#but now he's been tried he's been charged he claims the election was stolen from him like he is just so much more dangerous now

[autumnrory]

sometimes i feel silly worrying about this being our last election if trump wins bc it's like well that's what we thought would happen last time and it didn't but like THERE WAS AN ATTEMPT and it's like there are still ongoing trials, there are still MANY people who believe the 2020 election was stolen from him (funny how they get to yell about supposed election fraud but any suggestion of the 2016 election being unfair was just democrats whining about losing lol) and so many things that crumbled during and since his presidency like it IS even more dangerous now than it was then for the republican party to hold all that party it's not even just about him it's about all of them

and people don't want to acknowledge this very real threat i know we don't actually have a democracy but we could lose what little we do have you know? like how many people already lost their lives whether in death or in the loss of rights, of loved ones, of life as they knew it because of his presidency? how many more will if he gains power again? people love to be like "well biden didn't fix x" well he can't fix everything and people don't realize he doesn't have absolute power bc he's not TRYING TO but trump fucking will and there are so many things i wish biden would do better on but there are a hell of a lot of things still affecting us from trump's presidency that he can't control like look at the fucking supreme court look what they have done BECAUSE TRUMP WON IN 2016 how much worse are they going to get if he's allowed to put more people on there like i'm just so tired

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Forget hush money payments to porn stars hidden as business expenses. Forget showing off classified documents about Iran attack plans to visitors, and then ordering the pool guy to erase the security tapes revealing that he was still holding on to documents that he had promised to return. Forget even corrupt attempts to interfere with election results in Georgia in 2020.

The federal indictment just handed down by special counsel Jack Smith is not only the most important indictment by far of former President Donald Trump. It is perhaps the most important indictment ever handed down to safeguard American democracy and the rule of law in any U.S. court against anyone.

For those who have been closely following Trump’s attempt to subvert the results of the 2020 election, there was little new information contained in the indictment. In straightforward language with mountains of evidence, the 45-page document explains how Trump, acting with six (so far unnamed, but easily recognizable) co-conspirators, engaged in a scheme to repeatedly make false claims that the 2020 election was stolen or rigged, and to use those false claims as a predicate to try to steal the election. The means of election theft were national, not just confined to one state, as in the expected Georgia prosecution. And they were technical—submitting alternative slates of presidential electors to Congress, and arguing that state legislatures had powers under the Constitution and an old federal law, the Electoral Count Act, to ignore the will of the state’s voters.

But Trump’s corrupt intent was clear: He was repeatedly told that the election was not stolen, and he knew that no evidence supported his outrageous claims of ballot tampering. He nonetheless allegedly tried to pressure state legislators, state election officials, Department of Justice officials, and his own vice president to manipulate these arcane, complex election rules to turn himself from an election loser into an election winner. That’s the definition of election subversion.

He’s now charged with a conspiracy to defraud the United States, a conspiracy to willfully deprive citizens the right to vote, a conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and obstructing that official proceeding. If you’re doing the math, that is four new counts on top of the dozens he faces in the classified documents case in Florida and the hush money case in New York.

So far Trump has not been accountable for these actions to try to steal an American election. Although the House impeached Trump for his efforts soon after they occurred, the Senate did not convict. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, in voting against conviction in the Senate despite undeniable evidence of attempted election subversion by his fellow Republican, pointed to the criminal justice system as the appropriate place to serve up justice. But the wheels of justice have turned very slowly. Reports say that Attorney General Merrick Garland was at first too cautious about pursuing charges against Trump despite Trump’s unprecedented attack on our democracy. Once Garland appointed Jack Smith as a special counsel to handle Trump claims following the release of seemingly irrefutable evidence that Trump broke laws related to the handling of classified documents, the die was cast.

It is hard to overstate the stakes riding on this indictment and prosecution. New polling from the New York Times shows that Trump not only has a commanding lead among those Republicans seeking the party’s presidential nomination in 2024; he remains very competitive in a race against Joe Biden. After nearly a decade of Trump convincing many in the public that all charges against him are politically motivated, he’s virtually inoculated himself against political repercussions for deadly serious criminal counts. He’s miraculously seen a boost in support and fundraising after each indictment (though recent signs are that the indictments are beginning to take a small toll). One should not underestimate the chances that Donald Trump could be elected president in 2024 against Joe Biden—especially if Biden suffers any kind of health setback in the period up to the election—even if Trump is put on trial and convicted of crimes.

A trial is the best chance to educate the American public, as the Jan. 6 House committee hearings did to some extent, about the actions Trump allegedly took to undermine American democracy and the rule of law. Constant publicity from the trial would give the American people in the middle of the election season a close look at the actions Trump took for his own personal benefit while putting lives and the country at risk. It, of course, also serves the goals of justice and of deterring Trump, or any future like-minded would-be authoritarian, from attempting any similar attack on American democracy ever again.

Trump now has two legal strategies he can pursue in fighting these charges, aside from continuing to attack the prosecutions as politically motivated. The first strategy, which he will no doubt pursue, is to run out the clock. It’s going to be tough for this case to go to trial before the next election given that it is much more factually complex than the classified documents or hush money cases. There are potentially hundreds of witnesses and theories of conspiracies that will take much to untangle. Had the indictment come any later, I believe a trial before November 2024 would have been impossible. With D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan—a President Barack Obama appointee who has treated previous Jan. 6 cases before her court with expedition and seriousness—apparently in charge of this case, there is still a chance to avoid a case of justice delayed being justice denied.

If Trump can run out the clock before conviction and be reelected, though, he can get rid of Jack Smith and appoint an attorney general who will do his bidding. He could even try to pardon himself from charges if elected in 2024 (a gambit that may or may not be legal). He could then sic his attorney general on political adversaries with prosecutions not grounded in any evidence, something he has repeatedly promised on the campaign trail.

Trump’s other legal strategy is to argue that prosecutors cannot prove the charges. For example, the government will have to prove that Trump not only intended to interfere with Congress’ fair counting of the electoral college votes in 2020 but also that Trump did so “corruptly.” Trump will put his state of mind at issue, arguing that despite all the evidence, he had an honest belief the election was being stolen from him.

He also will likely assert First Amendment defenses. As the indictment itself notes near the beginning, “the Defendant has a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.” But Trump did not just state the false claims; he allegedly used the false claims to engage in a conspiracy to steal the election. There is no First Amendment right to use speech to subvert an election, any more than there is a First Amendment right to use speech to bribe, threaten, or intimidate.

Putting Trump before a jury, if the case can get that far before the 2024 elections, is not certain to yield a conviction. It carries risks. But as I wrote last year in the New York Times, the risks to our system of government of not prosecuting Donald Trump are greater than the risks of prosecuting him.

It’s not hyperbole to say that the conduct of this prosecution will greatly influence whether the U.S. remains a thriving democracy after 2024.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 27, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 28, 2024

The news that NBC News reconsidered its invitation to former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel to become a paid contributor has buried the recent news about some of the other participants in Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

Yesterday a judge in Minnesota ruled in favor of a warehouse owner who sought to evict MyPillow after it failed to pay more than $200,000 in rent. MyPillow chief executive officer Mike Lindell has complained that his company has been “decimated” by his support for Trump. His insistence—without evidence—that the 2020 presidential election was stolen has entangled him in expensive defamation lawsuits filed by voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. 

Lindell cannot pay his lawyers and claims to have “lost hundreds of millions of dollars,” but insists he is being persecuted “because you want me to shut up about [the] security of our elections.”

Also yesterday, Trump loyalist Kari Lake, who has pushed the idea that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, ran for Arizona governor in 2022, and is now running for the U.S. Senate, admitted she defamed Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer and that she acted with actual malice when she claimed he “sabotaged” the 2022 election. The request to admit to defamation came on the day that discovery, the process of sharing information about a case with each side, was to begin, suggesting that she preferred to admit wrongdoing rather than let anyone see what might be in her emails, texts, and recordings.

Arizona journalist Howard Fischer reported in the Arizona Daily Star that in a video statement, Lake said her admission did not mean she agreed she did anything wrong, although that is expressly stipulated in the court papers. She said she conceded because Richer’s lawsuit was keeping her off the campaign trail. “It’s called lawfare: weaponizing the legal system to punish, impoverish and destroy political opponents,’’ Lake said. “We’ve all seen how they’re doing it to President Trump. And here in Arizona, they’re doing the exact same thing to me.’’

One of Lake’s senior advisors said: “Kari Lake maintains she has always been truthful.” 

Also yesterday, a three-member panel of the D.C. Bar’s Board of Professional Responsibility began a disciplinary hearing for former Department of Justice environmental lawyer Jeffrey Clark, who was so key to Trump’s plan to get state legislatures to overturn the results of the 2020 election that Trump tried to make him attorney general.  

Clark joins Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who led the media blitz to argue—falsely—that the election had been stolen. Giuliani’s New York and Washington, D.C., law licenses were suspended in June 2021 after a court found that he made “demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers, and the public at large.” He is now facing disbarment. 

Earlier this month, he said on his podcast that he expected to be disbarred because “[t]he Bar Association is going to crucify me no matter what. I will be disbarred in New York. I will be disbarred in Washington. It will have nothing to do with anything I did wrong.”

Today, after a long trial, attorney discipline judge Yvette Roland recommended that John Eastman, the lawyer who came up with the justification for using fake electors to overturn the 2020 presidential election, be disbarred. Eastman will immediately lose his license to practice law. The California Supreme Court will decide whether to disbar Eastman. 

Eastman’s lawyer said it was unfair to take Eastman’s law license because he needs to make money to fight the criminal charges against him in Georgia, where he has been indicted for his part in the effort to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election there. For his part, Eastman maintains he did nothing wrong.

In her recommendation, Judge Roland compared Eastman’s case to that of Donald Segretti, the lawyer whose efforts to guarantee President Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection included, as Roland’s recommendation noted, distributing letters that made false accusations against Nixon’s rivals (including a forged letter attributing a slur against French-Canadians to Maine senator and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Edmund Muskie). At the time, the court noted that Segretti was only 30, thought he was acting for Nixon, and did not act in his capacity as a lawyer. The court also emphasized that Segretti “recognized the wrongfulness of his acts, expressed regret, and cooperated with the investigating agencies.” 

In contrast, Roland wrote, “[t]he scale and egregiousness of Eastman’s unethical actions far surpasses” Segretti’s misconduct. Segretti acted outside his role as an attorney, while “Eastman’s wrongdoing was committed directly in the course and scope of his representation of President Trump and the Trump campaign.” Roland also noted that while Segretti expressed remorse and recognized his wrongdoing, Eastman has shown “an apparent inability to accept responsibility. This lack of remorse and accountability presents a significant risk that Eastman may engage in further unethical conduct, compounding the threat to the public.”  

One by one, those who worked with Trump to overturn the election are being held to account by our legal system. But still, they refuse to admit any wrongdoing. 

In that, they are following Trump.  

Despite Judge Juan Merchan’s gag order, Trump continued today to attack both Merchan and his daughter. On his social media site, Trump posted that Merchan was trying to deprive him of his “First Amendment right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement, including the fact that Crooked Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and their Hacks and Thugs are tracking and following me all across the Country, obsessively trying to persecute me, while everyone knows I have done nothing wrong!” Trump posted in great detail about the judge’s daughter, accusing her of making money by “working to ‘Get Trump,’” based on images shared by an old social media account of hers that had been hacked. 

It was President Nixon who perfected the refusal to admit wrongdoing in the face of overwhelming evidence. Even after tapes recorded in the Oval Office revealed that he had plotted with an aide to block investigations of the break-in at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel by invoking national security and Republican Party leaders told him he needed to resign, he refused to admit wrongdoing. Instead, he told the American people he was stepping down because he no longer had enough support in Congress to advance the national interest. He blamed his fall on the press, saying its “leaks and accusations and innuendo” were designed to destroy him.

Gerald R. Ford, the president who replaced Nixon, inadvertently put a rubber stamp on Nixon’s refusal to accept responsibility. Believing it was better for the country to move past the divisions of the Watergate era, Ford issued a preemptive pardon for any crimes the former president might have committed against the United States while in office. Ford maintained that the acceptance of a pardon was an admission of guilt. 

But Ford’s pardon meant Nixon never faced legal accountability for his actions. That escape allowed him to argue that a president is above the law. In a 1977 interview with British journalist David Frost, Nixon told Frost that “when the president does it…that means that it is not illegal,” by definition. 

As Nixon did, Trump has watched those who participated in his schemes pay dearly for their support, but he appears angry and confused at the idea that he himself could be held legally accountable for his behavior.

But without accountability, as Judge Roland noted, there is no incentive to stop dangerous behavior. Josh Dawsey reported last night in the Washington Post that since Trump has taken over the Republican National Committee and purged it of former employees, those interviewing for jobs are being asked if they believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Other questions, Dawsey reported, include “what applicants believe should be done on ‘election integrity’ in 2024.” 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[spiderlegsmusic]

Trump is a rapist and a racist. His supporters are a cult with its members always mad. Ever notice how mad they are all the time? They are mad because they tried to steal the 2020 election in two different ways and both failed: the fake electors scheme (which there have been new charges filed against trump’s people today) which was set up before the election but failed and is being prosecuted, and the riot at the capitol attempting to interrupt Biden’s electoral college count to ratify him as president which failed and is being prosecuted

You undoubtedly noticed that Trump and his cult project their next moves every time. They tried to steal the election so they blame Biden for stealing the election. Trump is a corrupt cunt who thinks of himself as and pretends he’s a mob boss, so he calls Biden corrupt. Trump says Biden is the one behind all of trump’s felony court cases, so he has threatened to detain Biden if Trump wins the election.

Trump must lose the election. He’s already watering the ground with claims this election will be stolen too. But Trump is a convicted felon now.

So in this, the aftermath of trump’s conviction, we see all the republicans pissed off and making threats. Every single one of the GQP is a corrupt baby having a temper tantrum. They don’t have a legitimate reason to be mad (like Trump is actually guilty), so they come up with conspiracy theories even more ridiculous than the ridiculous truth: that Trump fucked a porn star while his wife was having their baby, and he payed hush money to keep it from derailing his 2016 campaign.

[leutjaneausten]

Open in app or online

March 20, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 21

As rumors swirl about what may be an upcoming indictment against former president Donald Trump from Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, Republican Party leaders are in a bit of a pickle.

For years now, they have gone along with—and some have fed—Trump’s insistence that the government is stacked against him and therefore against the right wing. Some have gone along out of conviction, undoubtedly, but others almost certainly were trying to keep the base voters without whom the Republicans cannot win an election.

