#select committee to investigate the january 6th attack on the us capitol
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Cassidy Hutchinson spoke with Rachel Maddow in her first live interview since her testimony before the House January 6th Committee. In case you missed her testimony on 22 June 2022, it is still available here.
She was an assistant to Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows who has since been indicted for election fraud in Georgia.
Ms. Hutchinson spoke about the current mindset of the GOP and also described the less than professional behavior of other Trump White House staffers as well as some GOP members of Congress including Matt Gaetz.
One phrase she used in the interview was: "Mr Trump's attempt to overthrow the government to stay in power"
Her book "Enough" has just been published.
#cassidy hutchinson#trump white house#select committee to investigate the january 6th attack on the us capitol#us house of representatives#trump's attempted coup#assault on the us capitol by pro-trump terrorists#donald trump#mark meadows#matt gaetz#Youtube
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No pardons in hell...
Biden issues Pardons for Treason
Biden "preemptively" issues pardons for TREASON: Anthony Fauci, Gen Mark Milley, Jan. 6 House committee & Staff who lied & destroyed evidence, Capitol police who LIED under oath...
Joe Biden pardoned Tony Fauci, General Mark Milley, and the entire J6 Select Committee of liars in his final act as president.
They were all faithful servants to the Democrat machine. Now comes their reward.
Fauci’s policies destroyed millions of lives, bankrupted thousands of businesses, and unnecessarily killed millions around the world.
Liz Cheney, who is currently under investigation by the US House of Representatives, knowingly lied about January 6 and President Trump’s actions that day.
General Milley was one of the architects of the worst American foreign policy blunder in history. His response to his own ineptness was to focus on the woke military agenda. Milley also was making promises with China to warn them about any possible US attack. What a traitor.
Biden just pardoned these individuals – now we know they were all criminals.
In December, Politico dropped an explosive report that Biden’s handlers were strongly considering issuing preemptive several current and former government officials who they believe will be in the incoming Trump administration’s crosshairs.
The outlet notes that the Regime has become even more panicked since Trump announced he was picking MAGA hero Kash Patel to drain the Deep State swamp and ensure those who persecuted Trump do not escape punishment.
The figures include Senator-elect Adam “Pencilneck” Schiff (D-CA), lying warmonger Liz Cheney, and COVID fraudster Anthony Fauci.
Today Biden pardoned Fauci, Milley, and liar Liz Cheney as a final act of defiance against the American people.
"Committee fulfilled this mission with integrity and a commitment to discovering the truth. Rather than accept accountability, those who perpetrated the January 6th attack have taken every opportunity to undermine and intimidate those who participated in the Select Committee in an attempt to rewrite history, erase the stain of January 6th for partisan gain, and seek revenge, including by threatening criminal prosecutions.
I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics. But these are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing. Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong-and in fact have done the right thing-and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.
That is why I am exercising my authority under the Constitution to pardon General Mark A. Milley, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Members of Congress and staff who served on the Select Committee, and the U.S. Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police officers who testified before the Select Committee. The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense. Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment to our country."
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If there was ever any doubt as to who bears responsibility for the COVID pandemic, Biden’s pardon of Fauci forever seals the deal. As Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee I will not rest until the entire truth of the coverup is exposed. Fauci’s pardon will only serve as an accelerant to pierce the veil of deception. Ignominious! Anthony Fauci will go down in history as the first government scientist to be preemptively pardoned for a crime. Jan 20, 2025
#biden crime family#treason#biden administration#pardons#hunter biden#anthony fauci#liz cheney#adam schiff#adam kinzinger#january 6#inauguration#capitol police
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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
June 26, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JUN 27, 2024
Today President Joe Biden pardoned more than 2000 former military personnel who had been convicted of engaging in consensual sex under a gay sex ban in the military that has since been repealed. People covered under the pardon can apply to have their military discharges corrected and to recover the pay and benefits the convictions cost them. “[M]aintaining the finest fighting force in the world…means making sure that every member of our military feels safe and respected,” Biden said in a statement.
Biden said he was “righting an historic wrong.” “This is about dignity, decency, and ensuring the culture of our Armed Forces reflect the values that make us an exceptional nation,” he said.
On this date in 2015, the Supreme Court handed down the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which said that states must license and recognize same-sex marriage because of the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement that citizens must have the equal protection of the laws and cannot be deprived of rights without due process of the laws.
In the New York Times today, Kate Zernike explained how the public conversations about abortion have shifted in the two years since the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion. The state bans that went into place have illustrated that abortion is indeed healthcare, as people suffering miscarriages have been unable to obtain the imperative medical care they need.
Zernike quoted pollster Tresa Undem, who estimated that before the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe, less than 15% of Americans thought that abortion was relevant to them personally. Now, though, Undem said, “it’s about pregnancy, and everybody knows someone who had a baby or wants to have a baby or might get pregnant. It’s profoundly personal to a majority of the public.”
In the three weeks since Biden announced restrictions on asylum applications for undocumented immigrants, the number of people trying to cross the border has dropped more than 40% to its lowest level since he took office. This information will likely come up in tomorrow’s scheduled debate between the president and presumptive Republican nominee Trump, who has made it clear he intends to accuse the president of promoting immigration policies that bring criminals into the United States.
Former representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), a military veteran who joined the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and who has fiercely criticized Trump, today endorsed Biden for president.
In a video, Kinzinger said: “[W]hile I certainly don’t agree with President Biden on everything, and I never thought I’d be endorsing a Democrat for president, I know that he will always protect the very thing that makes America the best country in the world: our democracy. Donald Trump poses a direct threat to every fundamental American value. He doesn’t care about our country. He doesn’t care about you. He only cares about himself. And he’ll hurt anyone or anything in pursuit of power.”
On CNN tonight, Georgia governor Brian Kemp told Kaitlan Collins he did not vote for Trump in his state’s Republican primary, although he said he would “support the ticket” in November so that Georgia would remain in Republican hands. It was an interesting statement, since he could easily have deflected the question or simply said he voted for Trump if he cared about avoiding Trump’s wrath. But he appeared not to care, suggesting that Trump’s power even with prominent Republicans is slipping.
Two Republican voters from Pennsylvania told MSNBC tonight that they are voting for Biden. When asked whether they think there is “a silent Biden voter out there,” one said, “I do. I know there is…. We don’t want to talk about it, but we’re all going to vote for Joe Biden.”
By a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court today blessed the practice of taking “gratuities” as a gift for past behavior by an official, distinguishing them from “bribes,” which require proof that there was an illegal deal in place. The case involved a former mayor from Indiana who helped a local truck dealership win $1.1 million in city contracts and then asked for and received $13,000 from the dealership’s owners. The mayor was found guilty of violating a federal anti-corruption law that prohibits state and local officials from taking gifts worth more than $5,000 from someone the official had helped to land lucrative government business.
For the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that the law prohibited officials from accepting “gift cards, lunches, plaques, books, framed photos or the like” in thanks for an official’s help, although David G. Savage of the Los Angeles Times noted that the law came into play only when the gift was worth more than $5,000.
Savage pointed out that as the federal law in question covers about 20 million state and local officials, the decision could have wide impact. This decision that officials can accept “gifts” so long as they are not “bribes” might have something to do with the fact that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have accepted significant gifts from donors—Thomas’s count is upward of $4 million—and it doesn’t relieve the sense that this Supreme Court, with its three right-wing Trump-appointed justices, is untrustworthy.
