As a retired attorney Never Trumper, I picked a lousy time, January 4 or 5, to damage my first-string computer so badly that it had to be decommissioned and hospitalized. My second-string computer lacks a smooth process for WordPress blogging, since the WordPress block editor strikes me as profoundly stupid and unusable. 

On the bright side, first-stringer has been released from medical care, and I was able to make notes all along the momentous way from Wednesday afternoon the 6th to date. So without further ado, my curated “best-of” notes of the last ten days.

January 6

After the riots began, I was mostly devoted to watching things develop on Television, looking for the least stupid coverage available. I believe I concluded that CNN fit that bill. I also noted:

• The late 1990s, my wife’s car bore a bumper sticker saying “My Disgust With the Current Administration Cannot Be Expressed Here.” I wish I had one of those bumper stickers now.
• I wish the press would stop talking about Congress being prevented from discharging its “sacred” duty. I will settle for solemn duty.

January 7

Donald Trump has been deformed and deranged for much of his life. It has been the pattern of his life to lie and to cheat, to intimidate and hurt others, to act without conscience, to show no remorse, and to make everything about himself. None of this was a secret when he ran for president, and certainly none of it was a secret once he became president. His viciousness, volatility, and nihilism were on display almost from the moment he took office. As president, he has acted just as one would have expected. He has never deviated from who he is.

Peter Werner, Republicans Own This Insurrection – The Atlantic

There is no excuse for political violence, and Trump, admittedly, did not ask anyone to engage in violence. However, if you tell people that their votes didn’t count, that the election was a sham, that the election you lost wasn’t even close but in fact a landslide in your favor, it’s only natural to expect that some people will be inclined to resort to violence, because the whole point of elections is to settle political matters without violence. If the election process is a total fraud, then violence is to be expected.

Even in the face of the violence yesterday, Trump, while telling the rioters to go home, also continued to insist that he really won in a landslide, thus continuing to foment violence. He is unfit to be president.

When Are We Going to Admit that Trump is Unfit to be President? – Reason.com

David French
@DavidAFrench

Tell me again that character doesn’t matter.

Tell me again that the only concern about Trump is with his “manners.”

You monumental hypocrites and cowards. Look what you’ve done.

Trump goosed his own mob of supporters in DC this morning, saying in a speech:

> “All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical Democrats. We will never give up. We will never concede. It will never happen. You don’t concede when there’s death involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.”

He said: “We will never take back our country with weakness.”

And then they went in and invaded the Capitol …

…

Rod Dreher, Trump’s Weimar America

Unlike so many other disturbances over the years, the events at the Capitol yesterday did not represent a policy dispute, a disagreement about a foreign war or the behavior of police. They were part of an argument over the validity of democracy itself: A violent mob declared that it should decide who becomes the next president, and Trump encouraged its members. So did his allies in Congress, and so did the far-right propagandists who support him. For a few hours, they prevailed.

Anne Applebaum, What Trump and His Mob Taught the World About America – The Atlantic

18 USC §2384—Seditious Conspiracy
If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.(Emphases added)

What Is Seditious Conspiracy? – Reason.com

This was not simple trespass. Some of those people need the full 20 years, starting with Q Shaman, a QAnon leader/celebrity.

The problem here is that it’s Trump’s job to prevent and stop rioting, especially rioting against federal institutions. He’s supposed to prevent and stop such behavior even when it’s promoted by total strangers to him. He has a special responsibility to prevent and stop such behavior by people who are on his side, since those are the ones whom he can most effectively try to calm even when they’re already in a rioting mood.

He most certainly isn’t supposed to say things—even constitutionally protected things—that are pretty likely to cause harms of the sort that we hired him to stop. The incitement test, which applies equally to all speakers, doesn’t capture this factor, nor should it. This factor is all about the special responsibilities of government officials (Presidents, governors, mayors, police chiefs, legislators, and the like). Such officials are supposed to be politically savvy enough to know what’s likely to produce (even contrary to their intentions) criminal conduct, and are supposed to organize their speech and action in a way that minimizes this, rather than making it especially likely.

Trump’s failure was a failure not as a speaker, of the sort that strips speakers of First Amendment protection. It was a failure, a massive and unjustifiable failure, as a public servant.

Incitement and Ordinary Speakers; Duty and Political Leaders – Reason.com

Especially shameful by Trump and his little leg-humpin’ friends:

• Trump immediately went after the most loyal ally he’s had the past four years: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.” Marc Short, a top aide to Pence, confirmed that he was denied entry into the White House last night because Trump blamed him for Pence’s “betrayal.”
• These walkbacks are, without question, a welcome development. But they are also evidence that the legislators’ planned objections were never really about correcting widespread voter fraud—they were about political expediency. Theoretically, nothing that transpired on Wednesday should have changed anybody’s mind about the existence of voter fraud. But it sure heightened the political ramifications of continuing to go along with the mob.

The Morning Dispatch: A Dark Day on Capitol Hill (emphasis added)

“This isn’t who we are as Americans,” the president-elect insisted. Yes, old men are entitled to their delusions, but the rest of us are not obliged to share them. Biden could not be any more wrong: This is exactly who we are.

“We must not normalize Donald Trump!” A hundred thousand variations on that sentence have been published in the past four years. It is a stupid sentence. Donald Trump does not require normalization. He is as normal as diabetes, as all-American as shooting up your high school.

…

The Trump presidency began in shame and dishonesty. It ends in shame, dishonesty, cowardice, and rebellion against the Constitution. For the past few weeks, the right-wing media, including the big talk-radio shows, has been coyly calling for a revolution. Of course they never thought they’d actually get one: That kind of talk is good for business — keep the rubes riled up and they won’t change the channel when the commercials come around on the half-hour. I never had much hope for the likes of Sean Hannity, tragically born too late to be a 1970s game-show host, but to watch Senator Ted Cruz descend into this kind of dangerous demagoguery as he jockeys to get out in front of the Trump parade as its new grand marshal has induced despair.

On May 4, 2016, I posted a little note to the Corner, headlined: “Pre-Planning My ‘I Told You So.’” It reads, in part: “Republicans, remember: You asked for this.” The path that the Republican Party and the conservative movement have taken in the past four years is not one that was forced on them — it is the product of choices that were made and of compromises that were entered into too willingly by self-interested men and women seeking money, celebrity, and power.

Of course it ends in violence — this is, after all, America.

Kevin D. Williamson

None of his policy achievements outweigh the paranoid extremism he has directed like a missile at the constitutional order. Pointing to his “enemies” does not excuse his behavior.

Matthew Continetti, Capitol Hill Protests: Trump Must Pay | National Review

In other words, we’ve become a bunch of damned ideologues who can’t see past our issue checklists to meta-issues, such as “This candidate ticks all the right boxes, but he’s a toxic narcissist, lifelong philanderer, cheat and con man. No way.”

There will be time to sort through the wreckage of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. There is not as much time — a little less than 14 days — to constrain the president before he plunges the nation’s capital into havoc again. Incitement to trespass, harassment, and destruction cannot go unanswered. The Constitution offers remedies. Pursue them — for no other reason than to deter the president from escalation. There must be a costS for reckless endangerment of the United States government. Trump must pay.

Matthew Continetti, Capitol Hill Protests: Trump Must Pay | National Review

This attack wasn’t just foreseeable, it was foreseen. At The Dispatch, we have been warning about the possibility of serious political violence for months. The president and many of his supporters have falsely claimed that the presidential election was stolen and have trafficked in transparently ridiculous conspiracy theories. They have told bizarre tales about false and even impossible schemes to corrupt the vote. And they’ve done this while speaking in apocalyptic terms about the fate of the nation.