Now, as it appears that some of the legal cases in which Trump is embroiled might be coming to the point of indictments, they are in a difficult position. Trump is blowing up his social media website with increasingly unhinged accusations and demanding that his supporters “take our nation back.” His language echoes that of the weeks before the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, during which Trump supporters tried to overturn the results of a presidential election. And few Republican leaders actually want to launch a war against the Manhattan district attorney's office.

So far, at least, Trump’s demands for his supporters to rally around him again have produced anemic results, suggesting his power is waning. When senior reporter for HuffPost Christopher Mathias reported from outside the Manhattan DA’s office, he found that the media there far outnumbered the protesters. “So many reporters here I just saw a reporter start interviewing someone but they turned out to be a reporter too,” he tweeted.

As a number of people have pointed out, Trump rallied his supporters in late 2020 around the idea that a key election had been stolen. His supporters are likely to find the idea that he must be protected over financial crimes committed in New York, possibly related to a sexual encounter with an adult film actress, less compelling.

And then there is the issue that those who turned out to support him in January 2021 found themselves on the hook for crimes, all on their own, without his help. Just today, a jury found four more people affiliated with the Oath Keepers guilty of conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, conspiracy to prevent an official from doing their duty, destruction of government property, and civil disorder. The jury found two others guilty of entering and remaining on restricted grounds. Meanwhile, Trump spent the day “truthing” on social media.

So, if Trump’s influence is waning and he is perhaps facing indictments—remember, there are a number of investigations outstanding, and for all that Trump is talking about an indictment about his hush-money payment, we do not know what any of them will turn up—what direction should Republicans who signed on with Trump now jump?

Rachael Bade, Eugene Daniels, and Ryan Lizza of Politico reported this morning that House leadership has gathered for their annual three-day retreat at a luxury resort in Orlando, Florida. Led by House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), far-right representatives were preparing to demand that members of the Manhattan district attorney’s office testify about any such indictment.

Indeed, this afternoon, the chairs of three House committees—Jordan, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY), and House Administration Committee chair Bryan Steil (R-WI)—sent a letter to Bragg criticizing his investigation as an “unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority,” even though there has been no announcement of any charges.

The chairs claim they want to know if federal money was used in the investigation, but Representative Daniel Goldman (D-NY) noted: “Defending Trump is not a legitimate legislative purpose for Congress to investigate a state district attorney. Congress has no jurisdiction to investigate the Manhattan DA, which receives no federal funding nor has any other federal nexus.”

Representative Glenn Ivey (D-MD), a former state’s attorney for Prince George’s County, went further, saying that he was “stunned” that the House Republicans were trying to obstruct a criminal investigation and intimidate an elected state law enforcement official.

House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) says the chairs are just “asking questions.” He appears to be trying to prevent an attack on the legal system while also keeping his far-right extremists happy. He says that people should not protest if Trump is arrested, but also seems to be trying to keep his claim on Trump voters by claiming that Bragg’s investigation is politically motivated.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has his own problems with the whole situation. He wants Trump’s voters but does not want to be saddled with a scenario in which Trump tries to hole up at Mar-a-Lago to resist an indictment in New York. Today, DeSantis said he would not get involved in an extradition order, although Florida law allows him to intervene in a contested extradition.

His lack of support for the former president apparently outraged Trump, who promptly accused DeSantis of sexually assaulting a teenaged boy. The tension between the two Republican leaders has prompted speculation that Trump will fight extradition if only to force DeSantis to choose between alienating Trump’s supporters or kowtowing to the former president. Either would wound his presidential hopes, perhaps fatally.

Other Republicans are trying to deflect attention from the former president’s potentially criminal behavior and to focus instead on what they say is overreach by prosecutors. But when former vice president Mike Pence this weekend said he was “taken aback at the idea of indicting a former president of the United States,” former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele tweeted "Why the hell are you 'taken aback by the idea of indicting a former President' who has engaged in criminal behavior? Why continue to make excuses for Trump who would rather see you hanged & rancid behavior you decry in others?"

Other Republicans have apparently decided to stay out of this whole mess. It is notable that Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) voice is missing right now, as he recovers from his fall.

Meanwhile, the Fox News Corporation’s troubles over the defamation lawsuit against it by Dominion Voting Systems have just gotten worse. Fox News producer Abby Grossberg has sued the company in New York and Delaware, saying company lawyers tried to coerce her into giving misleading testimony in the lawsuit to set up her and FNC personality Maria Bartiromo to take the blame for the airing of Trump’s conspiracy theories against Dominion.

Regardless of how that lawsuit proceeds, Grossberg’s quite graphic account of the misogyny at the network will not help its profile right now.

And what is most astonishing about all of today’s sordid news is that, so far, nothing has happened. If and when it does, it’s going to be quite a ride.

What did happen today, though, is that the Biden administration issued the president’s economic report—which I will cover in more depth in the next few days—and that American aid worker Jeff Woodke, who was taken prisoner more than six years ago in Niger and held captive by a terrorist group, has been released. Secretary of State Blinken told reporters, “As you know, I have no higher priority or focus than bringing home any unjustly detained American, wherever that is in the world.” He thanked the government of Niger, Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens, and “all of those who have been working at the department” to get Woodke released.

—

Notes:

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2023/03/20/scoop-house-gop-targets-manhattan-da-00087811

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/20/business/media/fox-news-abby-grossberg.html

Twitter avatar for @letsgomathias

Christopher Mathias

@letsgomathias

So many reporters here I just saw a reporter start interviewing someone but they turned out to be a reporter too

10:10 PM ∙ Mar 20, 2023

1,508Likes236Retweets

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/20/politics/oath-keepers-proud-boys/index.html

Twitter avatar for @danielsgoldman

Daniel Goldman

@danielsgoldman

Defending Trump is not a legitimate legislative purpose for Congress to investigate a state district attorney.

Congress has no jurisdiction to investigate the Manhattan DA, which receives no federal funding nor has any other federal nexus.

Twitter avatar for @tribelaw

Laurence Tribe @tribelaw

House Republicans are gathered at a luxury resort near Disney World where House Judiciary Chair JIM JORDAN (R-Ohio) & senior GOP leaders are preparing to demand testimony from members of Manhattan DA’s Office amid reports of an imminent Trump indictment.

https://t.co/syVwH4H1Fm

1:49 PM ∙ Mar 20, 2023

11,030Likes3,286Retweets

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/20/politics/house-republicans-letter-manhattan-district-attorney/index.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/mccarthy-says-americans-not-protest-trump-indicted-rcna75679

Twitter avatar for @RepGlennIvey

Rep. Glenn Ivey

@RepGlennIvey

I was stunned to read this letter that could obstruct a criminal investigation and intimidate an elected state law enforcement official.

The Chairman of @JudiciaryGOP appears to be demanding that @ManhattanDA violate NY grand jury secrecy laws.

Twitter avatar for @Jim_Jordan

Rep. Jim Jordan @Jim_Jordan

Was the Manhattan DA’s office in communication with DOJ about their investigation of President Trump?

Was the Manhattan DA’s office using federal funds to investigate President Trump?

Alvin Bragg owes our committee answers. https://t.co/G6mL4Jfiiq

8:41 PM ∙ Mar 20, 2023

3,800Likes1,427Retweets

Trump’s accusations are on his Truth Social account. I’m not going to link them here.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/20/desantis-wont-involved-trump-indictment-extradition-00087851

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/20/politics/jeffery-woodke-freed-niger/index.html

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/03/20/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-the-release-of-american-jeff-woodke/

https://www.newsweek.com/former-republican-chair-blasts-trumps-defenders-indictment-looms-1788777

[findingjoynweirdstuff]

Fundy's Arc: A Collection of Transcriptions

The seeds of this character arc have been sown from the very beginning. This was a loooong time coming.

Here’s just a collection of moments and quotes from across Fundy’s character arc with Wilbur in L’manberg.

How did we get here? How did all of this familial conflict arise? 

Because it’s been there long before Schlatt even got into power.

---

The very start: 

- Fundy’s house gets pranked. He can no longer live there. Wilbur says that he’s technically the first naturally born citizen of L’manberg and claims Fundy as his son. He proclaims that, unlike his own father, he would be there for Fundy and give him the world. Neither of these promises were kept.

- After the first war ends, Wilbur makes Tommy vice president and Tubbo secretary of state. He doesn’t give Fundy any position. In fact, he doesn’t even include Fundy in the national anthem. Even Eret’s name was included over Fundy.

---

Wilbur, rejecting Eret’s kingship:

Wilbur: “I actually recognize, um, subscriber counts actually denote who’s in charge, um...”

Tommy: “That means you’ve got like a week until Fundy’s in charge of L’manburg.”

Wilbur: “Nah, Fundy’s too young...”

---

- Fundy’s rebellious stage really starts when he takes off the L’manburg uniform, long before any of the others did. Wilbur tries to get him to put it back on, but Fundy refuses.

Fundy: “Wilbur, it’s all right, I’m...I’m not a uniform.”

Wilbur: “Fundy why aren’t you in uniform?”

Fundy: “Um...I...forgot...”

Tubbo: “Put it on.”

Wilbur: “No, no, no, my son knows, Tubbo, don’t -- stand down, alright...right.”

Wilbur: “Fundy, it’s alright -- it’s okay that you forgot it, you know you’re a young man now, you’ve grown up a lot since -- you know you’re a teenager, you’re going through your rebellious phase, it’s absolutely fine that -- sometimes you wanna wear you’re own clothes! You know, but -- you know...daddy made a nice uniform and gave it to you, and...you know--”

Fundy: “Wait you made me a uniform?”

Wilbur: “It’s nothing, it’s really nothing, don’t worry --”

Fundy: “Waiiiiit, wait, what do you mean? What do you mean you made me a uniform?”

...

Wilbur: “It’s okay, we’ll talk about your uniform when you’re a bit older.”

---

- He gets into a war with Sapnap, almost starts a civil war with Tubbo, and Wilbur is absent for both of these. He’s just straight up not there. He didn’t even know about Fundy’s war with Sapnap since he had no idea Mushroom would make Niki upset, and Tommy brings up the fact that Wilbur’s been absent when he explains what had been happening between Tubbo and Fundy. Tommy had to step in because he was the only one left in charge.

---

Tommy: “Fundy, okay can I tell you what’s happened from my point of view? The son of the President has gone around scamming the other presidential members, and as Vice President while the President’s not on, it is my duty to make sure this doesn’t pull apart L’manburg.”

...

Tommy: “What would father think?”

Fundy: “...”

Fundy: “...Well he - always...sides...by me...”

Tommy: “Well you know, I mean, you’ve gone against the other members of the nation he fought to build--”

Fundy: “--Well! only because my - my loot has been stolen, alright --“

---

Tommy, to Wilbur:

Tommy: “been a little while since you’ve been on, Wilbur.”

Wilbur: “Yeah, well there’s a reason I haven’t been on...it sickens me.”

...

Tommy: “There was a - there was a civil war.”

Wilbur: “I heard, between Fundy and Tubbo --”

Tommy: “Yeah, your son and our secretary of state had a huge quarrel, and I defused it.”

Maybe this is just me reading into that last line and the tone it was said with a bit too much, but Tommy kind of had to emphasize the fact that Fundy was Wilbur’s son, as if Wilbur had almost forgotten it

---

- Pog2020 works to get Sapnap’s vote by publicly disavowing Fundy. He goes to make his own party in response and Coconut2020 isn’t even taken seriously. Wilbur didn’t even want to include it on the ballot. 

Sapnap: “Your father would be very disappointed.”

Fundy: “Why - disappointed for wearing glasses?! 

Sapnap: “Ugly, wearing glasses, what are you wearing --”

Fundy: “What do you mean?!”

Tommy: “Fundy, Fundy...I’m just here to publicly denounce you.”

Fundy: “...What?”

...

Tommy: “I’m just here to kinda let you know...if you weren’t Wilbur’s son, you would be out of L’manberg. Just remember, you need to keep that relationship with your father - I saw how arsehole-y and bratty you were acting in the courtroom the other night, you need to pull your shit together young man.”

...

Fundy: “Chat, lemme get this straight real quick...so Tommy is demoting me, right, and he’s saying you’re only in L’manberg because of Wil. So Tommy says...in theory, he would kick me out if he had the chance. But considering that, while he’s together with Sapnap, it leads me to believe... Tommy wants to destroy L’manberg.”

--- More under the break because this is a horrendously long post ---

Fundy gives a speech after preparing the Festival decorations:

Fundy: “Chat, I wanna point something out...

at the start of everything in L’manberg, when Jschlatt got on top of everyone, when Jschlatt got the leading position, and everyone was saying it was a bad thing [...] I just wanna point out...

What have Tommy and Wil ever done for this country? What have they ever done for this country? Really? They put up walls, they accepted a drug scandal, and what do we have? Not two weeks after Schlatt got elected, we have a festival. We have a festival! [...] They kept our country alive, but we’ve revamped it to something better [...] They’ve kept us alive for us to continue our generation 

 I see progress, alright?”

---

The big turning point happens when Fundy denounces Wilbur as part of his plan as a spy. That moment sealed the fate between the two, fracturing their relationship beyond repair.

---

Fundy: “Wilbur, imma need you to shut up for a second--”

Wilbur: “Don’t you speak like that to me, Fundy. Don’t forget where you came from!”

Schlatt: “What’s the relationship between you and...and Wilbur, Fundy?”

Fundy: “Wilbur’s just the founder, and I was born here, and nothing else. That’s literally all there is to it.”

Wilbur: “But...you know that’s not...”

---

When Fundy goes back to help Wilbur and Tommy with his Spy’s Diary, he’s still mocked and spoken over, called Wilbur’s “traitor son.” His effort as a mole wasn’t enough to fix their bond.

And when everyone finally takes back L’manburg, Wilbur gets to choose who’s the new president. There’s only one person other than Tommy that that could be. And as Fundy watches...Wilbur gives Tubbo the country instead. And then blows Fundy’s home to smithereens. 

And instead of living with the consequences, he tells Phil to kill him, so that he can become a little floating ghost who wanders around avoiding his problems.

---

When a creeper explodes a hole in the wall and Wil asks Phil about his button room, Phil asks Wil to VC. Wil, seeing that it was a serious talk, immediately avoids it and drops the conversation. This is exactly what Fundy calls out later on.

---

Fundy tells Wilbur straight to his face:

Fundy: “Wil, LISTEN!”

Wilbur: “I am - I am, I am, I just --”

Fundy: “You know what’s wrong? Do you even know? Does it even break through, like - Wil, listen, look at me. Wil, WIL...stop. Every single time something serious comes up, you evade it. You just avoid everything. You run away from every serious consequence that might become of your actions. You walk away from it! You just smile throughout everything. You think nothing is going on, you think everything is fine...it’s not! 

