Liz Cheney has charted her own path. She is not willing to lie, at least about one thing, the results of the last presidential race and the former president’s role in fomenting the January 6th assault on the Capitol. She voted to impeach him for that act of sedition. The party of which she’s a leader in the House has chosen a different route. They want to remake the truth about the events on January 6, jumping wholeheartedly into the giant footprints of the master fabricator, the Pied Piper of MAGA Land. They can’t bring themselves to denounce the myth of the stolen election for fear that the MAGA mob will unseat them. And so the pilgrimages to Mar-a-largo; the echoing of themes, now so familiar to the whole country.
Their two paths, the Congresswoman and her party, have headed in opposite directions. Cheney concedes that she is not the person to carry the message of a party bent on Trumpism, meaning a change in leadership is appropriate. She’ll have to take her fight to a different audience. Perhaps the anti-Trump forces, which seems so demoralized at this point, are quietly organizing ahead of the approaching midterm election campaign season. It makes no sense for her to run for re-election, but she might, just to show her defiance, if she can raise the money. Perhaps, the enthusiasm for the Pied Piper will have cooled or current leadership will have shot itself in the foot.
Even now, there is polling that suggests that his popularity is waning among those who consider themselves Republicans, if not with governors, in state houses and Congress. Take the ludicrously mischaracterized audit of Maricopa County ballots in the 2020 races of Biden and Mark Kelly. Apparently they’re looking for traces of bamboo in the ballot paper to confirm that thousands of ballots were imported from China, an imaginative conspiracy theory if ever there was one. Clearly, these politicians are all about retaining power while the electorate may be increasingly interested in making their lives better, however they concieve of that.
Pundits are batting around the question of the future of the GOP and our two party democracy. That’s difficult to say; the country has never stumbled to this juncture before. But it feels inherently dangerous. Will Fox News and Qanon carry the day? Or will a considerable number of Americans come to their senses? The clock is ticking.
On May 10, 1740, South Carolina enacts the Negro Act of 1740, allowing masters to whip and kill those enslaved who violate the law by growing their own food, learning to read, assembling in groups or earning money.
When they came for indigenous peoples, Americans cheered.
When they kidnapped Africans, Americans exalted in the profits from enslavement and turned their backs.
When they came for the freed descendants of the Africans, the country stayed silent again and again and again and again.
When they came for Mexicans, the country cheered the seizure of their lands in a trumped up war.
When they came for the Chinese, the country cheered again and again and again.
When they came for the Japanese, the country cheered them on.
When they came for immigrants from countries south of the border, the country stayed silent again and again and again.
When they came for Muslims, the country stayed silent.
This is the reality of American history. When they come for the next group, will you cheer or stay silent? Or act? Do not assume that because you’re considered white today, you will still be tomorrow.
The 2020 elections were fair without evidence of significant fraud under the very trying circumstances of this coronavirus pandemic. There is no question that this is a true statement, despite the disinformation spread by the former president and his clique of authoritarians. There were the usual incidences of innocent procedural errors, because there is no large enterprise that does not involve human errors, but US security agencies unanimously agreed that the election was secure. However, the populist cult led by the last guy in the White House is trying to maintain the power of a significant number of elected officers across the country in order to return to the presidency. On the surface, that sounds like the GOP represents the majority of the country. In reality, several quirks in the electoral system– the two party system, winner-take-all elections, the creation of legislative districts by the legislatures themselves and the electoral college allow otherwise. Over decades, the Republican party has perfected the art of shaping the electorate to transform its minority party into the ruling party from governor’s mansions and state legislatures to city and town councils. Just looking at the Senate vote on impeachment, the 43 who voted to acquit represent only about 125 million while the 57 senators who voted to convict represent 202 million people. While the Senate is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, the Democrats represent 42 million more people than the Republican half, about 13% of the population. Worse disproportionalities are present across Republican dominated state legislatures.
The party continued to be successful in 2020, with the exception of the presidency, where the electoral college comes in, and the Senate. They made gains in the House and retained control of state legislatures and many local offices. Overall, the Republican Party’s strategy of minority hegemony is still working quite well even though one big one, the Senate, slipped from their grasp. They generated the Big Lie to try to overturn the electoral results, supported a violent attempt to overthrow the government and have settled into the role of the seditionists within until the next round of elections in 2022.
While Georgia was a surprise addition to the Electoral College vote for Biden, it was the epicenter of the loss of the GOP Senate majority. The whimsy of 2 vacant Senate seats at the same time delivered a double whammy. The two Democrats ran as a team; the two Republicans ran as dyed in the wool cult members, appendages of the former president. The Democrats generated a supercharged voter turnout larger than that of the Republicans to narrowly nab both seats.
Georgia Republicans may have been temporarily thrown off by the pandemic, unable to anticipate how it would affect the voting of the majority they had successfully suppressed in prior elections. But their belief in the superiority of whiteness blinded them to the skills and proficiency of Blackness. They didn’t believe that Stacy Abrams and the numerous organizations who mobilized the votes of people of color could out-mobilize their own forces of authoritarian darkness.
Now Georgia Republicans are engaged in a mea culpa to fix what they screwed up. The legislature where they enjoy a considerable majority, thanks to very effective gerrymandering and the manipulation of the mechanics of voting, is in the process of passing a coterie of bills to limit voting, down to the most minute details. For instance, it will be illegal to provide water or food to voters waiting in the long lines generated by their strategic under-resourcing of polling locations in minority voting districts. Fewer polling places, fewer machines in them, fewer personnel have been the hallmarks. But it is the restructuring of the electoral system that will have the largest impact.
Because absentee voting was the big culprit, the legislature moved to eliminate no excuse absentee voting. Henceforth, each person must present a reason to vote absentee like absence from their precinct, having a physical disability that would prevent them from going to the polls or age 75 years. That done, they moved on to further curtail that much smaller pool of absentees, forcing the majority of their perceived undesired voters into those hours long lines at the polls. One proposal would prohibit third-party and nonprofit groups from sending out applications for absentee ballots, a strike at national organizations that set up websites to facilitate absentee ballot requests in each state. Next up was the requirement of voter ID when requesting the absentee ballot and again when casting it, despite the fact that ID is required to register to vote. Other bills will shorten the time interval to request a ballot, when they can be sent out and the deadline for their receipt. Next up was making it harder to return an absentee ballot by banning ballot drop boxes, forcing ballots to be returned by mail or dropped at an election board office. Another version would limit drop boxes to inside early voting sites where ballots could only be accepted during hours the voting was occurring.
Having tied absentee voting in knots, the legislature has moved against early voting as well. As part of an omnibus bill in the House, the early voting period would be restricted to 9-5, Monday to Friday for three weeks before the election with an additional 9-5 session on the second Saturday before the election. County boards would be able to extend hours to 7 pm, but could add no other days. This was a strategic strike at Sunday voting, a popular day for church organized events to get people to the polls. In a last minute retraction, one allowable early Sunday voting day was reinserted after an uproar from constituents, including their Republican base.
To limit the number of potential voters, bills have been advanced to eliminate automatic voter registration through the Department of Driver Services which registers or updates registrations each time a person interacts with the department. Not only did this add a huge number of potential voters to the rolls, every new licensee and renewer in the state, it also made it easier to update voter registrations with change of address.
In an effort to curtail election board funding, county elections offices would be banned from accepting grants from outside organizations. And just to make the process less transparent, the Senate has approved a ban on the public release of any election results until the total number of ballots is reported. They have allowed scanning of the much smaller number of absentee ballots to begin 8 days before election day and will require updating records of who voted within 30 days after election.
Republicans have doubled down again on the falsehood that voter fraud is a major problem, last expanded during the 2016 campaign by the ultimate winner who suggested that his loss would have been an indication of fraud. Even with the win, the president pushed back against the reality of his popular vote loss by declaring that the margin was full of illegitimate votes by the usual culprits, illegal immigrants, dead people and pets. He dusted off his fantasy again in the run-up to what he probably anticipated would be a 2020 loss, the first plank in his crusade to retain the presidency no matter what the voters wanted. His action was the bridge-too-far personal extension of the GOP’s long standing strategy to engineer electoral victories for a minority party. But El Trumpe’s concern was only for himself, the rest of the party be damned. So now that the party has sunk into worship of a golden idol, the party must hitch its wagon to his entrails or they fear they will suffer the wrath of the gods. (As if the pandemic is not enough; but then again, they don’t acknowledge its reality either.) All that work to control state and local offices washed away.
Unfortunately after decades of propaganda and the emergent dominance of the GOP in elected office, the idea of rampant voter fraud is firmly planted in the national ether. The GOP has built a ferris wheel to continue to ratchet up voter suppression of minorities and the young, the voters who tend to find the party’s racialized themes, both overt and dog-whistled, non-starters for their votes. It’s not that the Democratic alternatives are better in terms of attention to the needs of these groups. It’s just that there is no alternative beyond simply staying home. But the more voters the GOP pushes out of the electorate, the stronger their hold on it will be.
The GOP’s idea of fraud is underpinned by their insistence that the only valid votes are the ones for them; any candidate outside their fold is illegitimate and should not be allowed to rule. Through Qanon, Democrats have literally become the devil incarnate. In this scenario, their attempts to insure their own victory is their patriotic duty; they are saving the country they love. In a battle against the Devil, no weapon is off the table, including the Devil’s own tools: lying, cheating, stealing, character assassination, etc. These tools have replaced policies except for one: dismantle the government so it can’t interfere. The accents of the Confederacy loom large; the Confederates fought to save from extinction what they considered civilization itself, based in the enslavement of fellow human beings reimagined as beasts of burden. But they replicated the same institutions of government as the nation they fought to leave behind. Now, the sole purpose of the effort is to elevate a single individual whose interest lies more with self-aggrandizement than the fate of the nation and its citizens.
Voting in Georgia will never be the same under this regime. Of course, the better angels will challenge these new laws in court, but the process will be slow. The state courts will favor the laws because legislatures have a right to set their electoral policies. The federal courts have not been supportive of voter rights; apparently the idea of one (hu)man, one vote is no longer in fashion. The trail to the Supreme Court is long and slow. If a case were to reach it, its decisions are unlikely to favor wider access to the voting booth. For one, the majority of justices are card carrying members of the party that created the voter fraud lie. In addition, that majority were hand picked by the Koch funded Federalist Society to cite originalism as the source of their rulings when it happens to be convenient. Of course originalism itself is a sham. It is an exercise in divining the thoughts of the Founding Fathers to interpret current events, truly an absurdity.
There is no way that a 21st century mind can envision the perspective of a 19th century thinker. Poised as it was at the beginning of science and discovery, there were so many things they didn’t know. Those lessons can’t be extracted from the 21st century mind except by a process of extreme denial, a critical component of mental processing. Republicans have elevated denial to a high art. For the justices today, there are broad advances in discovery that can’t be expunged from our world because they are the facts of its physicality, even as flat earthers wish that they were not.
Even the thought of straight jacketing the Constitution of a nation that occupied only the eastern coast of a vast continent is antithetical to the Framers’ purpose. They left parts of the document purposely vague and room for amendments to accommodate growth and change in the nation they hoped would prosper. Imagine their response to Justice Clarence Thomas, three-fifths of a person, channeling their ultra white thoughts. They could never have anticipated the United States, 50 states strong, would become the leader of the free world burdened with a decades long cold war against Communism, a philosophy that was not even a glimmer in their eyes. Originalism is a betrayal of what the Founders held dear.