Impeach Donald Trump, Remove Him, and Bar Him From Holding Office Ever Again – The Dispatch. Note the “bar him from holding office again” part.

This is from a conservative publication whose purpose is not “Never Trump” but whose sanity and decency has pretty well rooted it in that camp even as it casts its issue nets more widely.

January 8

Trump doesn’t care or doesn’t understand that he lost the election. He doesn’t care or doesn’t understand that his legal challenges, hindered in part by the stubborn facts on the ground and in part by the characteristic half-assedness of most of his endeavors, failed miserably. He doesn’t care about the idea of due process or any process at all, really, except to the extent that it can benefit him. He has consistently called for lawbreaking behavior to be deployed against journalists and activists he dislikes. He thinks he has a right to unleash constant, unhinged conspiracy theories against his enemies, but readily threatens his own critics with lawsuits. This is all deeply ingrained habit for him.

Before there was a single moment of violence yesterday, we were already in unprecedented territory: an outgoing president addressing his most deranged fans, continuing to insist that he had won an election that he had in fact lost by a significant margin (306 votes constituted a ‘landslide’ in 2016, according to the man himself), riling them up in a way that almost certainly led directly to what followed.

Yesterday was also about resentment in its rawest, least focused form. Trump was elected in 2016 in part because he was able to capitalize off a growing sense among many Americans that they have been “left behind.” There are elements of this sentiment that are well-founded and elements that are misguided, and it’s too big a subject to unpack here, but the point is that these feelings have manifested, in Trumpism, more as a general confused populist lashing-out and desire for a heroic figure than as the embrace of any specific politics or policies per se. Sure, in theory Trump voters are against illegal immigration and against China “screwing us” and for “American business” and against “thugs and looters,” but really, their political commitments start and stop at listening to Trump say mean things about the things they dislike and nice things about the things they like. They like Trump because he gives voice to their fuzzy resentments, fuzzily.

A Perfect Ending To The Trump Presidency – Singal-Minded

For roughly the past three decades, right-wing media personalities have enriched themselves by cultivating and encouraging a virulent anti-liberalism among a segment of Republican voters. As the ranks of these voters have grown and they’ve been networked together into virtual communities through social media, increasing numbers of elected officials have begun to chase them, seeking their support, by validating the increasingly deranged views they are fed by media profit-seekers.

Donald Trump’s primary and general-election victories in 2016 massively enhanced the power and intensity of this anti-liberal feedback loop. What we’ve witnessed since the November election has been its fullest flowering yet: the president, right-wing media, and dozens of members of Congress spreading and validating conspiratorial lies among a segment of the electorate — and then doing its bidding in the name of democratic representation.

Why did Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and the others flatter the delusions of those who stormed the Capitol building and cheer them on by casting their symbolic votes to reject the outcome of the election? They did so because, as a YouGov poll conducted on Wednesday made clear, roughly 45 percent of Republican voters approved of what happened in Washington that afternoon.

The insurrectionists are their constituents.

Damon Linker, The bloody power of symbolic gestures

For years now, my central thesis about American public life has been that it is fundamentally unreal, a kind of live action role-playing game augmented by digital technology.

The competing participatory narratives by which we experience politics have almost no connection to the banal reality of a sclerotic two-party system that primarily exists in order to increase the gross domestic product and the share prices of publicly traded corporations. Even at their respective partisan extremes — QAnon, Russiagate conspiracies, “Abolish the family” lunacy — the stories we tell ourselves about the perfidy of our leaders are a kind of ideological fan fiction.

…

On Wednesday we saw the limits of LARPing. The longed-for irruption of what Marxist intellectuals call “the real” — an actual attempt at the destruction of one of the most enduring symbols of the American civic order — happened. Supporters of a president who only moments before had been insisting that the recent election was illegitimate took him at his word and stormed the U.S. Capitol, smashing windows, occupying the floors of both chambers, vandalizing offices, skirmishing with police officers.

…

What did Wednesday’s events show us? I wish I could believe that the response would be a collective feeling that something has gone too far, that our tacit encouragement of a lunatic and conspiratorial politics has taken us to a dark place far beyond the comfortable ports of liberal capitalist decadence.
This does not seem to me likely. Instead I expect that in the weeks and months to come all the competing meta-narratives will be reinforced by Wednesday’s violence. The basic epistemic disjuncture in American society will be strengthened. Fifty percent of the country is not going to change its mind about the results of the election. A senile president incapable of maintaining order in the capital of the republic will continue to be regarded as an essentially Hitlerian figure rather than Wall Street’s second choice for the enrichment of our ruling class.

Matthew Walther, The limits of LARPing

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday the company was banning President Trump from its platform “indefinitely,” at least through the end of his term. “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Zuckerberg wrote. Snapchat and Twitch made similar decisions, while Twitter reinstated the president’s account following a short suspension.

…

[O]ne group at least seems to be unshaken by the shocking events: The core Trump base. How has the Trump movement avoided soul-searching following a day on which some of its most committed members stormed Congress by force? Simply by rewriting the facts of the event into something consistent with their worldview, in which America’s only violent political insurrectionists come from the radical left.

Mere minutes after the motley crew of Proud Boys, militia members, and other MAGA faithful were evicted from the Capitol Wednesday, a false narrative had already begun going viral among Trump supporters on social media. The people who stormed police barricades by force at the Capitol, the story ran, had actually been Antifa interlopers posing as supporters of the president.

Never mind that the crowd had come to D.C. and marched to Congress at Trump’s explicit request; never mind that some of those filmed trashing the place were well-known alt-right personalities; never mind that others interviewed inside were perfectly chatty about who they were and why they were there; never mind that the only “evidence” provided for this theory was a couple screenshots of misidentified faces and tattoos. Boosted by credulous and sloppy right-wing web media, loose-cannon MAGA celebrities, Fox News hosts “just asking questions,” and even members of Congress, the theory that the Capitol insurrection had been instigated by false-flag leftists almost immediately took over the pro-Trump internet.

Startlingly, even Trump supporters who had been physically present at the riot—who had personally stepped across crumpled barricades, pushed through smoke and tear gas over the Capitol lawn and onto the steps of the building itself, and seen the breach with their own eyes—had come around to this narrative by the following day. On Thursday, your Morning Dispatchers interviewed more than a dozen who had returned to the National Mall for a second consecutive day. Nearly all insisted—without any prompting—that the only people who had been truly violent the day before had been covert Antifa operators.

“The whole thing was set up,” said one South Carolina woman who declined to give her name. “They wanted the people to get pumped up and do that. … The picture of the guy sitting on Pelosi’s desk or whatever? I guarantee you he was working for Antifa—or whoever it is, whatever organization.” (It was, in fact, Richard Barnett from Gravette, Arkansas. The FBI reportedly visited his house yesterday.) 

“There was, you know, a window was broken,” said Christian, a protester who had driven up from Texas earlier this week and said he had witnessed the break-in but not entered the Capitol himself. “Some people were kind of doing it—either they were overzealous or there were some agitators within. It looks like some people have identified a few likely Antifa members based on their tattoos and stuff … For the people who were genuine Trump supporters, which there probably were a few, I don’t know if they were the first in—maybe they just tagged along.”