Writing for justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and herself, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said, “Officials who use their public positions for private gain threaten the integrity of our most important institutions.”
Yesterday, House Republicans released draft legislation to fund the Justice Department and the Commerce Departments for fiscal year 2025, which starts October 1. They propose to slash nearly a billion dollars from the Department of Justice in retaliation for its bringing cases against Trump, and both to cut funding for the FBI and to block the construction of its new headquarters. Attorney General Merrick Garland called the cuts “unacceptable” and said that the “effort to defund the Justice Department and its essential law enforcement functions will make our fight against violent crime all the more difficult.”
In a secret vote yesterday by a House panel that fell along party lines, House Republicans also agreed to say that the last Congress’s construction of the January 6th committee was invalid and illegal. This enabled them to back a last-ditch effort by Trump ally Steve Bannon to stay out of jail. After Bannon refused to respond to the committee’s subpoena for documents and testimony about the January 6 attack, a jury found him guilty of being in contempt of Congress.
Today, Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) filed a brief with the Supreme Court saying that Bannon was right to ignore the subpoena because the committee was illegally organized. Politico’s Kyle Cheney pointed out that the lawyer for the brief is not a House lawyer but rather comes from America First Legal, a public interest organization put together by Trump loyalist Stephen Miller to challenge the legal efforts to rein in Trump’s orders when in office.
Finally, Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer reported in The Recombobulation Area today that event bookings expected for the week of the Republican National Convention, which is set to begin on July 15, four days after Judge Juan Merchan sentences Trump for his 34 criminal convictions, have not materialized. Estimates were that the convention would bring $200 million in economic impact to Milwaukee, but that now appears to be optimistic. “[This is] certainly nothing like we were told or promised,” chef Gregory León told Shafer. With locals staying home to avoid the downtown area during the convention, “[i]f the [reservation] book stays the way it is, we’re not going to make enough money to cover costs.”
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
#Letters From An American#Heather Cox Richardson#Corrupt SCOTUS#LGBTQ#human rights#equal rights#election 2024#MAGA GOP
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Heather Cox Richardson 1.2.25
Heather Cox Richardson 1.2.25
This evening, President Joe Biden awarded twenty Americans the Presidential Citizens Medal, which is given to those “who have performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens.” Biden chose these particular individuals because he “believes these Americans are bonded by their common decency and commitment to serving others” and that “[t]he country is better because of their dedication and sacrifice.”
Those twenty included civil rights leaders who fought to end racial segregation, promote Black voting, restore rights for Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II, legalize same-sex marriage, and defend women’s rights to equality, and reformers who advanced tax reform and the reform of financial markets, moved forward childcare policies, advanced commonsense gun safety regulations, and promoted women’s health.
They included military personnel who perfected trauma care, ensured that female service members received the recognition they deserve, and worked to repair the relationship between the U.S. and Vietnam; a war correspondent who recorded the experience of battle; a photographer and philanthropist who has advanced teacher training and microenterprise in developing countries’ an educator who has guided students toward the arts.
The recipients included both Democrats and Republicans, with Biden honoring Senator Nancy Kassebaum (R-KS) for example, for supporting abortion rights. “[S]he stood up for what she believed in even if it meant standing alone,” he said, “and she reached across the aisle to do what she believed was right.”
And the recipients included the chair and vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, informally known as the January 6th Committee, Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY). Biden praised Thompson for “defending the rule of law with unwavering integrity and a steadfast commitment to truth.” He praised Cheney for raising her voice and reaching across the aisle “to defend our Nation and the ideals we stand for: Freedom. Dignity. And decency.” He added: “Her integrity and intrepidness remind us all what is possible if we work together.”
Biden also offered a public message today in response to the horrific New Year’s Eve attack in New Orleans in which Shamsud-Din Jabbar, an American citizen and Army veteran from Texas, drove a truck into a crowd in the French Quarter, killing 14 people and wounding 30 others.
Before today’s Sugar Bowl playoff between Georgia and Notre Dame in New Orleans, Biden addressed the nation: “Today all America stands with the people of New Orleans. We pray for those killed and injured in yesterday's attack. We are grateful… for the brave first responders who raced to save lives. We’re glad the game is back on for today, but I’m not surprised, because the spirit of New Orleans can never be kept down. That’s also true of the spirit of America. We just have to remember who we are. We’re the United States of America. There’s nothing, nothing, beyond our capacity if we do it together. God bless New Orleans, and God protect our troops.”
While Biden focuses on protecting civil rights and making progress together in a unified America, Trump and Elon Musk are doubling down on dividing Americans. Over the holiday, the fight between the original MAGA and the new tech billionaires taking over the Trump White House continued, and Trump and Musk appear to be trying to heal that rift by returning to culture war themes.
The fight began over immigration, which MAGA opposes and Musk champions for skilled workers, but spread as the Musk faction attacked the American culture MAGA celebrates. After rising to prominence by attacking immigrants, Trump sided with the Musk faction.
On New Year’s Eve, as President-elect Trump set out for a party at Mar-a-Lago, a reporter asked him why he had changed his mind on the H-1B visas that enable employers to bring skilled workers to the U.S. “I didn’t change my mind,” Trump answered. “I always felt we have to have the most competent people in our country. We need competent people. We need smart people coming into our country. We need a lot of people coming in.”
This is a dramatic change from Trump’s previous positions. On March 4, 2016, for example, Trump’s social media account posted: “The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay…. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first…. No exceptions.” It is this stand on immigration that Trump’s MAGA base supports.
For his part, last Friday Musk told those opposed to H-1B visas to “[t]ake a big step back and F*CK YOURSELF in the face.” He said: “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” But MAGA news sites Breitbart and Newsmax didn’t back down, reporting a story by Fred Lambert of Electrek, a site that follows the changeover from fossil-fuel to green vehicles, pointing out that Musk’s Tesla is a major user of H-1B visa workers and that it requested more than 2,400 such workers at the same time it was laying off U.S. workers early in 2024.
On New Year’s Eve, Musk changed his name on X to the name of a meme coin, a cryptocurrency based on an online meme, and changed his avatar to one using symbols favored by the far right. Some of his supporters saw the changes as a signal of his true beliefs, especially as he is strongly supporting the right-wing AfD party in Germany.
Trump also seemed to swing back to his MAGA base when he returned to his attacks on immigrants by echoing a mistaken report by the Fox News Channel. Trump falsely linked the New Orleans attack to “criminals coming in” from other countries and claimed that the U.S. has “open borders,” although in fact, encounters at the border have fallen to a four-year low, lower now than when Trump left office.
The abrupt elevation of culture wars echoes the formula Republicans have used for the past forty years to distract from the reality that between 1981 and 2021 their embrace of so-called supply-side economics moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. Distracting voters with outrage over “welfare queens,” “Libtards,” and so on, kept the country focused on cultural issues rather than economic ones.
As Musk and Trump appear to be making up for their defense of immigration by courting the far right again, Anthony Adragna of Politico reported today that incoming House Republicans are also relying on culture wars to hold their coalition together. Adragna reports they are planning to make trans rights their “marquee fight” of 2025.
