Has anyone contemplated what will happen if the Orange Asscactus (or one of his clones) wins in 2024? We could very well face a situation where Democrats are never again allowed to be President. Think that I’m being catastrophic in my prediction? Look at everything about which Judd just wrote. That is clearly the goal here (permanent minority Republican rule).
Congratulations on getting the word out on AT&T's big donations to the Texas legislators who voted for the abortion ban, Judd. And thanks for the update on TFG's very active campaign to make sure upcoming elections ARE rigged. We desperately need the Freedom to Vote Act to pass now!
donald trump is the most un-American President of all time. He is a traitor to the constitution and cannot be re-elected. He is fanning the flames of division because he's a sore loser that couldn't lie and cheat his way to another win...He will destroy this country if he is anywhere near government. Corporations need to cut off support completely to these insurrectionists and traitors to the US. It's not hyperbole anymore, these republicans are becoming full on traitors to democracy and free and fair elections. People like Marjorie Taylor Greene need to be eradicated from any government position. We need start giving full psych exams to people before they are able to run for office.
The only way this ends is to prosecute those spreading these lies & stirring up their base. Biden is far too tolerant with them. How long did it take him to finally declare a vaccination mandate? And this is insurrection! Each attack on the election is an effective (in the eyes of their voters) attack on our government. Insidious Insurrection & It. MUST. Be. Stopped.
I have maintained all along in remarks here on PI, the Jan. 6 insurrection has never ended. Add to your report all of the anti-voting rights legislation passed among 43 state legislatures.
Another big Far Right rally heading to DC this weekend. The fence is up around the Capitol again.
AT &T is going to fade into the woodwork again unless their feet are held to the fire. A fire the mainstream media ignores except to keep covering every damn word out of Trump's mouth.
Therein lies the real problem. Fox News, OAN etc don't hide what they are. MSM is owned by 1%ers that benefit from GOP rhetoric and policies.
They don't cover the truth on purpose in mho. They are accurate sometimes and certainly incomplete other times leaving stories on the table and covering partially instead of impartiality.
Judd, I agree with and support everything you said about Trump and Trumpism. I don’t know how I missed the Pence-Quayle call. I guess with the Indiana connection it makes sense, but that’s some straw grasping there. Your niche is accountability journalism, specifically following the money. You’ve done work no one else has done, and we know it has made a difference. We need more of it. I care about outing corp America, but I really care about who funds Trump, Johnson, DeSantis, Cruz, etc., and how the money filters to them. There’s evidence like the shady South Florida real estate deal with Trump and Russia, and innuendo surrounding Trump and his late BFF tycoon Adelson, but I think those are drops on the tip of the iceberg.
This is a nice summary of what your readers probably already know (and this is not a criticism; it is helpful to be reminded of all of these things). Finding cogent summaries also makes me think of the people I would like to influence who I know simply are not exposed to these details through the media they absorb and watch and listen to. And their responses when I share much of anything is the usual "what aboutisms?" The beauty in the way things are going, though, is that more and more people are questioning themselves and what they believe. There really are more and more people who do not want to be associated with the people on the right who are clearly crazy, opportunistic and shrill. Keep up the good work, Judd, Tesmin, and Rebecca and anyone else who is contributing to this great work. When the still-doubting among us start to open up to questioning what they're seeing, your work will be there and all the issues can be found in one place. Brilliant.
Coming soon from the "Republican" Party: the one-party state. Elections are valid only if The Party wins. Otherwise they must be overturned by loyal members of The Party.
Funny thing, that: the more loudly "Republicans" accuse everyone else of being a Communist, they more closely they resemble actual Soviet Communists.
Yes, the GOP coup is ongoing. The Republicans are putting all the pieces in place to win even if they lose elections. They are doing this in plain sight, as Judd reports here. The question: what are the Democrats doing about it? This is American's second Civil War, and only one side is fighting.
The courts will be the big battleground in 2022 and 2024. They held fast in 2020, but McConnell spent years refusing to fill judgeships under Obama, then worked overtime with the Federalist Society to stack the courts with young and ultra-conservative judges with lifetime tenure. The Supreme Court does not reflect the people of this country, and neither do the federal courts. Biden and the Dems can re-balance the court by adding to the federal district and appeals courts, something that has been done throughout our history and is actually needed not just to better reflect the values of our society, but to handle their burgeoning caseloads.
