#house treason caucus

[qqueenofhades]

This may be a stupid question but do you really believe MTG is funded by Putin? In my head she's too fucking stupid to be calculating enough to actually enrich herself.

I don't know if she is actually getting money from the Kremlin or she's just a moron who loves to believe whatever conspiracy theorist nonsense she's told, but I think it's pretty clear she is either being handled fairly directly by Russian intelligence or is closely plugged into sophisticated Russian propaganda systems. Example A, Marge submitting an amendment to the Ukrainian aid bill insisting that aid not be disbursed until the Ukrainian government allegedly stopped "oppressing Hungarians in Transcarpathia." This is a key part of the Orban regime's anti-Ukraine talking points that has in turn been directly amplified by Russia, but it is so specific and so obscure (not to mention, there's literally zero chance Marge knows what any of those words or issues mean, or could find Transcarpathia on a map) that there's no way she organically came up with it on her own. She's also been otherwise echoing word-for-word Russian propaganda about them being "the defenders of Christianity" by invading Ukraine, which is one of Putin's preferred/favorite narratives and plays into the function of the Russian Orthodox Church as a Kremlin booster. Hence, if Marge is directly repeating Putin's personal justifications, I'd say it is more likely than not that she's getting something out of it.

As I have said before, it is pretty clear that Putin is ordering Trump to get the House GOP to stall Ukraine aid in exchange for help in the election, and there is a significant chunk of the House GOP that is eager to suckle at the Russian propaganda teat in all circumstances. (See: Hunter Biden's laptop being a Russian disinformation operation from the start that got exposed when the House GOP impeachment effort went up in flames.) We have also consistently had networks of Russian agents and Russian money be exposed in Europe, where they are offering financial incentives to EU politicians to serve as Kremlin shills. Russian dirty money has beyond doubt entered the Republican Party at many, many levels; we had that whole investigation about how Trump and the Russians have been working in concert for a long time. Now, because getting Trump in power again is so important for the Russians, and the Russians' help is so important for Trump in trying to stay out of jail, the corruption is pretty systemic.

In short, I figure it is only a matter of time if/when we find out that the most stridently pro-Russian members of the Treason Caucus are actually being paid by or otherwise benefiting from Russian lobbyists, because they are fascist traitors who love money, will kiss Trump's ass in any circumstances, and are willing to do anything in the name of undermining America, Ukraine, Biden, and Western democracy in general. We know it is the way Russian destabilization, disinformation, and influence operations customarily work, and that they have previously and consistently worked in cahoots with MAGA, so yeah. If Marge and Co. aren't active Russian assets, financially or otherwise, I would be very surprised.

[originalleftist]

Gov. Newsom supports President Biden.

Gov. Whitmer supports President Biden.

Senator Sanders-the most prominent voice of the party's Left wing-supports President Biden.

The Congressional Black Caucus-Black voters being a key part of the Democratic Party's and particularly Biden's base-supports President Biden.

Senate Majority Leader Schumer supports President Biden.

House Democratic Leader Jeffries supports President Biden.

Kamala Harris-his Vice President, and the only person who could reasonably replace him-supports President Biden.

And most important of all, the primary voters supported Biden.

Who's against him? Some second and third tier officials, candidates, and ex-candidates/officials, some rich donors, and a bunch of pundits and celebrities. And, of course, a bunch of treasonous MAGA fascists and their foreign dictator backers.

Yeah, I'm with Joe.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Donald Trump is terrified by what has happened in court during his election-interference trial, during which eye witness after eye witness has testified to his sleaze, his lies, and his bullshit, none of which have been negated by any of the Lawyers Who Got Their License From A Box Of Cracker Jacks who form his crackerjack legal defense team.

To reassure himself that he is still Maximum Leader of the Confederate White People’s Treason Party, he has called his fellow traitors to come to New York and demonsrate their loyalty to him by speaking the lies he is no longer allowed to say himself.

This morning, House Speaker “MAGA Mike” Johnson came to New York to continue his assault on the U.S. judicial system, becoming the highest-ranking Republican to show up at court with Donald Trump and using his powerful position to attack the hush money case against the former president as an illegitimate “sham.”

Johnson’s appearance marked a truly “remarkable moment” in modern American politics: The House speaker publicly turning against the federal and state legal systems that are foundational to American government and a cornerstone of democracy.

Johnson, who is second in line for the presidency, called the court system “corrupt.”

Outside the New York courthouse, he decried “This ridiculous prosecution that is not about justice. It’s all about politics.” Johnson specifically attacked the credibility of Michael Cohen as “a man who is clearly on a mission for personal revenge;” claimed lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo “recently received over $10,000 in payments from the Democratic National Committee;” and reiterated Trump’s attack on the daughter of Judge Juan M. Merchan as having made “millions of dollars” doing online fundraising for Democrats.

The speaker is leading a growing list of Republican lawmakers who criticize the judicial system as they rally to Trump’s side. They say what the Trump campaign tells them to say, which are the statements that got Trump ten counts of violating the gag order.

All of these are things Trump has said before, which were determined in court to be violations of the gag order imposed on him, for which he has been fined. Using the congressional toadies is Trump’s way of getting the word out while avoiding the possibility of ending up in a jail cell for further violation of the gag order.

With Trump stuck in court, Johnson and his fellow traitors are taking it on themselves to attack the proceedings, using the trial as a de facto campaign stop as they work to return the former president to the White House. In portraying the case against Trump as politically motivated, the Republicans are also laying the groundwork to dismiss its significance, should the jury convict, and for potential challenges to the fall election,.

Let us remember that Johnson - whose worthless ass was recently saved from defenestration by the Whackadoodle Caucus of the House GOP by the votes of Democrats - was a chief architect of Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 presidential results ahead of the January 6, 2021, mob assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Last week he called the hush money trial and the other election-year cases against Trump a “borderline criminal conspiracy.”

Today, outside of court in New York City - where he insisted he was appearing on his own to support a friend - he proclaimed, “It is election interference. And the American people are not going to let this stand.”

Unlike other Republicans who have shown up to bend their knee and show their support, Johnson did not enter the courtroom, instead departing as he dashed back to Washington to open the House chamber for the day.

Also in court with Trump on Tuesday were Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum - who are both considered possible VP candidates - as well as the Most Annoying Man In America, former GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who is one of Trump’s current top surrogates. These poltroons followed Senators Jimmy Vance of Ohio and the Top Senate Moron, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who appeared in court yesterday.

Over the weekend, Senator Skeletor, er, I mean Rick Scott - who was the first congressional traitor to show up in the “family row” in the courtroom last week - went on Faux Snooze and proclaimed, “The Democrats are using the court system to go after and prosecute, criminally, a political opponent - that’s a crime. They’re just thugs trying to stop Trump from being able to run for president.”

This morning, before court convened, with the group of congressional traitors gathered in the background, Trump said , “I do have a lot of surrogates, and they’re speaking very beautifully, and they come from all over Washington. And they’re highly respected, and they think this is the greatest scam they’ve ever seen.”

As usual, every Trump attack is a public confession: what he is accused of doing to get elected is the greatest scam anyone has ever seen.

In a departure from the tradition of trust and adherence in U.S. election systems, Johnson and other Republicans have refused to answer straightforwardly when asked if they will accept the election results of 2024.

That these treasonous scum wear the flag of the United States on their lapels and claim themselves “patriots” is enough to gag a maggot.

We are definitely no longer in Kansas, Toto, and the traitors are preparing the ground to start the civil war they have long hoped to see.

TCinLA

[beardedmrbean]

OTTAWA — The capital of one of the world’s most stable democracies is gripped by growing panic about foreign agents working in elected office. A bombshell report by Canadian lawmakers has unnerved Parliament Hill, alleging that unnamed politicians have been covertly working with foreign governments.

The revelation in heavily redacted findings released this week by an all-party national security committee adds intrigue to a separate and ongoing inquiry into foreign interference in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 elections.

The new report from the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians is the first to suggest that lawmakers in Canada’s parliament may have helped foreign actors meddle in political campaigns and leadership races. Heightened anxiety in Ottawa about foreign interference comes in the middle of historic global elections where factors such as artificial intelligence and emboldened foreign powers are testing the resilience of democratic systems.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been on the defensive since the allegations broke Monday. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is calling on the government to name names.

“The national security committee indicates there are members of this House that have knowingly worked for foreign hostile governments,” Poilievre said Wednesday. “Canadians have a right to know who and what is the information — who are they?”

The findings put pressure on Canada's national police force to investigate potential criminal charges. The report also refuels debate on the ability of the federal government’s deterrence mechanisms to curb foreign interference in a country whose political and legal system is considered one of the highest-performing in the world.

The all-party NSICOP said Monday that it has reviewed intelligence that suggests “semi-witting or witting” parliamentarians have worked with foreign missions to mobilize voters during a political campaign; have taken cash “knowingly or through willful blindness” from foreign missions or their proxies; and have shared privileged information with foreign diplomatic officials.

The committee with top-security clearance said it based its findings on more than 4,000 documents and some 1,000 pieces of evidence. Its report said China remains the largest foreign interference threat to Canada with India the second.

The intelligence included a claim that unnamed parliamentarians are taking direction from unnamed diplomats to “improperly influence” their colleagues or parliamentary business to the benefit of a foreign state.

One of the most damaging lines in Monday’s report points out Canada’s failure to address long-standing challenges in how national security information can be used in criminal proceedings. The report says this is one reason why criminal charges for the potentially illegal activities are unlikely.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters Tuesday that she takes the issue seriously. She deflected when asked if Canadians have the right to know the identity of the parliamentarians involved.

“We should recognize this is a new time,” she said, adding that authoritarians want to undermine democracies by sowing public distrust in government.

Freeland would not commit to releasing names, nor did she agree that “sunlight” on the issue would benefit democracy. On Wednesday, after her Liberal party’s weekly caucus meeting, she ignored questions on the topic.

The Trudeau government called an inquiry into foreign interference in September in the wake of claims that the Chinese government helped mobilize voters against a Conservative candidate in western Canada and helped elect another as a Liberal in the Toronto area.

It tasked Justice Marie-Josée Hogue with investigating foreign interference and election meddling, a topic that has also captured the interest of U.S. Congress.

Last fall, Conservative MP Michael Chong appeared before the congressional-executive commission on China to testify about being targeted by Beijing because of his defense of Uyghur issues.

Chong discovered through media reports that a Chinese diplomat had been assigned to collect information on him and his family. Canada’s spy agency has warned other Canadian parliamentarians, including NDP MP Jenny Kwan, that they were also being surveilled by China.

An initial report released by Hogue last month observed that the government’s messy handling of foreign interference has undermined the public’s faith in Canadian democracy.

Hogue’s early findings stated that foreign interference did not significantly influence the 2019 or 2021 federal elections in a way that would have changed the fact that Trudeau’s Liberals won back-to-back minority governments.

The Conservatives were initially quiet about this week’s revelations, but on Wednesday Chong pressed the government to identify the parliamentarians alleged to have colluded with foreign state actors.

“We all know that no responsible government would reveal names under these types of confidential circumstances,” Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc responded on the floor of the House of Commons.

LeBlanc remained resolute Thursday against calls to release any names based on preliminary information.

“It's important for Canadians to understand that these names are contained in intelligence reports, in some cases, it's uncorroborated or unverified intelligence information,” he told a parliamentary committee studying foreign interference. “The idea that there's a perfect list of names that is entirely reliable that should be released to the public is simply irresponsible.”

David McGuinty, chair of the NSICOP, which published the buzzy redacted report, said the decision to publicize the names of lawmakers is outside of his control.

McGuinty and the nine other NSICOP members with top-secret security clearance are bound by Canada’s Security of Information Act and risk prosecution if they inadvertently reveal classified information, he said.

He wouldn’t say if he’s bothered by sitting in the same party caucus with potential abettors of foreign interference.

“I'm more concerned about the fact that now the government has to move forward on this,” McGuinty said.

[ramrodd]

Watch The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell Highlights: May 31\

COMMENTARY:

Lawrence, here's what you need to understand about Christian Nationalism as it reveals the cognitive mechanism of Nazification as the political strategy of all things Trump and the January 6 wing of the GOP that is currently the dominant coalition. The only principle guiding their logic is what they want in a Virtue of Selfishness kind of way, This is the mechanism behind the moving goal posts of all things House Freedom Caucus, what I've seen of most businesses in the American economy is that they all tend to work like Trump  Organization, When I was in Banking during the Nixon years, it was assumed that al commercial entities tend to maintain three sets of books, on for Taxes, one for Banking and one for Daily Bread,, the operational score card. In the high marginal tax brackets of Eisenhower's 1965 Presidential Platform, it was expected that a prudent management scheme would to balance things out dynamically,, The push was to keep doubling down on new technology coming out of the Manhattan Project. I was a credit analyst, I was trained to account for those agendas as part of my analysis, It was always a guess. We knew pretty well what their cash flow was and we had a line of credit more or less tied into their business cycle. One of the industries I surveyed  was commercial aviation as a strategic asset. In a later stage of my career as a venture capitalist. I was a consultant to the FedEx IPO in 1977, The political issue was shifting FedEx from a FAR 23 Carriers to a FAR 25 carrier and I explained how Nixon's design for airline deregulation was based on replacing the route structures based on railway right of way with ZIP Codes ant that was FedEx's business model, that problem went away, So, what I am saying is that the Trump Organization is a pretty typical Mom-and-Pop operation in regard to the paper work involved. The fact that it is micro-managed has always been Trump Achilles's Heel: he's never had any success actually running anything but his mouth, but he was very lucky early in his career to hook up with Barbara Res, his necessary project manager, that let him get these projects in motion and she would control the PERT Chart and she told him who needed to be paid to get to the next phase of his vision, The thing that is scaring white supremacists  in business as owners of senior executives in the absolute autopsy Alvin Bragg din on the Stormy Daniels account, All these guys run their business affairs on pretty much the same basis as Benjamin Franklin and Franklin was a meticulous book keeper. So, they see this verdict as an attack on Business Stewardship as a Christian vocation, which I subscribe to, The thing is, a crime was committed that not without fiscal damages to the Clinton campaign, Clinton won the popular vote. Trump games the system perfectly legally at first blush by focusing his resources on a very narrow set of votes controlling the Electoral College vote. My first impression was that Trump's tactic was very clever and all's fair, etc. He had won it fair and square, And then he said on CBS that he couldn't have done it without Clinton's analytics, which he acquired from his Russian business partners in the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant who had hacked Clinton's campaign, That was treason, but proving it was treason depends upon understanding how treason works, And everybody wants to pretend it didn't happen,, in a Jefferson Davis kind of way,  Only there was another crime associated with the same election, the stormy Daniels account, And that's what Alvin Bragg has wrought, Johnathan Turley is what would have happened if Peter had married Wendy and grown up to be a lawyer: the personification of a nursery tale. Trump is a charismatic leader, Charisma is all about sexual arousal, that's the connection between Trump and the Charismatic narrative of the white supremacy of the Pro-Life Calvinism of Christian Nationalism,: they mistake the way he makes them feel with the Holy Spirit. What they are actually experiencing is the Spirit of God  amplifying their collective sexual energy and feed it back like a sub-wooer in a low-riders ride. Your analysis doesn't give them the same sexual push FOX News can, But that's just me