That focus is likely intended to distract Republican voters from the reality that Trump has promised to swing the country away from Biden’s investment in rebuilding the middle class. Biden’s focus on employment meant that unemployment dropped dramatically during his term, more people got access to affordable health care, labor unions showed historic growth, and real wages went up so much that according to economist David Doney, workers now have the highest real hourly wages since the 1960s.
Good news for workers was good news for everyone: the country’s economic growth was more than double that of any other country in the Group of 7 (G7) economically advanced democracies.
But Trump has been very clear that he rejects this system and intends to take the country back to supply-side economics, in which the government encourages the concentration of wealth at the top of the economy. Those who embrace this theory argue that wealthy investors will use their money more efficiently than they could under government regulation.
Trump has promised to fill his cabinet with billionaires, and top donors have been donating as much as $2 million to his inauguration fund (those at that level can get up to six tickets to events of the inaugural weekend). According to Jeanna Smialek and Ana Swanson of the New York Times, Trump’s promise to back Wall Street investors and corporate boardrooms has given them high hopes for the Trump administration.
And, of course, Musk, the world’s richest man, has eclipsed Vice President–elect J.D. Vance and sometimes even Trump himself as the face of the incoming administration.
Trump’s very public embrace of billionaires comes just weeks after the December 4, 2024, shooting of United Healthcare chief executive officer Brian Thompson revealed a large American population that is desperately angry at wealthy and powerful executives. Across social media, posts have been defending and even praising Thompson’s alleged murderer since the shooting. Even those who avoided championing the shooter took exception to the fact that those defending Thompson’s industry and deploring his murder had little to say about those people who died after insurance companies denied their claims.
For decades now, Republicans have been able to keep class tensions at bay by hammering constantly on culture wars, and they appear to be trying that again to smooth over the fight between MAGA and the billionaires. But it is possible that the rumbling anger that flashed to the surface over the killing of an insurance CEO will reinforce the MAGA wing and keep class, rather than culture, uppermost.
If Trump does not bring down prices, as he promised and now has downplayed, if he imposes tariffs that will force poorer and middle-class Americans to pay for the tax cuts he has promised to the wealthy and corporations, if Republicans cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to balance the budget; all while Musk continues to pull down billions of dollars in taxpayer money, the rhetorical formula that worked for so long might finally break.
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Ramon Antonio Vargas at The Guardian:
US senator Lindsey Graham has said officials who investigated Donald Trump supporters’ deadly attack on the US Capitol in 2021 should not be imprisoned – despite what his fellow Republican has argued in advance of his second presidency. During an interview Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, show host Kristen Welker asked Graham whether he agreed with Trump’s assertion on the program seven days earlier that those involved in the investigation of the January 6 Capitol attack “should go to jail”. “No,” said Graham, South Carolina’s senior senator as well as a ranking member of the chamber’s judiciary and budget committees. Welker directed the question at Graham during a segment meant to elicit quick answers, which she acknowledged by replying: “OK – that was very clear and concise.” The exchange offered an example of Graham’s occasional willingness to publicly disagree with Trump while still generally serving as a staunch ally – and it came amid a broader political dialogue about who should receive pardons in connection with an attack on Congress that was linked to multiple deaths, including the suicides of traumatized law enforcement officers.
Trump has promised to begin his second presidency in January 2025 by issuing pardons to those who carried out the attack, though there may be some exceptions. He spoke to Welker on 8 December about how supporters of his were pressured into accepting guilty pleas in connection with the violent, desperate attempt to keep him in the White House after losing the presidency to Joe Biden in 2020.
On NBC’s Meet The Press yesterday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that officials on the House Select Committee who investigated the January 6th Insurrection should not face jail time.
From the 12.15.2024 edition of NBC's Meet The Press:
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#Lindsey Graham#Donald Trump#Kristen Welker#Meet The Press#NBC#NBC News#Capitol Insurrection#House Select Committee on the Capitol Insurrection
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Biden pardoned his family members before leaving White House
Former President Joe Biden used his constitutional authority to preemptively pardon several people, including relatives, minutes before Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States.
Biden cited possible political retribution as the reason for his decision to grant preemptive pardons.
I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics. But these are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing.
Among those pardoned was Trump’s former Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired General Mark Milley. Biden also pardoned members and staff of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol (January 6th Committee), including former Republican Representative Liz Cheney.
“The Select Committee fulfilled this mission with integrity and a commitment to discovering the truth. Rather than accept accountability, those who perpetrated the January 6th attack have taken every opportunity to undermine and intimidate those who participated in the Select Committee in an attempt to rewrite history, erase the stain of January 6th for partisan gain, and seek revenge, including by threatening criminal prosecutions.”
The former president granted the preemptive pardon to his former chief medical adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci. The doctor and his family had previously received threats from those who opposed his approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, including mandates to wear masks.
On Monday, Biden also pardoned relatives who were not under investigation, including his brother James Biden and his wife Sara Biden; his sister Valerie Biden Owens and her husband John Owens; and his brother Francis Biden.
My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me — the worst kind of partisan politics. Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end. The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that they engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.
In December 2024 he pardoned his son Hunter Biden for gun and tax offences.
Read more HERE
#world news#news#world politics#usa#usa politics#usa news#united states of america#united states#america#usa 2025#us politics#us news#us presidents#joe biden#biden administration#biden#president biden#hunter biden#democrats#pardon
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Trump Attacks Biden in Christmas Morning Messages, Trump Issues Remarks Addressing Biden
Trump Fires Christmas Barbs at Biden, Accusing Him of Corruption and 'Madness & Doom'.
Former President Donald Trump used Christmas Day as a platform to launch into a verbal attack on President Joe Biden, accusing him of incompetence, corruption, and contributing to a national state of "madness & doom."
Trump's criticisms, posted on his social media platform Truth Social, centered around allegations of election interference, biased law enforcement, and mishandled situations like the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. He also lashed out at special counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating Trump, and the House Select Committee probing the January 6th Capitol attack.
While offering some general holiday greetings, Trump's Christmas Day messages predominantly focused on attacking Biden and his administration, showcasing a continuation of his political rivalry despite the holiday season.
FULL VIDEO
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January 2, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JAN 3
This evening, President Joe Biden awarded twenty Americans the Presidential Citizens Medal, which is given to those “who have performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens.” Biden chose these particular individuals because he “believes these Americans are bonded by their common decency and commitment to serving others” and that “[t]he country is better because of their dedication and sacrifice.”
Those twenty included civil rights leaders who fought to end racial segregation, promote Black voting, restore rights for Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II, legalize same-sex marriage, and defend women’s rights to equality, and reformers who advanced tax reform and the reform of financial markets, moved forward childcare policies, advanced commonsense gun safety regulations, and promoted women’s health.
They included military personnel who perfected trauma care, ensured that female service members received the recognition they deserve, and worked to repair the relationship between the U.S. and Vietnam; a war correspondent who recorded the experience of battle; a photographer and philanthropist who has advanced teacher training and microenterprise in developing countries’ an educator who has guided students toward the arts.
The recipients included both Democrats and Republicans, with Biden honoring Senator Nancy Kassebaum (R-KS) for example, for supporting abortion rights. “[S]he stood up for what she believed in even if it meant standing alone,” he said, “and she reached across the aisle to do what she believed was right.”
