Month: January 2021

Members who attended a House Appropriations Committee briefing on the security failures of Jan. 6 “were left stunned,” says CNN. Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) told reporters members were “shaking their heads in disbelief” at how much worse the violence might have been:

“People said today that there was ample evidence, that the intelligence agencies had ample evidence, that an angry mob was going to descend on Washington with Congress’ meeting to certify the election as the intended target,” DeLauro added.

After participating in the hearing, Rep. Matt Cartwright, a Pennsylvania Democrat, told CNN, “It was only by pure dumb luck that elected officials, staffers and more Capitol policemen were not killed.”

Cartwright’s theory, confirmed by people he would not name, is that concern over the optics of more robust preparations played a role. Lack of manpower, proper equipment for repelling an assault, and more contributed to Capitol Police being quickly overwhelmed.

Insurrectionists had reason to expect they would be.

“Armed far-right mobs met little law enforcement resistance when they repeatedly attacked state capitols,” begins ProPublica’s Jan. 19 report. The lessons those mobs took away was that the U.S. Capitol would be a soft target:

In a year in which state governments around the country have become flashpoints for conservative anger about the coronavirus lockdown and Trump’s electoral defeat, it was right-wing activists — some of them armed, nearly all of them white — who forced their way into state capitols in Idaho, Michigan and Oregon. Each instance was an opportunity for local and national law enforcement officials to school themselves in ways to prevent angry mobs from threatening the nation’s lawmakers.

But it was Trump supporters who did the learning. That it was possible — even easy — to breach the seats of government to intimidate lawmakers. That police would not meet them with the same level of force they deployed against Black Lives Matter protesters. That they could find sympathizers on the inside who might help them.

And they learned that criminal charges, as well as efforts to make the buildings more secure, were unlikely to follow their incursions. In the three cases, police made only a handful of arrests.

“We had hundreds of individuals storm our Capitol building,” Michigan state Rep. Sarah Anthony told ProPublica. “No, lives were not lost, blood was not shed, property was not damaged, but I think they saw how easy it was to get into our building and they could get away with that type of behavior and there would be little to no consequences.”

Some armed invaders entered the Senate gallery. While none of the protesters faced charges, two of the men seen in a photo posted by state Sen. Dayna Polehanki looking down on lawmakers would be among the 14 people charged months later in a plot to kidnap Whitmer and bomb the state Capitol.

“It made national and international news, what happened in our Capitol,” Polehanki said in an interview. “People saw that, and it’s no coincidence that the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 had the same feel.”

“Eventually, you get to the point of entitlement where you can get away with anything and there will never be any accountability,” added Idaho House minority leader, Ilana Rubel (D), of the armed incursion in Boise.

New York Times Magazine‘s Charles Homans considers recent Lobby Day protests in Richmond, Va. A variety of armed gangs — self-styled militias, often white nationalists — flood the town strutting arsenals meant to impress or intimidate lawmakers considering gun control legislation. They want lawmakers’ attention and they get it, and that of the press.

One “protester” carries an AR-15 variant mounted with a grenade launcher and pounds of accessories, plus multitools strapped to spare magazines. He brought all his toys to show-and-tell.

These men want something but cannot say what. One group leader says of the Jan. 6 insurrection, “If they want to make the federal government or the state government fall, we can sort it out afterwards. It would be good to give this country a total reset.”

What would “afterwards” look like?

“I’ll leave that to the imagination. There’s not so much I can say on camera about stuff like that. Because it can get you in a lot of legal trouble.”

He wants people to know his boys mean business even if they have no idea what the business is.

When a press scrum formed around a masked, lone gunman, Homans sees how much it resembled a spin room. The man had no agenda, really, and little of substance to say about why he was there on the street with weapons.

The spin room lays bare the essential fallacy at the heart of bad political journalism, which is that proximity to power automatically grants a person an authority or insight that others lack. A similar logic was at work on the street in Richmond, where those of us who had come to cover the rally were operating on the tacit understanding that the simple act of carrying a gun in defiance of the local law gave a person standing to speak to a national political moment in which defiance of the law had become the de facto position of a political party representing the votes of more than 74 million Americans. This was, in a sense, its own kind of ideology — one that the desultory handful of militiamen on the street shared with the many factions of the Boogaloo, with the mob at the U.S. Capitol, with the outgoing president of the United States.

“The gun is the speech,” Homans realizes.

