Month: June 2022

Stop the presses

Jared was so concerned with pardons that he wasn’t really paying attention to the coup? Maybe. But he was one of the first to push the Big Lie:

Jared Kushner knew his father-in-law and boss Donald Trump had lost to Joe Biden. But that didn’t stop Kushner from trying to help his wife’s dad cling to power.

Nowadays, as Kushner seeks investments for his firm and attempts to launder his image, the former senior White House aide would like everyone in the public and the press to believe he had nothing to do with the January 6 insurrection or Team Trump’s most scandalous efforts to overthrow the American democratic order. However, there is one problem: Kushner absolutely was intimately involved with Trump’s scheme to overturn President Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 election. It’s just that he bailed on the mission early to save himself.

According to four people familiar with the matter, in the week following Election Day in early November of that year, Kushner took charge in overseeing the development of plans to keep Trump in office — Kushner just wasn’t publicly ostentatious about it in the way Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others were. During that first week, Kushner repeatedly met with Trump and other high-ranking aides to the then-president to discuss and map out possible strategies for multi-pronged legal battles and a scorched-earth messaging war against the victorious Biden campaign, the knowledgeable sources tell Rolling Stone.

Despite all the strong evidence to the contrary, Kushner told Trump that there could still be a path for the then-president in a number of critical states, including Arizona, that had already been called for Biden. In those early days of the scheme to overturn the election, two of the sources say, Kushner also personally encouraged Trump to fight on and ignore people who were saying it was over, and to stick to the burgeoning plans and court challenges spearheaded by the 2020 campaign attorneys and senior staff. Kushner was, of course, in the room with these fellow Trump lieutenants when the plans were first being crafted. (Axios reported this at the time as the trusted son-in-law urging Trump to explore and pursue “legal remedies” to the election results.)

Earlier this week, The New York Times published an article titled, “How Jared Kushner Washed His Hands of Donald Trump Before Jan. 6” — renewing questions of just how complicit Kushner was in his father-in-law’s months-long attempted coup d’état.

“Jared was directly involved,” one of these sources, a former senior Trump aide who worked on the effort to nullify the election outcome, said. “There was a [brief] window…when it seemed like he was positioning himself to be the Jim Baker of this fight … It didn’t last long. He backed away from it, but he was there and got his hands dirty like everyone else did.” (Baker, a towering figure in the Republican Party, helmed the legal team for George W. Bush during the chaotic Florida recount that ultimately handed Bush the presidency.)

“Jared helped create what then morphed into the Rudy clown show,” the source added.

Rolling Stone’s calls and messages to Kushner were not returned on Thursday. But five days after Election Day 2020, and the day after major outlets had already called the election for Biden, Trump adviser Jason Miller told The Daily Beast: “Jared has been more hardcore in fighting back on this than anybody.”

He backed off later out of self-preservation — in fact, he left town! But he’s as guilty as any of them.

It’s come to shitty pillows and shredded paper

Anyone who harbors hopes that the televised Jan. 6 committee hearings that resume Monday morning will change minds among the MGA faithful, read it and weep:

Six years into the grass-roots movement unleashed by Donald Trump in his first presidential campaign, Angela Rubino is a case study in what that movement is becoming. Suspicious of almost everything, trusting of almost nothing, believing in almost no one other than those who share her unease, she has in many ways become a citizen of a parallel America — not just red America, but another America entirely, one she believes to be awash in domestic enemies, stolen elections, immigrant invaders, sexual predators, the machinations of a global elite and other fresh nightmares revealed by the minute on her social media scrolls. She is known online as “Burnitdown.”

She is also among the people across the country willing to do whatever they can to ensure that the imagined enemies of the United States are defeated in the 2022 midterm elections and beyond. From school boards to state houses to Congress, their goal is to take political territory, and for evidence that this is possible, they look to northwest Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose first-time candidacy two years ago defined the fringe of the Republican Party and who is now running for reelection as one of its standard bearers.

Dumpster diving for evidence

Rubino retrieved a couple of bags of shredded materials from the dumpster outside her local elections office in north Georgia, took them back to her garage, and expects to reassemble them — there must be evidence in there . When she’s not taking down RINOs or trafficking in conspiracy theories or distributing campaign signs for “patriots” running against Republicans insufficiently Trumpy.

“And who were those people drinking each other’s blood?” said Rubino.

“Megan Fox and her boyfriend,” said Smith, referring to the actor.

“Did you ever see that clip about Hillary Clinton where she cut a girl’s face off and she wore it?” said Rubino, referring to one of the fake videos of the type always coming across her social media scroll. “I could hardly watch.”

