ABC | Congressional Democrats have demanded an investigation into what they
call "suspicious behavior and access" for some visitors the day before
the Capitol assault, alleging that unnamed lawmakers led "an extremely
high number of outside groups" through the building on what they say
could have been "reconnaissance" tours.
During a Facebook Live
on Tuesday, New Jersey Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill claimed that she
witnessed unnamed members of Congress lead groups of people through the
Capitol on a "reconnaissance" tour on Jan. 5, though it is common for
lawmakers to guide constituents through the building.
Sherrill also alleged that Republicans "abetted" President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the election, promising that she would "see they are held accountable, and if necessary, ensure that they don't serve in Congress."
The New Jersey Democrat, a former U.S. Navy helicopter pilot and former
federal prosecutor, joined more than 30 lawmakers signing a letter
Wednesday to request an investigation from the acting House
sergeant-at-arms, the acting Senate sergeant-at-arms, and the United
States Capitol Police.
CNN | One week after the deadly insurrection at the Capitol, there are still more questions than answers on whether any lawmakers or police assisted the pro-Trump rioters.
The
idea of an insurrection is unheard of in modern US history, and the
possibility that lawmakers or allies inside the Capitol were helping
only contributes to the uncertainty and worry about the event and what's
to come.
At
least one protest organizer said he coordinated with three House
Republicans. There are unverified accusations of a "reconnaissance"
mission one day before the attack. And more than a dozen US Capitol
Police officers are under internal investigation for allegedly helping rioters.
While
President Donald Trump's role in inciting the violence is clear, there
are some early indications and accusations that other insiders may have
more actively aided the mob.
House Republicans under scrutiny
Ali Alexander, a right-wing conspiracy theorist who led one of the "Stop The Steal" groups, claimed in a livestream video that
he planned the rally that preceded the riot with three GOP lawmakers:
Reps. Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs of Arizona, and Rep. Mo Brooks of
Alabama.
Brooks spoke at the rally before Trump took the stage, and urged the crowd to "start taking down names and kicking ass." In a 2,800-word statement about
his involvement, Brooks said he was only telling the crowd to fight
back at the ballot box. (Brooks also revealed that a White House
official called him one day earlier and invited him to speak at the
rally.)
CNN
previously reported that Gosar associated himself with Alexander's
group in recent months. A spokesman for Biggs told CNN that he hasn't
ever met or worked with Alexander.
Alexander
said he hoped his "mob" would pressure lawmakers to block
President-elect Joe Biden's victory through the Electoral College. After
the riot was quelled, the three lawmakers voted to throw out Biden's
electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania. Their effort failed.
"Those
three members of Congress are going to need to lawyer up, very fast,"
former GOP Rep. Charlie Dent, a CNN contributor, told CNN's Erin Burnett
on Wednesday, adding that he thinks the lawmakers will face scrutiny
from federal prosecutors and the House Ethics Committee.
NYTimes | At the heart of
Mr. Hawley’s condemnation of our terrifyingly Pelagian world lies a dark
conclusion about the achievements of modern, liberal, pluralistic
societies. When he was still attorney general, William Barr articulated
this conclusion in a speech
at the University of Notre Dame Law School, where he blamed “the
growing ascendancy of secularism” for amplifying “virtually every
measure of social pathology,” and maintained that “free government was
only suitable and sustainable for a religious people.”
Christian
nationalists’ acceptance of President Trump’s spectacular turpitude
these past four years was a good measure of just how dire they think our
situation is. Even a corrupt sociopath was better, in their eyes, than
the horrifying freedom that religious moderates and liberals, along with
the many Americans who don’t happen to be religious, offer the world.
That
this neo-medieval vision is incompatible with constitutional democracy
is clear. But in case you’re in doubt, consider where some of the most
militant and coordinated support for Mr. Trump’s postelection assault on
the American constitutional system has come from. The Conservative
Action Project, a group associated with the Council for National Policy,
which serves as a networking organization for America’s religious and
economic right-wing elite, made its position clear in a statement issued
a week before the insurrection.
It called
for members of the Senate to “contest the electoral votes” from
Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and other states that were the focus of
Republicans’ baseless allegations. Among the signatories was Cleta
Mitchell, the lawyer who advised
Mr. Trump and participated in the president’s call on Jan. 2 with Brad
Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state. Cosignatories to this
disinformation exercise included Bob McEwen, the executive director of
the Council for National Policy; Morton C. Blackwell of the Leadership
Institute; Alfred S. Regnery, the former publisher; Tony Perkins, the
president of the Family Research Council; Thomas Fitton of Judicial
Watch; and more than a dozen others.
