On January 4, PBS “Frontline” ran a chilling documentary about the armed groups that are behind domestic terrorism.
The program is called “American Insurrection,” and it is an eye-opener.
You no doubt have heard about or read about all the groups that are interviewed–the Proud Boys, the Bougaloo Bois, and many others–but this documentary ties them together.
They are armed, and they are dangerous.
One of these groups plotted to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and kill her.
They want a revolution or a civil war.
It is not clear what their grievances are.
They hate the government.
They love Trump, who validated their existence when he said in Charlottesville that “there are fine people on both sides” of the violent encounter between white supremacists and their opponents.
This is a gripping program. It is worth your time to watch.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I could only get through first 30 minutes. It’s just all surreal that there are living, breathing human beings who would deny this even happened. I also wish we would stop using the word insurrection. A simpler way to convey what happened is riot against democracy.
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The former leader of a white supremacist group says that now he is concentrating on politics rather than on white supremacy. He says, “You got a guy who is a Nationalist, and he’s president.”
This should be a clue. If Nazis, actual Nazis, fervently support the guy, this is a clue. They recognize their own.
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I was mesmerized by the last Repugnican Convention. ALL the standard fascists tropes were there. Beginning with the Party choosing not even to bother drafting a platform–the platform being simply Glorious Leader–and ending with the First “Lady” in military garb.
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Trump is a wannabe fascist autocratic leader, but he’s not smart enough or knowledgeable enough to pull it off. THE NEXT GUY will have Trump’s beliefs, but these will take the form of a coherent ideology, and he or she will be smart enough and knowledgeable enough to have all the necessary supports in place, including do-bots in key positions and an Enabling Act from a Republican-controlled House and Senate and an expanded, extremist Supreme Court–the Extreme Court, as Jon Awbry calls it. We came very, very close with Trump, but in the end, Barr, Milley, and Esper wouldn’t play ball. The next guy won’t make this mistake in staffing the fascist revolution.
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There are a LOT of radicalized members of our military and police forces. This is one of the most common phenomena to be found when a country has moved past the incipient revolution phase and into the active revolution phase. This is not a red flag–a sign of something horrific. it is the horrific thing itself. Very, very frightening. Democracy, such as it is, in America is in dire jeopardy.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/17/eaton-taguba-anderson-generals-military/
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“The potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command along partisan lines — from the top of the chain to squad level — is significant should another insurrection occur. The idea of rogue units organizing among themselves to support the “rightful” commander in chief cannot be dismissed.”
Here’s the oath that all members of the military take
I [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
It’s clearly an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not the Commander in chief.
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I’m less worried about the minority, albeit likely a larger minority of reactionaries than we might fear, as I am about the rank and file soldiers, the ones who will take orders and carry them out without questions. Most soldiers aren’t radicalized, the are malleable. In my experience, despite the mythology, virtually all soldiers enter the military not out of feelings of civic virtue, but because it is a job. Some learn it is a job with very good benefits the higher rank one achieves and time is served.
Indeed in my anecdotal experience gathered over a lifetime of some connection with the military, soldiers are no better or worse than the rest of the population. And like the general population, their knowledge about the nation’s history, government, and problems is very selective, skewed and generally ignorant about the duties and responsibilities of citizenship.
When the shift comes, it will be unnoticeable because the military will go along with whoever the individuals giving orders might be.
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Agreed!
How did this happen, why, and when? Not overnight. Not over the past 5-7 years.
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Armed services depend upon training people to follow orders. It’s your duty. Whatever the leader says. My country, right or wrong. That’s military discipline. But you can see how this can go astray. That’s why fascist takeovers originate, usually, with militaries.
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It’s very clear what their grievances are……Taxation without representation. Tax dollars collected from the masses are allocated by elected politicians into private business entities masquerading as “services” to the public. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and sicker and told that they should feel lucky to toil away and spend for the good of Wall Street and Big Business because this is the great USofA. They view the government as having taken from them without getting back much in return. Years of this creates bitter, angry and emotionally unstable people capable of doing great harm. Talk to one sometime.
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If this were the case, these people would have been allying themselves with human rights and civil rights groups who have been laying out same/similar grievances as long as we have been a country. But, they haven’t. In fact they are now the first to counter protest the activities of those seeking to remedy the grievances you listed above.
Please, don’t make the mistake of sympathizing with nazis.
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LisaM,
They are voting for the politicians that give the MOST money to the rich!
They are voting for the party who gives huge tax breaks to the rich.
They are voting for the party who wants to privatize Medicare.
I have talked to them and maybe you didn’t notice that most of them are white, and their grievances are NOT at big business but at the “other”. They don’t like the idea of people being given something they supposedly don’t deserve.
