about the fired-up fifteen-year-old that was going to get their official code name next month, just in time to join the first wave of attacks? If he’s being literal in his usage of “warrior,” the actual count of the MLA could easily be twice as high as the number he actually gives.

But okay, maybe Re-Destro’s number does include absolutely everyone. Maybe he’s just being rhetorical—maybe, in his mind, even the six-month-old is waiting to rise to action; she’s just going to have to wait a bit longer than the rest, is all. For simplicity’s sake, let’s stick with the numbers we have: a low-end of 17,000, a high-end of 115,000, captured not merely in a single day, but allegedly in the span of a few hours.

I’m sure I don’t need to stress that that is a lot of people. But how many people is it, practically speaking? Is there a precedent? Anything we can look to for guidance on how this kind of thing would go in real life?

Comparative Analogues

The PLF is tricky to categorize for the purposes of real-life comparison, especially compared to how they’re treated in-universe. In some lights, they resemble a protest movement; in others, a terrorist group. Just looking at the way the government reacts to them—and certainly in terms of their combat capabilities—they might as well be an all-out insurrectionist uprising! Below, I’ll examine a handful of historical incidents that cover that spectrum; they will continue to provide useful reference points throughout the rest of this essay.

The March 15 Incident

In the first half of the 20th century, Japan saw a huge uptick in socialist and communist activity, much to the general dismay of the ruling powers. In response, they passed a series of laws commonly referred to as the Peace Preservation Laws, designed to better enable authorities to suppress political dissent and freedom of speech, particularly that of leftists and labor movements.

The Japanese Communist Party was founded in 1922, but outlawed in 1925. This merely drove members underground, however, from which position they pointed supporters towards the numerous other parties with more legally tolerated leftist policies that had cropped up in the wake of the JCP’s dissolution. Following the February 1928 General Election (the first in Japan held with universal male suffrage), those parties supported by the JCP saw enormous gains in representation in Japan’s National Diet. Alarmed, the Prime Minister declared the mass arrest of known communists and suspected communist sympathizers. Accordingly, on March 15, 1,600 people were arrested throughout Japan.

Over the course of twenty years, some 70,000 people would be arrested under the auspices of the Peace Preservation Laws, the majority of them in 1925 through 1936. The laws would eventually be repealed by American occupation forces after WWII, and the JCP allowed to operate openly once again.

The Rice Riots

In 1918, an inflation spiral had driven the price of rice out of control, exacerbating economic insecurity and hardship. Farmers were being paid a pittance of the market value of their crop by rice buyers and government agents, while urban consumers were being charged an exorbitant price for the staple food, as well as a great many other consumer goods, and their own rents. In response, a series of riots ripped across Japan in late July through September. Beginning with peaceful protesting in a small fishing town in Toyama Prefecture, the unrest escalated to involve riots, strikes, looting, even bombing in demonstrations that reached major cities like Tokyo and Osaka. The scope was and remains unprecedented in modern Japanese history, seeing some 25,000 people arrested.

The Sarin Gas Attacks

If you’ve heard of any of them, it’s probably this one. On March 20, 1995, members of the cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas on five different Tokyo Metro trains in the middle of morning rush hour. Thirteen people were killed and over 5500 injured, about a fifth of them moderately to severely so. If not for small errors in the production of the gas and the rudimentary distribution method thereof, loss of life might easily have been catastrophically higher.

Aum Shinrikyo was a doomsday cult, but the motives for that particular attack were much baser than bringing about the Apocalypse: at the time, the organization was under police investigation for its involvement in the kidnapping of a public official. Its leader, Asahara Shoukou, hoped that the attack would divert police’s attention from a planned raid.

It did not do so; police executed raids on numerous of the cult’s compounds, arresting many of its senior members both immediately and over the course of the following months as the investigation unfolded. In all, over 200 members were arrested of an organization that counted its membership prior to the attack as numbering 11,000 people in Japan.[4]

The February 26 Incident

There have been a significant number of uprisings and violent protests in Japan’s modern history; when looking for a representative example, I focused my attention on the military coups of the 1930s and 40s, largely because they took place in what was closest to the modern Japanese legal context.[5] Of that subset, I chose the February 26 Incident for the severity of the government response. The others disintegrated before they could be properly carried out or were met with sympathy for the dissidents despite the obvious illegality of their actions. The February 26 Incident, however, was when they finally became too troublesome to dismiss, and the Emperor himself ran out of patience.

In this period, the Japanese military had become drastically factionalized into two main groups—an ultra-nationalist group, largely powered by a group of young officers, which supported the Emperor and wanted to purge Japan of Western influences, and a more moderate group mainly defined by their opposition to the above faction.[6] Occurring in 1936, the February 26 Incident involved the young officers, believing that they had tacit approval from higher-ranked officers of their own faction, launching assassination attempts against the nationalists’ most prominent enemies in the government (six assorted Ministers and former Ministers in the Emperor’s Privy Council and the Diet) and a bid to seize control of the administrative center of the capital and the Imperial Palace, after which they planned to demand the dismissal of more officers and the selection of a new Cabinet.

The seven ringleaders had convinced eighteen other officers to lend their forces to the attempted coup, a total of around 1,500 men, calling themselves the Righteous Army. Several of their assassination attempts failed, however, and while they succeeded at taking the Prime Minister’s residence and the Ministry of War, they did not manage to secure the Palace. The outraged Cabinet demanded the Emperor take a hard line with the rebels, and by the 29th, the Righteous Army was surrounded by 20,000 government troops and 22 tanks. In this hopeless situation, the officers dismissed their troops; two committed suicide (a third attempted it unsuccessfully) and the remainder were arrested by military police.

International Examples

For obvious reasons, I prefer to limit my examples to events that happened in Japan. However, I will also be briefly referring to a few international incidents of mass arrest, taking place in India, the U.S., and Egypt, respectively.

In the following parts, I'll use these facts and comparative analogues to take a closer look at what readers were told became of the Paranormal Liberation Front.

Part Two

-----------------------------------------------------

Footnotes (Part One)—

[1] Over three months’ time, they likely gained some new blood also, simply in the course of their usual recruitment tactics. You don’t get an underground organization that size by sitting back and waiting for people to come to you, after all. I don’t know a practical way to calculate that, though, so just bear it in mind for when I talk about new members later.

[2] Possibly because he was aware that 17,000 people captured in one fell swoop was difficult enough to swallow without adding on more than five times that number.

[3] We do, after all, see some very aged people fighting in the streets of Deika.

[4] They were considerably more international than you may have heard. They had 50,000 members at the time, some 30,000 of them based in Russia.

[5] The Meiji Constitution was ratified in 1889; universal suffrage (for men) was granted in 1925. The modern constitution was enacted in 1947.

[6] More moderate, mind, in the context of the Imperial Japanese military. Neither of these factions had any time whatsoever for leftist movements, hence all those suppressive crackdowns.

#bnha analysis #bnha meta #paranormal liberation front #meta liberation army #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #bnha #bnha spoilers #my writing #plf arrests #stillness has salt

[chargetheintruder]

Also Note: MORE ANGRY.