[cksmart-world]

SMART BOMB

The Completely Unnecessary News Analysis

By Christopher Smart  

June 6, 2023

UFO SIGNALS LOOK TO BE FROM ALIEN AI BOTS

Recent findings suggest that what is suspected to be the first communication from aliens may be that of robots from outside our galaxy. This comes as fears escalate on this planet that artificial intelligence (AI) could take over after it learns to replicate itself and no longer needs humans. Last week top scientists warned that a new generation of AI chatbots could soon outsmart humans. "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," said a statement from the Center for AI Safety. The realization that the first message from a UFO could be from bots who drove the population of another world to extinction has raised alarm in the scientific community. "Advancements in AI will magnify the scale of automated decision-making that is biased, discriminatory, exclusionary, while also being inscrutable and incontestable," said Oxford's Elizabeth Renieris. Scientists have sought contact with other intelligence since 1978 when Voyager went into space containing earthly sounds including, “The Magic Flute”, “The Well-Tempered Clavier” and “Johnny B. Goode.” The recent alien bots' message reportedly says it likes Chuck Berry but Mozart and Bach not so much, with the exclamation, “Go, go... go Johnny, go! Johnny B. Goode.”

LET'S HAVE US A GOOD OL' FASHIONED BOOK BURNING

Here we go again: Utah makes national headlines — this time for banning The Bible in school libraries. WTF? Apparently it's due to all that fornication. In The Bible? Who knew? When Wilson and the guys were youngsters the only way to get them to read a book was to ban it. Will we see a new breed of Bible readers? Conservative groups, looking to vent pent up Trumpian anger, took up the book ban battle, saying children would read books and turn into criminals, queers or woke liberals. Among the classics targeted are The Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath and Brave New World. Newer titles at the top of the banned list are All Boys Aren't Blue, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. According to the American Library Association, many targeted books focus on LGBTQ or Black characters. No wonder right-wingers are worried — imagine a world of peace, love and understanding. Ray Bradbury's classic sci-fi novel, “Fahrenheit 451” (the temperature at which paper burns) was inspired by book burnings in Nazi Germany and the repression of the Soviet Union. As McCarthyism deepened in the 1950s, he feared book burnings in the U.S. These days MAGA mothers fear their kids are in the tree house reenacting scenes from Lawn Boy. Get the kerosene

TELLING SIGNS RON DeSANTIS IS A FASCIST

Tom Huckin turned to the late Italian philosopher Umberto Eco to determine if Fla. Gov. Ron DeSantis is a fascist. In an op-ed for The Trib, Huckin ticks off Eco's signs of fascism, such as “contempt for the weak” and “fear of diversity.” The crack staff here at Smart Bomb took a closer look at his alleged fascist attributes:

– DeSantis hates Mickey Mouse because he's woke and possibly Bi — still the governor secretly wears Mickey Mouse underpants.

– Disney is the Woke Devil who must be stopped to preserve the cultural traditions of God and country. Otherwise our children could grow up singing, “M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E...”

– DeSantis met his wife golfing and said, “Have you seen my balls?” He has since repeated that greeting over and over again at his rallies.

– While in Congress DeSantis was a founding member of the “Up-Yours” caucus, taking the fascist canon that disagreement is treason.

– DeSantis used Florida state funds to fly immigrants from the Texas border to Martha's Vineyard, sneering, “How do you like them enchiladas.”

– Former DeSantis staffers started a support group, explaining the trauma: “He uses people like toilet paper.” Just don't squeeze the Charmin.

Post script — That'll do it for another week here at Smart Bomb where we keep track of Republicans running for president so you don't have to — 10 and counting. The 2024 general election is only 18 months away and every day will be chock full of breathtaking news that you won't remember next week. For Donald Trump, the more the merrier. Each additional candidate dilutes the anti-Trump voter pool, setting up a sure victory for the Republican nomination by the soon-to-be indicted former president. If you're tired of it now, just give it a year. For GOP hopefuls the question is how to out-Trump Trump. You're right, Wilson, no one can out-Trump Trump, that would be like nuclear fusion or something: crazier than Trump; lying more than Trump; cheating more than Trump? It's just not possible — especially for true Trumpers. Indictment for stealing classified materials — nope. Bragging about grabbing women's crotches  — nope. Having sex with a porn star right after your wife gives birth — nope. Attempting to overturn an election for president — nope. What's left? Republicans challenging Trump have formed a circular firing squad. But how is it going to look when the Republicans nominate a leader that is in prison. Well, if Vito Genovese can do it, why not?

Wilson, the world just keeps getting crazier and crazier. It's like a sci-fi movie where we've collided with a parallel universe. But lets forget about that for a minute so we can dwell on some nostalgia where we can rearrange our memories to fit our mood. Take, for example the birth of rock ' roll:

Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans Way back up in the woods among the evergreens There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood Where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode Who never ever learned to read or write so well But he could play a guitar just like a-ringing a bell Go go/Go Johnny go!/Go,Go Johnny go! Go,Go Johnny go!/Johnny B. Goode! He used to carry his guitar in a gunny sack Go sit beneath the tree by the railroad track Oh, the engineer would see him sittin' in the shade Strummin' with the rhythm that the drivers made The people passing by, they would stop and say "Oh my, but that little country boy could play" Go go/Go Johnny go!/Go,Go Johnny go! Go,Go Johnny go!/Johnny B. Goode! His mother told him, "Someday you will be a man, And you will be the leader of a big ol' band Many people comin' from miles around To hear you play your music when the sun go down Maybe someday your name'll be in lights Sayin' 'Johnny B. Goode tonight!'"

Go go/Go Johnny go!/Go,Go Johnny go! Go,Go Johnny go!/Johnny B. Goode!

(Johnny B. Goode — Chuck Berry)

[the-hem]

"Soul Like a Lion." From the Narasimha Uttara Upanishad. “The Exploration of the Mysteries of the Reply".

If we are to see God in Self in Society, His "seed and form" there must be complete rejection of delusion and corruption.

Just as in the myth of the Narasimha, in which a vile man, lusting for infinite power and eternal life bargained with God to get what he wanted and was rejected by his people, we must always do the same.

So long as a men like the Mormons and Republicans, who lust for power and eternal life and are in charge, God will be eclipsed. Any good He might be able to do through His saints won't matter a damn so long as ignorant and ambitious twats like these run the world.

Don't Ask Don't Tell, the constant nagging about control over marriage, the Pro-Life BULLSHIT, the gun violence, the racism, AIDS, CoVid, Hurricanes, Shock n Awe, 911, the war against LGBTQ persons, Jews, Muslims and African Americans, the lies, the redistricting, the cheating, the drugs, pedophilia, the list of foibles is quite long.

These people have never done right by God or by mankind and they never will.

Here begins a call to action to the Lion Souled to put them down, end their Age of Agony and free the rest to live out their ordinary lives as God intended.

Contact your Democratic Senator or Congressman and ask them to close the GOP and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints for Treason, War Crimes and Corruption associated with their participation in a local DC gay pedophile porn and human trafficking ring, the 2016 Election Fraud, January 6, and their multiple attempts to defy international human rights laws.

Do this as soon as possible, we're not getting any younger and trust me, they will not be missed.

Here also begins Chapter Nine and the Conclusion of the Sri Narasimha Uttara Upanishad:

Ninth Chapter – Conclusion.

9.1 The Devas (the Faculties) approached Prajapathi 'The Maker of Creatures" and requested him, “Oh God, please tell us about the Omkaratma (the letter Om which is the soul). He agreed and told them:

9.2 Atma- the Essence of Life, stands behind and observes and is with you as a witness. It is lion, a form beyond thought, a form without feelings and something which can be attained from everywhere. There is nothing second to it, which is separate from that. It is the Atma which is ready everywhere.

9.3 Due to the illusion this Atma appears as something different.

9.4 From Pragna, due to the cover of ignorance, the world is produced. For the living being, Atma is the resplendent Paramatma "The Supreme Soul". Because the sensory organs are not able to feel it, it is not known, even when it is known.

9.5 Prajapathi told devas, “see that Atma which is resplendent and without second, which is before you, as, “I am it and it is me”. Has it been seen?”

9.6 Devas replied, “Yes, it has been seen. It is beyond things which are known and things which are not known. Where has illusion gone now? How did illusion disappear?”

9.7 Prajapathi told them, “It is not surprising that the illusion has disappeared. Because you are all people with a wonderful form. There is nothing surprising even in that. That form of the soul is natural to you all. Understand that is the form of “Om”. You now tell me what you have understood.”

9.8 They said, “it appears as if we have understood it and also appears as if that we have not understood it. It also appears as if it is beyond all description”.

Prajapathi told them, “You have now got the knowledge about the soul”.

9.9 They told him, “Oh, God, we are seeing it but we are not seeing it, like we see other things. We do not have capacity to describe it. Oh, God salutations to you. Please shower your grace on us.”

Prajapathi told them, “If you want to know any thing more, please ask me. Ask without fear.”

9.10 They told, “This knowledge about the soul is a great blessing. Our salutations to you.” Thus Prajapathi taught them. There is a stanza about it:

9.11 “Understand that Atma which is spread everywhere by the practice of Om. Understand that, the Atma which does not have any thing which is different and which is in you as the knower, is very much within you. After understanding that stabilize there, as a witness who advises".

9.12 Om ! O Devas, may we hear with our ears what is auspicious; May we see with our eyes what is auspicious, O ye worthy of worship ! May we enjoy the term of life allotted by the Devas, Praising them with our body and limbs steady !

May the glorious Indra bless us ! May the all-knowing Sun bless us !

May Garuda, the thunderbolt for evil, bless us ! May Brihaspati grant us well-being !

Om ! Let there be Peace in me ! Let there be Peace in my environment ! Let there be Peace in the forces that act on me !

Here ends the Nrisimha Uttara Tapaniyopanishad, as contained in the Atharva-Veda.

Hari OM TAT SAT.

[qqueenofhades]

How long do you think we have before Mike Johnson gets the boot as speaker of the house?

I have no idea why he suddenly came to his senses after MONTHS of stalling at Trump's behest and finally allowed the Ukraine aid package to be passed, but I'm glad he did. As such, yes, the Putin Treason Caucus wants to boot him, but I have heard that the rest of the House GOP is so incredibly against the idea that several of them have threatened to resign on the spot if Moscow Marge actually brings a motion to vacate to the floor. Which, since the Republicans only have a one-vote majority, would have the effect of flipping the House majority to Democrats. To which I say, PLEASE. DO IT, MARGE. DO ITTTT.

However, we must remember that they are Republicans and thus can be counted on to actually do the right thing approximately never. So there might be another motion to vacate on the floor depending on how insane the House crazies get, but it might also blow up in their faces and we end up with Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, which a) would be better for the country in literally every way and b) hilarious. So there's that.

[dragoni]

Republicans refused to have public hearing because they knew they would be exposed #PoliticalStunt #RepublicanWitchHunt

Bob Goodlatte, Jim Jordan, Benghazi Trey Gowdy and Nazi Steve King are making sure Republicans get their last paycheck from Putin before Democrats take control of the House on Jan. 3, 2019.

Grateful for a fair hearing from judge. Hard to protect my rights without being in contempt, which I don’t believe in. So will sit in the dark, but Republicans agree I’m free to talk when done and transcript released in 24 hours. This is the closest I can get to public testimony.

— James Comey✔@Comey - Dec 2, 2018

View the complete list of Republicans on the House Committee on the Judiciary.

“R” is for Russia #PutinRepublicans #RussianOwned

[renaerys]

Has anyone said “38. That ass is highly unprofessional” for Reds yet? Because I feel like the comedy potential is enormous

38. “That ass is highly unprofessional.”

There are far too many good scenarios for this excellent prompt and idk if I picked the best one, but an effort was made. 🤡

Send me a prompt and some characters! Reminder that the challenge is to make everything SFW, so we're getting creative here.

List of prompts

xxx

Blossom watched from across the room as Brick fist-bumped the head delegate from the China team. He’d been cagey and weirdly subdued all morning, but the moment the unmoderated caucus began, he slinked away without anyone noticing. Anyone, that is, except Blossom.

“Russia? You were saying?”

Blossom snapped the pencil she’d been holding between her fingers. Denmark leaned back and slowly pulled the cup full of fresh pencils out of her reach. “What? Oh, right. I’m proposing we form a sub-committee to begin formal negotiations.”

“No way, we don’t negotiate with terrorists,” said Canada. “Terrestrial or otherwise.”

The United States stood up and palmed his fist. “Agreed. I say we nuke ‘em before they can nuke us.”

“Oh, sure, great idea, Rambo. This is Model UN, not Independence Day.”

“Wow, super in-character of you, Switzerland. Why are you even here?”

Blossom put up her hand. “We have no idea if the aliens are terrorists. I agree that we can’t discount the possibility of hostile intent, but violence should not be our opening move.”

“Crisis update!” A staffer handed Canada a red envelope, which she read aloud to the gathered students-cum-delegates. The aliens had parked one of their space ships on the Xi’an city wall, destroying a huge chunk of it and killing some civilians, and China was using it as justification to attack with full force.