But Republican appointed justices seem determined to turn back the clock to the days of Reconstruction when the Court invalidated the very amendments, 13th, 14th and 15th meant to achieve the promise of the Constitution: a true democratic republic. Part of the reason the justices were elevated to the Court is to saunter back into the days of yore.
Georgia is leading the charge to curtail voter access to the polls, a wave that includes states where the former president won handily. These developments only highlight the battle ahead. We are still only inches away from the brink of authoritarian rule and clawing back from that dangerously tottering edge will take decades. While the media has focused on the drama inside Washington, the real work is at the state and local level where the idea of one party hegemony has burrowed deeply into government itself.
This is a crisis that the nation has never known before. While the Civil War was a battle to keep the Republic in one piece, January 6, 2021 was the shot across the bow in the battle to keep the Republic democratic. Americans who want a republic committed to freedom, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the rule of law for every person in the country stand opposed to the Americans who want the dictatorial imposition of whiteness to decide who can be a citizen, who can participate in governance, who can rule the labor force, who decides who will own land and businesses. There can be no middle ground.
On February 26, 2012, 17 year old Trayvon Martin, a Black boy, was shot dead by George Zimmerman, a self appointed vigilante whose defense was the Florida Stand Your Ground Law, ironic since Zimmerman did not stand on any ground. He pursued Trayvon through the streets believing the boy did not belong in his space, a white space. Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder.
An elegant case for the conviction of Donald J Trump was laid out before the nation by House impeachment managers. It was at times poignant and painful as they covered the insurrection against Congress whose members only barely escaped execution. They detailed the call to assassinate the Vice President of the United States. There is no protected free speech that can call for and attempt the assassination of a Vice President. The brutal assault on the Capital and DC police was laid bare. The preparation by the traitorous mob was laid out almost exhaustively. There was testimony from multiple participants that they felt called by “their president” to “stop the steal” which was itself a lie. And then finally the complete inaction of the then president to defend the Capitol against assault, in violation of his oath to protect the nation. It‘s an airtight case.
The problem is that over half the Republicans in the jury are co-conspirators in the insurrection. They disseminated The Big Lie. Some continue to hold on to it now, particularly in their home districts. They retweeted the calls to fight. Some amplified the calls for violence. The managers’ points apply equally to these Republican Senators as they do to the Proud Boys and others who stormed the Capitol Building. To convict the former president is to convict themselves. To admit the treason is to call themselves treasonous. But to admit their part is too abhorrent for them to do.
To admit their part is not politically expedient as they see it. For these Republicans are all politicians who want to run for another office in a year or three or five. They have to guard their far right flank. The more aggressive individuals are plowing even further right into the company of their allied radicalized militia. They already sold their souls a long time ago.
The defense has provided a couple of faux off ramps. As the House managers have already previewed, the Senate has already voted to establish that it can hold an impeachment trial after a president is out of office. It is the only body authorized by the Constitution to make the rules about impeachment and it has spoken. It should be mentioned that the former president was impeached before he left office and the trial was only shifted to a later date because of manipulations by Senate leadership itself.
There is the free speech argument that is completely baseless, as the defense will try to hone in on isolated words in the speech on the 6th, not the full breath of Trump’s advocacy of violence, dating back even to the Central Park Five. But Senate Republicans have long landed on words that are nonsensical in context hoping they sound appropriate. They know it works in their Fox News media bubble because their audience is not composed of the most discerning thinkers who grapple with nuance. These Republicans just have to say something often enough, exposing the disdain they carry for their “gullible” supporters. In actuality, these people are not their supporters; they belong only to Agent Orange but they tolerate the tail of politicians who cling to him.
Is there a crevice where one or two Republicans will finally have the courage to jump ship and declare enough is enough? Could it be in the mob’s violence toward the police or the call that nearly assassinated VP Pence, the man most loyal to the president thrown under the bus with escalating tweets from Trump as the melee proceeded? Could it be visualizing their own near misses? Or perhaps the revelation of intention exhibited in 45’s glee while watching the violence and his inaction in violation of his oath of office? Could it be a new found investment in a co-equal branch of government? Or perhaps their realization that they themselves have participated in an intentional treasonous cabal? Maybe, that they enabled 45 by failing to convict him the first time impeachment came around? Possibly but far from likely. Their consciences were scrubbed out a long time ago. The Republican party has so debased itself that there is no path out of hell.
The impeachment trial presents in stark contrast the two visions of America battling it out for ascendancy. One, bequeathed from the Founding Fathers, of the superiority of whiteness. The insurrectionists carried their symbols, the Confederate flag, the swastika and Trump flags. The Confederate flag is a remnant from the war that was supposed to actualize the other vision, a land where all inhabitants are created equal. That it still flies is testimony to a defeat turned into victory when the country tired of the effort to fulfill its promise, establishing Jim Crow and segregation and castigation of Blackness from coast to coast.
The BLM demonstrations of the summer suggested that once again, the many were trying to birth the vision of equality. But it triggered the historic response disseminated directly out of the White House through MAGA rallies encapsulated in the re-raised Confederate flag. January 6th poses the question: how many Americans will choose the dominant white caste over democracy?
The GOP has answered loudly and clearly, officially stamped by the upcoming acquittal of Donald J Trump for inciting sedition. But maybe the Americans who want to fight for the other vision of America are listening and they will remember when those Republicans run for office in a year or three or five. Or, maybe not.
On February 12,1901 Delaware ratified the 13th Amendment abolishing enslavement after initially rejecting it in 1865.
To insure the success of Biden’s campaign to vaccinate America against COVID19, comprehensive public health messaging to combat vaccine hesitancy has drawn extensive media attention. It’s difficult to find a news piece across all platforms that doesn’t feature a story about which people are opting out. The first mention will be African Americans, as if we are the principal concern. While the intention is good, the media has stumbled into a common trap that reflects their racial biases.
Once the story hones in on the Black community, they quickly cite historically well grounded suspicions of the medical establishment, always beginning with the Tuskegee experiment. The media believe they are doing an educational service here, by familiarizing their audience with the infamous 30 year study of “the natural evolution of syphilis” among poor Black farmers in Alabama. Unfortunately, there is little more than a mention before they move on with their narrative.
To fill in that gap, first and foremost, the study was not associated with Tuskegee College; the town was the site of an experiment by the U.S. Public Health Service, now the CDC. This is no oversight but a product of the narrative spearheaded by the public health and medical establishment. While this may sound conspiratorial, it is clearly not in the interest of the CDC to remind people continually that it was that organization, not an HBCU that designed and executed an unethical study that continued from 1932 to 1972. It subtly implies that descendants of the enslaved were experimenting on themselves, yet another example of blaming the victims for crimes against them. The objective was to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis, a disease known since at least the 10th century and fairly well documented by the 1930s. The stated intention was to demonstrate the need for establishing syphilis treatment programs.
The infamous Tuskegee Experiment was run by the U.S. Public Health Service, now the CDC, not run by the college. Calling it by its location allows us to forget that it was a government study conducted by the very agency, the CDC, charged with protecting the health of the whole public, inclusive of African Americans.
The 399 poor men were enrolled through the offer of free health care from the government which included for some men not only free medical care but also meals and burial insurance. What they were not told was that they had been diagnosed with syphilis. Once penicillin was introduced, study participants were denied the treatment that had become the standard of care in the 1950s, as was generally done in medical practice across the country but most especially in the South. In that sense, it was not a deviation for medicine as practiced, simply an extension. These men went on to die from their disease. Even after treatment was given to the survivors in 1973, they continued to die because the damage to the heart, brain and nervous system had already been done by the previous decades of the disease. Those could not be reversed by treatment.
But the US Public Health Syphilis study in Tuskegee AL is only the most well known egregious example of the history between dark skinned people and the medical establishment. The very foundations of modern science were constructed to argue the inferiority of Africans and their descendants. Modern science in the 1830s began as classification of the species, including human, as in white and a possible different species, more ape-like and black. Many of these early pseudoscientists were enslavers determined to build the now “scientific” as well as religious argument for white people as masters saving dark people from their own savagery and ignorance. The enslaved were often used as subjects in this pseudoscientific discovery.
As medical science evolved, the enslaved continued to be experimented on. Dr Marion Sims, a gynecologist memorialized with a statue in Central Park, developed the vaginal speculum, an instrument he used to invent a surgical technique to repair recto-vaginal fistulas. He bought 5 enslaved women in whom he cut fistulas, a channel between the rectum and the vagina that naturally occurred during childbirth, and then repaired them. The anesthesia he reserved for white women after he perfected his surgical technique wasn’t even imagined for the women in bondage he considered to be animals. His first subject nearly died during the 5 months it took her to recover which did not deter Dr Sims from further operations on her like he might do on a cow.
Much of the details of human anatomy were learned on Black bodies, either in bondage or routinely stolen from graves in cities with the early medical schools like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Johns Hopkins is also well known for the Henrietta Lacks story, only one example of the routine practice of using overwhelmingly Black clinic patients, because no private physicians would take care of them, for whatever they chose without informing their patients. Physicians were gods back then!
While most African Americans may not know the details of this history, there remains a community memory of mistreatment kept alive by its current interactions with the healthcare system. This is the element that the news media fails to capture. African Americans are suspicious of the healthcare system because what they feel is general dismissiveness and often degradation. We feel it when we are sent home with COVID19 symptoms when white patients with the same complaints are admitted. We feel it when we are sent home without the pulse oximeter monitoring that can identify a sudden drop in oxygenation that requires hospitalization and treatment to avoid death. Women sense it when their Ob provider sees the Jezebel stereotype which assumes they are promiscuous when they are long married monogamous professional women. Professional Black women dress up and wear monikers of their work organizations to their medical appointments so they won’t be considered ignorant by their provider who goes on to tell them to live with their uterine fibroids rather than offer the surgical options they extend to white women. Even wealthy celebrities like Serena Williams with a super wealthy white husband to boot, couldn’t get nurses and physicians to act on her complaints about a pulmonary embolus, almost becoming another Black maternal mortality statistic. And she had had an embolus before! If she couldn’t get attention, imagine what the everyday clinic patient experiences.
So while the media has attributed higher coronavirus mortality rates for people of color to their medical risk factors and socioeconomic conditions, they have missed perhaps the biggest piece of the puzzle, the implicit racial biases within medical practice itself. Even the medical establishment has acknowledged that, almost 20 years ago in the Institute of Medicine report in 2003, Unequal Treatment. They noted it, published it as a book and then moved on. Even today, in the wake of the BlackLivesMatter movement, the medical establishment reiterated its concern but has not moved beyond simple lip service to actively restructure the implicit racial biases in the minds of medical providers and reinvent medical institutions to become actively anti-racist. In fact, many physicians are radical conservatives, witness Rand Paul, an opthamologist and member of the Trumpology cult. Sadly, Ben Carson and Justice Thomas are no exceptions as they are self loathing dark skinned versions of those who pay homage to the superiority of whiteness. Medical and legal education does not teach common sense. Neither, more importantly, do they undercut racial bias; they do just the opposite by enhancing it as witnessed through my own long career in medical education.
So if our routine encounters with the healthcare system convey a message of hostility toward our dark skin, is there any wonder that we would suspect a vaccine brought to fruition by a white supremacist president? If we are consistently ignored by the research establishment, even in the vaccine studies where AstraZeneca reported on a handful of Black enrollees in their initial publication, how do we know that the vaccines are even safe? Operation Warpspeed, the former president’s instrument of distribution, has confirmed what the pandemic itself confirmed, a lack of care for people of color. Thus statistics demonstrate that African Americans have been disproportionately excluded from vaccine distribution, not because we’re hesitant, but because we haven’t been given access. People from other countries have gotten vaccinated in Florida; black market vaccine is on sale on the web; and yet hundreds of Black seniors were turned away from a white student run distribution center in Philadelphia because of botched appointments. These were people in their 80s and 90s who had waited for hours. These sound like isolated incidents, but they are not. They reflect that old adage, when America gets a cold, Black people get pneumonia. If a system is going to be chaotic, it will never advantage us. The story of America is white versus black.