Biden has the power to do it. He can also add justices to the Supreme Court. He can also start the ball rolling to add Puerto Rice and the District of Columbia as states, something the is long overdue. Both have populations that exceed many of the states in the upper midwest and Northeast.
These are just a few of the steps the Democrats should take to push back on the ongoing Republican Coup. Waiting for the members of the Grand Old Party to come to their senses is a fool's errand. If nothing happens, we will soon be living under one-party rule. Playing by the old rules is no longer an option in a country with a sizeable minority that no longer believes the results of our elections if their candidate does not win.
January 6 hasn’t ended. The Civil War still hasn’t ended. How many American citizens still live for the wholly discredited and ahistorical revisionist belief that the South went to war with the rest of America over ‘state’s rights’ based on a misconstrued ‘Lost Cause?’
How many still think they are fighting the Civil War?
This is even though ranging from Henry Calhoun in South Carolina, to other politicians and senior members of the South’s then slaveholding old Victorian aristocracy and politicians, incendiary speeches were being given to justify a Civil War the South so wanted by repeatedly citing America’s ‘assault’ on slavery; on the right to continue holding and brutalizing human beings. On the South’s necessary and ‘peculiar institution.’
‘Peculiar,’ indeed, where they counted human slaves as 3/5 of a human so as to allow the South far disproportionate and artificial political power. And the South still has that disproportionate political power, now in some different ways, but it still remains wrapped around White Supremacy and the framework for human slavery. White Supremacy, sadly, remains the model for America showing itself through our laws, systems of court sentencing, policing, public schools, employment home ownership - and far more.
It must end.
The Electoral College existed as a result of then negotiations with slave holding states and should have long since been eradicated for a one adult; one vote simple American majority presidential election. But since doing do would end the South’s ‘peculiarly’ disproportionate power politics and bring it back in as part of America while helping to finally end the Civil War means it won’t happen anytime soon.
There is a direct line from the ahistorical ‘Lost Cause’ and bogus Civil war ‘states right’ arguments we continue to hear to the events of January 6. Poll the January 6 participants and I’d hypothesize so many are ardently, violently White Supremacist/Nationalist and far less concerned over America’s unique Constitution and Rights than there over having a Black President; over now having a Black Vice President who is likely to ultimately run for and win the White House.
Many of the domestic terrorists on January 6 flagrantly ran around our Capital with the Confederate battle flag or wore other components of the worst of America; of the old Confederacy and America’s 400 year old history of violent White Supremacy. Of still resented loss. Though Confederate armies tried but never set foot in our Capital during the Civil War, a combination of their descendants and so many wannabees were finally able to do so on January 6, 2020 on the direct incitement of Donald Trump; of Mo Brooks and Rudy Giuliani whom all remain unindicted.
If the insurrectionists; domestic terrorists hadn’t been huge majority white and sent directly by Donald Trump, police would have backed up vans and buses and made mass arrests as they did to the majority peaceful social and racial justice protestors during the Summer, 2020. A loon picked up just last week by the Capital police near the DNC in Washington DC with knives and a bayonet had confederate and White Supremacist iconography all over his pick up.
Fortunately, he was not among the more subtle. Many more are, however.
A strain of intense and violent White Supremacy continues to run through our military and law enforcement agencies. I believe a majority in both are not but far too many White Supremacists/White Nationalists remain in uniform. Far too many violent White Supremacists/Nationalists enlist to receive the ‘training’ they want to ultimately resume the extreme violence of the Civil War and, for so many, that of Nazi Germany. POC and Black Americans, Jews, immigrants, ‘liberal’ politicians - others - are in their primary sights. Hate crimes targeting POC and Jews are at an all time high. The nation continues to overlook this massive, extremely violent elephant in the room at our own potential destruction.
What is unique at this moment on our Timeline of History and acting as a primary precipitant is having a major political party in the GOP which has staked about everything it has left on the Civil War’s ‘Lost Cause’ etymology and Death.
This, though the insanity has now been well extended through far more bizarre conspiracy theories to include the aggregate ‘Q’ which considers about all elected Democrats to be evil pedophiles. What’s also unique at the moment is the presence of the deeply flawed, deeply unstable avatar in Donald Trump held up front for motivation and justification by America’s recently more dormant White Supremacist and White Nationalist movements.
