As Mark Meadows travails continue, I want to focus on a couple of related things. They both deal directly with the memo he was pushing, and which has become a focus of his contempt of Congress hearing, but in different ways.
The memo raises a number of overlapping issues that we need greater clarity on:
- Trump and several members of his White House senior staff like Meadows were clearly in on this.
- Meadows read an unknown number of GOP members of the House and the Senate on to the strategy delineated in the memo. The only one we know explicitly from the news reporting is Mike Lee. We don’t know, but can guess at some of the rest. We also don’t know if Meadows read in Trump’s lickspittle acting appointees at DOD: Miller, Patel, MacGregor, Cohen-Watnick. I’ve now seen reporting that Meadows or someone else sent the memo to Ratcliffe at ODNI, but he denies ever seeing it. And We don’t know if that Assistant AG Clark got it, but given his behavior we have to assume he did.
- NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM – Republican members of the House and Senate and/or their staffers, members of the administration, outside surrogates and allies – bothered to actually alert the authorities. Or even leak it it the news media as a way to try to prevent it and cover their own asses. Not that I think the news media would have covered it. They’d have held it for a book to be published later.
- The referenced in the reporting as partially responsible for creating the memo, COL (ret) Waldron is a 37A MOS. For the non-military/not veterans that’s a Psychological Operations officer. Allegedly his role in all of this is he’s Mike Flynn’s PSYOPer in whatever it is Flynn is actually doing.
- The news media, especially the political reporters that cover the White House, Congress, and what Trump is doing don’t seem too interested in actually reporting this. They comment about it on Twitter. In the case of Costa he refers, via Twitter, to his book. But it hasn’t been on the nightly network broadcasts until tonight’s contempt hearing. It’s certainly not been on FOX. CNN has covered it a bit. MSNBC has and will continue to cover it. It hasn’t on the front page of the NY Times or WaPo and it certainly isn’t in the Wall Street Journal. We now have as close to a smoking gun as possible that senior members of the Trump administration, in coordination with his personal attorneys and people working with them, developed an actual plan to overthrow the Constitution and they read in an unknown number of Republican senators and representatives. And the news media has decided to instead focus on whatever it is they’re focusing on.
Here’s a copy of the memo as a pdf:
I do want to make one point before getting to the other related item. This contempt hearing is not just intended to hold Meadows in contempt, it is intended to disturb the network around Trump and see what happens without disrupting or taking down that network. Basically, the House Select Committee on the events of 6 January is running an influence operation on Trump and Trump world. How do I know? This is how I know:
—@Liz_Cheney reads texts sent by Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade, and Donald Trump Jr. to Mark Meadows during the insurrection, imploring him to get Trump to do something. pic.twitter.com/mgzFeHiHsy
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) December 14, 2021
Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity have now all been exposed as not being fully supportive of Trump and his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and overthrow the constitutional order. Donald Trump, Jr. has as well. And Meadows agreed with each of them. Reading those tweets during a live broadcast of the committee hearing is intended to incense Trump setting him up to lash out at Kilmeade, Ingraham, Hannity, Meadows, and Jr for insufficient fealty and commitment to him. It is also designed to see what Kilmeade, Ingraham, Hannity, Meadows, Jr, and others do as a result. Panic will be setting in right now about just what, exactly, Meadows turned over to the committee and just who else he implicated before he stopped cooperating. And the results of this will be observable. I don’t know if it will work, but it is an excellent and most unexpected strategy.
The final item I want to discuss as a result of what we’re learning not just about Meadows role in the run up to and on 6 January, but the actual plan itself as delineated in the memo he was circulating is the attempt to create or instigate enough violence to seemingly justify the declaration of a National Security Emergency to stop the electoral vote certification in Congress. I specifically want to focus on this part from Barton Gellman’s excellent long form piece in The Atlantic that was published last week (emphasis mine):
Robert a. pape, a well-credentialed connoisseur of political violence, watched the mob attack the Capitol on a television at home on January 6.
Watching how the Great Replacement message was resonating with Trump supporters, Pape and his colleagues suspected that the bloodshed on January 6 might augur something more than an aberrant moment in American politics. The prevailing framework for analyzing extremist violence in the U.S., they thought, might not be adequate to explain what was happening.
“The thing that got our attention first was the age,” Pape said. He had been studying violent political extremists in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East for decades. Consistently, around the world, they tended to be in their 20s and early 30s. Among the January 6 insurgents, the median age was 41.8. That was wildly atypical.
Then there were economic anomalies. Over the previous decade, one in four violent extremists arrested by the FBI had been unemployed. But only 7 percent of the January 6 insurgents were jobless, and more than half of the group had a white-collar job or owned their own business. There were doctors, architects, a Google field-operations specialist, the CEO of a marketing firm, a State Department official. “The last time America saw middle-class whites involved in violence was the expansion of the second KKK in the 1920s,” Pape told me.
Yet these insurgents were not, by and large, affiliated with known extremist groups. Several dozen did have connections with the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, or the Three Percenters militia, but a larger number—six out of every seven who were charged with crimes—had no ties like that at all.
Pape’s team mapped the insurgents by home county and ran statistical analyses looking for patterns that might help explain their behavior. The findings were counterintuitive. Counties won by Trump in the 2020 election were less likely than counties won by Biden to send an insurrectionist to the Capitol. The higher Trump’s share of votes in a county, in fact, the lower the probability that insurgents lived there. Why would that be? Likewise, the more rural the county, the fewer the insurgents. The researchers tried a hypothesis: Insurgents might be more likely to come from counties where white household income was dropping. Not so. Household income made no difference at all.
Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.
Trump and some of his most vocal allies, Tucker Carlson of Fox News notably among them, had taught supporters to fear that Black and brown people were coming to replace them. According to the latest census projections, white Americans will become a minority, nationally, in 2045. The insurgents could see their majority status slipping before their eyes.
