Jeff Sharlet posted a long thread on Saturday reflecting on reporters’ initial reaction to his use of the the term “fascism” in “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.” One element dovetails with a post I’d already prepped from Jessica Valenti’s “Abortion, Every Day” substack.
When I launched THE UNDERTOW I did an event w/ a NYT politics reporter who scoffed at use of "fascism." When pressed, he didn't seem to know what it means. Here's my definition, informed by years of reading and… "fieldwork." With illustrations! A thread. 1/ pic.twitter.com/3KvuKLqIzX
“The anti-abortion movement is launching a national campaign to trick women into carrying doomed pregnancies to term,” Vessica Valenti wrote in October in a post titled “Calculated Cruelty.” She summarized it in a followup post on Friday and cautions that the movement has moved upstream of abortion clinic protests to targeting prenatal testing that might reveal fatal fetal abnormalities:
The short version, though, is that a coalition of the most powerful anti-abortion groups in the country are working together to ban abortion in cases of fatal fetal abnormalities, and to do away with the prenatal testing that provides those diagnoses. They’re not just targeting legislation, but individual women—embedding themselves in hospitals, doctors’ offices and anywhere else patients might be getting bad news about their pregnancy.
Worst of all, these groups are calling it “prenatal diagnosis counseling” and perinatal hospice care*—manipulating women in their most vulnerable life moments under the guise of offering real help. That characterization is also politically strategic: it means that when Democrats oppose funding to anti-abortion groups that lie to women about their fetal diagnoses, the GOP can claim that they’re actually callously refusing women counseling and care.
Crisis pregnancy centers are going underground, Valenti suggests. Or rather, planting “moles” inside traditional medicine. The anti-abortion movement “has rejected ‘viable’ and ‘nonviable’, and is working to get legislators and medical professionals to do the same” to further sow confusion. But more than that.
“The goal isn’t just to confuse and mislead people about their pregnancies, but to divorce abortion from healthcare—bolstering the lie that abortion is never necessary to save someone’s health or life,” Valenti writes.
The cruelty of what this means in practice cannot be overstated. Because conservatives’ strategy to stop women from ending doomed pregnancies isn’t just legislative—it’s about ensuring individual patients never know the truth about their diagnoses in the first place.
Consider the heartlessness it takes to go to someone who has just been given the worst news of their life and then lie to them about what it means. Or to keep that information from them entirely: one of the goals of this initiative is to make it difficult, if not impossible, for pregnant women to get prenatal tests at all.
What does this look like?
This week, The Catholic Spirit spoke to Dr. Robin Pierucci, a neonatologist who works with Be Not Afraid, one of the groups behind this anti-choice campaign. I want you to read what she says to patients who have just found out that their pregnancies aren’t viable: “Congratulations.”
“I love reminding them that the first diagnosis is, ‘it’s a baby,’ and no other diagnosis ever negates diagnosis number one. The baby is inherently valuable and worthy of our love.”
I’m going to say this with all the restraint I have in my soul: I cannot believe someone hasn’t knocked this lady out. I mean really. Congratulations??
The effort is organized. They are drafting legislation and pushing for federal and state funding for “perinatal hospice nurses.”
Valenti cautions, “Republicans know what they’re doing. They know that their laws will hurt and kill women. And for all their rhetoric about saving babies, they also know that more infants will die as a result of this work.”
Don’t ever let people forget that Republicans are willing to watch women and babies suffer and die in service to their cause. And their cause has never, and will never, be us.
Getting back to Sharlet, in addition to a “mythological past rooted in grievance,” several other myths are central to fascism: family, purity, whiteness, “cleverness” (transgressiveness as displays of courage), and “a reverence for violence as a purifying force, as an exhilarating, even titillating experience.” The recipe employs conspiracy theories as a binder.
Another feature that will be present if it’s fascism: misogyny, not just as a constant, but as an element of a purity-based nationalism. I call it gender nationalism.
Sharlet admits that in writing “The Undertow … I used to think full-fledged fascism wan’t possible in the U.S. Not because of democracy; because of fundamentalism. The missing ingredient, I thought, was cult of personality. We’d never switch out Christ for a man. I was wrong.”