Although
many of the foot soldiers in the assault on the Capitol appear to have
been white males aligned with white supremacist movements, it would be a
mistake to overlook the powerful role of the rhetoric of religious
nationalism in their ranks. At a rally in Washington on Jan. 5, on the
eve of Electoral College certification, the right-wing pastor Greg Locke
said that God is raising “an army of patriots.” Another pastor, Brian
Gibson, put it this way: “The church of the Lord Jesus Christ started
America,” and added, “We’re going to take our nation back!”
In
the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection, a number of Christian
nationalist leaders issued statements condemning violence — on bothsides.
How very kind of them. But few if any appear willing to acknowledge the
instrumental role they played in perpetuating the fraudulent
allegations of a stolen election that were at the root of the
insurrection.
They seem, like Mr.
Hawley, to live in a post-truth environment. And this gets to the core
of the Hawley enigma. The brash young senator styles himself not just a
deep thinker who ruminates about late-Roman-era heretics but also a man
of the people, a champion of “the great American middle,”
as he wrote in an article for The American Conservative, and a foe of
the “ruling elite.” Mr. Hawley has even managed to turn a few
progressive heads with his economic populism, including his attacks on tech monopolies.
christianitytoday | Though the overall number of Christians in Congress fell
slightly from 91 percent from 2017 to 88 percent in 2019, a vast
majority of freshmen—78 of the 96 newly elected lawmakers—identify as
Christian and around half—47—are Protestants, according to the Pew Research Center’s Faith on the Hill report.
With the largest freshman class since 2011, these
representatives bring historic levels of diversity to Washington, a
range of backgrounds outside politics, and deep convictions about faith
in governance. The group includes Sunday school teachers, deacons,
Christian college graduates, missions trip participants, prayer
advocates, a former aspiring pastor, and plenty of churchgoers.
“In Romans 13, government officials are described as
ministers of God,” said Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who assumes
Claire McCaskill’s seat, in an interview last year about his faith. “That’s how serious God is about politics.”
Former counsel with the religious liberty legal group
Becket (where he helped defend the Hobby Lobby and Hosanna-Tabor cases
before the Supreme Court), Hawley belongs to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, speaks before Baptist crowds,
and is one of 22 freshmen who identify as unspecified/other Protestants
in the congressional questionnaire from CQ Roll Call, the basis for the
Pew report released today.
This is why Kamala Harris was chosen by the Democrats despite my community rejecting her pic.twitter.com/JjgW8lexY5
— Nina Turner is a Dr. Cornel West Democrat 🥋 (@SocialistMMA) January 13, 2021
like a dying star that implodes before it goes supernova , in the final stage of an empire foreign policy becomes domestic policy 😎💫🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/Wb6OhWv0RH
A model of the statue of Freedom overlooks scores of U.S. troops deployed to the Capitol to protect Congress as the House prepares to impeach President Trump a 2nd time, on Jan. 13, 2021. pic.twitter.com/gwfdE3qeXB
mintpressnews | Liberals who express dismay, or more bizarrely a fevered hope, about
the corporatists and imperialists selected to fill the positions in the
Biden administration are the court jesters of our political burlesque. They long ago sold their soul and abandoned their most basic principles to
line up behind a bankrupt Democratic Party. They chant, with every
election cycle, the mantra of the least worst and sit placidly on the
sidelines as a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama and the Democratic Party
leadership betray every issue they claim to support.
The only thing that mattered to liberals in the presidential race,
once again, was removing a Republican, this time Donald Trump, from
office. This, the liberals achieved. But their Faustian bargain, in
election after election, has shredded their credibility. They are
ridiculed, not only among right-wing Trump supporters but by the
hierarchy of the Democratic Party that has been captured by corporate
power. No one can, or should, take liberals seriously. They stand for
nothing. They fight for nothing. The cost is too onerous. And so, the
liberals do what they always do, chatter endlessly about political and
moral positions they refuse to make any sacrifices to achieve.
Liberals, largely comprised of the professional managerial-class that
dutifully recycles and shops for organic produce and is concentrated on
the two coasts, have profited from the ravages of neoliberalism. They
seek to endow it with a patina of civility. But their routine and public
humiliation has ominous consequences. It not only exposes the liberal
class as hollow and empty, it discredits the liberal democratic values
they claim to uphold. Liberals should have abandoned the Democratic
Party when Bill Clinton and political hacks such as Biden transformed
the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and launched a war on
traditional liberal values and left-wing populism. They should have
defected by the millions to support Ralph Nader and other Green Party
candidates.
slate | It turns out that Fortress D.C.—the capital city’s permanent,
ever-expanding post-9/11 security-scape—is a myth. It’s a myth that
residents have put up with because, in some ways, we want it to be true.