And the recipients included the chair and vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, informally known as the January 6th Committee, Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY). Biden praised Thompson for “defending the rule of law with unwavering integrity and a steadfast commitment to truth.” He praised Cheney for raising her voice and reaching across the aisle “to defend our Nation and the ideals we stand for: Freedom. Dignity. And decency.” He added: “Her integrity and intrepidness remind us all what is possible if we work together.”
Biden also offered a public message today in response to the horrific New Year’s Eve attack in New Orleans in which Shamsud-Din Jabbar, an American citizen and Army veteran from Texas, drove a truck into a crowd in the French Quarter, killing 14 people and wounding 30 others.
Before today’s Sugar Bowl playoff between Georgia and Notre Dame in New Orleans, Biden addressed the nation: “Today all America stands with the people of New Orleans. We pray for those killed and injured in yesterday's attack. We are grateful… for the brave first responders who raced to save lives. We’re glad the game is back on for today, but I’m not surprised, because the spirit of New Orleans can never be kept down. That’s also true of the spirit of America. We just have to remember who we are. We’re the United States of America. There’s nothing, nothing, beyond our capacity if we do it together. God bless New Orleans, and God protect our troops.”
While Biden focuses on protecting civil rights and making progress together in a unified America, Trump and Elon Musk are doubling down on dividing Americans. Over the holiday, the fight between the original MAGA and the new tech billionaires taking over the Trump White House continued, and Trump and Musk appear to be trying to heal that rift by returning to culture war themes.
The fight began over immigration, which MAGA opposes and Musk champions for skilled workers, but spread as the Musk faction attacked the American culture MAGA celebrates. After rising to prominence by attacking immigrants, Trump sided with the Musk faction.
On New Year’s Eve, as President-elect Trump set out for a party at Mar-a-Lago, a reporter asked him why he had changed his mind on the H-1B visas that enable employers to bring skilled workers to the U.S. “I didn’t change my mind,” Trump answered. “I always felt we have to have the most competent people in our country. We need competent people. We need smart people coming into our country. We need a lot of people coming in.”
This is a dramatic change from Trump’s previous positions. On March 4, 2016, for example, Trump’s social media account posted: “The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay…. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first…. No exceptions.” It is this stand on immigration that Trump’s MAGA base supports.
For his part, last Friday Musk told those opposed to H-1B visas to “[t]ake a big step back and F*CK YOURSELF in the face.” He said: “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” But MAGA news sites Breitbart and Newsmax didn’t back down, reporting a story by Fred Lambert of Electrek, a site that follows the changeover from fossil-fuel to green vehicles, pointing out that Musk’s Tesla is a major user of H-1B visa workers and that it requested more than 2,400 such workers at the same time it was laying off U.S. workers early in 2024.
On New Year’s Eve, Musk changed his name on X to the name of a meme coin, a cryptocurrency based on an online meme, and changed his avatar to one using symbols favored by the far right. Some of his supporters saw the changes as a signal of his true beliefs, especially as he is strongly supporting the right-wing AfD party in Germany.
Trump also seemed to swing back to his MAGA base when he returned to his attacks on immigrants by echoing a mistaken report by the Fox News Channel. Trump falsely linked the New Orleans attack to “criminals coming in” from other countries and claimed that the U.S. has “open borders,” although in fact, encounters at the border have fallen to a four-year low, lower now than when Trump left office.
The abrupt elevation of culture wars echoes the formula Republicans have used for the past forty years to distract from the reality that between 1981 and 2021 their embrace of so-called supply-side economics moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. Distracting voters with outrage over “welfare queens,” “Libtards,” and so on, kept the country focused on cultural issues rather than economic ones.
As Musk and Trump appear to be making up for their defense of immigration by courting the far right again, Anthony Adragna of Politico reported today that incoming House Republicans are also relying on culture wars to hold their coalition together. Adragna reports they are planning to make trans rights their “marquee fight” of 2025.
That focus is likely intended to distract Republican voters from the reality that Trump has promised to swing the country away from Biden’s investment in rebuilding the middle class. Biden’s focus on employment meant that unemployment dropped dramatically during his term, more people got access to affordable health care, labor unions showed historic growth, and real wages went up so much that according to economist David Doney, workers now have the highest real hourly wages since the 1960s.
Good news for workers was good news for everyone: the country’s economic growth was more than double that of any other country in the Group of 7 (G7) economically advanced democracies.
But Trump has been very clear that he rejects this system and intends to take the country back to supply-side economics, in which the government encourages the concentration of wealth at the top of the economy. Those who embrace this theory argue that wealthy investors will use their money more efficiently than they could under government regulation.
Trump has promised to fill his cabinet with billionaires, and top donors have been donating as much as $2 million to his inauguration fund (those at that level can get up to six tickets to events of the inaugural weekend). According to Jeanna Smialek and Ana Swanson of the New York Times, Trump’s promise to back Wall Street investors and corporate boardrooms has given them high hopes for the Trump administration.
And, of course, Musk, the world’s richest man, has eclipsed Vice President–elect J.D. Vance and sometimes even Trump himself as the face of the incoming administration.
Trump’s very public embrace of billionaires comes just weeks after the December 4, 2024, shooting of United Healthcare chief executive officer Brian Thompson revealed a large American population that is desperately angry at wealthy and powerful executives. Across social media, posts have been defending and even praising Thompson’s alleged murderer since the shooting. Even those who avoided championing the shooter took exception to the fact that those defending Thompson’s industry and deploring his murder had little to say about those people who died after insurance companies denied their claims.
For decades now, Republicans have been able to keep class tensions at bay by hammering constantly on culture wars, and they appear to be trying that again to smooth over the fight between MAGA and the billionaires. But it is possible that the rumbling anger that flashed to the surface over the killing of an insurance CEO will reinforce the MAGA wing and keep class, rather than culture, uppermost.
If Trump does not bring down prices, as he promised and now has downplayed, if he imposes tariffs that will force poorer and middle-class Americans to pay for the tax cuts he has promised to the wealthy and corporations, if Republicans cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to balance the budget; all while Musk continues to pull down billions of dollars in taxpayer money, the rhetorical formula that worked for so long might finally break.
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News and Headlines: 4/15/2024.
In The News Today: Star Jan. 6 Witness Changed 47 Answers After Testifying, Document Shows Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testifies during the sixth hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, on June 28, 2022. (Photo by Andrew Harnik / POOL / AFP) (Photo by ANDREW…
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A wolf should not be embraced by those it might turn on and devour. Who is the Campaign Manager for the Democrat Challenging Biden? Steve Schmidt. The guy who gave us Sarah Palin. Cheney has intimated that she might run as a third-party challenger....."During her last term as Wyoming’s representative in the House, Cheney was an admirable truthteller as she excoriated Donald Trump with key facts and deft rhetoric. Her attacks on Trump as a dire threat to American democracy rang true. But the Democratic establishment’s embrace of Cheney could actually end up damaging the Biden campaign by reducing the turnout of voters who believe in the Democratic Party’s core precepts.
The current problem was foreshadowed in early January 2022, when Liz Cheney’s father Dick Cheney visited the House floor to mark the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. While showing up to support his daughter’s brave anti-Trump stand, the former vice president was met with profuse accolades from top Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went out of her way to ignore past differences, shaking the elder Cheney’s hand and later telling reporters, “We were very honored by his being there.”
