Month: March 2021

The New York Times did a stunning visualization of what happened in one part of the Capitol on January 6th linked up with the police radio calls at the time.

When I watch scenes like that, my mind is boggled that anyone can sit back and say “hey, no biggie, it was just a protest and they didn’t mean any harm” These people were literally trying to overturn a legal election through force. They were hunting down members of congress. It wasn’t the usual protest. The idea that anyone would suggest such a thing makes my head hurt.

Last night the outgoing Washington DC US Attorney was on 60 Minutes and he had a lot to say about all this. The big headline was that he believed it was certainly possible that there would be sedition charges. Here’s the statute:

Sedition:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

It doesn’t appear that the first and most common definition there is what’s in play. It’s the second. They stormed the capitol during a joint session of congress that was voting to certify the election of the president. You can’t find any better example of two or more people opposing “by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof.” It is obvious.

Here’s the 60 Minutes interview:

Until this past Friday, federal prosecutor Michael Sherwin was leading the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history. Sherwin’s team has charged hundreds of suspects in January’s assault on the Capitol. Sherwin has said little. But Wednesday, before he moved to his next assignment for the Department of Justice, he sat down with us to explain the nationwide dragnet that began after the riot.

Michael Sherwin: As looking eight, nine weeks out from the events, we’re over 400 criminal cases, which is a pretty amazing number, I think, in a very limited time frame.

Scott Pelley: 400 defendants?

Michael Sherwin: Correct. 400 defendants. And the bulk of those cases are federal criminal charges, and significant federal felony charges. Five, 10, 20-year penalties. Of those 400 cases, the majority of those, 80, 85%, maybe even 90, you have individuals, both inside and outside the Capitol, that breached the Capitol, trespassed. You also have individuals, roughly over 100, that we’ve charged with assaulting federal officers and local police officers. The 10% of the cases,  I’ll call the more complex conspiracy cases where we do have evidence, it’s in the public record where individual militia groups from different facets: Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Proud Boys, did have a plan. We don’t know what the full plan is, to come to D.C., organize, and breach the Capitol in some manner.

Michael Sherwin was an eyewitness to that alleged plan. As acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia– the top prosecutor– he dressed that morning in running clothes and joined D.C. Police at the president’s rally.

Michael Sherwin: And I wanted to see the crowd, gauge the temperature of the crowd, it was like a carnival environment. People were selling shirts, popcorn, cotton candy, I saw hot dogs. As the morning progressed, I noticed though there were some people that weren’t the typical, like, carnival-type people. I noticed there were some people in tactical gear. They were tacked up with Kevlar vests. They had the military helmets on. Those individuals, I noticed, left the speeches early. 

They headed to the Capitol and Sherwin walked with them.

Michael Sherwin: You could see it was getting more riled up. And more people with bullhorns chanting and yelling. And it became more aggressive. Where it was initially pro-Trump, it digressed to anti-government, anti-Congress, anti-institutional. And then I eventually saw people climbing the scaffolding.  The scaffolding was being set up for the inauguration. When I saw people climbing up the scaffolding, hanging from it, hanging flags, I was like, “This is going bad fast.”

Michael Sherwin, 49, is a federal prosecutor from Miami. After successful terrorism and espionage cases, the Trump administration asked him to fill a temporary vacancy leading the Washington U.S. Attorney’s Office. That’s how, on January 6th, Sherwin found himself launching a 50-state manhunt — made urgent by what was coming in just two weeks.

Michael Sherwin: After the 6th, we had an inauguration on the 20th. So I wanted to ensure, and our office wanted to ensure that there was shock and awe that we could charge as many people as possible before the 20th. And it worked because we saw through media posts that people were afraid to come back to D.C. because they’re like, “If we go there, we’re gonna get charged.” 

More than 100 arrests were made before the inauguration.

Michael Sherwin: So the first people we went after, I’m gonna call the internet stars, right? The low-hanging fruit. The ‘zip-tie guy,’ the ‘rebel flag guy,’ the ‘Camp Auschwitz guy.’ We wanted to take out those individuals that essentially were thumbing their noses at the public for what they did.

Sherwin told us the most serious cases, so far, focus on about two dozen members of far-right militias.

Scott Pelley: Was there a premeditated plan to breach the Capitol?

Michael Sherwin: That’s what we’re trying to determine right now. We’ve charged multiple conspiracy cases, and some of those involve single militia groups, some of them involve multiple militia groups. For example, individuals from Ohio militia were coordinating with the– a Virginia militia group of Oath Keepers, talking about coming to the capital region, talking about– no specific communication about breaching the Capitol– but talking about going there, taking back the House. Talking about stopping the steal. Talking about how they need a show of force in DC. And we see that in December.  

At the center of one video are members of the Oath Keepers in military gear. Michael Sherwin says their tight, single-file formation is evidence of a military-style assault.

Michael Sherwin: That’s what you learn in close, you know, order combat, how you stay with your team to– breach a room where maybe there’s a terrorist, to breach a room where maybe there was an Al Qaeda operative.  

Scott Pelley: The infantry calls it a stack.

Michael Sherwin: Correct. A stack or a Ranger File, a column, a close-quarter combat column going up that staircase.

Scott Pelley: The Oath Keepers in that stack, what have they been charged with?

Michael Sherwin: The most significant charge is obstruction. That’s a 20-year felony. They breached the Capitol with the intent, the goal to obstruct official proceedings, the counts, the Electoral College count.

Defense attorneys for some Oath Keepers declined to comment. Others told us their clients are innocent.

Prosecutors say 139 police officers were assaulted. Brian Sicknick died the next day. This month, Sherwin charged two men with assaulting Sicknick with a spray designed to repel bears. 

Scott Pelley: The medical examiner has not yet determined how Officer Sicknick died. If the medical examiner determines that his death was directly related to the bear spray would you imagine murder charges at that point?

Michael Sherwin: If evidence directly relates that chemical to his death, yeah. We have causation, we have a link. Yes. In that scenario, correct, that’s a murder case.