It made us feel safer and it made us feel important, if only by proxy.
(We also put up with it because we couldn’t say no.)
And it gave some higher purpose to getting yelled at for unknowingly
walking too close to a building or leaving your Swiss Army knife on your
keychain when you walk through a metal detector. The scrutiny was
frequently more intense for people of color.
Naïvely,
I thought they were taking little things so seriously to demonstrate
how gravely and ruthlessly they would dismantle a big thing. (After all,
Fortress D.C. hasn’t had a problem being ruthless in the name of
security in the fairly recent past.)
But Wednesday’s insurrectionist siege revealed that there never was any
higher purpose to us getting yelled at or detoured. It wasn’t an
indication of any higher seriousness at all. It was instead the limits
of the security’s reach.
When
Fortress D.C. was tested, it failed: An angry mob marched to the
Capitol, broke in, and stayed for hours. Unrushed, they sat in the House
speaker’s office with their feet up. Unbothered, they walked out with a senator’s computer.
I can barely believe these things happened, and not even in my wildest
imagination would I have considered them possible before Wednesday.
Fortress D.C. failed from a combination of factors that I’m sure will be
investigated and enumerated, and people will resign and be fired if they haven’t already. It turns out that yelling at bike commuters, stray tourists, and kids sledding did not prove a successful deterrent to a mob invasion that was announced ahead of time. Whatever the security plan was, it wasn’t sufficient to secure the building, deter the crowd, or prevent tragic and senseless
deaths, including that of one of the Capitol Police officers whose
superiors failed to adequately prepare for a clearly hostile crowd.
Fortress D.C. was so sure of itself it preemptively rejected offers to help. It took local police
to get things back under control, and by that point the building and
the myth of the building’s inviolability were completely wrecked.
The response will be to double down on more of the same. “Non-scalable” fences will
cut off the U.S. Capitol for at least the next 30 days. There will
inevitably be more bollards and more metal detectors. More street
closures. More intrusions on daily life. More of the things that proved
so easily surpassable when there was an effort to pass them. Fortress
D.C. didn’t work, and as a consequence, it will get larger. Everyone
will lose more public space, more access, and more mobility. And for
what?
jacobin | Nearly two decades since its initial passage in the aftermath of the
9/11 attacks, the Patriot Act has continued to linger in our collective
memory. Though few Americans probably remember much about its provisions
or specifics, the Bush-era legislation long ago entered into general
usage as an synonym for heavy-handed domestic surveillance and
institutional overreach — the words “Patriot Act” now being practically
synonymous with secrecy, eavesdropping, and the rolling back of civil
liberties under the intentionally broad guise of “national security.”
Given the law’s contents and implications in practice, this reputation is well deserved. Passing the Senate with only a single
dissenting vote, the Patriot Act dramatically expanded the power of
federal authorities to spy on ordinary Americans with minimal oversight:
enabling the FBI to obtain detailed information about citizens’ banking
history and personal communications without having to seek judicial
approval and even allowing “sneak and peek” searches of homes and
offices. “The Patriot Act,” in the rather blunt words of a brief prepared by the ACLU, “[turned] regular citizens into suspects.”
Predictably, a great deal of law enforcement activity resulted from the ludicrously titled law (USA PATRIOT was a backronym
for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools
Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”). According to data
released by the Department of Justice, the FBI made hundreds of
thousands of incursions into personal phone, computer, and financial
records in the years immediately following its passage — the utility of
these searches in identifying or preventing actual terrorist activities
being debatable, to say the least.
Despite passing with widespread support, the Patriot Act
was still considered extreme enough for lawmakers to attach sunset
clauses to several of its major provisions, guaranteeing their expiry in
lieu of congressional renewal (which, incidentally, eventually came under George W. Bush and again under Barack Obama).
One prominent Delaware lawmaker, however, felt it didn’t go far enough.
Ahead of the nearly unanimous October 25, 2001, Senate vote on the Patriot Act, Joe Biden was regularly claiming the law as his own, boasting in an interview with the New Republic:
“I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the
bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill.” Biden wasn’t wrong. In fact,
key parts of the Bush administration’s signature national security law
were drawn from provisions contained in Biden’s own 1995 anti-terrorism bill. Originally called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act, Jacobin’s Branco Marcetic summarized it contents as follows:
The bill made “terrorism” a new federal crime, allowed
those charged with terrorism to be automatically detained before trial,
outlawed donations to government-designated terrorist groups, allowed
electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists, and created a special
court to deport noncitizens accused of terrorism (ironically, when Bush
had proposed a similar measure years before, Biden had denounced it as “the very antithesis of our legal system”). It also let the government use evidence from secret sources in those trials.
