A Must-Read Article From The Guardian: "The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see it"

Here's the link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/next-us-civil-war-already-here-we-refuse-to-see-it

Here are some excerpts: 

The right has recognized that the system is in collapse, and it has a plan: violence and solidarity with treasonous far-right factions....

The legal system grows less legitimate by the day. Trust in government at all levels is in freefall, or, like Congress, with approval ratings hovering around 20%, cannot fall any lower. Right now, elected sheriffs openly promote resistance to federal authority. Right now, militias train and arm themselves in preparation for the fall of the Republic. Right now, doctrines of a radical, unachievable, messianic freedom spread across the internet, on talk radio, on cable television, in the malls....

Under such conditions, party politics have become mostly a distraction. The parties and the people in the parties no longer matter much, one way or the other. Blaming one side or the other offers a perverse species of hope. “If only more moderate Republicans were in office, if only bipartisanship could be restored to what it was.” Such hopes are not only reckless but irresponsible. The problem is not who is in power, but the structures of power....

An incipient illegitimacy crisis is under way, whoever is elected in 2022, or in 2024. According to a University of Virginia analysis of census projections, by 2040, 30% of the population will control 68% of the Senate. Eight states will contain half the population. The Senate malapportionment gives advantages overwhelmingly to white, non– college educated voters. In the near future, a Democratic candidate could win the popular vote by many millions of votes and still lose. Do the math: the federal system no longer represents the will of the American people.

The right is preparing for a breakdown of law and order, but they are also overtaking the forces of law and order. Hard right organization have now infiltrated so many police forces – the connections number in the hundreds – that they have become unreliable allies in the struggle against domestic terrorism....

Just consider: in 2019, 36% of active duty soldiers claimed to have witnessed “white supremacist and racist ideologies in the military”, according to the Military Times....

The right has recognized what the left has not: that the system is in collapse. The right has a plan: it involves violence and solidarity. They have not abjured even the Oath Keepers. The left, meanwhile, has chosen infighting as their sport....

It would be entirely possible for the United States to implement a modern electoral system, to restore the legitimacy of the courts, to reform its police forces, to root out domestic terrorism, to alter its tax code to address inequality, to prepare its cities and its agriculture for the effects of climate change, to regulate and to control the mechanisms of violence. All of these futures are possible. There is one hope, however, that must be rejected outright: the hope that everything will work out by itself, that America will bumble along into better times. It won’t.

Supporters of Donald Trump Say They Love America, But That’s an Oxymoron

    I had an “aha moment” last week when a reader who'll I'll call Bradley O. asked if I remembered him. I said, “Yes, you support Donald Trump.”  He responded, “That's right, I love my country,” which frankly pissed me off because it suggested that I didn’t love my country because I don’t support Donald Trump.

 Although he denied that implication, it got me thinking. Is it really possible that a supporter of Donald Trump loves America? In a twisted way, I suppose that’s possible, but let’s analyze what supporting Donald Trump really means.

To support Donald Trump is to support a man who incited insurrection against America because he didn’t accept his electoral defeat. At least his supporters are consistent, because many of them think it’s fine to display the confederate battle flag and to preserve statues of men who mounted actual armed conflict against our country in support of the continued enslavement of African American men, women and children.

Those same people applaud the appointment of “originalists” to the U.S. Supreme Court. An originalist is someone who supports the original intent of the founding fathers, which included the disenfranchisement not only of enslaved people but of women and, it should be noted, of men who didn’t own property.

What version of America do these supporters of Donald Trump love?  It’s not the America I love, which is a land of opportunity for all, not just for a select few. I love the America which welcomed immigrants and no longer imprisons and kills native Americans.

America has always been a work in progress, always striving toward a “more perfect union.”  Trump supporters talk about “making America great again,” but they are really talking about turning back the clock on the social progress that enfranchised women and persons of color (albeit 100 years after passage of the 13th Amendment), that allowed women to control their own bodies, and that recognized the rights of LGBTQ citizens to exist, to express their love for each other, and to be safe.

To support Donald Trump is to support a man whose rhetoric has emboldened white supremacists and racists (including anti-Semites), who he called “very fine people.” To “live and let live” is not part of their lexicon.

True Americans recognize and accept that we are not perfect now and never have been and choose to learn from history instead of ignore or bury it. Yes, our ancestors committed the Sand Creek massacre, the Tulsa massacre, the imprisonment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps, the Tuskegee experiment which involved leaving syphilis untreated in African Americans to see how it damages the human body, and more. Supporters of Donald Trump don’t want our children to know the dark side of our history because it will make them “uncomfortable.”

To support Donald Trump is to support a man who evaded the draft by getting a doctor’s note about bone spurs and derided Sen. John McCain, a war hero, in life and even upon his death solely because Sen. McCain, unlike Vladimir Putin, didn’t like him.

To support Donald Trump, above all, is to honor a man who always puts his interests above those of his country. His decision to downplay Covid-19 because it might hurt his re-election is an example, and it cost countless American lives. He has yet to urge vaccination, despite secretly getting his own family vaccinated. 

 

The Washington Post Counts Trump’s Lies. Who’s Keeping a Body Count?