It is the amoral and wholly disconnected ‘birther’ Trump, with his primary GOP racist and seditionist apologists, who have given new rise to the old ‘Lost Cause’ thereby reinvigorating among the least competent, most violent political groups in the United States. So many of whom who had still been fighting the Civil War in their head have now found a means by which to bring it back to the street. It is a huge network of White Supremacist/Nationalist and corporate ‘dark money’ which continues to actively fund and help organize behind Trump, their idiot avatar, who will say about anything so long as he thinks people like him.
No, January 6 is far from over and we will wait to see how it manifests again on January 18. This time, I’m anticipating, US Capital and DC Metro police will be far better prepared and far more aggressive in their response.
And the police response may be less whether selected officers feel specific ‘sympathy’ for those who would violently overturn our Constitution in the absurd effort to reinstate a mental incompetent to the White House as it is the fact that those who participated in the January 6 violent insurrection attacked and seriously injured so many fellow police officers. I also do believe that the intent of largest percentage of the police officers involved will be to honestly represent their uniforms while defending our nation. But these are no longer broad presumptions.
No, January 6 is far from over regardless of these next few days in the same way our Civil War has sadly; tragically not yet ended. The modern GOP continues every effort to return us to preferred elements of antebellum America with a primary emphasis on White Supremacist/White Nationalist violence and intimidation and the racist dissolution of voter rights targeting POC; urban communities.
America must finally dissolve the still active vestiges of it’s history of the abomination of human slavery from eliminating the Electoral College to ending lifetime appointments to SCOTUS and expanding the Court. America must also and immediately move to a simple national majority presidential election to include national, automatic voter registration.
It is time to end the Civil War. Otherwise, it could well catch back up to us otherwise.
Has anyone contemplated what will happen if the Orange Asscactus (or one of his clones) wins in 2024? We could very well face a situation where Democrats are never again allowed to be President. Think that I’m being catastrophic in my prediction? Look at everything about which Judd just wrote. That is clearly the goal here (permanent minority Republican rule).
Asscactus is a new one to me. Haha
I'm personally partial to shitgibbon, but that's just me. Your prediction is one that gives me nightmares frequently. D:
Trump, Trump, Trump…by far the most dangerous plague this country has ever faced and there doesn’t appear to be a vaccine for it.
Joe Biden says we need a strong Republican party. But it's not only strong enough as it is—it's dangerous. These people are outright fascists.
Congratulations on getting the word out on AT&T's big donations to the Texas legislators who voted for the abortion ban, Judd. And thanks for the update on TFG's very active campaign to make sure upcoming elections ARE rigged. We desperately need the Freedom to Vote Act to pass now!
donald trump is the most un-American President of all time. He is a traitor to the constitution and cannot be re-elected. He is fanning the flames of division because he's a sore loser that couldn't lie and cheat his way to another win...He will destroy this country if he is anywhere near government. Corporations need to cut off support completely to these insurrectionists and traitors to the US. It's not hyperbole anymore, these republicans are becoming full on traitors to democracy and free and fair elections. People like Marjorie Taylor Greene need to be eradicated from any government position. We need start giving full psych exams to people before they are able to run for office.
The only way this ends is to prosecute those spreading these lies & stirring up their base. Biden is far too tolerant with them. How long did it take him to finally declare a vaccination mandate? And this is insurrection! Each attack on the election is an effective (in the eyes of their voters) attack on our government. Insidious Insurrection & It. MUST. Be. Stopped.
I have maintained all along in remarks here on PI, the Jan. 6 insurrection has never ended. Add to your report all of the anti-voting rights legislation passed among 43 state legislatures.
Another big Far Right rally heading to DC this weekend. The fence is up around the Capitol again.
AT &T is going to fade into the woodwork again unless their feet are held to the fire. A fire the mainstream media ignores except to keep covering every damn word out of Trump's mouth.
Therein lies the real problem. Fox News, OAN etc don't hide what they are. MSM is owned by 1%ers that benefit from GOP rhetoric and policies.
They don't cover the truth on purpose in mho. They are accurate sometimes and certainly incomplete other times leaving stories on the table and covering partially instead of impartiality.