The CPOST team decided to run a national opinion survey in March, based on themes it had gleaned from the social-media posts of insurgents and the statements they’d made to the FBI under questioning. The researchers first looked to identify people who said they “don’t trust the election results” and were prepared to join a protest “even if I thought the protest might turn violent.” The survey found that 4 percent of Americans agreed with both statements, a relatively small fraction that nonetheless corresponds to 10 million American adults.
In June, the researchers sharpened the questions. This brought another surprise. In the new poll, they looked for people who not only distrusted the election results but agreed with the stark assertion that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” And instead of asking whether survey subjects would join a protest that “might” turn violent, they looked for people who affirmed that “the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.”
Pollsters ordinarily expect survey respondents to give less support to more transgressive language. “The more you asked pointed questions about violence, the more you should be getting ‘social-desirability bias,’ where people are just more reluctant,” Pape told me.
Here, the opposite happened: the more extreme the sentiments, the greater the number of respondents who endorsed them. In the June results, just over 8 percent agreed that Biden was illegitimate and that violence was justified to restore Trump to the White House. That corresponds to 21 million American adults. Pape called them “committed insurrectionists.” (An unrelated Public Religion Research Institute survey on November 1 found that an even larger proportion of Americans, 12 percent, believed both that the election had been stolen from Trump and that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”)
Let’s take Pape’s numbers as the starting point. Based on his survey data that I’ve copied and pasted above from Gellman’s reporting last week, the results indicate 21 million Americans who are thoroughly bought into and locked into Trumpism, MAGA, what Bannon calls the America First agenda, and all the conspiracy theories that go along with them. They’re overwhelmingly white and either evangelical Christian or traditionalist Catholic. When they’re not, they’re orthodox/ultra-orthodox Jews, white hispanics, or not white hispanics who identify as white (think proud boys leader Enrique Tario, who is afro-Cuban and, as such, at the bottom of the highly racialized Cuban-American pecking order in Miami).
So that’s 21 million Americans who are radicalized. The question we need to answer is how many of these folks are really willing to use violence? 10%? 20%? I’ve spent a good chunk of the past week looking through the low intensity warfare literature to see what the estimate is for figuring that out as I didn’t recall their being one off the top of my head. Or, rather, I recall being taught it was 10%, but I’d never actually seen that figure in any of our doctrinal publications. Or anyone else’s for that matter. And I was right. Our doctrine doesn’t have one. Just a formula to estimate how many counterinsurgents you need. So I emailed a former boss who is a retired Green Beret colonel, because I was sure I’d seen or been taught that the estimate was 10% of a radicalized population. He replied that he recalls being taught in his Special Forces officers course in the late 1970s that 10% is the estimator. He cautioned, however, that it is a rough one and will depend on what type of low intensity conflict is going on or possible. So revolutions and rebellions and insurgencies and terror campaigns may not all be estimatable the same way. It also explains where I learned it as I was trained and mentored by retired Green Berets who served in Vietnam.
Regardless, let’s take the 10% estimator. What this means, using Pape’s survey data numbers, is 2,100,000. Which is still a substantial number and problem. Our active duty military, across all branches, is currently 1,489,567. If you throw in the Guard and Reserve, you’ve got about another 600,000 or so. And some of that manpower will be useless. You can’t really use submariners to fight off a domestic rebellion and insurgency.
The real question here is how many of these 2.1 million would actually fight? And that I can’t answer. And I’m not sure anyone else can either. But what we’ve got, to paraphrase Mao, is a 21 million American sea for the actual violent fish to swim in. And that threat environment is more affluent and older that what we’d normally see. And it has deep pocketed, well healed backers. And the bulk of them are not nutbags like Mike Lindell or Patrick Byrne, but very bounded rational actors like the Koch’s, the Mercers, the DeVos/Prince family, the Uhliens, the Murdochs, the Bradleys, etc. And in the case of Bannon, his well heeled benefactor Miles Guo. Guo is alleged to actually be controlled opposition of the Peoples’ Republic of China meaning he is being run by the PRC’s Ministry of State Security to do exactly what he’s doing: infiltrate the Trump movement and help Trump and Bannon further cement control over the GOP and movement conservatism pushing it farther and farther into reactionary authoritarianism.
Open thread!
RaflW
“Meadows read an unknown number of GOP members of the House and the Senate on to the strategy delineated in the memo.”
Any guesses how those read in voted on the decision to have a Congressional January 6th investigation. No real need to guess, huh.
From the May 28, 2021 link: “In remarks from the Senate floor Thursday, McConnell called into question how much more a commission would be able to unearth.” Turns out, to no one’s shock or surprise, a lot is coming up outta that ground.
Kattails
Repeating this from the tail end of the last thread, that Liz Cheney hinted at federal criminal charges for Trump; I think they are about to go loudly public with this. That is, as you suggest, not just disturb the network around Trump, but Trump himself. She was reading from 18 U.S.C. 1505
Unfortunately, the best thing that might happen would be for Donald to just go completely, unequivocally off the rails. It would not surprise me. He’s facing huge fines in New York and might be called to testify there. He’s never been challenged on anything in his miserable life.
Mike in NC
Reading “Hiding in Plain Sight” about the rise of the Fat Orange Clown. Most of us know his chief mentor was the odious mob lawyer Roy Cohn. They are said to have often spoken by phone 15 to 20 times per day in the 80s. The mind reels…
JPL
what congressperson apologized for not getting the job done..
Adam L Silverman
@Kattails: The problem is that the decision Cheney appears to be alluding to is not her’s or the committee’s to make. And I don’t think anyone knows what the DOJ will do.