Everyone not with her is against her. Against America. Against Trump. Against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Dark night of the soul

All Rubino’s certainties have fallen away. As in any cult, members must have external reality broken down, stripped away, so the old reality can be filled with a new one.

She no longer trusted her schooling. She no longer trusted traditional news. She no longer trusted election results. She no longer trusted courts, or local government, or state government, or the U.S. government, or any of the institutions of democracy she once took for granted. She was no longer sure America was the country she once thought it was.

“It’s just endless questions,” she said. “You’d like to have somebody to trust, something to be sure of.”

[…]

“Sometimes I’m like, what if I’m wrong?” Rubino said. “It crosses my mind. Then I ask God: If I’m doing something wrong, please give me the strength to figure it out. Because I really want to understand what the point is. This can’t be what life is, that you get up and go to work and come home. That as humans, we’re nothing.”

It’s an age-old search for meaning. In all the wrong places. I’ve seen it before. Just never on this scale.

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31 members of Patriot Front arrested in Idaho

You once had to be Black and in the South to have a local group of masked white men assemble to assault you. Today, you no longer need to be Black or in the South, and the violent white men no longer need to be local.

Idaho Statesman:

Police in Coeur d’Alene arrested 31 masked members of a white nationalist group suspected of conspiring to riot in the city’s downtown on the same day as a scheduled and nearby Pride in the Park event.

The arrested men of “Patriot Front” arrived in Coeur d’Alene inside a U-Haul truck that police pulled over for a traffic stop. Only one was from Idaho. The rest came from Washington, Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia and Wyoming. Among the arrested is the national leader of the group, Tom Rosseau.

Conspiring to riot is a misdemeanor. More charges are possible after further investigation.

They came to riot

A concerned citizen called police after seeing men dressed in khakis, blue shirts, white balaclavas and baseball caps, jumping into a U-Haul truck outside a local hotel, Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White said in a news conference. “They had shields and looked like a little army,” the caller told police who spotted and stopped the truck as it headed toward downtown.

“It is clear to us based on the gear that the individuals had with them, the stuff they had in their possession, the U-Haul with them along with paperwork that was seized from them, that they came to riot downtown,” Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White told reporters. Those included the shields, shinguards, and planning paperwork “similar to an operations plan that a police or military group would put together for an event.”

The Washington Post offers a little background:

Many of those arrested were wearing logos representing Patriot Front, which rebranded after one of its members plowed his car into a crowd of people protesting a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens.

Rebranded? The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies Patriot Front as a white nationalist hate group calling for the formation of a white ethnostate.

“These people”

Pride in the Park advertised as a “family-friendly, community event celebrating diversity and building a stronger and more unified community for ALL.” Patriot Front was not the only group interested in standing against anything like that, the Post reports:

The Panhandle Patriots, a local motorcycle club, had planned a “Gun d’Alene” event on the same day as Pride in the Park to “go head to head with these people,” an organizer said in April during an appearance with state Rep. Heather Scott (R).

The organizer was not identified by name in a video but wore a vest bearing the alias “Maddog” and the insignia of the Panhandle Patriots group. He lamented that the Pride gathering would be “allowed to parade through all of Coeur d’Alene,” saying that “a line must be drawn in the sand” against such LGBTQ displays. Scott did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post late Saturday.

In a news release posted on the group’s website, the Panhandle Patriots encouraged the community to “take a stand” against the LGBTQ “agenda.” It also suggested without evidence that “extremist groups” were trying to hijack the event to provoke violence and said the group would change its event name to “North Idaho Day of Prayer” in response.

The group attempted to march on the park but were turned back by police, reports journalist Alissa Azar.

Ironically, Idaho’s state motto is Esto perpetua, “Be Eternal.” Some attitudes are. As well as how easily some performative “strongly” men are threatened by people unlike themselves.

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They followed a structure and didn’t deviate into bloviating

James Fallows has a typically astute analysis of what made the January 6th Committee hearing successful. Let’s hope they follow the same playbook going forward:

Congressional hearings are rarely designed to be watched. That’s why they’re typically aired on C-Span in off-prime hours. They’re usually shaped by the convenience and ambitions of the participants, rather than the interests of a potential audience.

The opening session of the January 6 investigative committee last night was different, and was tremendously effective. It reflected sharp awareness of how politicians typically get in their own way—with time-hogging introductions, with speeches masquerading as “questions,” with attempts to create dramatic moments that might make it onto a cable TV show or the internet.