But many Democrats don’t want to see their leadership embracing prominent Republicans just because they speak out against Trump. When Liz Cheney was a member of Congress, she voted in line with President Trump 93 percent of the time. On matters like abortion rights, environmental protection, racial justice, civil liberties and national security, the younger Cheney has consistently fought for positions that the vast majority of Democrats see as inimical to the best interests of the country.
It’s one thing to strive for a united front — which will be necessary — to defeat Trump if he is the GOP nominee. But if Democratic leaders are seen as aligning themselves with Cheney, her record of voting against virtually everything that the Democratic base believes in could add to the alienation that’s already felt by millions of young people who voted for Biden in 2020 but now see him as an unprincipled compromiser undeserving of their vote next year.
If Trump is the Republican nominee, Cheney will likely be a featured speaker at the Democratic National Convention, complete with a primetime TV slot. But for many Democratic voters, coziness with the likes of Cheney could be a turnoff.
If Trump is defeated in November 2024, it will not be because Democrats wooed Republican luminaries and conservative voters willing to defect from their own party. It will be because of a sufficiently large turnout from the Democratic base.
“While her work on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has been exemplary,” John Nichols noted last year, “she has an ugly history of exploiting political divisions by promoting Big Lies, as Cheney did when she refused to reject Trump’s vile ‘birther’ lies about former President Barack Obama, and when she claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris ‘sounds just like Karl Marx.’”
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The next two years are likely to see a test of what may turn out to be the most legally consequential recommendation—other than the suggestion of criminal charges—made by the January 6 committee in its final report. Namely, the committee’s view that
“those who took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution and then, on January 6th, engaged in insurrection can appropriately be disqualified and barred from holding government office…pursuant to Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
While the committee addressed congressional vehicles for enforcing that constitutional provision at the federal level, there are also existing provisions and processes to do so on a state-by-state basis. Those vehicles include states’ quo warranto laws. In this essay and our accompanying survey of those laws, we outline their applicability in all 50 states and four additional jurisdictions.
We come to this topic just over two years after a violent mob, alongside organized militia groups, stormed the Capitol building, the seat of American government. They disrupted the January 6 congressional certification of presidential electoral votes with the aim to overturn the 2020 presidential election. As a result, various institutions—from the Justice Department to Congress to civil society organizations—have been holding actors of all levels of culpability to account for the assault on our democracy. Over 900 individuals have been charged by the Justice Department in connection with the attack on the Capitol. Federal prosecutors have also secured historic, back-to-back seditious conspiracy convictions against leaders of the far-right Oath Keepers militia for helping foment the insurrection. And in December, the House January 6 select committee culminated their months-long investigation and series of public hearings by issuing several criminal referrals to the Justice Department against former President Donald Trump and some of his closest associates based on their involvement in different parts of the multi-prong effort to overturn the election.
But criminal prosecution is not the only means of January 6 accountability.
Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment can also serve that general purpose. Section 3 provides that no person shall hold any state or federal office “who[] having previously taken an oath…shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion…or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” In an initial detailed report published at the Project on Government Oversight, we examined the different avenues for modern-day enforcement of Section 3 with an eye toward holding accountable those who participated in the January 6 attack and in the events that precipitated it. As we discussed in that earlier analysis and an accompanying essay at Just Security, one of the main enforcement mechanisms for a Section 3 disqualification is a quo warranto lawsuit. (Quo warranto is Latin for “by what warrant.”) Through this type of lawsuit, an individual’s right to hold public office can be challenged.
Our purpose is to provide a comprehensive current survey of the nation’s quo warranto laws, and to build on the recent successful use of the doctrine. Despite that fact, the doctrine has been recently used to litigate against a public official who participated in the attack on the Capitol and resulted in his being removed from office. In that landmark ruling last fall, a New Mexico judge removed a state county commissioner from office under Section 3 for his participation in the January 6 attack. Since then, the House select committee in its final report has issued a recommendation that Section 3 disqualification actions be brought against other public officials who engaged in insurrection.
As a continuation of our previous analysis and the work of the House committee, we surveyed the quo warranto procedures in 55 different jurisdictions—the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and nationally, including some limited instances of federal common law. We did so to map the potential for future uses of quo warranto lawsuits to bar public officials from office. Our analysis of these procedures demonstrates that quo warranto lawsuits can be used by a variety of stakeholders—from private parties such as individual citizens to public entities such as state attorneys general, county district attorneys, municipal or county governments, and even U.S. attorneys. What’s more, it shows that quo warranto lawsuits are an accountability tool that is not only widely accessible but also practically meaningful. Such actions hold the potential to disqualify sitting public officials who have violated their oath by engaging in insurrectionist activity. In that way, quo warranto lawsuits can serve as a powerful means of furthering legal accountability against some of the highest-ranking individuals who participated or aided in the assault on January 6.
Our analysis interprets the wide array of state and territorial laws that establish the procedural framework for quo warranto actions by categorizing them according to how they empower different parties, both in bringing actions and in managing them. In some jurisdictions, private parties can supply the government with information to serve as the basis of the government’s quo warranto complaint against a public official. These private parties are often referred to as “relators.” In Texas, for example, prosecuting attorneys may file a motion “at the request of an individual relator.” While such an action is not technically a private action, some jurisdictions also allow relators to manage a case pursuant to the government’s oversight. For instance, Missouri law empowers relators to control a case after obtaining leave from the prosecuting attorney.
In other jurisdictions, private parties can themselves file quo warranto lawsuits against public officials without governmental permission. Some jurisdictions, such as Connecticut, allow parties to do so in their own name. In others like North Carolina, however, the government must be the named party. In the latter scenario, the private party, not the government, manages the case; and, indeed, the government possesses no management authority. For example, should the prosecuting attorney decline to bring a quo warranto case in New Mexico, the relator is afforded full control of the suit despite the government being the named party. We identify both these types of quo warranto procedures as private actions, since both enable private parties to bring the suit.
Some jurisdictions have similarly codified which public authorities may initiate a quo warranto lawsuit. Unlike the regulations that empower private relators to issue broader complaints, many regions specify which authorities can litigate against particular officeholders. For example, in Arkansas, prosecuting attorneys may bring quo warranto suits against county officials, while the state’s attorney general handles cases against all other officers. Other jurisdictions such as Massachusetts and New York place the onus entirely on the attorney general, while others task other officials such as county or U.S. attorneys with bringing quo warranto suits.
Beyond empowering specific parties, quo warranto laws also impose other and highly varied procedures in these kinds of lawsuits. In New Jersey, for example, the attorney general carries the burden of proof. But in Hawaii, the respondent—that is, the public official whose conduct is in question—bears the burden of proof in lawsuits initiated by the attorney general. Other laws establish a duty upon public officials, usually either the local or state prosecutor, to bring a quo warranto action when, as in Arizona, for example, “they have reason to believe there is a cause.” California, Idaho, and Montana, to name a few, impose such a duty upon prosecutors.
Disqualification actions can be brought against public officials who have violated their oath of office by engaging in insurrection or by giving aid or comfort to insurrectionists. The House select committee recognized that in their final recommendations. Our comprehensive survey of quo warranto procedures is intended to serve as a guide to the various private and public stakeholders empowered by state and territorial law to file quo warranto lawsuits so they can continue the House committee’s work—holding public officials whom voters have entrusted to lead their government accountable for their wrongdoing.