Facilities for the elderly are reported to have a high rate of staff immunization refusal, in some places as high as 80%. Because these are generally low wage workers, many of whom are darker skinned recent immigrants, some of the general suspicions of people of color may apply. But other factors likely do as well. These are primarily women who are overworked and disabused by facilities where profit is more important than the care. While these jobs have a high turnover rate, the staff retain the memory of being betrayed by management who left them unprotected with PPE while coronavirus raced through their workplace. There is no real reason to trust them now about a vaccine when there is a lot of online misinformation and community rumor about unassociated side effects. Side effects could lead to lost work days and therefore pay because they have no sick leave.
For their part, nursing facilities seem to be at a loss for ways to reduce staff hesitancy, beyond building trust with people that staff members already know. One facility offered an entry in a sweepstakes to win a gift card. Seriously! An obvious oversight is money. Give people a bonus to get the shot. A $25 Walmart gift card for each dose is the least they could do; it’s worth much more, at least $100 a shot.
Keeping that in mind, African Americans make up only 13% of the population. The big vaccine resistant nut lies with those who still live in La-La-Land, the anti-vaxxers led by whatever Kennedy it is, the anti-government crowd, believers of the Big Lie and of course believers in Q. And they are 99.9% white. Estimates number them to be at least 30% of US residents, a daunting task indeed. All of these people have lost their grip on reality and no PSA or respected role model can restore that. The ethos of the Trumpology cult sees acknowledgement of the virus as an insult to their fearless leader and any response to the pandemic as a plot to attack the beleaguered former president. They are the rule breakers; no mask, no social distancing, continued travel, restaurant and bar patronage, large gatherings dripping with automatic weapons and lots of shouting. If one’s own death or that of a loved one can’t bring them into the realm of reality, they seem doomed to circulate the virus among themselves until they achieve immunity or die trying.
If only they would go ahead and secede and we could seal the border behind them. Unfortunately, they live among us, a reservoir spitting out new viral droplets to catch us unawares, rejuvenated with RNA variants that increase their transmission rate or the severity of disease or resistance to the vaccines. Thus these people have taken on the second dimension of the enemy within. Not only do they stand on the verge of toppling our republic, from its very halls of governance, they can also become the nidus of infection that will take down the globe.
So who has a plan to pull the blinders from the eyes of the largest group of vaccine resisters? Will it require freeing their minds or can a more limited approach succeed? I don’t have any idea but let’s hope someone does. A solid 50% of them might put us in the realm of vaccine induced herd immunity, 75%, provided the vaccines continue to be effective against the dominant viral variants. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
On the eve of American (Black) History Month, we recognize Christian Fleetwood who won the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration in the United States. In April of 1865, Christian received his medal in the first group of 26 African American soldiers decorated for bravery in the Civil War for action in the Battle of Chaffin’s Farm outside Richmond. Rescuing the American flag after it was almost dropped by a wounded color bearer, Fleetwood rallied Union troops in retreat, inspiring the men to continue to fight on. Even though every officer in the regiment petitioned the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to promote him to a commissioned officer for his leadership, Stanton refused. He resisted the requests of those all white officers and stuck firmly to the rule that Sergeant Major was the highest enlisted rank permissible for a Black soldier.
As the fences, razor wire and blockades rose across Washington DC to create our very own Green Zone, there can only be sadness. For DC residents, it must have been frightening to see the military in the person of the National Guard patrolling their streets. Armed military guards in any town is what happens in other countries, not ours. The massive security presence separated inauguration from the people it is meant to serve, an additional barrier to coronavirus precautions that would already limit the crowds. Remembering the gaiety of my own experience during the Obama 2012 Inauguration, the festive atmosphere that ruled despite a biting cold, I could only be sad. Freezing in line to clear security for an inaugural ball, a much hyped affair that provided a video screen of the Obamas first dance, practically obscured by the sea of phones and even iPads recording it. Really; a video of a video! Still there were great musical acts and good music to dance to even if we were plastered together in postage stamp sized spaces at some points. The shared joy of distant proximity to the leading couple of the free world was intoxicating. Frozen toes in toeless pumps were a small sacrifice.
We warmed in the sun while waiting in the security line for a tour of the White House. I had time to stroll through the town, wandering out to Lincoln’s Cottage, the summer home on the outskirts of town meant to survive the summer heat of the capital city. From there, Lincoln could see Union troops camped across the river. Lincoln rode into town unchaperoned, once even being attacked. I discovered the Korean War Memorial, touched the Vietnam War Memorial, the war that launched me into a political movement as it changed the course of many of my friends’ lives. The capital oozes history around many corners; that too is mixed into the routine changing of administrations.
Photo by Denise Raynor
It felt like all that would be denied the first female Vice President who is both Asian and African American as well as the 78 year old President who finally, against long odds, achieved his goal as well as the millions of Americans who wanted to celebrate them. But the Inauguration Committee delivered a fantastic event, completely detached from the armed camp surrounding it. Traditional and civil, as if we awoke from a nightmare with our institutions shaken at their foundations but still standing as we root around in the splinters to inspect the damage.
Americans will soon forget that the descendants of the enslaved saved our democratic republic for now. President Biden himself has acknowledged that it was dark skinned voters who propelled him to winning the nomination on momentum built from his victory in the South Carolina primary and the outpouring of Black voters in other states. African Americans as a crucial minority in many locations not only came out to the polls but also organized aggressively to put him in office. Republican forces of 45 recognized our outsized contribution in their efforts to overturn the election. The ballots that they wanted thrown out came from specific urban strongholds of Black voters–Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta. MAGA’s belief that the only legitimate voters are white bubbles out of the cauldron of the supremacy of whiteness- Make America White Again. But this is not the first time.
The inauguration evoked not just the pageantry of traditions but a certain civility that the last administration jettisoned off the planet. The Republican seditionists showed up, casually posing for selfies, as if they hadn’t 7 days before continued to propagate the Big Lie on the House floor. The Big Lie that goosed the mob to attack the legislators whom some elements sought to kidnap and perhaps ransom for a continuation of their hero’s reign. Or maybe lynch, as in the Vice President, for whom they had a noose waiting. Some thought that their act of intimidation delaying the certification would win the day and leave the decision in the hands of Congress. These are the messages that Rudy Guiliani was peddling. In the intoxication of the mob, most weren’t thinking anything as they acted instinctively to scream their white rage.
While many of the inaugural traditions seem false and insincere, the veneer nevertheless reinforces the continuity of the national myth that hangs on the military costumes and reviews, in the musical notes of traditional anthems; in the word for word repetition of the oath of office used since the nation’s inception. To trot them out is to reaffirm that the nation will go on forever, much like Lincoln’s insistence that the Capitol dome should be completed during the Civil War to assert that the Union would continue. And their familiarity brought calm comfort to us weary of the last 4 years when everyday held a new and awful surprise or two or three.
Embedded in the Biden-Harris inauguration ceremony was a vision of America’s loftiest hopes. The variety of skin colors apparent on the stage including the blending of different races in the progeny of those involved projected the possibility of rising to power for the content of one’s character. The message in Spanish in JeLo’s rendition of America screamed that they too are Americans just like those before them who spoke a different language like Yiddish, Italian and German spoken by other immigrant groups even after they became citizens of the country. (A shout out to JeLo for the brilliance of her artistry, whatever her intention!) The inaugural poem that captured the majesty of language in the service of reaching deep emotional reservoirs. Inaugural poets have been eschewed by Republican presidents, one tradition that 45 followed.
I realized while watching the wreath laying at the Tomb of the Unknown as the 3 former presidents and first ladies waited patiently for Biden and Harris to arrive that we seldom saw 45 waiting with others. He always made a grand entrance and then left immediately when his part was done. He demanded that events go at his pace. The quick in and out, as if he was not part of the human race but above it. 46 is in and of the mass of humanity, evident as he stopped on his short walk down Pennsylvania Ave to talk with reporters and some children standing along the route as if he was drawn by a tractor beam to get close and interact. And Biden ran to the side, unlike his younger predecessor who at best lumbered and at worst gingerly stepped down inclines.
Photo by Denise Raynor
But beneath the veneer of Biden’s calls for unity forged around a common vision of America lies an awful truth; there are not one but two visions. There is the one captured by the Confederate flag walked loudly through the Capitol rotunda, for the first time in history even as the place is still packed with statues of its heroes. It represents the original secessionists now reincarnated within the MAGA movement. They want their America to be the one in which whiteness decides who can be a citizen, who can participate in its republic, who can rule the labor force, who decides who will own lands and businesses. For those people, they must always be white. And the red and brown original settlers of the country must stay subordinated in their assigned roles. Whites will tell them what they are, for they do not rank among the “whos”. (For those who don’t know, Mexicans inhabited the territory, conquered by the Spanish, which was reincarnated as Texas after a war with the US to extend its empire. Similarly California, inhabited by an indigenous population for thousands of years, was conquered by the Spanish and handed over to the US as part of the European treaty that ended the Seven Years War).
The democracy that stands in opposition reflects the vision of the people who saved it most recently. That is Black, brown, red and yellow people who went to the polls to color in their ideal. Black people have been the persistent nudge in history to save the soul of America. We are the believers who carry the vision of freedom and democracy even as we have been rejected at every turn. There is no more loyal American than an Afro-American. We made it possible for Joe Biden to stand on that podium. We made it possible for the Democrats to have a majority in the Senate to begin his work. We saved democracy again.
This is not our first time. One might start with the economy that made the nation; the commerce, the production and the financial system, all based in traffic and ownership of the enslaved and the products they produced. In 1860, our collective bodies were the most valuable asset in the country, larger even than land values. But beyond our economic role, when the nation was split asunder and the republic was fighting for its very existence, the formerly enslaved numbered 10% of the Union Army, roughly 198,000 men served as soldiers in the U.S. Army and Navy, infusing Union forces with desperately needed troops when they were being slaughtered in large numbers. Moreover, we provided the labor on which the army ran and our flight from Confederate lands deprived their forces of the labor on which they were even more dependent. White men in the South weren’t supposed to work if a dark skinned man was around. We were the labor in the munitions factories that built their weapons. We made the bricks that constructed their fortifications. We filled their bellies.
One could say we earned our freedom in the Civil War, if there is such a thing as earning what is supposed to be naturally ours. And yet, white Americans failed again to act on their ideals after a short interval when they discovered that if someone wasn’t growing cotton, their economy could not recover. And God forbid they should have to live next to, work next to, sit next to or eat with a perceived beast of the field. Their negligence plunged Black Americans into 100 years of the Jim Crow police state. The only thing that saved us from the genocide they perpetrated on indigenous Americans was our hands and our backs, and our distinct visibility.
Still 90 years in, we once again rose up in large numbers to try to claim our birthright, freedom of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. John Lewis, Fanny Lou Heimer and many many other men, women and children would rather risk beatings, lynchings and death than continue to live without their birthright. Many others, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, James Chaney are only a few whose lives were ended early by white partisans fighting for their vision of America. When the pictures splashed across TV, we got 2 laws that were supposed to make good on the trio of Civil War amendments that righted the Constitution still far short of our life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but were then ignored. Those laws allowed white Americans to pat themselves on the back over their generosity, even as they continued to live their own racially segregated lives which allowed them to ignore the movement of the police state into the country’s urban areas. Walking and riding while Black has always been a thing since the country began.