Sharlet summarizes:
So, “fascism”: A “purity” myth. A nationalist myth. Misogyny. All concentrated in a cult of personality, sanctified thru violence deemed not only necessary but thrilling, a militant eroticism.
The point of “The Undertow” is that so much of this movement is operating below the radar. The New Apostolic Reformation, as Paul Rosenberg reminded Salon readers last week, does the same. Researcher Fred Clarkson warns that this is deliberate, “They are wily because they are worried that the rest of society will figure out who they are and what they are up to.”
*Note: In light of (I am loathe to say, “in honor of”) the 3rd anniversary of the January 6th insurrection, I am re-posting this piece, originally published March 25th, 2023.
Castle by the sea, fig. 1: Richard Nixon’s “La Casa Pacifica” (California)Castle by the sea, fig. 2: Donald Trump’s “Mar A Lago” (Florida).
There’s an old theatrical performer’s axiom that goes “Always leave ‘em wanting more.” In August of 1974, President Richard Nixon made his Watergate-weary exit from the American political stage with a nationally televised resignation soliloquy and left ‘em wanting more…answers. Any immediate hopes for an expository epilogue to this 5-year long usurpation of the Constitution and Shakespearean tragedy were abruptly dashed one month later when President Gerald Ford granted him a full pardon. Like King Lear, the mad leader slunk back to his castle by the sea and out of public view. […]
[Actor Frank Langella] uncannily captures the essence of Nixon’s contradictions and complexities; the supreme intelligence, the grandiose pomposity and the congenital craftiness, all corroded by the insidious paranoia that eventually consumed his soul, and by turn, the soul of the nation.
In a 2019 CNN panel discussion regarding lessons learned from Nixon’s ill-fated second term, former Watergate Special Prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste had this to say:
“As I said in my book, written shortly after I left the office [as Special Prosecutor] …For the future, the lessons of Watergate are wonderful, in that the system worked–in this circumstance…but they almost didn’t work. For the future, does it take something more than what we have experienced in Watergate [regarding] the type of evidence: demonstrative, incredibly powerful evidence of criminal wrongdoing for a President of the United States to be put in a position of either resigning, or certainly [being] impeached and convicted?”
Panel member Carl Bernstein was more succinct, offering this take:
“The system worked in Watergate. But it worked ultimately because there was a ‘smoking gun tape’. It’s very questionable whether the system would have worked without that gun.”
Bernstein was referring to Nixon’s self-incriminating statements regarding a coverup and obstruction of justice…captured for posterity via a secret recording system the President himself had arranged to be set up in order to document all his Oval Office conversations.
I probably don’t need to remind you who the occupant of the White House was in 2019.
Several days after that CNN panel discussion aired (45 years after Nixon resigned), the media, members of Congress and concerned citizens found themselves poring over the 400 pages of the highly anticipated Mueller Report (officially titled as Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election) and asking themselves the $64,000 question:
“Is there a ‘smoking gun’ buried somewhere in here…or a reasonable facsimile thereof?”
As we’ve learned in the fullness of time, in regards to allegations of “conspiracy” or “coordination” between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia, the Mueller report concluded that the investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”. However, it also said that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was illegal and occurred “in sweeping and systematic fashion”.
As for obstruction of justice allegations, the report “does not conclude that the President committed a crime, [and] it also does not exonerate him”. On the latter point, the “investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations”.
The report also states that once Trump was aware that he was being investigated for obstruction of justice, he started “public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the president, while in private, the president engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.”
With the spectre of criminal charges hanging over his third bid for the White House, Donald Trump has scheduled a massive rally in Texas this weekend.
The campaign event, planned for Saturday, marks the former president’s return to a traditionally conservative state in which he remains very popular.
But his decision to hold the rally in Waco – best known for an armed standoff 30 years ago – has raised eyebrows.
The 1993 tragedy is seen as a landmark event for the American far-right.
A city of about 140,000 people in the heart of Texas, Waco is celebrated these days as host to Baylor University, the Dr Pepper Museum and the home-improvement reality show Fixer Upper.
Three decades ago, however, it was where FBI agents, the US military and Texas law enforcement laid siege to a religious cult known as the Branch Davidians.