#Do State Laws Block Insurrectionists from Office?#14th amendment#state election laws#insurrectionists#felons#office requirements for candidates#Laurence Tribe#constitutional law#constitutional law professor#Lawrence tribe#jan 6th
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David Horsey
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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
June 11, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JUN 12, 2024
“We’re producing more energy than ever before in this nation. We have the strongest economy in the world, and we are beating China for the first time in decades. More people went to work this morning in America than at any other time in our nation’s history. So I’ve got a message to Donald Trump and all his negativity and his whining: Stop sh*t talking America. This is the greatest country on earth, and it’s time that we all start acting like it.”
Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s words to Jen Psaki on MSNBC yesterday illustrated that Democrats are flipping the script on the MAGA Republicans.
Since he decided to run for president in 2015, almost exactly nine years ago, Trump’s narrative has been that the United States is in terrible decline and that only he can “make America great again.” In his speech announcing his candidacy on that June day in 2015, he claimed that “our country is in serious trouble” and complained that China, Japan, and Mexico were all “beating” the U.S. and “laughing at us, at our stupidity…. The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems,” he said before launching into the idea that Mexico was sending criminals and rapists across the border. “Our enemies are getting stronger and stronger…, and we as a country are getting weaker,” he said. “Even our nuclear arsenal doesn’t work.”
Trump claimed—falsely—that the nation’s gross domestic product was below zero, that the labor participation rate was “the worst since 1978,” that unemployment was between 18 and 20 percent, and that while Obamacare was “amazingly destructive,” he would replace it with something cheaper and better.
Trump continued this theme of decline and what he called “American carnage” in his inaugural address. He described “[m]others and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our Nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”
Trump initially seemed to blame inept politicians and bureaucrats for what he claimed was America’s decline, assuring the audience at his 2015 campaign announcement: “Well, you need somebody, because politicians are all talk, no action. Nothing’s gonna get done. They will not bring us—believe me—to the promised land. They will not.” But when then–FBI director James Comey refused to drop the investigation into the relationship between Russian operatives and the 2016 Trump campaign, Trump and his loyalists began to warn of a secretive “deep state” that was working to undermine Trump and, with him, the nation.
Trump’s narrative that he is the true defender of the United States, under attack by dark forces, maps beautifully over white evangelical narratives of religious decline. Trump continued that storyline even after voters turned him out of the White House, insisting that a nefarious conspiracy of Democrats, undocumented immigrants, and foreigners stole the election from him.
The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol estimated that Trump raised $250 million in donations from supporters for an “election defense fund” to pay the legal fees to overturn the results of the 2020 election. But the Trump team never actually set up that fund. Instead, the money went to the Save America political action committee founded and controlled by Trump, and from there the money went to Trump loyalists and pro-Trump organizations.
And therein lies a key reason for Trump’s story of an apocalyptic America: describing the nation as a hellhole that only he can fix also maps over a common pattern of American grifters. So long as supporters send him money, he claims, they will be able to defend the country against dark forces: communists, Marxists, atheists, immigrants, pedophiles, feminists—just what the dark forces are matters far less than that they are a foil for the grifter.
When Trump made that argument in 2015, it was not all that far-fetched. Economists estimate that the supply-side economics of the past 40 years had shifted $50 trillion dollars from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%, hollowing out the middle class. Schools had been chronically underfunded, and the opioid epidemic, which began in 1999, was claiming more than 10,000 Americans a year (a number that has continued to rise ever since). And by weaponizing the filibuster and gerrymandering states, Republicans had made it extraordinarily difficult for Congress to accomplish anything that would address these issues.
When Biden took office, he was in the unusual position of signing executive orders to establish policies that were not unpopular, like Trump‘s, but that were extraordinarily popular. This began the process of showing that the government could, in fact, represent the people.
Then, thanks to the election of Georgia senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in a runoff election on January 6, 2021—that was the seismic shift of January 6, 2021, that is often forgotten—the Democrats continued to demonstrate that the government could work for the people. They passed the American Rescue Plan to shore up the U.S. economy after the pandemic shutdowns, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act to rebuild roads and bridges and improve broadband access, the CHIPS and Science Act to promote semiconductor manufacturing, the Inflation Reduction Act to invest in climate change mitigation and permit the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices, and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to close loopholes in gun purchases.
Those changes have created a roaring economy with an unemployment rate that has just last month ticked up to 4% after 27 months below that number, with wages growing faster than the inflation that plagued the U.S.—and the world—after the pandemic eased. The highest wage growth has gone to the lowest earners, helping to cut the nation’s extreme wealth inequality.
That booming economy might be partly what’s behind another significant change: for all that Trump and MAGA Republicans still talk about Democratic cities as hellholes, the FBI yesterday released a report showing that violent crime in fact dropped by more than 15% in the U.S. during the first three months of 2024. As Jim Sciutto of CNN pointed out today, “Murders fell 26.4% and rapes decreased by 25.7%. Aggravated assaults decreased by 12.5%, according to the data, robberies fell 17.8%.” In his own assessment, Biden attributed those dropping numbers to “putting more cops on the beat, holding violent criminals accountable, and getting illegal guns off the street.”
On June 1, top sports talk host Colin Cowherd anticipated Shapiro’s pro-American stance when he pushed back on the Republican idea that the country is a dystopian nightmare. “[Trump’s] trying to sell me an America that doesn’t exist,” he said. “Stop trying to sell me on ‘everything’s rigged, the country’s falling into the sea, the economy’s terrible,’” he continued. “The America that I live in is imperfect. But compared to the rest of the world, I think we’re doing okay.”
Today, Biden pointedly illustrated one more difference between Trump and the real world. In the wake of his own conviction on 34 criminal counts, Trump has amped up his insistence that the Department of Justice is rigged against him and must be purged of nonpartisan civil servants and repopulated with his own loyalists. Biden today underscored his own respect for the rule of law.
This afternoon a jury found Biden’s 54-year-old son Hunter Biden guilty on three charges of lying on a form required to purchase a gun in 2018 when he checked the “no” box that asked if he was “an unlawful user of, or addicted to,” drugs. That lie permitted him to buy the gun that he owned for 11 days. His lawyer argued that he did not consider himself an addict because he was trying at the time to end his drug dependence.
The news made the Trump team rush back to their narrative. “This trial has been nothing more than a distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family, which has raked in tens of millions of dollars from China, Russia and Ukraine,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said. Echoing the false allegations MAGA Republicans have made about President Biden, she added: “Crooked Joe Biden’s reign over the Biden Family Criminal Empire is all coming to an end on November 5th, and never again will a Biden sell government access for personal profit.”
But there is no Biden family business, and Hunter Biden is not in the administration. President Biden has kept his distance from the case. Today he said, “I am the president, but I am also a dad. Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today. So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery. As I…said last week, I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal. Jill and I will always be there for Hunter and the rest of our family with our love and support. Nothing will ever change that.”
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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
#David Horsey#Letters From An American#Heather Cox Richardson#Biden administration accomplishments#MAGA Narrative#TFG#famous American grifters#The MAGA narrative#Infrastructure Act#CHIPS and science act
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Heather Cox Richardson 12.9.24
The sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria yesterday took oxygen away from the airing of President-elect Trump’s interview with Kristen Welker of NBC’S Meet the Press. The interview told us little that we didn’t already know, but it did reinforce what we can expect in the new administration.