We tried the courts, but schools are still 85% segregated. Congress, state legislatures, police and the courts evolved a novel permutation to just put us behind bars and lock us out of sight and mind. That combined with maneuvers to eliminate us from electoral participation using lies about election fraud and computer drawn gerrymandered district maps continued to keep us in our designated place, subordinated in the lowest caste. All our oppositional efforts generated a low hum, sometimes rising to a brief bleep before returning to practically inaudible.
The Confederate vision prospered in Congressional Dixiecrats turned dog whistling Reagan Republicans. It gathered steam while honking at the Obama train as liberal Americans patted their own backs again. Obama was the come-to-Jesus moment for the forces of the Confederate vision which finally blossomed into juicy ripe fruit under 45. Without a regional base of their own in the greatly expanded number of states, they were no longer content to take a slice, they wanted to have the whole damn country this time or they would tear it down.
So President Biden, if you want to achieve national unity you will have to first resurrect a singular vision for the nation that only haltingly emerged briefly as the republic began to stitch itself back together after its first major test. Then it was only half formed, but now more complete, it will require aggressive pursuit of the white supremacists in all their variant forms. While white supremacy will never die, the objective should be to make it socially unacceptable, much as it became in the 80s and 90s. However, the presence of media bubbles may make that impossible; Quanon is in people’s heads and MAGA will remain alive and well as long as Rupert Murdoch can masquerade his media as something other than disinformation in the service of racial animus. There is a whole flock of other media outlets in this category and as long as they have a captive audience, the prospect for dissipating that 40% nut of white supremacists is slim. It’s not the lunatic fringe, but the working farmers, small business owners, cops and firemen, teachers, elected officials, nurses and doctors who believe their color should be privileged over all others even as they don’t understand that is the heart of what they call racism. It’s not how nice they are to the brown or Black person they know at work that determines their racism. It’s the fact that they can’t extend that niceness to every other person who is brown or Black or yellow or red.
On the other hand, a pathway to reassuring anxious elements of the dominant caste that their world is not on the verge of collapse may be 1) conquer the pandemic; 2) provide relief to those affected; 3) restore the economy. However, if the administration intends to engage our problems with equitable solutions, the group imbued with the confederate vision will rear back. The very existence of Vice President Kamala Harris is a torch that lights their ire. The question going forward will be how many Americans want a republic committed to freedom, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for every person in the country. Those Americans who want it will have to fight fiercely to make it happen, neighbor to neighbor, kin to kin, colleague to colleague, policy to policy, legislative bill to legislative bill. It is a democracy only if we can finally make it one and then keep it. A 13% minority has worked hard to make it so, but all Americans who believe that the Bill of Rights and Constitution apply to all of us must remain engaged in the fight to make it so. HIstory tells the story of what happens when they tire of the fight. And we will not be the only ones who will suffer.
From The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman:
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished . . .
We are striving to forge a union with purpose
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and
conditions of man
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us
When Republicans talk about last week’s insurrection, Abraham Lincoln comes up. He called for the forgiveness of Confederates after the Civil War, they say. They don’t mention that Lincoln was shot dead by a Confederate supporter mourning their surrender. John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators who injured 3 other Cabinet members were hunted down and hanged. Instead, Republicans want to use, ironically, the Confederacy as an example for how the nation should proceed in the wake of Trump’s call to insurrection at the Capitol building. After all, the former CSA president Jefferson Davis was briefly jailed and then pardoned. It was Andrew Johnson who made the decision to allow Confederates to be accepted as full citizens in the country that they had conducted a 4 year war against months before. He decided to reclaim lands already distributed and planted by the formerly enslaved and return them to their enslavers. These ideas are a natural outgrowth of party supporters among the Civil War reenactors and Lost Cause proponents integral to the MAGA movement, misled about the nation’s true history.
To all of this, I call bullshit! Look where that postwar approach has led the country. It began 100 years of the apartheid police state that was the Jim Crow South. Outside the South, segregation and overt racial discrimination reigned throughout the rest of the country for over 100 years. Despite the 15th amendment, it took 100 years before the formerly enslaved gained the right to vote. It has worked out well for Republicans in whose minds systemic racism doesn’t exist. But it’s been a disaster for the descendants of the formerly enslaved, native born and those who immigrated from the Caribbean.
Our present catastrophic state is why racial justice demonstrations erupted across the world after the whole nation was invited to watch the lynching of George Floyd without the careful tutelage lavished on the youngsters who were taken to public lynchings in the 19th and 20th centuries. Children were brought to join in the “festivities” so that lynching traditions could be passed down. Today, young adults and their parents without that experiential lens were enraged that a Minneapolis cop invited them to participate in his act of state sponsored terror. How dare he implicate other white people in his inhumanity! He was supposed to be serving the community. Nonwhite BLM marchers were saying Hell, No! I don’t want to be any part of that.
How ironic for Republican senators to now say that impeachment will increase division in the country! The party that has stoked division for decades thinks divisiveness will be exacerbated by holding the president accountable for sedition. The divide, already as wide as the Pacific Ocean, has no room to expand. This is more political gamesmanship from those who should be ashamed that they have not united with the rest of the country in defense of our security, similar to the unity after 9/11. Their attempt is reminiscent of the Lost Cause rewrite of the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction as befits their La-La-Land bound supporters. They are trying to hide in plain sight. Yes they enabled the president in every way, shape and form for over 4 years. Yes they have promoted an agenda of disinformation and actively sought the right wing media bubble to spread manufactured scandal and conspiracy theories. No, they have not spoken out against any of it. Even after their lives were endangered during the assault on their workplace, a co-equal branch of government, Senators Hawley and Cruz kept on with business as usual, spreading the big lie of the theft of a Trump victory. No, they have not rejected the election fraud lie as 8 Senators and 139 Representatives voted against certification of the Electoral College certificates. No, some have not stopped spreading it.
It has taken longer for the nerves of others to settle, but as the days tick by, many have recovered their GOP mojo to begin whirling like dervishes. They’ve come out swinging with the party line of promoting national unity. It’s a testament to their moral bankruptcy and partisan gamesmanship. They’re in it for the long haul, anchored in preserving their minority party as the only one meant to rule, even as their numbers are shrinking. Trump allowed them to reach their pinnacle. Republicans believe they can’t allow his influence to wane if their dominance is to continue. There is nothing more divisive than the Divider in Chief.
Contrast the Trump response to that of the Democratic Party in 2016. Yes, the election was stolen from Clinton through Russian “active measures” that goosed the political divide. Liberals and progressives demonstrated, protested and moved to the courts in an attempt to block the major tenets of the president’s reign of cruelty. The supposedly independent legislative branch kowtowed to the executive branch, passing their signature legislative achievement, tax cuts for the rich, and then holding off any other legislation after their 12 year crusade against the ACA died under John McCain’s down turned thumb. Moscow Mitch’s own pet project, crippling the federal court system with partisan hacks for decades to come, has been the sum total of Senate accomplishments outside a ludicrous parade of faux Senate investigations designed to undermine the Mueller investigation. In the face of near economic collapse and escalating COVID19 deaths, they did pass a relief bill that managed to make their rich friends richer. And last but not least, the faux Impeachment trial.
Liberals concentrated on the voting booth to overturn this GOP hell and were ultimately successful in dislodging the devil, but losses at the state and local level show the power of the presidential bully pulpit to spread chaos and mental mania across the land. But that’s the American way; when you lose an election no matter the reason, you try again. At no point did democrats ever consider organizing an armed coup, an idea that would only occur to a party steeped in autocracy like Republicans. They convinced their constituents that elections are only valid when they win because they told them that. They told them that only they have the right to govern. They told them that the Democratic Party are demons that will destroy them. And they believed.
After the failure of their armed insurrection, the Republican Party is now at a fork in the road. To the right, the path to the Trump train. Straight ahead, Dump Trump and find a new leader to regain one party rule. Right now, cabinet and administration officials can’t abandon the ship fast enough, hoping the slime won’t seep into any future economic opportunities first and political prospects secondarily. But the majority of those in office, both federally and locally, elected for their fealty to Trump, have no choice. In their vacuous minds, unencumbered by a political ethos, they are unable to envision a path apart from the cult of Trumpology marching orders. Lifted by radiating the cult aura, the candidates attracted to elected office were either true believers or ambitious, self absorbed nihilists searching for fame and fortune. The attack on Capitol Hill hastened the timeline; surveys show that only 15% of Republicans disapprove of the incident, a measure of the extent to which the party is ensconced in La-La-Land.
As the House forged toward Impeachment, Congressional Republicans were being forced to take a side, even as they are witnessing the monster that they created devouring them. The harassment and intimidation of legislators and their families, at the state and federal levels has struck fear in the hearts of those who might be considering abandoning the ship. Lindsay Graham harassed in the airport. Social media trolls threatening kidnap, torture and death to those who don’t tow the radical extremist line. Rep Alyssa Slatkin, a Democrat from a red district in Minnesota, says that she has been subject to death threats for years. She told Christine Amanpour that her Republican colleagues told her that their safety was uppermost in their minds as they considered their vote on Impeachment. There is no way to thread a path in the middle when the Mafia has a person in their sites. Typical political maneuvering through wordsmithing is not possible in a yes or no vote. A vote to impeach represents the quickest route to being “primaried” out of their seats as well as a life threatening act for their families.
Legislators sincerely wanting to jump out of the Trump gang should contact the FBI to investigate their tormentors and prosecute them. There is probably some federal law against intimidating the votes of legislators. They should then vote against sedition and ultimately resign if they can’t live without fear. They should honestly self-reflect on their path into their predicament and literally repent. However, given the intestinal fortitude within the group, the probability that some members of Congress and the Senate are taking shelter in a popular excuse is high. As fellow seditionists, they should simply resign, as unlikely as a pig taking flight.
So as the impeachment debate proceeded, it was clear that most Republicans were forking right, as would be predicted. Their most coherent argument against impeachment boiled down to this is time to lower the temperature and strive for unity. Apparently, Pelosi is supposed to reach out to them and they have only to accept graciously. Republicans have made no pretense of an ounce of self reflection. I call bullshit political gamesmanship! If they are serious, they have one simple thing to do. Republicans, tell your supporters you lied, as Mitt Romney suggested. Get on Twitter with a simple statement, “there was no election fraud. Joe Biden legitimately beat our guy by 8 million votes.” Stand in your legislative chambers and at your governors’ podia and simply tell the truth. They lost and they can try again in 2024. Of course, this would be most effectively done by their fearless leader. But he has found no way to flip this loss into a win except to lie about it. He sees it as his continuing base of power. So he’s out. But rather than tell their supporters to go home and join the battle against COVID19, many Republicans have refused to abandon the election fraud lie. Some have yet to acknowledge Joe Biden as the legitimately elected president. They simply can’t remember how not to lie.
Leading those on this fork diverging to the far right are Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, positioning themselves to be the next autocratic leader. They radiate ambition and nihilism. Cruz has deluded himself into believing he is charismatic; he is not. This supposedly moral crusader has evolved into a simple power grabber as scraggly as his unkempt beard. There’s something sinister about him. Hawley considers himself a fast rising phenom and bright Harvard educated star meant to outshine the sun. Harvard makes its graduates believe that kind of horseshit in their mantra that it is training leaders even as it doesn’t implant the ethics that should guide leaders through the idea of service. It’s a hard sell, given the wealthy, white entitled clay they have to mold.
