My observation here the other day that Donald Trump had two more weeks in which to wreak havoc turned out to be quite the understatement, huh?
Like many people I watched yesterday's events unfold on TV, in my case the free stream from CBS News, whose commentators made their own elite priorities absolutely clear right from the get-go. And those priorities were disgust at the destruction of "sacred" property and concerns about how "the rest of the world" would react to a mob storming the capitol, as though America were some kind of third world Banana Republic.
"This is not who we are," moaned many a bubble-encased pundit and elected official.
The sight of that Andrew Jackson throwback lounging in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office, feet on her desk and scratching his crotch, did, I confess, elicit a little bit of schadenfreude. It would have been better if he posed eating some of her designer ice cream with his fingers. But as our betters always like to admonish us, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
CBS personality Norah O'Donnell, bless her heart, did her very best to blame the siege on Russia. But to his credit, even former CIA official-turned-#Russiagate pundit Michael Morell wasn't having it. This, he proclaimed, was pure Trumpian homegrown terrorism.
Not that I'm saying that these homegrown terrorists who are terrorizing both our elected officials and their media lackeys are therefore our friends. But at least somebody is finally striking unaccustomed fear into their self-satisfied cores.
Witness the inaction of the Capitol Police, who in at least one incident, literally seemed to invite the mob right into the Hallowed Halls, opening the gates and even posing for selfies when not being chased up the stairs by the teeming masses. No longer can our congress critters rely upon and trust their armed guards to protect them from... you know, actual people and their constituents. The only actual people that the Capitol Police have traditionally ousted from the building are climate activists, disability rights activists dragged out of their wheelchairs, Code Pink antiwar protesters and other social justice advocates. If the Capitol Police had seen crowds of Black Lives Matter protesters converging on the building, the tear gas canisters and sound blast cannons would have out in full force. It would have been over in five minutes instead of five hours.
Here's my theory. Security officials sympathetic to Trump thought the protesters they allowed into the building would have behaved a little bit better than they did. The storming got just a wee bit out of hand. The original plan might have been to let a dozen or so garishly costumed "patriots" into Senate chambers during the election hearing for a quick pro-Trump photo-op before security quickly moved in and pretended to drag them away.
So now that it's gotten totally out of their elite control, our elected officials face a choice. They can either tamp down social unrest by giving people health care, a guaranteed basic income, eviction relief and a federal jobs program. Or, they can declare all 300-plus million American citizens their sworn enemies and punish them with more austerity, more social media and press censorship, and more prisons. Right now they're flailing and still worried mainly about losing their precious - and very contrived and very tattered - global reputation as the bastion of democracy and human rights.
Even Donald Trump, who once infamously and pretty accurately claimed that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, might not get away with this latest stunt. For there's an unwritten rule among organized criminals of all kinds that you must never s--t where you eat. Trump just pooped all over the very same people who control the government's purse-strings, who bankrolled his military and his border wall while covering their own complicit butts by tsk-tskiing his boorish manners and pretending to punish him over his alleged romance with Putin. It's still up in the air whether they really mean it this time and will remove him from office (even ex post facto) thus denying him his retirement package, his life-long Secret Service protection and all the other perks enjoyed by former presidents.
Speaking of whom, it's a sad day indeed when unindicted war criminal George W. Bush, responsible for millions of deaths of innocents in his illegal war, can actually appear beside his fellow miscreants Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and condemn Trump for instigating domestic violence right in the elites' own back yard.
A page has turned, and we must look forward and not backward - but just not in the way that these presidents and congress critters mean whenever they exculpate themselves from accountability.
The tide has turned. For once, they are afraid of us. The only thing we have to fear is their fear itself.
20 comments:
Nancy you are spot on keep it coming girl thanks for everything you write.
Historian: White Terrorist Groups Attacked Democracy During Reconstruction, They Are Doing It Again —
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/1/7/us_capitol_violent_mob_manisha_sinha
January 7, 2021
[video & transcript in link]
Un pueblo sin memoria es un pueblo sin futuro = A people without memory are a people without a future.