It is the voice of those who feel voiceless and have nothing to say anyway. The weapons displays shout of grievance they cannot or dare not speak aloud, “a really futile and stupid gesture” of defiance … until the shooting starts.

And so long as there are “little to no consequences” for violations of law, for explicit and implicit threats, for armed insurrection or for instigating one, and sympathy for such behavior inside police agencies, the republic’s fate will be questioned here and abroad.

Armed gangs learned that legislative buildings are soft targets, acted on that knowledge, and came close to creating a bloodbath. What will they learn if Trump faces no sanction for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection?

I don’t know what makes anti-mask Trump jerks decide to make asses of themselves on planes, but they seem to be inspired to act out when they get on one. Flight attendants take the brunt of it:

One flight attendant needed medical attention for a crippling migraine brought on by confronting a passenger who refused to wear a mask.

The day after the siege on Capitol Hill, passengers on a shuttle bus with a Black flight attendant assailed her with racial slurs, according to a union for flight attendants.

Aviation safety officials have received dozens of confidential complaints in the past year from attendants trying to enforce mask safety rules. The reports, filed in the Aviation Safety Reporting System database, at times describe a chaotic, unhinged workplace where passengers regularly abuse airline employees.

“I felt like if this man is bold enough to scream ‘SHUT UP’ at me in the cabin, there is no limits,” a flight attendant said in one report.

The coronavirus pandemic and political divisions of the past year have caused fear, economic pain, and social and family rifts around the country, but for airline workers, and flight attendants in particular, the unease and tension have often converged in a tiny cabin space.

The tension is at a level flight attendants have not seen before, said Paul Hartshorn Jr., a veteran attendant and a spokesman for the Association of Professional Flight Attendants union.

“I think we’re pretty well trained on how to handle a disruptive passenger,” said Mr. Hartshorn, 46. “What we’re not trained to do and what we shouldn’t be dealing with is large groups of passengers inciting a riot with another group of passengers.”

“It’s insane,” he added.

Even as airlines have struggled to contend with the pandemic, attendants have increasingly faced problems from passengers attacking one another over politics.

Most prominently, before the Trump rally in Washington and the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, supporters of President Donald J. Trump were recorded on multiple flights to Washington heckling other passengers, including Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah.

On one packed American Airlines flight from Dallas to Washington on Jan. 5, Maranie R. Staab, a photojournalist flying to cover the rally, said that many of the passengers wearing red, white, and blue clothing and hats bearing Mr. Trump’s name, were quiet during the flight.

When the plane began descending, a passenger used a mini projector to flash an image of “Trump 2020” inside the darkened cabin. Ms. Staab said a Black passenger made a comment that clearly angered several Trump supporters, who accused him of threatening them.

“Stand up, boy,” one man said, according to a video Ms. Staab posted on Twitter.

“These are the guys we came to wipe out,” said a passenger, cursing as he held a small American flag.

When they got off the flight, Ms. Staab said she saw a group surround the Black passenger, and at the baggage claim, a flight attendant approached Ms. Staab and asked for her contact information. Several passengers had told the flight attendant that she should have done something about the Black passenger and said they would file a complaint.

“She seemed tough, but rattled,” Ms. Staab said.

In the aftermath of the riot, airlines, flight attendants and the authorities moved to prevent similar altercations. American Airlines crews were given access to private transportation during layovers in Washington-area airports. Delta barred six people from the airline after a group heckled Mr. Romney, according to a spokesman.

United Airlines moved its crews from downtown Washington hotels, and American Airlines, which had stopped serving alcohol in the main cabin because of the pandemic, also banned alcohol in first class for flights out of Washington.

I don’t think I ever saw this phenomenon before 2016 when it happened after Trump won! Maybe I’m wrong. There were, of course, the paranoid types who wanted people who “looked Muslim” booted from the planes. But this overt, in-your-face political advocacy for one man and the aggressive, hostility about it strikes me as something different. I think this shows that the impulses that drove that mob to the Capitol is more widespread than we might realize.

And, by the way, if this doesn’t creep you out you are stronger than I am:

Well, Team Trump leaving Iowa looking happy/with new hats (pic via @TimMurtaugh) pic.twitter.com/5JeDclwuVc

— Miriam Elder (@MiriamElder) February 4, 2020

Just don’t call it a cult. That would be totally wrong.

PETER DOOCY: Mr President, what did you talk to Vladimir Putin about?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: You. He sends his best. pic.twitter.com/Fq0zglc9aK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 26, 2021

Doocy is from Fox News, of course. Lol.

