Even as DC is now better prepared for a “million militia march” on 20 January, the likelihood is that only the most foolhardy will lay their lives down for Trump’s Big Lie.
Meanwhile “something of a pariah” Trump will flee to Florida to rehabilitate his now permanently abysmal position in history. And Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still counting votes for his 2020 landslide.
In particular, Van Hollen pointed to militia extremists as presenting the deadliest threat — and a "talk of a million militia march" in Washington.
"We have no idea how many will come," Van Hollen said. "We need to be prepared."
A 40-year Republican Big Lie brought us to this crisis point in America.
When Ronald Reagan was running for president in 1980, one of his biggest boosters was the political heavy hitter Paul Weyrich, who was also a cofounder of the Heritage Foundation and multiple other rightwing think tanks and operations.
Weyrich told a group of political activists in a church in Dallas that the GOP was changing their strategy to win elections.
No longer would the Republican Party try to win elections through high-minded policy goals or wonky speeches about the importance of fiscal austerity, like Barry Goldwater had tried to do in 1964.
No longer would the GOP embrace the goal that as many eligible people vote as possible, and the GOP would no longer support widespread voter registration drives like Nixon had done in 1968 and 1972, cooperating with the League of Women Voters.
“I don’t want everyone to vote,” Weyrich bluntly told the assembled Republican operatives. “Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populous goes down.”
The job going forward for the Republican Party, Weyrich announced, would be to make it harder for people to vote rather than easier, particularly people who typically vote Democratic.
But to justify suppressing the vote, they had to create the Big Lie of the fraudulent voter. It was an absolutely necessary excuse, because without it voter suppression efforts would seem totally partisan and thus be less effective.
For 40 years they've been using the Big Lie to tighten the screws on communities of color, city-dwellers, students and Social Security voters. It's time to expose and end it.
Trump's & the GOP's Big Lie must be exposed and cast out of American politicshttps://t.co/Bw0eyzmEZR
Remember that those yahoos thought that Trump was going to use the Insurrection Act to declare martial law so he could remain president.
Trump has become something of a pariah in the nation’s capital of Washington and its financial center of New York in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol that he incited, but Florida offers him a place to try to rehabilitate himself.
Trump will leave Washington this week politically wounded, silenced on social media and essentially unwelcome in his lifelong hometown of New York. https://t.co/fJWwh4LOjU
By migrating instead to Palm Beach, Fla., Trump plans to inhabit an alternate reality of adoration and affirmation. The defeated president will take up residence at his gilded Mar-a-Lago Club, where dues-paying members applaud him whenever he eats meals or mingles on the deck. He is sure to take in the same celebratory fervor whenever he plays golf at one of the two Trump-branded courses nearby.
In Florida — one of only two top battleground states Trump won in November — Trump will be living in a veritable MAGA oasis, to use the acronym for his “Make American Great Again” campaign slogan. South Florida has fast become a hub of right-wing power brokers and media characters, and some of Trump’s adult children are making plans to move to the area.
Even as Trump broods privately over his second impeachment last week and the election he continues to falsely insist he won, his aides are at work to establish a Trump fiefdom in the Sunshine State aimed at maintaining his influence over Republican politics, according to allies and advisers, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal discussions.
Asked about raising money for the library, another former top Trump fundraiser wrote in a text message: “Insane.” This person noted that, “except for the wackos, everybody’s running for the hills.”
"[T]he president has told supporters he wants to raise $2 billion for the library — a far greater sum than has been raised for past presidential libraries — and thinks he can collect it in small-dollar donations from his grass-roots supporters" https://t.co/TSKXV34I3u
Time to cast a wide investigative net: Possible Role of Flynn, Stone, Bannon, Rudy & Don Jr. in the Jan 6 Incident at the US Capitol. It’s time for accountability. It’s time for justice. #JusticeMattershttps://t.co/SwzZKSrMWa via @YouTube
The FBI is investigating whether foreign governments, organizations or individuals provided financial support to extremists who helped plan and execute the attack on the Capitol. https://t.co/ACgLTDZujH
Can you tell me a bit about when and how your book Q was written?