To avoid those pitfalls, this committee’s leaders, members, and staff did everything within their power to convey the result of their investigation: That there had been a plot to overturn the results of an election, and that the plot was led from within the White House by the incumbent president himself.

Here are some of the things that revealed the care of the committee’s planning and presentation.

1. Discipline.

Politicians like to talk. Being good at talking is how most of them got where they are. If you have nine elected officials on a platform, you’re going to get at least nine “introductory” speechlets.

Not this time. Nine accomplished politicians were indeed sitting in camera-range last night. Some of them are near-household-names, from their frequent TV appearances. (For instance: Reps. Adam Schiff of California, and Jamie Raskin of Maryland.) Some are next-generation officials who can always use more air time. (For instance: Reps. Stephanie Murphy of Florida, and Pete Aguilar of California.)

But only two of the committee members said even a single word on camera. These were the committee chair, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, and the vice-chair, Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. And the great majority of the case was made by Liz Cheney.

You can see the whole session of C-Span here. Bennie Thompson led off with about nine minutes at the start, and added a few minutes at the end. The rest of the two hours was left to Liz Cheney.

The discipline behind last night’s presentation was remarkable. Seven ambitious politicians needed to agree: We’re going to sit on stage, before multi-network national TV cameras. And we’re not going to say a word. And they agreed to that. I can’t think of a comparably self-limiting moment by TV-era politicians.

2. Casting.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Black man who grew up in segregated Mississippi, was the right person to talk about the long struggle to realize the American ideal.

Rep. Liz Cheney, a legatee of one of the most famous (and notorious) names in modern GOP history, was the right person to lay out chapter-and-verse on what the committee had discovered.

I have paid my dues as a critic of her father over the decades. (For instance: his role in the catastrophic decision to invade Iraq, and the even-worse aftermath.)

I imagine that I would disagree with Liz Cheney on nearly all issues of current policy.

But she was magnificent. No sentence in her presentation was over-delivered. Every word in every sentence landed to maximum effect. Her performance should be remembered alongside that of Joseph Welch nearly 70 years ago, in the Army-McCarthy hearings.

Rep. Thompson with the introductions. Rep. Cheney with the prosecution. Reps. Aguilar, Kinzinger, Lofgren, Luria, Murphy, Raskin, Schiff as silent witnesses and tribunes. This was ideal casting.

3. Narrative clarity.

From beginning to end, everything the committee presented was directed toward establishing one story line. It was this:

Donald Trump lost the election, and everyone including him knew it. Some people around him, albeit belatedly, finally stood up to him. Too many corruptly went along with what they all knew was a big lie. The only people who didn’t know were members of the mob who attacked the Capitol on January 6. Their mistake was believing the lies they were continually fed by Trump himself.

My point now is not to say, “They proved this point,” although I think they did. It is to recognize the beginning-to-end clarity of the committee’s case.

Effective persuasive speech usually follows this pattern:

1.Here is what I am going to tell you.
2.Now I am telling you.
3.Here is what I just told you.

Thompson, Cheney, their videos, their witnesses — all worked toward this end.

4. Foreshadowing.

Throughout her talk, Liz Cheney talked about the evidence that would come up in the second hearing, and the third, and beyond. People want to know how elements of a story fit together. She was providing the outline, and I bet that she and her colleagues will continue to do so.

There was also foreshadowing on the personal level. In bull-fighting the picadors are the horsemen who stick lances into the (doomed) bull, not to deliver the lethal blow but to soften him up for what lies ahead.

Liz Cheney acted as picador for a number of figures, notably including Mark Meadows, Jared Kushner, Rep. Scott Perry, the “legal” figures John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark, and of course Trump himself. She implicitly said, without spelling out, that these people and others were not going to like what the future evidence would show. (Kushner, for example, says at time 45:40 of this video that he was so busy “trying to get as many pardons done” that he waved-away complaints about Trump’s law-breaking. “Getting pardons done” is its own seventh-circle-of-hell in DC corruption.)

You can imagine the audience for these hearings growing rather than waning over time.

5. A memorable line.

Rhetorical lines can stick in the mind if they’re vivid or catchy on their own terms. Half the political speeches you’ve ever heard, involve someone straining for this effect. (“Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”)

But these lines last only if, like poetry, they capture and compress a larger idea.

Liz Cheney did that, in the few seconds you can see starting at time 46:40 of this C-Span video. What she said, with ice-cold clarity, was:

Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues, who are defending the indefensible.
There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone.
But your dishonor will remain.

My respect to Reps. Cheney and Thompson, and to their colleagues, and to all who have managed this presentation.

Please watch, think, and act.