Here’s the read-out:

US President Joe Biden has warned Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin about election meddling in their first call, the White House says.

The conversation on Tuesday afternoon included a discussion about the ongoing opposition protests in Russia and the Start nuclear treaty.

Mr Putin congratulated the new US president on winning the election, according to a Russian statement.

Both parties said they agreed to maintain contact moving forward.

Former US President Donald Trump was accused by critics of not being forceful enough with Mr Putin. US intelligence officials say Moscow has been involved in several US hacks.

Former President Barack Obama – under whom Mr Biden served as vice-president – was also accused by critics of weakness on Russia, and failing to check the Kremlin as it annexed Crimea, invaded eastern Ukraine and muscled in on Syria.

“President Biden made clear that the United States will act firmly in defence of its national interests in response to actions by Russia that harm us or our allies,” a US statement said.

A readout of the call from the White House said that the two presidents also discussed the massive SolarWinds cyber-attack, reports that Russia placed bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan, and the poisoning of Alexei Navalny.

The Kremlin’s readout of the call said Mr Putin, “noted that the normalisation of relations between Russia and the United States would meet the interests of both countries and – taking into account their special responsibility for maintaining security and stability in the world – of the entire international community”.

“On the whole, the conversation between the leaders of Russia and the United States was of a business-like and frank nature,” the Kremlin statement added.

Recall that when Trump took over he was royally pissed at Mike Flynn for not telling him Vlad called on the first day because he was dying to talk to him. Protocol is that the president returns the calls of allies first, but then Trump considered Russia an ally, for good reason.

I’m speaking of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green a person who should not be allowed anywhere near the House of Representatives. She is violent and dangerous:

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019 before being elected to Congress, a CNN KFile review of hundreds of posts and comments from Greene’s Facebook page shows.

Greene, who represents Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, frequently posted far-right extremist and debunked conspiracy theories on her page, including the baseless QAnon conspiracy which casts former President Donald Trump in an imagined battle against a sinister cabal of Democrats and celebrities who abuse children.In one post, from January 2019, Greene liked a comment that said “a bullet to the head would be quicker” to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In other posts, Greene liked comments about executing FBI agents who, in her eyes, were part of the “deep state” working against Trump.

In one Facebook post from April 2018, Greene wrote conspiratorially about the Iran Deal, one of former President Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievements. A commenter asked Greene, “Now do we get to hang them ?? Meaning H & O ???,” referring to Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Greene replied, “Stage is being set. Players are being put in place. We must be patient. This must be done perfectly or liberal judges would let them off.”After CNN reached out to Greene, her personal Twitter account posted a statement in which she did not deny that she liked posts and replied to comments but claimed that many people have run her Facebook page.

“Over the years, I’ve had teams of people manage my pages. Many posts have been liked. Many posts have been shared. Some did not represent my views. Especially the ones that CNN is about to spread across the internet,” she wrote.Greene did not specify whether she or a member of her team were behind the posts reviewed by CNN’s KFile.

CNN reached out to Pelosi’s office for comment multiple times but did not receive a response.Though her tenure in Congress has only lasted a few weeks, Greene is already facing calls to leave the House for her role in fanning the flames of the Capitol insurrection earlier this month after she objected to the election certification process and falsely insisted that Trump would remain president.

After Democratic Rep. Jimmy Gomez called on Greene to be expelled from the House for her role in the insurrection, Greene condemned the violence at the Capitol and falsely accused “Antifa/BLM terrorism” and Democratic politicians of stoking the insurrection.”I fully condemn ALL violence. The Antifa/BLM terrorism funded on ActBlue rests with Democrat accomplices like @CoriBush @Ilhan @KamalaHarris @AOC @timkaine & many more… Those who stoke insurrection & spread conspiracies have blood on their hands. They must be expelled,” she tweeted.

Parkland families call for Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation after posts surface showing she agreed shooting was a ‘false flag’Last week Greene faced calls to resign from the survivors of the Parkland shooting survivors after Media Matters reported she agreed with comments calling the 2018 shooting a “false flag” operation, which refers to acts that are designed by perpetrators to be made to look like they were carried out by other individuals or groups.