As Tom Nichols pointed out after the interview, when Donald Trump ran for the presidency this year, he “wasn’t running to do anything. He was running to stay out of jail. The rest he doesn’t care about.”
Nichols was reacting to the exchange that began when Welker asked the president-elect: “Do you have an actual plan at this point for health care?” Trump answered: “Yes. We have concepts of a plan that would be better.” “Still just concepts? Do you have a fully developed plan?” Welker asked.
The answer, nine years after Trump first said he would repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something cheaper and better, is still no. He went on to add, “I am the one that saved Obamacare,” although he spent his first term trying to weaken it.
Trump also reiterated his plans for revenge against those he perceives to be his enemies. He told Welker that when he is president, the Department of Justice should pursue and jail the members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, more commonly known as the January 6th Committee. He singled out committee leaders Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY).
But it was in his insistence on one specific lie that Trump was most revealing. He told Welker that there were “13,099 murderers released into our country over the last three years. They’re walking down the streets. They’re walking next to you and your family, and they’re very dangerous.”
This statement sets Trump up to be a strongman who will save America from great danger, but it is a lie that has been repeatedly debunked. It originated in a September 2024 letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX) listing 13,099 people convicted of homicide as being “non-detained.”
As Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato blog explains, “non-detained” does not mean free to roam the streets; it simply means that those in prison for homicide are not currently detained by ICE. Once they have served their sentences, they go back onto ICE’s docket to be deported unless their countries of origin don’t have repatriation agreements with the U.S., a condition that affects a very small number of people. Releases of criminal migrants into the U.S. dropped during the Biden administration from the numbers released during Trump’s term. In addition, as Nowrasteh points out, the 13,099 figure covers at least 40 years.
Welker tried to correct Trump: “The thirteen thousand figure I think goes back around 40 years,” she said. “No, it doesn’t,” Trump insisted. “It’s within the three-year period. It’s during the Biden term.”
Trump was intent on making Welker and the television audience accept an egregious lie, despite the fact it has been thoroughly debunked. His insistence echoed his determination in January 2017 to make the American people accept his lie that his inauguration crowd was bigger than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, although we could see with our own eyes that he was lying. He was demanding we reject our own experience and instead let him define how we see the country.
Trump built on a history of narrative shaping that ran through the Republican Party. In 2004 a senior advisor to President George W. Bush famously told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community,” believing that people could find solutions to problems based on their real-world observations. But such a worldview was obsolete, the aide said. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.… We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
America’s right wing has been able to shape reality in large part because of the 1996 advent of the Fox News Channel (FNC), the brainchild of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Shows on the FNC used clear, simple messaging with colorful graphics that told a story of an America overwhelmingly made up of white, rural folks who hated taxes and an intrusive government, and would do fine if they could just get the socialist Democrats to leave them alone. To spread the new channel, Murdoch initially offered ten dollars per subscriber to each cable company that carried it.
That right-wing echo chamber has expanded until it is now so strong that nearly 70% of Republicans falsely believe Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact that the FNC had to pay more than $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after it lied to viewers about that election.
Trump has built on that Republican narrative to create a fantasy world that is badly out of step with reality. It is not easy to see how he will reconcile his vision with real-world events.
He and his supporters might try simply to tell voters that they have done what they promised, and hope that story sells.
When Trump threatened to put a 25% tariff on goods from Mexico until Mexico stopped undocumented migrants from crossing the border, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum told Trump that "encounters at the Mexico–United States border have decreased by 75 percent between December 2023 and November 2024.” Trump then simply told reporters that Sheinbaum had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border,” and his supporters trumpeted on social media that Trump had closed the border with one phone call.
But convincing people of an alternative reality might be harder with issues closer to home.
Trump has vowed to place a tariff wall around the U.S., for example, at the same time he has promised to bring down the price of consumer goods. “Economists of all stripes say that ultimately, consumers pay the price of tariffs,” Welker told him on Sunday. “I don’t believe that,” Trump answered. He might not believe it, but producers do: car manufacturers as well as major shopping chains have warned that tariffs will force them to raise prices.
On other issues, Trump will have a vocal and established opposition. After his threat to go after the members of the January 6th committee, former representative Liz Cheney said in a statement: “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting.“
“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power. He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building, and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave. This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history.”
Cheney called for the release of the evidence and grand jury material special counsel Jack Smith assembled “so all Americans can see Donald Trump for who he genuinely is and fully understand his role in this terrible period in our nation’s history.”
Nobel laureates generally try to stay out of politics, but today more than 75 of them in medicine, chemistry, economics, and physics wrote a letter to senators urging them not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services. They object to Kennedy’s stand against the scientists and agencies he would oversee. They noted that he has no credentials or relevant experience and that he has opposed life-saving vaccines, promoted conspiracy theories, and attacked the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.
Putting him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, they write, “would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors.”
There is also the chance that the Fox media empire will not effectively push a right-wing narrative much longer. The Murdoch family is in a struggle over control of that empire after the death of the 93-year-old Rupert. He and his eldest son, Lachlan, want to lock the company into its current political slant, but at least two of the three of Murdoch’s other children who are set to inherit the company do not share their father and brother’s politics.
Rupert has been trying to change the terms of the family trust to cement Lachlan’s control of the empire, but today a commissioner in Nevada ruled against him. Edward Helmore of The Guardian noted that the decision likely means that even if the children do not take the media empire in a different direction, divided leadership will weaken the right-wing message.
Almost 30 years after the Fox News Channel began to shape American politics with a fictional narrative, a different Fox media empire would almost certainly disrupt the right-wing bubble. A lawyer for Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch said they will appeal the decision.
Finally, Pennsylvania law enforcement officials today arrested a “strong person of interest” in the shooting of United Healthcare chief executive officer Brian Thompson. Tonight a court document shows 26-year-old Luigi Mangione has been charged with murder.
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Political Cults and the Use of Cultic Tactics in the Recruitment and Mobilization of Participants in the January 6 Attack on the Capitol.
Statement for the Record
by Dr. Alexandra Stein
Visiting Research Fellow, London South Bank University
Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol 31 March 2022
A link to a PDF of the complete report is below
Sean Moon’s Rod of Iron Ministries is one of the three examples given in this report.
I would like to thank the members of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol for the privilege of presenting a statement for the record regarding cultic mechanisms involved in recruiting and mobilizing those involved in the Jan 6 attack.
Introduction I am a social psychologist specializing in the study of cults and totalitarian systems, and currently a visiting research fellow at London South Bank University in the department of Law and Social Sciences. I have over 30 years experience studying this phenomenon. My most recent book is Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in cults and totalitarian systems1. I would like to acknowledge the research and feedback assistance of Grace Connoy in preparing this document.
There is a great variety of ways in which certain political actors and groups are using cultic methods to influence the current social and political environment. The use of such methods is much more prevalent in our society than is generally recognized. This is important to understand in order to make sense of what may otherwise appear to be irrational behaviour at best, and certainly dangerous and destructive behaviour at worst, threatening our democratic social and political norms.