It’s unlikely that the party lead will fall to the Jr who is only a moon that reflects back the sun’s light. If elected, Don Jr would be a front man for his father whom he can’t refuse. But for him to be elected, Agent Orange would have to surrender a piece of the spotlight, an impossibility. That wing of the party has no one else because Trump quashed anyone who got any attention at all. He built a movement about him, not the party. He doesn’t care what happens to it when he’s gone. This wing of the party has nowhere to go in electoral politics. Not even the party’s best efforts to shrink the electorate to only those who support them appears to be a recipe to return to a dominant position in national government in the absence of the threat of widespread domestic terrorism. Here, think about The Troubles in Ireland and Irish terrorism in England. The penetration of La-La-Land should not be underestimated given that they started at almost 40%. On the other hand, many of them don’t often vote unless TheRealityTVPresident whistles them to the polls and he’s whistling only for himself. It seems clear that a bunch of them have opted out altogether, preferring violent guerrilla warfare to the voting booth.
Trump quashed anyone in the party who got any attention at all. He built a movement about him, not the party. He doesn’t care what happens to it when he’s gone.
The White Supremacist in Chief may not have anticipated a competitor that threatens to subsume even his influence. He was the hub where a range of radical right extremist causes could cross pollinate mainstream Republicans. But then there was Q. Qanon centered Trump’s name, the only time that he’s allowed it’s use without an attached financial remuneration, in a far out conspiracy theory that posited Democrats as a group that trafficked in children whose blood they drank. From there it has mushroomed in scope to embrace all kinds of other concerns like anti-vaxxers, supporters of silencing women who have been sexually harassed, abused or raped and involuntary celibates (Incels). The forces have all coalesced in the “Stop the Steal Movement”, it’s primary focus since the election. Trump’s stolen election lie has galvanized and radicalized a large cross section of people who have been mesmerized by ever widening conspiracies. To commit to Q is to walk through the looking glass, into an underground bunker in La-La-Land with an automatic self locking vacuum sealed door. There may be no way out.
Qers may even be beyond Trump’s influence. Qers have their own way to interpret his words. For instance, his announcement that he would skip the inauguration was a signal that he would be safely out of the way of any attempted action. His latest statement that violence did not represent what he stood for they understand as something he just has to say to tamp down criticism. They know he has promoted and supported violence in the past, from beating up protesters in his rallies to the killing of a demonstrator in Charlottesville to aggressive police attacks on peaceful BLM demonstrators. They see it as just another wink, wink. And if that is true, there may be no way to stop the wave of domestic terrorist attacks that will surely come. In recent polls, 64% of Republicans agreed with the statement that the traditional way of American life is disappearing so fast that they may have to use force to save it.
People like Mitt Romney and Jeff Flake may try to gather up the leftovers on the Dump Trump fork. At some point, though, they will have to reckon with the reality that the majority of citizens aren’t buying what they’re selling. As we’ve been tumbled in thunderous seas with waves of deaths from COVID crashing over us, economic depravity from viral fallout, a momentary recognition of economic and health disparities and the long history of racial violence at the hands of law enforcement, people are less likely to be receptive. The “real” conservative movement will have to reckon with their role in repackaging overt anti-Black racism into the dog whistles of Ronald Regan and his successors then flipped back into overtness by the White Nationalist in Chief. It’s just hard to sell their disdain for people of color in a country that is becoming majority nonwhite. They’ve been trying to adopt the verbiage but it rings hollow in the mouths of those who blame minorities for being the stereotypes that the conditions Republican governance has created when there are NO alternatives. (Not that Democrats haven’t made their own contribution.) The missing ingredient is empathy, the emotion that our caste system has given the upper caste permission to deny in the continuing war to keep the lowest caste in its place through degradation.
The importance of government to our survival was made manifest as dependence on the largess of corporate America in the COVID response exposed the inherent inequality baked into the prioritization of profit over people. Conservatives’ small government is incapable of meeting the overarching challenges of climate change and racial justice and is in large part responsible for the hole that we now have to dig ourselves out of. The fact that some still refuse to acknowledge climate change in order to recruit new members is appalling and speaks to the party’s propensity for disinformation.
The conservative hew and cry about budget deficits will be central to either path of the splintered GOP. It wasn’t real, just an excuse to divest in the country’s resources. We know that because George Bush 43 built an enormous federal deficit playing with war toys even before the response to the Great Recession. The size of the deficit has never prevented a massive tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthy, the last one creating the foundation for an even larger one as both humanity and the economy yields to the virus. One other critical factor, times have changed. The fact is, with 0% interest rate practically globally, the newest borrowings are a steal. There hasn’t been a better time in the last couple of decades to accumulate a deficit. The smart money would borrow more to repay older debt service.
These conservatives will have to abandon their attachment to the clearly bankrupt theory of trickle down economics, now thoroughly debunked in practice by the evidence that the wealth stays at the top. That fact is in large part responsible for the emergence of their nemesis, the RealityTVPresident who scooped up all those who saw their government wasn’t listening to them and didn’t give a shit about them. It is the decades of Republican penny-pinching governance that allowed the deterioration of infrastructure, the public school and public health systems among other governmental functions.
They must acknowledge and disavow their role in building the infrastructure for one party rule through guaranteed districts. They shouldn’t hope to claw back to national prominence by retelling the lie of voter fraud in order to restrict voting in elections and repackaging votes to undercut one man, one vote. They must support a level playing field for all candidates. This may be the most difficult step because they have grown up in a party that understood that its message was not a winning one unless they focused on molding the electorate to the most likely susceptible and eliminating those who were not.
“True” conservatives must honestly reexamine their role in facilitating the rise of Donald Trump and coddling him in office, before they begin to determine the new direction for conservatism in the fragment of the Republican Party that dumps Trump. But they must also understand that if their arguments don’t win over a sufficient majority in the country as it evolves, they must either be happy with minority status or alter their stances to win over more people. That’s electoral politics. If they can’t, they are just another autocratic party vying with a stronger one with more name recognition and the right wing media bubble in tow.
In the interim since January 6, more and more evidence is emerging that some Congressmen and perhaps some staff assisted in the planning and execution of the Capitol assault. Some Capitol police have been implicated in providing maps or instructions for moving around the building, reflecting the historical reality that law enforcement has often been supporters if not members of white supremecist groups. There may be some members in the National Guard tasked to defend the inauguration and state capitals who are playing for the other team as well. Republicans should be apologizing for leading their supporters to treason. But Republicans have not yet admitted that they were wrong in supporting and speaking at the rally. They will not admit that they enabled Agent Orange for 4 years or that their failure to convict at the first Impeachment trial led us to this moment. Instead they are trying to isolate January 6 as the first bad act that 45 committed.
The initial horror over January 6 suggested that the divide might produce some interesting results. Mitch McConnell had given up the stolen election lie just moments before the Capitol was breached. Recently it’s been reported that he thinks 45 should be impeached but that seems to have been a political trial balloon. He then announced that the trial would be delayed until after the Biden-Harris inauguration, seemingly denying the urgency to remove a traitor from office.
McConnell, always a political survivor without philosophy, ethics or principles seems to be trying to find a middle course outside either fork in the road. In truth, he’s old, he won a 6 year term and is unlikely to run for another. He has lost his majority position which he can hope to recover in 2022; he has no other political aspirations. He can just sit quietly in waiting for that leadership position, particularly if the impeachment trial falls under Shumer’s purview.
Liz Cheney stuck her neck out to support impeachment, a move that could earn her a place in the leadership of a newly constituted conservative party. However, her political pedigree smacks of strong autocratic tendencies, including her father Dick who pioneered the unitary chief executive, as close to a monarch as one can imagine. In the near term, it could result in the loss of her party leadership position, death threats and loss of seat.
Elected office is not where the newly constituted Republican party, probably with a new name to erase their shame, will draw new members. It will be in convened meetings with those who left the party under the Trump siege like the people in the Lincoln Project and Jeff Flake. They will have to compete with the wing under Trumpian influence for people who flake off from the cult of Trump. However, they should ask themselves whether they want to welcome chameleons like Lindsay Graham who wants to be anything politically advantageous to anyone. They have to decide if they want to add some principles back into their politics or just bodies.
In the meantime, elected officials in the grips of the Trumpology cult, either as believers or people trying to take advantage of them, will be a fifth column in government under Joe Biden. Hopefully, investigations will expose those who aided and abetted the terrorists and the legislative bodies will expel them. Two newly elected Qanon disciples in the House, Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) and Lauren Boebert (CO) are lost in the wilderness. Greene says she will propose a bill to impeach Biden for abuse of power on Inauguration Day. The idea demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of the term, given that Biden, a private citizen, will only have been president for an hour or two. Ok, so it’s a publicity stunt where she’s using Congress like Twitter, pushing her brand for maximum likes to raise her profile. Greene refused to wear a mask in a safe room and so may have infected 3 Democratic colleagues to date. She has also refused to go through the newly installed metal detectors and pushed back against Capitol police along with her Colorado colleague who swore she would bring a gun to the Capitol. Guns are allowed in member offices, but not the chamber. Goebert is also being investigated for tweeting out Pelosi’s location in the building during the riot in direct violation of police instructions not to disclose their secure location. It just has to be said, Qanon believers have lost their minds, but they bring 2 more Republican votes to the House to nibble away at Democratic initiatives. At the same time, they are implants of the radical right sworn to tear down the United States government.
People like Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy, Hawley and Cruz will retain a powerful platform in legislative investigations to distribute KGB planted propaganda and they will pursue the objective McConnell laid out against Barack Obama, to make Biden a one term president. Although the party will not be able to mount investigations, Hunter Biden will return as a topic in any place where conspiracy theories can be snuck in. They will insert their disinformation into confirmation hearings and legislative debates. (Great news that there will be legislative debates in the Senate.) They will use the filibuster to slow legislation in the Senate. They will be the Twitter feed for Trump; they will do the interviews on Trump/FoxNews and OAN.
More nefariously, these foes of democracy represent a significant security threat. They will have access to secure information that there is no assurance that they will not feel above the law to share. If you support and aid insurrection, a few laws about security should be no barrier. But outside Congress, there are the hundreds (some estimate 25 million Americans are Q at least partial believers) of law enforcement and former military, potential National Guards who believe in #stopthesteal if not Q. One fireman was arrested for beating a cop with a fire extinguisher at the Capitol. At least 3 policemen have been terminated from their local departments for participation in the Capitol storming and it’s still early in arrests of what will hopefully be thousands. Every person who broke through the barriers was at a minimum trespassing; hundreds of Black youths daily are arrested for much less.
On the other hand, the “true” conservative fork will likely lay low, as the Trump inspired violence peaks and coronavirus subsides. They have time. Think about this, doctors say that COVID19 can have long term effects that have not yet been defined. The virus attacks every organ, including blood vessels and the heart. As a survivor, Trump may have some illness in his future and that could change the political calculus completely.
On January 17, 1834 Alabama legislature passed a law that effectively bans any free Black person from residing in the state.
“You’re a traitor!” “You cannot tell us we didn’t see what we saw![the stolen election]” Ted Cruz told the Senate in his speech to reject Arizona’s certificate of electors because a significant number of people believed that the election was stolen from the ArtfulDodgerPresident. What Cruz didn’t say was that they believe that because they have been fed a torrent of lies from the president himself, the ground first prepared in the campaign before he won the election in 2016. A chorus of voices joined in, from Trumpophant GOP politicians to the usual right wing media actors. This is a central tenet of La-La-Land. Rudy Guiliani once said that if the people believe it, then it is a fact. The business of La-La-Land is to transform beliefs into facts, no matter how far they diverge from the realities in our world, no matter how absurd.