CNN’s KFile found additional comments from Greene where she called David Hogg, a survivor and activist, “#littleHitler” and spread a conspiracy that he was a “bought and paid little pawn” and actor.Before she ran for Congress in 2020, Greene created a White House petition in January 2019 to impeach the House speaker for “crimes of treason,” citing Pelosi’s support of so-called sanctuary policies that “are serving illegals and not United States citizens” and because Pelosi did not support Trump’s border wall.In one speech, promoting the petition, Greene suggested Pelosi could be executed for treason.

“She’s a traitor to our country, she’s guilty of treason,” Greene says in the video, which she posted on Facebook at the time. “She took an oath to protect American citizens and uphold our laws. And she gives aid and comfort to our enemies who illegally invade our land. That’s what treason is. And by our law representatives and senators can be kicked out and no longer serve in our government. And it’s, uh, it’s a crime punishable by death is what treason is. Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason.”

In another Facebook Live broadcast from inside Pelosi’s office on February 22, 2019, Greene suggested the House speaker will “suffer death or she’ll be in prison” for her “treason.”

Notably, Greene never mentions a trial. In another broadcast from later that day, she suggested California Rep. Maxine Waters was “just as guilty of treason as Nancy Pelosi.”

In the comments of her Facebook posts, often promoting the petition, Greene liked a comment that said “through removal or death, doesn’t matter, as long as she goes,” referring to Pelosi, and another that encouraged Greene to “beat Pelosi’s ass.”

The petition for Pelosi’s impeachment and removal for treason amassed over 420,000 signatures as of January 2021.

On social media, Greene portrays herself as an opponent to political violence and casts Democrats as the real instigators of political violence, either real or imaginary, who get away with threatening calls for violence.

“Do any of you remember a day when talking about assassinating the President resulted in getting arrested? As in arrested in real life, not FB [Facebook] jail. When was that? Pre-2016 I think, right??? But if you are a conservative that’s a different story!” wrote Greene in 2019.

While Greene notes in Facebook posts that she disavows and denounces violence, within the comment sections of Greene’s Facebook page, commenters frequently cheer for politicians to be executed by hanging or firing squad.Elsewhere on her Facebook page, Greene liked comments that advocated to “arrest” Obama and former Secretary of State John Kerry and one comment that said, “HANG that bitch,” referring to either Obama or Kerry or possibly both of them. She also liked a comment that urged for “civil war 2.0” to begin.

Greene, who has embraced and spread the baseless conspiracy theory about a “deep state” working to usurp Trump’s agenda, suggested in Facebook posts that FBI agents disloyal to Trump were traitors. She liked a comment that said, “Trump already said there were some great ones working with FBI but some have fallen and quite frankly need to be hung for TREASON!” Another she liked said, “These Traitors need to be put to death as an example of what will no longer be tolerated in our country!!!”

TPM connects some dots between the sedition and Trump organizing:

The night before a Trump-inspired mob attacked the Capitol, the assembled masses at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. chanted the name of the leader of a right-wing street gang. 

“Enrique!” the crowd chanted, referring to Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys. 

Tarrio had been arrested the day prior — on suspicion of burning a historically Black church’s Black Lives Matter banner during the previous pro-Trump protest in D.C. — but the event’s main organizer, Cindy Chafian, argued that he and his violent group were heroes, referring to them as “the ones who protect us.” 

“Enrique, if you’re hearing us right now, know that we have you,” Chafian told the crowd after leading the chant, lamenting that Tarrio’s arrest had prevented him from speaking at the event. The same night, Roger Stone used members of the Oath Keepers militia group as private security. 

As Tierney Sneed and I showed in a lengthy report yesterday,  Trump spent months cultivating the mob that attacked the Capitol. Put another way,  as the investigative website Bellingcat keenly observed on Jan. 5, “the Insurgent and MAGA Right are Being Welded Together on the Streets of Washington D.C.” 

Chafian’s speech that night represents one of the many ties between the popular pro-Trump events leading up to the Capitol attack and the violent far-right groups that, prosecutors allege, made up some of the violent actors that attacked the Capitol. (A compelling Wall Street Journal visual investigation out today shows the Proud Boys’ involvement in detail.) 

Chaffian is the founder of the Eighty Percent Coalition, an offshoot group of one of the primary organizers of the Jan. 6 events, Women for America First. Trump himself thanked that group’s chairwoman, Amy Kemer, in the speech he gave before the mob stormed the Capitol. 

“I want to thank that Amy and everybody,” Trump said. “We have some incredible supporters, but we didn’t do anything, this just happened!” 