This statement doesn’t claim to explain all these destructive behaviours and forces undermining democratic practices, but there is clear evidence that cultic leadership and methods are at work to a larger extent than is often understood as there is a lack of public knowledge about what constitutes cultic mechanisms. I will briefly highlight the key features of these systematic coercive methods and discuss selected exemplar cases contributing to the Jan 6 Capitol attack.
Background Cults typically thrive in times of social fragmentation and breakdown2. There has been increasing social fragmentation in recent decades with rapid demographic movement, job instability, loss of social and community structures such as unions and social clubs3, unstable communities, and a sharp increase in relative inequality. Adding to this has been the rapid change in the role of women and minorities, along with a change of relative status due to job displacement. Decades of unmitigated cult formation and growth in both the US and internationally have laid a groundwork for the current situation where cultic influence is felt throughout society and, I would argue, has become endemic. The internet provides an accelerant to cult formation and recruitment.
One element that has fed into the environment leading up to the Jan 6 attack has been the contribution of groups that fit closely to a definition of what constitutes a cult, as well as more dispersed movements that use cultic methods. The definition I use in my work consists of five points:
1) A cultic or totalist system is formed and controlled by a charismatic authoritarian leader (which in later generations may become a leadership group).
2) It is a rigidly bounded, dense, steeply hierarchical and isolating social system. Looser front groups may exist for the purpose of recruitment, gaining resources and spreading propaganda.
3) The structure is supported and represented by a total, exclusive and isolating ideology.
4) The leader sets in motion processes of brainwashing or coercive persuasion designed to isolate and control followers. This involves social and psychological isolation, engulfment within a supposed benevolent cultic system, and the chronic arousal of stress and fear.
5) As a result followers are able to be exploited and potentially become deployable agents, demonstrating “hyper-credulity”4 and uncritical obedience to the group, regardless of their own survival needs.
The Jan 6th attack included groups that fit this definition. They include among others, a classic cult: Sean Moon’s Rod of Iron ministries, and one of the many far-right hate groups present: The Proud Boys. Others attended who may have been influenced by cultic propaganda, although not themselves yet consolidated into a specific group, such as those radicalised either by Trump’s rhetoric or through the QAnon channel. In general attendees came from a population that in many ways is already fully or partly recruited into a world saturated with cultic influence and, importantly, where fiction is presented as fact.
Further, there is extensive and long-standing intrusion into the highest levels of the government through the late Doug Coe’s The Fellowship, also known as The Family, a group that has many cultic elements5. Much of Trump’s base came from a wide network of mega-churches, televangelists, prosperity gospel and purity culture churches, such as the those led by Paula White, who gave Trump’s inaugural invocation in 2016, or Kenneth Copeland’s Word of Faith church. These, and many others, operate in a cultic manner and over decades have gained considerable influence in both government and among large sections of the public.
Charismatic authoritarian leadership Totalistic, ideologically extremist groups are controlled by a charismatic and authoritarian leader (or leadership group). Both charisma and authoritarianism are required as they are the source of the group’s central organizing dynamic of “love” (or perceived benevolence) and fear. Charisma alone is not sufficient, but when combined with authoritarianism, a highly controlling, bullying system that entraps followers can emerge. Such leaders are also sometimes referred to as malignant narcissists.
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Full report here:
https://www.alexandrastein.com/uploads/2/8/0/1/28010027/select_cmte_on_jan_6_statement_for_the_record_a_stein.pdf
https://www.alexandrastein.com/blog
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a further extract:
In 2021 the Rod of Iron Ministries purchased a 40 acre property in rural Texas supposedly as a “safe haven” for its ��patriots”. Another isolated property in Tennessee houses families with children, dedicated full-time to the group. Many more such compounds are currently being planned. Among other activities, they are training members as part of their armed “Peace Police Peace Militia”12. This suggests increasing physical isolation in addition to an existing isolating, hierarchical structure inherited from the Unification Church.
In a cultic group the structure serves to isolate followers socially, psychologically, and sometimes physically, from the outside world. They are also isolated from fellow followers in that any doubts or critiques about the group are prohibited from being shared within the group. It is well known that Trump was quick to fire anyone who disagreed with him. Healthy debate and respect for minority opinions, normally important elements of democratic decision-making, are disallowed in a cultic environment.
Exclusive ideology
The exclusive ideology or belief system exists to justify and reinforce the position of the leader and the structural isolation of followers. The important feature of these ideologies is not so much whether they are left, right, religious or any other ideology, but it is rather the structure of those beliefs. That is: the ideology is total and exclusive allowing no other thought system to intervene, and claiming to have the single “Truth” and the answers to all possible questions for all time.
The source of all this “Truth” resides solely in the supposedly benevolent leadership: the leader is always right even when the leader is wrong. Cultic, totalistic ideologies paint the outside world in a highly fearful manner as the enemy, satanic, impure, or generally holding back the cause. Fear-arousing, Us versus Them narratives dehumanise outsiders and present apocalyptic visions. The leader is then positioned as the saviour from these fictional threats.
Along with other means, some methods of delivery of the belief system serve to confuse followers by either highly complex (and circular) or over-simplified, highly repetitive types of rhetoric. Critical thought is reduced to “thought-stopping cliches”13. The goal of the ideology is in fact to impose the group’s fictional interpretation of the follower’s experience so as to prevent followers from being able to think about their own feelings and experience independently. They are encouraged to “trust the leader” at all times as he has the plan and will disclose it as the follower is deemed ready.
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continued here:
https://www.alexandrastein.com/uploads/2/8/0/1/28010027/select_cmte_on_jan_6_statement_for_the_record_a_stein.pdf
https://www.alexandrastein.com/blog
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How Cult Relationships Work with Dr. Alexandra Stein
Chris Shelton: Sensibly Speaking Podcast #348
16 July 2022
comment: Excellent interview with Dr. Stein! I’ve heard her before, but there was a lot more information here than in other interviews. Thanks Chris and Alexandra!
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Alexandra Stein on cults
#Dr Alexandra Stein#January 6th insurrection#Hyung Jin Sean Moon#Sean Moon#Rod of Iron Ministries#Proud Boys#The Fellowship#The Family#Donald Trump#malignant narcissism#Sun Myung Moon#Unification Church
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The top investigator for the House Jan. 6 committee said it was hard to interview witnesses when '30 minutes later' their cooperation would leak
Kevin Marino (C), lawyer for former Trump campaign manager William Stepien, talks to Tim Heaphy (L), January 6th Committee lead investigator, before the second hearing by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol on June 13, 2022 in Washington, DC.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The top investigator for the House Jan. 6 committee told The New York Times it was…
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I echo the sentiments of all of the other Officers sitting here. I use an analogy to describe what I want is a hitman. If a hitman is hired and he kills somebody, hitman goes to jail, but not only does the hitman go to jail, but the person who hired them does. There was an attack carried out on January 6th, and a hitman sent them. I want you to get to the bottom of that. Thank you.
– US Capitol Police Ofc. Harry Dunn (source)
Inciting a riot is a crime. Inciting violence to overturn the rule of law is sedition.
I hope federal prosecutors are closely monitoring the testimony at the House hearings.
#hugs and kisses#donald trump#sedition#inciting a riot#hitman#us capitol#insurrection#pro-trump terrorists#terrorists not tourists#aquilino gonell#harry dunn#us capitol police#us house of representatives#select committee to investigate the january 6th attack on the us capitol
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