La-La-Land is the cudgel with which El Trumpe! holds the country hostage. It is his creation, constructed from the foundation of Obama birtherism and added to bit by bit with bricks of “alternative facts” from Trump/FoxNews and the right wing media bubble. His administration began with a meaningless detail, falsification of the size of the inaugural crowd in defiance of the photographic evidence, an elevation of the new president’s admonition, “do not believe what you see and hear” to the White House press briefing podium. Only he speaks the truth.
La-La-Land exists in the mind, without real touchstones like wildfires, rising sea levels, polluted waters, deaths from coronavirus. It’s symbols are swastikas, Confederate flags, Qanon tee shirts and red MAGA hats. La-La-Landers call themselves the “real Americans”, having stolen the name of our country for their own as their leader, foisted into the White House with the help of Russian intelligence “active measures”, commanded them to. Their country is 99% white, ours is multiracial. Their territory exists in enclaves scattered across the rural landscape, failed factory towns in the Midwest and the Northeast and sparsely populated states of the far West and of course, the former Confederacy in the South.
The Russians didn’t see a need to help Trump in 2020, thinking that the presidential propaganda machinery supplemented by the multiple GOP purveyors of disinformation in the Senate and House who continued to spout KGB propaganda would be sufficient. Frankly Putin has become disenchanted with his partnership with the Donald whom he feels has delivered very little concrete advantages for Russia. Gone from Russian state media is complementary coverage of Trump, sometimes even portraying him as a buffoon. Trump had also bungled several efforts with his big mouth, like failing to withhold aid and weapons from Ukraine in search of his own personal anti-Biden campaign. He squeaked through his impeachment trial with the help of his Senatorial co-conspirators, providing another platform for KGB disinformation as Fiona Hill begged them not to do. Most importantly, he has done nothing about the sanctions that are crippling their economy based primarily on fossil fuels. Still, Putin is ecstatic with his progress in sowing destabilizing chaos in the first democratic republic in the world, culminating in the overthrow attempt at the Capitol building. That is a propaganda coup beyond his wildest dreams. “This is what happens in democracies; they crumble while our Russian system is strong. We are the future.” crows Vladimir.
Putin’s successes in chaos sowing have shifted his attention to intelligence gathering as revealed by the months-long hack into US government agencies. This effort may not stop at mere information gathering, but may also include already planted back door levers to disable functionality. The Russians are miles ahead of the US in cyber stealth, much as they were in the race to space. And we will need the kind of all-out effort mobilized in JFK’s moon shot. That means not only MONEY, and the price will be steep, but also political will. Political will is a more difficult problem given the GOP’s determination to cement its one party autocratic rule in alliance with the Red Bear. The Sedition Caucus in Congress and La-La-Lander leadership will do everything possible to thwart efforts to secure the country from the Russian threat. China, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel have also been bad actors in this arena. Keeping the barn door open for Russia keeps it open for them all.
La-La-Land exists in the mind, without real touchstones like wildfires, rising sea levels, polluted waters, deaths from coronavirus. It’s symbols are swastikas, Confederate flags, Qanon tee shirts and red MAGA hats.
Trump lost the election because he overestimated the extent of La-La-Land’s citizenry. The RealityTVPresident’s decision to focus on La-La-Landers almost exclusively with actions that increasingly alienated his hesitant fringe may have been the error that cost him the election. Additionally, he perhaps did not anticipate the active anti-racism messaging and anti-voter suppression movement that sprang up to counter Russian bot driven efforts to depress African American voters this election cycle. He may have underestimated the need for Putin’s assistance there. He ran almost completely on grievances, primarily his own; the little talk about policy was drowned in pleas for sympathy, more pitiful as the end grew near. He also did not foresee that the reaction of people of color and their allies to his racist rhetoric concretized in oppressive physical violence in the streets against BLM demonstrators, white, other minority and Black. That anger was mobilized into successful massive Democratic voter registration efforts that knocked the White Supremacist in Chief out of the White House. The Lincoln Project has his number as well and they continue to be ruthless. Apparently, he overestimated his cult’s size or at least the part of it that would vote.
The same backlash that produced massive Democratic voter registration efforts ended McConnell’s detrimental majority leadership, 45’s final thrust at the GOP even as the party fared well in state legislatures, governors mansions and local governments. He has said he intentionally undermined the Senate runoff to punish MCConnell for insufficient support. Mitch, the savvier politician whose lifeblood is tied to his majority leadership, understood the more effective path and Trump’s election fraud themed rants were not it.
Citizenship in La-La-Land is granted through feeding at the trough of conspiracy theories peddled across radical right platforms and reflected onto Trump/FoxNews, Facebook pages and vice versa. It’s a virtual revolving door. Members come as the aggrieved, framing their receptiveness to victimhood narratives that promote revenge against the powerful and those they think have invaded their space, misidentifying who both those groups are. It allows them to identify a purported multimillionaire who has done nothing but victimize other people as the savior who would re-establish the world as they thought they knew it. Trump/FoxNews has dimmed as a leading myth purveyor, now dislodged by the rabbithole of conspiracy peddling chat rooms and internet platforms that then pop up in Facebook group feeds. It is a jungle of interconnecting vines in praise of the superiority of whiteness so dense that sunlight can not penetrate it’s interior.
Citizens believe that they are under siege by people of color. They are petrified that their America where white men reigned supreme over their homes, their wives and their political voice in dying. But that America is as fictional as La-La-Land. The power was always in the hands of the wealthy who corralled the majority of white men into believing they were in control as post WWII prosperity, the Jim Crow police state in the South and racial discrimination across the country brought economic prosperity. By the Reagan era, white middle and working class men became less economically secure as wages began to stagnate and unions were attacked. To stave off discontent, the wealthy called upon the tried and true Black bogey man as the cause of their economic stagnation, appealing to their membership in the dominant white caste to apply their knee to the necks of the lowest dark skinned caste. Americans have been brainwashed by whiteness! It is the gift of the robber barons that keeps on giving: our very own white-black caste system.
But La-La-Land’s imaginary model did not allow the country to flourish in the world as it evolved, although the slippage was not immediately evident. The exclusion of the talents and skills of significant portions of the population disadvantages the country to compete on the world stage. It is a powerhouse that could propel the creativity that will allow us to thrive in a world of globalized competition on the verge of climate disaster.
When the 45th president was inaugurated, he spoke about American carnage. What people, besides his co-architects the Steves Bannon and Miller, didn’t realize at the time was that carnage was what the president intended to bring, not what had happened in the past.
The parallels between Adolf Hitler’s Brown shirts and the seditionists are undeniable. The obvious one is that many in the mob share with the Nazis a common philosophy of white supremacy, if not all the same overt symbols. They will try to deny it but their rhetoric and actions are completely in sync. But more than that, in 1938 Hitler sent German citizens to join the Nazi SA, a paramilitary army to carry out Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass to corral and beat Jewish people and destroy their businesses, homes and synagogues. In 2021, Donald Trump and his enablers sent his similarly mesmerized La-La-Landers to break the windows of the Capitol building. To those who are not citizens of La-La-Land, that should be bone chilling.
On April 13,1873, armed white men in Colfax LA killed 150 Black people who were peacefully protesting a takeover of the courthouse by the white supremacist loser of the gubernatorial election. The legality of the Colfax Massacre was upheld by SCOTUS when it ruled that the 14th Amendment does not protect citizens from attacks by individuals, preventing federal prosecution of whites who perpetrated lynchings, bombings and massacres of African Americans. This cleared the way for decades of violence against Black citizens.
The outgoing President of the United States called from a rally podium for his supporters to go to the Capitol Building and claim the election that he convinced them he won. All the available evidence contradicts his fantasy but his cult has lost touch with reality, bubble wrapped in his LaLaLand. He told them he would walk with them down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, but strangely enough, he piled into his presidential motorcade and drove off with his Secret Service agents and a police escort that blocks traffic on every street he crosses.
Sometime later, the Secret Service had to quickly whisk VP Pence from the Senate chamber. Grassley, Pelosi and McConnell in the line of presidential succession had to be yanked away as well. They were in the midst of an attack on the people who run the government by those very same MAGA rallyers on a mission to Keep America White. A mortal strike would have created a leadership vacuum. Perhaps it was meant to be a demonstration that the Trumpology cult believes the country needs only one ruler, El Trumpe!.
It’s no accident that the crowd was dotted with Confederate flags, a symbol of the guiding light for this act of sedition. A woman interviewed leaving the building with tear gas reddened eyes said, “We were storming the Capitol. This is a revolution!”, pretty much summing up. These people broke windows to gain entry and then looted the offices of the country’s representatives, carrying out chairs and pieces of furniture. The assumption must be made that they also examined documents before they scattered them all over the floors in the offices, left in haste as members of Congress and staffers ran in fear for their lives. We know one man took a piece of Speaker Pelosi’s mail, proudly displayed for an interviewer. Pelosi’s laptop is also reported missing. The obvious intent was violence on our elected representatives. They meant to stop the certification of Joe Biden, our newly elected President. Rather than “Stop the Steal”, they were intent on their own theft, the voice of the country’s majority. We voted and answered that impeachment question Republicans had asked us to settle. Guilty! You’re Fired! It may have looked like an aimless mob, but many were dead serious, in fact fatally to 5 people. A woman was shot. Two IEDs were found on the ground. A Capitol policeman was killed.
Trump, in his Jefferson Davis persona, tweeted for his band of traitors to stand fast before, almost 5 hours into the rampage, releasing a video that pumped up the stolen election lie and empathized with his people over their frustration before telling them to go home. This expression of empathy stands out starkly from the BullyPresident’s usual rhetoric. And yet, it was a typical speech with forked tongue, the admonition to leave, a cover for his support of violent acts against our government mixed with praise for people he called special. In case of any legal recriminations, that will be his defense. It provides a veneer of deniability. 45 will say that he didn’t know the crowd would be violent although he later characterized their sedition as an act of patriotism in a tweet (that was later deleted as Twitter banned him for 12 hours):
“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.”
It’s reported that he laughed and cheered the rabble on while watching from the comfort of a couch shared with Kayleigh McEnany and Mark Meadows. The chief executive delights in watching violent actions, the way many cowards who could never deliver a physical blow themselves often do.
As I watched the Capitol police clear the steps of demonstrators outside, some rioters punched at the officers, but there was no attempt to detain anyone. Rioters were quietly and patiently escorted to different positions. One officer kindly held the hand of a woman helping her down the Capitol steps. These people have broken the law, unlawfully trespassing into an area that was designated as off limits and cordoned off by police whom they attacked. Recall the paddy wagons used to transport peaceful BLM demonstrators who had attacked no one but were being attacked by police. There were none at the Capitol. The police finally cleared the area around the building, but they let the crowd mill around in the streets, despite violating the 6 pm curfew imposed by the DC mayor. No zip ties; no billy clubs. No armored vehicles; no rubber bullets. Sparse use of batons. The cops in riot gear formed a line but they just looked at the crowd. Thousands of white lawbreakers were allowed to fade away in their own time, leaving primarily for points outside DC. They were free to drive or fly home.