Another key bridge to the far-right fringe is Ali Alexander, the leader of the “Stop the Steal” movement, who coordinated rallies in several states around the country after Election Day. Alexander was a central player in the three pro-Trump rallies held in D.C. after the election, one each in November, December and January. One of Alexander’s Georgia events is pictured above, where he, on the left, stands alongside the white nationalist Nick Fuentes and the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Alexander has networked in far-right circles for years. A few years ago, for example, he appeared on a web talk show that featured an alt-right personality’s swastika flag. When a hotel popular with Proud Boys decided to close on Jan. 4-6, during the riotous pro-Trump event, Alexander said it would be “karma” if “something bad happens” to the hotel.

After the attack, Alexander dipped from the public eye somewhat only to reemerge on Gab, a social media network popular with the far-right. He posted: “Illegal Invaders should be shot” and “Toss commies out of helicopters.” 

Alexander also spoke at the Jan. 5 rally, and he was scheduled to hold an event the following day as well — at 1 pm at the Capitol building. 

“We the People must take to the US Capitol lawn and steps and tell Congress #DoNotCertify on #JAN6!” a website for the so-called “Wild Protest” advertised. 

The point here isn’t that the movement attracted fringe figures, because of course it did. Rather, those figures were leading the movement, scheduling its events and working (at least in Amy Kremer’s case) to coordinate the President’s speaking time. 

As BuzzFeed News reported, Trump promoted Women for Trump’s bus tour in the weeks leading up to the Capitol attack, and the tour featured the type of violent rhetoric that would later bear fruit. 

One prominent organizer and speaker on the tour was Dustin Stockton, a former Breitbart writer. Before his 2020 election-related work, Stockton worked for We Build The Wall, the GoFundMe-powered border wall effort, where he was chummy with an armed militia group that patrolled the border and detained undocumented people. 

In city after city, Stockton worked up crowds with talk about firearms and instructions to “study tactics.” 

“I’m so angry, I’m in like pitchforks mode today, I really am,” he told an Ohio rally in December. “Let’s grab the pitchforks, let’s go to D.C., and let’s stay there until this crap is changed and we’re Americans again.”

On Jan. 4, after landing in D.C. and preparing for a speech he’d give the next day to Chafian’s rally, Stockton posed for a picture with a pitchfork-wielding woman at the airport. “Do you believe in signs?” he tweeted.

By the way, Amy Kremer was a major Tea Party organizer:

Amy Kremer is an American political activist associated with the Tea Party movement. She became involved in the movement in 2009 and campaigned as part of the Tea Party Express until 2014. During the 2016 presidential election she was a co-founder of two political action committees supporting Donald Trump‘s campaign. In 2017 she unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in a special election in Georgia’s 6th congressional district.

They are all the same people.

The above is a segment of Frontline’s documentary airing tonight on PBS:

When rioters breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s presidential victory, they carried Confederate flags through the building; chanted, “Hang Mike Pence”; and erected a noose outside.

As the insurrection unfolded, President Donald Trump, who had told a crowd earlier in the day to “fight like hell” after weeks of undermining the election, tweeted criticism of his vice president for planning to certify the election results. Several hours after the rioters breached the Capitol, when Trump issued a video telling them to go home, he added, “We love you. You’re very special.”

As the new FRONTLINE documentary Trump’s American Carnage reports, it was a scene foreshadowed by the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — and by President Trump’s response to that moment.

“This is probably the first time where the country realizes, ‘This is gonna get bad,’” Yamiche Alcindor, a PBS NewsHour White House correspondent, says of Charlottesville in the documentary.

From filmmaker Michael Kirk and his team, Trump’s American Carnage traces the former president’s incitement of division, racism and ultimately insurrection throughout his term, drawing a line from the earlier rally to January’s fatal riot.

As Trump’s American Carnage goes on to recount, top Republicans ultimately stood by the president after Charlottesville. By Jan. 6, 2021, Trump’s ire — and that of protesters who believed they were acting on Trump’s behalf — would be directed at Pence himself.

For the full story, watch Trump’s American Carnage. The documentary premieres Tuesday, Jan. 26 at 10/9c on PBS stations (check local listings). It will also be available to stream in FRONTLINE’s online collection of documentaries, on YouTube and in the PBS Video App.

That segment above shows how Pence collaborated with Trump from the very beginning. And by the end of Trump’s term, followers are chanting “hang Mike Pence.” It’s really something.