There could have been many more deaths, but Sherwin says two dangerous plots failed. 

Scott Pelley: What were the intentions of the suspect who was found with the 11 Molotov cocktail bombs?

Michael Sherwin: So you’re referring, Scott, to Lonnie Coffman. And I think this is emblematic, that that day, as bad as it was, could have been a lot worse. It’s actually amazing more people weren’t killed. We found ammunition in his vehicle. And also, in the bed of the vehicle were found 11 Molotov cocktails. They were filled with gasoline and Styrofoam. He put Styrofoam in those, according to the ATF, because when you throw those, when they explode, the Styrofoam will stick to you and act like napalm.

Coffman’s lawyer did not respond to us. In the other plot, the FBI is looking for a person seen near pipe bombs that were planted by the Capitol.

Scott Pelley: Why didn’t they explode?

Michael Sherwin: It appears they weren’t armed properly. And there could be a whole host of reasons. But they were not hoax devices, they were real devices.

[Pelley goes on to discuss the 140 people who are charged with simple trespassing and confers with a defense lawyer who says his client was an innocent bystander.]

Michael Sherwin: We have to protect the First Amendment. The great majority of the people there were protesters. When do you cross that line? You cross the line when you cross a police line aggressively. You throw something at a cop. You hit a cop. You go into a restricted area, knowing you’re not supposed to be there. These are the plus factors that cross that line from a protester to a rioter.

Scott Pelley: Has the role of former President Trump been part of your investigation?

Michael Sherwin:   It’s unequivocal that Trump was the magnet that brought the people to D.C. on the 6th. Now the question is, is he criminally culpable for everything that happened during the siege, during the breach? What I could tell you is this, based upon, again, what we see in the public record. And what we see in public statements in court. We have plenty of people– we have soccer moms from Ohio that were arrested saying, “Well, I did this because my president said I had to take back our house.” That moves the needle towards that direction. Maybe the president is culpable for those actions. But also, you see in the public record too militia members saying, “You know what? We did this because Trump just talks a big game. He’s just all talk. We did what he wouldn’t do.”

Scott Pelley: In short, you have investigators looking into the president’s role?

Michael Sherwin: We have people looking at everything, correct. Everything’s being looked at.

But, so far, prosecutors have not charged sedition–attempting to overthrow the government.

Scott Pelley: I’m not a lawyer, but the way I read the sedition statute, it says that, “Sedition occurs when anyone opposes by force the authority of the United States, or by force hinders or delays the execution of any law of the United States.” Seems like a very low bar, and I wonder why you’re not charging that now?

Michael Sherwin: Okay, so I don’t think it’s a low bar, Scott, but I will tell you this. I personally believe the evidence is trending towards that, and probably meets those elements. 

Scott Pelley: Do you anticipate sedition charges against some of these suspects?

Michael Sherwin: I believe the facts do support those charges. And I think that, as we go forward, more facts will support that, Scott.

The Biden administration asked Michael Sherwin to stay through the transition. Now, he plans to return to the Miami U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Scott Pelley: What do you want people to understand about this investigation?

Michael Sherwin: That we tried to move quickly to ensure that there is trust in the rule of law. You are gonna be charged based upon your conduct and your conduct only. Not what you may have posted about the election, not what you may have posted about different political views. The world looks to us for the rule of law and order and democracy. And that was shattered, I think, on that day. And we have to build ourselves up again. The only way to build ourselves up again is the equal application of the law, to show the rule of law is gonna treat these people fairly under the law.

If you want to follow the various indictments and the way the cases are shaping up in detail, Emptywheel is reading every document.

It was inevitable that a crisis at the U.S. border with Mexico would refocus the media away from the ongoing pandemic and the consequential economic fallout. Those are old stories and it appears that most people believe the nation is “rounding the turn,” as Trump used to weirdly say. The immigration story, however, while one that repeats itself every few years, most recently in 2019, offers up a deeply satisfying new narrative for the media: “Donald Trump was right.”

Never underestimate the overwhelming incentive for some in the press to seize on a storyline that allows them to prove that they are not the “liberal media” (or in today’s parlance “the fake news media.”) The situation at our southern border provides a perfect platform for them to show their even-handedness. Unfortunately, as with most such media moments, it’s not even-handed in the least.

First of all, it is true that the situation at the border is a humanitarian crisis. The most acute aspect of it at the moment is the record number of unaccompanied minors — somewhere around 15,000 and growing — who are now under U.S. government protection as they await a judicial resolution to their asylum claims. This is a reversal of the Trump administration’s cruel policy of forcing people to live in squalid refugee camps on the other side of the border. Needless to say, the Biden administration is scrambling to deal with this huge surge of children and teenagers. Obviously, they need proper shelter, medical care and expeditious resolution of their cases which, in most situations, means they are released into the care of family here in the U.S. or are placed with well-vetted sponsors. It is a challenge, to say the least. They are, by most accounts, moving as quickly as possible.

The main gripe from the news media is that the administration has refused to use the word “crisis” (they have since acquiesced to that demand) and they are not being transparent about how the children are being treated, raising suspicions even among immigrant advocates that they are hiding something. The administration says they are protecting the privacy of the children but it’s obviously better to show the scope of the challenge and, hopefully, show that they are meeting it quickly. Worrying about “optics” in a situation like this is counter-productive. But let’s be clear. The current hysteria is being ginned up by the shameless Republicans who are clutching their pearls over the alleged mistreatment of kids even as they are insisting that Trump’s cruel policies should be immediately reinstated as if they were highly successful. They were not. This current surge has been coming on for many months, as MSNBC’s Mehdi Hassan pointed out in this interview:

Me: "Since the pandemic… border apprehensions have gone up month after month. Joe Biden did not inherit falling numbers."
GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw: "I don't know where you're getting figures from."
Me: "Those are CBP numbers."