Adam L Silverman
@JPL: As far as I know that hasn’t been disclosed.
kfairchild
This is what I was thinking on Jan 6 and what I have never really heard explained in the time since then. I was waiting for Dolt 45 to either invoke the Insurrection Act or declare an emergency as described. Why didn’t he? Are we just lucky that he and everyone around him are complete morons? Did he get spooked? Did someone talk him out of it?
Chief Oshkosh
It’s just one opinion, but here’s Josh’s take on limits of Congress and need for DOJ to step it up:
From:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/where-things-stand-december-12-2021-mark-meadows-contempt-of-congress
raven
Who they gonna fight?
VOR
Didn’t Lara Logan tweet out the Powerpoint on January 5th? That implies it was circulating with at least some right-wing media.
Adam L Silverman
@Kattails: One other point on this, the former Federal prosecutors or military JAGs or Harvard Law School professors on Twitter screaming about how prosecutions are possible or explaining how they could be done or lamenting that Garland and/or DOJ isn’t doing anything or that the fact that no one hears anything actually means DOJ is, are all just noise.
David Anderson
@kfairchild: the only people who showed up for a fight were the MAGA mob normies and the planned insurrectionists. There was no non-white or long haired street fighting
Adam L Silverman
@kfairchild: I would like a very good answer to that. My guess is that Milley and the other Joint Chiefs had the senior military leaders lined up in opposition and made it unequivocally clear to Miller that if the Insurrection Act was invoked that the military was going to ignore it as an illegal order. This is speculation, but it is one of only two things that make sense. The other being that Trump chickened out at the last minute.
Adam L Silverman
@Chief Oshkosh: Marshall didn’t write that. David Kurtz and Zainab Shah did.
Adam L Silverman
@raven: Anyone they think is the enemy. They’re already violently targeting a large number of local and state officials, as well as others.
debbie
Lindell has become ridiculously whiny in his TV ads.
Chief Oshkosh
@Adam L Silverman: I stand corrected; thanks.
MagdaInBlack
@Adam L Silverman: I was going with “chickened out.”
Adam L Silverman
@VOR: Yes she did. She appears to have gotten it from that Jovan Pulitzer creep.
Kattails
@Adam L Silverman: Might they be more inclined to move on this
ifwhen the Committee presents solid evidence? Cheri Jacobus noted that Trump obstructed justice after leaving office by ordering Peter Navarro to ignore 1/6 committee subpoena. This was retweeted by Laurence Tribe who kinda knows what things are about. And having been Garland’s teacher at Hahvaahhd.Adam L Silverman
@Chief Oshkosh: No worries. They just deserve to be recognized for their writing. It is a good editorial.
Adam L Silverman
@Kattails: Navarro was ordered to ignore the COVID investigative committee, not the 6 JAN one. Jacobus needs to get her basic facts straight. As for Tribe, he has no actual idea how the DOJ actually works. What he says, writes, and tweets sounds good and is usually neither practical nor a description of how anything actually works outside of a discussion in his seminars.
Mallard Filmore
@kfairchild:
My wild guess is that Trump was waiting for one of these:
When it became obvious that none of this would happen, he gave up.
Again, just a wild guess.
[edited to make a bullet list]
John Revolta
I heard Gellman on NPR last week- I think it was on Fresh Air- talking about this article and about the ongoing takeover of the country by the Repubs. He did a very good job laying out everything they’ve done so far, everything they’re doing now, and where it’s all heading, but the surprising (to me) part was that the host asked all the right questions and never once tried to whatabout or both sides him. I frankly couldn’t believe NPR let it on the air.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kattails:
unfortunately, the eventual jury would not be made up of Lawrence Tribes and Merricks Garlands, and prosecuting trump is very much a case of “if you strike at him, you’d best not miss”
frosty
This is a great post, Adam! First, the suggestion that the committee is running an operation on TFG, which I hope is true. Second, the analysis of the number of radicalized right wingers and the fact that no one has anything more than a SWAG on how many are willing to act on it.
Chief Oshkosh
@Adam L Silverman: And forgot to say: thanks for the analysis.
brendancalling
“Regardless, let’s take the 10% estimator. What this means, using Pape’s survey data numbers, is 2,100,000. Which is still a substantial number and problem. Our active duty military, across all branches, is currently 1,489,567. If you throw in the Guard and Reserve, you’ve got about another 600,000 or so. And some of that manpower will be useless. You can’t really use submariners to fight off a domestic rebellion and insurgency.”
Aren’t there large bombs that could be dropped on them? Drones? Weapons/training that the insurgents don’t have access to?
I’d hate to think a bunch of penny-ante guerillas would be a match for the US Armed Services if things came to that.
Adam L Silverman
@Mallard Filmore: I think he was waiting for Pence to be removed from the Capitol. Remember, Pence refused to leave. He told the head of his detail he trusted him, but that he also believed if they put him in the vehicle and moved him offsite, he would never be allowed back to the Capitol. I think the plan was to disappear Pence. At least for a short time and use it as justification to declare the National Emergency. The excuse was going to be that the VP was missing.
bbleh
As to the 21 million number, despite the follow-on research and the counterintuitive results, I’m inclined to take it with a large lump of salt. These aren’t necessarily people who believe violence is justified to “return” Trump to the presidency; they’re people who tell a pollster they do. Given similar attitudes toward, eg, vaccination, I would suspect a large dose of “social-desirability bias,” where in this case the bias in their corner of the world is toward radical language.
As to the J6 committee’s strategy, that is some devious thinking there Adam, and I certainly hope it’s correct, because that crowd — with rare exceptions — is dimwitted enough that there really is the possibility of panicky overreaction, self-sabotage (eg Meadows’s volte-face), fratricide, etc. Pass the popcorn!