You were there for me, for a very very fucking long time...and when I needed you the most, you skedaddled the fuck out of my life and died. Because of what? L’manburg’s causes, huh? You thought that was justice, you thought that was good for me? You left me, man. You never take things seriously, you never do.”

Fundy: “Let me tell you something, Wil, let me tell you something. You know what happened, after all of your memories - all of your good memories of our quote unquote ‘last talk?’ Because it wasn’t our last talk, Wil - Wil--”

Wilbur: “If I didn’t remember it, it probably wasn’t worth remembering.”

Wilbur then feigns a meeting with Tubbo to get out of the conversation and leave, immediately proving Fundy’s point.

---

Wilbur doesn’t like to face the consequences of his actions. 

He started the election because he felt like no one respected his power. But instead of dealing with that lack of respect by gaining it legitimately, he just came up with a plan to rig an election. Instead of accepting that he lost the election, and that Schlatt was getting more done for L’manburg than he did in his time as president, Wilbur came up with a plan to bomb the festival and kill everyone. And when he finally exploded L’manburg, he perma-died and left everyone else to deal with Techno’s withers. 

Fundy is right about Wilbur. He walks away from uncomfortable situations. And Fundy is, to Wilbur, an uncomfortable situation.

---

(also everyone say thank you fundy and wilbur for bringing us this heartbreaker of a character arc rn because this is some damn good stuff)

[route22ny]

By Timothy Snyder

Published Jan. 9, 2021 - Updated Jan. 10, 2021, 10:12 a.m. ET

When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version.

Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent — that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. In 2020, in the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the polls, he spent months claiming that the presidential election would be rigged and signaling that he would not accept the results if they did not favor him. He wrongly claimed on Election Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his victory became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it ever more sophisticated and implausible.

People believed him, which is not at all surprising. It takes a tremendous amount of work to educate citizens to resist the powerful pull of believing what they already believe, or what others around them believe, or what would make sense of their own previous choices. Plato noted a particular risk for tyrants: that they would be surrounded in the end by yes-men and enablers. Aristotle worried that, in a democracy, a wealthy and talented demagogue could all too easily master the minds of the populace. Aware of these risks and others, the framers of the Constitution instituted a system of checks and balances. The point was not simply to ensure that no one branch of government dominated the others but also to anchor in institutions different points of view.

In this sense, the responsibility for Trump’s push to overturn an election must be shared by a very large number of Republican members of Congress. Rather than contradict Trump from the beginning, they allowed his electoral fiction to flourish. They had different reasons for doing so. One group of Republicans is concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters. They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government. The most important among them, Mitch McConnell, indulged Trump’s lie while making no comment on its consequences.

Yet other Republicans saw the situation differently: They might actually break the system and have power without democracy. The split between these two groups, the gamers and the breakers, became sharply visible on Dec. 30, when Senator Josh Hawley announced that he would support Trump’s challenge by questioning the validity of the electoral votes on Jan. 6. Ted Cruz then promised his own support, joined by about 10 other senators. More than a hundred Republican representatives took the same position. For many, this seemed like nothing more than a show: challenges to states’ electoral votes would force delays and floor votes but would not affect the outcome.

Yet for Congress to traduce its basic functions had a price. An elected institution that opposes elections is inviting its own overthrow. Members of Congress who sustained the president’s lie, despite the available and unambiguous evidence, betrayed their constitutional mission. Making his fictions the basis of congressional action gave them flesh. Now Trump could demand that senators and congressmen bow to his will. He could place personal responsibility upon Mike Pence, in charge of the formal proceedings, to pervert them. And on Jan. 6, he directed his followers to exert pressure on these elected representatives, which they proceeded to do: storming the Capitol building, searching for people to punish, ransacking the place.

Of course this did make a kind of sense: If the election really had been stolen, as senators and congressmen were themselves suggesting, then how could Congress be allowed to move forward? For some Republicans, the invasion of the Capitol must have been a shock, or even a lesson. For the breakers, however, it may have been a taste of the future. Afterward, eight senators and more than 100 representatives voted for the lie that had forced them to flee their chambers.

Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump — like the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia — is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true.

Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth. These last four years, scholars have discussed the legitimacy and value of invoking fascism in reference to Trumpian propaganda. One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it.

My own view is that greater knowledge of the past, fascist or otherwise, allows us to notice and conceptualize elements of the present that we might otherwise disregard and to think more broadly about future possibilities. It was clear to me in October that Trump’s behavior presaged a coup, and I said so in print; this is not because the present repeats the past, but because the past enlightens the present.

Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth. His use of the term “fake news” echoed the Nazi smear Lügenpresse (“lying press”); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as “enemies of the people.” Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when the conventional press had taken a beating; the financial crisis of 2008 did to American newspapers what the Great Depression did to German ones. The Nazis thought that they could use radio to replace the old pluralism of the newspaper; Trump tried to do the same with Twitter.

Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself.

Some of his lies were, admittedly, medium-size: that he was a successful businessman; that Russia did not support him in 2016; that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Such medium-size lies were the standard fare of aspiring authoritarians in the 21st century. In Poland the right-wing party built a martyrdom cult around assigning blame to political rivals for an airplane crash that killed the nation’s president. Hungary’s Viktor Orban blames a vanishingly small number of Muslim refugees for his country’s problems. But such claims were not quite big lies; they stretched but did not rend what Hannah Arendt called “the fabric of factuality.”

One historical big lie discussed by Arendt is Joseph Stalin’s explanation of starvation in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33. The state had collectivized agriculture, then applied a series of punitive measures to Ukraine that ensured millions would die. Yet the official line was that the starving were provocateurs, agents of Western powers who hated socialism so much they were killing themselves. A still grander fiction, in Arendt’s account, is Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the First World War. Intriguingly, Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.

In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.”

The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved. To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and of experts but also of local, state and federal government institutions, from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security and all the way to the Supreme Court. It brings with it, of necessity, a conspiracy theory: Imagine all the people who must have been in on such a plot and all the people who would have had to work on the cover-up.

Trump’s electoral fiction floats free of verifiable reality. It is defended not so much by facts as by claims that someone else has made some claims. The sensibility is that something must be wrong because I feel it to be wrong, and I know others feel the same way. When political leaders such as Ted Cruz or Jim Jordan spoke like this, what they meant was: You believe my lies, which compels me to repeat them. Social media provides an infinity of apparent evidence for any conviction, especially one seemingly held by a president.

On the surface, a conspiracy theory makes its victim look strong: It sees Trump as resisting the Democrats, the Republicans, the Deep State, the pedophiles, the Satanists. More profoundly, however, it inverts the position of the strong and the weak. Trump’s focus on alleged “irregularities” and “contested states” comes down to cities where Black people live and vote. At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people.

It’s not just that electoral fraud by African-Americans against Donald Trump never happened. It is that it is the very opposite of what happened, in 2020 and in every American election. As always, Black people waited longer than others to vote and were more likely to have their votes challenged. They were more likely to be suffering or dying from Covid-19, and less likely to be able to take time away from work. The historical protection of their right to vote has been removed by the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, and states have rushed to pass measures of a kind that historically reduce voting by the poor and communities of color.

The claim that Trump was denied a win by fraud is a big lie not just because it mauls logic, misdescribes the present and demands belief in a conspiracy. It is a big lie, fundamentally, because it reverses the moral field of American politics and the basic structure of American history.

When Senator Ted Cruz announced his intention to challenge the Electoral College vote, he invoked the Compromise of 1877, which resolved the presidential election of 1876. Commentators pointed out that this was no relevant precedent, since back then there really were serious voter irregularities and there really was a stalemate in Congress. For African-Americans, however, the seemingly gratuitous reference led somewhere else. The Compromise of 1877 — in which Rutherford B. Hayes would have the presidency, provided that he withdrew federal power from the South — was the very arrangement whereby African-Americans were driven from voting booths for the better part of a century. It was effectively the end of Reconstruction, the beginning of segregation, legal discrimination and Jim Crow. It is the original sin of American history in the post-slavery era, our closest brush with fascism so far.

If the reference seemed distant when Ted Cruz and 10 senatorial colleagues released their statement on Jan. 2, it was brought very close four days later, when Confederate flags were paraded through the Capitol.

Some things have changed since 1877, of course. Back then, it was the Republicans, or many of them, who supported racial equality; it was the Democrats, the party of the South, who wanted apartheid. It was the Democrats, back then, who called African-Americans’ votes fraudulent, and the Republicans who wanted them counted. This is now reversed. In the past half century, since the Civil Rights Act, Republicans have become a predominantly white party interested — as Trump openly declared — in keeping the number of voters, and particularly the number of Black voters, as low as possible. Yet the common thread remains. Watching white supremacists among the people storming the Capitol, it was easy to yield to the feeling that something pure had been violated. It might be better to see the episode as part of a long American argument about who deserves representation.

The Democrats, today, have become a coalition, one that does better than Republicans with female and nonwhite voters and collects votes from both labor unions and the college-educated. Yet it’s not quite right to contrast this coalition with a monolithic Republican Party. Right now, the Republican Party is a coalition of two types of people: those who would game the system (most of the politicians, some of the voters) and those who dream of breaking it (a few of the politicians, many of the voters). In January 2021, this was visible as the difference between those Republicans who defended the present system on the grounds that it favored them and those who tried to upend it.

In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller but simply diverted to serve a handful of interests.

At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in politics and his open racism made him a very uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the rich.

Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what his admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He arrived at a truly big lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that he might lose something.

Yet Trump never prepared a decisive blow. He lacked the support of the military, some of whose leaders he had alienated. (No true fascist would have made the mistake he did there, which was to openly love foreign dictators; supporters convinced that the enemy was at home might not mind, but those sworn to protect from enemies abroad did.) Trump’s secret police force, the men carrying out snatch operations in Portland, was violent but also small and ludicrous. Social media proved to be a blunt weapon: Trump could announce his intentions on Twitter, and white supremacists could plan their invasion of the Capitol on Facebook or Gab. But the president, for all his lawsuits and entreaties and threats to public officials, could not engineer a situation that ended with the right people doing the wrong thing. Trump could make some voters believe that he had won the 2020 election, but he was unable to bring institutions along with his big lie. And he could bring his supporters to Washington and send them on a rampage in the Capitol, but none appeared to have any very clear idea of how this was to work or what their presence would accomplish. It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around.

The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?

On Jan. 7, Trump called for a peaceful transition of power, implicitly conceding that his putsch had failed. Even then, though, he repeated and even amplified his electoral fiction: It was now a sacred cause for which people had sacrificed. Trump’s imagined stab in the back will live on chiefly thanks to its endorsement by members of Congress. In November and December 2020, Republicans repeated it, giving it a life it would not otherwise have had. In retrospect, it now seems as though the last shaky compromise between the gamers and the breakers was the idea that Trump should have every chance to prove that wrong had been done to him. That position implicitly endorsed the big lie for Trump supporters who were inclined to believe it. It failed to restrain Trump, whose big lie only grew bigger.

The breakers and the gamers then saw a different world ahead, where the big lie was either a treasure to be had or a danger to be avoided. The breakers had no choice but to rush to be first to claim to believe in it. Because the breakers Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz must compete to claim the brimstone and bile, the gamers were forced to reveal their own hand, and the division within the Republican coalition became visible on Jan. 6. The invasion of the Capitol only reinforced this division. To be sure, a few senators withdrew their objections, but Cruz and Hawley moved forward anyway, along with six other senators. More than 100 representatives doubled down on the big lie. Some, like Matt Gaetz, even added their own flourishes, such as the claim that the mob was led not by Trump’s supporters but by his opponents.

Trump is, for now, the martyr in chief, the high priest of the big lie. He is the leader of the breakers, at least in the minds of his supporters. By now, the gamers do not want Trump around. Discredited in his last weeks, he is useless; shorn of the obligations of the presidency, he will become embarrassing again, much as he was in 2015. Unable to provide cover for their gamesmanship, he will be irrelevant to their daily purposes. But the breakers have an even stronger reason to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is still around. Seizing Trump’s big lie might appear to be a gesture of support. In fact it expresses a wish for his political death. Transforming the myth from one about Trump to one about the nation will be easier when he is out of the way.

As Cruz and Hawley may learn, to tell the big lie is to be owned by it. Just because you have sold your soul does not mean that you have driven a hard bargain. Hawley shies from no level of hypocrisy; the son of a banker, educated at Stanford University and Yale Law School, he denounces elites. Insofar as Cruz was thought to have a principle, it was that of states’ rights, which Trump’s calls to action brazenly violated. A joint statement Cruz issued about the senators’ challenge to the vote nicely captured the post-truth aspect of the whole: It never alleged that there was fraud, only that there were allegations of fraud. Allegations of allegations, allegations all the way down.

The big lie requires commitment. When Republican gamers do not exhibit enough of that, Republican breakers call them “RINOs”: Republicans in name only. This term once suggested a lack of ideological commitment. It now means an unwillingness to throw away an election. The gamers, in response, close ranks around the Constitution and speak of principles and traditions. The breakers must all know (with the possible exception of the Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville) that they are participating in a sham, but they will have an audience of tens of millions who do not.

If Trump remains present in American political life, he will surely repeat his big lie incessantly. Hawley and Cruz and the other breakers share responsibility for where this leads. Cruz and Hawley seem to be running for president. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for office and denounce voting? If you claim that the other side has cheated, and your supporters believe you, they will expect you to cheat yourself. By defending Trump’s big lie on Jan. 6, they set a precedent: A Republican presidential candidate who loses an election should be appointed anyway by Congress. Republicans in the future, at least breaker candidates for president, will presumably have a Plan A, to win and win, and a Plan B, to lose and win. No fraud is necessary; only allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by spectacle, facts by faith.

Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished.

Informed observers inside and outside government agree that right-wing white supremacism is the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. Gun sales in 2020 hit an astonishing high. History shows that political violence follows when prominent leaders of major political parties openly embrace paranoia.

Our big lie is typically American, wrapped in our odd electoral system, depending upon our particular traditions of racism. Yet our big lie is also structurally fascist, with its extreme mendacity, its conspiratorial thinking, its reversal of perpetrators and victims and its implication that the world is divided into us and them. To keep it going for four years courts terrorism and assassination.

When that violence comes, the breakers will have to react. If they embrace it, they become the fascist faction. The Republican Party will be divided, at least for a time. One can of course imagine a dismal reunification: A breaker candidate loses a narrow presidential election in November 2024 and cries fraud, the Republicans win both houses of Congress and rioters in the street, educated by four years of the big lie, demand what they see as justice. Would the gamers stand on principle if those were the circumstances of Jan. 6, 2025?

