Sammy Davis Jr. (Ali Alexander) Getting His GOP Ratpack In TRUBBLE!!!

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.

 

The Clampdown Exceeds Cass Sunstein's Wildest Imaginings...,

rule of law: elite, establishment politics, psyops, and livestock management methods

Why Are Elites Working Overtime On Multiple Fronts To Cancel Sen. Josh Hawley?

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 both sides. 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.

I Am Familiar With And I Approve Of Josh Hawley's Theological Grounding

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.

Harris-Biden SUCKS SO HARD 20,000 Floor-Sleeping Troops Must Protect Its Installation...,

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

— detty (@0ddette) January 13, 2021

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

— Lindsay Wise (@lindsaywise) January 13, 2021

The Democratic Party Stands For Nothing And Fights For Nothing

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.

This defection, as Nader understood, was the only tactic that could force the Democrats to adopt parts of a liberal and left-wing agenda and save us from the slow-motion corporate coup d’état. Fear is the real force behind political change, not oily promises of mutual goodwill. Short of this pressure, this fear, especially with labor unions destroyed, there is no hope. Now we will reap the consequences of the liberal class’s moral and political cowardice.

The Democratic Party elites revel in taunting liberals as well as the left-wing populists who preach class warfare and supported Bernie Sanders.

Fortress DC Shown To Be As Useful As The Patriot Act, Patriot Missiles And The Political Class

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?

 

Patriot Act As Worthless As Patriot Missiles In A Genuine War On Terror

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.

Pelosi Appoints Fang Fang Bang Bang Swalwell As An Impeachment Manager...,

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.”

Not Horny, Just Happily Singing "Bringing In The Sheaves"

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.

Sexually Excited Watching The Corrupt Elderly Capitol Hill Parasites Cower...,

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. 

Technology-Driven Tyranney Has No Vulnerabilities Exploitable By Nazi Insurrectionists

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.

Russian-Backed Nazi Insurrectionists Cornered Themselves In The Capitol Building Last Week

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.

There Was No Coup Attempt But There Will Be An Authoritarian Clampdown

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.

Rep. Lauren Boebert Out'Chere Like Sammy Doing THE MOST!!!

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.

Raw Story reports:

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.

Former CO State Rep @Bri4CO at @laurenboebert rally: pic.twitter.com/kUZtiV8jxJ

— Dan Beedie KRDO (@BeedieonTV) January 8, 2021

Chants of Lauren Boebert has to go outside of the US Congresswoman’s Pueblo office. pic.twitter.com/da1U1tBnKP

— Dan Beedie KRDO (@BeedieonTV) January 8, 2021

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.

 

Do You Know How Much Damage One Lil Conk-Wearing Dindu Can Cause?

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.

Lawd HaMercy: Sammy Davis Jr. Reincarnated To Help "Stop The Steal"?

bayoubrief |  After amassing more than 350,000 followers, Facebook banned the group “Stop the Steal” once members began posting calls to incite violence at planned protests across the country. 

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 Jones reported 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 to The 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.” 

Weeks before the election, Alexander promoted a website that floated the bogus claim that Joe Biden secretly suffered from Parkinson’s disease.

 

Rebellious Rednecks In Hotter Water As Internet "Researcher" Downloaded All Of Parler's Posts...,

great job, everyone pic.twitter.com/22gooTH4sl

— crash override (@donk_enby) January 11, 2021

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.)

 

After They Get Done With These Rebellious Rednecks Jimmy Dore - They'll Be Coming For You!

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.

Retired Capitol Police Officer "I Think They Allowed Them To Do What They Did...,"

WSWS |   In a telling interaction on CNN Friday, retired capitol policeman Theortis Jones said, “I think they allowed them to do what they did.” The complacent moderator failed to ask who gave the orders to stand back. The interview with the 37-year veteran was ended abruptly soon after he added, “They were a part of allowing these people to come up to the Capitol the way they did.”

The Democratic leadership is boasting that it is conducting an investigation into the death of the police officer who was killed in the riot. But this “investigation” will be conducted by the Capitol Police and the FBI—the very institutions that must themselves be subject to a thorough investigation for their role in this ongoing plot.

The Capitol Police’s self-investigation comes even as Democratic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren reported that the chief of the Capitol Police lied to her by stating that the National Guard had been called up before January 6. The chief “was not truthful to me,” Lofgren told the press. “It was just not true. They had not been called.”

New details are also coming to light showing how close Wednesday’s riot came to ending in a massacre or mass kidnapping event. PBS Newshour correspondent Lisa Desjardins told NPR yesterday that she realized the danger she was in when she noticed police had abandoned their posts inside the Capitol building. She was barricaded in a room with several congressional representatives who held hands and prayed, worried that they were about to be killed.

An aide close to Vice President Mike Pence also told CNN yesterday that the Trump administration did not contact Pence or take any measures to ensure his safety. Pence was with his wife, daughter and brother in the Capitol building Wednesday as he presided over the electoral vote certification. CNN wrote:

Several of the violent Trump supporters who were rampaging the US Capitol were heard screaming ‘where’s Mike Pence,’ the source said, frightening the vice president and his family. Yet, the President and his top aides barely lifted a finger to check in on Pence to make sure he and his family were unharmed, the source added.

Online, fascist militias are now preparing for an even larger event on Inauguration Day. Hampton Stall, the founder of MilitiaWatch and an expert on the US far-right, told the World Socialist Web Site:

There’s a lot of really cryptic chatter and overt discussions of violence around the January 6 event, but a lot of inauguration-related organizing is related to a few different dynamics that have been planned for at least a month’s time. One that stands out is the Million Militia March apparently organized for 20 January at the Capitol. Propaganda and event fliers have been circulating around militia chat groups.

Militia members are also making plans for protests at various state capitols in the days leading up to the inauguration. Stall added that while Wednesday’s demonstration in Washington DC was largely unarmed, this may change on January 20:

There are also multiple state capital events organized for the 17th, 18, 19th and 20th. Fliers for these events have been quite mixed as far as indications as to the specific ideological tendencies of those organizing, whether it be ‘2A’ activism, overt militia organizing, Boogaloo, or something else entirely. The one commonality is that all are expressly right-wing in nature and often point to a militant or armed gathering.

Exactly one year before the date of the scheduled inauguration, on January 20, 2020, the largest armed demonstration in US history took place in Richmond, Virginia involving roughly 10,000 fascists. In December, Trump’s fascist adviser Stephen Miller said, “The only date in the Constitution is January 20,” adding that this was the “deadline” for action to protect Trump’s presidency.