~ quote painted on the back wall of the Estadio Nacional in Santiago, Chile
The Coup in Washington: Why is Anyone Surprised by Trump’s Fascist Politics?
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/07/the-coup-in-washington-why-is-anyone-surprised-by-trumps-fascist-politics/
January 7, 2021 ~ by Anthony DiMaggio
"For once, they are afraid of us. The only thing we have to fear is their fear itself."
That is the only bright spot in this.
They are very afraid. I had a NYT comment to this effect made a Times Pick, then removed from that status a few hours later, apparently due to outrage that anyone would dare to express anything other than the purest elite outrage, or the slightest understanding of events that include distrust of that elite.
Could it be that the U.S. is becoming a shithole country?
Who is "us"?
@ Mark
If you kept a copy of that NYT comment, please post it here.
You have to have a pretty good idea who "they/them" are to understand who "we/us" are. Hint: the comfortable, the afflicted; Dives, Lazarus. Hope that helps.
Seeing how Wednesday’s blasphemy against the world’s sacred shrine of democracy is playing out, I say a pox on both the parties that dwell there.
The mob’s action on the Epiphany is a follow up epiphany to Trump’s rabble rousing since he was inaugurated. But Trump’s followers may well have been suckered into a trap meant to finish him off politically. Good. I would not cry if Trump were to go directly from the White House to the Big House. Although justice might better be served by sending this delusional crook to an institution for the criminally insane.
At the same time, how curious the thin cordon of security around the Capitol on Wednesday. Trump’s followers roaming around DC were not a flash mob out of nowhere. The DC mayor, Pelosi who is the guardian of the shrine, and the Capitol Police Force must have had an inkling of what was brewing. For about an hour before Trump showed up on Wednesday, C-SPAN had a speechless camera focused on the stage from which Trump was to address a big basket of deplorables. Still, only a thin blue line around the Capitol. Strange, especially in light of the overkill of cops earlier in the year who were generally in full battle gear, thickly posted around the shrine and ready to crack skulls whenever meeker protesters, like BLM, showed up.
The party about to take over the Congress is not expected to change much. How much more proof is needed to support the Uniparty Theory? At home, the rich will continue to get richer, and the poor will become more numerous, more alienated, more sick, more miserable. The infrastructure most Americans depend on will continue to deteriorate.
Abroad, our troops, whom we should support, will continue to test MIC weapons systems in other countries. It has been suggested the Pentagon is chomping at the bit to provoke conflicts with more worthy opponents. Interesting times ahead.
It’s a class war, and you’re part of it (but on the losing side).
For years after the 2000 election, there were reviews of the Florida vote and recounts.
For years after the 1960 election, there was research done and published on the extent to which JFK was boosted by Mayor Daley's corruption in Chicago.
In both cases, the dispute was never 100% cleared, but it seems in each case that wrongful actions made very close election just slightly less close.
I expect the 2020 election will see the same sort of work, coming to the same sort of conclusion -- it will stimulate hard feelings which are already ugly.
That could have some slight consequence in keeping the pot boiling for 2024, but that is mostly likely to be somebody not Trump vs somebody not Biden due to age and health of both men.
"The tide shifts, like a drunk in gloom.”
~ Ken Kesey
This was not done in the name of the people. This was a cross class white identity politics disputing an election that was not actually close unless you consider a seven million vote margin narrow. That was an avowed white nationalist sitting in Nancy Pelosi's seat. This was more like Ammon and Cliven Bundy saying "we have a right to trash these federal lands". Go ahead and worry about "tech censorship". It is a shame the junior senator from Missouri had his book about Big Tech cancelled. How Orwellian!I'm sure it would have been a trenchant critique. I am taking pleasure from that fraud's career going kaput. He and Cruz need to be kicked out of the senate. I'm sure there will be conflation of support for deplatforming Trump with support for an anti terrorism bill from the usual quarters even though there are many speaking out against such a bill.