To be sure, this moment is also a chance. It is possible that a divided Republican Party might better serve American democracy; that the gamers, separated from the breakers, might start to think of policy as a way to win elections. It is very likely that the Biden-Harris administration will have an easier first few months than expected; perhaps obstructionism will give way, at least among a few Republicans and for a short time, to a moment of self-questioning. Politicians who want Trumpism to end have a simple way forward: Tell the truth about the election.

America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to facts as a public good. The racism structured into every aspect of the coup attempt is a call to heed our own history. Serious attention to the past helps us to see risks but also suggests future possibility. We cannot be a democratic republic if we tell lies about race, big or small. Democracy is not about minimizing the vote nor ignoring it, neither a matter of gaming nor of breaking a system, but of accepting the equality of others, heeding their voices and counting their votes.

Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University and the author of histories of political atrocity including “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth,” as well as the book “On Tyranny,” on America’s turn toward authoritarianism. His most recent book is “Our Malady,” a memoir of his own near-fatal illness reflecting on the relationship between health and freedom.

***

Essay copied & pasted here in its entirety for the benefit of those stuck behind the paywall. Follow the link for the accompanying photos and captions.

[alindakb]

Too Late - by Alinda

There are chains around his ankles and wrists. They keep him locked in the chair he was forced to sit in. He knows this chair. He sat in it once before. Years ago. When Dumbledore was still alive and there to save him. Back when the world still made some kind of sense. Before it had turned against him and took everything he ever cared about.

Ron had been there when they arrested him. He had looked at Harry as if he was a stranger. And maybe he is that now. A stranger. A killer and murderer. He’s no longer the boy Ron became friends with. He hasn’t been that boy for years. Just like he hasn’t been Ron’s friend since he made his choice and ran with the only one that mattered.

Hermione is somewhere in this room. He’s seen the paper when she was elected into the Wizengamot. Harry was proud of her. Still is. But that doesn’t matter now. She will not give him any favours. She will hear his testimony and know she won’t be able to claim he’s innocent. Because he isn’t.

Not that it matters anymore. None of it does. Not since the moment they took him. Not when Harry found out he was too late.

Harry doesn’t look up when Shacklebolt stands up and starts to talk. Another person Harry let down by running. By becoming an accomplish to a wanted criminal. Always on the run. Always looking over his shoulder. Until they made a choice and found a way to live their lives in peace.

At least they didn’t take his ring. His only reminder of the life he had before. Of the time he was truly happy.

“Harry James Potter, you are brought before the Wizengamot to be trailed for the crimes you committed. I understand that you have waived the right to have an attorney present. Is that correct?” Shacklebolt says.

Harry nods his head.

Shacklebolt scrapes his throat. “Please speak up for the court,” he says.

Harry closes his eyes. He can see the smile he woke up to for the last fifteen years. The smile that was stolen from him not that long ago. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. Then he opens his eyes and looks at Shacklebolt. “I don’t need an attorney,” he says.

“Harry, don’t be stupid,” a familiar voice says. Harry looks to Shacklebolt’s left and sees Hermione sitting there. She looks older. More mature. Life has done her good. Harry wonders if she and Ron have stayed together. He can’t remember if the article about her appointment into the Wizengamot that he’d read years ago said anything about her private life.

“It’s okay, Hermione,” Harry says. He’s ready to take whatever punishment they want to give him. It’s not like he has anything left to live for.

Shacklebolt continues as if Hermione hadn’t interrupted them. He looks at the parchment in front of him. The man is hard to read. Is he disappointed in Harry? The man he once thought would take over the Auror department. Maybe even become the next Minister of Magic. Now a criminal, on trial for the murder of some former Death Eater children.

“We’ve received your request to plea separately for the crimes you are on trial for, is that correct?” Shacklebolt asks.

“Yes,” Harry says.

“Mrs Granger, would you please list the crimes one by one,” Shacklebolt continues.

Hermione stands up. Her hands shake a little. “Harry James Potter, you are charged for abating Draco Lucius Malfoy’s escape from prison. How do you plea?”

“Guilty,” Harry says. It’s no secret that he was the one that escorted Draco out of the Ministry and fled the country with him. Not that Draco was guilty of the crimes they convicted him for. But nobody believed Harry back then. Said he was just upset and confused. Nobody cared that Voldemort would have won if it hadn’t been for Draco.

Hermione swallows before she continues. Harry wants to tell her that it’s okay, that it doesn’t matter. She can continue without feeling guilty for not believing him. It’s his fault for never being honest with them about all this in the first place.

“Harry James Potter, you are charged for murdering Pansy Parkinson. How do you plea?” Hermione says.

Again the word guilty rolls of Harry’s tongue. She deserved it. Draco trusted her. Was happy when she reached out to him. But she betrayed him.

The next two charges also follow a guilty plea from Harry. He found Theodore Nott and Gregory Goyle in the room with him. Their wands pointed at the love of Harry’s life. His husband. Who lay broken on the floor. The rage Harry had felt in that moment had burst out of him. He didn’t have a wand anymore. Hadn’t used one in years. But he didn’t need it. The spells just left his fingers. They screamed and begged until Harry had heard enough and green lights had filled the room.

But this will be all he will plead guilty for.

“Harry James Potter, you are charged for torturing and murdering Draco Lucius Malfoy,” Hermione says. Harry closes his eyes. He fights the tears that threaten to escape him. His voice seems lost as he opens his mouth to respond. He scrapes his throat and tries again.

“Not guilty,” he whispers.

“Please speak up,” Shacklebolt says.

Harry looks at them. His eyes lock with Hermione. They are moist as if she knows. And she probably does. She always knew what it was that Harry wasn’t saying. But it’s too late now.

“Not guilty,” he says again.

There is some commotion around them. Had they all hoped that Harry would just plead guilty to everything and be done with it? Now they have to prove that Harry killed his husband. The man he gave up everything for. And it will stretch this out. But even though Harry wants it all to be over, he couldn’t. He would not betray his love. He will not plea guilty and betray Draco. He will have justice for him before Harry can give up.

Pictures are shown of the murdered victims. Parkinson bled to death after the Sectumsempra hit her. Harry didn’t stay and watch. He had rushed down to the basement where he had found him. Draco his eyes had been open, but they didn’t see anything anymore. His clothes were torn and his bones broken. Harry had been too late. Compared to him, Goyle and Nott got off easy. They didn’t have to suffer to days of torture until their bodies gave out. They only had to endure a short time under the Cruciatus curse before Harry couldn’t stand the sound of their screams any longer.

Ron is questioned at some point. Harry is scared to look at him. He was the first Auror on the scene. The one that arrested Harry.

“Mr Potter was found holding Mr Malfoy’s body. He cradled him, as you cradle someone you love,” Ron says. “He was crying when I arrested him. The only hesitation he had was when he had to let go of Mr Malfoy’s body. Other than that, he came willingly.”

Later they examine the wands of Parkinson, Nott and Goyle. The last spells they fired are all dark and unforgivable. The pain they put Draco through was even worse than Harry had imagined. If only he had found them sooner. Not that they would have survived it. But at least Draco wouldn’t have had to suffer as he did. Tears fall now. Harry can’t stop them. He closes his eyes and tries to think of the good times. Of the day they bought fake Muggle IDs so they could get married. The moment they apparated back to their home after the I do’s. The perfect eggs Draco used to make for breakfast. The walks through the forest around their home. The days spend in the garden, growing herbs and vegetables. The nights spent in front of the fire, Draco reading a book out loud so Harry could listen to his voice. A voice he will never hear again.

A healer goes over the wounds on all the victims. Harry tries not to listen to the words spoken. He can’t stand to hear in even more detail how Draco had suffered in his final days.

“I would like to add that Mr Malfoy wore one piece of jewellery when we examen him. A golden ring with a date engraved on the inside, together with the Harry,” the healer says.

Harry looks at the ring on his own finger. The same golden ring they found on Draco. Only here the name Draco is engraved next to their wedding date.

“Would you say that this was a wedding ring?” Shacklebolt asks.

“It appeared so,” the healer answers. “Only the Aurors couldn’t find any registered marriage for Mr Malfoy.”

The lead investigator is brought in. They only searched the magical records. Shacklebolt orders them to look to the Muggle records. And when they come back they hold a piece of paper stating that Harry James Potter married Draco Lucius Malfoy twelve years, four months and six days ago. Three years after they ran from the magical world when they didn’t believe that Draco wasn’t a Death Eater. On the day they had been together for exactly six years. Eighteen years ago, when Harry hadn’t though and just reached out and kissed Draco. And all it had taken was Draco saying he didn’t believe that the Dark Lord was the great saviour everyone thought he was.

They had been together for eighteen years, two months and four days when Draco disappeared.

It had been eighteen years, two months and twenty-seven days when Harry found him.

Harry had only been minutes too late.

Minutes he can never get back. He can never catch up to them and save Draco.

“Mr Potter, is this true? Was Mr Malfoy your husband?” Shacklebolt asks.

“He was,” Harry answers.

More commotion follows. The Wizengamot gets adjourned. Harry is transported back to his cell. Time passes while he stares at the walls around him. Draco always said the cells were a horrible place. Cold and clamp. Harry never thought about it after he’d helped Draco escape. Now the words of those conversations flood his mind.

“You shouldn’t have rescued me,” Draco shouted on that first day. “You’re throwing away your life. And what for? A school crush?”

Harry had grabbed him and pulled him close. “For the injustice done to the man I love,” he’d said before they had kissed.

Draco would complain from time to time. And then Harry would remind him of all the things Draco had risked when he agreed to become a double agent. How he’d betrayed his own family for the person he loves. How he’d helped Harry find the Horcruxes and saved his life over and over again, until the final battle. How Harry had come back for him. How he’d fought to let others know that Draco was one of the good guys.

But everyone who had known was dead. Sirius had passed soon after the agreement was made. Dumbledore fell. So did Snape and Tonks. There was nobody but Harry who knew of Draco’s mission for the order. The only one still alive that had seen Draco struggle with the fact that he had to take the Dark Mark. The mark that stood for everything he was against. The mark that clouded the Wizengamot’s judgement and just claimed his guilty without a proper trial.

The next day, the Wizengamot questions Harry. Why didn’t he contact the Auror department when his husband went missing? Why did he even marry a Death Eater? Harry tells them he wasn’t. He shows them his memories when they ask for proof. It’s the only proof he has. The meetings in Dumbledore’s office with Sirius and Tonks. The talks about what it would mean for their relationship. The sneaking around, the meetups after Harry had to go on the run, the information Draco provided, the way he got Harry out of the Manor when they got captured.

“I was too late,” Harry says in the end. “I found him too late.”

He looks at Hermione. Tears are on her cheeks, a hand on her mouth. She finally understands how Harry had always known where to go next that final year. Why he never minded having the graveyard shift on watch. It was the moments he would meet up with Draco.

Nobody will ever know why they took Draco after all these years. Did they blame him for the destruction of Voldemort? Was this their way of revenging their parents? Harry doesn’t care. He only knows that they took the love of his life from him and that they broke his heart beyond repair.

The verdict, in the end, is expected. Shacklebolt says he understands, but they can’t condone murder, not even when it’s to revenge a loved one. Life in prison is the best he can do. Harry is taken to Azkaban. He stares at the ceiling of his cell until his broken hearts gives out and he can fly to the place where he will be reunited with his Draco.

[phroyd]

Joe Biden is going to be the next president of the United States. He will be inaugurated on January 20 and take power at noon that day. There is nothing, legally, that Trump can do to stop that.

What Trump and his feckless Republican Party might do illegally to try to overturn the results of the election and prevent Biden from taking power is a different matter. Trump has evidently intimidated the administrator of the General Services Administration into refusing to acknowledge Biden’s victory and thus prevent his team from starting the transition process. Only a smattering of Republicans have acknowledged that Biden won, and most of those who have, like George W. Bush, no longer hold any political power. Trump has already filed a raft of baseless lawsuits. His people are drumming up talk of some kind of Electoral College devilry to overthrow the popular will. And Trump fired the secretary of defense, Mike Esper, yesterday, which seems like the kind of thing one does before launching a coup d’état.

Years of watching Democrats snatch defeat from the jaws of victory gives many the sinking feeling that “it’s happening, again.” But rational thought tells us that these Trump gambits, all of them, are pointless. Biden won and his ascension to power is now inevitable, whether Trump accedes to that reality or not. As a wise man once sang: Gravity always wins.

Still, we’ve all seen Trump wriggle out of approximately a billion other defeats and scandals. He’s exposed the weakness of our democratic institutions, revealing just how useless they are in the face of his norm-breaking assaults. So it feels somehow naive to believe that his loss at the ballot box will translate into his loss of an actual job. It feels smart to consider that he might have a secret plan to retain that job, despite being voted out of it. Trump is the Michael Myers of our politics: He can’t be defeated, because the horror movie franchise makes too much money to ever end.

And yet, despite all this, I have gone to bed every night since Friday confident that President-elect Biden will become President Biden. I’ve come to this peace over the objection of my amygdala, which is the part of the brain that screams in fear and anxiety and tries to overpower rational thought. Here’s what I tell myself in order to help me sleep at night. Perhaps these are conversations others can have to achieve my level of forced serenity. (Amygdala in bold italics.)

Who won the election?

Joe Biden.

Who won the election if we only count legal votes?

Only legal votes are being counted. Joe Biden won those.

What about the possibility of a recount in swing states like Michigan or Pennsylvania?

Recounts traditionally do not change more than a thousand votes. Even if we’ve gone completely through the looking glass and this recount changes an unprecedented number of votes, like 5,000, which is completely unheard of, Biden’s margin of victory is too great to overcome. A recount would not change the result in states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin. If Trump wants to lose twice, that’s up to him.

What about all the lawsuits, especially the ones they keep filing in Arizona and Pennsylvania?

Trump’s election lawsuits fall, broadly, into three categories: lawsuits alleging poll watchers were too far away, lawsuits complaining about the established rules for submitting mail-in ballots, and lawsuits alleging Trump voters were denied their vote because of some kind of ballot machine malfunction.

None of these lawsuits provide evidence of massive voter fraud. None of the lawsuits provide evidence of voter fraud at all. Some of the lawsuits allege some accidents, but the remedy for those accidents is counting more votes, not fewer. Trump’s claims that his poll watchers were not allowed to watch the counting of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania is flatly untrue, and his lawyers have had to admit in court that they were allowed in the room. They’ve been reduced to arguing that their poll watchers were not close enough, which, whatever. The remedy for that is to move them closer, not throw out tens of thousands of votes.