The Morning Dispatch: Aftermath

In my reflections on Donald Trump when he was running for President in 2016, I made one significant error: I didn’t think he would nominate responsible judges and Justices. I thought he would hand out judicial appointments like candy to friends and toadies. But it turned out that the judiciary couldn’t capture his attention, so he farmed out the decisions to others who acted on sound conservative principles. (Given how many of the very judges he appointed ruled against his recent frivolous lawsuits, precisely because they were honest conservative jurists rather than toadies, I wonder if he’s belatedly reassessing his priorities.)

looking backward

Trump is now and always has been delusional. He lives in an imaginary world. His insistence that he won the last election in a “landslide” is psychologically indistinguishable from his declaration on his first day that his Inaugural crowd was larger than his predecessor’s. For four years, the actual evidence did not matter. It still doesn’t. Any rumor that helps him, however ludicrous, is true; every cold fact that hurts him, however trivial or banal, doesn’t exist. For four years as president, any advisor who told him the truth, rather than perpetuating his delusions, had an immediate expiration date. For four years, an army of volunteer propagandists knowingly disseminated his insane, cascading torrent of lies.

And Trump really believes these fantasies. He is not a calculating man. He is a creature of total impulse. As I wrote almost five years ago now, quoting Plato, a tyrant is a man “not having control of himself [who] attempts to rule others”; a man flooded with fear and love and passion, while having little or no ability to restrain or moderate them; a “real slave to the greatest fawning,” a man who “throughout his entire life … is full of fear, overflowing with convulsions and pains.” For the ancients, a tyrant represented the human whose appetites and fantasies had no form of rational control.

…

Quotes For The Week
“After this [rally], we’re going to walk down [to the Capitol] and I’ll be there with you. … We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of [the senators] because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” – insurrectionist leader Donald J. Trump, just before the violent assault on the Capitol.
“I do not believe that the founders of our country intended to invest in the vice president the unilateral authority to decide which electoral votes should be counted,” – Mike Pence.
“I can’t imagine that the president wanted this,” – Rick Santorum, deluding himself again.
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done,” – Trump.
“We love you. You are very special,” – Trump, in a taped statement addressing the seditionists who attacked the Capitol.
“Arrest everyone who has violated the fencing. Prosecute [the] trespassers [to] the fullest extent of the law for any crime beyond the simple trespass. Conclude the proceeding and confirm the election of President-elect Biden. Rule of law conservatives cannot be silent about this,” – Hugh Hewitt, the right-wing radio host of the old eponymous Dish award “given for the most egregious attempts to label Barack Obama as un-American, alien, treasonous,” on Wednesday.
“The other day, because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator,” – Raphael Warnock, the first black senator from Georgia.
“It turns out telling voters the election is rigged is not a good way to turn out your voters,” – Mitt Romney, on the Democratic triumph in Georgia.
“The Oklahoma City bombing killed the momentum of the small government movement. This is likely to do the same thing to the Trumpian right,” – Charles Murray, author of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. God I hope so.
“Media: quit labeling DC protestors ‘Conservatives, Republicans, Tea Partiers, Trump Supporters, etc’ LOOK IN TO WHO THESE PEOPLE ARE who’d choose an apparent leaderless insane swarm to create a perception of condoned violence. KNOCK IT OFF. And to any insincere, fake DC ‘patriots’ used as PLANTS — you will be found out,” – 2008 veep nominee Sarah Palin, implying that the deadly attempted coup at the Capitol was a false flag operation.
“If our capable floor staff hadn’t grabbed them [the electoral college ballots rescued from the Senate floor], they would have been burned by the mob,” – Senator Jeff Merkley, tweeting a photo of the ballot chests.
“We’re storming the Capitol! It’s a revolution!” – a Trump-cult member from Knoxville, Tennessee, on camera.
“This [storming of the Capitol] didn’t happen during the U.S. Civil War,” – Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League.
“It is a sickening and heartbreaking sight. This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic — not our democratic republic,” – George W. Bush.
“Today, the United States Capitol — the world’s greatest symbol of self-government — was ransacked while the leader of the free world cowered behind his keyboard — tweeting against his Vice President for fulfilling the duties of his oath to the Constitution,” – Republican Senator Ben Sasse.
“Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence,” – Nikole Hannah-Jones, on the rioting and looting this past summer.
“Right now, Republican leaders have a choice made clear in the desecrated chambers of democracy. They can continue down this road and keep stoking the raging fires. Or they can choose reality and take the first steps toward extinguishing the flames. They can choose America,” – Barack Obama.
“What’s the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?”- a senior Republican official quoted in the WaPo on November 9, two months before the deadly attempted coup at the Capitol.

Andrew Sullivan, This Is The Face Of The GOP Now – The Weekly Dish (emphasis added)

[T]here’s virtually no popular support for the idea that social media companies should permit insurrectionists (of any ideological stripe) to use their platform to plan or incite violent unrest.
 
But what if the president of the United States is the insurrectionist-in-chief?

When Donald Trump was elevated to the presidency, his core supporters pursued a fundamentally unsustainable course. They simultaneously celebrated his norm-breaking while furiously demanding that the response to Trump follow all applicable norms. Only Trump could be the bull in the china shop. Only Trump could be the horse in the hospital.

Well, the bull has broken a lot of china. And on Wednesday, the nation’s very ability to secure the liberty that’s the lifeblood of the republic wavered and cracked. A Trump mob achieved what the Confederacy could not. It launched a violent, deadly, and sustained occupation of the Capitol. It halted for a time the vital process of counting electoral votes, a process essential to the peaceful transition of power.

Why did this happen? There were many causes, but one cause—perhaps the principal cause—was the president of the United States using private platforms to spew an avalanche of grotesque lies and inflammatory rhetoric into the body politic. He triggered an actual insurrection.

So the advice I gave more than a year ago—advice I thought applied only to unstable countries in the developing world—applies here. It applies now. Should social media companies continue to provide a platform to Trump? No. They should not.

David French, Toss Trump Off Twitter

77 percent of Trump’s voters—77 percent—say he was the rightful winner and that the election was stolen from him.

I don’t think that most of the people in the mainstream of American culture, who have viewed this week with horror, have any idea what they’re up against.

It Could Have Been Worse. – The Triad

January 9

I found myself focusing on things other than our political woes, but made on note:

“People were willing to die for this man and he just threw them all under the bus. That’s the only thing that’s shameful about the events of the past 36 hours,” Nick Fuentes, the host of the America First podcast and the unofficial leader of the white nationalist Groyper Army, angrily tweeted, shortly after Trump released a video Thursday night in which he conceded that Biden would be the next president and called for political reconciliation.

Cassandra Fairbanks, a prominent MAGA activist, tweeted: “[He] tells angry people to march to the capitol [and then] proceeds to throw his supporters under the bus.”

Politico

Had these people really not noticed yet that loyalty for Trump is entirely, utterly, a one-way street? (Not that I think “threw under the bus” is a very good description of what Donald Trump did after Congress finished counting electoral votes, but it speaks to the deluded mindset of people who thought Trump cared.)

January 10

As befits Sunday, I pretty much gave it a rest.

A Jewish publication blames Wednesday’s riot on post-Christian pagans.
Christian David French blames it on sorely misguided Christians.
I’m going to have to chew on this one a while.

January 11

The Atlantic’s Caitlyn Flanagan gave me some guilty pleasure lampooning the insurrectionists:

Here they were, a coalition of the willing: deadbeat dads, YouPorn enthusiasts, slow students, and MMA fans. They had heard the rebel yell, packed up their Confederate flags and Trump banners, and GPS-ed their way to Washington. After a few wrong turns, they had pulled into the swamp with bellies full of beer and Sausage McMuffins, maybe a little high on Adderall, ready to get it done. Like Rush Limbaugh before them, they were in search of their own Presidential Medals of Freedom, and like Donald Trump himself, they were ready to relieve themselves on the withering soul of the nation and the marble floors of the Capitol building. Out of darkness we were born and into darkness we were returning.