A female insurrectionist was shot and killed on Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol building. It is indisputable that if President Trump hadn’t urged his followers to storm the Capitol that she would not have died. Four others are now reported to have died during the event, including one Capitol Police officer.

In the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, a woman was killed by an Alt-Right member in a demonstration that was inspired by a president who had emboldened those “deplorables.”

A 17-year-old man with an AR-15 rifle, inspired by Donald Trump, went to Kenosha and killed two people.

Over 1/3 million Americans so far have died from Covid-19, including people who showed up at mass spreader events — campaign rallies — held for no other purpose than to feed president Donald Trump’s ego.

These are only a few — very few — of the many, many people who have died as a direct result of our president’s tweets and rally speeches. Is anyone keeping a body count of the people who have died as a direct result of Donald Trump’s actions and pronouncements?  I hope so.

This week’s insurrection was the direct result of Donald Trump’s speech to the crowd of MAGA types assembled on the Ellipse outside the White House. He could well be indicted for inciting a riot later this month, after Joe Biden takes the White House from him — or from President Pence, if Trump resigns or is expelled by his cabinet pursuant to the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, or by the Senate through impeachment.

The continued espousal of a stolen election by millions of Americans only exists because the President promotes it. If he had conceded after the election, that movement would have evaporated and many lives would have been saved.

I repeat: It is only because of Donald Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen through fraud that there is large-scale distrust in our electoral system and in the 2020 election results.

A lot has been written about how the Capitol Police were ill-prepared for the insurrection, but lesser coverage of members of that force opening the barricades and taking selfies with the Trumpsters. In a previous column, I pointed out that, with 30% of the population being part of Trump’s base, it only makes sense that 30% of law enforcement personnel would be supporters of Trump and believers in his conspiracy theories.

Given that, one should ask whether chiefs of police do what other employers do, which is to study the social media of their employees. If a police officer is a follower, for example, of QAnon, is he or she the right person to protect the Capitol building or any of us from such rioters?

It is primarily through social media that the alt-right and QAnon types become infected and spread that infection to others, so studying a police officer’s social media accounts would quickly reveal if they support insurrectionists — clearly a disqualifying characteristic for law enforcement personnel, don’t you think? I support the idea that anyone employed in law enforcement must reveal their social media accounts when they join such forces, and the internal affairs divisions of those forces should scan those social media accounts to see whether they subscribe to conspiracy theories that support insurrection.

Many Trumpsters followed my column when it was published in the Denver Post and asked to receive my column by email after the election. They kept emailing me after each column, defending the president. After a while, it got so annoying to read their repetitive emails that I chose to block some of their email addresses, but they still included my address in emails to their friends, so I would occasionally see their emails anyway when their friends would “Reply All” to them.

I was surprised and somewhat gratified this week when I discovered the following email from a die-hard Trumpster. If “the tide has turned” against Trump, the following email forwarded by that Trumpster is a good example of it:

President Donald Trump cost the Republican Party dearly during his time in office, culminating in Democrats sweeping the Georgia runoffs to regain control of the Senate.

For the first time since 2008, Democrats control both chambers of Congress along with the White House.

“Trump f----ed the party,” a paid Trump adviser told a Bloomberg reporter.

“He f----ed the party with his conspiracy theories and pushing females and independents away from the party. The bleeding needs to stop. He needs to go.”

Despite all of the recommendations of an RNC “autopsy” following the 2012 election, Trump did the exact opposite during his time in office and left the GOP at square one.

With the Georgia runoffs in the books and Democrats regaining control of the Senate by sweeping both races, the cost of Donald Trump’s presidency to the Republican Party is in full view.

Since Trump took office in 2017, the GOP lost its House majority in the 2018 midterms, saw once reliable red states like Georgia and Arizona become competitive for Democrats, and now the Senate majority is gone too.

Trump’s pursuit of revenge against state election officials by calling the legitimacy of the vote into question and forcing the issue of $2,000 checks on GOP senators contributed to the Democratic sweep.

Will the cabinet and Vice President Mike Pence have the courage — and allegiance to the Constitution — to invoke the 25th Amendment?  Let’s hope so. On the other hand, if the House of Representatives impeaches the president, and the Senate convicts him in a “snap impeachment,” as I have heard is possible, there is the additional advantage that Trump will be disqualified from seeking the presidency in 2024, which will make numerous ambitious Republicans happy, since they won’t have to run against him. That, I think, makes the conviction more possible now than it was last year over the Ukraine episode.

I’m pleased that president-elect Biden joined those who have drawn attention to the disparity in how local and federal law enforcement prepared for the Black Lives Matter protest at the Lincoln Memorial with how the Capitol Police failed to prepare for the Trump demonstrators. Were they afraid that Black protestors would desecrate the monument to Abraham Lincoln, yet not worried that right-wing extremists would try to confront members of Congress voting to ratify Joe Biden’s election?  If there’s any example of systemic racism in America, isn’t that an example?

Lastly, if this was a watershed event for Donald Trump, it should also be a watershed event for Rupert Murdoch and his network, Fox News Channel, that has been nothing less than an echo chamber for Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories that led to this week’s insurrection. Time will tell.