And they aren’t talking about CEOs.
If what you were saying was true, and the racism of whites had no role in their “grievances”, then there would be just as high of a percentage of African American Trump loving anti Democracy Republicans as their are white ones.
Did it ever occur to you that tax dollars are ALSO collected from people who aren’t white and they haven’t used that as their excuse to spew hate and adore Trump and the Republican party.
I grew up in Trump country. Did you? Do you really not understand that the appeal to racism is far stronger than what you seem to be saying — that white people are voting for the party that makes them toil away for Wall Street and Big Business because they don’t want to toil away for Wall Street and Big Business.
Those people are rabidly opposed to the idea of Medicare for All because the people who appeal to their racist beliefs tell them that the lazy “other” will benefit.
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It is the insurrectionists that are totally indoctrinated, not public school students. They swim in a right wing media pool full of lies, hate and conspiracy theories. They do not even realize they are being used by people like Trump and Bannon.
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The Capitol riot of January 6, 2021 should be strongly condemned, and the rioters should be held accountable under law. But as this piece shows, the post-George Floyd riots of 2020 resulted in far more loss of life and property damage than did the Jan. 6 riots. Very few of those rioters are being held accountable, and prosecutors in the affected cities have dropped almost all charges, i.e. the few charges that were even brought. Not the preferred narrative here, but nonetheless the plain fact.
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/09/09/realclearinvestigations_jan_6-blm_comparison_database_791370.html
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They tried to hold accountable a white teenager who gunned down 3 people in cold blood with an assault weapon during the George Floyd protests, but the Republicans made him a hero.
Two non-white folks whose target was an empty, already destroyed police car during the George Floyd protests are in prison, even though no one got hurt, let alone mass murdered.
I hope you aren’t saying you would have cheered on anyone who had walked into the Capitol riot with an assault weapon and gunned down those rioters, and you would have especially supported that person with an assault weapon killing any person who heroically tried to disarm him after he had already killed some of the rioters.
It is shocking — but very revealing of your own implicit (or perhaps explicit racism) — that you don’t understand the difference between peacefully protesting when a white policeman feels so certain that the Republican party will back him up when he slowly kills a handcuffed American American man while bystanders are begging him to stop, and protesting because your favorite candidate lost an election and you are willing to use violence to prevent a Democrat who was elected president from taking office.
Do you remember all that violence when the Democrat lost a much closer election in 2000 or 2016?
The Capitol insurrectionists are traitors to democracy.
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You watched that trial?
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Also, I love that you link to a right wing donor funded website!
Perfect!
Thanks for revealing what sources you “trust”!
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FYI to anyone who doesn’t already understand that “Floyd Wright” is posting links to right wing media:
From the NYT, Nov. 17, 2020. “A Popular Political Site Made a Sharp Right Turn. What Steered It?” (In usual NYT fashion, they didn’t think it was worth reporting on this until after the election was over).
“For three days after every major news organization declared Joseph R. Biden Jr. the victor of the presidential election, one widely read political site maintained that Pennsylvania was still too close to call.
The delay was welcome news to allies of President Trump like Rudolph W. Giuliani and friendly outlets like The Gateway Pundit, which misrepresented the site’s decision in their efforts to spread false claims that Mr. Biden’s lead was unraveling.
That site, Real Clear Politics, is well known as a clearinghouse of elections data and analysis with a large following among the political and media establishment — and the kinds of political obsessives who might now have all the counties in Georgia memorized. It markets itself to advertisers as a “trusted, go-to source” admired by campaign and news professionals alike. Its industry benchmark polling average is regularly cited by national publications and cable news networks.
But less well known is how Real Clear Politics and its affiliated websites have taken a rightward, aggressively pro-Trump turn over the last four years as donations to its affiliated nonprofit have soared. Large quantities of those funds came through two entities that wealthy conservatives use to give money without revealing their identities.”
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Unlike some, I find it helpful to know what people are reading, regardless. It’s never going to be true, hard as it may be to hear, that one side is full of truth and the other full of lies.
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Clarity, You are right that most of the time both sides can claim some truth on their side. Usually, it’s challenging to know who is telling the truth. Re the 2020 election, it’s easy to see where the irrefutable truth is. Trump says he won the election because the election was rigged. His lawyers filed more than 60 challenges. Not one of them succeeded, because none of them presented credible evidence. Lawyers twice took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, where 6 of 9 justices are conservatives. The Court threw out the two cases. Do you really believe that the Republican governors of Georgia and Arizona “rigged” the election for Biden? The truth is before us. Donald Trump is a pathological liar.