Watch our exchange on @MSNBC:pic.twitter.com/4hw18tOQBK

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) March 22, 2021

To the extent the border was “closed” under Trump, it was due to the pandemic and only applied to the normal cross-border businesses which, for all of the hand-wringing by Republican politicians about the economy, never seemed to come on their radar. These towns and the people in them from both countries have been suffering from the border being closed but the migrant surge was growing all through 2020. And, as we know, this isn’t the first time this has happened. For a number of complicated reasons, there will from time to time be surges of migrants, often families or unaccompanied minors from Central America, to the border. From 2013 and 2018, between 300 and 450 thousand asylum applicants came to the border each year and generally speaking, there is more or less attention to the problem depending on where the crisis peaks in the election cycle. You may recall that in 2014 there was a surge of unaccompanied minors that caused a massive paroxysm on the right which led to the loss of one very powerful Republican House member as well as a disgusting display of racist rhetoric by the usual right-wing media suspects. In fact, that period was one of the leading factors in the rise of the demagogue Trump who rode to the White House spewing lurid fears about immigrant rapists. The “caravan” hysteria of 2018 was Trump’s main mid-term tactic. It did not pay off at the polls but did manage to inspire a mass murder.

Today, the GOP is shrieking that Biden has declared the border to be open (it is not) and that it’s his promise of a humane border policy that is driving people to apply for asylum. If that’s true it would seem to be important for the press to at least address the fact that 2019 had by far the highest number of apprehensions in over a decade. And it sure as hell wasn’t because of Trump’s generous immigration policies.

Journalist Heather Timmons of Reuters offered some context on Twitter that shows why so many people who have followed this issue for years are frustrated with the current coverage. It’s not that things aren’t bad at the moment, they are. But put in historical context, this specific crisis is par for the course. She notes that apprehension levels are lower than in the Trump administration, peaking at that a massive number in 2019, and much lower than during the 2000s, a period when there was quite a bit of active bipartisan cooperation on the subject but which, sadly, came to an end as the partisan acrimony accelerated at the end of the Obama administration.

The Republican party is now solely committed to politics via culture war, using media, state legislatures and the federal courts. And nothing gets their culture warriors’ juices flowing like racial unrest and immigration. Sure, rending their garments over Mr. Potatohead is lots of fun, but this is what goes directly into the right-wing lizard brain. They are the ones feeding this story which you can easily tell by such fatuous nonsense as the immigrant-hating extremist Stephen Miller declaring the Biden administration “morally monstrous.”

The media must cover the story, of course. But it doesn’t have to pull theatrical stunts as ABC did by sending its entire panel down to the border to absurdly seat them in front of the “wall” for its Sunday show. Neither does the Washington Post need to headline a big feature with the grossly provocative “‘No end in sight’: Inside the Biden administration’s failure to contain the border surge” which ignores their own paper’s own reporting last fall about the surge already happening under the Trump administration. They should leave this sort of thing to Fox News, which knows how to make a profit at it.

The mainstream media can educate the public without ratcheting up the hysteria by calmly providing the historical context for this surge and all the ones that came before. If they fail to do this we’re going to see yet another surge of dangerous, right-wing anti-immigrant demagoguery injected into the mainstream of American politics at a moment when feelings are running very high and there is bloodlust in the air. They need to tone it down for the sake of the people who are going to pay the price if it gets out of hand.

Salon

E.J. Dionne reports that there seems to have been a halt in the far right surge in recent elections around the world. That is very good news:

There’s a long-standing habit among Americans of reading our own politics as a signal for where the whole democratic world is moving. Sometimes it’s justified. Ronald Reagan’s election was clearly part of a broad movement toward the free-market right in the 1980s. Bill Clinton’s embrace of a centrist brand of progressivism in the 1990s was widely imitated.

So is a Joe Biden wave forming out there? Perhaps more importantly, has the drift toward right-wing authoritarianism that Donald Trump’s ascendancy seemed to herald been checked?

Of course it’s early, and many key national elections — in Germany and France, for example — lie in the future. But voting in the Netherlands last week and recent state elections in Germany and Australia point to a covid-era seriousness about government’s responsibilities, a search for democratic stability after a series of right-wing uprisings, and a redefining of progressive politics in a green direction.AD

Taken together, these things don’t necessarily suggest a Biden wave, but they do point toward the same sensibility that led to his election. Activism with a moderate tone, competence and focus in ending the pandemic, alertness about climate change — these approaches are being embraced by the center-left, but also by parts of the moderate right.

Here’s the most striking fact about the Dutch vote, two state elections in Germany and an election in Western Australia: The incumbents did well in all of them. And while parties of the far right in the Netherlands and Germany held their own — advancing a bit in the Netherlands, moving backward in Germany — their surge has been checked. They are no longer, as they were in the Trump years, at the center of the news.

[…]

In the Netherlands, Mark Rutte and his center-right VVD (from the Dutch name the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) topped the list of 37 parties that contested last week’s election. Rutte, one of Europe’s longest-serving leaders, will be forming his fourth coalition government. While his handling of the pandemic was far from perfect, he was seen as safe and experienced. That was enough this year for a sizable plurality of the electorate.AD

“Their priorities now are a stable government and reliable politicians,” University of Amsterdam political scientist Matthijs Rooduijn said in an interview, “and they see Rutte as someone who can lead the country out of the crisis.”

Coming in a surprisingly strong second was the ever-so-slightly left-of-center D66 party, partners in Rutte’s last government — and who expect to join him again and hope to move the next government in a more progressive direction, particularly on climate. A middle-class social liberal party, D66 appeared to draw votes from the Green Party, Rooduijn said.