…

The Viking guy was frightening, until it turned out that he’s a notorious ham who shows up at lots of Trump events and loves publicity. Last May, in Phoenix, he was pounding his drum and yelling, “Thank you, President Trump!” and “Thank you, Q!” until a reporter approached him to ask for an interview, and in an instant he turned into Beto O’Rourke. “My name is Jake Angeli,” he said smoothly. “That’s J-A-K-E and A-N-G-E-L-I. Angel with an i.”

The comedian Norm MacDonald has observed that the second-worst job in the world is Crack Whore and that the worst job in the world is Assistant Crack Whore. So let us cast our lonely eyes on the specter of Assistant Viking, Aaron Mostofsky, who was dressed in pelts and carried a police riot shield and who—in a rare Viking flourish—was bespectacled. Can you tell us what you’re doing here today? a reporter asked him. “What I’m doing here today is,” he began, but here the words began to fail him. He looked around and then said he was there to “express my opinion as a free American, my beliefs that this election was stolen. Um—we were cheated.” He adjusted one of his pelts and said that certain blue states—“like New York”—had once been red, and “were stolen.”

…

Why had she come to Washington? “We’re storming the Capitol!” she whined. “It’s a revolution!” Patty Hearst was more up to speed on the philosophy and goals of the Symbionese Liberation Army before she got out of the trunk. These people were dressed like cartoon characters, they believe that the country is under attack from pedophiles and “globalists,” and they are certain that Donald Trump won the election. In other words, the Founders’ worst fear—that a bunch of dumbasses would elect a tyrant—had come to pass.

…

All things are born, live, and then die. We can remember who we are, and keep going—maybe even moving forward. Or we can make a mockery of ourselves and die in filth.

Caitlyn Flanagan, Worst Revolution Ever – The Atlantic]

Thanks, Caitlyn. That (especially the first paragraph) was cathartic in a guilty pleasure sort of way.

• Ronna McDaniel and Tommy Hicks were reelected chair and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, respectively. The pair—who are both close allies of President Trump—will serve through the 2022 midterm elections.
• Alt-right activist Ali Alexander claimed in a video posted before the protest that he was working with three House Republicans—Reps. Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs and Mo Brooks—to organize the event. Alexander said he consulted the lawmakers as he “schemed up putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting…”
• Alex Jones, the InfoWars conspiracy theorist who claimed the Sandy Hook shootings were faked and has been publicly praised by President Trump, claimed in a video that the White House asked him three days before the event to lead the march to the Capitol.
• And sources familiar with the investigation tell The Dispatch that there are indications some of the militia groups involved had plans that included harming lawmakers and harming or capturing Vice President Mike Pence.
• Who should be held accountable for Wednesday’s siege on the Capitol? According to conservative columnist George Will, President Trump, Sen. Josh Hawley, and Sen. Ted Cruz. “The three repulsive architects of Wednesday’s heartbreaking spectacle—mobs desecrating the Republic’s noblest building and preventing the completion of a constitutional process—must be named and forevermore shunned,” he writes in his latest column. Even though Trump “lit the fuse for the riot in the weeks before the election,” the president’s conspiratorial antics were enabled by Hawley and Cruz and their refusal to certify the Electoral College vote on Wednesday, Will writes. While Trump is gone in just over a week, it will take longer to “scrub” Hawley and Cruz from public life. “Until that hygienic outcome is accomplished, from this day forward, everything they say or do or advocate should be disregarded as patent attempts to distract attention from the lurid fact of what they have become. Each will wear a scarlet ‘S’ as a seditionist.”

The Morning Dispatch: It Could Have Been So Much Worse

January 12

Republican Attorney General Official Resigns Over Group’s Role in Capitol March
Adam Piper was executive director of Republican Attorneys General Association, which sent robocalls asking people to join rally that turned into deadly riot

The executive director of the Republican Attorneys General Association resigned after the group was criticized for soliciting thousands of Trump supporters to march on the Capitol last week and fight to support President Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.

The Republican Attorneys General Association’s policy arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, authorized robocall messages urging “patriots” to join last Wednesday’s march to “fight to protect the integrity of our elections.”

… Within the organization, however, Mr. Marshall has called for an internal investigation into the robocall messages. “We are engaging in a vigorous review,” he told reporters in Montgomery, Ala., Monday. “I was completely unaware of our connection to this rally,” he said.

Other Republican attorneys general have also distanced themselves from last week’s violence.

Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, former chair of the Rule of Law Defense Fund, disavowed involvement.

“AG Reyes was not involved in organizing the rally in Washington DC,” his office said in a statement Friday, noting that “under his tenure, RLDF was not involved in any political rallies.”

What does a rally have to do with the (nonexistent) legal merits of “stop the steal”? None. Then why would AGs push a political rally?

January 13

What do you call it when rightwingnuts do something horrible and then pretend it was leftwingnuts conducting a “false flag” operation? Is that a “false flag false flag” operation?

Pence Says He Won’t Invoke 25th Amendment, Setting Stage for Impeachment Vote
Some Republican lawmakers say they would vote to impeach Trump in the wake of Capitol riot. House Democrats passed a resolution Tuesday demanding that Pence and a majority of the cabinet invoke the 25th Amendment.

Pence had no good options. Or, to put it another way, “lie down with dogs, rise up with fleas” is a cosmic law, and he lay down with a dog in 2016.

One of the chief reasons I couldn’t vote for Donald Trump is the ugly way he talks about human beings. That said, I underestimated how many people may have voted for him because of his rough, threatening, even violent talk, rather than despite. I never thought we would see what we saw in the Capitol. I do think it reached a whole new level post-election, but as I said in my syndicated column this week, people such as Jonah Goldberg, Jay Nordlinger, and David French were right to constantly sound alarms.

This is a time for humility and repentance, and for the Left, too. We’ve been too polarized and ideologically driven with a religious-like fervor on both sides. Hurt people are hurting hurt people. We need a president who honestly wants to be president of all Americans. Including peaceful ones at the Trump rally last Wednesday.

Kathryn Jean Lopez, A Mea Culpa

Don’t skim this too lightly. It’s wicked good.

At a joint press conference, a dozen or more of the most prominent figures in the “Stop the Steal” movement gather. There’s Kevin McCarthy, Rep. Steve Scalise, Newt Gingrich, and a claque of Fox News primetime anchors. (Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are at a separate table, because no one will agree to sit with them.)

“We are here to ‘revise and extend our remarks,’” McCarthy begins in an attempt at congressional wit.

“Joe Biden is president-elect. He won. Donald Trump lost. This has been the case since a few days after election night. There was no fraud worth speaking of; the courts from one end of the country to the other have thrown out every claim of irregularity. To our eternal regret, many in my party, out of ignorance, delusion, mendacity, or fear of our own constituents, endlessly repeated outright lies emanating from the fevered mind of our delusional president, whom we never should have nominated in the first place. This helped create the climate for the most violent assault on the Capitol in 200 years. I am ashamed personally, and for my party.”

Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell is next.

“While I urged my colleagues to accept the electoral vote count, I bear heavy responsibility in spending the last four years ignoring the increasingly lunatic actions and rhetoric of the president. As long as he gave me my judges, I turned away from the behavior that culminated in a presidentially triggered riot. In the interest of unity, I am asking the various committee chairs to move swiftly to put President-elect Biden’s economic and national security team in place as close to January 20th as possible.”

Newt Gingrich rises—slowly, with great difficulty—to acknowledge that “as a world-class historian, I knew better than to embrace the mad-as-a-hatter fantasies of the president. It’s not as if I have the mental acuity of Louie ‘Bag of Hammers’ Gohmert. But I was too busy selling my books, CDs, and commemorative coins to think about the harm I was doing to the country. I am now offering a ‘Collector’s Item’ special of videos and pen holders in honor of Joe Biden’s inaugural, just call this toll-free—”

When Gingrich has returned—slowly, painfully—to his seat, Senators Hawley and Cruz take the podium together.