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“real clear’ sites are right wing
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And?
Does reading stuff written by the other side mean it will rot our brains? Warp our minds? How can anyone think that both sides are not equally slanted? There was a time when those slants meant that they converged at one end to get stuff done. Now they seem to lean away from one another like minarets at the Taj Mahal.
Nothing falls together when it’s built to fall away.
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There’s evidence to suggest a majority of the right wing consciously deny reality. One example is the Jan. 6, almost successful coup, to overturn the democratic election of the U.S. President.
I don’t want negotiation in the following areas. I want the left to stand firm against systemic discrimination against women and POC, against America’s most watched Putin propagandist, Tucker Carlson, against social media that profits from turning Americans against their fellow citizens, against conservative Christianity that imposes its beliefs to the detriment of American political and social progress.
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Clarity,
No doubt you can also find some “truth” in statements by Hitler. Do you think that justifies people supporting Hitler rounding up entire Jewish families based on the outrageous lies that Hitler told?
A broken clock tells the “true” time twice a day.
You have posted here many times and until you stipulate that it is true that Biden won the election and the Republicans have presented no evidence of voter fraud, then your definition of “truth” is one that speaks for itself. Trump spoke truthfully on occasion just like Hitler did. So what? It is NOT true that Trump won the election. It is true that the insurrectionists were acting out violently on Trump’s behalf. That’s why Trump didn’t want them to stop.
If you can’t stipulate that the violent insurrectionists were motivated to take their violent actions based on a LIE, and that Germans were willing to sit back and let Hitler round up entire Jewish families based on a LIE, then that speaks for itself.
We are talking about harmful lies told by right wing media that are dangerous to democracy — like the election was “stolen” from Trump — and you want to change the subject to focus on whether some other fact they offered might be true.
If the discussion were about Hitler’s propaganda arm telling harmful lies that were dangerous to Jews, would you feel the need to change the subject to how you find that sometimes there were truthful facts put out by Hitler’s media arm?
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For me, there has always been something about Trump and Putin, who have an attraction for many Americans which can be quietly noticed, with no need to actually say anything. They are leaders for white people. Please tell me, no matter what you believe about everything else, if you consider my thoughts about this to be ridiculous.
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In addition, Putin and trump have been described as exhibiting performative faux masculinity.
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Were we ahead of history with our song “Blind man”….The things the blind man said to me was the way to be a man….should have been were instead of was…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAsjSPdvXD0
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The “LO B” “a year ago” comment at the YouTube-link ?
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Linda…the St. Louis Post Dispatch current affairs forum is loaded with commentators from the right wing, mostly male, who usually respond to things they do not like with 3-5 words of dismissal. I praised you for what you pointed out to me….a very long explanation came from an intelligent person….a key point he made:”According to data compiled a few months after the insurrection by researchers at the University of Chicago, of those arrested and charged with committing crimes at the Capitol, 93 percent were white, and 86 percent were men.” I responded to him…..”Thanks for posting that…I referred to my feeling that there was a connection between Trump and Putin, and it had a quiet basis in race…..Linda offered that they were also recognized for “performative faux masculinity”…..making the point of which you so vividly offered examples: that gender is a huge factor in the mess. The post I started with was titled (I was inspired by you) What is “performative faux masculinity”? I did not get any of the usual insults from the right wing bozos…..I will not say it was over their heads…they were intelligent enough to not participate in a subject which could not help them in the forum which they dominate.
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Both Putin and trump are backed by right wing Christian religious leaders. Putin is orthodox Christian. He brags about his fealty by saying he has never taken off the cross his mother gave him.
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It was 1974……the week Nixon left office…..”if only I had listened to the things the blind man said..he said that I’d go far in life..if I looked straight ahead..but I just glanced, I didn’t see the things before my eyes..and I fell prey to circumstance and a victim of their lies..if only I had lived the life the blind man said to me..and though my eyes are open there’s so much that I can’t see…….”
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The whole Trump phenomenon was engineered by Putin. This was probably the most successful intelligence operation in history. Putin is a judo expert. Use the opponent against himself/herself. Trump is Putin’s guy.
There’s a reason why Russia had operatives like Butina here in the US, working with the National Rifle Association to radicalize the right and put more guns in the hands of “citizens’ militias.” Destabilizing the country. Fomenting a right-wing revolution.
Worked like a charm, didn’t it?
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“This was probably the most successful intelligence operation in history.”
Except for one minor issue.
It hinged (or is it unhinged?) on one of the dumbest guys in history.
That’s called intelligent stupidity.
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The whole point was to give the Americans the dumbest guy.