Mr. President--

You had to know, going into this, that at least one of Trump’s muppets on the Formerly Supreme Court was going to exist to defy you and be insubordinate in a goddamn crisis that he and his deliberately prolonged.  You had to have seen this coming. So here’s what I’ll say, in all candor: GET OFF YOUR ASS ON THIS.  Stop doubling down and covering for Supreme Court insubordinance.  For that matter, stop caring about Pelosi’s own insubordinance as well.  Stop using the phone and/or internet to communicate with the Supreme Court and/or Pelosi if need be. Hire someone infected with COVID-19 to handle all communications with said people directly and face to unmasked and contagious face.  The idiots will get the point someday?  That ARTICLE II was meant for borderline perpetual crises like these. In short, work WITH the CDC, clarify that you’re “doing what the latest evidence demands” and that you are, on a non-partisan basis, EXTENDING the eviction moratorium until this time next year, retroactive to this past August 1st.  And also tell them (particularly the insubordinate of the Supreme Court) that you as President will DECLINE the privilege of  being sued by the Court until after your Presidency ends.  The office gives you the right to do this, and Article II gives you permission to save the Union (not the Johnny-Reb Confederacy THEY believe in) by any means necessary in a crisis.

Then you order the National Guards and State Police of each state to assist and make sure the remainder of the tenant/landlord assistance funds are SPENT down to the last penny EXACTLY as they should be.  Again, this is a crisis, and you’re trying to prevent societal collapse here.

THIS IS NOT A GODDAMN REQUEST.  Seriously, I shouldn’t have to spoon feed this to you but apparently you guys can’t fucking lead without sucking someone’s cock, so better mine than Lindsey Graham’s.  At least you know I’m coronavirus negative.

No, really, my prostate, bladder and kidneys are all about to call it quits and kill me instead of taking one more leak.  I don’t get to eat or sleep without constant pain and disruption, never mind get out and run errands.  I have the money to pay rent but my landlord/Public Housing Authority refuses to allow for online payment of rent, go figure.  None of this would be so urgent if I could pay my fucking rent that landlord cunts worship so goddamn much, on the goddamn internet.  Nah, these parasites demand checks and money orders and other signs you’ve had to expose yourself to the Han Disease that THEY invited here, ain’t that right Joe?  Because it’s SO fucking urgent that these Insurrectionist Landlord Scum from out of state corporations SUCK UP to their Han Disease Pet Clientele that THEY invited here to displace CITIZENS AND VOTERS.  Whole thing’s rotten all the way down to hell, but what do you care, am I right?

Ugh.  I can’t believe I’m feeling a need to cyberbully a sitting President to actually DO what he said he’d do.  What even IS this 21st century in progress?  Can I just get help for my health issue and maybe get OUT to a better place to live without risking homelessness during a goddamn plague?

#POTUS President Joe Biden reinstate the eviction moratorium under ARTICLE II get a spine already what even I'm half dying here

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The Secret Service warned in December 2020 that the far-right group Proud Boys planned to "kill people" during the January 6, 2021 march to the US Capitol.

That's according to internal emails released for the first time Thursday by the House Select Committee investigating the Capitol riot.

"They think that they will have a large enough group to march into DC armed and will outnumber the police so they can't be stopped," said one email sent a little after 9 p.m. ET on December 26, 2020.

"Their plan is to literally kill people," it continued. "Please please take this tip seriously and investigate further."

The email also noted that the Proud Boys had detailed their plans on a number of right-wing websites and forums.

In addition to the Secret Service, the FBI also warned of violence at the Capitol on the day of then-President Donald Trump's "Save America" rally.

An internal situational report warned on January 5, 2021 that pro-Trump insurrectionists were planning to wage a "war" at the US Capitol the next day, The Washington Post reported last year.

The Bureau's office in Norfolk, Virginia, issued the warning, saying that it "received information indicating calls for violence in response to 'unlawful lockdowns' to begin" on January 6 in Washington, DC, The Post reported.

According to The Post, the FBI report cited an "online thread" that "discussed specific calls for violence," including one that said: "Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal."

#us politics #news #business insider #2022 #donald trump #trump administration #capitol riot investigation #capitol riot #proud boys #alt right #insurrectionists #the washington post #fbi #department of justice #us secret service #domestic terrorism

[artielu]

[Yes, this is long, but it is worth your time to read the whole thing.]

January 6, 2021 (Wednesday)

Today the Confederate flag flew in the United States Capitol.

This morning, results from the Georgia senatorial runoff elections showed that Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff had beaten their Republican opponents—both incumbents—by more than the threshold that would require a recount. The Senate is now split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats, so the position of majority leader goes to a Democrat. Mitch McConnell, who has bent the government to his will since he took over the position of majority leader in 2007, will be replaced.

With the Democrats in control of both Congress and the Executive Branch, it is reasonable to expect we will see voting rights legislation, which will doom the current-day Republican Party, depending as it has on voter suppression to stay in power.

Trump Republicans and McConnell Republicans had just begun to blame each other for the debacle when Congress began to count the certified electoral votes from the states to establish that Democrat Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. The election was not close—Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million votes and the Electoral College by 306 to 232—but Trump contends that he won the election in a landslide and “fraud” made Biden the winner.

Trump has never had a case. His campaign filed and either lost or had dismissed 62 out of 63 lawsuits because it could produce no evidence for any of its wild accusations. Nonetheless, radical lawmakers courted Trump’s base by echoing Trump’s charges, then tried to argue that the fact voters no longer trusted the vote was reason to contest the certified votes.

More than 100 members of the House announced they would object to counting the votes of certain states. About 13 senators, led by Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), agreed to join them. The move would slow down the count as each chamber would have to debate and take a separate vote on whether to accept the state votes, but the objectors never had anywhere near the votes they needed to make their objections stick.

So Trump turned to pressuring Vice President Mike Pence, who would preside over the counting, to throw out the Biden votes. On Monday, Trump tweeted that “the Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” This would throw the blame for the loss onto Pence, but the vice president has no constitutional power to do any such thing, and this morning he made that clear in a statement. Trump then tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”

It seemed clear that the voting would be heated, but it was also clear that most of the lawmakers opposing the count were posturing to court Trump’s base for future elections. Congress would count Biden’s win.

But Trump had urged his supporters for weeks to descend on Washington, D.C., to stop what he insisted was the stealing of the election. They did so and, this morning, began to congregate near the Capitol, where the counting would take place. As he passed them on the east side of the Capitol, Hawley raised a power fist.

In the middle of the day, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani spoke to the crowd, telling them: “Let’s have trial by combat.” Trump followed, lying that he had won the election and saying “we are going to have to fight much harder.” He warned that Pence had better “come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country.” He warned that Chinese-driven socialists are taking over the country. And he told them to march on Congress to “save our democracy.”

As rioters took Trump at his word, Congress was counting the votes alphabetically by state. When they got to Arizona, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) stood up to echo the rhetoric radicals had been using to discredit the certified votes, saying that public distrust in the election—created out of thin air by Republicans—justified an investigation.

Within an hour, a violent mob stormed the Capitol and Cruz, along with the rest of the lawmakers, was rushed to safety (four quick-thinking staffers brought along the electoral ballots, in their ceremonial boxes). As the rioters broke in, police shot and killed one of them: Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran from San Diego, QAnon believer, and staunch Trump supporter. The insurrectionists broke into the Senate chamber, where one was photographed on the dais of the Senate, shirtless and wearing a bull costume that revealed a Ku Klux Klan tattoo on his abdomen. They roamed the Capitol looking for Pence and other lawmakers they considered enemies. Not finding them, they ransacked offices. One rioter photographed himself sitting at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk with his feet on it.

They carried with them the Confederate flag.

Capitol police provided little obstruction, apparently eager to avoid confrontations that could be used as propaganda on social media. The intruders seemed a little surprised at their success, taking selfies and wandering around like tourists. One stole a lectern.