In fact, none of the Trump lawsuits allege anything that can be used to throw out tens of thousands of votes. Throwing out votes that have already been counted is not something that courts do. We can recount votes, this time with Trump watchers breathing down the necks of ballot counters and giving them Covid-19, but again, recounts don’t usually change the balance of votes by all that much.

The important thing to ask with each new Trump lawsuit is this: What is the remedy? If the remedy is “throw away tens of thousands of votes from people whose votes were clear in their choice and timely in their submission,” then that lawsuit is going nowhere. And if the remedy is not throwing out those entirely timely and legal votes, then the lawsuit will not change the results of the election.

Why would the Trump people be pushing these lawsuits if there was no chance for them to change the outcome?

Because Trump people are dumb? Hanlon’s Razor tells us: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Joking aside, there might be many malicious reasons for the Trump campaign to be pushing lawsuits they know are destined to fail. Stirring up doubt in Biden’s victory is a prelude to refusing to acknowledge his authority as president. Trump, or one of his kids, or somebody “Trump-approved” is surely going to run for president in 2024, and making Trump’s rabid, white-supremacist base feel like the election was “stolen” from them has a political upside as they fight for their new “Lost Cause.”

And, there’s also the grift. Trump’s campaign is broke. They’ve literally written checks they can’t cash. Trump doesn’t like spending his own money on these things (to the extent he actually has any). These lawsuits purportedly challenging the election are a huge money-making opportunity for the Trump campaign. If you read the fine print on the new fundraising e-mails Trump’s campaign is sending out to supporters, they say that “60 percent of contributions” will go toward retiring campaign debt.

Would the Trump campaign put America through 70 days of trauma to make a buck? You better believe it. The whole Trump presidency is a guerrilla marketing campaign for the Trump brand that went too far.

But the Republican Senate is going along. This is just like impeachment. Republicans wouldn’t remove Trump then and they won’t now.

Well, it’s not up to Republicans to remove Trump from office. The Constitution does all that work on January 20. Joe Biden is the president on that day whether Republicans acknowledge it or not.

But now Bill Barr has gotten in on the game, and he is the worst of Trump’s henchman.

Yes.

He’s given federal prosecutors the green light to open up investigations into possible voter fraud.

So?

SO?

There wasn’t election fraud. Trump’s legal team has no evidence of election fraud and has no money to investigate to find such evidence, so they’re using the taxpayers’ money to look for it. But Barr’s prosecutors won’t find anything because there’s nothing there. This is going to turn out the same way it did when Barr investigated but didn’t arrest Hunter or Joe Biden.

The head of the Election Crimes Branch, Richard Pilger, resigned. That should tell us how wrong this is. But Barr is not going to succeeded. It’s just another thing to remember in 70 days when Barr is out of a job. We should arrest him and charge him with abuse of power.

What if Trump refuses to leave the White House?

Biden can be president from Delaware until the White House runs out of cheeseburgers. He’ll come out of hiding eventually.

But what if Republicans never acknowledged that Biden is the president?

How’s that different from the way they treated Barack Obama?

Good point, but what about a re-vote? I’ve seen MAGA people online calling for a re-vote.

Re-voting is not a thing. There is no statutory or constitutional language that can compel a nationwide re-vote. States will certify the results of their elections in the coming weeks. And then the Electoral College will meet on December 14 in a pro-forma session to…

WHAT ABOUT THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE?

Damn it.

Can Republican state legislatures put forward a slate of electors who will vote for Trump even though Biden won those states?

Let’s be very clear: The states get to choose how they will determine their own electors, but that determination has to be made before the election. A state with a Republican legislature—let’s say, Pennsylvania—could have decided to choose electors based on a simple vote of the legislature. In fact, Republican legislators contemplated doing such a thing. But they didn’t. Instead they decided, like every other state, to let the popular will in their state determine the slate of electors.

They can’t change the method of picking electors after the election has taken place. Remember, when voters showed up to vote, they technically weren’t voting for “Joe Biden” or “Donald Trump” but for a slate of electors who would vote for Biden or Trump. If Pennsylvania wanted to change those rules, it would have had to tell its voters before they voted. It can’t run a bait-and-switch on an election. It can’t say that a vote for Biden’s electors was actually a vote for the Pennsylvania legislature to choose the electors. This is an election, not a Groupon.

The only legal recourse, which some Republicans are arguing for, is to determine that the voters “failed to make a choice” on which slate of electors to nominate, or that the results of that choice are somehow unclear. But the results will be clear once Pennsylvania certifies its election results (and, in this case, the governor and secretary of state, who certifies the results, are Democrats). It will be a close election, but voters made a choice and that choice will be clear upon certification.

States have until December 8 to certify the results of their elections.

But what if Pennsylvania’s Republican legislators insist that the results weren’t clear? Would the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority allow the state’s Republican legislature to choose a Republican slate of electors, even though it’s unconstitutional?

Maybe? Conservatives on the Supreme Court act in bad faith all the time. But consider that Biden has likely won this election with 306 electoral votes. For this gambit to work, legislatures in Pennsylvania and at least two of the other states Biden won would have to submit a slate of Trump electors. The Supreme Court would have to OK this upending of the popular will three times in total. That’s incredibly unlikely and would spark almost immediate civil unrest directed right at the Supreme Court, which has no army to enforce its rulings.

Well, what’s our plan for that?

My dude, I don’t have a plan for “nothing matters anymore.” The end of democratic self-government is not a thing one has a legal plan for. That’s like asking what my plan is for closing a demonic hell mouth that opens in my backyard. Die. My plan would be to die. I’m not Keanu Reeves.

What if Trump fires FBI Director Chris Wray and CIA Director Gina Haspel and gets the “deep state” to keep him in power indefinitely?

I’m not Kiefer Sutherland either. I cannot find the mole.

What if Trump launches a full-scale coup d’état and uses the military to keep him in power?

Then we’re at war. Honestly, what do you want from me? Yes, there is a non-zero chance that Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the election leads to a civil war and, in such a conflict, Abigail Spanberger forms a Vichy government to “compromise” with Trump supporters, and I have to pilot a jet carrying Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez off of Naboo in hopes of finding friendly Jedis willing to fight for our cause.

But there is no legitimate way for Trump to stay in power now. There’s no peaceful way for Trump to stay in power. Either he’s gone on January 20 or he remains atop a military junta willing to use violence to enforce his will.

This makes you feel better?

I find it comforting that a full-scale military takeover is now the only way for Trump to stay in power. Because if there’s one thing I know about Trump, it’s that he is a coward. President Bone Spurs is not the guy to cross the Rubicon.

I look at it this way: Captain von Trapp hiked his enormous family over the Alps to get away; all I have to do is drive my people to the Thousand Islands Bridge while we all sing “Edelweiss.” Thinking much beyond that is pointless.

Well, you could get your lazy ass on the elliptical trainer in case you’re needed to fight.

Don’t start this with me again. Goodbye.

Phroyd

[beauty-grace-outer-space]

Alright, kids. You know what to do. 

Here’s the link with information on how to contact all the US Senators, and below is a letter I drafted this morning. Feel free to use it or to write your own insisting that they not only impeach, but convict. We need 15 Republican Senators to vote to convict to prevent Trump from ever running for President again. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Senator, 

I am writing in regards to the impeachment proceedings set forth by Congress regarding Donald Trump’s incitement to insurrection at the Capitol on Wednesday, January 6, 2021. 

The entire nation watched in horror as the mob of terrorists, spurred forward by the charge of Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, Rep. Mo Brooks, and most notably the president himself to “fight like hell” and “take back [the] country, including the clear instruction to march on the Capitol and aggressively intimidate Members of Congress to bow before his will to overturn the election in the eleventh hour.

For weeks, if not months, experts have warned against Trump’s behavior and rhetoric, and what happened at the Capitol was the realization of many of our worst fears: a coup attempt by a petulant hatemonger desperate for the spotlight and consequences be damned. Sadly these warnings were mocked or dismissed outright, despite best efforts, and in spite of rising cause for alarm as Trump continued insisting wrongfully that he had in some way won the election, that the “left” had “stolen” it, and that his base of followers must be ready to “stop the steal” and “take back [their] country”. 

We watched appalled as he wrongfully insisted on election night that he had won. We watched in the weeks following as he continued to insist on widespread fraud (of which there has been no substantiated evidence) and accuse democrats of shady and nefarious dealings, even as he himself called election officials and state representatives and tried to convince them to “find” the votes he needed. 

Trump’s attempts at undermining our democracy have steadily increased over the past several years, and it has culminated now in this terrorist attack on the Capitol itself. As you know, senator, members of the mob that laid siege to Congress came prepared to inflict far worse damage than what they were able to achieve, armed with weapons, chemicals, flex cuffs-- indicative of their intent to take hostages--, and even erecting a gallows as they chanted “hang Mike Pence”, an action surely instigated by the president’s repeated claims that the Vice President “hadn’t come through” for him and didn’t “have the courage” to do as Trump demanded just hours before. 

Thankfully, they were unable to access or harm any members of Congress, even with a Member of Congress, Rep. Boebert -- a known member of the far-right conspiracy theorist group QAnon-- tweeted out the Speaker of the House’s location two minutes after the Capitol was breached. 

As you know, at least one police officer lost his life at the hand of these terrorists, and several members of the mob were killed during their participation.  

As the timeline of events becomes more clear, so too does the president’s culpability. His endless rhetoric of lies about the outcome of the election, his calls for the Proud Boys-- a known hate group-- to “stand back and stand by”, his speech on the day of the riot, and even his actions during and afterward (refusing to call in the National Guard, telling the terrorists that he “loves them” and they’re “very special”, etc.) have made it clear that not only is he unfit for the office of President of the United States, but that he actively incited insurrection against those very United States. 

As such, senator, we the people find that you must vote to convict him and prevent him from ever running for said office again. The world is watching; those who stand aside with calls for “unity” instead of consequences for this sedition will be remembered as equally culpable in these events. As a famous man once said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” 

I call upon you to remember your oath to the United States, and to do what is right. 

Convict, and prevent this traitor from ever holding office again. 

Thank you,  

A concerned citizen.

[reading-writing-revolution]

Heather Cox Richardson:

November 28, 2020 (Saturday)

It seems as if Trump and President-Elect Joe Biden are in a contest to see who can will their vision of the future into life.

Trump continues to maintain that he won the 2020 election. Wedded to this alternative reality, his supporters are circulating articles wondering how Biden--who was ahead by significant numbers in all pre-election polls-- could possibly have won the election… against a president who, for the first time since modern polling began, never cracked a 50% approval rating.

In their fury, they are turning against election officials, including committed right-wing Republicans like Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whom Trump has called “an enemy of the people” for defending the actual results of the election and refusing to make up reasons to throw out Democratic ballots. Raffensperger and his wife have been getting death threats, while Republican leaders refuse to stand up for him.

Many of Trump’s supporters believe him when he downplays coronavirus, which just passed the landmark of causing at least 200,000 cases in a single day. Today NBC reporter Dasha Burns echoed the words of South Dakota nurse Jodi Doering two weeks ago, saying that three days in Appalachian hospitals had revealed a world in which “hard-hit communities still don’t believe COVID is real. Misinformation is rampant.” Burns told of patients who, according to nurses, “don’t believe they have COVID until they’re in critical condition.”

Burns goes on to say: “Ultimately, politicization and misinformation around COVID are having tragic real-world consequences.” Health care workers “are watching neighbors die because they were told by leaders they trust that this virus is a hoax.”

Trump’s vision is destroying faith in our electoral system and spreading death. It is destabilizing our democracy, an outcome that helps those who are eager to see America’s influence in the world decline.

In contrast, Biden is trying to will into existence a country in which we can accomplish anything, saving ourselves from the ravages of coronavirus, rebuilding the economy, and joining those countries eager to defend equality before the law.

To that end, his nominations for key positions are experts who believe in making the government work for ordinary Americans. Rather than tweeting frequently about conspiracy theories, he tweets sparingly words of encouragement: “I’ve always believed we can define America in one word: Possibilities. We’re going to build an America where everyone has the opportunity to go as far as their dreams and God-given ability will take them” and “We have to come together as a nation and unite around our shared goal: defeating this virus.”

These two visions are in a fight to control our government.

The reality is that Biden was elected president in 2020. He has won more votes than any president in American history, over 6 million votes more than Trump and 306 Electoral College votes to Trump's 232. This is not close. Trump has challenged this election in a number of court cases; he has lost all but one of them, giving him a record of 1-39.

Yesterday, a federal appeals court made up of Republican-appointed judges rejected Trump’s attempt to overturn Pennsylvania’s certification of its election results. Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, wrote the opinion, which said the campaign’s challenge had “no merit.” “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,” the opinion said. “Voters, not lawyers, choose the President. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections.”

But Trump continues to tell his supporters that he has been cheated.

At some level, it is clear he cannot handle the reality that he has lost the election. On Thanksgiving, Trump finally spoke to reporters for the first time since the election, sitting at a comically small desk that has become fodder for comedians. He was not in a good mood. When a reporter asked if he would concede the election if the Electoral College votes for Biden, he exploded: “Don’t talk to me that way. I’m the president of the United States, don’t ever talk to the president that way.”

But Trump is also fundraising off his insistence that the election was stolen. The small print of fundraising emails reveals that donated money goes either to Trump’s political organizations or to the Republican National Committee. Today, rumors surfaced that Trump is considering holding a 2024 election rally on Biden’s Inauguration Day, a move that would help Trump feel important while it also would bring in money.

To rebuild the government, Biden is choosing officials who are institutionalists and experts. Today, for example, he announced more members of the Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board, adding a mental health nurse, the Executive Director at Navajo Nation Department of Health, and an epidemiologist who worked as Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA).

But Trump is trying to rush through regulations and pack positions with loyalists before he leaves office.

Biden has been clear that he would like to return the nation to its cooperative multilateral approach to foreign affairs. He hopes to elevate diplomacy and reduce the influence of the military in our foreign policy.

His national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, centers his understanding of foreign policy on a belief that echoes that of Republican Dwight Eisenhower a half-century ago: that American strength lies in the health of its middle class, which transnational threats are undermining. His initial focus will be health policy and China. He wants to send a “very clear message to China that the United States and the rest of the world will not accept a circumstance in which we do not have an effective public health surveillance system, with an international dimension, in China and across the world going forward.”

Sullivan believes the U.S. can rally other nations to fight corruption and authoritarianism, and to set up a “rules-based system.” But observers note that the Biden team will be working against the “shattered glass” of the Trump administration, which dumped treaties and tried to take on the world alone.