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The thing that kills me, SomeDAM, is that this is all there for people to put together. 2 + 2 + 2. Trump’s visiting Moscow in 1987 on the dime of the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. His getting bailed out by Deutsch Bank when no American bank would loan to him–by a bank with huge deposits from Russian oligarchs. It’s Don Jr., telling a reporter, after the bankruptcies, that the Trump Organization was awash in cash, mostly from Russians. It’s Russian mobsters living in Trump Tower. It’s Trump having married two eastern European “models.” It’s a Russian spy getting caught running around the U.S. promoting “gun rights.” It’s the closeted Lindsay Graham doing a 180 on Trump.
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Linda…you noticed the comment — The “LO B” “a year ago” comment at the YouTube-link ? I have always wondered about it….I looked up what was available about him….almost nothing, he seemed to appreciate heavy rock….almost no negative comments are ever made about the album….I thought his was pretty nasty, but he is entitled to his opinion. The album needed a different title….my name was stuck on it by those who pressed the original records…there was resentment among the band members and some of their friends, but they did not consider the recording very important. It was a warmup, and the machine is small enough was somewhat related to my run for the missouri general assembly….I thought the drummer, Norman Pelot did an excellent job on the songs…..but his style was very forceful….effective in what he tried to do..evidently LO B found something in it….thus he said ….This album was originally titled “Songs To Beat Women To” but then changed when the drummer was arrested for animal abuse…..It has never made any sense to anyone that I know of.
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Joe- Thanks for the answer. People like “Lo B” can make up and write crazy stuff. I’m glad that you are holding your own among the right wing Bozo commenters at the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
After listening to the Blind Man song, I felt it deserved the high praise it was given. The poetry and music had a haunting or melancholy quality that reached and quieted the soul. Listening to it makes for an unforgettable memory. Thanks for the link.
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Finished teaching the The Crucible by showing the film, “Guilty by Suspicion” (1991; dir. Irwin Winkler; starring Robert DeNiro, Annette Bening) and following up our film study activity with this essential question; Is dissent disloyalty? Wow! The discussions that ensued should make every adult in this country either blush or blanche out of shame and embarrassment for their own closed-minded, disagreeable, silo’d conduct when it comes to politics. I’m so proud of my kids for conducting themselves with such a sense of propriety, manners and consideration when they articulated their positions with such eloquence. I teach at an inner-ring suburban school with mixed a demographic, yet white majority, with sympathies that range from the right to the left. It was a spot of hope, which is what we need, especially now at this critical, yet scary, phase of American democracy.
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You’d think the people who took part in the insurrection would be ticked off at Trump because he egged them on and even said “I’ll be there with you” and then hid in a coat closet during the whole thing.
So, they have been prosecuted and jailed while their “hero” (who essentially hung them out to dry) is free and has not been prosecuted for anything?
I don’t get why these people still support him. If nothing else, he’s a coward and a traitor to their cause who has clearly abandoned them.
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I read an analysis that described the type of person who attacked the Capitol. They like to be or, to be cast as, a villain. It is adolescent attention-seeking carried into adulthood.
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On that day–January 6th–I saw a live video in some news report-I forget where–of Trump and Don Jr. watching the events on television and cheering and laughing. Don Jr. seemed particularly jubilant. This seems to have disappeared. I didn’t imagine this.
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The Maxwell trial is very ………look there is guy in a Viking Hat!!!!!
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Yup. A fatal flaw. The founders of the US didn’t expect the wedding of universal suffrage with mass consumer market idiocracy.
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Or the wedding of Jeffrey Epstein to Ghislaine Maxwell
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There is a move afoot to hold people accountable for their oath to defend the Constitution, including the 14th amendment:
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Seems crystal clear that Trump is barred by the Constitution from ever again holding public office and so is any member of Congress or former member of the military who took part in or in any way encouraged the insurrection.
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SDP, great point about 14th Amendment!
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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/exclusive-jan-6-organizers-met-congress-white-house-1245289/
Jan. 6 Protest Organizers Say They Participated in ‘Dozens’ of Planning Meetings With Members of Congress and White House Staff
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Of course they did.
Which tells you that Navarro is a liar and his propaganda about a different (supposedly “legal”) plan is all about changing the subject from this conspiracy to stop Biden’s victory being certified to “was this other plan legal or not, and if it wasn’t, who cares because it never happened anyway.”
I can’t believe the media is once again falling for that right wing propaganda. But gosh they are really, really good at it.
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A coup is a coup
A coup is a coup is a coup is a coup
No matter what Trump and his flunkies will claim
No matter what Trump and his flunkies will do
A coup is a coup , and Trump is to blame
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