In Germany’s Baden-Württemberg, 72-year-old Winfried Kretschmann, the Green Party’s only state minister-president (in U.S. terms: governor) was comfortably reelected, rewarded for his moderate policies and grandfatherly image. (His simple slogan: “You know me.”) The Greens have been surging nationally and threaten to displace the Social Democrats, Germany’s traditional center-left party. But in Rhineland-Palatinate, Social Democratic incumbent Malu Dreyer won reelection by converting her personal popularity into a showing far stronger than the Social Democrats’ national standing.AD

In both states, outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats lost ground, partly because of a corruption scandal around the acquisition of face masks that led to the resignations of two senior party members. The Social Democrat Dreyer, who led a coalition government that also included the Greens and the middle-of-the-road Free Democrats, suggested that such an alliance might be appropriate for the country as a whole after September’s national elections. It would actually resemble Biden’s own electoral coalition.

Until last Sunday’s vote, Merkel’s extraordinary durability made a government without the Christian Democrats seem inconceivable. Now, said Olaf Scholz, the Social Democrats’ national candidate, voters can see the possibility of a majority without the Christian Democrats.

Finally, in Western Australia, incumbent Premier Mark McGowan converted exceptional personal popularity arising from his handling of the pandemic into an astonishing sweep. His center-left Labor Party won 53 of the 59 seats in the state parliament.

Perhaps the clearest signal of the shift in the political winds from an expressive nationalist politics to pragmatic reform is Rutte’s path to his fourth victory. A politician skilled at reading public sentiment, Rutte offered a tough line on immigration in the last election to push back against the far-right surge. He has not walked away from that position, but he moved toward the center this time with a program for more affordable child care, raising the minimum wage and expanding clean energy subsidies.

If nothing else, Biden’s defeat of Trump has shifted the momentum away from the global far right. And the pandemic and growing concerns about the climate have made electorates more practically minded and more focused on results. That’s progress.

A global catastrophe can sometimes focus the mind …

Tom Nichols takes his own advice (The Atlantic):

I’ve spent years telling people, usually with exasperation and a certain amount of petulance, to trust experts and to stop obsessing about the rarity of their failure. But that was before a crisis in which millions of lives were dependent on a working relationship between science and government. Now that I must take my own advice, I feel the same anxiety I’ve so often dismissed in others. We—and I’m including myself here—need to come back to our senses about expertise.

My gut instincts are much like those of any other American. When my wife and I became eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations in our state, we plowed through different locations and times trying to capture an appointment. When we finally nailed down a date, I blurted out, as if it mattered: “Which vaccine is it?” I immediately ran through questions in my head. Do I trust the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine? Do I prefer one shot to two? Are Moderna’s data more reliable than Pfizer’s?

Perhaps most important: Do I have any idea what I am talking about?

No. Not really. Nichols is a political scientist. Meaning “not a ‘scientist’ at all,” he admits. But like others, he tends to obsess over the flood sometimes of contradictory data that he is unequipped to evaluate.

Yes, experts sometimes make mistakes. Thirty-five years ago, a bad decision at the launch pad ended in the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle. But those spectacular failures are rare. Mixed signals about how to prevent and treat COVID-19 left many people confused and edgy thjis last year. “But when the pandemic recedes—and after we have reflected on all of this death and heartbreak—we’ll need to recover some perspective and learn once again when to put aside gut instincts and listen to the people who know what they’re doing,” Nichols writes.

And stop going to Google to self-diagnose, I’d add.

Partway through Nichols’ essay, I recalled a passage from somewhere (I’ll kick myself when I remember) in which the author was talking about computers with another passenger on a commercial flight. The great thing about computers, said the guy in the next seat, was you can always turn them off. But considering he was seated in an aluminum tube in an air traffic pattern with dozens of other planes, and it was computers keeping them from running into each other and falling from the sky, the author decided he really did not want to turn them off.

Nichols offers a similar anecdote about a submarine, and continues:

The best experts help us find the sweet spot between our gut and our brain by explaining processes, risks, and benefits in ways that we can understand. The questions we pose to those experts are an important part of establishing a trusting relationship with them. But we must consider whether we are asking questions that are meaningful and intended to help us reach a decision, or whether we are asking questions to enjoy a temporary sense of empowerment. We should focus on useful inquiries that are guides to action: Do these vaccines have side effects? If I need two shots, how long can I wait between getting them? How long will immunity last? What can I do after I’m vaccinated?

We must also ask whether we distrust particular individuals or whether our beef is with the entire system. A certain amount of skepticism toward elected officials—who have a vested interest in being reelected—is normal. But in our polarized time, this distrust has become extreme. When President Joe Biden said that he thought the Fourth of July was a good target date for the return of small gatherings, many of his critics went ballistic: Who is Joe Biden to tell me what to do?

But Nichols trusts that Joe Biden is listening to experts. He could not muster the same trust when it came to Donald Trump. But he trusts scientists “not because they wear a white jacket or have certificates on their wall, but because I have confidence in the educational and scientific infrastructure that created them.”

Flying in low/no visibility means having to rely on instruments, not on your gut. Your senses don’t work in there. In situations like this pandemic, we have to rely on experts who know what we do not. Admitting we don’t know better is a good start.

They hail from the Dallas suburbs, but it could be Robert Altman’s Nashville. Frisco, Texas finds itself in the spotlight as a hub for domestic extremists. Authorities have charged nineteen residents for breaching the Capitol on Jan. 6. Many still believed Donald Trump would be installed as president on March 4th (Washington Post):

“We are optimistic . . . If you’re in morning [sic] Please stay at home!!!” the group’s organizer, Jeff Hauk, told the weekly meeting of a group of conservatives who call themselves the “DFW Deplorables.”

In posts on their private Facebook page, Hauk said he still believed Trump had their backs and that the former president was working behind the scenes to return to power. “It is not over,” Hauk wrote.

Not quite. More arrests are coming. Perhaps here in North Texas.

Local law enforcement authorities had been grappling for months with the poisonous impact of baseless claims. In September, Frisco authorities were flooded with calls and emails after QAnon conspiracy theorists latched onto a video shared on social media of a crying little girl in the back seat of a car. In reality, the girl, who police say was part of a custody dispute, was safe, but her privacy was violated by the video being shared repeatedly, and time spent addressing the false accusation affected the investigation, authorities said.

