Dispatches From Pre-Civil War America

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

 "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." -President Lyndon B. Johnson.

By now, it's become as conspicuous as a Black Panther at a Klan rally that the radical right wing is plotting a nationwide coup of the electoral process. You'd have to be blinder than a Kentucky cave fish to not see that. What should frighten more of us is that some of that radical right wing element is already in Congress. MTG, Lauren Bobo, Louis Gomer, Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar, Mo Brooks, etc. They're just the advance scouts.

     What should scare even more of us is that these advance scouts have already been in close contact with the shock troops that we saw a little over a year ago during the siege at the Capitol. Ali Alexander said as much. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ 11) said on a Facebook Live a week after the riot that certain Republican lawmakers gave the future rioters tours of the Capitol the very day before, despite tours being banned at the Capitol at the start of the pandemic March of 2020 (a claim that made Barry Loudermilk scream for Sherrill and other Democrats to be investigated).

     And, incredibly, Republicans and right wing conspiracy theorists are still obsessed with overturning the election results that came in the year before last. One of them is even crowdsourcing citizen audits on a new platform that's gaining new members at an exponential rate. Laura Logan (Of the ironically-named "Lara Logan Has No Agenda" show), who four years ago left CBS to float up to the mothership of Fox "News", got dropped by her talent agency UTA for comparing Dr. Fauci to Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who'd murdered thousands during the Holocaust. If you think that doesn't merit mention in this wall of shame, reconsider that Bill O'Reilly's rants against abortion doctor George Tiller resulted in Dr. Tiller getting shot to death in a Wichita church.

    To get back to Marjorie Taylor-Greene again, let's not forget that in between conspiracy theories involving Jewish space lasers and the borderline hilarious Qanon Frazzledrip charge involving Hillary Clinton, America's most beloved bleacher bum also called for a "national divorce" between red and blue states, which would be laughable just on its face since not one state has all Republican or all Democratic voters. Plus, just because someone moves from a so-called blue state to a so-called red state, it doesn't mean they're liberals or Democrats. Likewise, Greene's suggestion that such emigres should have their voting rights suspended "temporarily" could wind up hurting her own base.

     Greene's suggestion should have been laughed out of the marketplace of ideas after being tarred and feathered were it not for its antebellum implications. And, unlike the Civil War, in which the lines dividing North and South were plainly demarcated by the invisible Mason Dixon line (or which states allowed slavery and which didn't), such a civil war nowadays would be impossible since the radical right wing has thoroughly infested not only the body politic but also our population. Think of a certain virus that has killed nearly 6,000,000 people worldwide over the last two years.

     State lines in a latter-day Civil War wouldn't exist and the uniforms of the insurrectionists would be identical to those worn by those on January 6th- Proud Boys riot gear, red hats and Trump flags worn as capes such as the one worn by Ashli Babbitt when she was shot dead that day. The right wing is using the Us vs Them mentality straight out of the Nazi playbook. And, like the Nazis, they're tapping into a rich vein of nationalist resentment that the elections they have no problem stealing as long as a radical Republicans wins was in turn stolen from them. Evidence or the lack thereof that any wide-spread fraud was committed means nothing because we're not dealing with sane people. And it's about time we stopped treating them as if they are and worth listening to.

     So, considering the openly arrogant boasts of the radical right wing and the fruit they've already begun harvesting from their labors, how come the Democratic Party isn't more alarmed by this?

 

The Lowest White Men 

"Trumpism is a religion founded on patriarchy and white supremacy." Charles Blow, NY Times, January 11, 2018

Perhaps the most vivid delineation of this lack of alarm regarding the planned right wing takeover of the government within the next year are the forged documents signed by Republican officials and sent to the Supreme Court, the US Senate, the National Archives (which had rejected them) and other official bodies. These forged documents claiming to be electors when the electors had already been chosen were signed, sealed and delivered over a year ago. We knew about this over a year ago. Yet Congress, the American voter and the reliably supine mainstream media had hardly managed more than a yawn until recently.

     Helping to tie together these disparate threads of white collar insurrection was Jeffrey Clark's now-infamous "proof of concept" letter that was written and intended to be sent off to Georgia's Republican leadership (Brian Kemp, the GA Speaker of the House and the Senate President pro tem). It was a draft letter written by Clark, who was briefly favored by Trump to take over as Acting AG until the DOJ's leadership threatened to quit en masse if Jeffrey Rosen was fired and replaced by Clark. It seemed to quiver for the seal of the Justice Department that Clark could only use if he was the Acting Attorney General.