Good stuff. Let’s hope it holds.

More horror

Timothy Snyder:

Russia has a hunger plan. Vladimir Putin is preparing to starve much of the developing world as the next stage in his war in Europe.

In normal times, Ukraine is a leading exporter of foodstuffs. A Russian naval blockade now prevents Ukraine from exporting grain.

If the Russian blockade continues, tens of millions of tons of food will rot in silos, and tens of millions of people in Africa and Asia will starve.

The horror of Putin’s hunger plan is so great that we have a hard time apprehending it. We also tend to forget how central food is to politics. Some historical examples can help.

The idea that controlling Ukrainian grain can change the world is not new. Both Stalin and Hitler wished to do so.

For Stalin, Ukraine’s black earth was to be exploited to build an industrial economy for the USSR. In fact, collectivized agriculture killed about four million Ukrainians.

Notably, as people began to die in large numbers, Stalin blamed the Ukrainians themselves. Soviet propaganda called those who drew attention to the famine “Nazis.”

Actual Nazis had related ideas. They liked the idea of controlling Ukrainian agriculture. This was in fact Hitler’s central war aim.

Hitler wished to redirect Ukrainian grain from the Soviet Union to Germany, in the hope of starving millions of Soviet citizens.

The Second World War was fought for Ukraine and in considerable measure in Ukraine, between dictators who wanted to control food supplies.

Russian memory politics prepared the way for a 21st-century hunger plan. Russians are told that Stalin’s famine was an accident and that Ukrainians are Nazis. This makes theft and blockade seem acceptable.

Putin’s hunger plan is, I believe, meant to work on three levels. First, it is part of a larger attempt to destroy the Ukrainian state, by cutting off its exports.

Putin’s hunger plan is also meant to generate refugees from North Africa and the Middle East, areas usually fed by Ukraine. This would generate instability in the EU.

Finally, and most horribly, a world famine is a necessary backdrop for a Russian propaganda campaign against Ukraine. Actual mass death is needed as the backdrop for a propaganda contest.

When the food riots begin, and as starvation spreads, Russian propaganda will blame Ukraine, and call for Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine to be recognized, and for all sanctions to be lifted.

Russia is planning to starve Asians and Africans in order to win its war in Europe. This is a new level of colonialism, and the latest chapter of hunger politics.

Originally tweeted by Timothy Snyder (@TimothyDSnyder) on June 11, 2022.

They planned it carefully

Chris Hayes did a great job exposing Fox’s perfidy and corruption in “covering” the January 6th Committee this week. It was even worse than I knew.

Three million people saw their broadcasts. Over twenty million saw the actual hearing. But the entire Republican party backs the Fox version of events and they will amplify it and continue to validate it as the counter-narrative of Trump’s coup. And using their institutional power in the states and the courts, they could overwhelm the truth and maneuver their way back into power.

It sounds terrifying

Tell me this isn’t a dystopian nightmare:

In 1966, 15-year-old Renee Chelian lay down, blindfolded, in the back seat of a stranger’s car and rode to a Detroit warehouse packed with other patients for a pre-Roe, illegal abortion. Her parents arranged it on the phone, using code words because they shared the line with neighboring houses and feared prosecution. It cost $3,000 — nearly $27,000 today — and she had to return home to pass the pregnancy, painfully, over many hours, into the toilet.

She was admonished by her parents never to speak of it and told no one would marry her if they knew. For two decades, she didn’t say a word.

Yet Chelian described her abortion as feeling like a second chance from God — a rescue from having to drop out of school, marry her 16-year-old boyfriend and abandon her career dreams. Today, she runs Northland Family Planning Center — a group of clinics in the Detroit and Ann Arbor suburbs — with her two daughters, and, like hundreds of abortion providers across the country, is waiting to learn whether a Supreme Court decision, expected in the coming weeks, will force her to close her doors.

“The idea that we’re going back to where we were when I started my career makes me sick to my stomach,” she told POLITICO in the conference room of one of her clinics.

Chelian now is among the tens of thousandsof providers, lawmakers and volunteers fighting to keep the state law that necessitated her covert abortion decades ago from once again taking effect should federal protections fall.

The uncertainty over Michigan’s 1931 law, which has no exceptions for rape or incest, has providers like her preparing for two scenarios: a near-total ban that could make them close their practices, or, if one of their strategies to block the 90-year-old law succeeds, and abortion is protected, a surge of patients from Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin and other nearby states that could overwhelm their resources.