Police also were forced to address a viral social media post that falsely labeled the town’s sprawling Stonebriar Center the “No. 1 mall in the U.S. for sex trafficking,” assuring the public that teenagers were not being kidnapped.

The area has doubled in size over the last two decades. Median household income of $97,000 exceeds the national median of $69,000. But with the population increase came diversity and with diversity unease. The county’s Latino and Asian American populations are growing, and the White population is in decline, writes Annie Gowan.

“They created this perfect little bubble of the way they wanted things … now we’ve got true diversity, and those Christian nationalists are afraid of losing their power,” said Johnston, a Democratic activist and one of the Internet sleuths who helped unmask local residents who participated in the Capitol riots. “These are the very people who would do things like have Trump parades every weekend and take a private jet to a riot.”

Realtor Jenna Ryan did just that with a few of her friends. Her Facebooked participation led to her arrest. “I bought into a lie, and the lie is the lie, and it’s embarrassing,” she says now. “I regret everything.”

Shortly before Biden’s inauguration, Pastor Brandon Burden of the KingdomLife church — a boxy, largely windowless sanctuary in Frisco — mounted the pulpit and gave a stemwinder of a sermon that went viral.

Burden spoke in tongues and urged his flock of “warriors” to load their weapons and stock up on food and water as the transfer of power loomed. The emergency broadcast system might be tampered with, so if Trump “took over the country,” he could not tell them what to do, he said.

“We ain’t going silently into the night. We ain’t going down. This is Texas,” Burden preached.

“This isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville! They can’t do this to us here,” country singer Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) tells a political rally at the climax of Altman’s film.

Except this is Dallas.

Trump was going to save the world — their world — from a cabal of baby-eating, Satan-worshipping pedophiles. But where are the bodies? The pictures of the missing on milk cartons? The shallow graves off Rte. 9 containing bleached bones of the tiny victims? The news-at-six video of distraught parents pleading for the return of their babies? Those are not answers the QAnon faithful seek. Nor are they the real source of their anxieties.

Sigh:

Trumpworld is at war over who controls the golden ticket — a Donald Trump endorsement.

Since late February, a small band of insiders led by Donald Trump Jr. and former campaign manager Bill Stepien have established themselves as gatekeepers for who gets endorsed and how fast those endorsements roll out, according to interviews with more than a half dozen Republican strategists and Trump advisors.

“One month ago, there were nine ways to win an endorsement. Now that’s being winnowed down to just one,” said one Republican working on 2022 congressional midterm races. 

This consolidation of Trumpworld power in the chaotic months since Trump lost re-election have angered the Republicans who supported Trump but are not part of the tiny clique running Trump’s post-White House political operation. 

Some Trump loyalists and Republican operatives outside of Trump’s inner sanctum derided the development as an effort by Stepien, in particular, to preserve power for himself. Longtime Trump advisors and others have knocked Stepien and his team for losing the White House and still getting to keep control of access to Trump. 

“It’s become a very big source of contention,” said one former Trump White House aide keeping tabs on the endorsement struggle. “It is ridiculous that someone who didn’t do a good job in the campaign is now out there leading the charge and getting all the rewards after doing a s****y job.”

At stake is control of the most valuable item in Republican politics at the moment: Trump’s official seal of approval.

With a single, emailed statement from his nascent political action committee, Save America, Trump could decide the fate of ambitious Republicans running in competitive House or Senate primaries. 

Trump remains extremely popular among most Republicans despite his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and subsequent impeachment trial, during which he was acquitted.

“President Trump’s endorsement is the most important in political history, as evident by more than 20 senators and 50 House members calling or traveling to Mar-a-Lago just since January to seek his support,” Trump senior advisor Jason Miller said in a statement to Insider. 

Trump Jr., Stepien, and their top deputies began limiting endorsements from the former president last month, after Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina trekked to Mar-a-Lago toting a list of endorsements for incumbent Republican senators.

Graham’s trip secured endorsements — and the implicit protection from costly Republican primaries that come with the Trump endorsement — for incumbent Sens. Jerry Moran of Kansas, Mike Crapo of Idaho, and John Boozman of Arkansas. 

Since leaving the White House, Trump has endorsed 10 candidates in all. His support has ranged from former White House press secretary Sarah Hucakbee Sanders, who is running for governor of Arkansas, to Julia Letlow, the widow of former Louisiana Rep.-elect Luke Letlow, who is running in Saturday’s special election to fill his seat. 

Republicans supporting the Trump Jr. and Stepien team say they’re right to establish a formal process for deciding how Trump doles out his blessings. 

“Nobody’s blocking other people from going to Trump,” said one Republican supporting the Trump Jr. and Stepien team. “If Corey (Lewandowski) wants to call the president, he can walk right in. If (RNC Chairwoman) Ronna McDaniel wants to call, she can get through.”

Trump Jr., Stepien, and their small team have urged Trump recently to delay jumping into competitive races, particularly in states such as Ohio, where multiple Trump supporters are vying to win the Republican Party nomination for US Senate. 

The top Republicans angling for this seat, which Sen. Rob Portman is vacating, are all expected to descend on Trump’s Florida residence at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday. 

Former Ohio Republican Party chairwoman Jane Timken, former Ohio state treasurer Josh Mandel, and author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance are among them.

The event Wednesday is ostensibly for former Trump White House aide Max Miller, who is trying to unseat Ohio Rep. Anthony Gonzalez for supporting Trump’s second impeachment. 

But Trumpworld will instead be watching to see who can get around Trump Jr. and Stepien to lobby Trump directly for his approval.

“It’s the first cattle call of the Ohio Republican primary,” said one Trump advisor.

And there’s more:

Donald Trump spokesman Jason Miller was on Fox News on Sunday trying to build hype for the former president’s big, grand return to social media — whatever form it may take.

