Thursday, February 10, 2022

Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The era of the Big Lie means more and more Democratic lawmakers (and even a few Republican holdouts) are facing increasing numbers of terrorist threats from enraged Trump cultists who want to harm or even kill those not loyal to Dear Leader.

 
Early one morning in November 2019, Representative Rodney Davis, Republican of Illinois, received a profanity-laden voice mail message at his office in which the caller identified himself as a trained sharpshooter and said he wanted to blow the congressman’s head off.

Two years earlier, Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, received a similar voice mail message from an irate man who falsely accused her of threatening President Donald J. Trump’s life. “If you do it again, you’re dead,” he said, punctuating the statement with expletives and a racial epithet against Ms. Waters, who is Black.

Across the country, the office of Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, received a profane call from a man who said that someone should “put a bullet” in her skull, before leaving his name and phone number.

The cases were part of a New York Times review of more than 75 indictments of people charged with threatening lawmakers since 2016. The flurry of cases shed light on a chilling trend: In recent years, and particularly since the beginning of Mr. Trump’s presidency, a growing number of Americans have taken ideological grievance and political outrage to a new level, lodging concrete threats of violence against members of Congress.


The threats have come in almost every conceivable combination: Republicans threatening Democrats, Democrats threatening Republicans, Republicans threatening Republicans. Many of them, the review showed, were fueled by forces that have long dominated politics, including deep partisan divisions and a media landscape that stokes resentment.

But they surged during Mr. Trump’s time in office and in its aftermath, as the former president’s own violent language fueled a mainstreaming of menacing political speech and lawmakers used charged words and imagery to describe the stakes of the political moment. Far-right members of Congress have hinted that their followers should be prepared to take up arms and fight to save the country, and in one case even posted a video depicting explicitly violent acts against Democrats.

A plurality of the cases reviewed by The Times, more than a third, involved Republican or pro-Trump individuals threatening Democrats or Republicans they found insufficiently loyal to the former president, with upticks around Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and, later, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol last year. In some cases leading up to Congress’s official count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, callers left messages with lawmakers in both parties warning them to keep Mr. Trump in office or face violence.

Nearly a quarter of the cases were Democrats threatening Republicans. Many of those threats were driven by anger over lawmakers’ support for Mr. Trump and his policies, including Republican attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as well as the drive to confirm one of his Supreme Court nominees, Brett M. Kavanaugh.
 
Yes, the reason why the era of the Big Lie continues is because the media watchdogs like the NY Times are careful to indict Democrats and their voters along with the Trump cultists, and declare everyone to be equally responsible for the threats against lawmakers.

That's not actually true of course, but the Times says it is.

It's not "both sides" folks. Democratic voters weren't responsible for the January 6th terrorist attack. Trump and his cultists were, 100%.

A team of scholars, faith leaders and advocates unveiled an exhaustive new report Wednesday (Feb. 9) that documents in painstaking detail the role Christian nationalism played in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and calling it an unsettling preview of things to come.

Christian nationalism was used to “bolster, justify and intensify the January 6 attack on the Capitol,” said Amanda Tyler, head of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which sponsored the report along with the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Tyler’s group is behind an initiative called Christians Against Christian Nationalism.

The organizations touted the report as “the most comprehensive account to date of Christian nationalism and its role in the January 6 insurrection,” compiled using “videos, statements, and images from the attack and its precursor events.”

The report, written chiefly by Andrew L. Seidel, an author and director of strategic response at the Freedom From Religion Foundation, details Christian nationalist rhetoric and symbols that cropped up at events that preceded the insurrection, such as the Million MAGA March and Jericho Marches that took place in Washington in Dec. 2020 and Jan. 2021.

Christian nationalist symbols and references, Seidel writes, were ubiquitous at those gatherings, as well as the insurrection itself: flags with superimposed American flags over Christian symbols; “An Appeal to Heaven” banners; prayers recited by members of the extremist group Proud Boys shortly before the attack or by others as they stormed the Capitol.


Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Seidel highlighted what he called the preponderance of “openly militant” rhetoric that conflated religion and violence. He pointed to William McCall Calhoun Jr., a Georgia lawyer who reportedly claimed on social media that he was among those who “kicked in Nancy Pelosi’s office door” on Jan. 6. (Calhoun later claimed in an interview with the Atlanta Journal Constitution that he did not personally enter any office.)

God is on Trump’s side. God is not on the Democrats’ side,” Calhoun allegedly wrote in a social media post. “And if patriots have to kill 60 million of these communists, it is God’s will. Think ethnic cleansing but it’s anti-communist cleansing.”
 
Both sides did not create this assault on the US government.

More GOP Kayfabe, Con't

Kayfabe is the term for pro wrestling drama, the scripted anger between two wrestlers, and it's also an integral part of US politics as well. The latest example of this is the "feud" this week between Donald Trump (himself an inductee into the WWE Hall of Fame) and GOP Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, which is about as real as, well, pro wrestling.

Former President Trump slammed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday after the top Senate Republican criticized the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) censure of Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and its characterization of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot as “legitimate political discourse.”

“Mitch McConnell does not speak for the Republican Party, and does not represent the views of the vast majority of its voters. He did nothing to fight for his constituents and stop the most fraudulent election in American history,” Trump said in a statement, resurfacing his baseless claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

“If Mitch would have fought for the election, like the Democrats would have if in the same position, we would not be discussing any of the above today, and our Country would be STRONG and PROUD instead of weak and embarrassed,” Trump added.

Trump has frequently attacked McConnell for acknowledging President Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and rejecting the former president’s claims that widespread fraud tainted the outcome of the vote.

His latest remarks came a day after McConnell pushed back against the RNC’s censure of Cheney and Kinzinger for their roles on the select committee investigating the Capitol riot. McConnell also criticized the party’s censure resolution for apparently referring to the attack on the Capitol as “legitimate political discourse.”


“We saw it happen,” McConnell said. “It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”

RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has rejected the notion that the resolution’s inclusion of the phrase “legitimate political discourse” referred to those who committed acts of violence during the Jan. 6 riot. Rather, she has argued that it was intended to refer to those who engaged in peaceful protests.

In a op-ed published on the conservative website Townhall on Tuesday, McDaniel noted that she has “repeatedly condemned the violence that occurred at the Capitol on January 6th” and blamed the news media for misconstruing the text of the censure resolution.
 
Again, this is all staged. Trump needs McConnell, and McConnell needs Trump. They throw brickbats at each other because it's good drama, and the Republican rubes who vote for them eat it up. 

Don't buy it for a second.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Donald Trump admitted to "accidentally" taking more than a dozen boxes full of documents that should have been turned over to the National Archives via the Presidential Records Act this week, and while Trump plans on returning them someday (I guess) the National Archives is quite put out by this and wants the Justice Department to investigate Trump.

The National Archives and Records Administration has asked the Justice Department to examine whether former President Donald Trump’s handling of White House records violated federal law, two administration officials told NBC News.

One official said it's unclear whether the Justice Department would take up the request, saying it’s all very preliminary. The Washington Post first reported the National Archives’ request.

The Justice Department and the National Archives declined requests for comment. A representative for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The National Archives said Monday that Trump had to return 15 boxes of documents that were improperly taken from the White House.

In mid-January, the National Archives "arranged for the transport from the Trump Mar-a-Lago property in Florida to the National Archives of 15 boxes that contained Presidential records, following discussions with President Trump’s representatives in 2021,” the agency said in a statement.

Among the items Trump had to return were correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that Trump has described as “beautiful letters,” two sources told The Post, as well as a handwritten letter that former President Barack Obama had left behind in the Oval Office for his successor. NBC News hasn’t independently confirmed the contents of the boxes.

The National Archives said items covered under the Presidential Records Act should have been turned over at the end of the Trump administration. The act mandates that all presidential records must be properly preserved by each administration so a complete set of records is transferred to the National Archives at the end of the administration, the agency’s archivist said.
 
Judging from the last year under AG Merrick Garland, I'm not even positive that the DoJ will even bother with this. It's a clear violation of the Presidential Records Act, in fact it's multiple violations of it, and you'd think that would at least prompt an investigation since some of the documents were apparently classified.

We'll see.