“Of course we know the truth,” they recite together. “We are two of the smartest, best-credentialed senators ever: Stanford and Princeton, Yale Law and Harvard Law. But our joint lust for the presidential nomination unmoored us from any sense of decency. We are resigning our seats and—like the British politician John Profumo, who left in scandal and spent the rest of his life doing charity work—we intend to spend the coming years doing menial labor for the Little Sisters of the Poor, while engaging in prayerful meditation so that we might somehow become less reprehensible human beings.”

A few moments later, after the Fox News primetime team pledges a vow of silence, the gathering ends. And peace and tranquility settle upon our divided land.

Jeff Greenfield, Yes, by All Means, Let the Healing Begin

I hadn’t thought, before sometime in the last year, about the connotation of “impunity.” The real “tells” in last week’s riots at the U.S. Capital were the maskless rioters, smirking and taking selfies, obviously thinking that Trump and sundry Congressrats had their backs and that they were acting with impunity.

Dumbasses. Some of them are going to prison for long terms.

And, by the way, after some initial hesitation about calling the riots a “coup attempt,” because the rioters did not want personally to govern, I’m now entirely comfortable with calling a “coup attempt” the effort to disrupt the peaceful transition of power to the duly elected President so that your demagogue can remain in power.

If the price of winning your next primary is remaining silent on the question of Trump and his post-election behavior, which culminated in the storming of the Capitol by a “Hang Mike Pence!” mob, then you have lost your priorities. If you cannot explain to voters why they are wrong to give a pass to a president who behaved as Trump has done, and what it means to have a president who fouls American democracy by rousing the rabble to break down the doors of the Capitol and shout for lynching the vice president, then why are you in public service? If that’s what it takes to keep your job, why would you even want a job like that? Honestly, I do not get it.

…

I had an extremely frustrating conversation this evening with a friend who believes all of this was invented by the Left to discredit the president. The narrative is unfalsifiable. It’s not a question of a political disagreement; it’s about living outside of reality. All day long I’ve been getting e-mails from people who are really suffering because beloved friends and family members — even elderly parents — are completely lost in this toxic unreality of paranoia and conspiracy. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, aside from woke militants. Something demonic is in the air. We might not need an impeachment and conviction so much as we need an exorcism.

Rod Dreher, * Impeachment As Exorcism*

The conservative Catholic writer John Jalsevac explains why he’s so angry right now. Excerpts:

> Nothing, absolutely nothing, has disturbed me more over the past four years, than the weird misuse of Christian religious language, spirituality and mysticism in service of the Trumpist political agenda ….

Rod Dreher, * Impeachment As Exorcism*

Conservative writer and radio host Erick Erickson expanded upon some of the themes we touched on above in his newsletter yesterday. Cancel culture exists, and it is a threat, he writes. But that’s not what we’re seeing in the wake of last week’s insurrection. “No, I am not sympathetic to you over major corporations deciding not to give you a penny. No, I am not sympathetic to you getting your internet social media accounts canceled. No, I am not sympathetic to you having your rising career in politics ruined,” he writes of those facing repercussions for their role in Wednesday’s events. “This was bound to happen because you overplayed your hand and your action is causing a reaction. It is an equal and opposite reaction. Trying to cancel a presidential election causes a cancelation rebound.”

The Morning Dispatch

If you asked today “what’s an evangelical?” to most people, I would want them to say: someone who believes Jesus died on the cross for our sin and in our place and we’re supposed to tell everyone about it. But for most people they’d say, “Oh, those are those people who are really super supportive of the president no matter what he does.”

Ed Stetzer interviewed in ‘How Did We Get Here?’ A Call For An Evangelical Reckoning On Trump

A related argument, lent weight by the president himself yesterday, is to suggest, hint, insinuate, or outright proclaim that impeachment could lead to violence. It could tear apart the country. Yada, yada, yada.

> “This impeachment is causing tremendous anger and you’re doing it and it’s really a terrible thing that they’re doing,” he added, in his first public comments since the deadly assault on the Capitol.
>
> “For Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to continue on this path, I think it’s causing tremendous danger to our country and it’s causing tremendous anger. I want no violence,” Mr. Trump concluded before heading across the South Lawn to Marine One.

Maybe it could spark violence—and even if that were the case, since when do conservatives argue that we should appease potential rioters? I’ve been writing about the pernicious “riot ideology” of the 1960s left for 20 years. Lo and behold, the right has now embraced it. Moreover, the mere fact that it is plausible that Trump’s second impeachment could spark violence is an argument for why he should be impeached. Forget that he’s threatening Congress with the possibility of violence; the fact that the threat is plausible is testament to the environment he deliberately created.

But here’s my point: If Trump actually believes this stuff, the incandescently obvious moral choice is for him to resign, to spare America even greater turmoil and strife. That would be a display of Trump putting the interests of America first. The only reason for him to stick around is vanity. It’s not like there’s anything more he can do policy-wise, save issue a bunch of easily rescinded executive orders or hand out more pardons.

Jonah Goldberg

January 14

• President Trump issued a statement yesterday (which was also texted to campaign supporters) calling for calm leading up to and on Inauguration Day. “I urge that there must be NO violence, NO lawbreaking and NO vandalism of any kind,” he said. “This is not what I stand for, and it is not what America stands for.” He expanded upon this message in a pre-recorded video as well. “Mob violence goes against everything I believe in, and everything our movement stands for,” he said. “No true supporter of mine could ever endorse political violence.” (The New illustrative case of the No True Scotsman fallacy.)
• … ten Republicans broke ranks—sufficient to make it the most bipartisan impeachment vote in American history.
• Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy … said the president bore responsibility for the attack … [but] argued … that the most prudent course of action would not be impeachment, but rather a “fact-finding commission and a censure resolution.” … McCarthy conditioned his comments on President Trump “accept[ing] his share of responsibility” for last week’s violence and “quell[ing] the brewing unrest.” While the former will almost assuredly never happen (at least in public) ….
• “I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues last night, and a couple of them broke down in tears, talking to me and saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.” (Rep. Jason Crow)
• The Freedom Caucus, founded to promote limited government and reducing spending, has become in recent years little more than an enforcer of Trump loyalty ….
• The Republican Party has a choice to make: Does it want leaders who bury their convictions for public political gain, or leaders who act on their conscience even at the risk of short-term political loss? Using Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney as examples of the two paths, Steve argues for the latter in a piece on the site. “I suspect in two years, in five years, in 10 years, the overwhelming majority of the country and even the majority of Republicans will look back on this moment and wonder how anyone could have voted against impeaching the president on substantive grounds,” he writes. “And the procedural arguments against doing so—there’s no time, the Senate isn’t in session, his presidency is almost finished—will feel even smaller than they feel today.”

The Morning Dispatch

Lucky are the foreign ministers of very small, very consensus-driven countries, for those who play their cards right sometimes get to hold office for many years. One of the luckiest card players out there is Jean Asselborn, the amusing polyglot who has been the foreign minister of Luxembourg since 2004. Although his country is tiny (population 613,000), the longevity of Luxembourg’s top diplomat gives him the confidence to say what he thinks—even if it is, well, undiplomatic. Last week, following the insurrection in Washington, D.C., Asselborn did exactly that: “Trump is a criminal,” he told RTL, his country’s leading broadcaster.* “A political pyromaniac who should be sent to criminal court. He’s a person who was elected democratically but who isn’t interested in democracy in the slightest.”