Calling the Patriot Act “measured and prudent” during an approving speech
on the Senate floor, Biden would nonetheless lament the removal of
sections from his 1995 bill that would have given police even more
sweeping powers of surveillance.
jonathanturley | Speaker Nancy Pelosi shocked many in Washington by
appointing Eric Swalwell as a house managers in the impeachment of
President Donald Trump as he continues to face calls for his removal
from the House Intelligence Committee due to his alleged intimate
relationship with a Chinese spy. Swalwell has been bunkered down to
avoid questions from the media and the public, but he will now be one of
those prosecuting the case against the President.
He allegedly first met the spy, Fang Fang
or Christine Fang, in 2011. She not only raised money for Swalwell but
reportedly had a personal relationship with him. She also pushed
successfully for his office to accept an intern. He cut ties with her in
2015 after the FBI contacted him. Pelosi made no mention of the scandal
in heralding Swalwell’s credentials:
“Congressman Swalwell serves on House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where he chairs the
Intelligence Modernization and Readiness Subcommittee, and on the
Judiciary Committee,” Pelosi’s office said in a statement. “He is a
former prosecutor and is the son and brother of law enforcement
officers. He is serving his fifth term in Congress.”
Usually a speaker selects House managers to reinforce the credibility
and integrity of the case against a president. Even before the current
scandal, Swalwell was viewed as a member who was a raw partisan. Last
year, it was revealed that (despite long denials) the FBI did send an
agent to report on his observations within the Trump campaign. As I
discussed in a column,
Democratic members spent years mocking allegations that there was any
spying or surveillance of Trump or his campaign by the FBI. That was
just a conspiracy theory. Now however there is proof that the FBI used a
briefing in August 2016 of then candidate Trump to gather information
for “Crossfire Hurricane,” the Russia investigation. It turns out that
it did not really matter after all and Rep. Eric Swalwell did not miss a
step. Swalwell declared
that such targeting of the opposing party and its leading presidential
candidate was “the right thing to do.” That’s it. A conspiracy theory
suddenly becomes a commendable act.
Previously, Swalwell also declared that if President Donald Trump
refused to give Congress the documents and witnesses that it has
demanded, he is clearly guilty of all charged offenses. Swalwell
declared “We can only conclude that you’re guilty.”
WaPo | Over
the past day, a lot of people have asked me how I feel. They are
usually referring to my covid-19 diagnosis and my symptoms. I feel like I
have a mild cold. But even more than that, I am angry.
I
am angry that after I spent months carefully isolating myself, a single
chaotic day likely got me sick. I am angry that several of our nation’s
leaders were unwilling to deal with the small annoyance of a mask for a
few hours. I am angry that the attack on the Capitol and my subsequent
illness have the same cause: my Republican colleagues’ inability to
accept facts.
When
I left for Washington last week, it was my first trip there in several
months. I had a list of things to accomplish, including getting my
picture taken for the card I use when voting on the House floor. For the
past two years, I appeared on that card completely bald as a result of
the chemotherapy I underwent to eliminate the cancer in my right lung.
It was because of that preexisting condition that I relied so heavily on
the proxy voting the House agreed to last year, when we first began to
understand the danger of covid-19.
I
was nervous about spending a week among so many people who regularly
flout social distancing and mask guidelines, but I could not have
imagined the horror of what happened on Jan. 6.
To
isolate as much as possible, I planned to spend much of my day in my
apartment, shuttling to the House floor to vote. But the building shares
an alley with the Republican National Committee, where, we’d later
learn, law enforcement found a pipe bomb. I was evacuated from that
location early in the afternoon.
The
next best option would have been my office in the Cannon House Office
Building, where just three of my staffers worked at their desks to
ensure safe distancing. Before I arrived, security evacuated that
building as well, forcing us to linger in the hallways and cafeteria
spaces of the House complex. As I’m sure you can imagine, pushing the
occupants of an entire building into a few public spaces doesn’t make
for great social distancing. Twice, I admonished groups of congressional
staff to put on their masks. Some of these staffers gave me looks of
derision, but slowly complied.
dailymail | The woman interrupted Schumer during his
press conference in Manhattan on Tuesday. During the encounter, she is
heard calling Schumer, who is Jewish, a 'racist, anti-Semite'.