Mart
Think I know where the deep state is that TFG wanted us all to worry about. Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society. They gave us the Eastman memo. Now a Meadows PowerPoint. Strong arm swing states run by R’s to disqualify and move vote totals.Kill Pence and Pelosi during the 1/6 riots and claim national emergency, I am dictator for life. Get the fanatical Federalist Society USSC to agree the election was stolen. That’s five plots for a coup (fancy kids say autogolpe). Probably missing a couple. Mentioned this to a couple Frumpers and got the ‘ol WTF you talking about unhinged liberal? treatment.
Adam L Silverman
@Chief Oshkosh: You’re quite welcome.
schrodingers_cat
I find Teri Kanefield’s analysis cogent, to the point and devoid of dramatics. She is a great follow on Twitter.
And Scott MacFarlane for actual reporting about the Jan 6 court cases and litigation
Kattails
@Adam L Silverman: Ok I’m trying to check my references and type while you’re replying to the second thought I had dammit. Got that magic 8-ball out?
Do I gather that you are happily surprised at the tactics of the committee but don’t think the Harvard fellow is all that important as a voice? I’m tending to keep my eye on Mueller She Wrote.
PS thanks as always for the insights.
RaflW
BTW it seems Meadows is gonna be a guest on Hannity tonight. Mark is clearly desperate, because he’s very likely to blow up any slim chance of persuading anyone about his ‘privilege’ claim before the House when he’ll blab with Sean for a couple million viewers.
Leto
@John Revolta:
For anyone who might want to listen. Gellman expands a bit more on his article.
Adam L Silverman
@brendancalling: You assume the US military would actually respond. If, through extreme gerrymandering; passage of voter suppression laws; passage of laws giving state legislators the right to decide who the electors are, not the voters; passage of laws allowing state officials to take over local election boards and administration; and the actual takeover of local election boards and administration the GOP sets the conditions to steal the 2024 election it will all have been done in the open and through legal means according to state statutory and constitutional law and in line with the new conservative/GOP/Federalist Society reading of the US Constitution’s meaning regarding election administration being solely in the hands of state legislators. It will all have been done legally and constitutionally. So exactly what would allow or compel the military to respond? Trump would, according to the rules put in place beginning in 2021, the president. And if he ordered the military to not interfere that would be a lawful order.
As comical as some of the players involved with this seem to be, this plan was constructed and is being implemented by people that actually understand how things work.
Mallard Filmore
@Adam L Silverman:
I like your version better. If good evidence of that shows up, there is no walking that back from a well planned full on insurrection. Many participants to pull that off, should be lots of electronic evidence with fingerprints.
debbie
@John Revolta:
Teri Gross never does that kind of thing.
Adam L Silverman
@Kattails: I don’t think Tribe or Mueller She Wrote or Kirschner or Pam Keith or any of these folks are contributing anything useful to this discussion. Even when, like Kirschner, they actually have experience working at the DOJ.
Jackie
Thanks for this, Adam.
Kent
One thing about all these 1/6 insurrectionists that I haven’t really seen discussed is that none of them seem to be violent dead-enders.
As far as I know, every single one of them has been arrested quietly and there have been what? over 600 arrests? Not a single one has gone out in a blaze of glory like Randy Weaver, David Koresh, Eric Rudolf, LaVoy Finicum, etc. etc. It is relatively common in this country for extremists to barricade themselves with arms and explosives in deadly standoffs. Has any of that happened at all with this bunch? I suspect that points to their likely unwillingness to lead any sort of ISIS style insurgency with guns and explosives against legitimate police and military forces. That seems like more of a young man’s game.
Hell, I’m in my mid-50s and I can’t imagine sleeping outdoors in the cold anymore which is what actual military action would entail.
guachi
My guess is the DoJ isn’t going to do anything to any politician or anyone directly connected to Trump aside from a contempt citation or two. Republicans will retake the House next year, the 1/6 committee will disappear, and anyone important will face no repercussions.
Leto
@debbie: she did for this one. Check my comment at 36.
raven
@Kattails: What kind of 8ball?
UncleEbeneezer
@schrodingers_cat: Add all the women from the #SistersInLaw podcast to your list: @KimberlyEAtkins, @JoyceWhiteVance, @JillWineBanks, @BarbMcQuade. All have significant legal experience and they aren’t afraid to pull punches. Excellent follows for this, as well as SCOTUS rulings.
Leto
@Kent: Gellman discusses it in his article, how the people in this are at least 10 years older than average and they’re all well off people. Also you have this goober: U.S. Prosecutors Indict American Seeking Asylum In Belarus On Charges Related To Capitol Riot
Lyrebird
Thanks very much for making this more plain. Is it irritating to mention Ronnie Dumsfeld and the known unknowns? Probably he didn’t make that up.
I don’t have any training to evaluate what you say, but on this front I’m in disgusted agreement:
I seriously think that a big part of the media dumping on Biden is because he is not giving them goodies for their next books.
Adam, if you include this essay in your next book, put “well-heeled” in, not “healed”, before it goes to press. ETA: I am not putting you in the same boat as the press corpse just because you might also publish some books.
RaflW
@David Anderson: I remember very distinctly that the word was out thru many left/liberal networks to absolutely stay outta D.C. around Jan 6, and not engage. It turned out to be incredibly sage advice.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: They were counting on the other side showing up for a fight. But left groups had loud, organized warnings going out saying to stay away. If there had been counterprotesters there looking to mix it up, there would have been more cover.
Gin & Tonic
@Leto: That clown first fled to Ukraine, but it was made clear to him that he shouldn’t stay long.
debbie
@Leto:
I listened to the interview. She didn’t both-sides anything.
ETA: I misread John Revolta’s post. Never mind. ?