We started writing Q in the last months of 1995, when we were part of the Luther Blissett Project, a network of activists, artists and cultural agitators who all shared the name «Luther Blissett». Luther Blissett was and still is a British public figure, a former footballer, a philanthropist. The LBP spread many mythical tales about why we chose to borrow his name, but the truth is that nobody knows.
Initially, Blissett the footballer was bemused, but then he decided to play along with us and even publicly endorsed the project. Last year, during an interview on the Italian TV, he stated that having his name adopted for the LBP was «a honour». The purpose of signing all our statements, political actions and works of art with the same moniker was to build the reputation of one open character, a sort of collective “bandit”, like Ned Ludd, or Captain Swing. It was live action role playing. The LBP was huge: hundreds of people in Italy alone, dozens more in other countries. In the UK, one of the theorists and propagandists of the LBP was the novelist Stewart Home.
The LBP lasted from 1994 to 1999. The best English-language account of those five years is in Marco Deseriis’ book Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous. One of our main activities consisted of playing extremely elaborate pranks on the mainstream media. Some of them were big stunts which made us quite famous in Italy. The most complex one was played by dozens of people in the backwoods around Viterbo, a town near Rome. It lasted a year, involving Satanism, black masses, Christian anti-satanist vigilantes and so on. It was all made up: there were neither Satanists nor vigilantes, only fake pictures, strategically spread rumours and crazy communiqués, but the local and national media bought everything with no fact-checking at all, politicians jumped on the bandwagon of mass paranoia, we even managed to get footage of a (rather clumsy) satanic ritual broadcast in the national TV news, then we claimed responsibility for the whole thing and produced a huge mass of evidence. The Luther Blissett Project was also responsible for a huge grassroots counter-inquiry on cases of false child abuse allegations. We deconstructed the paedophilia scare that swiped Europe in the second half of the 1990s, and wrote a book about it. A magistrate whom we targeted in the book filed a lawsuit, as a consequence the book was impounded and disappeared from bookshops, but not from the web.
This is the context in which we wrote Q. We finished it in June 1998. It came out in March 1999 and was our final contribution to the LBP.
After the #Capitol insurrection, we need to understand QAnon as a terrorist element. @travis_view discusses #QAnon conspiracy theories, what motivates them, and their political goals.
An internal Capitol Police intelligence report warns of a violent scenario in which “Congress itself” could be the target of angry Trump supporters on Jan. 6. The 12-page report says that the president’s backers could feel a “sense of desperation and disappointment” about the election results that “may lead to more of an incentive to become violent.” It does not appear to have been shared widely with other law enforcement agencies, including the FBI.
In an email exchange, a Defense Department official asks for confirmation from a colleague that U.S. Capitol Police are making “no requests for DoD support?” The colleague replies that a Capitol Police official — at least two notches below the chief — had confirmed that the department was not seeking such help.
Alex Jones revealed his and Donald Trump‘s involvement in the attempted coup while attempting to blame Antifa for the riot. He told viewers of his radio show “The Alex Jones Show” that he was told to lead the mob days in advance.
“And then the White House told me three days before, ‘We’re going to have you lead the march. The Secret Service – before Trump finishes, 30 minutes before – so we’ll lead you to a point, take you out of the front row and lead you to the place where they want you to start the march and Trump will tell people, ‘Go, and I’m going to meet you at the Capitol,’ ‘ ” he shared.
I read Highlights magazine every week at the dentist and thought about Goofus and Gallant all night long so, you can imagine my surprise at finding this obviously defaced copy-written material that expressed my feelings so eloquently. pic.twitter.com/Cp6j8wGYUx
Gab & Parler are peppered with talk of possible “Million Militia March” on Inauguration Day. There is chatter about what to bring: Baseball bats, perhaps, or assault rifles. “We took the building once,” one commenter posted, “we can take it again.” https://t.co/xfnWvW2zsT