Howard Kurtz first spoke with Miller about Trump repeating his baseless statements about the 2020 election. In a statement Saturday, the former president continued to make false claims that the election was rigged. Just weeks ago, Trump’s comments riled up a mob of his supporters to storm the Capitol.

He was permanently suspended by Twitter in the following days, so Kurtz asked Miller if Trump is planning to get back on social media soon.

Miller first boasted about the attention Trump is getting for the statements he’s been sending out recently, before saying, “I do think that we’re going to see President Trump returning to social media, in probably about two or three months here, with his own platform.”

“This is something that I think will be the hottest ticket in social media,” he added.

Miller claimed Trump has heard from a lot of different people about these plans:

“It will be big once he starts. There have been a lot of high-powered meetings he’s been having at Mar-a-Lago with some teams of folks who have been coming in, and I gotta tell you, it’s not just one company that’s approached the president, there have been numerous companies… Everyone wants him.”

Aaaand, apparently all the bigfoot journalists who are writing books on the Trump years — Jeremy Diamond,Michael Wolfe (!) Maggie Haberman etc are going down to Mar-a-lago to interview Trump. He wants to “set the record straight.”

… for fun and profit:

The mysterious individual behind a new and rapidly growing online disinformation network targeting followers of QAnon, the far-right cult, can be revealed as a Berlin-based artist with a history of social media manipulation, a prominent anti-racism group claims.

Since Donald Trump left the White House, QAnon’s vast online community has been in a state of flux as it comes to terms with the reality that its conspiracy theories – such as the former US president being destined to defeat a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles – amount to nothing.

That may explain why significant numbers have turned to a new far-right network, found mostly on the Telegram messaging app, that is growing quickly in the UK and globally and has amassed more than one million subscribers so far this year.

Called the Sabmyk Network, like QAnon it is a convoluted conspiracy theory that features fantastical elements and is headed by a mysterious messianic figure. Since its emergence there has been widespread speculation about who that figure might be. The person who first posted as “Q” has never been positively identified.

This week the British anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate will unmask Sabmyk’s leader, who it claims is 45-year-old German art dealer Sebastian Bieniek. It says Bieniek – who has not responded to questions from the Observer – has a history of creating online conspiracies and even wrote a book in 2011 called RealFake that detailed a campaign to deceptively promote his work.

But Hope Not Hate says the speed of Sabmyk’s growth serves as a warning of the opportunities for manipulation that exist on social media, particularly unregulated alt-tech platforms such as Telegram.

Gregory Davis of Hope Not Hate, which will publish its annual report into the far right on Monday, said: “His success in developing such a huge audience is a reminder that the QAnon template of anonymous online manipulation will continue to pose a threat in the years to come.”

Since 21 December last year, when Sabmyk was supposedly “awakened”, more than 136 channels in English, German, Japanese, Korean and Italian have sprung up, adding tens of thousands of followers on a daily basis.

Much of Sabmyk’s content is designed to appeal toQAnon followers; it features Covid mask scepticism, anti-vaccine conspiracies and false assertions that the 2020 US election was stolen from Trump.

Some is also designed to actively recruit Britons: one Sabmyk channel, the British Patriotic Party, uses the same branding as anti-Muslim group Britain First and posts about the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.

Other channels are entitled London Post and Liverpool Times, as well as the Great Awakening UK, a reference to a well-known QAnon trope predicting a day of reckoning in which Trump would rise against his liberal enemies. Others include WWG1WGA, an acronym for the QAnon rallying call “where we go one, we go all.”

Among the clues used to identify Bieniek are posts saying that the messiah Sabmyk can be identified by specific marks on his body. One post claimed that Sabmyk would have “17 V-shaped scars” on his arm, the result of a “prophetic ceremony at the age of 24”.

Hope Not Hate has found a since-deleted section on Bieniek’s website recalling a 1999 art exhibit in which, aged 24, he cut V-shaped wounds into his arm for 16 days in a row.

Attempts to connect Sabmyk to Trump have been made, including a clip that splices together instances of the former president saying “17”, and a doctored image showing him with a Sabmyk pamphlet in his suit pocket.

Bieniek has created countless false identities, according to the Hope Not Hate investigation, to promote his career as an artist. The group also says his German Wikipedia page has been deleted at least four times, most recently in January.

I won’t be surprised to learn eventually that “Q” was a similar personality. I mean, come on. In a world in which there are millions of people who are willingly sucked into internet rabbit holes and don’t realize they’re being manipulated, it’s inevitable that charlatans will take advantage.

Should be great when they all get on planes and head back home all over the country. Thanks DeSantis!

The 2022 election in Georgia is going to be lit. This piece by Tim Miller on Trumper Herschel Walker and his nascent campaign says it all. Trump seems to think he would be best suited to beat Raphael Warnock, but who knows? Maybe he could take on Governor Brian Kemp in a primary:

Ask any football fan about the worst trades in NFL history and the one player they will all mention is Herschel Walker.

Back in 1989 the Dallas Cowboys traded their star running back to the Minnesota Vikings for five players and six draft picks, an unprecedented haul that Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson later described as “the great train robbery.” The Cowboys used those picks to draft Hall of Famer Emmitt Smith and a bunch of other key cogs for the budding dynasty that would dominate the NFL for much of my childhood. For the Vikings on the other hand…well they haven’t been to the big game since 1977.

So you might say that being on the losing end of a swap is something Herschel knows a little bit about.

That’s going to be relevant experience for him, because 30 years after Jimmy J’s big heist, Herschel finds himself as a key player on the losing end of the political trade that turned Georgia—home to his alma mater and site of a potential run for either Senate or governor—into a blue state. In addition to being the answer to an NFL trivia question, Walker is now a card-carrying Trumper. And also a real-world celebrity. Or rather, as close to a “real-world celebrity” as exists in the jackleg MAGA world where Scott Baio and Kevin Sorbo are part of the A-list. Walker even has celebrity progeny: A son who is—I shit you not—a gay, anti-BLM, pro-Trump, TikTok sensation.