     In it, he seemed to anticipate two weeks in advance the phony documents purporting to be the actual electors in at least seven states, all of which having been won by Joe Biden (Georgia, New Mexico, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona). In fact, the phony document out of Lansing alarmed Attorney General Dana Nessel so much she'd sent the documents to that same Justice Department requesting a review.

     So, we now know that Clark knew about the phony documents, which is to say Trump knew about it, at least a fortnight before they were amateurishly copied and pasted onto templates using the same spacing, phraseology and even fonts. The Clark draft letter was intended to be sent out to several states and one should shudder if such a letter was sent out to state legislatures with the seal of the DoJ on it.

     We also know from the "privilege log" submitted by Bernie Kerik to the J6 Select Committee that Trump had drafted out a letter announcing his intention to seize every voting machine in the nation just a day after a certain infamous Oval Office meeting in which Michael Flynn brow-beat Trump into doing just that, including invoking martial law.

     We know about the war rooms, plural, at the Willard Hotel (subsidized by the Trump campaign). Impaneling a slate of fraudulent electors in, again, seven states, was also in the Eastman coup memo, which detailed a comical six point plan that would allow then VP Mike Pence to either throw out or send back to these states the results of their electoral college votes. 

     Then, if that didn't work, there were more drastic and sloppier measures to be taken. That's where Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, and his goons came in.

Blue Collars and White Collars

With all due respect to them and the lack of information they had at the time of the insurrection, one of the most damaging misconceptions put out by the mainstream media was that the rioters were disaffected blue collar types who were legitimately concerned that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. We now know with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight that this was far from the case.

     If we could bisect the factions that took part in the insurrection, we could neatly divide them into blue collar and white collar. There were the white collar types, DoJ and administration stooges fanned out by Trump, intended to overthrow the election in a bloodless coup. But if Trump's tweets in the lead-up to the January 6 rally at the Ellipse and other rumblings from GOP lawmakers were any indication, they plainly relied on the likes of Stewart Rhodes and other far right wing militia leaders as their Plan B.

    Trump had shock troops well-placed in the right wing media ecosystem (Alex Jones and Steve Bannon, among others, not to mention an army of flunkies at Newsmax and OAN parroting the lame duck administration's Big Lies) as well as in the Department of Justice, the Pentagon  as well as the US Congress. Looking at it with a bird's eye view, it shows an administration that was far more obsessively focused on overturning the election than it was in confronting the very real threat of coronavirus. Last winter and all the revelations that have come out this winter made us look like a glorified banana republic.

     It boggles the mind how much better we'd all be if Trump had been this focused and proactive in combating the pandemic as he was in his increasingly frenzied attempts to remain in power to avoid prosecution over the dizzying variety of his countless crimes. The COVID pandemic was, to Trump, just an increasingly serious inconvenience to his reelection chances.

     But the blue collar rioters turned out to be a lot more uncivil in their 45 minute-long takeover of the Capitol than the white collar insurrectionists counted on. Five people died that day and on January 7, one of them a cop. Four more policemen committed suicide. They called for major elected officials, including VP Pence and Speaker Pelosi, to be executed (in a loud echo of Marjorie Taylor Greene's calls for Pelosi's execution and Lauren Boebert tweeting about Pelosi's location during the riot).

    What we don't have, incredibly, after over a year, is the smoking gun absolutely establishing a connection between the likes of Rhodes and other rioters and the white collar faction consisting of administration, Trump campaign officials and others. Where are the security tapes of the Capitol from January 5th when the recon was taking place between right wing lawmakers and the next day's rioters? Why haven't more phone records been seized? Hard drives, email accounts? Anything?

     We now know from the videotapes that are available that the Oath Keepers marched up the Capitol steps in a stack formation, or Ranger file, commonly used by the military (not surprising, as many Oath Keepers are former military and/or law enforcement). We know they'd set up ammo and weapons dumps theoretically supplying a "quick reaction force" in various motels surrounding Washington DC. According to Rhodes and his communiques through right wing social media, all it would've taken was a word from Trump to get them scrambling back for their guns and ammo and return to the Capitol.

     Again, one shudders to think how much bloodier January 6th would have been had Trump issued that order to his loyal followers.

     So, my open question to Congress, federal law enforcement and our 16 intelligence agencies is, "Why didn't you take this threat seriously then and why aren't you taking it seriously now?"

     You know, since past is often prologue?