The small, insular Christian sect was led at the time by David Koresh, 33, an apocalyptic prophet who allegedly believed he was the only person who could interpret the Bible’s true meaning.
Under Koresh, the Branch Davidians had stockpiled weapons in order to become an “Army of God”.
Authorities intended to conduct a surprise daylight raid on 28 February 1993 and arrest Koresh, but what ensued was a 51-day standoff that left 76 people dead, including more than 20 children and four federal agents. […]
Two years after the siege, Timothy McVeigh – a young man who had shown his support at Waco and became fixated with the federal response as evidence of an impending New World Order – bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people and injuring nearly 700 others. It remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in US history.
The raid also had an impact on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who – as a young radio host in 1998 – organised a campaign to rebuild the Branch Davidians’ chapel as a memorial to those who had died. Mr Jones was among the most prominent early voices to back Mr Trump in his 2016 presidential campaign.
“Waco still resonates in this anti-government space as something that shows the federal government doesn’t protect people, is out to violate their civil rights, is out to take their guns,” [co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism non-profit Heidi] Beirich said.
“Nowadays that very much feeds into the ‘deep state’ conspiracies that we see on the far-right; the attacks on the FBI; the idea that federal law enforcement is a weapon of Democratic presidents.”
Mr Trump has often drawn on these frustrations, painting himself as the victim of a secret cabal of government operatives and effectively tearing down the walls that separated the mainstream Republican Party from its more extremist and radical fringes.
The former president’s sense of victimhood has only intensified since he left office. His conspiracies about the 2020 election still abound and he has framed the legal action he is facing on multiple fronts as an effort to destroy him.
Depending upon whom you might ask, MOVE was an “organization”, a “religious cult”, a “radical group”, or all of the above. The biggest question in my mind (and one the film doesn’t necessarily delve into) is whether it was another example of psychotic entelechy. So what is “psychotic entelechy”, exactly? Well, according to Stan A. Lindsay, the author of Psychotic Entelechy: The Dangers of Spiritual Gifts Theology, it would be
…the tendency of some individuals to be so desirous of fulfilling or bringing to perfection the implications of their terminologies that they engage in very hazardous or damaging actions.
In the context of Lindsay’s book, he is expanding on some of the ideas laid down by literary theorist Kenneth Burke and applying them to possibly explain the self-destructive traits shared by the charismatic leaders of modern-day cults like The People’s Temple, Order of the Solar Tradition, Heaven’s Gate, and The Branch Davidians. He ponders whether all the tragic deaths that resulted should be labeled as “suicides, murders, or accidents”.
Keeping Lindsay’s definition of “psychotic entelechy” in mind:
“Potential death and destruction”?
One could also ask if “MAGA” is an “organization”, a “religious cult”, a “radical group”, or all of the above. I mean, they do have a flag:
I’m just asking questions.
Nixon famously stated in the David Frost interviews, “I’m saying that when the president does it…it’s not illegal.” Mind you, he made that statement several years after he had resigned from the office of the president in shame, ending a decades-long political career in the most humiliating manner imaginable. Yet he never publicly apologized for any of the questionable actions he engaged in while serving as the President of the United States.
If that pathology reminds you of somebody else…perhaps a specific “somebody” currently vying for the presidency (yet again), you will not be surprised to learn that there is a disturbingly prescient link between Richard M. Nixon and Donald J. Trump, in this letter:
Nightmare fuel.
How ironic that Nixon, the man who many historians posit lost his 1960 presidential bid because he was not as telegenic as JFK and never did get the hang of the medium (even once he eventually became the leader of the free world) was nonetheless canny enough to recognize a master manipulator of the idiot box when his wife saw Trump on a TV show.
As this post goes to press, tonight’s scheduled episode of Richard Nixon’s Ghost Presents: The Donald Trump Show will have just wrapped up on C-SPAN …live and direct from Waco, Texas.
Howard Beale: “Why me?”
Arthur Jensen: “Because you’re on television, dummy.”
Which brings me to why I felt this was the perfect week to pull out my dusty DVD of Robert Altman’s brilliant (and underappreciated) 1984 film adaptation of Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone’s one-man play Secret Honor (****) to take it for a spin on current events.