In the last days of his term, Trump seems eager to limit Biden’s ability to recover multilateral agreements, especially the 2015 Iran agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which limited the amount of enriched uranium Iran could hold. Trump withdrew from that treaty in 2018, and inspectors recently reported that Iran now has many times the amount of uranium it could have held had the deal remained in force. Trump responded by asking his advisers if he could strike against Iran’s nuclear center. They talked him out of a military strike, saying that such a strike could lead to an escalating crisis.

Yesterday, gunmen likely associated with Israel assassinated the leader of Iran’s nuclear program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in an ambush outside Tehran. Experts note that the assassination might spark retaliation, and thus might well have destroyed Biden’s ability to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal, as he has pledged to do. It seems more likely to undermine diplomacy than Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Finally, while Biden has pledged science-based policies and protection of civil rights, Trump’s Supreme Court appointees on Wednesday indicated they will defend religion. Trump-appointed Justice Amy Barrett cast the deciding vote to strike down restrictions on religious services to combat the spread of Covid-19. In two similar cases in the past, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s vote had swung the court the other way. The decision claimed that secular businesses had received preference over religious gatherings; the dissenters pointed out that the distinction was not the nature of the gathering, but rather its chances of spreading a deadly disease.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan said the majority was being reckless. “Justices of this court play a deadly game,” they said, “in second-guessing the expert judgment of health officials about the environments in which a contagious virus, now infecting a million Americans each week, spreads most easily.”

While the majority on the court claimed to be speaking for religious interests, on Thursday, Pope Francis published an op-ed in the New York Times that seemed to side with Biden. He noted that most governments have tried to protect their people from the coronavirus, but “some governments… shrugged off the painful evidence of mounting deaths, with inevitable, grievous consequences.” He scoffed at those who refused to accept public health restrictions, “as if measures that governments must impose for the good of their people constitute some kind of political assault on autonomy or personal freedom!”

He called for a fairer economic system, a political system that gives voice to marginalized people, and protection for the environment.

According to Pope Francis, “This is a moment to dream big, to rethink our priorities — what we value, what we want, what we seek — and to commit to act in our daily life on what we have dreamed of.”

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

On the first day of the new Congress, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) delivered one of the nominating speeches for Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who was seeking the House Speakership. Jordan bemoaned a “government that has been weaponized” against the American people and called for greater accountability. The next day, during a second round of failed votes for McCarthy, Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), the leader of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, voiced a similar sentiment but in opposing McCarthy: “Washington is broken… We have an administration that has contempt for the American people.” Though the two men were on different sides in this battle royal, they were united in hypocrisy, for each of these decriers of abusive power had been collaborators in Donald Trump’s public crusade to promote the lies about the 2020 election that led to the January 6 insurrectionist attack on the Capitol and in Trump’s devious plotting to overturn the election and upend American democracy.

Their roles in the House GOP’s crapshow illustrated a profound fact largely overlooked in this hullabaloo: The political chaos that brought the House of Representatives to a standstill was being perpetuated by a party that two years earlier had tried to sabotage the republic and had championed falsehoods and conspiracy theories that led to seditious violence in the very chamber where the Speakership fight was now occurring. Of the 222 Republicans currently in the House GOP caucus, 119 had on January 6, 2021, after the Trump-incited riot, affirmed the false charge of a stolen election by voting to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory. This group included most of the anti-McCarthy bloc, among them Reps. Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, and Ralph Norman, who in January 2021 texted then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that Trump should consider “Marshall Law” to remain in office. And this group included McCarthy.

The GOP civil war in the House was being fought over whether to elevate an election denier who had helped spread the Big Lie that spurred violence to a position that is second in the line of presidential succession. Yet McCarthy’s participation in that assault on democracy was not an issue. For Republicans, it was a prerequisite.

Though most Republicans elected to the new Congress share culpability for January 6 and the failed effort to blow up the 2020 election, Perry and Jordan stand out for their significant participation in Trump’s anti-constitutional and arguably criminal caper.

The House January 6 committee’s report details Perry as a key conspirator in one of Trump’s plots to reverse the election. After the 2020 election was called, Perry was a prominent cheerleader of Trump’s fraudulent claim the election had been stolen from him. He was one of 27 Republican House members who signed a letter requesting that Trump “direct Attorney General Barr to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate irregularities in the 2020 election.” He attended a December 21 Oval Office meeting with at least 10 other congressional Republicans to discuss a strategy for objecting to the electoral college votes on January 6. And with 125 other House Republicans, he supported Texas’ lawsuit that called for throwing out the votes of Pennsylvania and three other states.

But Perry outdid other GOP election deniers with his behind-the-scenes scheming to corrupt the Justice Department.

In late December 2020, after Barr resigned (having told Trump privately and stated publicly there was no evidence of any significant electoral fraud), Trump relentlessly leaned on the Justice Department—mainly, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and his deputy, Richard Donoghue—to affirm his baseless assertion that the election had been rigged. They resisted and repeatedly told Trump the allegations of fraud were untrue. Trump was not getting what he wanted from the department.

This is where Perry came in. He found a Justice Department official named Jeffrey Clark who was running the Environment and Natural Resources Division. Clark had nothing to do with investigating the allegations of election fraud, but he was willing to echo and legitimize Trump’s false charges. Perry introduced Clark to Trump, arranging a meeting between the two in the Oval Office on December 22. As the January 6 Committee noted, “Clark’s contact with President Trump violated both Justice Department and White House policies designed to prevent political pressure on the Department.”

Perry also sent numerous text messages to Meadows urging that Clark be promoted within the department, presumably to a position in which he could compel the Justice Department to assist Trump’s bid to retain power. In one message, Perry referred to the upcoming certification of the electoral vote and declared, “11 days to 1/6… We gotta get going!”

Though Rosen and Donoghue ordered Clark to have no further contact with Trump, Clark continued to meet with Trump and Perry. Perry also directly confronted the Justice Department about its refusal to back up Trump’s false allegations. He called Donoghue on December 27 and assailed the FBI and the department for not finding evidence of election fraud. He added that “Clark would do something about this.”

That night, Perry emailed Donoghue material alleging that election authorities in Pennsylvania had counted 200,000 or so more votes than had been cast—a claim that he and Trump raised publicly. No such thing had happened. Perry was spreading disinformation in an attempt to disenfranchise the voters of his own state.

Meanwhile, Clark—Perry’s man at the Justice Department—was pushing an underhanded plan to keep Trump in power. This included proposing to send a letter to the state legislature of Georgia—and those of other swing states—that falsely declared that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia.” The letter recommended that the state legislature call a special session to evaluate potential election fraud. The draft of this letter referred to the fake electors that Trump and his campaign had organized.

When Rosen and Donoghue refused to sign this letter, Trump moved to boot Rosen and replace him with Clark. At a combative Oval Office meeting on January 3, Rosen, Donoghue, White House counsel Pat Cipollone and others strenuously opposed Clark’s appointment and told Trump it would lead to massive resignations at the department. Only then did Trump retreat on appointing Clark acting attorney general. This attempt to enlist the Justice Department for a coup was over.

The Trump-Clark scheme, in which Perry was a major plotter, was cited by the House January 6 committee in its final report as one basis for its criminal referral of Trump and others. And apparently Perry had some concerns for his own legal safety. According to the committee, after January 6, he reached out to White House staff and asked to receive a presidential pardon. (He did not receive one.)

In August, the FBI seized Perry’s cell phone, presumably as part of its investigation of the Trump-Clark operation. Perry claimed he was told he was not the subject of an investigation. The January 6 committee subpoenaed Perry, but he refused to show up for a deposition, and the committee subsequently referred him to the House Ethics Committee for sanction for failing to comply with the subpoena.

As for Jim Jordan, the January 6 committee declared he was “a significant player in President Trump’s efforts.” It noted:

"He participated in numerous post-election meetings in which senior White House officials, Rudolph Giuliani, and others, discussed strategies for challenging the election, chief among them claims that the election had been tainted by fraud. On January 2, 2021, Representative Jordan led a conference call in which he, President Trump, and other Members of Congress discussed strategies for delaying the January 6th joint session. During that call, the group also discussed issuing social media posts encouraging President Trump’s supporters to ‘march to the Capitol’ on the 6th."

The committee’s report points out that Jordan was in touch with Meadows and Trump in the days before the January 6 riot. On January 5, he texted Meadows that Vice President Mike Pence should “call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.” That is, Jordan was urging an unconstitutional action to achieve a Trump power-grab that would thwart the peaceful transfer of power.

On January 6, Jordan spoke with Trump at least twice, and, according to the committee, “he has provided inconsistent public statements about how many times they spoke and what they discussed.” He also spoke to Rudy Giuliani at least twice in the hours after the riot, as Giuliani continued to encourage members of Congress to block the certification of the election. In the following days, the committee noted, Jordan discussed with White House staffers the prospect of presidential pardons for members of Congress.

Like Perry, Jordan was subpoenaed by the January 6 committee and refused to cooperate, earning a referral to the House Ethics Committee—as did McCarthy. The committee wanted information from McCarthy regarding his conversations with Trump and Pence on and about January 6. He, too, would not cooperate.

As the McCarthy drama has played out, critical participants have been election deniers who not long ago sought to undermine democracy and whose actions led to the domestic terrorism of January 6. McCarthy’s foes, his defenders, and McCarthy himself all were part of the efforts to subvert the Constitution following Biden’s victory. Moreover, whatever happens with McCarthy, these enemies of democracy will end up with important positions in the House. Jordan is expected to become chair of the Judiciary Committee. Perry will likely remain chair of the House Freedom Caucus, which will continue as a band of extremists and plague whichever Republican becomes speaker. This absurd speakership fight is a reminder that Republicans who tried to annihilate the constitutional order and who bolstered conspiracy theories and lies that ignited violence have attained power and influence. The guilty have been rewarded.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 20, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson

As rumors swirl about what may be an upcoming indictment against former president Donald Trump from Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, Republican Party leaders are in a bit of a pickle. For years now, they have gone along with—and some have fed—Trump’s insistence that the government is stacked against him and therefore against the right wing. Some have gone along out of conviction, undoubtedly, but others almost certainly were trying to keep the base voters without whom the Republicans cannot win an election. Now, as it appears that some of the legal cases in which Trump is embroiled might be coming to the point of indictments, they are in a difficult position. Trump is blowing up his social media website with increasingly unhinged accusations and demanding that his supporters “take our nation back.” His language echoes that of the weeks before the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, during which Trump supporters tried to overturn the results of a presidential election. And few Republican leaders actually want to launch a war against the Manhattan district attorney's office. So far, at least, Trump’s demands for his supporters to rally around him again have produced anemic results, suggesting his power is waning. When senior reporter for HuffPost Christopher Mathias reported from outside the Manhattan DA’s office, he found that the media there far outnumbered the protesters. “So many reporters here I just saw a reporter start interviewing someone but they turned out to be a reporter too,” he tweeted. As a number of people have pointed out, Trump rallied his supporters in late 2020 around the idea that a key election had been stolen. His supporters are likely to find the idea that he must be protected over financial crimes committed in New York, possibly related to a sexual encounter with an adult film actress, less compelling. And then there is the issue that those who turned out to support him in January 2021 found themselves on the hook for crimes, all on their own, without his help. Just today, a jury found four more people affiliated with the Oath Keepers guilty of conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, conspiracy to prevent an official from doing their duty, destruction of government property, and civil disorder. The jury found two others guilty of entering and remaining on restricted grounds. Meanwhile, Trump spent the day “truthing” on social media. So, if Trump’s influence is waning and he is perhaps facing indictments—remember, there are a number of investigations outstanding, and for all that Trump is talking about an indictment about his hush-money payment, we do not know what any of them will turn up—what direction should Republicans who signed on with Trump now jump? Rachael Bade, Eugene Daniels, and Ryan Lizza of Politico reported this morning that House leadership has gathered for their annual three-day retreat at a luxury resort in Orlando, Florida. Led by House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), far-right representatives were preparing to demand that members of the Manhattan district attorney’s office testify about any such indictment. Indeed, this afternoon, the chairs of three House committees—Jordan, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY), and House Administration Committee chair Bryan Steil (R-WI)—sent a letter to Bragg criticizing his investigation as an “unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority,” even though there has been no announcement of any charges. The chairs claim they want to know if federal money was used in the investigation, but Representative Daniel Goldman (D-NY) noted: “Defending Trump is not a legitimate legislative purpose for Congress to investigate a state district attorney. Congress has no jurisdiction to investigate the Manhattan DA, which receives no federal funding nor has any other federal nexus.” Representative Glenn Ivey (D-MD), a former state’s attorney for Prince George’s County, went further, saying that he was “stunned” that the House Republicans were trying to obstruct a criminal investigation and intimidate an elected state law enforcement official. House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) says the chairs are just “asking questions.” He appears to be trying to prevent an attack on the legal system while also keeping his far-right extremists happy. He says that people should not protest if Trump is arrested, but also seems to be trying to keep his claim on Trump voters by claiming that Bragg’s investigation is politically motivated. Florida governor Ron DeSantis has his own problems with the whole situation. He wants Trump’s voters but does not want to be saddled with a scenario in which Trump tries to hole up at Mar-a-Lago to resist an indictment in New York. Today, DeSantis said he would not get involved in an extradition order, although Florida law allows him to intervene in a contested extradition. His lack of support for the former president apparently outraged Trump, who promptly accused DeSantis of sexually assaulting a teenaged boy. The tension between the two Republican leaders has prompted speculation that Trump will fight extradition if only to force DeSantis to choose between alienating Trump’s supporters or kowtowing to the former president. Either would wound his presidential hopes, perhaps fatally. Other Republicans are trying to deflect attention from the former president’s potentially criminal behavior and to focus instead on what they say is overreach by prosecutors. But when former vice president Mike Pence this weekend said he was “taken aback at the idea of indicting a former president of the United States,” former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele tweeted "Why the hell are you 'taken aback by the idea of indicting a former President' who has engaged in criminal behavior? Why continue to make excuses for Trump who would rather see you hanged & rancid behavior you decry in others?" Other Republicans have apparently decided to stay out of this whole mess. It is notable that Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) voice is missing right now, as he recovers from his fall. Meanwhile, the Fox News Corporation’s troubles over the defamation lawsuit against it by Dominion Voting Systems have just gotten worse. Fox News producer Abby Grossberg has sued the company in New York and Delaware, saying company lawyers tried to coerce her into giving misleading testimony in the lawsuit to set up her and FNC personality Maria Bartiromo to take the blame for the airing of Trump’s conspiracy theories against Dominion. Regardless of how that lawsuit proceeds, Grossberg’s quite graphic account of the misogyny at the network will not help its profile right now. And what is most astonishing about all of today’s sordid news is that, so far, nothing has happened. If and when it does, it’s going to be quite a ride. What did happen today, though, is that the Biden administration issued the president’s economic report—which I will cover in more depth in the next few days—and that American aid worker Jeff Woodke, who was taken prisoner more than six years ago in Niger and held captive by a terrorist group, has been released. Secretary of State Blinken told reporters, “As you know, I have no higher priority or focus than bringing home any unjustly detained American, wherever that is in the world.” He thanked the government of Niger, Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens, and “all of those who have been working at the department” to get Woodke released.