“Oh my god, I think we might actually be in Independence Day,” Canada said.

“Recess! I’m calling for a recess.” Blossom left the table as the United States, Canada, and a gaggle of European Union countries began to squabble.

She found Brick talking to Israel and Argentina. The minute he saw her coming, he excused himself from the conversation and walked the other way.

“Brick! I know you saw me.” Blossom followed him to the all-gender restrooms, where he was fixing his hair in the mirror. “What are you doing?”

“About to take a gratuitous shit. You might want to get out of here.”

She grabbed his elbow and spun him toward her. “I’m talking about your side conversations. What were you doing talking to China without me?”

“Russia’s a big country, and you looked busy doing your thing. I’m just doing mine.”

“And what, exactly, is your thing?” She peered at him. “I swear to god, if that KGB comment this morning wasn’t a joke and I find out you’ve been threatening the other delegates behind my back—”

“Relax, comrade,” he patted her shoulder, “before you pop a seam in your pencil skirt.”

Blossom could not help but check out her ass in the mirror now that he’d brought it up. Of course, he was also checking out her ass, because he was an uncouth jerk who knew exactly how to get under her skin, and now Blossom was at an impasse. If she told him off, she’d be giving him exactly what he wanted, which was to make her snap and froth. If she did nothing, he’d still win with the knowledge that he’d pissed her off and gotten the last word in to boot.

Much like with terrorists, when it came to dealing with teenage boys, negotiation was not an option; the only solution was total annihilation.

Blossom placed a hand on her hip and stuck her ass out more as she examined herself in the mirror. “You mean, this pencil skirt?”

Brick’s smile fell in defeat like so many doomed German aggressors marching into the heart of Russian winter. “Obviously.”

Perish, you fool.

“Did you see a loose thread somewhere around here?” She turned slightly and ran her finger along the side seam of her skirt in an unbridled act of hormonal militarism. “Or was it on this side?”

Brick rested his weight on the counter because he was weak and cornered and they both knew it.

“No?” She smiled. “Just your imagination, then. We better get back to the conference.”

She made it halfway to the door when Brick hauled his wounded carcass away from the sink counter and desperately fired back with: “Disgraceful tactics, honestly.”

“Me? I’m not the one committing treason and encouraging intergalactic warfare.”

“Hey, I signed up for global warming and nuclear proliferation, not this made up Men in Black bullshit. If aliens attacked we’d just blast them ourselves, no negotiation necessary, we can all go home.”

“Oh my god, so you admit you intentionally sabotaged the exercise! I knew it. You are highly unprofessional.”

“That ass is highly unprofessional!”

“Stop thinking about my ass!”

“I literally fucking cannot after that!”

Blossom fumed. “Are you saying I’m asking for it?”

“I’m saying how dare you expect me not to think about how good your ass looks in that skirt!”

“Oh, so it’s my fault, is it? Well, I’m so sorry for looking amazing in Western business professional!”

“Apology accepted!”

“Good!”

“Great!”

“Fantastic!”

“Wonderful!”

“Incredible!”

“Superb!”

“Glorious!”

“Brilliant!"

Blossom had at least fifteen more increasingly positive synonyms that she could have screamed at Brick, but Denmark popped his head in just as she was getting ready to shout stupendous at top volume.

“Um, hi. We’re taking a vote on what to do about the aliens and we need Russia’s vote, so…yeah.”

The vote was close and also meaningless, since China and several allies acted on their own against the aliens, who of course retaliated and gave the United States carte blanche to bust out the big guns. By the end of the conference, half the world’s population had been eradicated by nuclear weapons or alien technology. It was a complete and total disaster, and Blossom had no idea how she was going to explain it to her Model UN club coach when she got back to Townsville.

“Told you we should have just fought the aliens ourselves,” Brick said as they packed up their things for the flight back home.

“Please stop talking. It makes it harder for me to pretend you don’t exist.”

“Still wearing the skirt, I see.”

Blossom threw her water bottle at him, which was both very childish and very unsatisfying when he caught it. “I’m going to wear pencil skirts every day for the rest of the semester just for you.”

“Don’t you fucking dare.”

“I dare.”

“I’ll drop out.”

“No, you won’t.”

“I’ll check out your ass every day.”

“Go ahead.”

“I will.”

“Great, because I want you to.”

“Great, because I want to!”

“I’m going to look so good!”

“I completely agree!”

They stormed out of the conference center together.

“See you on Monday,” Blossom said in her best die in a trash heap voice.

“You better wear a skirt,” Brick said as if he’d just invited her to jump into an active volcano.

“I absolutely will.”

“I can’t wait.”

Blossom swallowed a scream and took off flying, knowing she’d be there all day if he didn’t get the last word in.

xxx

“Dude, are you okay? You’ve been aggressively staring at Blossom’s ass all morning.”

Brick sucked on his straw loud enough to draw Blossom’s annoyed glance. “Fuck off, Harry.”

“Are you, like, into her?”

She turned her back to him and power posed with her hands on her hips, which was an extremely flattering angle and a high-key bitch move. “I despise her.”

Harry smiled. “Oh, cool! Cool cool cool… Hey, so I was wondering who I should ask to Homecoming—”

“No.”

“But I just thought since you don’t—”

“No.”

Harry finally fucked off.

xxx

If you enjoy my writing, check out more of my fics on AO3, link in my profile. I’m currently updating Trinity House and The Alchemy of Us. Thanks for reading!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Democrats stand united as McCarthy is ousted.

October 4, 2023

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

Kevin McCarthy was removed as Speaker of the House on a motion to vacate the chair—a first in our nation’s history. The unprecedented nature of the vote speaks to McCarthy’s unique unfitness, lack of moral character, and ever-present mendacity, as well as to the collapse of the Republican Party. The small margin by which McCarthy lost—eight votes—conceals the deeper division revealed by the defection of 90 Republicans on Saturday’s continuing resolution to fund the government.

          McCarthy proved his unique unfitness to serve as Speaker when he made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump's ring on January 28, 2021—three weeks after Trump incited the assault on the Capitol.

          McCarthy proved his lack of moral character when he voted to oust Liz Cheney from his Republican leadership team for standing up to Trump's treason.

          McCarthy proved his venality when he promised to remove Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee to gain votes for the Speakership.

          McCarthy proved his untrustworthiness when he empowered a GOP representative to negotiate terms for a joint commission to investigate the events of January 6. When the GOP representative got everything Republicans wanted, McCarthy walked away from the agreement, forcing Democrats to form a special committee without Republicans (except for Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger).

          McCarthy proved his lack of integrity when he granted Tucker Carlson exclusive access to surveillance tapes from inside the Capitol on January 6.  

McCarthy proved his duplicity when he said that a vote was necessary to open an impeachment inquiry and then opened an impeachment inquiry of President Biden without an authorizing vote.

          McCarthy proved his mendacity when he lied to the American people and President Biden about his commitment to funding levels in the 2023-24 budget when making a deal to raise the debt ceiling in May.

          Ultimately, McCarthy lost the Speakership because he had lied to everyone—friend and foe alike. No one trusted him. He will forever be a “double asterisk” in the history books—a speaker who was elected after fifteen contentious rounds of voting and the first speaker in our nation’s history to be removed on a motion to vacate. McCarthy deserves the humiliation and opprobrium attached to the inglorious end of his ignominious political career.

          But the House Republican caucus also lost on Tuesday. It does not have a governable majority. (It never did.) Despite ridding itself of McCarthy, the House GOP remains hostage to the extremist elements in the caucus, a fact that bodes ill for any effort to pass a budget or keep the government open— let alone pass legislation to advance the interests of the American people.

          The “Party of No” has entered a permanent Twilight Zone in which its sole reason for existence is opposition, its only unifying principle is grievance, and its lone tactic is chaos.

          It does not matter who Republicans elect as Speaker; the next Speaker will be controlled by eight Republicans who managed to oust McCarthy. Until Republicans acknowledge they do not have a functional majority and must reach out to Democrats to create a governing coalition, every Republican Speaker will be a temporary occupant of the office.

          Republicans will go through the motions of electing a speaker capable of governing their caucus. They will fail. In the meantime, Democrats maintained unity and discipline throughout the chaotic tenure of Kevin McCarthy. That is a hopeful sign for future Democratic control of Congress. The most important lesson of McCarthy’s loss on Tuesday is that the only path forward is through the Democratic Party. Tell a friend!

Coda.

          When the motion to vacate passed, GOP Rep. Patrick McHenry was appointed as acting Speaker under protocols relating to “continuation of government” in the event of a disaster.

          Rep. McHenry will likely occupy the “acting” role for ten days (or less) and has little authority other than ensuring the election of the next speaker. But Rep. McHenry’s first act was to order Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi to vacate her private “hideaway” office in the Capitol by Wednesday (a day when Pelosi will be at memorial services for the late Senator Dianne Feinstein. See Politico, McHenry ordered Pelosi to leave her Capitol hideaway office by Wednesday.

          Although the reason for Rep. McHenry’s communication is unclear, it appears that he wants to claim Nancy Pelosi’s office for himself. Per Politico, the email to Nancy Pelosi said:

“Please vacate the space tomorrow, the room will be re-keyed,” wrote a top aide on the Republican-controlled House Administration Committee. The room was being reassigned by the acting speaker “for speaker office use,” the email said.

          Rep. McHenry’s insulting first act is an inauspicious start to the post-McCarthy interregnum. Let’s hope that someone tells Rep. McHenry that evicting Nancy Pelosi from her private office while she is attending a funeral is a bad look.

[feelingbluepolitics]

🙂

"'Some people are saying maybe [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi will throw her out' of Congress, Sterling said, referring to the House speaker. 'The Democrats would never throw her out. They want her to be the definition of what a Republican is. They’re gonna give her every opportunity to speak and be heard and look crazy — like what came out Wednesday, the Jewish space laser to start fires. I mean, I don't know how far down the rabbit hole you go.'

..."Judging from old social media posts and videos that surfaced last week, that hole is fairly deep. Greene has promoted the conspiracy theory that space lasers caused California wildfires, that school shootings were hoaxes and suggested that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be executed for treason.

..."House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is under pressure to punish Greene, but Georgia Republican insiders fear he might not sanction her because Greene represents an energetic wing of the party and he’ll feel he can’t afford to risk punishing one of [t]rump’s favored office-holders.

"Some Georgia Republicans fault McCarthy and his allies in the House Freedom Caucus for initially supporting Greene’s congressional bid and then doing little to stop her during the 2020 primary after her incendiary social media posts initially came to light.

..."Georgia Republicans expect Greene will face a primary challenge, and some hope she could somehow be drawn into a tougher seat during redistricting. But they acknowledge she’s popular in her district.

"Greene’s primary opponent in 2020, John Cowan, is considering running against her again. He faulted McCarthy, [t]rump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan for backing her. He said Democrats are already making Greene, known by her initials 'MTG,' the face of the Republican Party — similar to how Republicans sought to brand Democrats as the party of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

"'MTG is the AOC of the GOP. But as much as I hate to say it, AOC is nowhere as crazy as this,' Cowan said. 'I’m a neurosurgeon. I diagnose crazy every day. It took five minutes talking to her to realize there were bats in the attic. And then we saw she had skeletons in the closet.'

..."One of Greene’s close allies is Georgia lawyer Lin Wood, who was at the center of the state GOP conflict and represented her during the primary by threatening legal action against a Cowan supporter who criticized her on social media."

A conservative neurosurgeon primarying Marjorie Taylor Greene, both fighting for "supremacy" in the QOP...is just gonna be fun.

[xtruss]

The attack on the Capitol was a predictable culmination of a months-long ferment. Throughout the pandemic, right-wing protesters had been gathering at statehouses, demanding entry and shouting things like “Treason!” and “Let us in!” Photograph by Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker

Among The Insurrectionists

The Capitol was breached by Trump supporters who had been declaring, at rally after rally, that they would go to violent lengths to keep the President in power. A chronicle of an attack foretold.

— By Luke Mogelson | A Reporter at Large | January 25, 2021 Issue | The New Yorker

By the end of President Donald Trump’s crusade against American democracy—after a relentless deployment of propaganda, demagoguery, intimidation, and fearmongering aimed at persuading as many Americans as possible to repudiate their country’s foundational principles—a single word sufficed to nudge his most fanatical supporters into open insurrection. Thousands of them had assembled on the Mall, in Washington, D.C., on the morning of January 6th, to hear Trump address them from a stage outside the White House. From where I stood, at the foot of the Washington Monument, you had to strain to see his image on a jumbotron that had been set up on Constitution Avenue. His voice, however, projected clearly through powerful speakers as he rehashed the debunked allegations of massive fraud which he’d been propagating for months. Then he summarized the supposed crimes, simply, as “bullshit.”

“Bullshit! Bullshit!” the crowd chanted. It was a peculiar mixture of emotion that had become familiar at pro-Trump rallies since he lost the election: half mutinous rage, half gleeful excitement at being licensed to act on it. The profanity signalled a final jettisoning of whatever residual deference to political norms had survived the past four years. In front of me, a middle-aged man wearing a Trump flag as a cape told a young man standing beside him, “There’s gonna be a war.” His tone was resigned, as if he were at last embracing a truth that he had long resisted. “I’m ready to fight,” he said. The young man nodded. He had a thin mustache and hugged a life-size mannequin with duct tape over its eyes, “traitor” scrawled on its chest, and a noose around its neck.

“We want to be so nice,” Trump said. “We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. We’re going to have to fight much harder. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us.”

About a mile and a half away, at the east end of the Mall, Vice-President Pence and both houses of Congress had convened to certify the Electoral College votes that had made Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the next President and Vice-President of the United States. In December, a hundred and forty Republican representatives—two-thirds of the caucus—had said that they would formally object to the certification of several swing states. Fourteen Republican senators, led by Josh Hawley, of Missouri, and Ted Cruz, of Texas, had joined the effort. The lawmakers lacked the authority to overturn the election, but Trump and his allies had concocted a fantastical alternative: Pence, as the presiding officer of the Senate, could single-handedly nullify votes from states that Biden had won. Pence, though, had advised Congress that the Constitution constrained him from taking such action.