There is a long history of not taking far right violence seriously. There were more than a few law enforcement officers and military in the ranks. If you want to go down some rabbit holes, however, might I suggest a few blogs listed on the blogroll. hat offguardian is a good start. There you may learn it is all a false flag operation. Great info on Covid-19 too! Leave you with a nice picture from the insurrection:
https://twitter.com/_ericblanc/status/1347670642720722952
Regarding my Blog Roll:
I maintain a list of websites of varying political persuasions and viewpoints as a courtesy to my readers, who have always been encouraged to send in their own suggestions for inclusion.
Listing on said blog roll is not an endorsement of them on my part. I trust my readers to read and decide for themselves whether to agree or disagree with the wide variety of opinions and whether to accept, reject or question the material provided. I assume everybody who comes here is a grownup with a critical thinking brain who won't be damaged or tainted by reading something outside of their comort zones.
I certainly don't police the blog roll and I don't even regularly visit most of them - because I simply don't have the time.
I have removed sites from the list from time to time, usually when nothing new has been posted on them for more than six months and I assume they're defunct.
When concerned reader Kat complained about the "Off-Guardian" I decided to give it another look-see, since I haven't read it in a very long time. I'd originally added it to my list because it led the criticism of the real "Guardian's" Luke Harding, who wrote a scoop detailing alleged direct links between Trump (via Paul Manafort) and Julian Assange and which was later thoroughly debunked. Sometime since that excellent reporting, the site has become an unabashed pro-Trump site dabbling in various unhinged theories and containing no reporting or thoughtful analysis that I could discern. I therefore removed it from the blog roll.
So thank you, Kat, for bringing it to my attention. Everything else is staying as is, even some of the sites that contain mainly conservative content and the occasional "far-fetched" speculation. I think it's always smart to at least try to find out what "the other side" is thinking. Yeah, there are some smart people out there who are Covid skeptics. I think we can deal with it and discount their arguments without muzzling them. And also find common ground when we can, as in the excellent anti-war commentary in The American Conservative.
It shocks me to find that two or three extremely rich men can shut off the ability for political speech, even of a President.
Now this particular case is a classic example of "hard cases make bad law."
The important issue is not about him. It is about two or three guys who can shut off political speech in this country as it is done today.
That is a problem, and it can only get worse, because it WILL be abused. Anything that can be abused by the rich and powerful will be abused by them.
Mark,
Trump is free to call a press conference. Nobody is shutting off his right to speak.
That a handful of business people can silence or greatly diminish the speech of the president of a country is more scary than a ragtag mob desecrating a governmental shrine on the urging of an idiot. That silencing event will be as enduring as a Supreme Court precedent if the silencing is allowed to pass in this instance.
It’s true that Trump can still get a hearing one way or another, as with a press conference, but it should be obvious that cutting off his Twitter and several other network accounts greatly curtails his ability to communicate. And, as has been pointed out above, the censorship of President Trump’s words was brought about not by a panel of judges, legislators or psychiatrists, but by a handful of self-selected business people in Silicon Valley.
Trump’s communications by internet, especially Twitter, reached millions more people directly, immediately and continually. Pressers are by nature few and far between and, except for those people able to watch on live TV, Trump’s points would afterwards be clipped and filtered through reporters, editors and analysts before ever reaching the MSM audience that bothers to read or tune in to what's left.
Decades ago the ACLU defended the right of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie even though that would pain many of the residents who were Holocaust survivors. If you build a machine (i.e., set a precedent) to censor, curb or silence dissent by the bad guys, you can count on that machine’s being used some day to silence dissent by the good guys.
https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-speech-skokie
Many more years before Skokie, J.S. Mill argued for letting truth and error duke out openly without a referee, self-appointed or appointed by authority. He was confident truth and good sense would prevail.