'You're
nothing but a coward. Seeing you hide under your desk, I actually got
sexually excited over it. That's how much I loathe you. That's how much
I'm glad what they did.'
As the woman continued to rant about the Capitol riot, Schumer's security was seen trying to get her to leave.
'As
long as there’s unrest, there’s going to be unrest in these streets, I
don’t give a sh*t whether you believe me,' she yelled.
'Six feet! Six feet! Stand down! Stand down! Stand down!' she screamed.
sicsempertyrannis |The shape of what is
coming to America is already clear; a technology driven tyranny that
will make the Chinese leadership green with envy. Siri, Alexa and other
unknown AI demons will read, listen and watch everyone, everywhere,
always, not just for impure thoughts, let alone acts, but for even the
suggestion that an unapproved thought process is occurring.
The initial outcome of
such surveillance will be your appearance on lists. The "No fly" list,
soon to be followed by the "No train", "No credit card", "No
employment", "No drivers license", "No phone", "No internet access", "No
Education", "No voice", "No Welfare" and of course the "No firearms"
list. I call this process Human deplatforming.
The checks and balances
have been replaced with (Bank) checks and (Bank) balances. The richest
men in the world are overseeing this experiment which is going global
quicker than you can say "Google". They are enabled by the University
academics who as Raymond Asquith once observed are always prepared to
provide an intellectual justification for vile acts if the price is
right and journalists will laud said acts to the heavens as decent,
moral doings if they want a paycheck next week from their masters.
The Legislature is
bought. The Executive is bought. The Supreme Court are ninnies. The only
thing standing in their way is soon to be Ex President Trump. I don't
like his chances of becoming a rallying point, they are going to go
after his children.
Oh Yes, but you have
guns you say. Well those pasty faced, namby, pamby West Coast
transgender wokeists, as you call them, may not be able to shoot
straight but they have drones, swarming drones, robots and God knows
what else in the way of weapons. They have satellite data and almost
perfect intelligence regarding your behaviour. They don't have to shoot
accurately, they have machines to do that. They can and will commit
unspeakable acts of murder and destruction before they turn off the
monitor and jog off for a Latte. After all if you are not with us you
are a domestic terrorist aren't you? There is no middle ground.
consentfactory | So, welcome to 2021! If last week was any indication, it is going to
be quite an exciting year. It is going to be the year in which GloboCap
reminds everyone who is actually in charge and restores “normality”
throughout the world, or at least attempts to restore “normality,” or
the “New Normality,” or the “Great Normal Reset,” or “The New Normal War
on Domestic Terror” … or whatever they eventually decide to call it.
In any event, whatever they call it, GloboCap is done playing
grab-ass. They have had it with all this “populism” malarkey that has
been going on for the last four years. Yes, that’s right, the party is
over, you Russian-backed white supremacist terrorists! You Trump-loving,
anti-mask grandmother killers! You anti-vax, election-fraud-conspiracy
theorists! You deviants who refuse to follow orders, wear your damn
masks, vote for who they tell you, and believe whatever completely
nonsensical official propaganda they pour into your heads!
Oh, yes, you really did it this time! You stormed the goddamned US Capitol. You and your racist, Russia-backed army of bison-hat wearing half-naked actors
have meddled with the primal forces of GloboCap, and now, by God, you
will atone! No, do not try to minimize your crimes. You entered a
building without permission! The building where America simulates
democracy! You walked around in there waving silly flags! You went into
the Chamber, into people’s offices! One of you actually put his filthy populist feet up on Pelosi’s desk … ON HER DESK! This aggression will not stand!
OK, before I go any further with this essay, I need to explain to my
regular readers (in case it wasn’t already clear) that I’ve decided to
forswear every word I’ve ever written, and all my principles, and my
common sense, and join the remainder of my old leftist and liberal
friends in the orgy of online hate and outrage they are currently
mindlessly indulging in.
Yes, I realize this comes as a shock, but I have seen the GloboCap writing on the wall, and I don’t want to … you know, get ideologically “cleansed,” or charged with “extremism,” or “insurrectionism,” or “domestic terrorism,” or “populism,” or whatever. I’m already in enough trouble as it is for not playing ball with their “apocalyptic plague,”
and whatever else I am, I am certainly no martyr, and I have a career
in the arts to consider, so I have decided to listen to my inner coward
and join the goose-stepping global-capitalist mob, which is why this
column sounds slightly out of character.
mtracey | There was no real “coup attempt,” despite incessant politician and media histrionics to that effect. Just a pitiful outburst that was quickly dispersed.