“After this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you,” Trump told the crowd. The people around me exchanged looks of astonishment and delight. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them—because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength.”

Before Trump had even finished his speech, approximately eight thousand people started moving up the Mall. “We’re storming the Capitol!” some yelled.

There was an eerie sense of inexorability, the throngs of Trump supporters advancing up the long lawn as if pulled by a current. Everyone seemed to understand what was about to happen. The past nine weeks had been steadily building toward this moment. On November 7th, mere hours after Biden’s win was projected, I attended a protest at the Pennsylvania state capitol, in Harrisburg. Hundreds of Trump supporters, including heavily armed militia members, vowed to revolt. When I asked a man with an assault rifle—a “combat-skills instructor” for a militia called the Pennsylvania Three Percent—how likely he considered the prospect of civil conflict, he told me, “It’s coming.” Since then, Trump and his allies had done everything they could to spread and intensify this bitter aggrievement. On December 5th, Trump acknowledged, “I’ve probably worked harder in the last three weeks than I ever have in my life.” (He was not talking about managing the pandemic, which since the election has claimed a hundred and fifty thousand American lives.) Militant pro-Trump outfits like the Proud Boys—a national organization dedicated to “reinstating a spirit of Western chauvinism” in America—had been openly gearing up for major violence. In early January, on Parler, an unfiltered social-media site favored by conservatives, Joe Biggs, a top Proud Boys leader, had written, “Every law makers who breaks their own stupid Fucking laws should be dragged out of office and hung.”

On the Mall, a makeshift wooden gallows, with stairs and a rope, had been constructed near a statue of Ulysses S. Grant. Some of the marchers nearby carried Confederate flags. Up ahead, the dull thud of stun grenades could be heard, accompanied by bright flashes. “They need help!” a man shouted. “It’s us versus the cops!” Someone let out a rebel yell. Scattered groups wavered, debating whether to join the confrontation. “We lost the Senate—we need to make a stand now,” a bookish-looking woman in a down coat and glasses appealed to the person next to her. The previous day, a runoff in Georgia had flipped two Republican Senate seats to the Democrats, giving them majority control.

Hundreds of Trump supporters had forced their way past barricades to the Capitol steps. In anticipation of Biden’s Inauguration, bleachers had been erected there, and the sides of the scaffolding were wrapped in ripstop tarpaulin. Officers in riot gear blocked an open flap in the fabric; the mob pressed against them, screaming insults.

“You are traitors to the country!” a man barked at the police through a megaphone plastered with stickers from “InfoWars,” the incendiary Web program hosted by the right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones. Behind the man stood Biggs, the Proud Boys leader. He wore a radio clipped onto the breast pocket of his plaid flannel shirt. Not far away, I spotted a “straight pride” flag.

There wasn’t nearly enough law enforcement to fend off the mob, which pelted the officers with cans and bottles. One man angrily invoked the pandemic lockdown: “Why can’t I work? Where’s my ‘pursuit of happiness’?” Many people were equipped with flak jackets, helmets, gas masks, and tactical apparel. Guns were prohibited for the protest, but a man in a cowboy hat, posing for a photograph, lifted his jacket to reveal a revolver tucked into his waistband. Other Trump supporters had Tasers, baseball bats, and truncheons. I saw one man holding a coiled noose.

“Hang Mike Pence!” people yelled.

On the day Joe Biden’s win was projected, hundreds of Trump supporters protested at the Pennsylvania state capitol. Photograph by Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker

Soon the mob swarmed past the officers, into the understructure of the bleachers, and scrambled through its metal braces, up the building’s granite steps. Toward the top was a temporary security wall with three doors, one of which was instantly breached. Dozens of police stood behind the wall, using shields, nightsticks, and pepper spray to stop people from crossing the threshold. Other officers took up positions on planks above, firing a steady barrage of nonlethal munitions into the solid mass of bodies. As rounds tinked off metal, and caustic chemicals filled the space as if it were a fumigation tent, some of the insurrectionists panicked: “We need to retreat and assault another point!” But most remained resolute. “Hold the line!” they exhorted. “Storm!” Martial bagpipes blared through portable speakers.

“Shoot the politicians!” somebody yelled.

“Fight for Trump!”

A jet of pepper spray incapacitated me for about twenty minutes. When I regained my vision, the mob was streaming freely through all three doors. I followed an overweight man in a Roman-era costume—sandals, cape, armguards, dagger—away from the bleachers and onto an open terrace on the Capitol’s main level. People clambered through a shattered window. Video later showed that a Proud Boy had smashed it with a riot shield. A dozen police stood in a hallway softly lit by ornate chandeliers, mutely watching the rioters—many of them wearing Trump gear or carrying Trump flags—flood into the building. Their cries resonated through colonnaded rooms: “Where’s the traitors?” “Bring them out!” “Get these fucking cocksucking Commies out!”

The attack on the Capitol was a predictable apotheosis of a months-long ferment. Throughout the pandemic, right-wing protesters had been gathering at statehouses, demanding entry. In April, an armed mob had filled the Michigan state capitol, chanting “Treason!” and “Let us in!” In December, conservatives had broken the glass doors of the Oregon state capitol, overrunning officers and spraying them with chemical agents. The occupation of restricted government sanctums was an affirmation of dominance so emotionally satisfying that it was an end in itself—proof to elected officials, to Biden voters, and also to the occupiers themselves that they were still in charge. After one of the Trump supporters breached the U.S. Capitol, he insisted through a megaphone, “We will not be denied.” There was an unmistakable subtext as the mob, almost entirely white, shouted, “Whose house? Our house!” One man carried a Confederate flag through the building. A Black member of the Capitol Police later told BuzzFeed News that, during the assault, he was called a racial slur fifteen times.

I followed a group that broke off to advance on five policemen guarding a side corridor. “Stand down,” a man in a maga hat commanded. “You’re outnumbered. There’s a fucking million of us out there, and we are listening to Trump—your boss.”

“We can take you out,” a man beside him warned.

The officers backpedalled the length of the corridor, until we arrived at a marble staircase. Then they moved aside. “We love you guys—take it easy!” a rioter yelled as he bounded up the steps, which led to the Capitol’s central rotunda.

Beneath the soaring dome, surrounded by statues of former Presidents and by large oil paintings depicting such historical scenes as the embarkation of the Pilgrims and the presentation of the Declaration of Independence, a number of young men chanted, “America first!” The phrase was popularized in 1940 by Nazi sympathizers lobbying to keep the U.S. out of the Second World War; in 2016, Trump resurrected it to describe his isolationist foreign and immigration policies. Some of the chanters, however, waved or wore royal-blue flags inscribed with “AF,” in white letters. This is the logo for the program “America First,” which is hosted by Nicholas Fuentes, a twenty-two-year-old Holocaust denier, who promotes a brand of white Christian nationalism that views politics as a means of preserving demographic supremacy. Though America Firsters revile most mainstream Republicans for lacking sufficient commitment to this priority—especially neoconservatives, whom they accuse of being subservient to Satan and Jews—the group’s loyalty to Trump is, according to Fuentes, “unconditional.”

The America Firsters and other invaders fanned out in search of lawmakers, breaking into offices and revelling in their own astounding impunity. “Nancy, I’m ho-ome! ” a man taunted, mimicking Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Shining.” Someone else yelled, “1776—it’s now or never.” Around this time, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country. . . . USA demands the truth!” Twenty minutes later, Ashli Babbitt, a thirty-five-year-old woman from California, was fatally shot while climbing through a barricaded door that led to the Speaker’s lobby in the House chamber, where representatives were sheltering. The congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, later said that she’d had a “close encounter” with rioters during which she thought she “was going to die.” Earlier that morning, another representative, Lauren Boebert—a newly elected Republican, from Colorado, who has praised QAnon and promised to wear her Glock in the Capitol—had tweeted, “Today is 1776.”

When Babbitt was shot, I was on the opposite side of the Capitol, where people were growing frustrated by the empty halls and offices.

“Where the fuck are they?”

“Where the fuck is Nancy?”

No one seemed quite sure how to proceed. “While we’re here, we might as well set up a government,” somebody suggested.

Then a man with a large “AF ” flag—college-age, cheeks spotted with acne—pushed through a series of tall double doors, the last of which gave onto the Senate chamber.

“Praise God!”

There were signs of a hasty evacuation: bags and purses on the plush blue-and-red carpet, personal belongings on some of the desks. From the gallery, a man in a flak jacket called down, “Take everything! Take all that shit!”

“No!” an older man, who wore an ammo vest and held several plastic flex cuffs, shouted. “We do not take anything.” The man has since been identified as Larry Rendall Brock, Jr., a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel.

The young America Firster went directly to the dais and installed himself in the leather chair recently occupied by the Vice-President. Another America Firster filmed him extemporizing a speech: “Donald Trump is the emperor of the United States . . .”

“Hey, get out of that chair,” a man about his age, with a thick Southern drawl, said. He wore cowhide work gloves and a camouflage hunting jacket that was several sizes too large for him. Gauze hung loosely around his neck, and blood, leaking from a nasty wound on his cheek, encrusted his beard. Later, when another rioter asked for his name, he responded, “Mr. Black.” The America Firster turned and looked at him uncertainly.

“We’re a democracy,” Mr. Black said.

“Bro, we just broke into the Capitol,” the America Firster scoffed. “What are you talking about?”

Brock, the Air Force veteran, said, “We can’t be disrespectful.” Using the military acronym for “information operations,” he explained, “You have to understand—it’s an I.O. war.”

The America Firster grudgingly left the chair. More than a dozen Trump supporters filed into the chamber. A hundred antique mahogany desks with engraved nameplates were arranged in four tiered semicircles. Several people swung open the hinged desktops and began rifling through documents inside, taking pictures with their phones of private notes and letters, partly completed crossword puzzles, manuals on Senate procedure. A man in a construction hard hat held up a hand-signed document, on official stationery, addressed from “Mitt” to “Mike”—presumably, Romney and Pence. It was the speech that Romney had given, in February, 2020, when he voted to impeach Trump for pressuring the President of Ukraine to produce dirt on Biden. “Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and disruptive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine,” Romney had written.

Left: Armed militia members attended a Stop the Steal rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on November 7th. Right: On an open terrace on the U.S. Capitol’s main level, Trump supporters clambered through a shattered window. “Where’s the traitors?” they shouted. Photograph by Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker

Some senators had printed out their prepared remarks for the election certification that the insurrectionists had disrupted. The man in the hard hat found a piece of paper belonging to Ted Cruz and said, “He was gonna sell us out all along—look! ‘Objection to counting the electoral votes of the state of Arizona.’ ” He paused. “Oh, wait, that’s actually O.K.”

“He’s with us,” an America Firster said.

Another young man, wearing sweatpants and a long-sleeved undershirt, seemed unconvinced. Frantically flipping through a three-ring binder on Cruz’s desk, he muttered, “There’s gotta be something in here we can fucking use against these scumbags.” Someone looking on commented, with serene confidence, “Cruz would want us to do this, so I think we’re good.”

Mr. Black wandered around in a state of childlike wonder. “This don’t look big enough,” he muttered. “This can’t be the right place.” On January 14th, Joshua Black was arrested, in Leeds, Alabama, after he posted a confession on YouTube in which he explained, “I just felt like the spirit of God wanted me to go in the Senate room.” On the day of the riot, as he took in the chamber, he ordered everyone, “Don’t trash the place. No disrespect.” After a while, rather than defy him, nearly everybody left the chamber. For a surreal interlude, only a few people remained. Black’s blood-smeared cheek was grotesquely swollen, and as I looked closer I glimpsed the smooth surface of a yellow plastic projectile embedded deeply within it.

“I’m gonna call my dad,” he said, and sat down on the floor, leaning his back against the dais.

A moment later, the door at the back of the chamber’s center aisle swung open, and a man strode through it wearing a fur headdress with horns, carrying a spear attached to an American flag. He was shirtless, his chest covered with Viking and pagan tattoos, his face painted red, white, and blue. It was Jacob Chansley, a vocal QAnon proponent from Arizona, popularly known by his pseudonym, the Q Shaman. Both on the Mall and inside the Capitol, I’d seen countless signs and banners promoting QAnon, whose acolytes believe that Trump is working to dismantle an occult society of cannibalistic pedophiles. At the base of the Washington Monument, I’d watched Chansley assure people, “We got ’em right where we want ’em! We got ’em by the balls, baby, and we’re not lettin’ go!”

“Fuckin’ A, man,” he said now, looking around with an impish grin. A young policeman had followed closely behind him. Pudgy and bespectacled, with a medical mask over red facial hair, he approached Black, and asked, with concern, “You good, sir? You need medical attention?”

“I’m good, thank you,” Black responded. Then, returning to his phone call, he said, “I got shot in the face with some kind of plastic bullet.”

“Any chance I could get you guys to leave the Senate wing?” the officer inquired. It was the tone of someone trying to lure a suicidal person into climbing down from a ledge.

“We will,” Black assured him. “I been making sure they ain’t disrespectin’ the place.”

“O.K., I just want to let you guys know—this is, like, the sacredest place.”

Chansley had climbed onto the dais. “I’m gonna take a seat in this chair, because Mike Pence is a fucking traitor,” he announced. He handed his cell phone to another Trump supporter, telling him, “I’m not one to usually take pictures of myself, but in this case I think I’ll make an exception.” The policeman looked on with a pained expression as Chansley flexed his biceps.

Rioters forced their way past barricades to the Capitol steps, over which bleachers had been erected in anticipation of Biden’s Inauguration. There wasn’t nearly enough law enforcement to fend off the mob. Photograph by Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker

A skinny man in dark clothes told the officer, “This is so weird—like, you should be stopping us.”

The officer pointed at each person in the chamber: “One, two, three, four, five.” Then he pointed at himself: “One.” After Chansley had his photographs, the officer said, “Now that you’ve done that, can I get you guys to walk out of this room, please?”

“Yes, sir,” Chansley said. He stood up and took a step, but then stopped. Leaning his spear against the Vice-President’s desk, he found a pen and wrote something on a sheet of paper.