As the White House, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security all remained silent, President-Elect Joe Biden spoke to cameras urging calm and calling on Trump to tell his supporters to go home. But CNN White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins later reported that she spoke to White House officials who were “genuinely freaked… out” that Trump was “borderline enthusiastic” about the storming of the Capitol because “it meant the certification was being derailed.”

At 4:17, Trump issued his own video, reiterating his false claims that he had been cheated of victory. Only then did he conclude with: “Go home, we love you, you’re very special.” Twitter immediately took the video down. By nighttime Trump’s Twitter feed seemed to blame his enemies for the violence the president had incited (although the rhythm of the words did not sound to me like Trump’s own usual cadence): “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

Twitter took down the tweet and banned the president for at least twelve hours for inciting violence; Facebook and Instagram followed suit.

As the afternoon wore on, police found two pipe bombs near the headquarters of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C., as well as a truck full of weapons and ammunition, and mobs gathered at statehouses across the country, including in Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota, California, and Georgia.

By 5:00, acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller issued a statement saying he had conferred with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Vice President Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and had fully activated the D.C. National Guard.

He did not mention the president.

By late evening, Washington, D.C., police chief Robert J. Contee III announced that at least 52 people had been arrested and 14 law enforcement officers injured. A total of four people died, including one who died of a heart attack and one who tased themself.

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone urged people to stay away from Trump to limit their chances of being prosecuted for treason under the Sedition Act. By midnight, four staffers had resigned, as well as Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger, with other, higher level officials also talking about leaving. Even Trump adviser Stephen Miller admitted it was a bad day. Quickly, pro-Trump media began to insist that the attack was a false-flag operation of “Antifa,” despite the selfies and videos posted by known right-wing agitators, and the fact that Trump had invited, incited, and praised them.

Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis laid the blame for today’s attack squarely at the feet of Trump himself: “Today’s violent assault on our Capitol, and effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule, was fomented by Mr. Trump. His use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice.”

The attempted coup drew condemnation from all but the radical Trump supporters in government. Former President George W. Bush issued a statement “on insurrection at the Capitol,” saying “it is a sickening and heartbreaking sight.” “I am appalled by the reckless behavior of some political leaders since the election,” he said, and accused such leaders of enflaming the rioters with lies and false hopes. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) was more direct: “What happened here today was an insurrection incited by the President of the United States.”

Across the country tonight are calls for Trump’s removal through the 25th amendment, impeachment, or resignation. The Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have joined the chorus, writing to Pence urging him to invoke the 25th. Angry at Trump’s sabotaging of the Georgia elections in addition to the attack on our democracy, prominent Republicans are rumored to be doing the same.

At 8:00, heavily armed guards escorted the lawmakers back to the Capitol, thoroughly scrubbed by janitors, where the senators and representatives resumed their counting of the certified votes. The events of the afternoon had broken some of the Republicans away from their determination to challenge the votes. Fourteen Republican senators had announced they would object to counting the certified votes from Arizona; in the evening count the number dropped to six: Cruz (R-TX), Hawley (R-MO), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), John Kennedy (R-LA), Roger Marshall (R-KS), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).

In the House, 121 Republicans, more than half the Republican caucus, voted to throw out Biden’s electors from Arizona. As in the Senate, they lost when 303 Representatives voted in favor.

Six senators and more than half of the House Republicans backed an attempt to overthrow our government, in favor of a man caught on tape just four days ago trying to strong-arm a state election official into falsifying the election results.

Today the Confederate flag flew in the United States Capitol.

[Heather Cox Richardson is a Professor of History at Boston College. She has daily posts on Facebook that summarize the day's political events and puts them in historical context. The Facebook post link's first comment are her citations to sources.]

#read the entire thing #domestic terrorism #fuck trump #heather cox richardson

[spade-riddles]

"Adjusting Expectations" Post

This submission received a lot of responses and 120 notes, so I thought I would compile the comments here.

Anonymous said:

Adjusting expectations anon was so good. If their timetables are right and we do just need to be patient a little longer, can Kaylor please send us a sign? I guess it would be too loud to slip "adjusting expectations" into social media posts, but maybe they could both do something with playing cards? To show they are card sharks right now but they'll find their way home eventually? That would reassure people. And it would fly under the radar.

casuallycruel131313 said:

I agree with a lot of this but I think the main issue right now is that moral and ethical lines have been crossed and there's no coming back from that. In these post-Trumpian insurrectionist times it's unfathomable that they could continue the Kushner narrative I no longer care if or when they come out, I enjoy the music and I'm happy to observe from a distance because I'm interested from a PR/marketing point of view but my opinion of T &K as people has changed irrevocably and I don't see how they can clean the tarnish off.

@theprologues said:

Agree with most of not all if this but I would like to say as a Kaylor the toe Grammy stunt didn’t phase me. I was not crushed by that by any means. I just shrugged and honestly expected it. It was the attributing Betty and exile to him during the LPSS in November that bummed me out and really made me go...really?

rockcrow20 said:

Have to say I also agree with most of this.

I no longer have any expectations on anything changing any time soon and have not been surprised by the recent events its to be expected after everything over the years really

Nothing has really changed (bearding narrative wise) since I fell down the rabbit hole in 2017 (except that great night in nashville 2018 rep)

Honestly I can't say I am as invested anymore about them ever coming out as I was.

I think the wb/Joe thing was the last moment for me and the continual kushner connection just troubles me like many others.

I mean my kaylor motto for awhile now has been hope for the best but expect disappointment.

Low expectations = limited feelings of disappointment.

original-cypher said:

@rockcrow20 the WB was a breaking point for so many. You are absolutely right. There are just so ma'y contradictions that feel like absolute whiplash. (I know I seem to have been the only one experiencing that with Gorgeous but... that was a big one for me, too) But like. You go on a whole PR campaign about speaking up and standing up for yourself. You say you're capable and tired of men trying to take ownership of your success and profit off of your name. And you credit you literal damn work to a bloke? Bitch, 'consistency'? Look it up. It grossed me out. It would have felt iffy if I believed they were real. But since I wasn't born yesterday it just sent me the message "this is how far I'm willing to sacrifice my principles to not be queer".

rockcrow20 said:

@original-cypher exactly why it bothered me and I know alot us so much. Such mixed messaging of being a strong fighting for your rights female and then oh hey let me attribute some of my best work to my pr boyfriend and the pr pics where she is walking behind all the time like 🙄 The Betty thing that was big one for me too!

rainbowdaisy13 said:

This write up and the comments are spot on. I don’t have much to add other than like @original-cypher said, Miss Americana is tainted for me now and seems like at the very least, it was released too soon in the plan. I get we think they have had to pivot but man, that doc, and including her literally saying “gay rights make me me” at the end was such a false flag. To see her wax poetic about not taking shit from men anymore and then see her do the same old hetero weak woman song and dance routine with the WB shit for albums that are of her genius mind has been so disappointing. I still believe Kaylor is real and I hope they get a chance to show the world that. Karlie posting that cardigan pic in the woods before the folklore release cemented for me they are still together. Adding a baby makes me feel all kind of weird ethical things but I hope I live long enough to see it play out and wear my I Told You So shirt 😁

@kellykaylor said:

agree with your post... I dont care about toe stunts but what really pissed me of was hetwashing betty 🤮! beautiful post tho anon!!

roameroo said:

Totally agree with these all comments especially the strong messaging of MA only to turn around & pull that WB = my "bf" crap. I was disheartened by her mentioning him at the Grammy's only bc he's getting credit for sh*t he doesn't/didn't do. That is what irks me the most about this, giving him credit for her life's work.

always-the-last-word said:

Can I throw my pennies in the pool ?? Taylor will put out the big three first Fearless, RED then 1989 that should bring us to about August. This is where the excitement should begin. If Taylor preps and waits for National Coming Out day it's a no lose for her. Lover her money making machine will go through the roof !! If things go bad or good in the public eye she'll have REPUTATION Taylor's Version ready to release. It will be epic and she'll own it and be FREE.