It was clear
within about ten minutes of the intrusion that the most severe
consequences would stem not from the incident itself, but the
deliberately-stoked over-reaction. The bipartisan political and media
class, whether cynically or sincerely, is broadcasting their steadfast
conviction that this was something like a “MAGA Terrorist Insurrection” —
which is literally how it’s being described on CNN. Under such
allegedly extreme circumstances, of course extreme remedial action is
going to be demanded.
Few
entities capitulate to upswells of political hysteria more reliably
than the tech companies. Knowing that there will soon be a Democratic
presidential administration and Congress to appease, they launched this
week what is the most drastic corporate censorship offensive in modern
history. Not only was Trump banished from Facebook, Instagram, and
Twitter — the latter being his primary communications platform (for
better or worse) — multiple high-profile Trump allies were likewise
purged. Steve Bannon was nuked from YouTube. Trump and his supporters
are being neutralized online not because he currently poses any kind of
bonafide “threat” to the Republic, but because his enemies are desperate
for revenge. And they have been gifted with a perfect “crisis” that
will justify their getting it.
patheos |Domestic Terrorist: Rep. Lauren
Boebert, a newly elected member of congress and a big QAnon supporter,
is facing calls for her arrest after live-tweeting Nancy Pelosi’s
location to terrorists as they stormed the U.S. Capitol earlier this
week.
Rep. Lauren Boebert
(R-CO), a gun-toting supporter of the QAnon movement, is facing backlash
after she was accused of live-tweeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s
(D-CA)
As Trump supporters were storming the Capitol, Boebert warned the terrorists that Pelosi had been moved, tweeting:
The Speaker has been removed from the chambers.
Before tweeting that Pelosi had moved, she had tweeted:
We were locked in the House Chambers.
In addition, Boebert tweeted encouragement to the domestic terrorists before the assault, declaring:
location during the attack on Capitol Hill last week.
KRDO | Friday at noon, the organization Rural Colorado United is holding
rallies at newly elected U.S. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert's offices all
across her district, including Pueblo, calling for her resignation in
the wake of Wednesday's riot at the US Capitol.
On Wednesday, Boebert objected to the certification of the 2020
Presidential election results in key battleground states, specifically
objecting to Arizona's electoral votes. However, all of the states
independently certified their votes before Boebert's objection.
"Madame Speaker, I have constituents outside this building right now
and I promised to be their voice," said Boebert on the floor of the
House of Representatives during the debate over an objection to the
Electoral votes in the state of Arizona. "It is my separate but equal
obligation to weigh in on this election and object."
Not long after Boebert's speech, supporters of President Donald Trump
stormed U.S. Capitol Building after a rally, attempting to stop the
certification of the election for President-elect Joe Biden. Five
individuals, including a U.S. Capitol Policeman, died as a result of the
riot.
thedailybeast | Two weeks before thousands of Trump rioters breached Congress, “Stop
the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander said his group wasn’t violent—“yet.”
“One of our organizers in one state said, ‘We’re nice patriots, we don’t throw bricks,’” Alexander told a crowd at a Dec. 19 rally
at Arizona’s state capitol. “I leaned over and I said, ‘Not yet. Not
yet!’ Haven’t you read about a little tar-and-feathering? Those were
second-degree burns!”
Alexander,
who has described himself as one of the “official originators” of the
Jan. 6 rally in Washington, went on to use “yet” as a code word for
violence. Then Alexander told the Phoenix crowd about his plans for
Washington.
“We’re going to convince them to not certify the vote
on January 6 by marching hundreds of thousands, if not millions of
patriots, to sit their butts in D.C. and close that city down, right?”
Alexander said. “And if we have to explore options after that…‘yet.’
Yet!”
Alexander’s supporters cheered, yelling threats like “noose!” and “nothing’s off the table!”
Alexander
led a host of activists in ratcheting up the rhetoric ahead of
Congress’ certification of the electoral votes, threatening to “1776”
opponents of Trump’s re-election. Now that five people, including a
Capitol Police officer, are dead, however, Alexander has gone into
hiding, and the website promoting his Jan. 6 rally has been wiped from
the internet.
Alexander is defiant, saying he won’t “take an iota of blame that does not belong to me.”
“I didn’t incite anything,” Alexander said in a video posted Friday to Twitter. “I didn’t do anything.”
In reality, even as Alexander claimed his supporters were peaceful,
he repeatedly raised the prospect of using violence in the weeks ahead
of Jan. 6.
On
Sunday night, Twitter banned Alexander’s personal account and an
account for “Stop The Steal.” Alexander didn’t respond to a request for
comment.