All Americans, white and Black, have the same expectations of law enforcement, summed up by one of the mob interviewed by the media, “They shoot BLM; they don’t shoot us.” These folks had no fear. They were confident that they could go maskless in easily identifiable clothing and get off scot free. And why not. They did it at the Michigan state house in Lansing, and there they had automatic weapons and long guns. (I imagine an armed shootout between the Proud Boys, assorted militias and law enforcement. It’s complicated, what with the sympathy among officers for militia groups. Who has the most guts? Alas, that will never happen. The cops would be de-escalating their asses off.)
They should have seen it coming. Republicans did see it coming because Trump consistently telescopes his behavior. They chose not to believe.
One has to ask how this happened. The FBI and intelligence community was well aware of the preparations of the radical right. The President himself said he would create something spectacular on the day in his invitations to participate. The signs were everywhere. Homeland Security was Johnny on the spot to clear Lafayette Square, but they were nowhere in sight to defend the Capitol building. Nor did they arrive later. Mayor Boyser and Nancy Pelosi had to call for the National Guard; Governor Northam of Virginia kicked in an additional complement of state troopers while being sidestepped by Pentagon command. The question has to be asked if the DOJ purposely did not prepare a security plan and deploy a force to protect a joint session of Congress attended by the country’s leadership directly below the president that was the target of right wing social media chatter and a speech that incited violence by the president’s henchmen, Rudy G who called for a “trial of combat” (more Trump deniability). A gesture of deference to the president, perhaps from an obsequious partisan official. Law enforcement on site amounted to Capitol police and Secret Service agents who left with the vice president. There was not even a DC police presence. Streets around the area that were supposed to be barricaded were not. The possibility that some partisan employees within the building may have assisted the terrorists with entry must be investigated as some police were seen taking selfies with seditionists.
Throughout the whole day, there were no public remarks from the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, Homeland Security or other members of the executive branch. (In the revolving door of agency heads during the waning days of the administration, it wasn’t worth the time to find the names in these positions; no one’s heard of any of them anyway.) We had only the press to inform us of events without the input of any government officials except those trapped inside. Remember the days when Obama communications officials would keep us up to date on these kinds of momentous events. As reported by MSNBC, the entire supplemental law enforcement response circumvented the PiedPiperPresident by using consultation with DOJ and Pence, not the Commander in Chief and that is why most of it was initially non-federal. Where is Bill Barr’s assembled DOJ hodgepodge force of ICE, DEA and multi-agency SWAT teams when they’re needed? Answer: some of them are probably in the crowd inside the building.
Apparently, the feds were wary of appearing to overreact against “demonstrators” given the blowback from their violent treatment of social justice demonstrators and so had planned a minimal presence. This is an example of straight line thinking in law enforcement, unable to extrapolate the obvious differences between the two groups. Alas, here’s where their implicit racial biases screwed them. Law enforcement sees a dark face and they immediately fear for their lives. It’s automatic, their societal stereotypes reinforced, no hammered into their heads, by their militarized police training. The basis of policing since the 1960s is theoretically crime prevention based on the assumption that Black youth have a propensity for criminal behavior; if you don’t catch ‘em early, they grow up into felons.
Never mind that they live in segregated neighborhoods with lousy schools where they’re hounded by police masquerading as school guards and teachers who “discipline” them for the same behaviors white kids get away. Not that there are many white kids in their 85% segregated schools. And then there is the lack of jobs, economic development, transportation. Let’s not forget institutionalized racial bias that means that D’Quan will get fewer job offers, in fact responses to application because his name identifies him as an African American. Those prejudices combined with the scientifically documented physiological changes caused by coping with them, contribute to a higher burden of disease among descendants of the enslaved and a shorter life span. Those conditions say more about exclusion of dark skinned people from American society and the economy than about a genetic propensity to criminal behavior.
In contrast, white faces get the benefit of doubt with law enforcement unless they’re with Black people or closely allied with them. The Capitol police somehow were expecting the 2016 Women’s March crowd when they should have been thinking of the Charlottesville Tiki Torch folks with concealed weapons.
Unfortunately, conflicts over the response to BLM demonstrations have apparently strained communications between the various agencies in DC. So the Capitol police seemed unaware of the social media chatter about the plans for the day’s event. I guess they don’t read the newspaper either. Even members of Congress were nervous that something untoward could happen. So the game plan was to use a force of about 500 of their 2000 officers. After the mob had broken in, the DOJ was apparently still worried about appearing heavy handed and didn’t want to permit mobilization for what they called a limited mission. Seems like the ransacking of the Capitol wasn’t a high priority, even after 2 IED had been found on the grounds and been disarmed.
Somehow the Capitol police were expecting the 2016 Women’s March crowd when they should have been thinking of the Charlottesville Tiki Torch folks with concealed weapons.
In the end, the mob succeeded in delaying Congressional acceptance of the electors count just as the present resident in the White House intended. But life threatening experiences tend to change calculations, particularly privileged legislators who live in cocoons of safety, including their own dedicated security force. Congress vowed to get back to work and complete the task working through the night. The GOP enablers of the stolen election fantasy, led by Cruz and Hawley seem to have decided to continue their act of theatre without admitting that what they have advanced as harmless is in fact aid and comfort to seditionists. Hawley, photographed with his fist raised in front of the mob like he’s some kind of freedom fighter rather than destroyer, is ready to ride this wave to a presidential campaign in 2024. He was sending out fund-raising emails and trying to campaign among the mob as they stood in front of the Capitol. If the Senate had guts, they would eject him from the body. After all, 5 people died in what they call a caper; one seditionist shot by police and one policeman beat to death with a fire extinguisher. That’s aggravated assault and murder, you purported Republican defenders of the thin blue line!
All of these GOP enablers, the McConnells and Grahams and Meadows and Loefflers etc should be punished in some way, even if it is simple censure in the chambers. ( Loeffler got her comeuppance with her defeat by Raphael Warnock). But that too is white privilege. It’s just not true that bad people will meet justice in this world. There have been so many examples in just the last year, that adage should be deleted from the lexicon. Think of all the white cops that murdered or maimed Black men and boys who have gone on to keep working their jobs and even be promoted. The Ku Klux Klansmen who have murdered thousands of descendants of the enslaved who went on to long happy lives, even community veneration. I don’t believe in an afterlife and even if I did, the people hurt by bad people will never see that evil punished. If there is no god, then christianity is just a bunch of rules that white people have written to protect their power. If there is a god, he must be white if he sanctions the torture of people of color all over the world for the history of civilization. God’s sanction is the narrative that empire builders and enslavers laid out for centuries.
Now that the RealityTVPresident has made his most radical move to overthrow democracy, some in the GOP have decided that he exposed their mission of one party rule too overtly. The GOP has used him to unleash his corp of cultists at the state, local and national levels in ways that will continue their one-party autocracy despite the impression that he has them corralled. Republicans want their autocracy to look like an organic evolution of American democracy, not a coup. They should have seen it coming; they did see it coming because he consistently telescopes his behavior. They chose not to believe. They have let the BullyPresident take the lead because he doesn’t take direction. They have only been able to follow because the cult listens to its leader alone. But that doesn’t relieve them of the responsibility to try, first by abandoning the lie and then by reputiating their insistence that only their party should rule.
Although Republicans appear to be frightened to cross El Trumpe!, the fact that he has consistently accomplished the party goals of supporting the rich and taking down government, has meant they would just let him spin his bizarre web. The phone calls to Georgia and canoodling state legislators at White House meetings could be rationalized to stay in power. But a physical assault on the seat of government with a band of ragtag miscreants is a PR nightmare. There are those, Hawley and Cruz for example, who hang in there, relying on their media rabbithole to transform the coup attempt into something else as if most of us weren’t watching it in real time. But even cult members who were there are willing to follow their spokesmen anywhere and have joined into the social media hype that it was anit-fa.
As the GOP has evolved into the party of Trump, the cult has elected the most despicable self aggrandizing gang of national thugs who will watch the country wither away as they suck out every ounce of wealth they can. Going forward, the Sedition Caucus of over 100 members of Congress and 7 Senators who voted against accepting the challenged elector certificates remains in the legislative branch, much like the Congress of 1859. Those men left in 1860 with the election of Abe Lincoln, but the fate of the current contingent is still unclear. While Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz should be drummed out of the Senate for feeding the flames of sedition through providing the event and raising hopes that the election lie could escape the cult bubble for the outside world. But they won’t be. They won’t even be censored. They will remain with their traitorous comrades to pollute congressional debate with propaganda emanating from the Trumpology cult, continuing to rock the democratic applecart hoping to tip it into overt autocracy in 2022 or 24. They are the snake in the grass poised to strike at any moment.
And what of Rudy Giuliani? Why has he not been arrested for incitement to riot for his remarks at the rally, calling for “trial by combat”? He is the principal purveyor aside from Trump of the stolen election lie that fed the drive to attack the Capitol. And yet his name has not come up at all. Shouldn’t the FBI shut him down so he can’t cause more potential fatal mayhem on Inauguration Day.
As President Biden takes the oath of office on January 20, the battle for all of us who hope democracy will survive must be committed to actively continuing the battle. We can not sit back and hand it over to the politicians. To win, the radical right wing media bubble must be dismantled, a delicate task given the importance of maintaining the free press. But Fox News is not the press or journalism. It is a corporation that profits from spreading disinformation that they know is patently false. Our window into what is happening around the world has been fogged by the hunt for advertising dollars. Fox News is a knowledgeable peddler of fantasy constructed from rumors, doctored and mislabelled images and pure fiction. Rupert Murdoch and sons are holding at least 3 countries, Australia, the UK and the US, hostage to his quest to make more money than anyone can spend in several lifetimes. A former prime minister in Australia has launched a legal and legislative assault on Murdoch’s monopoly of that country’s press. We need something similar here.
The other target is Facebook which is central to creating nests of many bad actors from porn to politics. Globally, it has been instrumental in toppling governments and inciting genocide. Its reactive model of dealing with problematic posts can never fix the problem. The problem is their business model itself that sells its users’ lives to whoever is willing to pay. Their objective is to keep people watching to maximize the advertising dollars. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech. The Bill of Rights precludes the government from abridging speech. A corporate entity can decide what is and is not acceptable and those unhappy with that decision can shop in the free market for an alternative. It will not be sufficient to break up the Silicon Valley giants, their products must be regulated. Any regulation will be aggressively opposed by Republicans who have used this oasis to achieve their one party hegemony. Without the bubble, Americans will have to confront reality and other Americans honestly, not anonymously. With the bubble, the right wing La-La-Land will continue to suck the life out of democracy.
Anti-democratic foreign countries are watching carefully and want to weigh in. Social media platforms continue to be the cheapest highway. The war to secure American democracy is a multi-faceted, multi-year perhaps decades long war that will see an uneven mix of battle victories and defeats. American democracy, now only 55 years old, will be a true democratic republic when every eligible voter is given equal and easy access to the voting booth, encouraged by the knowledge that their participation in the process will determine their governance. Otherwise, voter turnout will remain among the lowest in the world; why vote if it’s hard to do and won’t affect the outcome anyway. The low turnout is not only a result of Republican voter suppression initiatives, but a disillusionment with the impact of that vote, both on the right and the left. Republicans see the Biden win as a bump in the road to one-party rule, much like they viewed the Obama years. Their objectives have not changed nor will they until they pay the political price that dislodges them from their minority rule built on low voter turnout. The fight has only haltingly begun.
On December 15, 1917 Claxton Dekle was lynched in Candler County Georgia.
Marco Rubio? Mario Cuomo? US troops in South Korea? There seems to be a whole tier of people who were left out of the ACIP recommendations that the CDC adopted for vaccine administration. Were those doses reserved outside the originally reported 6.4 million doses of Pfizer vaccine earmarked for the elderly in nursing homes and healthcare workers, supposedly the first priority? Was there another stash that was not publicly announced but reserved for political purposes? Does each state have its own stash for local politicians?