Good job reporting, Judd.
Judd, I agree with and support everything you said about Trump and Trumpism. I don’t know how I missed the Pence-Quayle call. I guess with the Indiana connection it makes sense, but that’s some straw grasping there. Your niche is accountability journalism, specifically following the money. You’ve done work no one else has done, and we know it has made a difference. We need more of it. I care about outing corp America, but I really care about who funds Trump, Johnson, DeSantis, Cruz, etc., and how the money filters to them. There’s evidence like the shady South Florida real estate deal with Trump and Russia, and innuendo surrounding Trump and his late BFF tycoon Adelson, but I think those are drops on the tip of the iceberg.
Thank you Judd, Tesnim and Rebecca. Forewarned is forearmed.
#democracydying
This is a nice summary of what your readers probably already know (and this is not a criticism; it is helpful to be reminded of all of these things). Finding cogent summaries also makes me think of the people I would like to influence who I know simply are not exposed to these details through the media they absorb and watch and listen to. And their responses when I share much of anything is the usual "what aboutisms?" The beauty in the way things are going, though, is that more and more people are questioning themselves and what they believe. There really are more and more people who do not want to be associated with the people on the right who are clearly crazy, opportunistic and shrill. Keep up the good work, Judd, Tesmin, and Rebecca and anyone else who is contributing to this great work. When the still-doubting among us start to open up to questioning what they're seeing, your work will be there and all the issues can be found in one place. Brilliant.
Coming soon from the "Republican" Party: the one-party state. Elections are valid only if The Party wins. Otherwise they must be overturned by loyal members of The Party.
Funny thing, that: the more loudly "Republicans" accuse everyone else of being a Communist, they more closely they resemble actual Soviet Communists.
Yes, the GOP coup is ongoing. The Republicans are putting all the pieces in place to win even if they lose elections. They are doing this in plain sight, as Judd reports here. The question: what are the Democrats doing about it? This is American's second Civil War, and only one side is fighting.
The courts will be the big battleground in 2022 and 2024. They held fast in 2020, but McConnell spent years refusing to fill judgeships under Obama, then worked overtime with the Federalist Society to stack the courts with young and ultra-conservative judges with lifetime tenure. The Supreme Court does not reflect the people of this country, and neither do the federal courts. Biden and the Dems can re-balance the court by adding to the federal district and appeals courts, something that has been done throughout our history and is actually needed not just to better reflect the values of our society, but to handle their burgeoning caseloads.
Biden has the power to do it. He can also add justices to the Supreme Court. He can also start the ball rolling to add Puerto Rice and the District of Columbia as states, something the is long overdue. Both have populations that exceed many of the states in the upper midwest and Northeast.
These are just a few of the steps the Democrats should take to push back on the ongoing Republican Coup. Waiting for the members of the Grand Old Party to come to their senses is a fool's errand. If nothing happens, we will soon be living under one-party rule. Playing by the old rules is no longer an option in a country with a sizeable minority that no longer believes the results of our elections if their candidate does not win.
January 6 hasn’t ended. The Civil War still hasn’t ended. How many American citizens still live for the wholly discredited and ahistorical revisionist belief that the South went to war with the rest of America over ‘state’s rights’ based on a misconstrued ‘Lost Cause?’
How many still think they are fighting the Civil War?
This is even though ranging from Henry Calhoun in South Carolina, to other politicians and senior members of the South’s then slaveholding old Victorian aristocracy and politicians, incendiary speeches were being given to justify a Civil War the South so wanted by repeatedly citing America’s ‘assault’ on slavery; on the right to continue holding and brutalizing human beings. On the South’s necessary and ‘peculiar institution.’
‘Peculiar,’ indeed, where they counted human slaves as 3/5 of a human so as to allow the South far disproportionate and artificial political power. And the South still has that disproportionate political power, now in some different ways, but it still remains wrapped around White Supremacy and the framework for human slavery. White Supremacy, sadly, remains the model for America showing itself through our laws, systems of court sentencing, policing, public schools, employment home ownership - and far more.
It must end.
The Electoral College existed as a result of then negotiations with slave holding states and should have long since been eradicated for a one adult; one vote simple American majority presidential election. But since doing do would end the South’s ‘peculiarly’ disproportionate power politics and bring it back in as part of America while helping to finally end the Civil War means it won’t happen anytime soon.