Originally titled as “Secret Honor: The Last Testament of Richard M. Nixon” when it opened in 1983 at Los Angeles Actors’ Theater, the film is a fictional monologue by Nixon, set in his post-presidential New Jersey office. Part confessional, part autobiographical, and (large) part batshit-crazy postcards from the edge rant, it’s an astonishing piece of writing; a pitch-perfect 90-minute distillation of Nixon’s dichotomy.
Philip Baker Hall (most recognizable from the Paul Thomas Anderson films Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia) pulls out all the stops in a tour-de-force turn reprising his stage role.
His Nixon is at once darkly brooding and explosively feral, pacing his claustrophobic office like a caged animal, swigging Chivas Regal and alternately pleading his “case” before an unseen Court of Public Opinion and howling at the moon (not dissimilar to how late night TV satirists envisioned Donald Trump pacing the Oval Office, wolfing cheeseburgers and unleashing Tweet storms from the Id).
Nixon, who is taping his monologue on a cassette recorder (in a blackly comic reference to his purported technical ineptitude, he spends the first several minutes of the film fumbling and cursing while trying to figure out how to work it) largely speaks in the first person, but oddly switches to the third at times, referring to his “client” whenever he addresses “your honor” (it’s no secret Trump often refers to himself in the third person).
The word salad soliloquies Nixon utters as he prowls the long dark night of his soul in arctic desolation share spooky parallels with the word salad soliloquies that Trump bellows as he prowls podiums in the full light of day at his public rallies.
Nixon frequently rants at his “enemies”. He is particularly obsessed with “those goddam Kennedys”. This is one of the more revealing insights into Nixon’s psychology contained in Freed and Stone’s screenplay; Nixon, ever self-conscious about his modest Quaker roots, is obviously both resentful and envious of the Kennedys’ privileged patrician upbringing, Ivy League education, movie-star charisma, and physical attractiveness.
He also lights into the other usual suspects in his orbit: Henry Kissinger, President Eisenhower, liberals, “East coast shits”, Jews, the FBI, and the media (you know…the “deep state” and “fake news”).
In rare moments of lucidity, he sadly recalls the untimely deaths of his brothers (Arthur, who died in 1925 at age 7, and Harold, who died in 1933 at age 23, both from TB) and speaks tenderly to the portrait of his late mother (although it gets weird when he refers to himself as her “loving dog”…and promptly begins to bark).
Hall is mesmerizing; while he doesn’t physically resemble Nixon, he so expertly captures his essence that by the end of the piece, he is virtually indistinguishable from the real item. It takes substantial acting chops to carry an entire film; Hall has got them in spades.
Film adaptations of stage plays can be problematic, especially in a chamber piece. But since this is, after all, Robert Altman…not to worry. He cleverly utilizes the limited props to his full advantage; for example, the four CCTV monitors in the office pull double duty as both a metaphor for Nixon’s paranoia and a hall of mirrors representing his multiple personalities (shades of the symbology in Pete Townshend’s rock opera Quadrophenia).
It also helps that Hall’s performance is anything but static; he moves relentlessly about the set (in a supplemental interview on the Criterion DVD, Hall recalls the original running time of the play as 2 ½ hours…I can’t begin to imagine the mental and physical stamina required to deliver a performance of that intensity night after night). DP Pierre Mignot deserves major kudos for his fluid tracking shots.
Watching the film again in context of all the drama and angst surrounding the ongoing saga of former POTUS/current presidential hopeful Donald J. Trump, I was struck by both its timelessness as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked power and corruption, and its timeliness as a reminder of what democracy looks like at its lowest ebb-which is where we may be now (sadly).
As Oliver Stone reminded us in the closing credits of JFK: What is past is prologue. Stay tuned.
You have to watch whole thing. He is the dumbest man to ever obtain the presidency. He’s basically saying that Lincoln wanted to be famous and so he refused to negotiate and started the war. The entire comment is so incredibly ignorant, shallow and basically infantile it’s stunning:
Trump on The Civil War: I’m so attracted to seeing it. There was something that could’ve been negotiated… Abraham Lincoln, if he negotiated it, we wouldn’t know who Lincoln was. He wouldn’t have been the Abraham Lincoln. But that would’ve been ok. pic.twitter.com/RbmnXCvypI
Any “negotiation” he would have entered into would have ended up allowing slavery to expand to the entire country. That’s how good he is.