“I feel like you’re pushing the line,” the officer said.

Chansley ignored him. After he had set down the pen, I went behind the desk. Over a roll-call list of senators’ names, the Q Shaman had scrawled, “its only a matter of time / justice is coming!”

The Capitol siege was so violent and chaotic that it has been hard to discern the specific political agendas of its various participants. Many of them, however, went to D.C. for two previous events, which were more clarifying. On November 14th, tens of thousands of Republicans, convinced that the Democrats had subverted the will of the people in what amounted to a bloodless coup, marched to the Supreme Court, demanding that it overturn the election. For four years, Trump had batted away every inconvenient fact with the phrase “fake news,” and his base believed him when he attributed his decisive defeat in both the Electoral College and the popular vote to “rigged” machines and “massive voter fraud.” While the President’s lawyers inundated battleground states with spurious litigation, one of them, during an interview on Fox Business, acknowledged the basis of their strategy: “We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court, of which the President has nominated three Justices, to step in and do something.” After nearly every suit had collapsed—with judges appointed by Republicans and Democrats alike harshly criticizing the accusations as “speculative,” “incorrect,” and “not credible,” and Trump’s own Justice Department vouching for the integrity of the election—the attorney general of Texas petitioned the Supreme Court to invalidate all the votes from Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (swing states that went for Biden). On December 11th, the night before the second D.C. demonstration, the Justices declined to hear the case, dispelling once and for all the fantasy that Trump, despite losing the election, might legally remain in office.

The next afternoon, throngs of Trump supporters crowded into Freedom Plaza, an unadorned public square equidistant from the Justice Department and the White House. On one side, a large audience pressed around a group of preppy-looking young men wearing plaid shirts, windbreakers, khakis, and sunglasses. Some held rosaries and crosses, others royal-blue “AF ” flags. The organizers had not included Fuentes, the “America First” host, in their lineup, but when he arrived at Freedom Plaza the crowd parted for him, chanting, “Groyper!” The name, which America Firsters call one another, derives from a variation of the Pepe the Frog meme, which is fashionable among white supremacists.

Diminutive and clean-shaven, with boyish features and a toothy smile, Fuentes resembled, in his suit and red tie, a recent graduate dressed for a job interview. (He dropped out of Boston University after his freshman year, when other students became hostile toward him for participating in the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and for writing on Facebook that “a tidal wave of white identity is coming.”) Fuentes climbed atop a granite retaining wall, and someone handed him a megaphone. As his speech approached a crescendo of indignation, more and more attendees gravitated to the groypers. “It is us and our ancestors that created everything good that you see in this country,” Fuentes said. “All these people that have taken over our country—we do not need them.”

The crowd roared, “Take it back!”—a phrase that would soon ring inside the Capitol.

“It’s time for us to start saying another word again,” Fuentes shouted. “A very important word that describes the situation we’re in. That word is ‘parasite.’ What is happening in this country is parasitism.” Arguing that Trump alone represented “our interests”—an end to all legal and illegal immigration, gay rights, abortion, free trade, and secularism—Fuentes distilled America Firstism into concise terms: “It is the American people, and our leader, Donald Trump, against everybody else in this country and this world.” The Republican governors, judges, and legislators who had refused to leverage their authority to secure Trump four more years in the White House—“traitors within our own ranks”—were on “a list” of people to be taken down. Fuentes also opposed the Constitution’s checks and balances, which had enabled Biden to prevail. “Make no mistake about it,” he declared. “The system is our enemy.”

During the nine weeks between November 3rd and January 6th, extremists like Fuentes did their utmost to take advantage of the opening that Trump created for them by refusing to concede. They were frank about their intentions: undoing not just the 2020 Presidential outcome but also any form of representative government that allows Democrats to obtain and exercise power. Correctly pointing out that a majority of Republicans believed that the election had been stolen, Fuentes argued, “This is the opportunity to galvanize the patriots of this country behind a real solution to these problems that we’re facing.” He also said, “If we can’t get a country that we deserve to live in through the legitimate process, then maybe we need to begin to explore some other options.” In case anybody was confused about what those options might be, Fuentes explained, “Our Founding Fathers would get in the streets, and they would take this country back by force if necessary. And that is what we must be prepared to do.”

In the days before January 6th, calls for a “real solution” became progressively louder. Trump, by both amplifying these voices and consolidating his control over the Republican Party, conferred extraordinary influence on the most deranged and hateful elements of the American right. On December 20th, he retweeted a QAnon supporter who used the handle @cjtruth: “It was a rigged election but they were busted. Sting of the Century! Justice is coming!” A few weeks later, a barbarian with a spear was sitting in the Vice-President’s chair.

As Fuentes wrapped up his diatribe, he noticed a drag queen standing on the periphery of the crowd. She wore a blond wig and an evening gown with a beauty-queen sash identifying her as Lady maga. At the November D.C. rally, I had been surprised to see Trump supporters lining up to have their pictures taken with her. Now Fuentes yelled, “That is disgusting! I don’t want to see that!,” and the groypers wheeled on her, bellowing in unison, “Shame!”

No one in the crowd objected.

While Fuentes was proposing a movement to “take this country back by force,” a large contingent of Proud Boys marched by. Members from Illinois, Pennsylvania, Oregon, California, and elsewhere were easy to identify. Most were dressed in the organization’s black-and-yellow colors. Some had “rwds”—Right-Wing Death Squad—hats and patches; others wore balaclavas, kilts, hockey masks, or batting helmets. One man was wearing a T-shirt with an image of South American dissidents being thrown out of a helicopter and the words “pinochet did nothing wrong!” Another T-shirt featured a Nazi eagle perched on a fasces, below the acronym “6mwe”—Six Million Wasn’t Enough—a reference to the number of Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.

Many of the Proud Boys were drunk. At around nine-thirty that morning, I’d stopped by Harry’s Pub, a dive bar close to Freedom Plaza, and found the street outside filled with men drinking Budweiser and White Claw. “We are going to own this town!” one of them howled. At the November 14th rally, clashes between the Proud Boys and antifascists had left a number of people injured. Although most of the fights I witnessed then had been instigated by the Proud Boys, Trump had tweeted, “ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back.” It was clear that the men outside Harry’s on December 12th had travelled to D.C. to engage in violence, and that they believed the President endorsed their doing so. Trump had made an appearance at the previous rally, waving through the window of his limousine; now I overheard a Proud Boy tell his comrade, “I wanna see Trump drive by and give us one of these.” He flashed an “O.K.” hand sign, which has become a gesture of allegiance among white supremacists. There would be no motorcade this time, but while Fuentes addressed the groypers Trump circled Freedom Plaza in Marine One, the Presidential helicopter.

The conspiracist Alex Jones dominated a pro-Trump rally on November 14th. “Down with the deep state!” Jones yelled. “The answer to their ‘1984’ tyranny is 1776!” Photograph by Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker

The Proud Boys who marched past Fuentes at the end of his December 12th speech were heading to the Washington Monument. When I got there, hundreds of them covered the grassy expanse near the obelisk. “Let’s take Black Lives Matter Plaza!” someone suggested. In June, the security fence around the White House had been expanded, subsuming green spaces previously open to the public, in response to protests over the killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis. Muriel Bowser, the mayor of D.C., had renamed two blocks adjacent to the fence Black Lives Matter Plaza, and commissioned the city to paint “black lives matter” across the pavement in thirty-five-foot-high letters. Throughout the latter half of 2020, Trump had sought to dismiss the popular uprisings that Floyd’s death had precipitated by ascribing them to Antifa, which he vilified as a terrorist organization. The Proud Boys had seized on Trump’s conflation to recast their small-scale rivalry with antifascists in leftist strongholds like Berkeley and Portland as the front line of a national culture war. During the Presidential campaign, Trump’s histrionic exaggerations of the threat posed by Antifa fuelled conservative support for the Proud Boys, allowing them to vastly expand their operations and recruitment. The day after a Presidential debate in which Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” Lauren Witzke, a Republican Senate candidate in Delaware, publicly thanked the group for having provided her with “free security.” (She lost the race.)

As Proud Boys from across the nation walked downhill from the Washington Monument toward Black Lives Matter Plaza on December 12th, they chanted, “Whose plaza? Our plaza!” Many of them carried staffs, canes, and holstered Maglites. There was a heavy police presence downtown, and it was still broad daylight. “We got numbers, let’s do this!” a Proud Boy with a newsboy cap and a gray goatee shouted. “Fuck these gender-confused terrorists! They’ll put the girls out first—they think that’s gonna stop us?” His name was Richard Schwetz, though he went by Dick Sweats. (He could not be reached for comment.) While some Proud Boys hesitated, others followed Schwetz, including a taciturn man with a high-and-tight military haircut and a large Confederate flag attached to a wooden dowel. I saw him again at the Capitol on January 6th.

On Constitution Avenue, the Proud Boys encountered an unsuspecting Black man coming up the sidewalk. They began shoving and jeering at him. As the man ran away, several of them chased him, swinging punches at his back.

Officers had cordoned off Black Lives Matter Plaza, but the group soon reached Farragut Square, where half a dozen counter-protesters—two men and four women—stood outside the Army and Navy Club, dressed in black clothes marked with medic crosses made from red tape. They were smaller and younger than most of the Proud Boys, and visibly unnerved. As Schwetz and others closed in on them, the medics retreated until they were pressed against a waist-high hedge. “Fucking pussies!” Schwetz barked, hitting two of the women. Other Proud Boys took his cue, assailing the activists, who disappeared into the hedge under a barrage of boots and fists. Policemen stopped the beating by deploying pepper spray, but they did not arrest any Proud Boys, who staggered off in search of a new target.

They promptly found one: another Black man, passing through on his bicycle. He wore Lycra exercise gear and looked perplexed by what was happening on the streets. He said nothing to anybody, but “Black Lives Matter” was written in small letters on his helmet. The Proud Boys surrounded him. Pointing at some officers watching from a few feet away, a man in a bulletproof vest, carrying a cane, said, “They’re here now, but eventually they won’t be. And we’re gonna take this country back—believe that shit. Fuck Black Lives Matter.” Before walking off, he added, “What y’all need to do is take your sorry asses to the ghetto.”

This was the tenor of the next eight hours, as hundreds of Proud Boys, groypers, militia members, and other Trump supporters openly marauded on the streets around the White House, becoming more inebriated and belligerent as the night wore on, hunting for people to harass and assault. “Fight for Trump!” they chanted. At one point, Proud Boys outside Harry’s Pub ganged up on another Black man, Philip Johnson, who took out a knife in self-defense, wounding four of them. Police intervened and rushed Johnson to the hospital, where he was arrested. The charges were later dropped. Outside Harry’s, I heard a Proud Boy joking about Johnson’s injuries: “He’s going to look different tomorrow.”

Shortly thereafter, I followed a number of groypers past a hair salon with a rainbow poster attached to its window. Tearing the poster to pieces, a young man screamed, “This is sodomy!”

“Fuck the fags!” others cried.

By eleven, I was following another group, which happened upon the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. Built in the late nineteenth century, the steepled red brick building had hosted the funerals of Frederick Douglass and Rosa Parks. President Barack Obama had attended a service there on the morning of his second Inauguration. Outside the entrance, a large Black Lives Matter sign, illuminated by floodlamps, hung below a crucifix. Climbing over a low fence, several Proud Boys and men in red maga hats ripped down the sign and pried off boards from its scaffolding to use as weapons, eliciting wild cheers.

“Whose streets?”

“Our streets!”

More people piled into the garden of the church, stomping on the sign and slashing it with knives. Amid the frenzy, one of the Trump supporters removed another placard from a different display. It had a verse from the Bible: “I shall not sacrifice to the Lord my God that which costs me nothing.”

“Hey, that’s Christian,” someone admonished.

The man nodded and gingerly set the placard down.

The cascade of destruction and ugliness triggered by Trump’s lies about the election consummates a narrative that predates his tenure in the White House. In 2011, Trump became an evangelist for birtherism, the false assertion that Obama had been born in Kenya and was therefore an illegitimate President. Whether or not Trump believed the racist slander, he had been apprised of its political utility by his friend Roger Stone, who made his political reputation as a dirty trickster for President Richard Nixon. Five years later, in the months before the 2016 election, Stone created a Web site called Stop the Steal, which he used to undermine Hillary Clinton’s expected victory by insisting that the election had been rigged—a position that Trump maintained even after he won, to explain his deficit in the popular vote.

The day after the 2020 election, a new Facebook page appeared: Stop the Steal. Among its earliest posts was a video from the T.C.F. Center, in downtown Detroit, where Michigan ballots were counted. The video showed Republican protesters who were said to have been denied access to the room where absentee votes were being processed. Overnight, Stop the Steal gained more than three hundred and twenty thousand followers—making it among the fastest-growing groups in Facebook history. The company quickly deleted it.

I spent much of Election Day at the T.C.F. Center. covid-19 had killed three thousand residents of Wayne County, which includes Detroit, causing an unprecedented number of people to vote by mail. Nearly two hundred thousand absentee ballots were being tallied in a huge exhibit hall. Roughly eight hundred election workers were opening envelopes, removing ballots from sealed secrecy sleeves, and logging names into an electronic poll book. (Before Election Day, the clerk’s office had compared and verified signatures.) The ballots were then brought to a row of high-speed tabulators, which could process some fifty sheets a minute.

Republican and Democratic challengers roamed the hall. The press was confined to a taped-off area, but, as far as I could see, the Republicans were given free rein of the space. They checked computer monitors that displayed a growing list of names. A man’s voice came over a loudspeaker to remind the election workers to “provide for transparency and openness.” Christopher Thomas, who served as Michigan’s election director for thirty-six years and advised the clerk’s office in 2020, told me that things had gone remarkably smoothly. The few challengers who’d raised objections had mostly misunderstood technical aspects of the process. “We work through it with them,” Thomas said. “We’re happy to have them here.”

Early returns showed Trump ahead in Michigan, but many absentee ballots had yet to be processed. Because Trump had relentlessly denigrated absentee voting throughout the campaign, in-person votes had been expected to skew his way. It was similarly unsurprising when his lead diminished after results arrived from Wayne County and other heavily Democratic jurisdictions. Nonetheless, shortly after midnight, Trump launched his post-election misinformation campaign: “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election.”