—

Notes:

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2023/03/20/scoop-house-gop-targets-manhattan-da-00087811

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/20/business/media/fox-news-abby-grossberg.html

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[aion-rsa]

Doctor Who: Why Does Everyone Keep Forgetting the Daleks?

https://ift.tt/3g81nbE

A scene that did not appear in New Year’s Day’s Doctor Who Special, ‘Revolution of the Daleks’.

SCENE: EXT. 10 DOWNING STREET, A PRESS CONFERENCE IS BEING HELD

PRIME MINISTER JO PATTERSON: …and so I introduce to you, our new, fully automated defence drones!

A “DEFENCE DRONE” GLIDES INTO VIEW.

JOURNALIST (RAISES A HAND): Hello, Jeff Typeface, Daily Exposition. Sorry but, um, isn’t that just a Dalek?

PM: A what?

JOURNALIST: A Dalek? About twelve years ago they transported the entire planet through space then rounded humans up in the streets and exterminated them?

PM: Hmmm. Doesn’t ring a bell.

ANOTHER JOURNALIST: Yeah, and a few years before that a bunch of them came flying out of Canary Wharf?

PM: Sorry, I’m completely drawing a blank.

JOURNALIST: Come on! They murdered one of your predecessors!

PM: Excuse me, but you can’t honestly expect me to remember every single British Prime Minister that suffered a violent death over the last two decades. We all know this job has the life expectancy of a Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher.

PM’S ADVISOR: Actually, Prime Minister, talking of your predecessors, Winston Churchill did try this exact same plan with a very similar looking contraption during the War, and I hear that went badly.

PM: I mean, I’m sure I believe you. I’m just saying this is all news to me.

JOURNALIST: Very well. Moving on, how will these “Defence Drones” help us deal with the Covid-19 pandemic?

PM: See, now you’re just making words up.

Doctor Who has always been a series that points and laughs at fans who want to try and piece together a consistent continuity across all its stories, but even by Doctor Who standards, forgetting an entire global invasion barely more than a decade ago (y’know, just before most of the show’s viewers were born, you absolute fossil you) might seem like a stretch.

Of course, the real reason Jo Patterson couldn’t remember the Daleks is that unlike say, the MCU, where weirdness layers upon weirdness to create a world that almost counts as alt-history, Doctor Who is, on some level, always reaching to be set in “our” universe. The key conceit of the show is that you might turn a corner, find a blue box, and suddenly be whisked away through space and time to a world of adventure. Which doesn’t really work if the British town squares of the Doctor Who universe all feature memorials to the victims of the Daleks and diet pills have to be tested for Adipose DNA.

But at the same time, Doctor Who just loves a great big Hollywood space invasion, and making these two core ingredients of the show mesh is a nightmare for continuity.

Let’s, for instance, take a look at the life of recently departed Doctor’s companion, Ryan Sinclair.

Life of Ryan

Ryan was born in 1998 or 1999. As a child, he attended Redlands Primary School at around the same time London was hit by a “terrorist attack” when shop windows dummies started shooting people. A year later a spaceship crashed into Big Ben, although this was later dismissed as a hoax. That Christmas Day, when Ryan was around eight years old, every human with O negative blood got up in a trance and went and stood on a tall building while a gigantic spaceship hung over London.

Still Ryan is a kid, he doesn’t watch the news, maybe nobody in his family is O negative and let’s face it, news of a lot of this stuff probably doesn’t get as far as Sheffield.

However, even in Sheffield he would have seen the regular “ghost shifts” that appeared all over the world, and at nine years old he would have been traumatised to have his home, like so many others, invaded by Cybermen before they all got sucked away by something.

His family make the wise decision not to turn on the news that Christmas, so he doesn’t hear about the “Christmas star” attack, or later that year a hospital being teleported to the moon, and while he probably remembers grown-ups getting very excited by Harold Saxon getting elected, fortunately most of his tenure as Prime Minister was erased from history.

Read more

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By Chris Farnell

TV

Doctor Who: the genius of making the Cybermen an ideology

By Chris Farnell

Ryan would have noticed when CBBC was replaced by a giant eyeball shouting that “Prisoner Zero Has Escaped”, and, shortly after turning ten, he definitely would have noticed when the entire sky was set on fire to prevent a Sontaran invasion.

And then of course, the Earth was teleported across space, planets filled the skies, and Daleks roamed the streets rounding people up. He would have been about the same age as future astronaut and Mars colonist, Adelaide Brooke at this time, and she was profoundly affected by the experience.

After that it’s possible the government may have rounded up him and his classmates to offer up to the 456.

To round the year off, Ryan actually turned into Harold Saxon for a bit. This was probably, on balance, the worst Christmas of the lot.

2011 was largely uneventful except that nobody could die.

Ryan went on to see the Tenth Doctor light the flame at the 2012 Olympics, was briefly into that whole “mysterious black cubes” craze before they got banned for some reason, and while he was in high school the entire Earth was covered in dense forest overnight but that disappeared, and nobody ever mentioned it again. The Cybermen invaded again. Then, not long after Ryan left school, the entire world was taken over by a species of really gross looking mummified monks who claimed to have always been in charge, before they also disappeared overnight.

Not long after that, Ryan met the Doctor for the first time and was shocked, shocked, to discover that aliens exist.

Cracks in Time

Steven Moffat did give us one handy explanation for why nobody in Doctor Who remembers the Dalek invasion, or the giant steampunk Cyberman that invaded Victorian London, and probably much more. In ‘Victory of the Daleks’ the Doctor tries to persuade Winston Churchill that using his own force of Daleks to secure the country was a bad idea, and he turns to Amy, who would have seen that invasion, to back him up. She has no idea what’s he’s talking about.

Later it’s revealed this is because the TARDIS explodes, destroying the entire universe with it. The cracks in time left by that explosion erased all kinds of events from history, including, handily, anything that would cause the human view of the universe to deviate too far from the real-world status quo.

Of course, that does leave some problems. Adelaide Brooke, again, clearly remembers the Dalek invasion and it was a moment so formative and influential on her eventual Fixed Point In Time that even the Dalek she saw (who, I remind you, was working on a plot to destroy literally all existence) didn’t dare exterminate her because of its influence on the timeline. And since it’s not implied the crack in time could bring anyone back from the dead, it does make you wonder what history says happened to Harriet Jones (former Prime Minister) and all the many others killed by the Daleks.

But maybe you don’t need a giant retconning Crack in Time?

Because while the Doctor has often waxed lyrical about humanity being indomitable, creative, and curious, there is also a lesser innate human quality the Doctor sometimes mentions: our absent-mindedness.

The Forgetfulness of the Daleks

As well as the Dalek incursions in ‘The Stolen Earth’ and ‘The Army of Ghosts’, there was another Dalek visitation of Earth in the ironically named ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’, which was set in 1963. During this adventure then-companion Ace points out she doesn’t remember anything about Daleks invading in the 1960s. The Doctor replies, “Do you remember the Zygon gambit with the Loch Ness Monster? Or the Yeti in the Underground? Your species has an amazing capacity for self-deception.”

Likewise, nobody remembers dinosaurs invading London, or the other time shop window dummies came to life and started killing people, or when the Earth encountered its exact twin. Without any cracks in time hanging around, Doctor Who falls back on an old staple of fantasy and sci-fi- that humans just ignore anything that doesn’t fit into their worldview.

As we’ve already mentioned, this turns up a couple of times in the new series as well. In ‘In the Forest of the Night’, the entire planet is overnight covered in forest for reasons that we’re not going to go into too closely because that story’s a bit of an embarrassment to be honest. As the forest disappears at the end of the story the Doctor says it will be forgotten outside of fairy stories, because that’s “a human superpower”.

It can even work two-way. In ‘The Lie of the Land’, the entire Earth is taken over by the gross-looking and mysterious “monks”. Using a psychic link, the monks convince humanity that not only are they humanity’s generous benefactors, but also that the monks have always been here, guiding human evolution. This is of course a lie, as the monks are actually one of the very few aliens not to have guided human evolution at some point.

After the Doctor does his thing and the monks’ statues are torn down, someone passes by the ruins of one and wonders what it was. Already, people are forgetting.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Which, if you think about it, is a Doctor Who story in itself. Imagine being an alien visiting Earth. Humanity must seem like the Silence, but in reverse- as soon as they stop looking at you they forget you exist. The Doctor really ought to take a look at that some time.

The post Doctor Who: Why Does Everyone Keep Forgetting the Daleks? appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3bcKfBX

[ask-de-writer]

SEA DRAGON’S GIFT : Part 82 of 83 : World of Sea

Return to the Master Story Index

Return to World of Sea

SEA DRAGON’S GIFT

Part 82 of 83

by

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

140406 words

copyright 2020

written 2007

All rights reserved.

Reproduction in any form, physical, electronic or digital is prohibited without the express consent of the author.

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Copyright fair use rules for Tumblr users

Users   of Tumblr.com are specifically granted the following rights.  They may   reblog the story provided that all author and copyright information   remains intact.  They may use the characters or original characters in   my settings for fan fiction, fan art works, cosplay, or fan musical   compositions.

All sorts of fan art, cosplay, music or fiction is actively encouraged.

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New to the story?  Read from the beginning.  PART 1 is here

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Sarfin nodded and began writing swiftly and neatly on a fresh sheet of parchment.  He paused for a moment and conferred with Sula briefly. Her eyes went wide and she nodded vigorously.  He wrote for a few more moments.  The parchment was given to a clerk who took it and disappeared in the direction of the scriptorium.

When the clerk returned, he gave the parchment back to Sarfin along with several copies.  Sarfin handed one copy to Kotance who began to read and then snarled, “This is insane!  Attempted Piracy? Mutiny?  Murder?  Attempted murder?  Theft?  Falsification of Council documents?  Rape?  Violation of the Second Great Law?  Who am I supposed to have stolen from?  These witnesses are children like her!”  He ended by pointing dramatically at Kurin.

Kurin pounced on his statement at once.  “You just qualified them as witnesses!  You know very well that I am a legal adult since I got my journeyman’s certificate.  If they are like me, then they are viable witnesses by your own testimony.”  Sarfin nodded and wrote quietly and quickly on another parchment.  Sula looked surprised and then stifled a guffaw.  Some of the audience laughed outright.

Sarfin raised his hands for silence and after a few moments, got it. “Mister Kotance, You have now been formally charged with crimes. Some of these are capital charges.  Included with the charges are a list of witnesses who will testify in your case.

“You may speak to these witnesses under supervision.  You may seek any other witnesses that you need and the fleet will produce them for you, if possible.  Other than as needed to prepare your case, you will be held in custody until your trial at the next Spring Gathering of the Naral fleet.  If you need an advocate, you may obtain one of your choice or the fleet can provide you with one.  Your choice or changes in your choice of advocate will not be allowed to delay your trial.   Exercise both care and wisdom in this matter.”

Soaring Bird crewmen appeared at Kotance’s arms and each took one, bending it behind the now struggling man.  They bound his wrists and forced him back onto his bench.  The sheet of charges and witnesses was neatly folded and placed into a pouch on his sash-belt.

Kurin wanted to hide instead of say what had to be said next.  “Your Honor, the matter of the attempted piracy of the Grandalor by the Longin has not been fully settled.  One charge of murder remains from that attempt.  Many, at least the boarding party, followed the Captain-pretender Kotance voluntarily.  They hoped for illegal promotions based on his false promises.  If he’d won the engagement and succeeded in his piracy, he’d have been able to deliver on at least some of those promises.  Others, like the promise to make Cron an officer were completely false.  We need to know how many followed him voluntarily.”  She swallowed a lump in her throat.  “The Longin may need to be partially or wholly Scattered.”  She sat face in her hands, small shoulders shaking.  High Cloud, on her shoulder, was trying to preen the hair around her ear, and alternately stroking along her jaw with his beak.

Tanlin put arms about Kurin and held her, stroking her white hair comfortingly as she said, “Shush, child, t’ere’s a way oot o’ t’is net, i’ t’ey’ll take ‘t.  Remember t’at Arrakan law t’at I told ye o’?”  Turning her head to Barad, she added, “Luve o’ m’ ‘eart, tell t’e Court o’ t’e Arrakan Wergeld law.”

Barad stood and faced the still appalled Sarfin, Sula and audience.  “Your Honor, as my most able advocate said earlier, the Grandalor does not ask so much.  In my wife’s home fleet, there is a unique form of settlement for both civil and criminal complaints.  They call it a Wergeld.  

A Wergeld takes this form.  All the parties involved in the dispute get together before the fleet, at a Gathering, usually.  There, they agree to a mutually satisfactory penalty, often monetary, but not always, for the wrong.  As part of the agreement, all grudges and feuds between all the parties must be laid aside forever.  Failure to abide by that last part of the Wergeld voids the settlement and regular Law must take its often harsh course.  

“If the Court and the Longin will agree, the Grandalor and the Longin can try to reach a Wergeld agreement before you.  You have the proxies of the fleet as a whole and the Longin’s Councils are present.  If all parties agree to this, it will be binding under the Third Great Law.”

Master Juris stood, hands raised for recognition, suspicion plain to see on his face.  “I speak for the Longin’s combined Councils.  I was elected head of the combined Councils by the Articles.” Here he shot a dark look at Barad.  “I cannot believe that the journeyman that I am proudest of has done to her home ship what she has just done.”

Tanlin cut in hotly, “Dinnae ye blame ‘er!  She ‘as a duty t’ be our advocate an’ ‘ard as some o’ the job is, she’s doin’ ‘t! Be proud o’ ‘er t’at she doesnae shirk t’e ‘ard parts o’ t’e task.  We’re tryin’ t’ save bot’ ye!

“Wen Barad an’ Oi were married in yer food boot’, WE forgave all feuds between you and us!  T’at is Arrakan Law and Custom.  We claimed it an’ ye accepted, makin’ it bindin’ under t’e T’ird Groit Law.  We’re nae forsworn.”