Anne Applebaum

It certainly was not one of those “Tell your grandchildren” moments. For the second time in a year, Donald Trump was impeached on Wednesday afternoon in the House of Representatives by a vote of 232-197, which included 10 members of his own party, after a few hours of unmemorable speechifying. The most shocking thing about it was not not being able to read Trump’s own reaction.

Matthew Walther. The remainder of Walther’s tendentious column confirms that when he’s bad, he’s dumber than a box of rocks.

The days since last Wednesday’s insurrection against the legislative branch of the United States have felt extremely odd and quite out of keeping with much of the past four years.

…

There’s also a different feeling in the political air — one that might best be described as being snapped back to wakefulness from a semi-conscious dream state. Or maybe a feeling of rubber hitting road after a long, drawn out sideways skid on civic black ice. We may not right our course before we crash, but at least it feels like we might have a brief window and a chance to regain control over our direction.

For the moment, at least, there’s a sense in our public life that we’ve returned to reality after four interminable years of psychological torture and abuse — a time during which the president of the United States has systematically and repeatedly used a bully pulpit amplified with powerful new communication technologies to lie to us extravagantly and constantly about nearly everything. He has conjured an alternative reality of words into which millions of our fellow citizens have gladly retreated. But the rest of us have been captured by them, too, like epistemic hostages confined to a virtual world that was imagined into existence by a narcissistic sociopath.

Damon Linker

Hypothesis: Evangelical susceptibility to QAnon is a natural extension of Evangelicalism’s steady diet of prophecy porn over more than 50 years. New Apostolic Reformation may have been an intermediate step. Hal Lindsey is a primary offender, but a teacher at my Evangelical boarding school warned us in 1964 that if Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater, the Communists planned an immediate takeover.

This crap isn’t brand new.

Insurrection and impeachment, yesterday’s All the President’s Lawyers podcast, is an extremely good discussion of the criminal law consequences and prosecutorial strategy surrounding last Wednesday’s insurrectionary Capitol riots. More than fun banter this week.

Of reports that insurrectionists are on DC dating apps, providing pictures and videos of themselves to women they’re trying to impress – some of whom are only pretending to be conservative and are sending the evidence to the FBI:

Progressive women catfishing conservative men to turn them in to the FBI. They think it’s a game. Politics justifies everything, right? What could possibly go wrong?

Rod Dreher.

Sorry, Rod, but I support those women even if they do think it’s a game. It is important that the insurrectionists and their friends understand that there are consequences – really bad ones – for following Trump into insurrection.

At 7 p.m. Eastern on Newsmax, Kelly said that there’s “overwhelming” evidence that Trump “did nothing wrong” on the day of the attack. At 8 p.m. on One America News, host Dan Ball said the Republicans who spoke out against the “political theater” of impeachment were “brave patriots.” At 9 p.m. on Fox, Sean Hannity bashed the “ten swamp Republicans” that “went along with the stunt.” Oh, and QAnon-promoting congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said on Newsmax that she will file articles of impeachment against Biden on January 21.

CNN

Why would we listen to my friend Joe, who says he’s a Christian and who’s telling me about Jesus, if he also thinks that Communists are taking over America and operating a pedophile ring out of some pizza restaurant?

Ari Shapiro, * How QAnon Conspiracy Is Spreading In Christian Communities Across The U.S.*, quoting a Texas pastor who’s trying to fight QAnon.

More, and very important, stuff:

SHAPIRO: I guess one question is, if these pastors are the voices of authority within the church community, why aren’t they able to talk their parishioners out of this false belief?

BEATY: The pastors that I spoke with talked about a crisis of authority that they feel acutely as spiritual leaders. They perceive that we’re in this time when traditional forms of credibility, of verifying truth, of looking at authoritative figures as holding truth – we’re in a time when there’s a lot of mistrust of traditional sources of authority and truth. And they feel that themselves as church leaders. So they’re concerned that if they try to take on QAnon directly and speak truth instead of falsehood, that they just – they won’t be trusted. They won’t be believed.

And, also, if they try to point their church members to credible news sources, to mainstream media, that none of that will come through because, of course, according to the QAnon conspiracy theory, the mainstream media is part of the cover-up. So I think a lot of the pastors felt that their hands are tied in this time, and they’re concerned that members of their church are not only accepting falsehood and kind of believing in these falsehoods but also spreading falsehood to other people in the church. And that’s especially problematic when QAnon is being espoused by other pastors in a denomination or by leaders in a particular church.

SHAPIRO: Do you think we would find a growing belief in QAnon in any community that includes a lot of Trump supporters, or is there something specific to the white evangelical church that makes it susceptible to these messages?

BEATY: That’s a great question. I think about a poll conducted by the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, a prominent evangelical institution in the Chicago suburbs. This was a poll conducted in 2018 that found that over half of evangelicals, as defined by belief, are strongly convinced that the mainstream media produced fake news. And Ed Stetzer, the executive director of the Billy Graham Center, noted that that distrust in mainstream media and that willingness to write off mainstream media information as fake news opens the door for a lot of evangelicals to turn to alternative and fringe news sources, including those that traffic in conspiracy theories. So I certainly think there’s a connection there.

But, also, again, it’s that QAnon uses this explicitly spiritual language that sounds Christian. You know, there’s a clear battle between good and evil. There’s the promise of this great awakening. More people are going to wake up to these prophecies, if you will, that’s coming from Q. And so it’s easy for many white evangelicals to read their Bibles and connect the dots between what they read there and what they’re hearing from QAnon sources.

(Emphasis added)

I feel a bit of schadenfreude at the emphasized part, because bog standard American Evangelicalism is rooted in schismatic rebelliousness, and was seen as an extension of democracy in the U.S. 190-240 years ago.

I’m not even talking about guys like the Methodist Wesleys, the heirs of rebellion against Roman Catholicism (a rebellion I understand, but that’s a long story); no, sober voices like the Wesleys were the ones being rejected in favor of fire-breathers like Asbury, and innumerable individual judgments, and almost-innumerable sects and cults being born.

So it feels as if “Christian” America is reaping the whirlwind of Evangelical Protestantism’s fissiparousness. Every man is now his own pope. Pastors are, at best, facilitators or advisors. (Evanglicalism is too incoherent for this to be the whole story, but it’s a part of the story I think I know well enough to opine.)

America’s Third Great Awakening needs to be a repentant return to the Orthodox Christian faith from which Western Christendom split a thousand years ago. With God, it’s possible, but I’m not so sure it will happen until we’ve sunk even further, if then. We’re not God’s special pet.

The impeachment vote will be a vote on the president and these things. But it’ll also tell us a lot about the kinds of leaders Republicans want. Do they want leaders willing to amplify lies and deceive their constituents in the interest of political expediency? Or do they want leaders who will act out of conviction, who will do the right thing and try to persuade others, even when the short-term politics are daunting?

Any party that chooses the former doesn’t deserve to survive.

Steve Hayes, * What Kind of Leaders Do Republicans Want?*

[T]he president of the United States has systematically and repeatedly used a bully pulpit amplified with powerful new communication technologies to lie to us extravagantly and constantly about nearly everything. He has conjured an alternative reality of words into which millions of our fellow citizens have gladly retreated. But the rest of us have been captured by them, too, like epistemic hostages confined to a virtual world that was imagined into existence by a narcissistic sociopath.

What we’ve confronted at long last this past week, as shock from the events on Capitol Hill have sunk in and reverberated throughout the nation, is that lies can have dire consequences — that if enough people believe enough of them, the result can be an all-too-real disaster. That has had the salutary effect of inspiring genuine concern in some of those who, until now, have been perfectly content to play along with the game, convinced that they benefitted from the transformation of our public life into a lunatic asylum.