He cannot learn. This isn’t the first time he’s made an ass out of himself with this issue. Here he is from 2017:
“People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why?” Trump said in an interview with The Washington Examiner, according to a transcript released Monday. “People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”
Trump ruminated after lauding Jackson, the populist president whom he and his staff have cited as a role model. He suggested that if Jackson had been president “you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.”
Jackson had been dead for 16 years when the civil war broke out.
By the way, Putin was invading Ukraine during the entire Trump presidency. If he is president again he will also “negotiate” that one by giving western Europe to Putin. Who knows? Maybe Alaska too. As long as Putin says he’s great he’ll say he got a good deal.
If I adopted MSNBC’s policies against showing Trump or his followers spreading lies, I wouldn’t post that. I have more respect for my audience. I think you’re all smart enough to be able to understand why I do it. These videos are an example of how cultists think and how some of them can possibly come to understand how illogical their thought processes are:
“People do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world,” William J. Bernstein writes, in “The Delusions of Crowds” (Atlantic Monthly). Instead, they “rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions.”
Bernstein’s book, a survey of financial and religious manias, is inspired by Charles Mackay’s 1841 work, “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” Mackay saw crowd dynamics as central to phenomena as disparate as the South Sea Bubble, the Crusades, witch hunts, and alchemy. Bernstein uses the lessons of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience to elucidate some of Mackay’s observations, and argues that our propensity to go nuts en masse is determined in part by a hardwired weakness for stories. “Humans understand the world through narratives,” he writes. “However much we flatter ourselves about our individual rationality, a good story, no matter how analytically deficient, lingers in the mind, resonates emotionally, and persuades more than the most dispositive facts or data.”
It’s important to note that Bernstein is referring not just to the stories told by cults but also to ones that lure people into all manner of cons, including financial ones. Not all delusions are mystical. Bernstein’s phrase “a good story” is possibly misleading, since a lot of stories peddled by hucksters and cult leaders are, by any conventional literary standard, rather bad. What makes them work is not their plot but their promise: Here is an answer to the problem of how to live. Or: Here is a way to become rich beyond the dreams of avarice. In both cases, the promptings of common sense—Is it a bit odd that aliens have chosen just me and my friends to save from the destruction of America? Is it likely that Bernie Madoff has a foolproof system that can earn all his investors ten per cent a year?—are effectively obscured by the loveliness of the fantasy prospect. And, once you have entered into the delusion, you are among people who have all made the same commitment, who are all similarly intent on maintaining the lie.
The process by which people are eventually freed from their cult delusions rarely seems to be accelerated by the interventions of well-meaning outsiders. Those who embed themselves in a group idea learn very quickly to dismiss the skepticism of others as the foolish cant of the uninitiated. If we accept the premise that our beliefs are rooted in emotional attachments rather than in cool assessments of evidence, there is little reason to imagine that rational debate will break the spell.
The good news is that rational objections to flaws in cult doctrine or to hypocrisies on the part of a cult leader do have a powerful impact if and when they occur to the cult members themselves. The analytical mind may be quietened by cult-think, but it is rarely deadened altogether. Especially if cult life is proving unpleasant, the capacity for critical thought can reassert itself. Rothschild interviews several QAnon followers who became disillusioned after noticing “a dangling thread” that, once pulled, unravelled the whole tapestry of QAnon lore. It may seem unlikely that someone who has bought into the idea of Hillary Clinton drinking the blood of children can be bouleversé by, say, a trifling error in dates, but the human mind is a mysterious thing. Sometimes it is a fact remembered from grade school that unlocks the door to sanity. One of the former Scientologists interviewed in Alex Gibney’s documentary “Going Clear” reports that, after a few years in the organization, she experienced her first inklings of doubt when she read L. Ron Hubbard’s account of an intergalactic overlord exploding A-bombs in Vesuvius and Etna seventy-five million years ago. The detail that aroused her suspicions wasn’t especially outlandish. “Whoa!” she remembers thinking. “I studied geography in school! Those volcanoes didn’t exist seventy-five million years ago!”