They ain’t done yet:

Donald Trump’s QAnon fans are not giving up hope that he will be reinstalled in the White House this year, with a new theory that has them planning on celebrating his inauguration on March 4th.j

According to a report from Vice, the latest theory being passed around by right-wing extremists is based upon writings from members of the fringe “sovereign citizen” movement and a unique interpretation of American history.

As the Vice report notes, “Sovereign citizens believe that a law enacted in 1871 secretly turned the U.S. into a corporation and did away with the American government of the founding fathers. The group also believes that President Franklin D. Roosevelt sold U.S. citizens out in 1933 when he ended the gold standard and replaced it by offering citizens as collateral to a group of shadowy foreign investors.”

“Over the weekend, QAnon groups on Gab and Telegram, where most QAnon supporters have found a home since they were kicked off Twitter and Parler was de-platformed, commenters have been sharing documents describing the 1871 act, claiming it proves that Trump will be sworn in on March 4,” the report states. “The source for this date is the fact that 1937 was also the year when inaugurations were changed from March 4 to Jan. 20 — to shorten the lame-duck period of outgoing presidents. QAnon followers believe that Trump will become the president of the original republic, and not the corporation that they believe the 1871 act created.”ADVERTISING

The belief that Trump might bolster the hopes of the QAnon followers who have been despondent that President Joe Biden wasn’t arrested on January 20th.

A deeper explanation of this latest theory — and its genesis — can be found below:

Some QAnon followers are borrowing discredited arguments from sovereign citizens in order to yet again move the goalposts. They're absurdly claiming Trump will be inaugurated on March 4, because the U.S. was "incorporated" in 1871 and all Amendments passed after that are invalid. pic.twitter.com/W0c8QqiOqu

— Travis View (@travis_view) January 24, 2021

This is how prophesy cults often work. For instance:

If the past has taught us anything it is that failed prophecies and frustrated predictions don’t always mark the beginning of the end for radical social movements.

In addition to being a historic event, one might be forgiven for thinking that the inauguration of President Biden and Vice President Harris would sound the death knell of QAnon conspiracy theories. Now that Biden is actually president and QAnon predictions about Trump’s continuing hold on power have failed to come to fruition it would seem logical that they would pack up shop and admit that they were wrong. But if history has taught us anything it is that failed prophecies and frustrated predictions don’t always mark the beginning of the end for radical social movements. With apologies to Madonna, it’s prophets who are the mothers of reinvention.

In the early 19th century, New York farmer and Baptist preacher William Miller preached that the return of Jesus Christ was imminent. His prophecy was based largely on his study of the biblical book of Daniel. His interpretation led him to conclude, initially at least, that Christ would return sometime between March 1843 and 1844. When March 1844 passed without the appearance of Christ and his angels in the sky, Miller picked another date —April 18, 1844—which also slid by without cosmic incident or divine intervention. A follower of Miller’s, Samuel Snow, proposed a third date in October, but the Day of Judgment had still not arrived. The Millerites were understandably disillusioned. One member, Henry Emmons, wrote that he had to be helped to his bedroom, where he lay “sick with disappointment.”

You would think that three false prophecies, collectively known as the Great Disappointment, would be the end of the Millerites. To be sure, some members did leave to join the Shakers, but others began to reinterpret the prophecies about the end of days. One group began to argue that they were only partly wrong. The prophecies weren’t about the Second Coming and end of the world but, rather, about the cleansing of a heavenly sanctuary. It wasn’t an earthly event, it was a heavenly one, and this explained why, to us mere humans, it might appear that nothing had happened. It was out of this group that the Seventh Day Adventist Church arose. Today the Seventh Day Adventist Church has between 20-25 million members. They are, according to Christianity Today, “the fifth largest Christian communion worldwide.”

Update: John Amato caught a new Q defender on Fox News

Monday night, Tucker Carlson went on a rant about how the Democratic Party is trying to “control your thinking” because they are denouncing the insane QAnon conspiracies, and nobody is stopping them.

The Fox News host played a series of clips from other cable networks discussing the disaster caused by these conspiracy theory nuts. Trump used QAnon crazies to promote his failed presidency and his crazy voter fraud lies. As long as the QAnons were defending him, Trump was happy to give constant retweets of their preposterous ideas.

Carlson focused on a Tom Friedman quote when he said that QAnon conspiracy theorists were “frightening.”

Tucker agreed, “And he’s right. but not, as usual, as he thinks.”