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: If this is the case, why does the number of violent pro-Trump insurrectionists matter?
Adam L Silverman
@Jackie: You’re welcome.
VOR
Covering TFG’s White House must have been a joy. It leaked like a sieve. Everyone was back-stabbing everyone else to curry favor with TFG. Every day had something to talk about as the scandal du jour erupted and faded away, eclipsed by tomorrow’s scandal – a Gish Gallop of crap.
Adam L Silverman
@Kent: Randy Weaver is still alive.
Ruckus
@Mallard Filmore:
I think he was waiting for the violence and a number of congress people to be killed/beaten/harmed badly. That would bring his opposition numbers down and likely in his mind give him the ammo he needed to declare something and seize what he likely wanted all along, absolute power, which would give him power over the courts, states, congress….. This in his mind would likely give him power over his creditors and the country therefore protecting him for the rest of his life.
RaflW
@John Revolta: Fresh Air, thankfully, isn’t newsroom product, so it isn’t subject to Nancy Barnes’ nice polite republican newsroom ethos (I have it on fairly good authority how she ran a major daily newspaper before going to NPR).
Adam L Silverman
@Lyrebird: I don’t write books. I’m not wired that way.
UncleEbeneezer
Another thing that is good about this call-out by Cheney is that it should drive more coverage due to the big names being quoted.
If you haven’t watched the press conference yet, you should. It was really excellent. At one point one of the committee members used Meadows’ own words about Contempt of Congress charges when he strongly advocated for them. All the members had a tremendous sense of urgency too.
Leto
@Gin & Tonic: from that article:
Bold is mine. Maybe Lukashenko can pass him off to Putin. Honored guest and all. /gag
schrodingers_cat
So what’s the deal with Tucker Carlson. Isn’t he independently wealthy? In his early days at CNN he was not the rabid white supremacist he is now. What happened? Any insights?
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Because it tells us the number of people the rest of us are going to deal with. Not because we want to, but because we’ll have no choice. You think the behavior at school board and county commission and city council meetings is bad now? The screaming, the threats, the escalation to actual low level violence? If they do this, and everything indicates they are trying to, all of that will escalate. This is what I’ve been trying to get you all to understand.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Important to note – white South Africans never comprised more than 20% of the population (dropped to 13% in 1990, is at 8% now). What this means is that a fraction of a smallish fraction can maintain control for a long time if it runs things harshly enough.
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat: Some, like Rick Wilson, think it is purely performative that he’ll say or do anything to maintain his position. Other’s think he’s gone full nihilist. In reality it doesn’t matter because regardless of which category he fits in, regardless of his motivations, he’s doing it.
lowtechcyclist
As you say, this was also happening in microcosm on January 6th. You had a relative handful of Proud Boys and 3 Percenters, but they were swimming in a sea of thousands upon thousands of these unaffiliated rioters.
If it had only been the Proud Boys and 3 Percenters, they would have been out there in plain sight, and there probably wouldn’t have been enough of them to successfully invade the Capitol.
And this is why our justice system really needed to throw the book at the unaffiliated rioters. The organized seditionists needed them for cover, and needed them for sheer mass. The unaffiliated rioters needed to get prison sentences that would deter people like them from showing up next time. This has not happened, and that means that we’re likely to have an even bigger mob showing up on another occasion.
Next time, there may be no way to stop such a mob, short of the National Guard (or whoever) gunning down white, middle-aged, respectable-looking Americans en masse.
And we all know that’s not gonna happen.
RaflW
@Kent: But they’ll be more than willing to defend the legally structured upending of democracy that Adam describes @37 above which may occur in ‘24.
We have to stay frosty.
Kent
OK, I don’t keep track of all these people. It was his wife and kid killed then? Point being that violent standoffs with the police or FBI are a pretty damn common thing in our right wing militia ecosystem of this country. But we haven’t seen any of that with these 1/6 folks. None of them seem to be willing to barricade themselves in their houses on behalf of Trump surrounded by weapons and ready to take on the “deep state” FBI. Which kind of surprises me.
Kent
Oh, I agree. Democracy is hanging by a thread. But for the reasons you cite, not because we are going to face some insurrectionist army.
Eunicecycle
I’ve wondered why Trump wasn’t moved to a secure location when the Capitol was being overrun and the VP in danger?
Kattails
@raven: Ask Adam, he’s shown a pic of one before. Fortune telling. You can look it up on Wikipedia.
Five years ago I thought to start a loose leaf notebook with names and connections, never did it. It would be several volumes now. I did not check the Navarro reference so my bad, but there’s a reason why my guidance counsellor wanted me to be a journalist and I stuck with art. I am trying to find the positives here and not just wake up every day in a state of existential dread. Maybe I need to do what the bulk of my countrymen do and ignore it all.
I can only hope that the committee and the good guys are smarter than the bad ones.
Another Scott
Thanks for this.
I just finished watching the 45 minute hearing. I was impressed by Chair Thompson saying that they’re not going to let their report out in dribs and drabs, and weren’t going to let parts become old news before they were done. That’s a good and sensible strategy. I get the impression that they’re going to be reporting their findings sooner rather than later, and that’s good as well.
They certainly aren’t going to let attempts to stall their work succeed without a fight.
Oh, and Meadows is an idiot, but we already knew that only an idiot would willingly work for TFG in such a role…
Cheers,
Scott.
Jeffro
trumpov didn’t know what to do when a) Pence balked b) Pence didn’t let himself get whisked away c) the insurrection went full-on violent, beating cops and looting the Capitol d) ‘antifa’ never showed up to give them an excuse to declare an emergency.