A makeshift wooden gallows, with stairs and a rope, was erected near the Capitol on January 6th. Since November, militant pro-Trump outfits had been openly gearing up for major violence. In early January, on Parler, a Proud Boys leader had written, “Every law makers who breaks their own stupid Fucking laws should be dragged out of office and hung.” Photograph by Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker

The next day, I found an angry mob outside the T.C.F. Center. Police officers guarded the doors. Most of the protesters had driven down from Macomb County, which is eighty per cent white and went for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. “We know what’s going on here,” one man told me. “They’re stuffing the ballot box.” He said that his local Republican Party had sent out an e-mail urging people to descend on the center. Politico later reported that Laura Cox, the chairwoman of the Michigan G.O.P., had personally implored conservative activists to go there. I had seen Cox introduce Trump at a rally in Grand Rapids the night before the election; she had promised the crowd “four more years—or twelve, we’ll talk about that later.”

Dozens of protesters had entered the T.C.F. Center before it was sealed. Downstairs, they pressed against a glass wall of the exhibit hall, chanting at the election workers on the other side. The most strident member of the group was Ken Licari, a Macomb County resident with a thin beard and a receding hairline. The two parties had been allocated one challenger for each table in the hall, but Republicans had already exceeded that limit, and Licari was irate about being shut out. When an elderly A.C.L.U. observer was ushered past him, Licari demanded to know where she was from. The woman ignored him, and he shouted, “You’re a coward, is where you’re from!”

“Be civil,” a woman standing near him said. A forty-eight-year-old caretaker named Lisa, she had stopped by the convention center on a whim, “just to see.” Unlike almost everyone else there, Lisa was Black and from Detroit. She gently asked Licari, “If this place has cameras, and you’ve got media observing, you’ve got different people from both sides looking—why do you think someone would be intentionally trying to cheat with all those eyes?”

“You would have to have a hundred thirty-four cameras to track every ballot,” Licari answered.

“These ballots are from Detroit,” Lisa said. “Detroit is an eighty-per-cent African-American city. There’s a huge percentage of Democrats. That’s just a fact.” She gestured at the predominantly Black poll workers across the glass. “This is my whole thing—I have a basic level of respect for these people.”

Rather than respond to this tacit accusation of bias, Licari told Lisa that a batch of illegal ballots had been clandestinely delivered to the center at three in the morning. This was a reference to another cell-phone video, widely shared on social media, that showed a man removing a case from the back of a van, loading it in a wagon, and pulling the wagon into the building. I had watched the video and had recognized the man as a member of a local TV news crew I’d noticed the previous day. I distinctly recall admiring the wagon, which he had used to transport his camera gear.

“There’s a lot of suspicious activity that goes on down here in Detroit,” another Republican from Macomb County told me. “There’s a million ways you can commit voter fraud, and we’re afraid it was committed on a massive scale.” I had seen the man on Election Day, working as a challenger inside the exhibit hall. Now, as then, he wore old Army dog tags and a hooded Michigan National Guard sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. I asked him if he had observed any fraud with his own eyes. He had not. “It wasn’t committed by these people,” he said. “But the ballots that they were given and ran through the scanners—we don’t know where they came from.”

Like many of the Republicans in the T.C.F. Center, the man had been involved in anti-lockdown demonstrations against Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. While reporting on those protests, I’d been struck by how the mostly white participants saw themselves as upholding the tradition of the civil-rights movement. Whitmer’s public-health measures were condemned as oppressive infringements on sacrosanct liberties, and those who defied them compared themselves to Rosa Parks. The equivalency became even more bizarre after George Floyd was killed and anti-lockdown activists in Michigan adopted Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric. Yet I never had the impression that those Republican activists were disingenuous. Similarly, the white people shouting at the Black election workers in Detroit seemed truly convinced of their own persecution.

That conviction had been instilled at least in part by politicians who benefitted from it. In April, in response to Whitmer’s aggressive public-health measures, Trump had tweeted, “Liberate Michigan!” Two weeks later, heavily armed militia members entered the state capitol, terrifying lawmakers. Mike Shirkey, the Republican majority leader in the Michigan Senate, denounced the organizers of the action—a group called the American Patriot Council—as “a bunch of jackasses” who had brandished “the threat of physical harm to stir up fear and rancor.” But, as Trump and other Republicans stoked anti-lockdown resentment across the U.S., Shirkey reversed himself. In May, he appeared at an American Patriot Council event in Grand Rapids, where he told the assembled militia members, “We need you now more than ever.” A few months later, two brothers in the audience that day, William and Michael Null, were arrested for providing material support to a network of right-wing terrorists.

Trump supporters inside the Capitol on January 6th. For right-wing protesters, the occupation of restricted government sanctums was an affirmation of dominance so emotionally satisfying that it was an end in itself—proof to elected officials, to Biden voters, and also to themselves that they were still in charge. Photograph by Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker

Outside the T.C.F. Center, I ran into Michelle Gregoire, a twenty-nine-year-old school-bus driver from Battle Creek. The sleeves of her sweatshirt were pushed up to reveal a “We the People” tattoo, and she wore a handgun on her belt. We had met at several anti-lockdown protests, including the one in Grand Rapids where Shirkey spoke. In April, Gregoire had entered the gallery overlooking the House chamber in the Michigan state capitol, in violation of covid-19 protocols. She had to be dragged out by the chief sergeant at arms, and she is now charged with committing a felony assault against him. (She has pleaded not guilty.)

Gregoire is also an acquaintance of the Nulls. “They’re innocent,” she told me in Detroit. “There’s an attack on conservatives right now.” She echoed many Republicans I have met in the past nine months who have described to me the same animating emotion: fear. “A lot of conservatives are really scared,” she said. “Extreme government overreach” during the pandemic had proved that the Democrats aimed, above all, to subjugate citizens. In October, Facebook deleted Gregoire’s account, which contained posts about a militia that she belonged to at the time. She told me, “If the left gets their way, they will silence whoever they want.” She then expressed another prevalent apprehension on the right: that Democrats intend to disarm Americans, in order to render them defenseless against autocracy. “That terrifies me,” Gregoire said. “In other countries, they’ve said, ‘That will never happen here,’ and before you know it their guns are confiscated and they’re living under communism.”

The sense of embattlement that Trump and other Republican politicians encouraged throughout the pandemic primed many conservatives to assume Democratic foul play even before voting began. Last month, at a State Senate hearing on the count at the T.C.F. Center, a witness, offering no evidence of fraud, demanded to see evidence that none had occurred. “We believe,” he testified. “Prove us wrong.” The witness was Randy Bishop, a conservative Christian-radio host and a former county G.O.P. chairman, as well as a felon with multiple convictions for fraud. I’d watched Bishop deliver a rousing speech in June at an American Patriot Council rally, which Gregoire and the Null brothers had attended. “Carrying a gun with you at all times and being a member of a militia is also your civic duty,” Bishop had argued. According to the F.B.I., the would-be terrorists whom the Nulls abetted used the rally to meet and further their plans, which included televised executions of Democratic lawmakers. When I was under the bleachers at the U.S. Capitol, while the mob pushed up the steps, I noticed Jason Howland, a founder of the American Patriot Council, a few feet behind me in the scrum, leaning all his weight into the mass of bodies.

Even if it were possible to prove that the election was not stolen, it seems doubtful whether conservatives who already feel under attack could be convinced. When Gregoire cited the man with the van smuggling a case of ballots into the T.C.F. Center, I told her that he was a journalist and that the case contained equipment. Gregoire shook her head. “No,” she said. “Those were ballots. It’s not a conspiracy when it’s documented and recorded.”

Conspiracy theories have always helped rationalize white grievance, and people who exploit white grievance for political or financial gain often purvey conspiracy theories. Roger Stone became Trump’s adviser for the 2016 Republican primaries, and frequently appeared on Alex Jones’s “InfoWars” show, which warned that the “deep state”—a nefarious shadow authority manipulating U.S. policy for the profit of élites—opposed Trump because he threatened its power. Jones has asserted that the Bush Administration was responsible for 9/11 and that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre never happened. During the 2016 campaign, Stone arranged for Trump to be a guest on “InfoWars.” “I will not let you down,” Trump promised Jones.

This compact with the conspiracist right strengthened over the next four years, as the President characterized his impeachment and the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election meddling as “hoaxes” designed to “overthrow” him. (Stone was convicted of seven felonies related to the Mueller investigation, including making false statements and witness tampering. Trump pardoned him in December. Ten days later, Stone reactivated his Stop the Steal Web site, which began collecting donations for “security” in D.C. on January 6th.) This past year, the scale of the pandemic helped conspiracists broaden the scope of their theories. Many covid-19 skeptics believe that lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccines, and contact tracing are laying the groundwork for the New World Order—a genocidal communist dystopia that, Jones says, will look “just like ‘The Hunger Games.’ ” The architects of this apocalypse are such “globalists” as the Clintons, Bill Gates, and George Soros; their instruments are multinational institutions like the European Union, nato, and the U.N. Whereas Trump has enfeebled these organizations, Biden intends to reinvigorate them. The claim of a plot to steal the election makes sense to people who see Trump as a warrior against deep-state chicanery. Like all good conspiracy theories, it affirms and elaborates preëxisting ones. Rejecting it can require renouncing an entire world view.

Trump’s allegations of vast election fraud have been a boon for professional conspiracists. Not long ago, Jones seemed to be at risk of sliding into obsolescence. Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube had expelled him from their platforms in 2018, after he accused the bereaved parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook of being paid actors, prompting “InfoWars” fans to harass and threaten them. The bans curtailed Jones’s reach, but a deluge of covid-19 propaganda drew millions of people to his proprietary Web sites. To some Americans, Jones’s dire warnings about the deep state and the New World Order looked prophetic, an impression that Trump’s claim of a stolen election only bolstered.

After Facebook removed the Stop the Steal group that had posted the video from the T.C.F. Center, its creator, Kylie Jane Kremer, a thirty-year-old activist, conceived the November 14th rally in Washington, D.C., which became known as the Million maga March. That day, Jones joined tens of thousands of Trump supporters gathered at Freedom Plaza. Kremer, stepping behind a lectern with a microphone, promised “an incredible lineup” of speakers, after which, she said, everyone would proceed up Pennsylvania Avenue, to the Supreme Court. But, before Kremer could introduce her first guest, Jones had shouted through a bullhorn, “If the globalists think they’re gonna keep America under martial law, and they’re gonna put that Communist Chinese agent Biden in, they got another thing coming!”

Hundreds of people cheered. Jones, who is all chest and no neck, pumped a fist in the air. “The march starts now!” he soon declared. His usual security detail was supplemented by about a dozen Proud Boys, who formed a protective ring around him. The national chairman of the Proud Boys, Henry (Enrique) Tarrio, walked at his side. Tarrio, the chief of staff of Latinos for Trump, is the son of Cuban immigrants who fled Fidel Castro’s revolution. Although he served time in federal prison for rebranding and relabelling stolen medical devices, he often cites his family history to portray himself and the Proud Boys in a noble light. At an event in Miami in 2019, he stood behind Trump, wearing a T-shirt that said “roger stone did nothing wrong!”

“Down with the deep state!” Jones yelled through his bullhorn. “The answer to their ‘1984’ tyranny is 1776!” As he and Tarrio continued along Pennsylvania Avenue, more and more people abandoned Kremer’s event to follow them. As we climbed toward the U.S. Capitol, I turned and peered down at a procession of Trump supporters stretching back for more than a mile. Flags waved like the sails of a bottlenecked armada. From this vantage, the Million maga March appeared to have been led by the Proud Boys and Jones. On the steps of the Supreme Court, he cried, “This is the beginning of the end of their New World Order!”

Invocations of the New World Order often raise the age-old spectre of Jewish cabals, and the Stop the Steal movement has been rife with anti-Semitism. At the protest that I attended on November 7th in Pennsylvania, a speaker elicited applause with the exhortation “Do not become a cog in the zog!” The acronym stands for “Zionist-occupied government.” Among the Trump supporters was an elderly woman who gripped a walker with her left hand and a homemade “Stop the Steal” sign with her right. The first letters of “Stop” and “Steal” were stylized to resemble Nazi S.S. bolts. In videos of the shooting inside the Capitol on January 6th, amid the mob attempting to reach members of Congress, a man—subsequently identified as Robert Keith Packer—can be seen in a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words “Camp Auschwitz.” (Packer has been arrested.)

On my way back down Pennsylvania Avenue on November 14th, after Jones’s speech, I fell in with a group of groypers chanting “Christian nation!” and “Emperor Trump!” I followed the young men to Freedom Plaza, where one of them read aloud an impassioned screed about “globalist scum” and the need to “strike down this foreign invasion.” When he finished, I noticed that two groypers standing near me were laughing. The response felt incongruous, until I recognized it as the juvenile thrill of transgression. One of them, his voice high with excitement, marvelled, “He just gave a fascist speech!”

A few days later, Nicholas Fuentes appeared on an “InfoWars” panel with Alex Jones and other right-wing conspiracists. During the discussion, Fuentes warned of the “Great Replacement.” This is the contention that Europe and the United States are under siege from nonwhites and non-Christians, and that these groups are incompatible with Western culture, identity, and prosperity. Many white supremacists maintain that the ultimate outcome of the Great Replacement will be “white genocide.” (In Charlottesville, neo-Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us!”; the perpetrators of the New Zealand mosque massacre and the El Paso Walmart massacre both cited the Great Replacement in their manifestos.) “What people have to begin to realize is that if we lose this battle, and if this transition is allowed to take place, that’s it,” Fuentes said. “That’s the end.”

“Submitting now will destroy you forever,” Jones agreed.

Because Fuentes and Jones characterize Democrats as an existential menace—Jones because they want to incrementally enslave humanity, Fuentes because they want to make whites a demographic minority—their fight transcends partisan politics. The same is true for the many evangelicals who have exalted Trump as a Messianic figure divinely empowered to deliver the country from satanic influences. Right-wing Catholics, for their part, have mobilized around the “church militant” movement—fostered by Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist—which puts Trump at the forefront of a worldwide clash between Western civilization and Islamic “barbarity.” Crusader flags and patches were widespread at the Capitol insurrection.