Censorship is dangerous. Yes, it can be a tool to protect people from lies, stupidity and propaganda and, in the case of the very young, information they are ill-equipped to handle. However, no censor should be given standing or placed as a blocker between any word, statement or idea and the adult readers and listeners willing to pay attention to all sides.
Here's the problem: No one on earth is qualified to filter what you see, hear and read –– unless you are a child. Even if that word, statement or idea is offensive, troubling, difficult. Your humanity is license enough to hear it all and judge for yourself.
Mill’s point was endorsed in a very practical way by (some of) our Founding Fathers in the First Amendment. If you favor censorship in tough cases (Q-Anon, Fear Mongers, Secrecy Advocates, Partisan Hacks, Con Men like Trump), if you allow selective exceptions to free speech, don’t claim you understand and trust the wisdom contained within the First Amendment.
Yes, the tech monopolies (google is really the true monopoly) must be taken on. How to do this-- this is open for debate and it is a debate long overdue.
Deplatforming is not censorship though-- even if the platforms have ties to government.
The free speech wars have been raging for years now. The NYT Magazine (which I know some feel is hopelessly tainted and thus automatically suspect) had a good article which summarized some of the arguments in this long running debate but I'll highlight just one paragraph:
Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful,” MacKinnon, now a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in “The Free Speech Century,” a 2018 essay collection. Instead of “radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed,” she wrote, the First Amendment now serves “authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.” In the same year, Justice Elena Kagan warned that the court’s conservative majority was “weaponizing the First Amendment” in the service of corporate interests, in a dissent to a ruling against labor unions
We actually do limit speech all the time. For example, few take up the cause of child pornographers. There are some free speech absolutists that might, just as there are some libertarians that would argue against child labor laws, but most are not "absolutists". I have no dog in the fight against the deplatforming of Trump. I don't think this will lead to a prisoner speaking out against prison conditions or a poultry plant worker speaking out against working conditions getting disciplined. It happened before Trump was "censored".
The other thing Jay-- it is a bit of American exceptionalism to say that when it comes to speech rights our way is the best way.
@Kat - I don't really give much of a damn about Donald Trump's right to speak. But I care very much about my right to hear.
"Deplatforming is not censorship though-- even if the platforms have ties to government."
And that is utter BS. Sophist arguments that try to deny plain fact by crafting restrictive definitions and novel jargon (as in what is "racism") is one of the great sins of the Identitarian Left. Orwell must be spinning like a top by now.
@ Kat
Tell me, whom do you propose serving as the state's authorized censor: a Supreme Court Justice, a religious cleric, a business man or woman, an academic, an elected official, a cabinet officer, a bureaucrat, an IT expert? Who?
Jay,
Twitter was worried about backlash and also simmering discontent from their workers who have a better idea of how their algorithms work. Trump had repeatedly violated their terms of service and was given a lot more chances than other users who would have had their accounts suspended. There is still plenty of pro Trump content out there. He is the president of the United States. He is the government, although i know there are many who seem to believe he is helpless and hamstrung by the "real" government. What should the government do? Step in and tell Twitter that they cannot slap content warnings on posts or remove inflammatory content? What about the mass murderer who livestreamed from Christchurch? Facebook took down that content. Should the government have stepped in and told them it was a violation of free speech?
What about Ruby Freeman, the Georgia poll worker who has gone into hiding after Trump claiming she was engaged in fraud and these claims were amplified by Stop the Steal sites? Are her rights being violated?
The right and libertarians have always only believed in negative freedoms-- freedom from restraint. "nobody can tell me what to do!". It is the same with the anti masker types (stop the stealers and anti maskers pretty much completely overlap). I shouldn't have to wear a mask even if this impinges on the right to move about freely of others.
There have been numerous books written about the power of big tech from a left--not libertarian--perspective. I find it strange that for some it is just now a big problem. But, this is absolutely not a first amendment violation. What do you think of Trump blocking followers on his account as he has?
Post a Comment