I expect that most of the people Klepper interviews never give another thought to what he said. But you can tell that few of them are startled enough by what he’s led them to (without being hostile in any way) that they realize they may have gone down the wrong rabbit hole.
This was 90 minutes after barricades were breached & 60 minutes after it was a full scale riot w/officers being beaten. During this 90 minutes people inside the WH, Congress & his own family begged him to tell them to stop. Instead, while they were hunting Pence, he posted this. pic.twitter.com/d2jmGez7tl
Most Republican officials know that he’s lying. The election was not stolen. They knew it then and they know it now. They are fine with this because they believe it benefits them.
Maybe they could take a stand as to what reality really is in that headline? And maybe they could be just a little bit more assertive about it in the piece as well?
Rarely in American politics has a leading presidential candidate made such grave accusations about a rival: warning that he is willing to violate the Constitution. Claiming that he is eager to persecute political rivals. Calling him a dire threat to democracy.
Those arguments have come from President Biden’s speeches, including his forceful address on Friday, as he hammers away at his predecessor. But they are also now being brazenly wielded by Donald J. Trump, the only president to try to overthrow an American election.
Three years after the former president’s supporters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Trump and his campaign are engaged in an audacious attempt to paint Mr. Biden as the true menace to the nation’s foundational underpinnings. Mr. Trump’s strategy aims to upend a world in which he has publicly called for suspending the Constitution, vowed to turn political opponents into legal targets and suggested that the nation’s top military general should be executed.
The result has been a salvo of recriminations from the top candidates in each party, including competing events to mark Saturday’s third anniversary of the attack on the Capitol.
The eagerness from each man to paint the other as an imminent threat signals that their potential rematch this year will be framed as nothing short of a cataclysmic battle for the future of democracy — even as Mr. Trump tries to twist the very idea to suit his own ends.
“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him — not America, not you,” Mr. Biden said Friday, speaking near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. “Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.”
On Friday evening, at his own rally in Sioux Center, Iowa, Mr. Trump fired back, calling Mr. Biden’s remarks “pathetic fear-mongering” and again accusing him, without any evidence, of wielding federal law enforcement to attack his political opponents.
“They’ve weaponized government, and he’s saying I’m a threat to democracy,” Mr. Trump said incredulously.
The early maneuvering by Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump points to an election that will be fought on extraordinary ground. While the economy, abortion rights and the ages of the candidates are all expected to be central campaign issues, both men argue that what is fundamentally at stake is whether the country’s nearly 250-year-old system of government endures.
How nice of them to help Trump frame his bogus “I know you are but what am I” claims as just another interpretation of the threat to democracy. Just saying “brazenly” and issuing a passing disclaimer like “without any evidence” does not properly convey reality. And yet, they present this story as a battle for reality!
This is going to be a problem. The reflexive impulse to “be fair” leads to whitewashing what Trump is doing which is lying while Biden is accurately reflecting exactly what Trump is doing.
Yes, Trump is going to say that Biden is a threat to democracy. He’s been saying the elections are all rigged for Democrats sits he first started running for president. But that doesn’t make it true and the media is going to have to stop the “both sides” their coverage of this or many voters are going to believe that their arguments cancel each other out and get more cynical and more polarized and our country will slip further and further away from political sanity.
The whole world watched in disbelief. And Trump did nothing.”
Here are the first words of Biden’s speech yesterday:
Today, the topic of my speech today is deadly serious and I think it needs to be made at the outset of this campaign.
In the winter of 1777, it was harsh and cold as the Continental Army marched to Valley Forge. General George Washington knew he faced the most daunting of tasks, to fight and win a war against the most powerful empire in existence in the world at the time. His mission was clear: liberty, not conquest. Freedom. Not domination. National independence. Not individual glory.
America made a vow: Never again would we bow down to a king.
Months ahead would be incredibly difficult. But General Washington knew something in his bones. Something about the spirit of the troops he was leading. Something, something about the soul of the nation he was struggling to be born. In his general order, he predicted, and I quote, with one heart and one mind, with fortitude and with patience, they would overcome every difficulty, the troops he was leading. And they did. They did.
This army that lacked blankets and food, clothes and shoes. This army, whose march left bloody bare footprints in the snow. This ragtag army made up of ordinary people.