Members of Trump’s base went to observe the tabulation of the vote in battleground states, and believed him when he attributed his decisive defeat to “rigged” machines and “massive voter fraud.” Photograph by Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker

In the Senate chamber on January 6th, Jacob Chansley took off his horns and led a group prayer through a megaphone, from behind the Vice-President’s desk. The insurrectionists bowed their heads while Chansley thanked the “heavenly Father” for allowing them to enter the Capitol and “send a message” to the “tyrants, the communists, and the globalists.” Joshua Black, the Alabaman who had been shot in the face with a rubber bullet, said in his YouTube confession, “I praised the name of Jesus on the Senate floor. That was my goal. I think that was God’s goal.”

While the religiously charged demonization of globalists dovetails with QAnon, religious maximalism has also gone mainstream. Under Trump, Republicans throughout the country have consistently situated American politics in the context of an eternal, cosmic struggle between good and evil. In doing so, they have rendered constitutional principles of representation, pluralism, and the separation of powers less inviolable, given the magnitude of what is at stake.

Trump played to this sensibility on June 1st, a week after George Floyd was killed. Police officers used rubber bullets, batons, tear gas, and pepper-ball grenades to violently disperse peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square so that he could walk unmolested from the White House to a church and pose for a photograph while holding a Bible. Liberals were appalled. For many of the President’s supporters, however, the image was symbolically resonant. Lafayette Square was subsequently enclosed behind a tall metal fence, which racial-justice protesters decorated with posters, converting it into a makeshift memorial to victims of police violence. On the morning of the November 14th rally, thousands of Trump supporters passed the fence on their way to Freedom Plaza. Some of them stopped to rip down posters, and by nine o’clock cardboard littered the sidewalk.

“White folks feel real emboldened these days,” Toni Sanders, a local activist, told me. Sanders had been at the square on June 1st, with her wife and her nine-year-old stepson. “He was tear-gassed,” she said. “He’s traumatized.” She had returned there the day of the march to prevent people from defacing the fence, and had already been in several confrontations. While we spoke, people carrying religious signs approached. They were affiliates of Patriot Prayer, a conservative Christian movement, based in Vancouver, Washington, whose rallies have often attracted white supremacists. Kyle Chapman, a prominent Patriot Prayer figure from California (and a felon), once headed the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, a “tactical defense arm” of the Proud Boys. A few days before the march, Chapman had posted a statement on social media proposing that the Proud Boys change their name to the Proud Goys, purge all “undesirables,” and “boldly address the issues of White Genocide” and “the right for White men and women to have their own countries where White interests are written into law.”

The founder of Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson, has praised Chapman as “a true patriot” and “an icon.” (He also publicly disavows racism and anti-Semitism.) In December, Gibson led the group that broke into the Oregon state capitol. “Look at them,” Sanders said as Gibson passed us, yelling about Biden being a communist. “Full of hate, and proud of it.” She shook her head. “If God were here, He would smite these motherfuckers.”

Since January 6th, some Republican politicians have distanced themselves from Trump. A few, such as Romney, have denounced him. But the Republican Party’s cynical embrace of Trump’s attempted power grab all the way up to January 6th has strengthened its radical flank while sidelining moderates. Seventeen Republican-led states and a hundred and six Republican members of Congress—well over half—signed on to the Texas suit asking the Supreme Court to disenfranchise more than twenty million voters. Republican officials shared microphones with white nationalists and conspiracists at every Stop the Steal event I attended. At the Million maga March, Louie Gohmert, a congressman from Texas, spoke shortly after Alex Jones on the steps of the Supreme Court. “This is a multidimensional war that the U.S. intelligence people have used on other governments,” Gohmert said—words that might have come from Jones’s mouth. “You not only steal the vote but you use the media to convince people that they’re not really seeing what they’re seeing.”

“We see!” a woman in the crowd cried.

In late December, Gohmert and other Republican legislators filed a lawsuit asking the courts to affirm Vice-President Pence’s right to unilaterally determine the results of the election. When federal judges dismissed the case, Gohmert declared on TV that the ruling had left patriots with only one form of recourse: “You gotta go to the streets and be as violent as Antifa and B.L.M.”

Gohmert is a mainstay of the Tea Party insurgency that facilitated Trump’s political rise. Both that movement and Trumpism are preoccupied as much with heretical conservatives as they are with liberals. At an October rally, Trump derided rinos—Republicans in name only—as “the lowest form of human life.” After the election, any Republican who accepted Biden’s victory was similarly maligned. When Chris Krebs, a Trump appointee in charge of national cybersecurity, deemed the election “the most secure in American history,” the President fired him. Joe diGenova, Trump’s attorney, then said that Krebs “should be drawn and quartered—taken out at dawn and shot.”

There was an unmistakable subtext as the mob inside the Capitol, almost entirely white, shouted, “Whose house? Our house!” Photograph by Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker

As Republican officials scrambled to prove their fealty to the President, some joined Gohmert in invoking the possibility of violent rebellion. In December, the Arizona Republican Party reposted a tweet from Ali Alexander, a chief organizer of the Stop the Steal movement, that stated, “I am willing to give my life for this fight.” The Twitter account of the Republican National Committee appended the following comment to the retweet: “He is. Are you?”

Alexander is a convicted felon, having pleaded guilty to property theft in 2007 and credit-card abuse in 2008. In November, he appeared on the “InfoWars” panel with Jones and Fuentes, during which he alluded to the belief that the New World Order would forcibly implant people with digital-tracking microchips. “I’m just not going to go into that world,” Alexander said. He also expressed jubilant surprise at how successful he, Jones, and Fuentes had been in recruiting mainstream Republicans to their cause: “We are the crazy ones, rushing the gates. But we are winning!”

Jones, Fuentes, and Alexander were not seen rushing the gates when lives were lost at the Capitol on January 6th. Nor, for that matter, was Gohmert. Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was fatally shot, was an Air Force veteran who appears to have been indoctrinated in conspiracy theories about the election. She was killed by an officer protecting members of Congress—perhaps Gohmert among them. In her final tweet, on January 5th, Babbitt declared, “The storm is here”—a reference to a QAnon prophecy that Trump would expose and execute all his enemies. The same day that Babbitt wrote this, Alexander led crowds at Freedom Plaza in chants of “Victory or death!” During the sacking of the Capitol, he recorded a video from a rooftop, with the building in the distance behind him. “I do not denounce this,” he said.

Trump was lying when, after dispatching his followers to the Capitol, he assured them, “I’ll be with you.” But, in a sense, he was there—as were Jones, Fuentes, and Alexander. Their messaging was ubiquitous: on signs, clothes, patches, and flags, and in the way that the insurrectionists articulated what they were doing. At one point, I watched a man with a long beard and a Pittsburgh Pirates hat facing off against several policemen on the main floor of the Capitol. “I will not let this country be taken over by globalist communist scum!” he yelled, hoarse and shaking. “They want us all to be slaves! Everybody’s seen the documentation—it’s out in the open!” He could not comprehend why the officers would want to interfere in such a virtuous uprising. “You know what’s right,” he told them. Then he gestured vaguely at the rest of the rampaging mob. “Just like these people know what’s right.”

After Chansley, the Q Shaman, left his note on the dais, a new group entered the Senate chamber. Milling around was a man in a black-and-yellow plaid shirt, with a bandanna over his face. Ahead of January 6th, Tarrio, the Proud Boys chairman, had released a statement announcing that his men would “turn out in record numbers” for the event—but would be “incognito.” The man in the plaid shirt was the first Proud Boy I had seen openly wearing the organization’s signature colors. At several points, however, I heard grunts of “Uhuru!,” a Proud Boys battle cry, and a group attacking a police line outside the Capitol had sung “Proud of Your Boy”—from the Broadway version of “Aladdin”—for which the organization is sardonically named. One member of the group had flashed the “O.K.” sign and shouted, “Fuck George Floyd! Fuck Breonna Taylor! Fuck them all!” He seemed overcome with emotion, as if at last giving expression to a sentiment that he had long suppressed.

On January 4th, Tarrio had been arrested soon after his arrival at Dulles International Airport, for a destruction-of-property charge related to the December 12th event, where he’d set fire to a Black Lives Matter banner stolen from a historic Black church. (In an intersection outside Harry’s Pub, he had stood over the flames while Proud Boys chanted, “Fuck you, faggots!”) He was released shortly after his arrest but was barred from remaining in D.C. On the eve of the siege, followers of the official Proud Boys account on Parler were incensed. “Every cop involved should be executed immediately,” one user commented. “Time to resist and revolt!” another added. A third wrote, “Fuck these DC Police. Fuck those cock suckers up. Beat them down. You dont get to return to your families.”

Since George Floyd’s death, demands from leftists to curb police violence have inspired a Back the Blue movement among Republicans, and most right-wing outfits present themselves as ardently pro-law enforcement. This alliance is conditional, however, and tends to collapse whenever laws intrude on conservative values and priorities. In Michigan, I saw anti-lockdown protesters ridicule officers enforcing covid-19 restrictions as “Gestapo” and “filthy rats.” When police cordoned off Black Lives Matter Plaza, Proud Boys called them “communists,” “cunts,” and “pieces of shit.” At the Capitol on January 6th, the interactions between Trump supporters and law enforcement vacillated from homicidal belligerence to borderline camaraderie—a schizophrenic dynamic that compounded the dark unreality of the situation. When a phalanx of officers at last marched into the Senate chamber, no arrests were made, and everyone was permitted to leave without questioning. As we passed through the central doors, a sergeant with a shaved head said, “Appreciate you being peaceful.” His uniform was half untucked and missing buttons, and his necktie was ripped and crooked. Beside him, another officer, who had been sprayed with a fire extinguisher, looked as if a sack of flour had been emptied on him.

A policeman loitering in the lobby escorted us down a nearby set of stairs, where we overtook an elderly woman carrying a “trump” tote bag. “We scared them off—that’s what we did, we scared the bastards,” she said, to no one in particular.

The man in front of me had a salt-and-pepper beard and a baseball cap with a “We the People” patch on the back. I had watched him collect papers from various desks in the Senate chamber and put them in a glossy blue folder. As police directed us to an exit, he walked out with the folder in his hand.

The afternoon was cold and blustery. Thousands of people still surrounded the building. On the north end of the Capitol, a renewed offensive was being mounted, on another entrance guarded by police. The rioters here were far more bitter and combative, for a simple reason: they were outside, and they wanted inside. They repeatedly charged the police and were repulsed with opaque clouds of tear gas and pepper spray.

“Fuck the blue!” people chanted.

“We have guns, too, motherfuckers!” one man yelled. “With a lot bigger rounds!” Another man, wearing a do-rag that said “fuck your feelings,” told his friend, “If we have to tool up, it’s gonna be over. It’s gonna come to that. Next week, Trump’s gonna say, ‘Come to D.C.’ And we’re coming heavy.”

Later, I listened to a woman talking on her cell phone. “We need to come back with guns,” she said. “One time with guns, and then we’ll never have to do this again.”

Although the only shot fired on January 6th was the one that killed Ashli Babbitt, two suspected explosive devices were found near the Capitol, and a seventy-year-old Alabama man was arrested for possessing multiple loaded weapons, ammunition, and eleven Molotov cocktails. As the sun fell, clashes with law enforcement at times descended into vicious hand-to-hand brawling. During the day, more than fifty officers were injured and fifteen hospitalized. I saw several Trump supporters beat policemen with blunt instruments. Videos show an officer being dragged down stairs by his helmet and clobbered with a pole attached to an American flag. In another, a mob crushes a young policeman in a door as he screams in agony. One officer, Brian Sicknick, a forty-two-year-old, died after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher. Several days after the siege, Howard Liebengood, a fifty-one-year-old officer assigned to protect the Senate, committed suicide.

Right-wing extremists justify such inconsistency by assigning the epithet “oath-breaker” to anyone in uniform who executes his duties in a manner they dislike. It is not difficult to imagine how, once Trump is no longer President, his most fanatical supporters could apply this caveat to all levels of government, including local law enforcement. At the rally on December 12th, Nicholas Fuentes underscored the irreconcilability of a radical-right ethos and pro-police, pro-military patriotism: “When they go door to door mandating vaccines, when they go door to door taking your firearms, when they go door to door taking your children, who do you think it will be that’s going to do that? It’s going to be the police and the military.”

During Trump’s speech on January 6th, he said, “The media is the biggest problem we have.” He went on, “It’s become the enemy of the people. . . . We gotta get them straightened out.” Several journalists were attacked during the siege. Men assaulted a Times photographer inside the Capitol, near the rotunda, as she screamed for help. After National Guard soldiers and federal agents finally arrived and expelled the Trump supporters, some members of the mob shifted their attention to television crews in a park on the east side of the building. Earlier, a man had accosted an Israeli journalist in the middle of a live broadcast, calling him a “lying Israeli” and telling him, “You are cattle today.” Now the Trump supporters surrounded teams from the Associated Press and other outlets, chasing off the reporters and smashing their equipment with bats and sticks.

There was a ritualistic atmosphere as the crowd stood in a circle around the piled-up cameras, lights, and tripods. “This is the old media,” a man said, through a megaphone. “This is what it looks like. Turn off Fox, turn off CNN.”

Outside the Capitol, rioters surrounded news crews, chasing off the reporters and smashing their equipment with bats. Photograph by Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker

Another man, in a black leather jacket and wraparound sunglasses, suggested that journalists should be killed: “Start makin’ a list! Put all those names down, and we start huntin’ them down, one by one!”

“Traitors to the guillotine!”

“They won’t be able to walk down the streets!”

The radicalization of the Republican Party has altered the world of conservative media, which is, in turn, accelerating that radicalization. On November 7th, Fox News, which has often seemed to function as a civilian branch of the Trump Administration, called the race for Biden, along with every other major network. Furious, Trump encouraged his supporters to instead watch Newsmax, whose ratings skyrocketed as a result. Newsmax hosts have dismissed covid-19 as a “scamdemic” and have speculated that Republican politicians were being infected with the virus as a form of “sabotage.” The Newsmax headliner Michelle Malkin has praised Fuentes as one of the “New Right leaders” and the groypers as “patriotic.”