@karlie-what-you-want said:

always-the-last-word I like this take a lot! I try not to be too optimistic but if she wanted to come out sooner rather than later, I think this plan would satisfy both business and PR needs (at least on Taylor’s end). Remains to be seen how Tay will help Karlie dig her way out of the mess they made together regarding the K*shners.

always-the-last-word said:

Always remember that Taylor has a PLAN. Some of her plans are year's old (easter eggs). Taylor's one and only LOVE is her music, everything else comes second. If KK wants to change and be with her full time she'll make moves around the same time frame. That's if she chooses to. In any event Tay will be open and own all her music. I've seen this film before and WE might not like the ending.

chosetherose said:

I’ve been going back and forth for a day trying to figure out what I wanted to say when I reblogged this post. I’m tired. I’m frustrated. I understand I’m owed nothing by Taylor or Karlie. I understand that circumstances out of their control have caused the girls to pivot over and over again.

But, the root of my frustration in the past months stems not from me battling with the trivial (e.g. pap walks, etc.) but with my personal principles. I fiercely believe credit should be given where it is earned and I uphold this in my career regularly. To see Taylor crediting Toe with her art was deeply disappointing. Watch the 1989 and folklore acceptance speeches back to back and tell me it doesn’t upset you. I believe the K******s have blood on their hands and that their actions during the pandemic have killed people. To see Karlie still associating with one of them disgusts me.

I can’t help but think back in frustration - Would you really fall from grace to touch her face? (And in the brilliant words of @9w1ft) But would you die for her in public? I go back and forth feeling like questions like this aren’t fair at all and thinking they are sort of valid. At this point, it sort of feels like Taylor would only fall from grace for her lover if all the stars and facets of her life aligned perfectly. But perfection like this does not happen. Such is life. So why am I here?

I do question why Spade left certain messages in their final days. I am still holding hope a fervent revolution exonerates everyone. I so desperately want Taylor to regain control of her masters or re-records. Maybe this is the plan they thought was best with multiple goals in mind (re-records, having a family, coming out of the closet one day etc). I’m trying to remain patient because Spade told us to trust her endless yearning. But WOW it is asking a lot of us at this point.

Anonymous said:

Despite being a pragmatist kaylor and oftentimes getting into arguments with fellow optimistic kaylors (owner of this blog included) I think it's quite unfair -at this point- to say to the optimists who have patiently sat through the worst kind of stunts with the most terrible kind of people (yes I'm talking about the Kushner's friend group too) that they should have seen it coming. Besides, if it weren't for the optimists we the cynicals would have burned this fandom down by now.

Anonymous said:

Even if we ignore that an insurrection happened partially because of the family karlie's still working for and getting paid from, she literally said before the pregnancy debacle unfolded that j*sh was her last client while talking about cutting hair and doing a cutting gesture. How should we have interpreted that? 😤That a year later she would be more stuck with the Kushners than ever? We don't wake up on day and decide to have unrealistic expectations. She feeds into them. 😠

Anonymous said:

I have no expectation of Taylor coming out anymore. Zero. None. I have no expectation of her dropping Toe or even of Kaylor publicly reuniting. It doesn't even matter that much anymore. But I - do - expect 1 thing. Karlie to drop and completely dissociate herself from the Kushners and this has nothing to do with kaylor. It was everything to do with me being unable to support a person who willfully assists (now using her baby too) and receives money from a family that has made so many suffer.

Anonymous said:

A quick word from an ex-kaylor (who will never become an anti). A year ago, when the Trumps were still in power and untouchable and there was no baby, I was excusing and turning a blind eye to many things Karlie did for the K*shners. Even that dinner in September. I had also made peace with the truth never being revealed. But a year later the Trumps are gone, Karlie is still on full stunting mode now with a baby in the mix, a baby that is already being used by the Kushners, and I've really run out of excuses. Now the only thing that could possibly keep me on board is if I knew there was a good chance that the full truth would come out, so that Karlie's inexplicable and honestly borderline immoral actions could eventually make sense. But as your sub said, this is an unrealistic expectation, thus I became an ex-kaylor and I'm not planning to come back even when they reunite. 😕

Anonymous said:

What baffles me is that Taylor has explicitly expressed her regret about not giving her lover the credit she deserves and her doubt whether fame is worth hiding her true love: "when I walked up to the podium, I think I forgot to say your name", "what's a lifetime of achievement, if I pushed you to the edge". But yet again she didn't do anything to change this. I didn't expect her to acknowledge Karlie, but a nod or at least not falsely crediting her beard would be a good start.

Anonymous said:

1🙁 Let me chime in re: "expectations". I'm one of the kaylors who ever since the pregnancy reveal was trying to tell everyone there's NO way she was gonna dump him soon after birth let alone before that. It would bring too much unnecessary attention and Jerk would have never agreed to something that would make him look like a bad guy/husband. For the exact same reasons, I was also saying there's no way he wasn't going to post about the baby. All the above against the popular opinion back then.

2🙁 So I agree that the day of the birth post was known to T, not the timing though. Simply bc Kushner-leaning outlets made sure to note that detail. If they wanted it to go unnoticed, why draw attention to it? That being said, kaylors would have been more patient with this mess, if Karlie hadn't gone overboard with her freedom "smoke signals" last summer and Tay's "insiders" hadn't been insinuating that the end is VERY near. Both of them SHOULD have known by then how we would react to these.

3🙁 So it's natural that everyone feels played and has no patience for any more bullshit. Another sore point is how Jerk AND the Kushner-Trump klan monopolize the baby news. This isn't just to make it realistic, it's an abuse of Kaylor's baby's name to garner good pr for the worst family in America, with Karlie's blessing. In order for her marriage and split to appear realistic she's putting a LIFETIME burden on her child's back. Unless you believe she's eventually gonna say Jerk isn't the dad.

4🙁 So "we’re in a position we should realistically have been able to see coming". But we did see it coming, that why some made these extreme scenarios, bc this is the worst possible outcome. "Good people try to make it work, even in bad relationships." Ultimately this isn't just a "bad rs". It's a horrific association that should have been resolved ages ago, not one to bring your child into, doom it to suffer a similar fate, and expect people to sit idly and watch. That's what frustrates most.

[clearlyshycherryblossom]

January 6, 2021 (Wednesday)

Today the Confederate flag flew in the United States Capitol.

This morning, results from the Georgia senatorial runoff elections showed that Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff had beaten their Republican opponents—both incumbents—by more than the threshold that would require a recount. The Senate is now split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats, so the position of majority leader goes to a Democrat. Mitch McConnell, who has bent the government to his will since he took over the position of majority leader in 2007, will be replaced.

With the Democrats in control of both Congress and the Executive Branch, it is reasonable to expect we will see voting rights legislation, which will doom the current-day Republican Party, depending as it has on voter suppression to stay in power.

Trump Republicans and McConnell Republicans had just begun to blame each other for the debacle when Congress began to count the certified electoral votes from the states to establish that Democrat Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. The election was not close—Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million votes and the Electoral College by 306 to 232—but Trump contends that he won the election in a landslide and “fraud” made Biden the winner.