Their mission, George Washington declared, was nothing less than a sacred cause. That was the phrase he used. A sacred cause. Freedom, Liberty. Democracy. American democracy.
I just visited the grounds of Valley Forge. I’ve been there a number of times since the time I was a Boy Scout years ago.
You know, it’s the very site that I think every American should visit, because it tells the story of the pain and the suffering and the true patriotism it took to make America.
Today, we gather in a new year, some 246 years later, just one day before January 6, a day forever seared in our memory because it was on that day that we nearly lost America, lost it all.
Today, we’re here to answer the most important of questions. Is democracy still America’s sacred cause? I mean it.
This is not rhetorical, academic or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time.
And it’s what the 2024 election is all about.
The choice is clear.
Donald Trump’s campaign is about him, not America, not you.
Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.
Our campaign is different. For me and Kamala, our campaign is about America. It’s about you. It’s about every age and background that occupy this country.
It’s about the future we’re going to continue to build together. And our campaign is about preserving and strengthening our American democracy.
Three years ago tomorrow, we saw with our own eyes the violent mob stormed the United States Capitol. It was almost in disbelief as you first turned on the television.
For the first time in our history, insurrectionists had come to stop the peaceful transfer, transfer of power in America. First time.
Smashing windows, shattering doors, attacking the police.
Outside, gallows were erected as the MAGA crowd chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.”
Inside, they hunted for Speaker Pelosi. The House was chanting as they marched through and smashed windows, “Where’s Nancy?”
Over 140 police officers were injured.
Jill and I attended the funeral of police officers who died as a result of the events of that day.
Because of Donald Trump’s lies, they died because these lies brought a mob to Washington.
He promised it would be wild. And it was.
He told the crowd to “fight like hell” and all hell was unleashed.
He promised he would be side by side with them.
Then, as usual, he left the dirty work to others.
He retreated to the White House.
As America was attacked from within, Donald Trump watched on TV in a private, small dining room off my oval, off the Oval Office.
The entire nation watched in horror.
The whole world watched in disbelief.
And Trump did nothing.
Members of his staff, members of his family. Republican leaders who were under attack at that very moment pled with him.
Act. Call off the mob. Imagine had he gone out and said, “Stop.”
Still, Trump did nothing.
It was among the worst derelictions of duty by a president in American history.
An attempt to overturn a free and fair election by force and violence.
There was much more to the speech than that but this was the essence. I know we have to talk about other things in the election, kitchen table issues, gas prices, school loans, Israel, etc. etc. But this is the central issue facing Americans in 2024. None of the rest of it will matter if we don’t get this right. And many, many, many more innocent people will suffer.
Here’s the whole speech if you didn’t get a chance to see it and you’d like to.
Biden almost got medieval on his presumptive rival
Three years ago for the first time in our history, a violent mob attacked the Capitol and tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power. We must make sure that never happens again and that democracy always remains the sacred cause of our nation. https://t.co/FHf06VG4Bk
Dramatic new Jan. 6 video shows two GOP representatives speaking with Capitol rioters through the broken windows of the House chamber doors as officers point weapons at the mob attempting to breach the floor.
“Coming for you Pelosi, you socialist c**t!” “We know where you live!” “Antifa’s a bunch of p*ssies!” “If we’re got to hang a bunch of crooked congressmen, we’ll do that, okay?”
That’s just a small sample of the patriotic rhetoric heard from these patriots that day. Watch the whole Youtube if you have the stomach for it. It’s about 8 minutes. It’s so easy to forget just how violent these feral criminals were that day.
And by the way, Roy Nehls, the congressman attempting to talk to the protesters, wrote this before he voted against certifying the election:
Here he is today:
Nehls announced Tuesday that he will be serving as a witness for Trump’s defense in the 14th Amendment case that argues the former president should be barred from running for office under the Constitution’s disqualification clause. Calling the civil trial a “sham” and “clear election interference,” Nehls said, “I was at the doors on January 6, face to face with protestors, and I know firsthand there was NO INSURRECTION.”
“I look forward to providing my eyewitness account of that,” Nehls wrote in a post on X.