So he let it run for a few hours, then – when they didn’t get there, didn’t grab Pence, didn’t grab the actual ‘votes’, didn’t have Pelosi and McConnell in zip-ties – he told his supporters to go home. And his GQP enablers have been whitewashing what they knew – KNEW! – ever since
Kent
Yes he is. His father married into the Swanson family which owned Swanson foods and previously Campbell Soup. But he has made millions at Fox as well.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: So the GOP is going take over and we are going to have over 2 million violent nutcases in the streets?
John Revolta
@debbie: @RaflW: I don’t listen to the radio much, except when I’m in the car, so I don’t know who’s who over there. I just know that I typically hear a lot of half-truths and crucial bits left out and so on in their coverage, so this was a pleasant surprise.
Kent
You don’t think the White House is a secure location? Good grief. It is probably the most secure location in Washington DC. In 10 seconds they can probably get whisked down into ultra-secure bunkers. And God knows how many secret service agents are patrolling the place.
RaflW
@schrodingers_cat: Tucker was climbing the ladder and needed to keep a lid on his dark, twisted soul. But not at Fox!
eta: I remember trying to watch his short lived PBS show and could see what an absolutely phony he was. I’ve never entirely forgiven Public Broadcasting for being a rung, however naively and briefly.
RaflW
@Adam L Silverman: To this specific point, Run For Something is organizing mass-scale training and recruitment for progressive and public-minded poll workers, election judges, school boards etc.
They need more candidate-volunteers and more money.
Dan B
Adam – Thanks for this piece. I had the feeling that Cheney was absolutely psyching out the FOX pundits and Junior. When my partner got back from the doctor he was jaw-on-the-floor when Cheney read the quote from Jr.
Re: Insurrectionists organizing a couple. It seems they would need extensive training in strategy and tactics. It would be easier to assemble a group of right wing military then to conceal a big training operation of amateurs. It also would be easier for Eric Prince to do. He’s got lots of experience in leveraging a small number of hired fighters / mercenaries in other countries. What say you?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@RaflW: good lord, I knew he was fired at least once by every cable network before figuring out whatever he finally does now, but I didn’t know he’d ever been hired PBS
and it’s never been about money for Tucker, I believe his father was rich even before he married step-money Swanson. It’s attention, it’s influence, it’s trying to make people forget he was on Dancing With the “Stars”.
Jeffro
the Post is on the “Fox hosts knew and then turned right around and lied about it being ‘antifa’ that same night” angle
fucking scumbags
jimmiraybob
On behalf of the Great State of Missouri, I hereby nominate Josh Hawley for due consideration.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: No, don’t be obtuse.
The GOP is setting the conditions to do so. They have created a permission structure through the public statements of current and former GOP officials, conservative movement leaders, leaders – including clergy – of socially conservative religions/religious denominations, conservative news media, and conservative social and digital media to motivate some percentage of the 21 million that Pape’s research has identified as hard core supporters to continue to engage in low intensity violence. The leadership and the people bankrolling them intend to leverage the violence of those supporters. And if they are successful in achieving their objectives, they’ll continue to leverage that violence to provide justification for far more organized and effective state directed violence to consolidate their control.
Jeffro
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: yes – attention and influence and thinking he’s brighter and so much better.
When he got canned, I think it broke him. His son is heavily into RWNJ circles and I think he’s running cover for him too. God only knows what blackmail (a la Gaetz’ “remember we were at dinner with your wife and my escort, Tucker?”) is going on as well.
Dan B
@UncleEbeneezer: I remarked to friends that the 1/6 Committee members seemed outraged. The public understands outrage much better than facts and legalese.
Good on em!
Adam L Silverman
@Dan B: The insurrectionists aren’t going to organize a coup. GOP and conservative movement elites are going to and part of the plan is to encourage and leverage the violence of their supporters/the insurrectionists.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jeffro: there have been rumors on twitter that Buckley Carlson was in the crowd on 1/6. I don’t know if he was in the Capitol.
SmallAxe
Thanks Adam, kind of analysis that makes BJ a great stop. My only quibble is that you add Peter Thiel to the very short list of villains at the top.
Another Scott
@RaflW: Yup. Remember the recent video of him being confronted by some guy in a sporting goods store in Idaho or Montana or wherever? As soon as he sees that it’s being videotaped he laughs at the camera and continues trying to tell the guy that he’s all wrong…
He thinks his audience is just a bunch of rubes.
Rubes that he can use to increase his personal wealth (and political power, if you believe some of the comments about his aspirations).
Cheers,
Scott.
Jeffro
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I think he works for Rep Banks, who is one of the main GQP insurrectionists in the House. In or out of the crowd, he was in on it, and I think Tucker knows it.
Dan B
@Adam L Silverman: Yes. I realized that Prince would want chaos to distract from what his mercenaries are doing. He would not want the spotlight. Let the amateurs be locked up, not Prince’s pros.
danielx
@Kattails:
Actually, he has – during his various bankruptcy proceedings. Which goes a long way towards explaining his antipathy to legal proceedings in which he is the object of judicial attention. Federal judges are the only ones who have ever held him accountable for anything in his odious life.
Mike in DC
The Committee needs to make criminal referrals regarding the underlying conduct discovered.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, …
His parents messed up not naming him “Great and Powerful”.
:-/
(via Popehat)
Cheers,
Scott.
Leto
@Jeffro: I’ll honestly be surprised if Swanson’s Hungry Man Frozen Dinner didn’t text Meadow’s during 1/6. Seems every other parasite at Faux did that day.
artem1s
@bbleh:
their willingness to say things out loud that were previously socially unacceptable is something we’ve all noted. Maybe hearing and seeing similar sentiments online and in social media normalized the idea of violence in their mind. Or maybe society’s ear is better tuned to pick up violent subtext.
debbie
@Another Scott:
Silence him by using his name? ? ??♀️
Another Scott
@danielx: He knows how to do civil depositions – there are videos of at least one that he did
while in office(26:49). “I have no specific recollection…” Ad nauseum.If/when the folks in NY and in DC depose him, I hope they are very aware of his tactics and know how to counter them.