Trump has never had a case. His campaign filed and either lost or had dismissed 62 out of 63 lawsuits because it could produce no evidence for any of its wild accusations. Nonetheless, radical lawmakers courted Trump’s base by echoing Trump’s charges, then tried to argue that the fact voters no longer trusted the vote was reason to contest the certified votes.

More than 100 members of the House announced they would object to counting the votes of certain states. About 13 senators, led by Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), agreed to join them. The move would slow down the count as each chamber would have to debate and take a separate vote on whether to accept the state votes, but the objectors never had anywhere near the votes they needed to make their objections stick.

So Trump turned to pressuring Vice President Mike Pence, who would preside over the counting, to throw out the Biden votes. On Monday, Trump tweeted that “the Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” This would throw the blame for the loss onto Pence, but the vice president has no constitutional power to do any such thing, and this morning he made that clear in a statement. Trump then tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”

It seemed clear that the voting would be heated, but it was also clear that most of the lawmakers opposing the count were posturing to court Trump’s base for future elections. Congress would count Biden’s win.

But Trump had urged his supporters for weeks to descend on Washington, D.C., to stop what he insisted was the stealing of the election. They did so and, this morning, began to congregate near the Capitol, where the counting would take place. As he passed them on the east side of the Capitol, Hawley raised a power fist.

In the middle of the day, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani spoke to the crowd, telling them: “Let’s have trial by combat.” Trump followed, lying that he had won the election and saying “we are going to have to fight much harder.” He warned that Pence had better “come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country.” He warned that Chinese-driven socialists are taking over the country. And he told them to march on Congress to “save our democracy.”

As rioters took Trump at his word, Congress was counting the votes alphabetically by state. When they got to Arizona, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) stood up to echo the rhetoric radicals had been using to discredit the certified votes, saying that public distrust in the election—created out of thin air by Republicans—justified an investigation.

Within an hour, a violent mob stormed the Capitol and Cruz, along with the rest of the lawmakers, was rushed to safety (four quick-thinking staffers brought along the electoral ballots, in their ceremonial boxes). As the rioters broke in, police shot and killed one of them: Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran from San Diego, QAnon believer, and staunch Trump supporter. The insurrectionists broke into the Senate chamber, where one was photographed on the dais of the Senate, shirtless and wearing a bull costume that revealed a Ku Klux Klan tattoo on his abdomen. They roamed the Capitol looking for Pence and other lawmakers they considered enemies. Not finding them, they ransacked offices. One rioter photographed himself sitting at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk with his feet on it.

They carried with them the Confederate flag.

Capitol police provided little obstruction, apparently eager to avoid confrontations that could be used as propaganda on social media. The intruders seemed a little surprised at their success, taking selfies and wandering around like tourists. One stole a lectern.

As the White House, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security all remained silent, President-Elect Joe Biden spoke to cameras urging calm and calling on Trump to tell his supporters to go home. But CNN White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins later reported that she spoke to White House officials who were “genuinely freaked… out” that Trump was “borderline enthusiastic” about the storming of the Capitol because “it meant the certification was being derailed.”

At 4:17, Trump issued his own video, reiterating his false claims that he had been cheated of victory. Only then did he conclude with: “Go home, we love you, you’re very special.” Twitter immediately took the video down. By nighttime Trump’s Twitter feed seemed to blame his enemies for the violence the president had incited (although the rhythm of the words did not sound to me like Trump’s own usual cadence): “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

Twitter took down the tweet and banned the president for at least twelve hours for inciting violence; Facebook and Instagram followed suit.

As the afternoon wore on, police found two pipe bombs near the headquarters of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C., as well as a truck full of weapons and ammunition, and mobs gathered at statehouses across the country, including in Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota, California, and Georgia.

By 5:00, acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller issued a statement saying he had conferred with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Vice President Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and had fully activated the D.C. National Guard.

He did not mention the president.

By late evening, Washington, D.C., police chief Robert J. Contee III announced that at least 52 people had been arrested and 14 law enforcement officers injured. A total of four people died, including one who died of a heart attack and one who tased themself.

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone urged people to stay away from Trump to limit their chances of being prosecuted for treason under the Sedition Act. By midnight, four staffers had resigned, as well as Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger, with other, higher level officials also talking about leaving. Even Trump adviser Stephen Miller admitted it was a bad day. Quickly, pro-Trump media began to insist that the attack was a false-flag operation of “Antifa,” despite the selfies and videos posted by known right-wing agitators, and the fact that Trump had invited, incited, and praised them.

Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis laid the blame for today’s attack squarely at the feet of Trump himself: “Today’s violent assault on our Capitol, and effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule, was fomented by Mr. Trump. His use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice.”

The attempted coup drew condemnation from all but the radical Trump supporters in government. Former President George W. Bush issued a statement “on insurrection at the Capitol,” saying “it is a sickening and heartbreaking sight.” “I am appalled by the reckless behavior of some political leaders since the election,” he said, and accused such leaders of enflaming the rioters with lies and false hopes. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) was more direct: “What happened here today was an insurrection incited by the President of the United States.”

Across the country tonight are calls for Trump’s removal through the 25th amendment, impeachment, or resignation. The Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have joined the chorus, writing to Pence urging him to invoke the 25th. Angry at Trump’s sabotaging of the Georgia elections in addition to the attack on our democracy, prominent Republicans are rumored to be doing the same.

At 8:00, heavily armed guards escorted the lawmakers back to the Capitol, thoroughly scrubbed by janitors, where the senators and representatives resumed their counting of the certified votes. The events of the afternoon had broken some of the Republicans away from their determination to challenge the votes. Fourteen Republican senators had announced they would object to counting the certified votes from Arizona; in the evening count the number dropped to six: Cruz (R-TX), Hawley (R-MO), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), John Kennedy (R-LA), Roger Marshall (R-KS), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).

In the House, 121 Republicans, more than half the Republican caucus, voted to throw out Biden’s electors from Arizona. As in the Senate, they lost when 303 Representatives voted in favor.

Six senators and more than half of the House Republicans backed an attempt to overthrow our government, in favor of a man caught on tape just four days ago trying to strong-arm a state election official into falsifying the election results.

Today the Confederate flag flew in the United States Capitol.

#tw #tw politics #us #us politics #tw us politics

[lastsonlost]

I’m not sure if people have completely wrapped their minds around this, but we have an entire political party that has converted into an authoritarian—albeit Americanized version—style of politics that cares nothing about U.S. democracy or anyone who is not white.

With the exception of a few dissenting Republican senators who aren’t up for reelection until 2024 or 2026 (only Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is on the ballot in 2022) or are retiring, the GOP not only acquitted Donald Trump of inciting an insurrection that he clearly incited, but they told Republican voters that the lies Trump told them were true: The election was stolen and you have a right to be angry about that.

And it’s working.

During the impeachment trial last week, his defense lawyers reinforced those lies, and Republicans basically sat by and said nothing to counter them. They, in effect, are a party of turncoats. What makes their behavior so terrifying is that Democrats, who hold control of the Senate by only Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote, are left with no choice but to negotiate with the very people whose leading members encouraged the coup and instigated supporters to undermine American institutions.

Pam Keith, a U.S. Navy veteran who ran out of Florida’s 18th Congressional District as the Democratic nominee, told The Root that Democrats should give up on working with Republicans as if they are operating in good faith and have shown that they will be as corrupt and obstructionist as Trump.