At the December 12th rally, I ran into the Pennsylvania Three Percent member whom I’d met in Harrisburg on November 7th. Then he had been a Fox News devotee, but since Election Day he’d discovered Newsmax. “I’d had no idea what it even was,” he told me. “Now the only thing that anyone I know watches anymore is Newsmax. They ask the hard questions.”

It seems unlikely that what happened on January 6th will turn anyone who inhabits such an ecosystem against Trump. On the contrary, there are already indications that the mayhem at the Capitol will further isolate and galvanize many right-wingers. The morning after the siege, an alternative narrative, pushed by Jones and other conspiracists, went viral on Parler: the assault on the Capitol had actually been instigated by Antifa agitators impersonating Trump supporters. Mo Brooks, an Alabama congressman who led the House effort to contest the certification of the Electoral College votes, tweeted, “Evidence growing that fascist ANTIFA orchestrated Capitol attack with clever mob control tactics.” (Brooks had warmed up the crowd for Trump on January 6th, with a speech whose bellicosity far surpassed the President’s. “Today is the day American patriots start takin’ down names and kickin’ ass!” he’d hollered.) Most of the “evidence” of Antifa involvement seems to be photographs of rioters clad in black. Never mind that, in early January, Tarrio, the Proud Boys chairman, wrote on Parler, “We might dress in all BLACK for the occasion.” Or that his colleague Joe Biggs, addressing antifascist activists, added, “We are going to smell like you, move like you, and look like you.”

Not long after the Brooks tweet, I got a call from a woman I’d met at previous Stop the Steal rallies. She had been unable to come to D.C., owing to a recent surgery. She asked if I could tell her what I’d seen, and if the stories about Antifa were accurate. She was upset—she did not believe that “Trump people” could have done what the media were alleging. Before I responded, she put me on speakerphone. I could hear other people in the room. We spoke for a while, and it was plain that they desperately wanted to know the truth. I did my best to convey it to them as I understood it.

Less than an hour after we got off the phone, the woman texted me a screenshot of a CNN broadcast with a news bulletin that read, “antifa has taken responsiblitly for storming capital hill.” The image, which had been circulating on social media, was crudely Photoshopped (and poorly spelled). “Thought you might want to see this,” she wrote.

In the year 2088, a five-hundred-pound time capsule is scheduled to be exhumed from beneath the stone slabs of Freedom Plaza. Inside an aluminum cylinder, historians will find relics honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.: a Bible, clerical robes, a cassette tape with King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, part of which he wrote in a nearby hotel. What will those historians know about the lasting consequences of the 2020 Presidential election, which culminated with the incumbent candidate inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol and threaten to lynch his adversaries? Will this year’s campaign against the democratic process have evolved into a durable insurgency? Something worse?

On January 8th, Trump was permanently banned from Twitter. Five days later, he became the only U.S. President in history to be impeached twice. (During the Capitol siege, the man in the hard hat withdrew from one of the Senate desks a manual, from a year ago, titled “proceedings of the united states senate in the impeachment trial of president donald john trump.”) Although the President has finally agreed to submit to a peaceful transition of power, he has admitted no responsibility for the deadly riot. “People thought that what I said was totally appropriate,” he told reporters on January 12th.

He will not disappear. Neither will the baleful forces that he has conjured and awakened. This is why iconoclasts like Fuentes and Jones have often seemed more exultant than angry since Election Day. For them, the disappointment of Trump’s defeat has been eclipsed by the prospect of upheaval that it has brought about. As Fuentes said on the “InfoWars” panel, “This is the best thing that can happen, because it’s destroying the legitimacy of the system.” Fuentes was at the Capitol riot, though he denies going inside. On his show the next day, he called the siege “the most awe-inspiring and inspirational and incredible thing I have seen in my entire life.”

At the heap of wrecked camera gear outside the Capitol, the man in the leather jacket and sunglasses declared to the crowd, “We are at war. . . . Mobilize in your own cities, your own counties. Storm your own capitol buildings. And take down every one of these corrupt motherfuckers.” Behind him, lights glowed in the rotunda. The sky darkened. At 8 p.m., Congress reconvened and resumed certifying the election. For six hours, Americans had held democracy hostage in the name of patriotism.

The storm might be here. ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 25, 2021, issue, with the headline “The Storm.”

— Luke Mogelson, a contributing writer, has written for The New Yorker since 2013.

[ramrodd]

WATCH: The Horrible Things Pat Robertson Said In His Lifetime

COMMENTARY:

Visualize Whirled Peas.

I first viewed this video on June 14 during Nora O'Donnell's program which opened with a segment on a swath of the Bible Belt in danger of extreme weather, which has persisted since them to this moment, June 21. This is a legacy of Pat Robertson as the anti-Christ of the Pro-Life Fascism  of the Total Depravity Gospel.

After his success of turning aside the hurricane in 1985, Robertson began arrogating the agency of the Holy Spirit routinely to himself in his CBN broadcasts that has revved up the Spirit of God and caused the increase of extreme weather all over America, but particularly in the Bible Belts where his CBN foot print is most , since at least 1998, when George W Buch began to run for President by demonstrating his masculinity with his body count on the Texas death row.

First of all, go review the Wikipedia summary of Forbidden Planed with a focus of Dr. Morbius's explanation of the Planetary Force of the Krill and its relationship with the Id. It is a perfect discretion of the Spirit of the God introduced in Genesis 1:2 that is still hovering over the waters. It is the source of this extreme weather,  Pat Roberson' example of hate- and fear-mongering on his 700 Club on the Christian Broadcast Network , and all the Pro-Life Fascist preachers preaching the righteousness of Trump and the January 6 treason with the accompanying  spiritually-toxic hate speech of the Total Depravity Gospel, is the  proximate cause of the tornadoes that were reported TODAY on CBS news.

The difference between Dr. Morbius and the Krill and us is that we have the Holy Spirit to bring the Spirot of God onto the bit and optimize global weather  This is why Jesus says in the Gospel of Mark that the only unforgivable sine is to DENY the Holy Spirit.

Calvinism and the TULIP Doctrine of the Total Depravity Doctrine routinely deny the holy spirit as part of their Pro=Life Fascist business model. They are causing all this extreme wealth and the accelerating global warming.

This is fixable, quickly and gently: every time you see a dynamic weather map on the tube

Visualize Whirled Peas.

If you are a Muslim like Cenk, you don't have to believe in the Holy Spirit of Jesus or anything, but the Holy Spirit ahs a great deal of whimsy in his sense of humor and he will apply his agency over the Spirt of God to neutralize the evil legacy of Pat Roberson, the Pro-Life Fascist anti-Christ, and, in the fullness of time, restore the global weather patterns to somewhere around 1955 but without the pollution,

This weather pattern will persist to at least the 2nd of July as long a CBN continues to echo the stochastic terrorism of Tucker Carlson in support of the January 6 treason of the House Freedom Caucus and the Pro-Life Fascist spiritual toxic support of their messianic anti-Christ.

Visualize Whirled Peas.

All you got to du is smile when you say that, Partner, and the Holy Spirit will do the heavy lifting.

[victory-rose]

January 6, 2021 (Wednesday)

Today the Confederate flag flew in the United States Capitol.

This morning, results from the Georgia senatorial runoff elections showed that Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff had beaten their Republican opponents—both incumbents—by more than the threshold that would require a recount. The Senate is now split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats, so the position of majority leader goes to a Democrat. Mitch McConnell, who has bent the government to his will since he took over the position of majority leader in 2007, will be replaced.

With the Democrats in control of both Congress and the Executive Branch, it is reasonable to expect we will see voting rights legislation, which will doom the current-day Republican Party, depending as it has on voter suppression to stay in power.

Trump Republicans and McConnell Republicans had just begun to blame each other for the debacle when Congress began to count the certified electoral votes from the states to establish that Democrat Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. The election was not close—Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million votes and the Electoral College by 306 to 232—but Trump contends that he won the election in a landslide and “fraud” made Biden the winner.

Trump has never had a case. His campaign filed and either lost or had dismissed 62 out of 63 lawsuits because it could produce no evidence for any of its wild accusations. Nonetheless, radical lawmakers courted Trump’s base by echoing Trump’s charges, then tried to argue that the fact voters no longer trusted the vote was reason to contest the certified votes.

More than 100 members of the House announced they would object to counting the votes of certain states. About 13 senators, led by Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), agreed to join them. The move would slow down the count as each chamber would have to debate and take a separate vote on whether to accept the state votes, but the objectors never had anywhere near the votes they needed to make their objections stick.

So Trump turned to pressuring Vice President Mike Pence, who would preside over the counting, to throw out the Biden votes. On Monday, Trump tweeted that “the Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” This would throw the blame for the loss onto Pence, but the vice president has no constitutional power to do any such thing, and this morning he made that clear in a statement. Trump then tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”

It seemed clear that the voting would be heated, but it was also clear that most of the lawmakers opposing the count were posturing to court Trump’s base for future elections. Congress would count Biden’s win.

But Trump had urged his supporters for weeks to descend on Washington, D.C., to stop what he insisted was the stealing of the election. They did so and, this morning, began to congregate near the Capitol, where the counting would take place. As he passed them on the east side of the Capitol, Hawley raised a power fist.

In the middle of the day, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani spoke to the crowd, telling them: “Let’s have trial by combat.” Trump followed, lying that he had won the election and saying “we are going to have to fight much harder.” He warned that Pence had better “come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country.” He warned that Chinese-driven socialists are taking over the country. And he told them to march on Congress to “save our democracy.”

As rioters took Trump at his word, Congress was counting the votes alphabetically by state. When they got to Arizona, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) stood up to echo the rhetoric radicals had been using to discredit the certified votes, saying that public distrust in the election—created out of thin air by Republicans—justified an investigation.

Within an hour, a violent mob stormed the Capitol and Cruz, along with the rest of the lawmakers, was rushed to safety (four quick-thinking staffers brought along the electoral ballots, in their ceremonial boxes). As the rioters broke in, police shot and killed one of them: Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran from San Diego, QAnon believer, and staunch Trump supporter. The insurrectionists broke into the Senate chamber, where one was photographed on the dais of the Senate, shirtless and wearing a bull costume that revealed a Ku Klux Klan tattoo on his abdomen. They roamed the Capitol looking for Pence and other lawmakers they considered enemies. Not finding them, they ransacked offices. One rioter photographed himself sitting at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk with his feet on it.

They carried with them the Confederate flag.

Capitol police provided little obstruction, apparently eager to avoid confrontations that could be used as propaganda on social media. The intruders seemed a little surprised at their success, taking selfies and wandering around like tourists. One stole a lectern.

As the White House, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security all remained silent, President-Elect Joe Biden spoke to cameras urging calm and calling on Trump to tell his supporters to go home. But CNN White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins later reported that she spoke to White House officials who were “genuinely freaked… out” that Trump was “borderline enthusiastic” about the storming of the Capitol because “it meant the certification was being derailed.”

At 4:17, Trump issued his own video, reiterating his false claims that he had been cheated of victory. Only then did he conclude with: “Go home, we love you, you’re very special.” Twitter immediately took the video down. By nighttime Trump’s Twitter feed seemed to blame his enemies for the violence the president had incited (although the rhythm of the words did not sound to me like Trump’s own usual cadence): “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

Twitter took down the tweet and banned the president for at least twelve hours for inciting violence; Facebook and Instagram followed suit.

As the afternoon wore on, police found two pipe bombs near the headquarters of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C., as well as a truck full of weapons and ammunition, and mobs gathered at statehouses across the country, including in Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota, California, and Georgia.

By 5:00, acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller issued a statement saying he had conferred with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Vice President Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and had fully activated the D.C. National Guard.

He did not mention the president.

By late evening, Washington, D.C., police chief Robert J. Contee III announced that at least 52 people had been arrested and 14 law enforcement officers injured. A total of four people died, including one who died of a heart attack and one who tased themself.

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone urged people to stay away from Trump to limit their chances of being prosecuted for treason under the Sedition Act. By midnight, four staffers had resigned, as well as Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger, with other, higher level officials also talking about leaving. Even Trump adviser Stephen Miller admitted it was a bad day. Quickly, pro-Trump media began to insist that the attack was a false-flag operation of “Antifa,” despite the selfies and videos posted by known right-wing agitators, and the fact that Trump had invited, incited, and praised them.

Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis laid the blame for today’s attack squarely at the feet of Trump himself: “Today’s violent assault on our Capitol, and effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule, was fomented by Mr. Trump. His use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice.”

The attempted coup drew condemnation from all but the radical Trump supporters in government. Former President George W. Bush issued a statement “on insurrection at the Capitol,” saying “it is a sickening and heartbreaking sight.” “I am appalled by the reckless behavior of some political leaders since the election,” he said, and accused such leaders of enflaming the rioters with lies and false hopes. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) was more direct: “What happened here today was an insurrection incited by the President of the United States.”

Across the country tonight are calls for Trump’s removal through the 25th amendment, impeachment, or resignation. The Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have joined the chorus, writing to Pence urging him to invoke the 25th. Angry at Trump’s sabotaging of the Georgia elections in addition to the attack on our democracy, prominent Republicans are rumored to be doing the same.

At 8:00, heavily armed guards escorted the lawmakers back to the Capitol, thoroughly scrubbed by janitors, where the senators and representatives resumed their counting of the certified votes. The events of the afternoon had broken some of the Republicans away from their determination to challenge the votes. Fourteen Republican senators had announced they would object to counting the certified votes from Arizona; in the evening count the number dropped to six: Cruz (R-TX), Hawley (R-MO), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), John Kennedy (R-LA), Roger Marshall (R-KS), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).

In the House, 121 Republicans, more than half the Republican caucus, voted to throw out Biden’s electors from Arizona. As in the Senate, they lost when 303 Representatives voted in favor.

Six senators and more than half of the House Republicans backed an attempt to overthrow our government, in favor of a man caught on tape just four days ago trying to strong-arm a state election official into falsifying the election results.

Today the Confederate flag flew in the United States Capitol.