You have been warned
It was already clear weeks ago that Donald John Trump and his Project 2025 co-conspirators — Christian nationalist OMB director Russ Vought and the president’s pet psychopath, Stephen Miller, among them — were on a trajectory to unmake the United States of America, its constitution, and your freedoms. The Heritage Foundation published their plan in 900-plus pages entitled “A Mandate for Leadership” (2023) that looks to the world now like a blueprint for dictatorship. A key element of its implementation was a shock-and-awe strategy, a concept made famous in George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq on false pretenses.
On October 10, 2006, Keith Olbermann (“Countdown”) examined how Bush’s Military Commission’s Act of 2006 impacted the right of habeas corpus, a.k.a. The Great Writ. That foundational right is enshrined in Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution. Olbermann built a memorably snarky rant around habeas and other Bush assaults against the Bill of Rights in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Worldwide revulsion against the Bush torture regime, the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses, and leak of the 2002 torture memos was by then over two years old.
Given the manifold predations against the Constitution and Bill of Rights by the Trump 2.0 autocracy, it feels timely to dredge up the low-rez Olbermann video for your review. (Transcript here.) Its application to the Trump 2.0 terror campaign against civilians by masked ICE agents dressed as if for invading Fallujah needs no further explanation.
His Imperial Lordship makes no secret of which of your constitutional rights he believes are contingent on his mood. Sen. Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut takes notice.
Timothy Snyder (“On Tyranny“) spelled out their plan on October 25: “[T]he goal of these people is the end of law, the end of democracy, and the end of a recognizable republic.”
In testimony after the September 11 attacks, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told a congressional hearing that nobody could have predicted that terrorists might use a commercial airplane as a missile. In fact, they’d been warned.
Americans had a quarter of a century of warnings that an autocrat in the White House was a potential threat. They did not take it seriously, even after Trump impeachments, felony convictions, federal indictments, and his brown-nosing of world dictators. Your job now — our job — is to make sure it is not too late.
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