“What they’re saying is we don’t care that he broke the law,” said Keith, who also hosts the politics show But What It Really Means. “He’s our guy and we’re with our guy and there’s nothing you can say to make us turn on our guy. He’s above the law. He’s above the Constitution. He is above the well-being of the United States because he’s our mechanism to retaining power. That is the absolute definition of totalitarian dictatorship. We don’t care what he does—especially if what he does hurts you,” she said.

“You cannot live in a diverse country when the paradigm is oppressed or be oppressed. That’s what’s going on in South Sudan right now. There’s only one way: bloody conflict. The only way a country like ours survives is through mutual agreement to set a standard. That’s what the Constitution is. That’s what the rule of law is. If you don’t have that, then there’s no incentive to peacefully allow the other sides to exercise power.”

Kyle Bibby, national campaign manager at Common Defense and a former Marine Corps Infantry officer, told The Root that had a foreign entity engaged in an attack similar to the Jan. 6 coup attempt or rallied the support of the main culprit thereafter, the U.S. military would have responded with an offensive strike or at the minimum stiff economic penalties. But he added that the militias and Trump supporters who were there are ultimately not so much the issue as is the Republican Party that empowers them.

When asked about the violent insurrectionists, Bibby said, “If they were in Afghanistan, we would’ve hit them. Either a raid, drop a bomb on them, whatever it is.” He continued, “But the organizations that are funding this and who are backing this that are creating the political movement behind this are organizations like Fox News, Breitbart, One America News Network, and the Republican Party. If these organizations existed in another country, we would be sanctioning them. We would be seizing their assets for inciting terroristic threats against an American ally or against U.S. interests.”

Mind you, Republicans lead a meaningless investigation into the Benghazi attack, accusing Democrats of being soft on terrorism. They forced Susan Rice to withdraw her name from consideration for Obama’s secretary of state because of their unfounded claims that she did not react appropriately to the 2012 attacks on the American consulate in Libya. They drilled former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in very bad faith, for hours over her management of the tragedy during a hearing in 2015. Meanwhile, when it comes to the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Republican Congress members called for the nation to move on and acquitted the man responsible for inciting it.

“The bottom line is that this kind of white nationalist violence was never taken seriously,” Pam Campos-Palma, director of Peace & Security at the Working Families Party, told The Root, “because it is inherent to the GOP, policing and national security institutions.”

In addition to terrorism against their fellow citizens and authoritarian behavior, Republicans also traffic in conspiracy theories. Newly sworn member of Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga) has become Trump’s loudest disseminator of conspiracy theories and lies about the 2020 election, according to CNN:

Greene also peddled in 2017 the debunked “Clinton Kill List” or “Clinton Body Count” conspiracy, which alleges the Clintons have assassinated their associates. She spread false conspiracies the Clintons were involved in sextrafficking and peddled the cruel conspiracy that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was not killed during an attempted robbery but murdered by Democratic actors.

CNN’s KFile previously reported that Greene in 2017 peddled the “Pizzagate” conspiracy, a debunked conspiracy alleging that Clinton and other Democratic Party leaders were running a human-trafficking and pedophilia ring out of a pizzeria in Washington, DC. In a blog post, she suggested that the White supremacist rally held in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, that killed one woman was an “inside job” to “further the agenda of the elites.” Greene also endorsed 9/11 trutherism conspiracies and falsely claimed there was no evidence a plane crashed into the Pentagon, according to reporting from Media Matters.

She was stripped of her committee assignments, but the GOP leadership still supported her.

In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is blaming wind turbines and the Green New Deal for power outages across his state—which are lies. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes spent more than seven minutes debunking right-wing media lies about the outages, but Republicans in Congress aren’t doing much to quell them. In fact, they are spreading them. Much of why they are doing this is because they feel their power is being threatened and the only way to galvanize support for their causes is through lying and scaring people so intensely that they will see lies as truth. Those people are the ideal type of supporters Republicans can groom into ill-informed and lethal insurrectionists and white supremacists who will help you maintain power—even if it destroys the country, so long as enough of the “enemy”—Black folks and people of color—suffer and/or die as a result.

Malcolm Nance, a national security expert and author of the upcoming book, They Want to Kill Americans: The Armed Militias, The Fanatical Terrorists, and The Deranged Ideology of the Coming Trump Insurgency, told The Root that not only is the Republican Party behaving like a terror group, he predicted soon after the Charlottesville, Va., attacks in 2017 that Trump’s use of insurrectionist language—“stand down and stand by”—essentially would become a white supremacist call to arms akin to kind of terrorist extremism he saw as a military intelligence officer.

“If Trump wins, these unofficial paramilitaries, the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boys, the state militias, all these other groups, are essentially going to become semi-official Brownshirts [the original paramilitary of Germany’s Nazi Party] of the Trump campaign,” he said. “If Trump loses, these people are going to become the Iraq insurgents. They’re going to go underground. They’re going to be furious and, over time, with the Trump campaign leading as the political wing of this insurgency. With a president in exile, those people will resort to armed violence, political standoffs, and terrorism.”

He said the reason why these threats aren’t taken seriously is because white people do not take white terrorism seriously. He brought up a post-election appearance on Bill Maher where he was a guest with an expert from George Washington University who said his analysis was over the top.

“She’s all, ‘Tone it down. Kumbaya,’ and I’m telling her what I’ve seen for the last six months, which is, the alt-right has transformed itself into the paramilitary arm of the Trump campaign,” he said. “Now that Trump has lost that election, they are going to be the Iraq insurgents. The Republican Party will view themselves as Sinn Fein and the Republican base will view themselves as the white Catholics who think they’ve got to support the IRA.”

Nance added: “Black evidence is never believed until a white person confirms it.”

Democrats introduced a resolution calling for an investigation into white supremacy earlier this month. This week, the NAACP, civil rights law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss) are suing Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and two white nationalist groups over the coup. While these are promising steps, Democrats have few options to get to the heart of white terrorism because their Republican colleagues in Congress benefit from it politically. We have to view the GOP as enemy combatants because, for years, they have proven that Democrats are theirs.

As far as Keith is concerned, Democrats have to go hard. That means going as far as pressuring any Democrat who supports the filibuster into changing their mind or face a primary challenge. The days of compromise are dead. Obama should have taught us that much. The GOP went to war with him for eight years and Democrats, along with much of America, suffered.

We don’t want to be as gangsta as they are,” Keith said of Democrats in Congress. “We still have this delusion of bipartisanship. There’s no fucking bipartisanship. Get off that ship. It does not work. It’s sinking. It’s done. It’s at the bottom of the ocean. It’s the fucking Titanic. It’s down in the water. Let it go.”

Update: 2/19/2012, 5:23 p.m. ET: A quote by Kyle Bibby was clarified to reflect that he meant that the insurrectionists would be bombed not the GOP.

[poisonheadcrabsalesman]

More therapy thoughts part 1/?

Behavior Theory Frameworks/Conditioning and What the fuck does Master Chief talk about in therapy?

Ramblings below - like a lot, like I spent too much time writing this and you should not read this

Behavioral Theory could work well as a framework with rehabilitating Spartan IIs if the case worker focused on Operant Conditioning Theory and Cognitive Social Learning Theory, which I talked about in this ask because I think I’m funny and this blog is an archive of me applying human behavior theories to video games.