… [There is] a growing realization that turning our politics into an unhinged reality show has turned reality itself into a madhouse — that the president and his party piling lie upon lie upon lie has had terrible consequences, transforming a segment of the American public into lunatics convinced they must burn down American democracy in order to save it.

…

“What Trump taught the right is that if you are completely shameless all the time, you gain a sort of political superpower. You can get away with (almost) anything.” The advantage of telling lies all day, every day is that nothing real — no outrage, no crime, no act of cruelty or incompetence — can gain traction in the world. Instead, truth, lies, evidence, and substantive policy goals dissolve “in a stew of culture war grievance, resentment, and lunacy,” allowing free reign for every corrupt bad actor around.

Damon Linker, * America’s rendezvous with reality*

Liz Cheney’s was a moment of real stature. Standing alone in the well of the House, the third-ranking member of the Republican leadership said, of the events of Jan. 6: “The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president. The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”

And so she would vote to impeach. Her remarks implicitly urged others in her party to do so, and the bluntness and power of what she said offered them cover: They could be tough too. But most couldn’t. They were stupid and cowardly.

They claimed high-minded concern for the nation’s well-being, but they didn’t seem to believe their own arguments; some rushed through their statements, some gestured wildly as if hoping their arms could convince their brains they were sincere.

Impeachment is needlessly divisive. They weren’t concerned about division when they refused to accept the Electoral College result …

The distinguishing characteristic of the House Republican Caucus right now is that whenever you say, “Could they be that stupid?” the answer—always—is, “Oh yes!”

… This week, before the vote, Mr. Jordan was awarded the Medal of Freedom. I am not sure that great honor will ever recover. No press were allowed, but I’m sure the ceremony was elevated, like P.T. Barnum knighting Tom Thumb with a wooden sword in the center ring of the circus.

Peggy Noonan

January 15

“I spent the last couple of days looking at what happened that day and what the president was doing while it was happening,” [South Carolina Rep. Tom Rice] said in an interview Thursday. “And the more I looked at it, the madder I got.”

…

Mr. Rice said that for him, the question of whether Mr. Trump had incited the crowd wasn’t the most important question. Rather, it was whether he had done enough to try to stop it, or later, to take any responsibility.

“When people are in the Capitol, ransacking the Capitol and trying to get to the Senate chamber and House chamber, and Vice President Mike Pence is in the Capitol and the president is tweeting the vice president lacks courage, I just cannot abide that,” Mr. Rice said. “It was a vote I felt I didn’t have a choice on. The path was clear.”

…

“I’ll be surprised if I don’t get one,” Mr. Rice said of a primary challenge. He said he had already heard plenty of both positive and negative feedback in the less than 24 hours since he cast his vote.

“I hope I get re-elected,” Mr. Rice said. “If they decide based on this vote, which I know was the right vote, that they don’t want me to be their representative, so be it.”

(Wall Street Journal, 1/15/21)

Wall Street Journal has a Guest Opinion, How to Make the Islamic World Less Radical, by Yahya Cholil Staquf.

I’m not mad at them for running it, but news I could use is How to Make Notorious Swaths of American Evangelicalism Less Radical.

The incitement case against [Donald Trump] isn’t just the use of a few words he uttered before the assault by his followers on the Capitol but the conduct over an extended period leading up to his rally before the assault on the Capitol.

Context matters. President Trump had repetitively falsely stated, as he did again at his rally on Jan. 6, that the electoral results were fraudulent and that he (and therefore his followers) had been robbed of a legitimately elected presidency. He had urged his followers to come to Washington on Jan. 6 for a “wild” day. At the Trump rally itself, his lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, called on his followers to engage in “trial by combat,” and the president himself called on his followers to accompany him to the Capitol to combat the supposed “election theft” that he was “not going to let . . . happen” and for them “to show strength,” and “to be strong.” And as his supporters yelled out “fight for Trump,” his response was “we will not take it anymore . . . we will stop the steal.”

All this is the equivalent of waving a flock of red flags before a bull. The Supreme Court has admirably defined incitement narrowly to avoid stifling free speech, but like Mr. Shapiro it has never had an incitement case involving Donald Trump or Trump-like speech before it. We may yet hear from the court.

FLOYD ABRAMS
New York

(Source: Wall Street Journal). When Floyd Abrams thinks you’ve crossed a free speech line, you probably have crossed it.

• An internal FBI bulletin earlier this week warned that additional armed demonstrations will likely take place in Washington, D.C. and all 50 state capitals this Sunday, ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday. FBI Director Chris Wray warned of an “extensive amount of concerning online chatter” yesterday in a joint press conference with Vice President Mike Pence, who, for all intents and purposes, has been carrying out the bulk of executive branch responsibilities in recent days.
• In the wake of last week’s events, Rich Lowry revisited Michael Anton’s (in)famous 2016 “Flight 93 Election” essay, in which Anton urged Republicans to “charge the cockpit” (vote for Trump), or risk “dying” under a Clinton presidency. “Donald Trump finally did exactly what the foremost metaphor associated with his political rise would have suggested,” Lowry writes. “He plowed his plane straight into the ground.” Anton, Lowry continues, “wrote as if the end of the republic were upon us, and there’s nothing like a rabble storming a citadel of American democracy—assaulting police officers, ransacking the place and disrupting a constitutional procedure—to shake confidence in the stability of our system. Of course, it was the man Anton believed could be our savior who whipped up and urged on this crowd. The mob didn’t charge the cockpit metaphorically, but charged the Capitol literally, in the grip of a more extreme, rough-hewn version of Anton’s logic and narrative.”
• Missing from a lot of the conversation about whether President Trump should have been impeached, and whether he should be convicted in the Senate, is the simple fact that the vast majority of Republican voters still like the guy … [E]lected officials who believe Trump to have been reckless—like freshman GOP Rep. Nancy Mace—are attempting to bridge the divide. “It’s clear that people, some people, have been brainwashed,” Mace said. “And I’m grappling with: How do we carefully and honestly pull these people out of it and bring them back into reality?”

The Morning Dispatch

Jeong is falling for the fundamental attribution error. When those guys over there do something bad, it’s because they are bad. When our side does something bad, we just got temporarily out of hand, perhaps because we were so upset about genuine injustice (which is not something the other side, stupid and evil as they are, cares about). Our bad acts don’t reflect our essential character; their bad acts do.

But there’s no such thing as “essential character” in anything but the most zonked-out hippie sense. All there are are actions. The marks we leave on the world, the bruises and flower patches. And while I understand that people want to focus on right-wing violence at the moment — it does pose the most imminent threat — it should disturb us that so many people are willing to excuse so much violence and destruction because they think that when ‘our’ side does it, it’s warranted. This is how things really and truly degenerate — this is how more people die.

Jesse Singal

Item 1

Dear Republican Party,

Tax cuts and economic stimulus are good for business.

Lying about elections as part of a plot to overthrow US constitutional democracy that causes violent insurrection is bad for business.

Plan accordingly.

Item 2

One way to understand the partisan divide is “everyone’s entitled to healthcare (even if they can’t afford it)” vs. “everyone’s entitled to social media (even if they violate terms of service).”

Item 3

Not trying to overturn election:
Congress follows Constitutional procedures to hold POTUS accountable for actions in office.

Trying to overturn election:
Pressure state election officials to reverse results based on debunked lies, violently attack Congress to stop certification.

Item 4

If you want to attack the United States, you need the element of surprise.
In war: Japan.
Terrorism: Al Qaeda.
Information warfare: Russia.
Insurrection: Dead-end Trumpists, QAnon, far right militias.
You get one shot. After that, defenses and countermeasures ramp up.