[eta:] I’m pretty sure he did a deposition in office, but that’s not it.
Cheers,
Scott.
Cameron
Looks like 2022 is shaping up to be a very interesting year.
Dan B
@debbie: I could believe Oz if his first name were Osama. Although Mohammed would do in a pinch.
Leto
@Another Scott: He’s mad because they’re… using his name. Bless his heart.
Dan B
@Cameron: LIke the famous curse, “May you live in interesting times.” ?
Leto
@debbie: Just an absolute fucking clown. Fits right in with them.
RaflW
@Another Scott: I’m gonna guess that the Inquirer doesn’t routinely call the First Lady Dr. Jill Biden.
Librarian
Don Lemon was just asking Brian Stelter why the Biden WH still treats Fox as a real media outlet. Nobody brought up what happened when Obama attacked Fox- the rest of the media rallied around them and defended them.
Cameron
This one’s just for Dr. (This space left intentionally blank) Oz.
https://youtu.be/QkqVU8PQOgE
Another Scott
That Silverman fellow is getting recognized more and more…
Cheers,
Scott
John Revolta
@Another Scott: Hilarious. This clown is used to everybody kissing his butt and never ever getting any pushback on whatever he says. Something tells me this is not going to go well.
VOR
@Another Scott: He has a brand as “Dr. Oz” which he wants to leverage. “Dr. Oz” has name recognition, Mehmet Oz does not.
Minnesota allows people to run using the name they are known by in the community. Thus James Janos was able to run for Governor as “Jesse Ventura”. Several years ago a Republican ran for Attorney General using his wife’s Scandinavian maiden name, claiming that was the name he was known by.
dopey-o
Two reasons: TFG knew the rioters were being herded away from the White House, so there was no need to protect him. And TFG wanted to watch the action live, ready to grab the phone and issue orders and declare the national security emergency from the photogenic Resolute Desk.
All part of the plan. The trigger would have been when the SS told him that Pence was out of the Capitol. TFG would have said “VP Pence’s whereabouts are unknown. I am declaring Martial Law.”
cain
@Adam L Silverman:
Including teachers – you can bet that they would be targets.
MisterForkbeard
@Another Scott: That Cheryl Rofer is a smart duck. John should ask her to post here.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@MisterForkbeard: she’s so smart she posts from the future!
Another Scott
Meanwhile, …
(The next UK general election is scheduled for May 2, 2024…)
(via IamHappyToast)
Cheers,
Scott.
Ksmiami
@Adam L Silverman: then we need to disrupt their networks and work on a more lethal version of Covid…
The Dangerman
@Adam L Silverman: Which ties in to who turned off access of the VP to his offices? Seems like someone wanted Pence to have no place to go and to get out while the getting was good. Then he gets disappeared for a while, Grassley takes over, it gets kicked to the States, and Trump wins 26 to 24. Then shit gets real real fast. I wonder if they bothered to game out what would happen if Trump won that way.
rikyrah
I watched a lot of the hearing. Very interesting. Not surprising. Just interesting.
Dan B
Adam; I hear you say that you’re trying to get “us” to understand the gravity of the situation we are in. I believe there are plenty of us here who do understand. We don’t speak up as much because we get accused of being doomsayers and pessimists. I’m fine with looking at the evil and how we may be helpless to counter it. And I believe we may find some tools to avoid catastrophe if we realize we have a choice to say all is lost or it’s awful but we have a chance if we truly understand what is putting us in harm’s way. Seeing through the fog and chaos is very valuable at this point. Thanks for your insight!
sfinny
Not to be a pain but the Jan 6 memo download is backwards for me.
sdhays
@Kent: Don’t forget that he tested out that bunker in 2020 when the peaceful protesters made him crap his pants. So they knew it worked.
gene108
@Dan B:
See ????
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmed
bemused senior
@Adam L Silverman: Adam Schiff’ s book we are reading for our book club says Schiff and Tribe are close friends and talk frequently. schiff worked at DoJ. Seems he wouldn’T respect him if he got doj badly wrong.
Adam L Silverman
@The Dangerman: I don’t know. I have some speculation that the former senior military leaders involved – like Flynn, Waldron, Mastriano, and others who are all senior leader college graduates (the war colleges) – did. Whether Trump, Meadows, Giuliani, and the congressional proxies had, I don’t know. I also don’t think some of them are capable of thinking that way.
Adam L Silverman
@Dan B: Thanks for the kind words and you are quite welcome.
Adam L Silverman
I’m racking out. Catch everyone on the flip.
Bill Arnold
“Flushing game” – not unfamiliar to the Cheney family.
The flip side is that many of the R leadership have been huffing their own side’s disinformation and can no longer properly model reality well enough to form viable plans. (And they must know or at least suspect that that not all their side’s disinformation is actually their’s. :-)
Aaron
Reminder: Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa tweeted on Jan 5 that Pence was not going to be at the electoral vote counting and that he would take his place. because he was in on it.
counting of the EC vote usually takes less then an hour, and starts at 1pm, when the STS rally ends over a mile and a half away. R Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley deliberately held up the counting so that it would end after the violent STS crowd arrived.
They must all have been in on it.
Adam L Silverman
@bemused senior: I can’t actually write the response that needs to be written here for professional reasons.
Another Scott
In other news, Phys.org:
Good, good.
Cheers,
Scott.
Dan B
@gene108: Perfect!
Thanks for the lol inducing knowledge!!! ❤ ?
Another Scott
@Aaron: Grassley is very old and often seems out of it (to me) at the snippets of hearings I’ve heard.