Alexander is a convicted felon, after pleading guilty
to felony property theft in 2007 and felony credit card abuse in 2008.
Alexander first appeared in conservative politics in the Tea Party era
under the name “Ali Akbar,” organizing a group called the National
Bloggers’ Club that was tied to “shady data collection operations.”
In
the Trump era, now using a new name, Alexander emerged as an
idiosyncratic, trash-talking MAGA die-hard affiliated with figures like
InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, anti-Muslim Trump booster Laura
Loomer, blundering provocateur Jacob Wohl, and Trump ally Roger Stone.
Before Trump’s 2020 election defeat, Alexander was perhaps best known
for Donald Trump Jr. retweeting his groundless claim that Vice
President-elect Kamala Harris is not an “American Black.” He was invited
to the White House for Trump’s “Social Media Summit” with various
right-wing internet figures, and began frequently wearing orange
clothes, claiming God had given him a message that the color had special
significance for 2020.
The protests were the brainchild of Ali
Alexander, a controversial far-right operative who boasts more than
140,000 followers on Twitter, where he’s simply @ali.
“Alexander appears to be involved with Stop The Steal both through
his tweets promoting it and through his links to one of the websites
boosting it,” Mother Jonesreported Friday.
“Stopthesteal.us’s domain is registered to Vice and Victory, a possibly
defunct political consultancy he’s affiliated with. After clicking the
site’s donate button, visitors are prompted with the option to donate
money to one of several cryptocurrency addresses associated with
Alexander, or given links to his Paypal, CashApp, and Amazon wishlist.”
Here in Louisiana, Alexander is better known by his legal name, Ali
Akbar. Although he now lives in Texas, for the past four years,
Alexander resided in Baton Rouge, a fact that has gone virtually
unnoticed in the torrent of coverage he’s recently generated.
In June 2019, Alexander made national headlines
for a racist tweet that asserted Kamala Harris was not “an American
Black” because her father was Jamaican. His comment was retweeted and
then later deleted by the president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr. The next month, Alexander was one of several controversial figures invited to the White House’s “social media summit.”
There’s more.
“According to a 2018 Politico report,
the night before the 2016 election, a PAC advised by Alexander
received a $60,000 donation from hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer,
the pro-Trump billionaire,” Right Wing Watch’s Jared Holt reported in
September. “Alexander has associated with far-right figures including Unite the Right white supremacist attendee Matt Colligan, and made a habit of noting when members of the media he criticizes are Jewish, according toThe Observer.”
In an August profile of Alexander, the Daily Dot
reported that he had “found a niche among the likes of anti-Muslim
activist and Republican Florida congressional candidate Laura Loomer and
blundering political fraudster Jacob Wohl….The trio went to Minneapolis in June 2019 to film a documentary called Importing Ilhan,
which was severely mocked online for lacking credibility. The video
they produced was aimed at proving Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) had married
her brother. While filming, they also wore bulletproof jackets only to
turn out to report fake death threats against themselves to
authorities.”
gizmodo | In the wake of the violent insurrection at
the U.S. Capitol by scores of President Trump’s supporters, a lone
researcher began an effort to catalogue the posts of social media users
across Parler, a platform founded to provide conservative users a safe
haven for uninhibited “free speech” — but which ultimately devolved
into a hotbed of far-right conspiracy theories, unchecked racism, and death threats aimed at prominent politicians.
The researcher, who asked to be referred to by their Twitter handle, @donk_enby,
began with the goal of archiving every post from January 6, the day of
the Capitol riot; what she called a bevy of “very incriminating”
evidence. According to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab,
among other sources, Parler is one of a several apps used by the
insurrections to coordinate their breach of the Capitol, in a plan to
overturn the 2020 election results and keep Donald Trump in power.
Hoping to create a lasting public record for future researchers to sift
through, @donk_enby began by archiving the posts from that day. The
scope of the project quickly broadened, however, as it became
increasingly clear that Parler was on borrowed time. Apple and Google
announced that Parler would be removed from their app stores because it
had failed to properly moderate posts that encouraged violence and
crime. The final nail in the coffin came Saturday when Amazon announced
it was pulling Parler’s plug.
Operating on little sleep, @donk_enby began the work of archiving all of Parler’s posts, ultimately capturing around 99 percent of its content. In a tweet
early Sunday, @donk_enby said she was crawling some 1.1 million Parler
video URLs. “These are the original, unprocessed, raw files as uploaded
to Parler with all associated metadata,” she said. Included in this data tranche, now more than 56 terabytes in size, @donk_enby confirmed that the raw video files include GPS metadata pointing to exact locations of where the videos were taken.