Item 5

Who cares that violent insurrectionists will be mad if we treat their violent insurrection like a violent insurrection?
They’re already mad. That’s why they attacked America. Coddling their feelings is not our primary concern.

Love,
Corporate America

Prior five items from Nicholas Grossman on Twitter. I now Follow.

Hawley didn’t just own the libs, he gave permission to dark forces he is too childish, privileged and self-absorbed to understand.

David Brooks

Donald Trump is, of course, a class-A strange-o, a man whose youngest son is named after the imaginary friend he invented to lie to the New York gossip pages about who he was cheating on his wife with. His gold-plated plumbing fixtures are about No. 1,883,441 on the list of weird things about Donald J. Trump, possessor of a Liberace-meets-Caligula sense of taste that can only be produced by the confluence of vast inherited wealth, neurotic masculine insecurity, and an IQ of 85.

But, seriously, what is it with these people and toilets?

…

In 2019, Trump made an impassioned, detailed — detailed in his daft way — case for a national program to build big, beautiful, perfect toilets, complaining that, after years of misgovernment under Barack Obama et al., Americans are forced to flush too many times. In the nearest thing Trump has ever offered to a Gettysburg Address, he declared: “We have a situation where we’re looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms where you turn the faucet on, and in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where the water rushes out to sea because you could never handle it, and you don’t get any water. You turn on the faucet, and you don’t get any water. They take a shower. And water comes dripping out. Just dripping out. Very quietly. Dripping out.”

The result? Americans are forced to flush “ten times, 15 times, as opposed to once.”

Funny thing about that. Nancy Pelosi has flushed twice, but there he floats.

Kevin D. Williamson, Trump & Toilets: Family Obsession | National Review

Politico’s Tim Alberta …:

> Crow is right. Numerous House Rs have received death threats in the past week, and I know for a fact several members want to impeach but fear casting that vote could get them or their families murdered. Not spinning or covering for anyone. Just stating the chilling reality.
>
> This is why, as I’ve written/said before, Republicans should have asserted themselves and held Trump accountable from Day One. Their silence in the face of his manifest abuses contributed to the formation of a cult that now threatens their lives. Never should have come to this.
>
> And yes: Trump’s rhetoric the last 5 years has stirred constant threats of violence against immigrants, journalists, Democratic lawmakers and others. Republicans are not the only ones being terrorized here. All the more reason for Americans to band together and say never again.

The bottom-line: threats and intimidation have become — and are likely to remain — an essential feature of Republican politics.

Charlie Sykes, Defeated, Disgraced, Twice Impeached – Morning Shots. I am astonished at the number of death threats to conservatives coming from somewhere conventionally called “far right.” The threatened credit the threats.

No unity until his morally bankrupt defenders get over him and repent

Tom Nichols in USA Today:

The president’s supporters, however, now plead for understanding and inclusion, for lowering the temperature, for moving on. In speech after speech Wednesday on the floor of the House, the same Republicans who had no objections to the president’s incitement to insurrection now have deep concerns about parliamentary process, the rule of law and national unity.

This is moral charlatanism and I say to hell with it.

It is almost impossible to comprehend the sheer moral poverty of the people calling now for unity. Elected Republicans now admit they fear for their physical safety from their own constituents, but instead of thunderous defenses of the Constitution, we have soft mewling from people like Sen. Marco Rubio and his Bible-Verse-A-Day tweets, or the head-spinning duplicity of Sen. Lindsey Graham, who within days of saying “count me out” of any further sedition was jollying it up with the president on Air Force One.

Via Charlie Sykes, Defeated, Disgraced, Twice Impeached – Morning Shots. I am astonished at the number of death threats to conservatives coming from somewhere conventionally called “far right.” The threatened credit the threats.

This is really a helluva lede.

> Ted Cruz has long had a public reputation as an unctuous asshole. Even so, his staffers have tended to hold him in high regard as a kind and geeky man who treated his underlings well even while his fellow senators loathed him. Now though “most of Cruzworld is pretty disgusted” with the senator for choosing to back Donald Trump’s absurd claims of widespread election fraud, in the words of one former aide. As another former aide put it, “everyone is upset with the direction things have gone, and the longer they’ve been with the senator, the more distaste they are expressing.”

January 16

Shortly after becoming the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice, President Trump summoned political advisers and demanded to know more about the 10 Republicans who had voted against him.

Mr. Trump, who had feared an even larger number of defections, wanted to know who the lawmakers were and whether he had ever done anything for them, according to people familiar with the meeting. He also inquired who might run against them when they face re-election in two years, the people said.

…

Even some of his close allies say his handling of his election loss has created an entirely avoidable crisis that will overshadow his accomplishments in office and complicate his future business and political aims.

The Trump Organization has already faced some fallout from the riot, including PGA of America’s decision to terminate an agreement to hold the 2022 PGA Championship at the Trump New Jersey golf club, a move that left Mr. Trump fuming, according to a person familiar with his reaction.

As he prepares to depart, advisers describe the president as sullen and regretful about the events of the last week, though he says he is not responsible for prompting them …

the president sought to reach a detente with Mr. Pence, whom he invited to a meeting on Monday after the two men didn’t speak for five days in the wake of the riot, during which the president attacked Mr. Pence on Twitter for not helping him overturn the election.

The president, who has often turned on allies over the last four years, was taken aback by the level of loyalty to Mr. Pence in the White House, one adviser said.

Trump Spends Final Days Focused on GOP Defectors, Senate Defense – WSJ

Decent people who think Facebook and Twitter censor too much presumably have not seen Gab and Parler, the two leading open-sewer examples of what goes on when there’s no threat of censorship.

It has always bugged me that dirty money guys like Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson were enthusiastic Republican Party supporters.

TO PARAPHRASE Samuel Johnson, nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged. And so it has proved inside the Republican leadership. A week after Donald Trump’s MAGA mob erected a gallows besides the Capitol reflecting pool then invaded the building, the president’s party is for the first time seriously reviewing its loyalty to him …

It is hard to exaggerate how dramatic a turnaround this already is. Although inciting the attack itself was worse than anything Mr Trump has done, it revealed nothing fundamentally new about his character. And his newly emboldened Republican critics did not merely stomach his earlier abuses—of ethics rules, migrant children, and so on—but vociferously defended them.

Lexington – The conscience of some conservatives | United States | The Economist

Ever since Donald Trump came down the escalator on June 14, 2015, his rise has been aided and abetted by the reluctance to do the hard thing and take him on directly. Instead, always and forever people hoped that he’d destroy himself, that “this time” he’d go too far.

…

There is no easy path to ridding our nation of Donald Trump or the movement he inspired. As Jonah has always said, this ends in tears. This ends in anguish. Republicans in the Senate have a choice: Take the risk to end it now, or appease the mob, appease talk radio and Fox, and hope and pray it ends later. There is only one responsible answer. Do the hard thing. Convict Donald Trump.

David French, GOP Senators Must Take the Hard Path – The French Press

If God tells you something:

1. Keep it to yourself.
2. If you share it, understand that I’m going to respond somewhere between utter indifference and active contempt.

Private revelations are private.

E.g., this Economist story

Thinking about this one tells you a lot about social media complicity in our woes:

On November 5, Facebook removed one of the first “Stop the Steal” groups, which had grown to 350,000 members—but only after the platform’s own algorithms “drove 100 new people to join [that] group every 10 seconds,” according to research from Ryerson University.

Joan Donovan, MAGA Isn’t a Typical Protest Movement – The Atlantic