Tucker claims that society is profoundly “changing right before our eyes” and the proof is in the denouncing of a batsh*t crazy Republican conspiracy theory movement.

“The threat is from an idea. It’s called Qanon,” Carlson said.

Tucker tells his rubes that if he doesn’t defend QAnon, then tyranny will prevail over our democracy.

Democrats need to act like they won. They have power and should use it.

We don’t need Eugene Robinson to tell us that, but let’s let him confirm our bias. We’re due:

Republican calls for President Biden and the Democratic majorities in Congress to settle for half-measures in the name of “unity” would be laughable if they weren’t so insulting. The GOP’s definition of unity would require not doing anything the GOP opposes. To accept that would be a betrayal of the citizens who voted in record numbers — some of them braving a deadly pandemic in the process — to put the Democratic Party in charge.

A better way to seek unity is to vigorously pursue policies that have broad public support — and that begin to clean up the shambles the Biden administration inherits. Democrats may have slim majorities, but they have been given a mandate to lead. They need to remember the past four years when Republicans controlled the White House and Senate. The GOP grandly pronounced that “elections have consequences” and treated the Democratic minority like a doormat.

Robinson is not calling for payback, but if Democrats expect to retain control of the House and Senate after November 2022, they had better deliver an improved standard of living for Americans and not be shy about shouting it from sea to shining sea.

Don’t worry. Be spendy.

Robinson cautions:

The most urgent matter of business is passing a new covid-19 relief package, providing desperately needed help for individuals, small businesses and state and local governments. Republicans who hardly batted an eye at Trump’s free-spending ways, and who blew a huge hole in the budget with a massive tax cut for the wealthy, have suddenly — and predictably — rediscovered their deep concern about the national debt.

Wall Street is not wringing its hands in harmony with Republicans this time (Politico):

Senior U.S. lawmakers are stressing out about mounting government debt as they resist President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion plan to boost the economy through more direct checks to Americans and aid to states and cities.

But investors in the federal debt, a wide range of market-focused economists and officials in the Biden administration have a firm response: Don’t worry about it right now.

The debt poses no imminent danger to U.S. finances, they say, so the more pressing concern should be jump-starting the economy to avoid the type of sluggish recovery that persisted for years following the Great Recession.

“Without further action, we risk a longer, more painful recession now — and long-term scarring of the economy later,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told senators last week at her confirmation hearing.

Go big

Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in an interview Monday night let MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow know that, yes, Democrats have learned not to negotiate with themselves. They would no longer squander precious legislative time catering to Republicans’ bad-faith demands for compromise. The ten years of “sluggish recovery” that resulted from the Obama administration’s failure to “go big” in its recovery plan left a lasting impression. Schumer promises to avoid a repeat now.

“Our north star has to be the legislation itself. It has to be big and bold and strong,” Schumer said. Of the drawn-out negotiations over the Affordable Care Act that both weakened the 2008 bill and foreclosed passage of other Democratic priorities, he said, “We will not repeat that mistake.”

That mistake led to historic losses for Democrats nationwide in the 2010 elections. Which led to Republican control of redistricting in many state legislatures. Which led to gerrymandering targeting “African-Americans with almost surgical precision” where I live and a decade of court fights to secure proportional representation in Congress for Democrats.

North Carolina is bracing for another decade of the same. Their 2011 gerrymandering efforts helped Republicans in 2020 retain control of the legislature and redistricting for another ten years. They will keep running the same play again and again as long as it works, here and everywhere else. Without bold actions by Democrats in Congress to improve Americans’ lives in President Joe Biden’s first two years, Republicans will regain control of Congress in 2023. Their efforts to secure minority rule will continue to work.

“Watch what they do, not what they say,” Maddow said of Republicans throughout the Trump administration. Schumer says Democrats in Congress have learned their lesson. Don’t listen to what he says either. Watch what Democrats do.

Chris Hayes Monday night framed the Trump Insurrection of Jan. 6 in a clarifying way, as an assassination attempt on democracy. House managers earlier had delivered to the U.S. Senate an article of impeachment against Donald J. Trump for inciting insurrection against government he was sworn to defend. The ex-president wanted his name emblazoned in history. He succeeded in ignominy.

I keep doing a quick mental audit and being, like "Why do I have this ambient sense of dread and anxiety?" and then I'm like, "Oh right the pandemic that's killed 400,000 people and destroyed normal daily life and American democracy barely escaping an assasination attempt."