@donk_enby later shared a screenshot
showing the GPS position of a particular video, with coordinates in
latitude and longitude.
The privacy
implications are obvious, but the copious data may also serve as a
fertile hunting ground for law enforcement. Federal and local
authorities have arrested dozens of suspects in recent days accused of
taking part in the Capitol riot, where a Capitol police officer, Brian
Sicknick, was fatally wounded after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher.
@donk_enby
describes herself as hacker, in the sense that she’s “someone with a
creative, but skeptical attitude toward technology,” to paraphrase a
definition offered by the Chaos Computer Club, Europe’s largest hacker
association. “I want this to be a big middle finger to those who say
hacking shouldn’t be political,” she said. @donk_enby work has aided
other researchers, including one at New York University’s Center for
Cybersecurity.
@donk_enby, whose efforts are documented on the website ArchiveTeam.org, said the data will eventually be hosted by the Internet Archive. (The two sites are not affiliated.)
BAR | It must be noted that back in 2005-06, when Pelosi was gearing up for
her first successful run for Speaker, she prevented Democrats from
holding hearings on the Katrina catastrophe in fear of identifying the
Party too closely with Black issues, and then forbade the Congressional
Black Caucus and all other Democrats from attending Republican hearings
on Katrina. All of the Black Caucus meekly complied with her diktat –
except for Atlanta Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who was shunned by her fellow
Black congresspersons as a result. As Peter Gamble and I reported in The Black Commentator,
Pelosi “was able to convince the Congressional Black Caucus, as a body,
to stand down in the face of a horrific crisis: the displacement of
hundreds of thousands of residents of New Orleans.” The Black Caucus’s
political irrelevance and impotence can be dated to that debacle. AOC
and her Squad are on the same path – and the slope is much steeper in
this era of accelerating national and imperial decay.
“The death of 40 to 60 thousand Americans a year due to
lack of healthcare, and 300,000-plus Covid-19 fatalities to date, is
corporate-inflicted violence on a horrific scale.”
In her self-pitying funk, the Bronx fashion-plate and champion
tweeter -- a rival of Trump, in that regard – sounded no different than
the standard “because…Trump” Democrat, blaming the outgoing Orange
Menace for her own political cowardice: “[I]n a time when the Republican
Party is attempting an electoral coup and trying to overturn the
results of our election, this is not just about being united as a party.
It's about being united as people who have basic respect for the rule
of law.” Having nothing to offer their “base,” Democrats make Trump the
excuse for their refusal to buck the corporate masters. What will they
do when the Orange Ogre is finally gone?
Doubtless, they will blame the Russians and a “handful of outspoken left-wing activists,” as MSN dubbed
the #ForceTheVote advocates, for undermining the smooth workings of
“American democracy.” However, the exodus of the leftmost ranks of the
Democratic Party has finally begun, and will accelerate in the
excruciatingly unending Covid-19 crisis, and as the post-Covid corporate
economic order emerges with the full collaboration of the Democratic
Party. The biggest benefactor of the New Year’s revolt is the Movement
for a People’s Party, coordinated by Nick Branna, which vows to run a
slate of congressional candidates in 2022 and mount a presidential bid
in 2024. For the first time in this century, significant numbers of
young people of all races – most of them unabashed Democrats only
yesterday, it seems – are expressing raw hatred for the Democrats, who
are richly deserving of the utmost contempt.
“Democrats make Trump the excuse for their refusal to buck the corporate masters.”
Having witnessed and participated in the largest demonstrations in
the history of the United States in the past year, these young activists
correctly see elections as only one aspect of “politics.” Indeed, the
corporate monopoly has rendered electoral projects the narrowest, most
circumscribed arena of U.S. political expression. Left political
parties’ electoral activity must be an extension of grassroots and
“street” advocacy.
Covid-19 ensured the demise of Trump and has laid bare the
anti-people nature of racial capitalism and the corporate duopoly that
serves the oligarchs. Pelosi and her Democrats have shown themselves to
be one with the Republicans in enforcing the Race to the Bottom that
capitalists have imposed, worldwide, and whose noose has been tightening
in the United States for two generations. Medicare for All is anathema
to both corporate parties because it would go far towards deprivatizing
one-sixth of the U.S. economy but, just as importantly, it would greatly
diminish the precarity and desperation of workers who fear they must
take and hold any job that provides health insurance. The oligarchy
understands perfectly that its super-profits are derived from
super-exploitation of the precarity-stricken workers of the planet, and
on the deepening desperation of its own workforce.
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