At the same time, conservative officials, candidates and advocates who are fighting to preserve the state’s abortion ban in court, in the capitol in Lansing, and on the campaign trail are grappling with a different set of questions: should they enforce the 1931 ban if the Supreme Court gives a green light or pass an updated and possibly more moderate version? And how harshly should the state punish violators?

“I don’t know where we will land on that,” said Rep. Pam Hornberger, the Republican speaker pro-tempore of the Michigan state legislature. “None of us are thinking we’re going to let this 1931 law go back into effect and people are going to start getting arrested. Instead, we are fully prepared to have those difficult conversations with our colleagues.”

Republicans, many of whom are hesitant to discuss the potential ban, are also split over whether the state needs to boost health care or child care funding or make other preparations for either a ban or a surge in demand — even as health care workers across the state warn that patients could be in serious risk in just a matter of weeks.

“I’m worried we’re going to start seeing more patients from out of state, sicker patients, and patients who are further along in their pregnancies because they’ve had to figure out how to afford the trip,” Sarah Wallett, the chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood of Michigan, told POLITICO. “I’m also afraid that if there’s a surge, something will have to give. Will that be birth control? STD screenings?”

Sitting in the lobby of the group’s Ann Arbor clinic in navy blue scrubs and a silver necklace reading “1973” — the year Roe was decided — Wallett explained that the clinic doubled its capacity at the end of last year. The group also has tried to recruit more doctors, nurses and medical assistants, but have struggled to do so as pandemic burnout plagues the health care workforce.

But Wallett, who is also the lead plaintiff in Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit against the state’s 1931 abortion ban, said despite a preliminary injunction the group recently won in that case, they’re also preparing for the ban taking effect.

“I get teary-eyed just thinking about it, but we have been developing a plan for if the Supreme Court decision comes down in the middle of the day when patients are here, and we have to look them in the eye and tell them: ‘I have the ability to help you, but I won’t because I’d be committing a felony,’” she said.

In Michigan, providers could face up to 15 years in prison for violating the state’s ban if the Supreme Court allows it to be enforced. And as Texas — which last September banned most abortions — demonstrated, few, if any, providers are willing to violate the bans given the threat of prosecution and lengthy prison sentences.

This sounds like a recipe for paralysis so I’m confident the draconian 1931 law will take effect. And since they can’t reconcile their belief that abortion is murder with the fact that the woman who has an abortion is then logically a murderer it is just a matter of time before women who have them will be arrested.

These right wingers have never been willing to think through the real ramifications of what they are doing. They think they can wave away all the complexities by saying “just give your baby up for adoption” like that’s an easy answer. This difficult, intimate, highly personal issue is beyond their simple-minded “oh the babies!” reasoning and it’s going to result in pain and horror and nightmares for women.

Not that they care.

Carl Palladino is back! And Elise Stefanik is his biggest fan

“Hitler was a doer”

On Thursday, MediaMatters unearthed a local radio interview Paladino gave on Feb. 13 last year in which he cited Nazi ruler Adolf Hitler as a model for a leader who gets the people jazzed about taking action.

The radio host, Peter Hunt, had asked Paladino how to “rouse the population” and “get people thinking about the possibility of change.”

“I was thinking the other day about somebody [who] had mentioned on the radio Adolf Hitler and how he aroused the crowds,” the Republican replied. “And he would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just — they were hypnotized by him. I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational. We need somebody that is a doer, has been there and done it, so that it’s not a strange new world to him.”

Paladino’s kudos to Hitler resurfaced about 48 hours after it was discovered that the House candidate — who’s been endorsed by House Republican Conference chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY) — had posted a conspiracy theory claiming that the Uvalde and Buffalo shootings were false flags on his Facebook page on June 1.

Paladino initially insisted on Wednesday that he hadn’t posted the screed, didn’t know how it ended up on his page and that he didn’t even know how to use Facebook.

But when it was also discovered that Paladino had not only posted the tirade on Facebook but had also emailed it out, the Republican quickly backpedaled and admitted that he had, in fact, posted the rant. “I didn’t write it but did carelessly republish it without clearly reading it,” he told Spectrum News 1.

Paladino’s Hitler shout-out and the Facebook post are part of the longtime GOP operative’s pattern of unhinged behavior — set on full display when he made a failed bid for New York governor in 2010 and was working for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Lowlights include comparing First Lady Michelle Obama to a gorilla, advocating for throwing welfare recipients in prison, publicly accusing then-rival Gov. Andrew Cuomo of having an affair (despite having a love child of his own) and threatening to “take out” a reporter.

Two peas in a pod.

Find one near you

More fallout from Thursday:

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com