Walker currently lives in Texas, but is thought of as a Georgia candidate thanks to his heyday between the hedges. The Trump family wants revenge against Georgia’s Republican political establishment and see Walker as their prime recruit. And, God bless ‘em, the Republican consultant/media complex is getting on board, too.

Reading about Walker, you will see what the Trump family likes about him (spoiler: he’s a Trump suck up). What’s less clear is why Georgia Republicans would want to bring the Walker Texa(n)’s drama to the Peach State.

Miller describes Walker’s admission of having severe mental illness (“dissociative identity disorder” or D.I.D., which is colloquially known as “multiple personality disorder.”) which resulted in serious threats of violence to others and himself. He would play Russian Roulette in front of people.

After his book tour in 2008, Walker became a contestant on Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice reality show where he “finished” a gentleman’s 7th place—behind Joan and Melissa Rivers, but ahead of Khloe Kardashian. The judges felt like his orange chicken with a yogurt dessert was not suitable for the frozen food category. It probably says something that Walker’s self-described competitive streak did not seem to engender any bitterness towards the man who fired him in week nine of the show.

Walker then tried his hand at MMA where he was more successful, finishing 2-0 before determining that he was aging out of a young man’s game.

A few years after that Walker reconnected with Trump and began to show a real interest in politics.

Lucky us.

Walker’s political ideology is somewhat muddled, but the through line that connects it all is his willingness to partake in any conspiracy theory that bubbles up from the MAGA internet.

Some examples.

In October of 2020, many months after Obama began campaigning for Biden, Walker suggested that Obama had delayed doing so because he might be privy to unspecified information about “O’Biden’s son” and “he may have known about it, knew it wasn’t right. And, uh, who knows?”

Who does know?! Not Herschel.

He also proposed a complex theory in which the Communist Party of China funded the Black Lives Matter movement, which in turn funded the Democratic party.

“Why does it seem like I’m the only one that’s coming up with this? Just think about it,” he said.

[Chin Scratch Emoji]

Walker was, of course, early to the #StopTheSteal conspiracy, proposing in the weeks before the election that Biden had already admitted to fraud and suggesting that maybe Obama had cheated in his victories, too.

We heard @JoeBiden say they put together voter fraud and Joe stated that’s also what they did for @BarackObama. Did they cheat to get Obama elected? @FoxNews @CNN @realDonaldTrump @espn @LouDobbs @DonaldJTrumpJr @kayleighmcenany

— Herschel Walker (@HerschelWalker) October 26, 2020

After the election, Walker, like many other consumers of MAGA media, became increasingly unhinged and radicalized—I understand this might not seem possible. But in this he was egged on by his increasingly visible son, Christian.

To fully understand the extent to which Herschel has internalized the messaging from the dregs of the Parlerified pro-Trump internet, you have to understand his gay, 21-year-old son, Christian, who—prior to becoming a content creator extraordinaire—was a competitive cheerleader.

(I want to break the fourth wall and offer, as a personal aside, that it’s pretty cool for a guy like Herschel to be so supportive of his cheer-squad son. I hope other MAGA dads get some cheerspiration from him on this count. . .)

Christian went on to become a star of the online right during the 2020 campaign, garnering over 400,000 followers on TikTok and 125,000 on Twitter with his sassy, contrarian rants.

Among his first viral hits was a harangue against Joe Biden over the “you ain’t black” gaffe, which Christian marked with the hashtag #JoeBidenIsARacist.

By September he had inhabited all of the trolly bad faith attacks that were popular in pro-Trump internet circles but which you likely would have had no familiarity with if you weren’t an extremely online MAGA.

For instance, Christian crams all of the following conspiracies into one 35 second clip: “Jim Crow” Joe Biden is a “drug addict” because he is “refusing a drug test,” he was demanding breaks every 30 minutes to get his diaper changed or sniff a child backstage, and that his press secretary was talking in his ear during debates. He goes on to call Biden a dementia patient, an elderly patient (?), and an unstable man. Which is a little weird since (a) Joe Biden has never copped to playing Russian Roulette or putting a gun to his wife’s head and (b) presumably the Walkers would tell you that being mentally unstable should not be disqualifying for high office.

As the campaign wore on Christian dedicated his feed to insane anti-Biden rants, condemning Black Lives Matter, and insisting that marginalized communities should stop complaining and be more positive about their opportunities. Like he was. During this time he honed his messaging, became ensconced in the MAGA web, and saw his online follower count skyrocket. As Christian’s commitment to the bit solidified, so did his dad’s ability to communicate in TheDonaldeeze.

Like many of their compatriots, the Walkers were undeterred by Trump’s loss.

On November 21, Herschel claimed that some of our elected officials knew about the fantastical “Dominion fraud” and that, as a result, they might end up in jail. The next day Herschel sent two tweets about his faith in Sidney Powell, saying that doubters “will be shocked” when Powell “lays the SMACKDOWN.”

Later that day he announced that he was moving over to the greener pastures of Parler, @HerschelWalker34.

Oops.

In December the Walkers visited with Maria Bartiromo about the state of affairs. Herschel lamented that his son’s first time voting had been tainted by (imaginary) voter fraud and demanded that people go to jail for . . . whatever. He went on to say that punishing the “bad players” who committed the fraud was the “only way you can make this country free.” He then ranted about how Trump needs to stay in power to punish the people who “have done the bad things.”

I think this president is going to bring law and order back to this country that’s the way we can get back to the country we used to be, the United States of America that believes in law and order and you got to send people to jail that have done the bad things. And I hate to say it, I don’t care where you’re from, whether you’re in Washington or whether you’re from the smallest town in the United States of America. If you’ve done something wrong, you need to go to jail and just know you’re going to get a knock at your door and I think that’s the only way you can solve this.