There is a direct line from the ahistorical ‘Lost Cause’ and bogus Civil war ‘states right’ arguments we continue to hear to the events of January 6. Poll the January 6 participants and I’d hypothesize so many are ardently, violently White Supremacist/Nationalist and far less concerned over America’s unique Constitution and Rights than there over having a Black President; over now having a Black Vice President who is likely to ultimately run for and win the White House.
Many of the domestic terrorists on January 6 flagrantly ran around our Capital with the Confederate battle flag or wore other components of the worst of America; of the old Confederacy and America’s 400 year old history of violent White Supremacy. Of still resented loss. Though Confederate armies tried but never set foot in our Capital during the Civil War, a combination of their descendants and so many wannabees were finally able to do so on January 6, 2020 on the direct incitement of Donald Trump; of Mo Brooks and Rudy Giuliani whom all remain unindicted.
If the insurrectionists; domestic terrorists hadn’t been huge majority white and sent directly by Donald Trump, police would have backed up vans and buses and made mass arrests as they did to the majority peaceful social and racial justice protestors during the Summer, 2020. A loon picked up just last week by the Capital police near the DNC in Washington DC with knives and a bayonet had confederate and White Supremacist iconography all over his pick up.
Fortunately, he was not among the more subtle. Many more are, however.
A strain of intense and violent White Supremacy continues to run through our military and law enforcement agencies. I believe a majority in both are not but far too many White Supremacists/White Nationalists remain in uniform. Far too many violent White Supremacists/Nationalists enlist to receive the ‘training’ they want to ultimately resume the extreme violence of the Civil War and, for so many, that of Nazi Germany. POC and Black Americans, Jews, immigrants, ‘liberal’ politicians - others - are in their primary sights. Hate crimes targeting POC and Jews are at an all time high. The nation continues to overlook this massive, extremely violent elephant in the room at our own potential destruction.
What is unique at this moment on our Timeline of History and acting as a primary precipitant is having a major political party in the GOP which has staked about everything it has left on the Civil War’s ‘Lost Cause’ etymology and Death.
This, though the insanity has now been well extended through far more bizarre conspiracy theories to include the aggregate ‘Q’ which considers about all elected Democrats to be evil pedophiles. What’s also unique at the moment is the presence of the deeply flawed, deeply unstable avatar in Donald Trump held up front for motivation and justification by America’s recently more dormant White Supremacist and White Nationalist movements.
It is the amoral and wholly disconnected ‘birther’ Trump, with his primary GOP racist and seditionist apologists, who have given new rise to the old ‘Lost Cause’ thereby reinvigorating among the least competent, most violent political groups in the United States. So many of whom who had still been fighting the Civil War in their head have now found a means by which to bring it back to the street. It is a huge network of White Supremacist/Nationalist and corporate ‘dark money’ which continues to actively fund and help organize behind Trump, their idiot avatar, who will say about anything so long as he thinks people like him.
No, January 6 is far from over and we will wait to see how it manifests again on January 18. This time, I’m anticipating, US Capital and DC Metro police will be far better prepared and far more aggressive in their response.
And the police response may be less whether selected officers feel specific ‘sympathy’ for those who would violently overturn our Constitution in the absurd effort to reinstate a mental incompetent to the White House as it is the fact that those who participated in the January 6 violent insurrection attacked and seriously injured so many fellow police officers. I also do believe that the intent of largest percentage of the police officers involved will be to honestly represent their uniforms while defending our nation. But these are no longer broad presumptions.
No, January 6 is far from over regardless of these next few days in the same way our Civil War has sadly; tragically not yet ended. The modern GOP continues every effort to return us to preferred elements of antebellum America with a primary emphasis on White Supremacist/White Nationalist violence and intimidation and the racist dissolution of voter rights targeting POC; urban communities.
America must finally dissolve the still active vestiges of it’s history of the abomination of human slavery from eliminating the Electoral College to ending lifetime appointments to SCOTUS and expanding the Court. America must also and immediately move to a simple national majority presidential election to include national, automatic voter registration.
It is time to end the Civil War. Otherwise, it could well catch back up to us otherwise.