Spartans have always been taught the mission comes first! Always! The 2s are indoctrinated from age 6-14 and then have that reinforced the rest of their lives. From the beginning they are taught to push themselves to the limits, earn their food by winning, form bonds with teammates but be ready to sacrifice them for the mission. The whole lives wasted vs spent conversation between John and Mendez after the augmentation surgery!

What the UNSC/ONI wants comes before their lives, the lives of other soldiers, civilians, AI etc. This constant conditioning of expectations and rewards has created the norms cemented in their minds. This becomes standard operating procedure.

Spartans are also an entirely separated social group, other people have made really great posts on how they are Othered and have their own way of communicating with body language. ODSTs hate Spartans, marines see them as cyborgs or saviors, and while they’re allies, Spartans are not seen or treated as human, by literally everyone. They are a means to an end, with the original goal being to maintain the UNSC’s position of power and crush the insurrectionists in the outer colonies, but uh oh Aliens!

Maybe the 2s aren’t as expendable as the 3s but the mindset and reinforcement of “mission first, people second” being repeated their entire lives is going to stick. So is the constant mistreatment and abuse from their fellow soldiers and handlers. 

Addressing the cognitive distortions that come from their upbringing while also balancing the fact that Spartans are so fundamentally different from the way they developed to survive would be so much work, especially considering how much information on them is given to their therapist.  The main distortion I would apply is minimization, making large problems small and not properly dealing with them, and specifically for John, personification, accepting blame for negative events without sufficient evidence. 

Like these are grown ass super soldiers who can kill you in less than a second and calculate the amount of gravity in a room on the fly but then also can flounder when trying to comfort civilians or make small talk because their experiences and values are so alien to adults who had more developmentally “normal” lives. 

Literally applying therapy to Spartans would be like, what was done to you was wrong, the ends do not justify the means, you were children and the adults in your life failed to protect you. You are a human person who is fallible and did the best you could with what you had. And the Spartan would say, “sounds fake but okay, can I pass my psych eval and go back to war now please?”

Jumping back to Behavior Theory

Different approaches to therapy under the Behavior Theory umbrella help modify negative behaviors with treatments like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Dialectical behavior therapy that teach individuals adaptive coping like emotional regulation, distress tolerance, cognitive distortions, and interpersonal communication. And that’s just one framework under the umbrella of human behavior theories.

Social work therapy is different from psych as it approaches individuals with heavily researched, evidence-based theories and frameworks in a holistic viewing of person-in-environment, instead of a strong focus on internal psychology. 

Social work looks at all the interacting systems, environment, history, and internal and external factors affecting an individual. One of the most useful frameworks is the Biopsychosocial-Spiritual Frameworks (BPSS) when helping a client. It helps with identifying all the intersecting factors, both risk and protective, that shapes a client’s lived experiences. The most important thing to remember is that the individual is an expert in their own life, they know their experiences best.

The hardest part is applying this to Spartans because they Are So Fucked, their lived experiences, their environments and systems and institutions interacting with them, and the amount of their personal information that is probably so classified.

BPSS is a tool to help social workers assess individuals and their situations by collecting info that is related to the presenting issues and current and past circumstances. Info like medical history, hospitalizations, substance abuse, mental illness, personal relationships, family history and background, culture and norms, education, legal history, spirituality and participation etc. is all under this framework. 

For Spartan 2s most of this info is lost or classified and helping someone who has repressed every negative emotion they've had for the sake of the mission would be so much to unpack but that’s also why you’re reading the mad ramblings over an over caffeinated nerd on the internet.

Life Course Theory which looks at developmental milestones and the individual’s experiences versus the socially expected markers, how do you apply that to children who were taken and have lived such different lives? 

While early adolescence is when “normal” development of thoughts of self and identity take place alongside the physical changes of puberty, Spartans were being turned into emotionless calculating weapons. Sorry John, no forming a sense of identity and peer bonds for you, go kill that Watts guy who betrayed us and joined the insurrectionists. 

And now that I’ve gone this insane and opened 2 whole textbooks up, let’s get to Master Chief thoughts. If you’ve read this far thank you, I swear I’m normal, 2020 has just been a weird year. 

Why the fuck did I think I could write a therapy fic on a guy with 20 minutes of actual dialogue across almost 2 decades of games?

I make fun of him and call him a himbo, but he’s smart, he knows he’s being used and there is resentment there that’s been building for years. 

There’s also decades of trauma and combat experience, physical, and emotional abuse, the lack of a support network,  lack of an identity, the biological factors and aftermath of the augmentations and injuries he’s received, a whole lot of grief and self-inflicted guilt. 

The loss of a third of his peer group with the augmentation surgery, Sam’s death, the loss of Reach (the only place he’s considered home), Keyes, the Pillar of Autumn crew, Miranda Keyes, Johnson, Cortana. He cares about the marines who fight with him!!!

He just stands there and takes it and rarely snaps, and even then it’s just small cracks on the surface with fissures running deep. The few details I will pull from Halo 5 are Blue Team’s reactions to John pushing himself so hard from the beginning of the game, and the literal crack in his armor from the fight with Locke. Like dude.  

John’s a leader and will get the mission done but he tugs on the leash. He’s earned enough of a reputation and uses it to get his way.

Halo 2’s “Permission to leave the station” with Mr. “I’m going to hand deliver a bomb to the fusion reactor of a covenant supercarrier and hope my friends catch me”. 

Halo 4 is when we see him say no to a superior officer and then 5 is him going AWOL. Palmer literally points out that no one is going to stop him.

Halo 5 kills me for many reasons but John bringing up Halsey and what she did to him and also pointing out that he knows Halo 5 Cortana is trying to manipulate him with psychological tactics hurts. 

He knows what’s been done to him!

I cannot remember which book it was but John isn’t used to working alone. He literally takes fire because he was expecting someone to have his back! 

He’s lost without Cortana! She was in his brain! Y’all! I played Halo Combat Evolved on the original xbox when I was like 8 and I knew these two were meant to be together. From the moment they met they had great chemistry and relied on each other! Cortana literally goes after people who have it out for John! John wants her approval and shows off for her in one of the books. 

I’ve already written too much here but like all of the games have John showing off for Cortana, making dry jokes, jumping out of things he shouldn’t. 

The whole point of this rambling is to try and get my thoughts about how to approach John’s character under control.

And that’s the thing. He’s lost control. He’s lost people, he’s losing his position and being phased out as an aging spartan, a relic. John’s used to following orders and making some decisions on the battlefield but it was always short term.

He has no identity beyond being a weapon. Complete the mission, clear the LZ, get put in cryo. Rinse, repeat. 

The timeline of the games are what I'm most familiar with but with the comics and books too it’s one long run from Halo 2 to Halo 4. Cairo station to the Dreadnought to the crash landing to Forward Unto Dawn to Requiem to “The Didact is Dead but not really but we’ll deal with him off-screen”.

I know Hood apparently gave John R&R orders before Halo 5 that he ignored and kept running himself into the ground. This is a man who has to keep moving and keep being useful. 

I imagine him giving in and seeking help as a last resort to fix any problems he has with performing his duties rather than helping himself be healthier. 