Mitch McConnell is quite elderly and has had to negotiate the COVID infused environment through several episodes of White House superspreading. Despite his despicable role in the Senate, he at least fits an early criteria group. But Ted Cruz? Marco Rubio? Shouldn’t they be the last to get immunized when they’ve been central to the government’s role in consistently enhancing the impact of the pandemic? Why should they be prioritized over healthcare workers and the elderly in nursing homes? They are not essential to the functioning of the government; essential workers should even be prioritized above them. Besides, over 50 members of Congress have tested positive for the virus. The CDC recommends that previous positives wait at least 90 days before vaccination on the assumption that they have some immunity from having fought off the virus. While this is consistent with most viruses, it has not been demonstrated yet with COVID19. Still, because the vaccines are in short supply, the more vulnerable should be prioritized. In addition, younger legislators would benefit from the immunization of other elderly Congressional members as part of a halo effect that protects members in a community where 70-80% are immune. This is the definition of herd immunity.
Of course this same routine is being repeated in all 50 states; governors and state legislators lining up for their dose. Perhaps, that’s an overstatement. Some public pandemic deniers may be getting their doses in private, but the governor of Georgia took his turn in front of the cameras and Kemp is a firm Trump wannabe despite having his hand bitten by TheBullyPresident over failure to invalidate the legitimate Georgia victory for Biden. Kemp is still licking his boots as 45 calls for his resignation. They should have an interesting encounter when Air Force One touches down for the Perdue-Loeffler rally on January 4.
An alternate list of immunization priorities is no surprise in this country where the mantra is racial and class inequality, now almost as extreme as the early 20th century. The haves inevitably keep getting more; everyone else has less. The current ruse is that leaders will be role models to encourage others to get vaccinated but most people don’t like or trust them. Trumpology cult members are the exception, but he’ll never do the sensible thing. Maybe celebrities, like Beyonce, JayZ or Lebron, would be more effective in encouraging African Americans to extend an arm to the needle. These icons cut across healthcare and essential workers demographics. Perhaps Black ministers too could be enlisted in an “extend an arm” campaign. Interesting question; why have no dark-skinned people outside healthcare workers and VP elect Harris been on camera getting their vaccine? Maybe I’m jumping the gun and these will be approaches when the general population is slated to receive the vaccine. Skeptic that I am, I haven’t heard anyone propose this kind of strategy to reach our community? Hum, is there some racial bias inherent in the planning just like it’s inherent in the medical and public health system. Alas, caste dominance rears its ugly head again.
It’s also no surprise that Operation Warpspeed screwed up early distribution by failing to deliver allotted amounts to several states on schedule. The Trump administration has never considered expertise as a job qualification and near its end, given its record of misconduct, pickings are particularly thin. And of course, the one thing apparent in the chief executive’s history is that he has no idea how to run a family business, let alone a federal bureaucracy larger than any single corporation in the country. The chance that there would be no snafus was zero.
But more than that, Operation Warpspeed stopped at the governor’s mansion door, forcing individual states to create their own plans. This meant that overwhelmed public health departments would leave it to individual facilities to develop their own priority plans. Each new bureaucratic plan forms another node, snarling vaccine administration like cars at a broken traffic light. It’s not surprising then that only about 3 million vaccine doses have been distributed when Warpspeed promised that 20 million people would be vaccinated during the month of December. That’s a whopping 15%! More importantly, of the 12 millions doses distributed only 3 million have actually been administered.
With less vaccine to be put in peoples’ arms, are the right people getting what there is? We know that a yes is unlikely. Here are some examples. The renowned Mass General Hospital used the honor code for personnel to sign-up online. Honesty is not one of the characteristics that is admired or rewarded these days. So many requests came in that the Mass General system crashed. It came back online with little staff notification and the doses were soon snapped up. Night shift workers didn’t have a chance. A significant number of lucky winners were managers and administrators who have no patient contact. They had mentally constructed a risk ladder from meeting with staff who interact with patients. And yet, their protections in those interactions are that the staff will have been immunized. They probably didn’t consider that if they as managers contracted disease in the window before they achieved immunity. They probably didn’t consider that if they contracted disease in the window before they achieved immunity, there might not be enough frontline providers to take care of them as they fold in with the hundreds of others being treated. It’s that “me, me, me!” thing again.” The poor anesthesiologists and respiratory therapists who intubate and man the ventilators. Mass General’s comment to an NPR reporter was that they had too many employees to come up with a better system. Not important enough to safeguard their frontline personnel, you say? Featured in the story was a neonatal unit night shift nurse who was caring for neonates of COVID19 positive mothers. Unable to log-in during her shift, all appointments were filled by the time her shift ended.
Because the vaccination plan aims to lower death rates rather than stop the spread there will be millions of more cases and hundreds of thousands more deaths before vaccine penetration is adequate to minimize the spread of infection.
Florida is no surprise as one of the Republican led states that have adopted their own plan for prioritizing vaccine recipients rather than follow CDC recommendations. Texas and Ohio are 2 others who have prioritized the elderly over essential workers as the next tier following healthcare workers and the institutionalized elderly. Governor DeSantos is politically astute enough to know that a population that has almost 21% adults over 65 years old may add delayed access to the vaccine to their displeasure with the minimal state efforts to control the pandemic, imperiling his chances of reelection. The governor has demonstrated repeatedly that politics is more important than the health of his state, continuing to allow beaches, gyms and personal services, restaurants and bars to remain open. DeSantos is a tried and true virus denier demonstrating stubborn anti-intellectualism despite a Harvard degree.
The colleges of Harvard might reconsider their curricula, given the number of its graduates, like Ted Cruz, Martha McSally, Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Wilbur Ross and Kayleigh McEnany, just a few El Trumpe devotees engaged in magical thinking. They are all at least personal aggrandizers if not true cult believers. But then personal aggrandizement is a central cult tenet. Look at the number of prosperity ministers and their congregants who support the Swindler in Chief.
Florida public health officials apparently threw up their hands and declared the elderly would be vaccinated on a first come, first serve basis. The result, when Lee county officials called both healthcare providers and the elderly in one group, first come, first serve, one older man arrived at 3 am the day before the day the office would open at 9. A parking lot full of others sitting in lawn chairs often less than 6 feet apart had joined him over the intervening hours. Luckily, some of them had on masks. The county used their entire allotment by the end of the day before all were served. At this rate, getting the vaccine is likely spreading the virus. Those unable to find an alternative source for vaccination may have already been infected garnering their own immunity if they survive the disease.
The mismatch between supply and demand began with Operation Warpspeed’s decision to allocate doses by the total state population rather than the proportion at risk, a calculation which would have brought a larger allocation to Florida’s elderly. By the same token, at the state level, some consideration should have been given to estimates of vaccine uptake. In the months of planning, surveys of providers committed to taking the vaccine could have guided allocations to institutions. There are enough people who want to get vaccinated in the first tier; others can be added later as they are persuaded. Excess amounts can be used to begin the next priority tier. It’s more important to vaccinate the 50% of adults who desire the vaccine than to hold on for stragglers. Efforts to persuade them can take place at the same time but in this country, people have the right to be stupid. Remember too that vaccine production lags far behind the supply that will be needed, so there is still time for the unpersuaded to catch up with production.
Instead, a rural county in Arizona administered less than half of their shots reserved for medical personnel. There seem to be no provisions to move excess doses to another site, particularly important given the short window of viability for defrosted vials. Once the Pfizer vaccine is brought to 4O C, every effort should be made to get those doses in someone’s arm. It can’t be any more chaotic than it seems to be now; a precious resource should not go to waste.
There has been at least one reported incidence of sabotage. In Grafton Wisconsin outside Milwaukee, one pharmacist at Aurora Health Center intentionally removed the vials containing over 500 doses of the Moderna vaccine from the refrigerator to sit out overnight, not once but twice. The repetition suggests that the intention was to inactivate the vaccine so that any recipient would fail to be protected after believing their dose was viable. There’s been no information on the political or moral cause he was channeling. While personnel tried to save some doses by administering them, it is now not clear that they will be effective, further confusing the situation. And the first of 2 doses for over 200 people went in the rubbish.
And as in any human endeavor, there is error. So, a group of 42 people in West Virginia were given a dose of Regeneron, the monoclonal antibodies, instead of the vaccine. The error was a multilevel failure. Apparently the drug was included in a shipment of vaccine by workers in a distribution hub and then refrigerated together. But the distinctly different boxes of vials and the vials themselves mean that there were multiple failures in a system of checks critical to prevent medical error. How is it possible that none of the several people involved in preparing the injections noticed? There should have been some process for recording the lot numbers of the doses given, just as there is with flu vaccine. Review of those records is probably how the mistake was discovered but apparently set off no alarms before the doses were given. This then is a double screw-up; Regeneron has limited availability when it has been shown to prevent death in severe cases at a time when thousands of people are infected with COVID19. It is meant to be administered intravenously, not intramuscularly where its impact on immunity is unclear. The people mistakenly injected with it will remain susceptible to viral infection while their eligibility for vaccination will remain unclear. It’s recommended that people treated with intravenous Regeneron should delay immunization by at least 3 months but this situation has not been evaluated.
Some institutions have adopted their own roadblocks, apparently less concerned about maximizing the safety of providers than their ability to work. They’re administering shots in waves so that staffer side effects don’t interfere with work schedules. Interesting, since the vast majority of side effects are so minor that they don’t interfere with work. Some states are holding supplies for CVS and Walgreens, fearing that the supply will be exhausted before the drug companies can visit the elderly in nursing homes. A sense of urgency has given way to personal agendas. This is a national emergency after all.
All is not lost. Doses of the Moderna vaccine have been added to the vaccine supply. This vaccine is easier to distribute because it requires only the normal range of refrigeration so a larger range of potential sites can administer the shots. It also appears that Moderna set up its own distribution system outside Warspeed that so far has had fewer hangups. Hopefully, there will be some review of distribution and administration procedures that will improve them. First would be revision of state and institutional allotments utilizing estimates of the at risk population. Unfortunately, significant revision seems unlikely, given the whimsical nature of the whole enterprise. Operation Warpspeed is like throwing 4 decks of cards in the air and hoping they will land in numerical order in 4 separate piles. A rapid mass vaccination effort requires national (federal) planning down to the last detail. The vaccine centers set up in the UK and Germany have allowed them to outpace US efforts. It seems that this country with its vast resources can’t do much right given its insistence on maintaining one of the largest disparities in wealth distribution on the planet. So what else is new?
The decision was made to set a vaccination plan aimed at decreasing deaths rather than stopping the spread. Stopping the spread may be impossible without massive amounts of testing to determine the asymptomatically infected. But while we wait for significant vaccine penetration, more people will become severely ill with possible long term disabilities as the virus continues to spread within a population that refuses to take simple public health measures that could help prevent it.
The vision of the wealthy and powerful have shaped the country’s response to the pandemic. By their standards, they’ve done a great job and yet, hundreds of thousands of Americans are dying. So be it, they say. The death of 1 in 1000 Black Americans across the country is simply a fact of life. For them, that will make America greater. The US has the worst pandemic response among developed nations in the world. So far, it has the least successful vaccination program launch in the world. The question is can our future be different or will our rich robber barons continue to hold us under their thumb?
On December 17, 1882 Richmond Roberts, an African American man, was lynched in Burke County Georgia.
oleblacklady 