Barad interrupted her calmly, “Peace, my love.  Setting aside a lifetime of suspicion is not easily done.  Some cannot do it.  If they will not accept, they will not accept.  We cannot force them to save themselves.  We can only throw them the line.  They must be the ones to take it.”

Abashed, Tanlin continued to hold and rock the weeping Kurin in her arms. High Cloud had flown off.  “Ye’re right, Barad.  Seems a shame t’ let t’em go down, t’ough.  Only met t’em a little but t’ey appeared t’ be a decent ship.  Good folk.”

“They are,” said Barad simply.

High Cloud returned with a still flopping fish in his claws.  Tanlin made him space and he landed in Kurin’s lap.  He tried to poke the fish inexpertly into Kurin’s mouth.  The bird’s antics brought a small smile to Tanlin’s lips.  “Ye know t’e drill, sailor,” she said to Kurin.  “Let ‘im ‘elp.  T’at’s ‘is first catch ‘e’s givin’ t’ ye.”

Kurin took the fish in shaking hands and took a bite.  She said in a quivering voice, “Thanks, High Cloud.  I do need help just now.” The young Wide Wing climbed back to her shoulder and settled down to some serious preening of Kurin’s hair.

Master Juris glared at Kurin.  The threat to his ship had him in a fury. “Kurin, as head of the combined Councils of the Longin, I could propose you be voted off the ship for your treachery.  How would you like that?”

Tanlin said, with a mildness that belied the fury clear to see in the set of her whole body, “From all t’at Oi‘ve ‘eard o’ ‘ow ye deal wit’ orphans on yer ship, an’ Kurin tried t’ say naught but praise for ye, t’at would be just w’at Oi wad expect.”

A grim faced Captain Sarfin was beginning to write on a new sheet of parchment.

Kurin looked up, almost dry eyed, and saw what was happening.  She knew the penalty for threatening or bribing an officer of the Court.  Most folk did.  She had to divert Captain Sarfin before he finished writing the death warrant for Master Juris.  

A decision now clear in her mind, she said woodenly, “Go ahead.  It’s not like I don’t have a ship to go to.  Besides the Grandalor that I own, I can think of a few other ships that would have me as well. I have accounts, tools of my own in your shop, my booth and other goods along with clothing that all have to be transferred.  Bring everything here before the Court to be verified as complete.”

Master Juris stopped as if he had just been punched in the stomach. Wide-eyed, appalled that his bluff had been called, he said shakily, “You can’t be serious.  You can’t leave us!  You — — you’re just a child.”

Barad interjected angrily, “But you can bully her with the threat of being cast off her ship?”

Instead of answering Master Juris, Kurin asked Captain Sarfin, “Your Honor, are you done with that adoption registry?  I may need it in a few minutes.  It seems that this is one time that the Longin is not happy that I have done well.  Please send officers appointed by your Court to get my things.”  Sula detailed several crewmen from the Dark Dragon to go to the Longin and get Kurin’s property.

Sarfin struggled to retain his composure as he produced the book.  He said gently, “Are you sure that you want to do this, Kurin?  They have a contract with the fleet that they cannot fulfill without you.  This will cost them both the mapping contract and the school.  The default penalties will bankrupt them and force a total Scattering.”

In a voice carefully controlled but still a little shaky, Kurin replied, “If they remove me from their ship, how is that my problem?”

As she spoke, her voice began to steady down.  “Your Honor, as an advocate before the Court, am I allowed know of a crime and keep it from the Court?”

“No,” said Sarfin, “the smallest penalty would be a fine.  The least that you can do is exactly what you have done.  Ask for an investigation.”

Kurin chewed a little more of High Cloud’s fish and began to do what she did best.  Think.  The change was obvious and immediate as she separated her feelings from her words and actions.  Evenly she asked, “Tell me, all of you Masters and Officers of the Longin, how many guards were put on each of your shops to keep you penned in during the piracy attempt against the Grandalor?”

TO BE CONTINUED

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Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Lockdown named word of the year by Collins Dictionary (Guardian) Lockdown, the noun that has come to define so many lives across the world in 2020, has been named word of the year by Collins Dictionary. Lockdown is defined by Collins as “the imposition of stringent restrictions on travel, social interaction, and access to public spaces”, and its usage has boomed over the last year. The 4.5bn-word Collins Corpus, which contains written material from websites, books and newspapers, as well as spoken material from radio, television and conversations, registered a 6,000% increase in its usage. In 2019, there were 4,000 recorded instances of lockdown being used. In 2020, this had soared to more than a quarter of a million. “Language is a reflection of the world around us and 2020 has been dominated by the global pandemic,” says Collins language content consultant Helen Newstead. “We have chosen lockdown as our word of the year because it encapsulates the shared experience of billions of people who have had to restrict their daily lives in order to contain the virus. Lockdown has affected the way we work, study, shop, and socialise. With many countries entering a second lockdown, it is not a word of the year to celebrate but it is, perhaps, one that sums up the year for most of the world.” Other pandemic-related words such as coronavirus, social distancing, self-isolate and furlough were on the dictionary’s list of the top 10 words.

Republicans Back Trump’s Refusal to Concede, Declining to Recognize Biden (NYT) Leading Republicans rallied on Monday around President Trump’s refusal to concede the election, declining to challenge the false narrative that it was stolen from him or to recognize President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Republican in Congress, threw his support behind Mr. Trump in a sharply worded speech on the Senate floor. He declared that Mr. Trump was “100 percent within his rights” to turn to the legal system to challenge the outcome and hammered Democrats for expecting the president to concede. And in Washington, Emily W. Murphy, a Trump political appointee and administrator of the General Services Administration, refused to formally recognize Mr. Biden as the president-elect with a letter of “ascertainment,” leaving the country’s transition of power in flux.

White House, escalating tensions, orders agencies to rebuff Biden transition team (Washington Post) The Trump White House on Monday instructed senior government leaders to block cooperation with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, escalating a standoff that threatens to impede the transfer of power and prompting the Biden team to consider legal action. Officials at agencies across the government who had prepared briefing books and carved out office space for the incoming Biden team to use as soon as this week were told instead that the transition would not be recognized until the Democrat’s election was confirmed by the General Services Administration, the low-profile agency that officially starts the transition. While media outlets on Saturday projected Biden as the winner, President Trump has not conceded the election. “We have been told: Ignore the media, wait for it to be official from the government,” said a senior administration official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly. The GSA, the government’s real estate arm, remained for a third day the proxy in the battle. Administrator Emily Murphy, a Trump political appointee, is refusing to sign paperwork that releases Biden’s $6.3 million share of nearly $10 million in transition resources and gives his team access to agency officials and information. The Biden transition team is evaluating its legal options and growing increasingly alarmed that the stalemate could drag on and impede its work.

Candidate concessions have been colorful, funny—or absent (AP) Losing presidential candidates have conceded to their opponents in private chats, telegrams, phone calls and nationally televised speeches. Al Gore conceded twice in the same race. President Donald Trump isn’t expected to concede at all—not even with a tweet. Most concessions are gracious—less about the loser and more about closure for the country. Others have a little dry humor mixed in. After failing to win reelection in 1992, George H. W. Bush quoted Winston Churchill and said he had been given the “Order of the Boot,” according to presidential historian Michael Beschloss. The concession tradition had a hiccup in 2000 when Gore called George W. Bush to concede and then called him back to recant as the results from Florida went sideways. Their tight campaign ended with the Florida vote in limbo. “Let me make sure I understand,” Bush told Gore on the phone. “You’re calling me back to retract your concession?” When Bush was declared the winner after the Supreme Court halted further recount action, Gore delivered his second concession. “Just moments ago I spoke with George W. Bush and congratulated him on becoming the 43rd president of the United States. And I promised him that I wouldn’t call him back this time,” Gore said. After Gerald Ford and Bob Dole lost the 1976 presidential election to Carter and Walter Mondale, Dole, quipped: “Contrary to reports that I took the loss badly, I want to say that I went home last night and slept like a baby—every two hours I woke up and cried.”

Trump’s Fury Feeds Moscow and Beijing Accounts of U.S. Chaos (NYT) For years, state propaganda in both Russia and China has painted Western democracy as dangerously chaotic compared to what it described as the safety and stability of the countries’ authoritarian systems. With President Trump’s unfounded allegations that Democrats stole last week’s presidential election, Moscow and Beijing got a fresh chance to claim vindication. Russia seized that chance, while China was more restrained, perhaps reflecting cautious optimism that a President-elect Joseph R. Biden could stabilize relations with the United States. Neither country, however, congratulated Mr. Biden for winning the election. A spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia couched the delay as a technical matter of diplomatic protocol, and pledged that Mr. Putin would be ready to work with “any elected president of the United States.” On the flagship weekly news program on state TV Sunday night, host Dmitri Kiselyov said the election showed the United States to be “not a country but a huge, chaotic communal apartment, with a criminal flair.” For China, state media’s response to Mr. Biden’s win has been more measured. Mr. Biden would be “more moderate and mature” than Mr. Trump on foreign affairs, Global Times, a fiercely nationalistic tabloid, said. Other Chinese outlets emphasized the potential for political violence in the United States all last week as the vote counts trickled in. The Chinese state media shared photos of boarded-up businesses and police officers on watch at poll sites. A narrative of American decline has been a constant refrain in recent months, as an increasingly wealthy and confident China has tried to market itself to the rest of the world as a viable alternative for global leadership.

Florida cities mop up after deluge from Tropical Storm Eta (AP) Cities in South Florida mopped up after Tropical Storm Eta flooded some urban areas with a deluge that swamped entire neighborhoods and filled some homes with rising water that did not drain for hours. It was the 28th named storm in a busy hurricane season, and the first to make landfall in Florida. Broward County, which includes Fort Lauderdale, was among the harder hit areas. “It’s very bad. In the last 20 years, I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Tito Carvalho, who owns a car stereo business in Fort Lauderdale and estimated the water was 3 feet deep in some places.

Vizcarra impeached in Peru (Foreign Policy) Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra is to leave office after the country’s congress successfully impeached him on charges of corruption. Vizcarra was accused of accepting bribes for public works contracts during his time as a governor. Although he denies the allegations, he said on Monday that he would “leave the presidential palace today.” Manuel Merino, the head of the minority party Popular Action, will assume the presidency until a new one is chosen in April 2021.

Landmines cleared from Falkland Islands 38 years after conflict (Reuters) The final landmines on the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic have been cleared, Britain said on Tuesday, nearly 40 years after they were laid by Argentine forces when they seized the British territory. The removal of the mines meant the United Kingdom had met its obligations set by the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, Britain’s Foreign Office (FCDO) said, adding that there were now no anti-personnel mines on British soil anywhere in the world. Argentina invaded the archipelago, to which it lays claim, in 1982. Britain sent a task force to retake the islands in a brief war which saw more than 600 Argentine and 255 British servicemen killed. A British-funded programme, which started in 2009, to de-mine the islands completed its mission three years ahead of schedule.

As virus spikes, Europe runs low on ICU beds, hospital staff (AP) In Italy lines of ambulances park outside hospitals awaiting beds, and in France the government coronavirus tracking app prominently displays the intensive care capacity taken up by COVID-19 patients: 92.5% and rising. In the ICU in Barcelona, there is no end in sight for the doctors and nurses who endured this once already. Intensive care is the last line of defense for severely ill coronavirus patients and Europe is running out—of beds and the doctors and nurses to staff them. In country after country, the intensive care burden of COVID-19 patients is nearing and sometimes surpassing levels seen at last spring’s peak. Health officials, many advocating a return to stricter lockdowns, warn that adding beds will do no good because there aren’t enough doctors and nurses trained to staff them. In France, more than 7,000 health care workers have undergone training since last spring in intensive care techniques. Nursing students, interns, paramedics, all have been drafted, according to Health Minister Olivier Veran.

Greece: Floods sweep cars into sea, send people to rooftops (Washington Post) Heavy flooding on the Greek island of Crete damaged roads, flooded hundreds of homes and swept cars into the sea amid ongoing torrential rainfall. Authorities Tuesday said the most serious damage occurred east of the island’s capital, Iraklio, in small towns and villages where schools were closed and residents were advised to stay indoors. In the worst-affected areas, some residents sought refuge on the roofs of their homes as muddy water swept through towns, dragging cars and debris. A state of emergency was declared in flooded areas. It was the third time in less than a month that the area has been hit by flooding. Heavy rainfall is expected to continue through Thursday.

China gears up for world’s largest online shopping festival (AP) Chinese consumers are expected to spend tens of billions on everything from fresh food to luxury goods during this year’s Singles’ Day online shopping festival, as the country recovers from the pandemic. The shopping festival, which is the world’s largest and falls on Nov. 11 every year, is an annual extravaganza where China’s e-commerce companies, including Alibaba, JD.com and Pinduoduo, offer generous discounts on their platforms. Last year, shoppers spent $38.4 billion on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms Tmall and Taobao.

Erekat, longtime spokesman for the Palestinians, dies at 65 (AP) Saeb Erekat, a veteran peace negotiator and prominent international spokesman for the Palestinians for more than three decades, died on Tuesday, weeks after being infected by the coronavirus. He was 65. The American-educated Erekat was involved in nearly every round of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians going back to the landmark Madrid conference in 1991. Over the years, he was a constant media presence. He tirelessly argued for a negotiated two-state solution to the decades-old conflict, defended the Palestinian leadership and blamed Israel—particularly hard-line leader Benjamin Netanyahu—for the failure to reach an agreement. As a loyal aide to Palestinian leaders—first Yasser Arafat and then Mahmoud Abbas—Erekat clung to this strategy until his death, even as hopes for Palestinian statehood sank to new lows. In the weeks leading up to his death in an Israeli hospital, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain had normalized ties with Israel, breaking with the long-held Arab position that a deal on Palestinian statehood must precede normalization. Abbas and members of his inner circle, including Erekat, found themselves internationally sidelined and deeply unpopular among Palestinians. And decades of unfettered Israeli settlement expansion had made a statehood deal based on the partition of territory increasingly unlikely.

Concern of outright war in Ethiopia grows as PM presses military offensive (Reuters) Ethiopia’s prime minister stepped up a military offensive in the northern region of Tigray on Sunday with air strikes as part of what he called a “law enforcement operation,” increasing fears of outright civil war in Africa’s second-most populous country. Abiy last week launched a military campaign in the province, saying forces loyal to leaders there had attacked a military base and attempted to steal equipment. Government fighter jets have since been bombing targets in the region, which borders Sudan and Eritrea. Aid workers on Sunday reported heavy fighting in several parts of the region.