But I remember that, and thought it was very strange.
Thread:
Of course, his staff “clarified” what he “meant”…
The GQP is a hive mind that instantly uses the same talking points when talking to the press. I have no doubt that there’s much more to this story, and I assume Thompson’s committee knows this as well.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
patroclus
@The Dangerman: Speaker Pelosi would have had to okay the House moving to a vote on anything and she wouldn’t have done it (just like in 1876-77). And there then would have been a standoff, requiring negotiation and possibly a commission. The Democrats would not have been without options; despite what Eastman and others may have gamed out. And on January 20, Trump would have ceased to be President and Pelosi would have become President.
frosty
@patroclus: I like this timeline!
Citizen Alan
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
This. When The Coming Democratic Majority or whatever that damned book was called came out and lefties started gloating about it, I said even then that the GOP could delay that Democratic Majority for quite a while of they brought back Jim Crow and for a very long while indeed if they instituted Apartheid policies. And less than 20 years later, here we are.
AJ
@Adam L Silverman: is there anyone writing publicly about gaming out or scenario-planning “then what do we do?”
AJ
Joining the thread very late but
A) thank you Adam this is very helpful analysis
B) does this kind of comment section make anyone else long for some workable version of threaded comments?
I think that been declared as “no, never” by the Blogfather and I know it sucks on mobile when are offset way to the right, but still..
Betty
@Mallard Filmore: Grassey is reported as having said that he would take over because he didn’t expect Pence to be there. He has been openly supportive of Trump recently. This is all so ugly yet Pence is afraid to say boo about it.
Geminid
@AJ: This morning I happened to read Cheryl Rofer’s LGM post of some excerpts from Mr. Silverman’s post. I read the 300 comments, and I was not impressed by the threaded aspect. It aggregated a lot of half-clever quips and counterquips that might have been incomprehensible if not threaded, but had little value anyway (I may just have caught a poor thread). I think that even though an unthreaded comment system like the one here has it’s defects, it’s still the lesser of two evils.
Geminid
@Betty: One of the reasons Pence was chosen as VP may have been that he was the type that doesn’t rock the boat. He did not leave office with a lot of money. Now Pence has a job with the Heritage Foundation that he doesn’t want to jeopardize, so he probably will maintain his natural state of non-entity.
NWO Joe
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
What concerns me there is that idea has repeatedly been used as an excuse to not do anything. At some point you can’t play safe anymore and I am pretty sure we have reached that point. What if we miss? Well what if we don’t take the shot because we might miss…
Starfish
@Geminid: Pence has always disappeared when there has been trouble. The assumption that the plan for that day relied on Pence disappearing, and Pence refused to do so is quite interesting.
Ken T.
Thank you very much for your articles; always, always educational, smart and informed. The link didn’t work for me to read the Jan 6 memo. It shows up backwards and only 1 page. Maybe there is a new link.
Geminid
@Starfish: There is a story there. I’m not sure Pence will tell it, but maybe someone close to him will. I wonder if the January 6 Commitee has questioned his staff. I don’t see why they wouldn’t.
Those are going to be some good heariings. McCarthy really screwed up when he pulled all his nominees. There will be no one even skeptical to sow doubt or blow smoke.
wenchacha
@Adam L Silverman: People complain about the “incrementalism” preached by Hillary Clinton, for instance. It’s worked wonders for the GOP.
A good friend has been warning me for years of the coming violence from angry whites. But he also was certain Covid would kill millions in the states, so he can be apocalyptical. Your scenario, where there’s just enough violence, enough mud thrown on left/liberal representatives to move public opinion to the right, seems more likely. Neither is great.
Thank you for your perspective.
Warblewarble
Not saying Meadows needs waterboarding, but on a purely personal level MEADOWS NEED WATERBOARDING.
Uncle Cosmo
@Dan B: FTR “Mehmet” is the Turkish form of Mohammed.
(ETA: gene108 got their foist at
#102#122 supra.)Uncle Cosmo
NB 6 Jan pdf still bass-ackwards, downside-up & one page long. Please to fix???
Secret Agent Of NIMH
I’m not sure that difference in polling responses is a result of the 2nd question being more extreme. I see at least two other differences between the polling questions that might explain it:
1) the first question uses the word ‘protest’ which might have negative associations (protests are for hippies and blm), while the second one does not.
2) the first question specifically asks whether the respondent would go to a protest, while the second just asks if political violence is justified.
I think #2 is probably more important, so my guess is the response to the first question s a better metric of insurrectionist numbers.
But 1 million or so Maga foot soldiers swimming in a sea of about 11 million is still hardly comforting.
The Lodger
@Kent: I see your point. The people who have been arrested (so far) all seem to recognize when they’re outnumbered. Also, none of them look like the type to have crossed their old man back in Oregon.
AJ
@Geminid: Yes, I agree with you about the quality of comments on that post. I thought the same thing.
Do you think there’s a causal relationship between the threading of the comments and that kind of low-quality comment content? I’m not assuming that, but I could be wrong. It’s an interesting question imo.
A Republic, If You Can Keep It
@Adam L Silverman: Yes. I’ve always thought that was the purpose of the open letter by the ten former DoD Secretaries published on January 3rd. I believed at the time it was major signaling to Trump/Miller by the military that they wouldn’t go along. My guess is that Milley was the primary instigator of that letter (even though he couldn’t put his name to it). Thanks for a wonderful post.
A Republic, If You Can Keep It
@Adam L Silverman: Yes. I’ve always thought that was the purpose of the open letter by the ten former DoD Secretaries published on January 3rd. I believed at the time it was major signaling to Trump/Miller by the military that they wouldn’t go along. My guess is that Milley was the primary instigator of that letter (even though he couldn’t put his name to it). Thanks for a wonderful post.