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) January 26, 2021

A sitting president incited an assault on the Capitol itself. With a violent mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence” (Trump’s vice president) and searching for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a serious threat existed that insurrectionists meant to murder the next two people in line for the presidency as well as other lawmakers. For him. For Trump.

“The first impeachment of Donald Trump was an act of self-preservation by Democrats. The second is an act of self-preservation by Congress,” Adam Serwer writes at The Atlantic.

The reason to convict Trump and bar him from office forever is rather simple: No sitting president has ever incited a violent attack on Congress. Allowing Trump to do so without sanction would invite a future president with autocratic ambitions and greater competence to execute a successful overthrow of the federal government, rather than the soft echo of post-Reconstruction violence the nation endured in early January. The political incentives for the Republican Party in convicting Trump may be unclear, but the stakes for democracy are not. The Senate must make clear that attempted coups, no matter how clumsy or ineffective, are the type of crime that is answered with swift and permanent exile from American political life.

Reaching the two-thirds Senate majority needed to convict has never happened in three previous presidential impeachments. Andrew Johnson escaped removal from office by a single vote, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump (in his first impeachment) by a much wider margin. Whether the threat to their lives on Jan. 6 put enough of the of God in Republican senators to join Democrats in convicting Trump in his second trial time will determine.

The costs for Republicans would be high, Serwer notes. Arizona Republicans censured Sen. John McCain’s widow, former Sen. Jeff Flake and Gov. Doug Ducey over the weekend.  In Oregon, the Republicans’ state executive committee in a resolution declared the insurrection a “false flag” operation “designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters and all conservative Republicans.” Republicans in the Senate will consider not only their political futures and their own safety but must choose between their allegiance to their party and to the republic.

Serwer summarized their strategy for avoiding holding Trump accountable for his actions:

To avoid a difficult choice, some Senate Republicans have coalesced around the cowardly and nonsensical argument that ex-presidents cannot be tried by the Senate. But neither the text of the Constitution nor the intent of the Framers can justify, say, a president ordering a drone strike on the Supreme Court and then resigning and retiring to private life without consequence. Or imagine a president ordering a politically aligned militia to assemble outside Congress in order to compel the opposition party to pass a law he favors, without explicitly ordering an attack. An acquittal would represent an invitation to a future president to use force to bend Congress to his will.

The Capitol riot was a tragic farce, but the type of political violence it represents poses an existential threat to democracy. Congress now faces a question not just of self-preservation, but of deterrence. Parties change over time. Although today it is the Republican Party that is struggling with a faction that does not accept the legitimacy of its political opponents, a century and a half ago that description applied to the Democratic Party. Any president from any party who incites a violent attack on another branch of government in order to seize power should be forever barred from holding office.

Republicans national and state were eager supplicants throughout Trump’s four years. They give no indication of having regrown spines or a deepened commitment to the republic. They acquitted him for using his office to turn a foreign government into a tool in his reeleection. They stood by, maskless accomplices in COVID-19 denial, as 400,000 Americans died under Trump’s misadministration of what should have been a coordinated, national response to the global pandemic. Their response to the Trump-incited attempt to assassinate American democracy inspires no confidence they have sobered from drinking MAGA kool-aid. Whether a significant portion of citizens and a major political party are Americans now in name only remains an open question. One the coming Senate trial is unlikely to resolve.

Hayes’s “ambient sense of dread and anxiety” is justified.

Dogs have returned to the White House after a four-year hiatus, reports CBS News.
Champ and Major, the German shepherds of President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden, arrived at the White House on Sunday, a few days after their owners. https://t.co/smfV2q9zlB pic.twitter.com/BS6C4mUmwI

— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) January 25, 2021

Spotted by pooler @kaitlancollins @petermorrisCNN on the South Lawn — Champ and Major Biden. The first time dogs of leisure (a term I just made up, as opposed to working dogs) have been seen by reporters at the White House since Bo and Sunny Obama pic.twitter.com/8z2enx1L8n

— Betsy Klein (@betsy_klein) January 25, 2021

Biden's dogs barking… pic.twitter.com/doTErYoG4T

— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) January 25, 2021

The dogs even have Twitter accounts dedicated to their lives ― two of which are @TheFirstDogs and @TheOvalPawffice ― where updates about their goings-on are often posted.

No word yet on FLOTUS’s reported plan to add a White House cat. I look forward to the new addition.