Also, get a look at this, from yesterday:
Trump: You have the J6 hostages. Nobody has been treated ever in history so badly pic.twitter.com/hkBvFc0UAT
Friday afternoon the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the case from Colorado that declared Donald J. Trump, Insurrectionist, ineligible to appear on that state’s 2024 primary ballot. And oh, the humanity!
The 14th Amendment, the Civil War, Maine, Colorado, a divided nation, MAGA death threats against lawmakers and judges, etc. Plus the kettles of limp-spaghetti arguments desperate Trump’s attorneys have thrown at courtroom walls hoping something, anything, will stick and save their client’s ass.
And then there’s the tarnished Roberts court itself (Washington Post):
The public already views the Supreme Court through a partisan lens, with Democrats expressing little confidence in the court and Republicans saying the opposite — and the question of whether Trump should be kept off the ballot has the potential to further polarize those views.
“It throws them right into the political thicket,” Stanford law professor Michael W. McConnell said of the court. “There is no way they can decide the case without having about half the country think they are being partisan hacks.”
Oh, but Team Trump thinks they have this in the bag:
“I think it should be a slam dunk in the Supreme Court; I have faith in them,” [Trump attorney Alina] Habba said on Fox News.“You know, people like Kavanaugh who the president fought for, who the president went through hell to get into place, he’ll step up.”
[D]espite Habba’s cleanup effort, she was clearly pointing in the direction of Kavanaugh (and potentially others) being beholden to Trump; there is no other reason to invoke the supposed favors Trump did for Kavanaugh. This adds to a volume of evidence that indicates that Trump does indeed expect loyalty from judges and justices — along with plenty of others in positions where that shouldn’t be a consideration.
That was before SCOTUS decided to accept the case it must take no matter how much it does not want to.
Trump sent the judges a message himself at a Friday rally in Iowa:
“All I want is fair; I fought really hard to get three very, very good people in,” he said, referring to his appointees. He added, “And I just hope that they’re going to be fair because, you know, the other side plays the ref.”
Also sprach MAGAthustra.
Translation: You owe me.
Implied threat: You’d better come through. Or else.
Constitutional scholars are divided on whether it would be good for democracy to bar Trump from the ballot, or whether such a move, even if legally sound, is politically too dangerous. Many of them say theyexpect the justices to try to find a way to decide the case without addressing the underlying question of whether Trump engaged in an insurrection.
Listen. Listen closely. Trump did this. That is the context no one in the press has the guts to talk about. All this hand-ringing over the Court’s dilemma, over a democracy in peril, and no mention that our democratic republic stands at this crossroads because Donald Trump is a career criminal! We’re here because of him.
Oh, but he’s not been adjudicated! they cry. Like the dozens of indicted Jan. 6 insurrectionists still awaiting trial while their accomplices sit rotting in jail? Poor babies, all!
“There’s no confusion about who Trump is,” Biden said on Friday. We know who Trump is. You don’t have to be Maya Angelou or Robert Zimmerman to know which way the wind blows.
Look, I don’t agree with everything Dan Froomkin writes here, but I share his frustration that the mainstream press refuses, refuses, to address any elephant in any room:
Our top newsrooms are too timid to go there, however. Racism, especially when it comes to calling specific people or practices racist, has long been the third rail of journalism. Newsroom leaders don’t want to be accused of stoking racial resentment, don’t want to alienate racist readers, and don’t want to have to defend their own insufficient attempts to diversify their newsrooms and sources. They just don’t want to go there.
Sadly, the fact that racism may be the key to understanding the current political climate hasn’t changed that aversion.
By the same token, Trump is a criminal. By temperament and by habit if not by judicial decree.
But God forbid anyone should speak bluntly about the personality cult that accuses Democrats of being baby-blood-drinking pedophiles.
Trump is not the the genetic progenitor of this movement. As a natural-born predator, he just exploits it more efficiently than his wannabes.
But the flood of 14th Amendment odds-making just sickens me. Because Trumpism, with its not-so-subliminal threats of violence has turned press watchdogs into lapdogs. The expert analysis we’ll be expected to swallow as SCOTUS deliberates Trump’s questionable standing as a candidate for dictator will focus on every legal and political consideration except the behaviors of the man who misled us here.
I’m reminded of the kids’ nonseense song about the hole at the botton of the sea. It all comes back to Trump. He’s the hole.