In the middle of Herschel demanding that the defeated president stay in power against the will of the people and jail his political enemies, Bartiromo interjected to compliment Christian on his Instagram posts raising awareness about the upcoming January 6 election certification. Christian and Bartiromo then agree that the election was “far from over.” (Reminder: At the time of this interview the election had been over for six weeks.)

Herschel and Christian continued to bang the drum about fraud all the way up through Insurrection Day. In one of the many…many…tweets Christian sent about election fraud in January, he declared that to get a fair vote in Georgia, someone should “throw Stacey Abrams a bucket of Popeyes fried chicken to distract her.”

On January 4, Herschel praised Lin Wood and said “America needs a total cleansing only Donald Trump can do with the help of TRUE PATRIOTS…Whatever it takes to get the job done.” Two days later when those true patriots went to the Capitol to get the job done, Herschel tweeted that they were “trojan horses.” Then he went dark on the platform for a month.

Sitting in sunny California, Christian was more clear-eyed about the patriots that he and his father had helped inspire.

https://twitter.com/ChristianWalk1r/status/1346894490536189959?s=20

Expect more of this?

Alrighty then.

There’s more at the link… oy vey.

Apparently, the Georgia MAGAs are over the moon at the prospect of Walker entering the race for either Senator or Governor and they seem to believe his winning the election is a slam dunk since he’s Black, a Trumper and a former football star which they think covers all the bases. And maybe it does. I honestly feel like I don’t know anything anymore.

Dr. Tom Frieden has some good news and some bad news:

Covid Epi Weekly. Progress and Peril.

Vaccinations have already saved 40,000+ lives in the US and the pace keeps increasing. But explosive spread of variants in Brazil and lower interest in vaccination are ominous portents.

A 4th surge is likely, but a less deadly one. 1/thread

First, the epi. Cases have stopped decreasing in many places and are increasing in some. Vaccinations are preventing deaths. Cases (~50,000/d) and test positivity plateauing nationally, with a concerning trend of PCR test positivity increasing slightly to 4.3% last week. 2/

The faster decline in deaths is striking and undoubtedly from vaccination. Look how steep the red line is below. Because vaccination rates in people over 65, especially those in nursing homes, are so high, the lethality of the virus is, as a result of vaccination, decreasing. 3/

Vaccines have likely saved 40,000+ lives in the US. Previously, ~40% of reported Covid deaths were among nursing home residents vs ~19% of ~200,000 deaths in 2021. If nursing home residents still accounted for 40% of Covid deaths, 40,000 more would have died since January. 4/

Will we have a 4th surge? I think so, but not huge & not nearly as deadly because so many of the most vulnerable people have been vaccinated. The more we mask up & distance, the less we travel, the faster we vaccinate, the fewer cases, hospitalizations & deaths there will be. 5/

Cases are increasing in parts of Europe, often despite masks and distancing – following vacation travel. Travel is an accelerator of viral transmission. Spring break travels while the virus isn’t taking a break – not a good idea. http://bit.ly/3s3O8Pv 6/

Surprisingly high second-dose vaccine completion largely among long-term care population & healthcare workers, so expect this proportion to decrease. The single-dose J&J vaccine will be a big help in many settings (shopping center vaccination, anyone?) http://bit.ly/3tBfCw6 7/

You shouldn’t have to live in the right place or know the right people to get vaccinated. Highlights of inequities in distribution; 43 countries are on track to vaccinate in 2021, but 148 are not. Ramping up mRNA production is a promising approach. http://nyti.ms/30Zmo2p 8/

Will be increasingly difficult to keep up pace of vaccination. Many of the most eager got vaccinated. Next will be the willing, then the reluctant, finally the late converts. For each area and demographic, key is to listen, address concerns with right messages and messengers. 9/

Brazil – a cautionary tale. Uncontrolled spread and slow vaccination led to huge wave even though there was a devastating earlier wave. Seems likely that the P1 variant can reinfect people, although evidence for this still emerging. Read our summary: http://bit.ly/3eTYiOH 10/

The B117 variant is spreading throughout the US and may be associated with higher risk of death. Growing evidence suggests that available vaccines protect against this variant, but the bigger problem is the possibility of newer variants. Immunity after infection isn’t perfect.11/

Those who have had COVID-19 should still be vaccinated! A study from Denmark suggests that previous infection provided 80% protection against reinfection, but protection among those age 65 and older was only 47%. https://bit.ly/3cO9PN4 12/

More people vaccinated means that selective pressure on the virus increases, and if strains emerge that can evade this immunity, they can spread. We don’t know if this will happen, but it’s a risk, and we can reduce the risk by reducing uncontrolled spread wherever it occurs.13/

The virus is a wily enemy, and this investigation demonstrates just how contagious it can be. If we let our guard down too early, Covid will take advantage. https://twitter.com/HelenBranswell/status/1372568216342556675?s=20 14/

With proper measures in place, especially masks, we can begin to do more as vaccination makes the virus less lethal–adjusting if there are rising cases. The virus has had a major impact on many facets of our lives, from schools to jobs, and recovery will take awhile. 15/

Multiple studies demonstrate that schools can open without excess Covid risk, and CDC has appropriately updated its guidance. However, the more Covid spreads in a community, the higher the risk for everyone, including school staff and students. https://bit.ly/3qiKfoL 16/

In some places, the pandemic’s impact has been as harmful as Covid itself. Data from 19 @_AfricanUnion Member States shows the pandemic has driven food insecurity and disruptions to health services. We must ensure equitable access to vaccines. https://bit.ly/2ZjPrNA 17/

A new report shows that Covid set us back years in tuberculosis control. A million patients may have been missed as a result of the lack of access to health facilities. Each one can potentially infect others. A devastating setback. http://bit.ly/3vI9Z0S 18/

This timeline of progress from the past year: remarkable. Scientists across the globe made rapid progress against the most disruptive health threat of the past century, but there is so much more to learn! https://go.nature.com/3qXlQ7S 19/

Originally tweeted by Dr. Tom Frieden (@DrTomFrieden) on March 20, 2021.