Any professional he sees is going to have to approach him like they’re approaching a self sacrificing feral cat, with lunch meat and quiet. This man needs to have his support network closer, set up long term goals, and do some serious, and most likely incredibly painful, self reflection on where he’s come from and where he wants to go. Get him out of that tin can and into therapy. I don’t have a nice neat ending because this was a ramble and also therapy is not neat and tidy. Thanks for reading my words about mr halo

#this is not coherent but it needs out of my brain #John - has different characterizations based on what media he's in #Me - my writing must be in character or I Will Die #also me - we don't talk about halo 5 but i will loot its corpse for bits of lore I like #im sorry for being like this #my writing #Therapy time #John 117 #this is not a halo blog #haha this was peer reviewed nonsense #thanks yall for enabling me #i have even more ideas for the infinity sitcom folder now

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LUCIAN TRUSCOTT NEWSLETTER

You want to know what has doomed Nancy Pelosi’s attempts to get a bipartisan agreement to investigate the violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6? Every time she has talked about why we need a bipartisan commission or the select committee, she said they were necessary “so nothing like this will ever happen again.”

Republicans aren’t against investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection because they fear it will make them look bad. They’re against doing anything to make sure that such an insurrection doesn’t happen again.

The assault on the Capitol is already damaging to the Republican Party image, at least to outsiders. The Capitol was attacked by a violent mob of Trump supporters. It’s doubtful there were any Democrats among them. The assault took place immediately after a Trump rally on the Ellipse and was incited by the then-president. Several Republican members of Congress joined Trump in addressing the crowd, along with other famous party stalwarts like Rudy Giuliani. It was a Republican rally with a Republican crowd. So was the mob at the Capitol.

Republican members of Congress know it was their supporters out there beating down the doors of the Capitol, ransacking the well of the Senate and looting congressional offices. Republicans don’t want to investigate the violence at the Capitol because they want to leave the door open for it to happen again.

Most of them come from safe seats in Republican-majority congressional districts, many of them in Republican-controlled states. Republican senators, not all of them but most, come from Republican states in the South and Midwest. But every one of them can read census numbers, and every one of them understands that their days are numbered, even in states that have been Republican strongholds for decades, like Arizona and Texas. They saw the Election Day returns which showed previously Republican suburbs falling to the Democrats all over the country. They read the depressing voting numbers for millennials and younger voters that show them strongly leaning Democratic. Even a dull, lumbering beast like the Republican Party can tell when a water hole runs dry.

They can read the polls showing how popular Democratic issues are, including improved access to health care, the pandemic rescue bill, the infrastructure bill and the American Family Plan. How many calls have you heard Republicans make lately for repealing Obamacare? How many speeches have you heard them make saying we don’t need to spend money on crumbling bridges, obsolete airports and ancient, failing mass transit like the Long Island Railroad or the Chicago Transit Authority or the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority? They don’t dare oppose spending that is in any way grounded in reality. All they can come up with is screaming about “socialism” and “Democratic Party wish-lists,” because their constituents drive across cracking bridges and commute on failing transit systems and pay a third of their income on rent and a third on child care and way more than they can afford on health care.

Electorally, Republicans are hanging on by their fingernails. In 2020, in the midst of the worst pandemic since 1918, before a single American had received a life-saving vaccination, with 230,000 already dead from the coronavirus and more deaths on the way, voters turned out in record numbers. And Republicans lost. They lost the White House. They lost the House of Representatives. After a runoff election, they lost control of the Senate. They did well locally in Republican-controlled states, maintaining control of state houses and governorships, but they lost ground in the areas where the country is growing. They lost the big cities. They lost the suburbs. They lost in population centers in the South and Midwest and West. They lost in the places where people are moving, where young people are getting jobs when they graduate from college, where many seniors are choosing to retire.

After the 2020 election, Gallup found in a December poll that 31 percent of Americans identified as Democrats, 25 percent as Republicans and 41 percent as independents. When independents were asked whether they were “Democratic leaners” or “Republican leaners,” 50 percent said they leaned Democratic, and 39 percent leaned Republican. These were not good numbers for the Republican Party. Nobody knows better than Republicans that there are fewer of them than there are of us.

You’ve heard chapter and verse from me and others about how Republicans are passing voter suppression laws to make it more difficult for Democrats to vote. They know they don’t have the votes. They don’t have them now, and they’ll have even fewer of them in the future.

That’s why they’ve started to concentrate their efforts at the state level on laws that change how votes are counted and who counts them, moving the center of power from elected officials like secretaries of state and appointed officials like election administrators to state legislatures, inherently political bodies where the counting can be managed and controlled politically.

It’s why they’re clinging to Trump’s lie that the election was stolen from him, and it’s why their own efforts to “audit” the 2020 election results in places like Arizona are so shambolic and absurd. They know that if honest assessments are done of how the election turned out in battleground states, they will come to the same conclusions that a 55-page report by the Michigan state Senate did last week: There was no election fraud in the 2020 election. None. Zero. Nada.

They’ve been downplaying the assault on the Capitol, calling it “a normal tourist visit” as Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia did during a hearing a few weeks ago. He is among a growing number of Republicans in Congress who are making the case that nothing really bad happened on Jan. 6, so there’s no need to investigate it. They blocked the creation of a nonpartisan 9/11 style commission to investigate the insurrection, and they’re in the process of undercutting Pelosi’s select committee by labeling it as a Democratic exercise in blame-laying.

Furthermore, they’re absolutely right. When the select committee issues its report, it’s going to lay the blame where Republicans want it least: on Trump for inciting the riot, and on their own constituents for committing insurrection against the government. And the select committee will likely produce evidence that Republicans are not interested in seeing in the light of day: detailed accounts of the violence committed by the mob and reports of the preparations some of the mob had taken that we haven’t seen yet, such as evidence of weapons caches — and planning by some insurrectionists to use them.

Republicans don’t want a report that basically comes out and says, Here’s how close we came to a coup against our government, and here is what they are planning next. Laws that put partisan political bodies like legislatures in charge of counting votes make it much more likely that an upcoming election will end up in a political wrangle — not down in the states where the counting takes place, but in Washington.

Think about it: there were no controls whatsoever on that mob in Washington on Jan. 6. Estimates of the size of the crowd at Trump’s rally on the Ellipse ran as high as 30,000. More than 800 rioters are estimated to have broken through police barricades and entered the Capitol, with as many as 10,000 outside. They outnumbered police by the thousands.

What if that crowd had been armed? What if instead of carrying iron pipes and bear spray and flag poles they had been carrying AR-15s and pistols? What if some of them were carrying the kinds of bombs that were found outside the Democratic and Republican headquarters? Capitol police couldn’t stop them from overwhelming barricades and gaining entrance to the Capitol. Do you think they could have searched that mob for hidden weapons and bombs?

This is why Republicans don’t want to see an intensive investigation of the insurrection on Jan. 6. If an investigation proves how bad the insurrection was this time, it might predict what will be possible if a mob of 100,000 or more assault the Capitol or other governmental buildings in Washington, and what that mob might be capable of if they’re organized and armed next time.

The Republican Party has reached the point where it does not recognize the legitimacy of elections unless it wins them. Democratic political victories are per se illegitimate in Republican eyes. Republicans are lapping up their own lawlessness and ramping up the insanity. They are turning right-wing lunatics like Kyle Rittenhouse into folk heroes. He is the shooter in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who killed two people and wounded a third during Black Lives Matter protests following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

Republican state legislatures in Oklahoma and Iowa have passed laws granting immunity to drivers who hit protesters with their cars during demonstrations on public streets. Multiple states already have laws allowing both open and concealed carry of firearms without a license, with more such laws on the way.

These are the kinds of laws that not only allow insurrection, but encourage it. The Proud Boys and the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers and their ilk aren’t the right’s political fringe anymore. They are the Republican base — and the Republican future.

#Lucian Truscott Newsletter #January 6 2021 #Insurrection #corrupt GOP #criminal gOP #legitimacy of elections #state legislatures